earthli News 3.7 https://www.earthli.com/news/ 2026-02-10T21:31:05+01:00 https://www.earthli.com/news/icons/webcore_png/app/news_100px.png https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=4715 2026-01-24T13:11:55+01:00 https://earthli.com/users/marco

(January, 2023) 2. "nato1968 - Software Engineering" <#nato1968> (October, 1968) 3. "IEEE-Annals - A Brief History of Software Engineering" <#IEEE> (February 2008) 4. "Compiling Swift Generics" <#Compiling> (October 2022) 5. "How did Dennis Ritchie Produce his PhD Thesis? A Typographical Mystery" <#Ritchie> (June 2022) 6. "Capability Myths Demolished" <#Capability> (2003) 7. "Serverless Computing: One Step Forward, Two Steps Back" <#Serverless> (December 2018) 8. "Algebraic Effects for Functional Programming" <#Algebraic> (August 2016) 9. "Generalized Algebraic Data Types and Object-Oriented Programming" <#Generalized> (August 2005) 10. "Fexprs as the basis of Lisp function application or $vau: the ultimate abstraction" <#Fexprs> (August 2010) Economics 1. "Regulating the Sharing Economy" <#Regulating> (June 2016) 2. "Political Aspects of Full Employment" <#Political> (Spring 1942) 3. "Crypto is the Mother of All Scams and (Now Busted) Bubbles While Blockchain Is The Most Over-Hyped Technology Ever, No Better than a Spreadsheet/Database" <#Crypto> (October 2018) 4. "The Housing Bubble and the Great Recession: Ten Years Later" <#Housing> (September 2018) [Stack of technical papers] [The Usability of Advanced Type Systems: Rust as a Case Study] "The Usability of Advanced Type Systems: Rust as a Case Study" by Kasra Ferdowsi "[...] a human-centered evaluation of these type systems and their usability was all but absent, with empirical evaluations limited to testing their expressiveness in programs written by experts, i.e. the creators of the type system." "Linear Types enable memory management of mutable values without Garbage Collection. If a value cannot be copied or implicitly discarded and it must be used exactly once, then we can reclaim its memory after it is used. This handles memory management, and prevents use-after-free and double-free bugs. By prohibiting aliasing, Linear Types also solve the problem of reasoning about mutations, both in single-threaded code (where aliased references are a notable source of bugs), and in multi-threaded code (where aliasing can lead to race conditions)." "[...] these types were neither widely adopted, nor evaluated on real users. Instead, each extension, implementation or application of these types was only evaluated by the designers of the system, who programmed real-world applications with their type system to argue for its expressiveness" "Linear, Region and Ownership Types are related by their attention to memory management and safety. Each realized that type systems could be used to help programmers reason about complex programs, prevent various errors in using aliased or freed references, and offer a provably correct solution to memory management without the need for runtime checks or garbage collection." "Note that both of these programs are “safe”, and a more advanced type system involving dependent types could in theory statically verify the safety of Fig. 3a, but the current limitations of the type system means that developers need to learn, not just the rules of Ownership, but how the borrow-checker verifies them." "In the 5 applications they inspected, [Qin et al. 2020] found 4990 uses of unsafe, with a further 1581 unsafe code regions in the standard library, and concluded that unsafe code is used “extensively”. Though they note that it is “unavoidable in many cases” and “usually for good reasons”, including interfacing with existing libraries written in other unsafe languages such as C, and performance improvements by a factor of 4 or 5." [nato1968 - Software Engineering] "SOFTWARE ENGINEERING Report on a conference sponsored by the NATO SCIENCE COMMITTEE" by Peter Naur and Brian Randell * the problems of achieving sufficient reliability in the data systems which are becoming increasingly integrated into the central activities of modern society * the difficulties of meeting schedules and specifications on large software projects * the education of software (or data systems) engineers The problems that confront us today have been with us since 1968. We have improved our approach, but it's a bit sobering to think how accurately these 56-year-old bullet points capture our current predicament. [IEEE-Annals - A Brief History of Software Engineering] " A Brief History of Software Engineering" by Niklaus Wirth "[...] the rapid growth of computing power made it possible to apply computing to ever more complicated tasks. This trend dramatically increased the demands on software engineers. Programs and systems became complex and almost impossible to fully understand. The sinking cost and the abundance of computing resources inevitably reduced the care for good design. Quality seemed extravagant, a loser in the race for profit. But we should be concerned about the resulting deterioration in quality. Our limitations are no longer given by slow hardware, but by our own intellectual capability. From experience we know that most programs could be significantly improved, made more reliable, economical and comfortable to use." "The sinking cost and the abundance of computing resources inevitably reduced the care for good design. Quality seemed extravagant, a loser in the race for profit. But we should be concerned about the resulting deterioration in quality. Our limitations are no longer given by slow hardware, but by our own intellectual capability." "From the point of view of software engineering, the rapid spread of C represented a great leap backward. It revealed that the community at large had hardly grasped the true meaning of the term “high-level language” which became an ill-understood buzzword." "Computer systems are machines of large complexity. This complexity can be mastered intellectually by one tool only: Abstraction. A language represents an abstract computer whose objects and constructs lie closer (higher) to the problem to be represented than to the concrete machine. For example, in a high-level language we deal with numbers, indexed arrays, data types, conditional and repetitive statements, rather than with bits and bytes, addressed words, jumps and condition codes." "C provided freedom, where high-level languages were considered as straight-jackets enforcing unwanted discipline. It was an invitation to use tricks which had been necessary to achieve efficiency in the early days of computers, but now were pitfalls that made large systems error-prone and costly to debug and “maintain”." "The group of Ken Bowles at UC San Diego built a text editor, a file system, and a debugger around the portable Pascal compiler (P-code) developed at ETH, and they distributed it for $50. So did the Borland company with its version of compiler. This was at a time when other compilers were expensive software, and it was nothing less than a turning-point in commercializing software. Suddenly, there was a mass market. Computing went public" "The craft of programming turned to “hacking. Methods were sought to systematize, if not construction, then at least program testing and documentation. Although this was helpful, the real problems of hectic programming under timepressure remained." "Methods were sought to systematize, if not construction, then at least program testing and documentation. Although this was helpful, the real problems of hectic programming under time pressure remained. Dijkstra brought the difficulty to the point by saying: Testing may show the presence of errors, but it can never prove their absence." Add this to the workshop presentation "Just as structured programming had been the guiding spirit behind Pascal, modularization was the principal idea behind the language Modula-2, the successor of Pascal, published in 1979 [15]. In fact, its motivation came from the language Mesa, an internal development of the Xerox Research Lab in Palo Alto, and itself a descendant of Pascal. The concept of modularization and separate compilation was also adopted by the language Ada (1984), which was also based largely on Pascal. Here, modules were called packages." "It is no exaggeration at all to claim that the modern computing era started in 1975 with the Alto. The Alto caused nothing less than a revolution, and as a result people to-day have no idea, how computing was done before 1975 without personal, highly interactive workstations. The influence of these developments on software engineering cannot be overestimated." "Languages appeared supporting this model, among them Smalltalk (Goldberg and Kay, 1980), Object-Pascal (Tesler, 1985), C++ (Stroustrup, 1985), Oberon (Wirth, 1988), Java (Sun, 1995) and C# (Microsoft, 2000)." "I am overwhelmed, when I compare this with the first, stand-alone minicomputer that I worked with in 1965, a DEC PDP-1: Clock rate, < 1 MHz, memory of 8K word of 18 bits, drum storage of some 200 KB. It was time-shared by up to 16 users. It is a miracle that some people insisted in believing that one day computers would become powerful enough to be useful." "In the 1990s, a phenomenon started to spread under the name of Open Source. The distrust against huge systems designed in industrial secrecy became manifest. A wide community of programmers decided to build software and to distribute their products for free through the Internet. Although it is difficult to recognize this as a sound business principle – making the idea of patents obsolete – the bandwagon turned out to be rather successful. The notions of quality and responsibility in case of failure seemed irrelevant. Open Source appeared as the welcome alternative to industrial hegemony and abrasive profit, and also against helpless dependence." Patents are not sound business principle. They are a business principle. The revolution has to start somewhere. "Surely, software engineering has profited too from the many sophisticated development tools. But the quality of its products hardly reflects signs of great progress. No wonder: After all, the increase of power was itself the reason for the terrifying growth of complexity. Whatever progress was made in software methodology was quickly compensated by higher complexity of the tasks. This is reflected by Reiser’s “law”: “Software is getting slower faster than hardware is getting faster”. Indeed, new problems have been tackled that are so difficult that engineers often have to be admired more for their optimism and courage than for their success." "The consequence is waste of cheap resources – processor cycles and storage bits – resulting in inefficient code and bulky data. This waste has become ever-present and represents a grave lack of sense for quality. Inefficiency of programs is easily covered up by obtaining faster processors, and poor data design by the use of larger storage devices. But their side effect is a decrease of quality – of reliability, robustness, and ease of use. Good, careful design is timeconsuming, costly. But it is still cheaper than unreliable, difficult software, when the cost of “maintenance” is not factored" "A primary effort must be education toward a sense of quality. Programmers must become engaged crusaders against home-made complexity. The cancerous growth of complexity is not a thing to be admired; it must be fought wherever possible [17]. Programmers must be given time and respect for work of high quality. This is crucial and ultimately more effective than better tools and rules." [Compiling Swift Generics] "Compiling Swift Generics" by Slava Pestov "The standard ownership semantics for a Swift function call are defined such that the caller retains ownership over the parameter values passed into the callee, while the callee transfers ownership of the return value to the caller. This means that the identity(_:) function cannot just return the value x; instead, it must first create a logical copy of x that it owns, and then return this owned copy. This is achieved by incrementing the string value’s buffer reference count via a call to a runtime function." "As the joke goes, every problem in computer science can be solved with an extra level of indirection. The calling convention for a generic function takes runtime type metadata for every generic parameter in the function’s generic signature. Every type in the language has a reified representation as runtime type metadata, storing the type’s size and alignment together with function pointers implementing the move, copy and destroy operations. The generated code for a generic function abstractly manipulates values of generic parameter type using the runtime type metadata provided by the caller. An important property of runtime type metadata is identity; two pointers to runtime type metadata are equal if and only if they represent the same type in the language." "Definitions of generic functions are always visible to the specializer within their defining module. Shared library developers can also optin to exporting the body of a function across module boundaries with the @inlinable attribute." "The witness table for this conformance references the witness (indirectly, because the witness is always wrapped in a thunk, which is a small function which shuffles some registers around and then calls the actual witness. This must be the case because protocol requirements use a slightly different calling convention than ordinary generic functions)." "While metadata for generic parameters is passed in directly, for dependent member types the metadata is recovered from one or more witness tables provided by the caller." "Operator symbols are declared at the top level of a module. Operator symbols have a fixity (prefix, infix, or postfix), and infix operators also have a precedence group. Precedence groups are partially ordered with respect to other precedence groups. Standard operators like + and * and their precedence groups are thus defined in the standard library, rather than being built-in to the language itself." "The request evaluator framework was first introduced in Swift 4.2 [ 5]. In subsequent releases, various ad-hoc mechanisms were gradually converted into request evaluator requests, with resulting gains to compiler performance, stability, and implementation maintainability." "The Swift ABI was formally stabilized in Swift 5.0, when the standard library became part of the operating system on Apple platforms. Library evolution support and textual interfaces became user-visible features in Swift 5.1" "The difference between the type representation Array and the type Array is that the type representation only stores identifiers, with no connection to the declaration of Array and Int. The semantic type points at the declarations themselves." "The utmost care must be taken when working with type variables because unlike all other types, they are not allocated with indefinite lifetime. Type variables live in the constraint solver arena, which grows and shrinks as the solver explores branches of the solution space. Types that contain type variables, and other structures that recursively contain such types, also need to be allocated in the constraint solver arena." "In contrast, the second case would introduce significant complexity to the language design, by allowing “generic protocols” with more generic parameters than just the protocol Self type. Such a protocol would be what Haskell calls a “multi-parameter type class.” Unlike the prior generalizations this one carries profound implications and tradeoffs and it is not clear that it belongs in the Swift language." "The first case is a relatively straightforward; the non-generic declaration contexts acts as a namespace to which the protocol declaration is scoped. In contrast, the second case would introduce significant complexity to the language design, by allowing “generic protocols” with more generic parameters than just the protocol Self type. Such a protocol would be what Haskell calls a “multi-parameter type class.” Unlike the prior generalizations this one carries profound implications and tradeoffs and it is not clear that it belongs in the Swift language." "[...] imagine if there were two different conformances of some concrete type K to Hashable. Then it would be possible for two different modules to construct values of type Set with incompatible hash functions; passing such a value from one module to the other would result in undefined behavior. For now, there’s no real answer to this dilemma. The compiler rejects duplicate conformance definitions if an existing conformance is statically visible, so this scenario cannot occur with Int and Hashable for instance, because the conformance of Int to Hashable in the standard library is always visible, so any attempt to define a new conformance would be diagnosed as an error. However, if the concrete type K is defined in some common module, and two separatelycompiled modules both define a conformance of K to Hashable, a module that imports all three will observe both conformances statically, with unpredictable results." "In the absence of proper compiler support for addressing this problem, there is a rule of thumb that, if followed by Swift users, mostly guarantees coherence. The rule is that when defining a conformance on an extension, either the extended type or the protocol should be part of the current module." "A conformance where neither the conforming type nor the protocol is part of the current module is called a retroactive conformance. Today, retroactive conformances are allowed without any restrictions. In a future compiler version, they might generate a warning." "A client might declare a subclass of BaseClass and conform it to MyProtocol, concluding this it is safe to do so because the conforming type, DerivedClass, is owned by the client, and thus this is not a retroactive conformance: 1 import OtherLibrary 2 3 class DerivedClass: BaseClass {} 4 extension DerivedClass: MyProtocol {} However, in the next version of the framework, the framework author might decide to conform BaseClass to MyProtocol. At this point, DerivedClass has two duplicate conformances to MyProtocol; the inherited conformance from BaseClass, and the local conformance of DerivedClass." "You might wonder why archetypes exist at all, when at first glance, they appear equivalent to a reduced type parameter together with a generic signature. In the case of primary archetypes at least, the reason is partly historical. However, the additional indirection provided by creating multiple generic environments from a single generic signature allows archetypes to represent abstract types which are not described by the generic parameters that are in the scope of a generic declaration, namely opaque return types and existential types." [How did Dennis Ritchie Produce his PhD Thesis? A Typographical Mystery] "How did Dennis Ritchie Produce his PhD Thesis? A Typographical Mystery" by David F. Brailsford, Brian W. Kernighan, William A. Ritchie "It may be hard for readers today to appreciate just how labor-intensive it was to prepare documents before the creation of word processing programs, when there were only mechanical typewriters—better than clay tablets or quill pens, to be sure, but any change of more than a few words in a document could require a complete retype. Thus most documents went through only one or two revisions, with handwritten changes on a manuscript that had to be laboriously retyped to make a clean copy." [Capability Myths Demolished] "Capability Myths Demolished" by Mark S. Miller, Ka-Ping Yee, Jonathan Shapiro "By shifting to this new visualization, where the references are explicitly visible, we see a difference between the models that was previously obscured: the direction of the arrows. To see why this matters, let us consider how subjects and resources refer to each other." "In a capability system, each capability points from a subject to a resource. Consequently every capability can serve both to designate which resource to access, and to provide the authority to perform that access. This change provides us with the option to avoid introducing a shared namespace into the foundations of the model, and thereby avoid the complex issues involved in managing a shared namespace – issues rarely acknowledged as a cost of non-capability models." "Although Lampson’s definition of the access matrix does not prohibit the possibility of fine-grained subjects4, even in an ACL system, the difficulty just explained strongly motivates ACL systems to define subjects at a coarse granularity so as to keep the set of subjects relatively static." This is exactly what you end up doing. But it also applies to claims. [Serverless Computing: One Step Forward, Two Steps Back] "Serverless Computing: One Step Forward, Two Steps Back" by Joseph M. Hellerstein, Jose Faleiro, Joseph E. Gonzalez, Johann Schleier-Smith, Vikram Sreekanti, Alexey Tumanov and Chenggang Wu "[...] serverless computing today is at best a simple and powerful way to run embarrassingly parallel computations or harness proprietary services. At worst, it can be viewed as a cynical effort to lock users into those services and lock out innovation." "Recent studies show that a single Lambda function can achieve on average 538Mbps network bandwidth; numbers from Google and Azure were in the same ballpark [26]. This is an order of magnitude slower than a single modern SSD. Worse, AWS appears to attempt to pack Lambda functions from the same user together on a single VM, so the limited bandwidth is shared by multiple functions." "The result is that as compute power scales up, per-function bandwidth shrinks proportionately. With 20 Lambda functions, average network bandwidth was 28.7Mbps—2.5 orders of magnitude slower than a single SSD [26]" "[...] two Lambda functions can only communicate through an autoscaling intermediary service; today, this means a storage system like S3 that is radically slower and more expensive than point-to-point networking. As a corollary, a client of Lambda cannot address the particular function instance that handled the client’s previous request: there is no “stickiness” for client connections. Hence maintaining state across client calls requires writing the state out to slow storage, and reading it back on every subsequent call." "[...] serverless functions are short-lived and non-addressable, so their capacity to cache state internally to service" "FaaS routinely “ships data to code” rather than “shipping code to data.” This is a recurring architectural antipattern among system designers, which database aficionados seem to need to point out each generation. Memory hierarchy realities— across various storage layers and network delays—make this a bad design decision for reasons of latency, bandwidth, and cost." "[...] with all communication transiting through storage, there is no real way for thousands (much less millions) of cores in the cloud to work together efficiently using current FaaS platforms other than via largely uncoordinated (embarrassing) parallelism." "[...] we trained the same model on an m4.large EC2 instance, which has 8GB of RAM and 2vCPUs. In this setting, each iteration is significantly faster (0.14 seconds): 0.04 seconds to fetch data from an EBS volume and 0.1 seconds to run the optimizer. The same training process takes about 1300 seconds (just under 22 minutes), which translates to a cost of $0.04. Lambda’s limited resources and data-shipping architecture mean that running this algorithm on Lambda is 21× slower and 7.3× more expensive than running on EC2." "The first replaced Lambda’s role in the application with an EC2 machine to receive SQS message batches—this showed a latency of 13ms per batch averaged over 1,000 batches—27× faster than our “optimized” Lambda implementation. The second experiment used ZeroMQ to replace SQS’s role in the application, and receive messages directly on the EC2 machine. This “serverful” version had a per batch latency of 2.8ms—127× faster than the optimized Lambda implementation." "[...] there are two classical dual patterns to implement concurrent communicating systems: eventdriven execution over shared state (the natural FaaS approach), or message-passing across long-running agents with distributed state [16]." "[...] communicating via cloud storage is not a reasonable replacement for directly-addressed networking, even with direct I/O—it is at leaste one order of magnitude too slow. “Pure” functional FaaS programming style exacerbates that expense to an inordinate degree, and should be avoided at all costs." "To model this, we implemented one of the simplest of these protocols in Python: Garcia-Molina’s bully leader election [7]." Why always Python? Are there no numeric libraries in other languages? Of course not. C# 7 has SIMD and vectorization and parallelization. It has AOT in version eight. Why on Earth is Python still so popular? Is it the omly thing peope know? Is it inertia now? Are data scientists just shitty programmers withnofeel for memory or performance efficiency? It's kind of like the JS/Node everywhere thing. There are far, far better runtimes. We have LLVM. Why did the shitty hack win? "FaaS limitations favor operational flexibility over developer control, a theme we generally agree is critical to the scale and elasticity of the cloud—and a major design shift from the traditional data systems ethos." "Developers are forced to compose larger programs out of asynchronous tasks, with no guarantees like sequential consistency or serializability to reason about the semantics of global state mutation across tasks. These limitations can be challenging for developers used to writing sequential programs or transactions. But the result may be both healthy and manageable: this kind of “disorderly” loosely-consistent model has been at the heart of a number of more general-purpose proposals for scalable, available program design in recent years," "Any reasonable system design will need the ability to selectively co-locate code and data on the same side of a network boundary, whether that is done via caching/prefetching data near computation or pushing computation closer to data. Neither feature is provided in a meaningful way by today’s FaaS offerings." "[...] we see autoscaling (and hence pay per use) as a big step forward, but disappointingly limited to applications that can work over today’s hobbled provider infrastructure. We acknowledge that there is an enormous market of such “narrow” applications, many of which consist of little more than business logic over a database." "[...] serverless computing could produce a local minimum: yet another setting in which the compute and storage potential of the cloud is lost in the noise of refactoring low-tech and often legacy use cases." "We see the future of cloud programming as far, far brighter than the promise of today’s serverless FaaS offerings. Getting to that future requires revisiting the designs and limitations of what is being called “serverless computing” today." "High-level, data-centric DSLs—e.g., SQL+UDFs, MapReduce, TensorFlow—can make this more tractable, by exposing at a high level how data flows through computation. The more declarative the language, the more logical separation (and optimization search space) is offered to the infrastructure." "[...] recognizing hardware affinity does not mean that we advocate tight binding of hardware to services; the platform should make dynamic physical decisions about allocation of code to distinguished resources, based on logical performance requirement specs either provided by programmers or extracted from code." "[...] elasticity requirements dictate that these agents be virtual and dynamically remapped across physical resources. Hence we need virtual alternatives to traditional operating system constructs like “threads” and “ports”: nameable endpoints in the network. Various ideas from the literature have provided aspects of this idea: actors [11], tuplespaces [4] pub/sub [18] and DHTs [21] are all examples." "[...] if cloud programming is achieved via higher-level abstractions, it will offer the opportunity for program analysis and constraint enforcement that could improve security. However, some of our desired architectural improvements for performance in this paper make achieving security more difficult for the responsible parties." [Algebraic Effects for Functional Programming] "Algebraic Effects for Functional Programming" by Daan Leijen "It has long been recognized that one can selectively CPS transform only parts of the program that need it [8, 9, 37]. In our case, we only have to use CPS translation on those parts that may issue effectful operations. Moreover, since effects are tracked in the type system, we can use a type-directed selective CPS translation (as used by Scala [38] for example). We built on the translation by Nielsen [31] who introduces a sound selective CPS translation for the simply typed lambda calculus extended with callcc and throw. However, the translation by Nielsen applies to monomorphic effects only and we will see that in the presence of polymorphic effect variables the translation becomes more complex." "The built-in effects consist of exceptions (exn), non-termination (div), non-determinism (ndet), polymorphic state (st⟨h⟩), and general I/O operations (io). All of these are usually provided directly by the target system (like JavaScript) and can thus be directly compiled without needing CPS translation. This turns out to be a very important optimization as many (leaf) functions do not use any user defined effects and can thus be compiled directly – and implies there is no cost for effect handlers for any code that does not use them." "In the case of polymorphic functions, the simplified types of Section 3.2 turn out to have a performance impact as well: many functions that would otherwise get a type with an open polymorphic effect, are now closed and thus do not need a CPS translation as H will be false. In the Koka core library, this reduced the set of CPS translated functions by over 80%." "Here we take another approach: we are going to try to not change the runtime representation of functions that are CPS translated, even if they are called from a nonCPS context and the continuation argument is lacking. We assume that our target environment supports some form of variadic functions and that we can check at runtime if the k argument is present or not. This is well supported in JavaScript but it works well in typed environments too. For example, for the .NET target, first-class functions are represented by function objects and we can modify to the Apply methods to check if the k parameter was present." "Since only the tail of an effect row can be polymorphic, there is no risk of exponential code duplication. Even for the Koka core library which contains many of these higher-order effect polymorphic functions, the code size increased by a modest 20%." "[...] the original Links type system can be naturally extended to handle algebraic effects too. Their system is also based on row-polymorphism but they use instead Remy style rows [36] where the kind system is extended to record presence or absence of effects in the row. We believe our approach based on scoped labels [22] is simpler in practice, but the Remy style can be more expressive as it can describe the absence of effects." "Algebraic effect handlers concisely describe many complex control-flow constructs in various programming languages. We hope that the language design, the direct operational semantics, and compilation scheme described in this article will contribute to wider adoption of algebraic effects." [Generalized Algebraic Data Types and Object-Oriented Programming] "Generalized Algebraic Data Types and Object-Oriented Programming" by Andrew Kennedy and Claudio V. Russo "We identify a surprising expressivity gap compared to functional programming with parameterized algebraic datatypes (PADTs): operations with natural definitions in ML and Haskell require unnatural and nonextensible object-oriented encodings to ensure safety. With the introduction of generics, virtual dispatch is no longer as expressive as functional case analysis." [Fexprs as the basis of Lisp function application or $vau: the ultimate abstraction] "Fexprs as the basis of Lisp function application or $vau: the ultimate abstraction" by John N. Shutt "[...] mostly avoids this element by concerning itself with semantics. However, the background chapters are also meant to discuss language design motivations, and psychology is integral to that discussion because it often dominates programmer productivity. Semantics may make some intended computations difcult to specify, but rarely makes them" "background chapters are also meant to discuss language design motivations, and psychology is integral to that discussion because it often dominates programmer productivity. Semantics may make some intended computations difcult to specify, but rarely makes them impossible — especially in Lisp, which doesn’t practice strong typing; whereas psychological bias may prevent entire classes of computations outright, just by preventing programmers from intending them" "The acts of the mind, wherein it exerts its power over its simple ideas, are chiefy these three: (1) Combining several simple ideas into one compound one; and thus all complex ideas are made. (2) The second is bringing two ideas, whether simple or complex, together, so as to take a view of them at once, without uniting them into one; by which way it gets all its ideas of relations. (3) The third is separating them from all other ideas that accompany them in their real existence: this is called abstraction: and thus all its general ideas are made. — John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding ([Lo1690]), Bk. II Ch. xii §" "Classically, an extensible language consists of a sourcelevel base language together with meta-level defnitional facilities to extend the base language ([Chr69]). A program then consists of two parts, a meta-level part that specifes an extension of the base language followed by a source-level part written in the extended language" "Syntactic abstractions do not have to be macros. A class of non-macro syntactic abstractions is proposed, under the name micros, in [Kr01]; a micro specifes a transformation directly source-to-target (rather than source-to-source, as macros), which is clearly syntactic since its processing must be completed before the target abstract machine begins computation.8 Micros are a universal syntactic abstraction, in that they can be used to assign any possible (computable) semantics to source programs. (However, they won’t play a signifcant role in this dissertation, because they aren’t a traditional abstraction, so aren’t within the scope of the thesis.9)" This sounds like source generators. "[...] the measure of the abstractive power of a programming language is the class of programming languages that it can readily specify — or, more to the point (but also more subjectively), the class of problem domains that the language, including its readily achieved abstractive extensions, can readily address." "Each extensible language is surrounded by an envelope of possible extensions reachable by modest amounts of labor by unsophisticated users" "(Smoothness Conjecture) Every roughness (violation of smoothness) in a language design ultimately bounds its radius of abstraction." "The intuition here is that a butterfy efect occurs, in which the consequences of roughness are compounded by successive abstractions until, sooner or later depending on the degree of roughness, cumulative resistance drags down further abstraction through the fuzzy threshold from feasible to infeasible" "Programmers spend much of their time reasoning informally about programs. Formal reasoning about programs may be used, on occasion, to prove that particular programs are correct; but more powerfully, to prove that general classes of program transformations preserve the meanings of programs. The general transformations are then safe for use in meta-programs —such as optimizing compilers— and also for use in subsequent program correctness proofs" "Some languages, such as Haskell, allow argument evaluation to be postponed past the application of a compound function — lazy argument evaluation; but in general this takes out too much of the order of operations, so that the language interpreter must either do additional work to put back in some of the lost order, or else lose efciency.21 A few languages, such as Haskell, have taken the applicative trend to its logical extreme" "Some languages, such as Haskell, allow argument evaluation to be postponed past the application of a compound function — lazy argument evaluation; but in general this takes out too much of the order of operations, so that the language interpreter must either do additional work to put back in some of the lost order, or else lose efciency.21 A" Also, performance predictability, with unforeseeable lumps in the execution profile. "It is not yet clear whether the mathematical models used in ‘monadic’ programming will eventually fnd a useful balance between expressiveness and simplicity" Hasn't really happened yet. "We’re really referring to the notion of frst-class object, which was discussed in the Preface, and for which nameability by variables is just one particular requirement; but in Lisps, most objects nameable by variables have all the rights and privileges of frst-class-ness. Christopher Strachey, by the way, originally evolved the notion of frst-class value from W.V. Quine’s principle To be is to be the value of a variable ([La00]); and Quine, after deriving the principle in his essay “On What There Is” [Qu61, pp. 1–19], had applied it to reifcation in another essay, “Logic and the Reifcation of Universals” [Qu61, pp. 102–129]." "Technical simplicity would favor always using the double-quotes — but technical simplicity is a primary goal for expressions to be read by formal systems, not by the human audience. For the human audience our goal is accuracy of understanding, which is enhanced by ease of understanding but does not always correlate with technical simplicity, nor even with technical unambiguity" "The distinction intended is that modularity hides implementation, while abbreviation merely shortens expression." "Programming languages should be designed not by piling feature on top of feature, but by removing the weaknesses and restrictions that make additional features appear necessary." "Programmer-defined facilities should be able to duplicate all the capabilities and properties of built-in facilities" This is the principle I found most interesting, but it wasn't discussed. [Regulating the Sharing Economy] "Regulating the Sharing Economy" by K. Erickson, I. Sørensen "[...] sharing platforms disrupt some of the fundamental assumptions underlying common law “special relationships.”75 Unlike two-party relationships between service providers and consumers, sharing platforms create three-party relationships between the platform, provider, and user. These new relationships require a different allocation of liability and statutory protection." "Sharing platforms must navigate rules promulgated by multiple agencies at both state and local levels. Second, the relevant local codes are complex and, as discussed in the previous Section, impose heightened compliance burdens on service providers." "[...] sharing platforms also generate negative externalities for third parties. Short-term rentals can change the character of a building or even a community,97 and many residents object to finding strangers routinely entering the common areas of an apartment complex." "P2P auction houses and per-task contractor services allow users to purchase temporary licenses, such as a position in line for a movie, a table in a coffee shop, or a public parking spot. Blurring these lines creates difficult legal issues because these categories affect determinations of liability in almost every field of law, from tax149 to civil rights." "While Expedia, Priceline and Hotwire are best defined as retailers or resellers and, as such, can be controlled and taxed accordingly, it is much more difficult to find a comparable taxing analogue for the Internet-sharing economy.”)." "Insurance Commissioner Jones aptly summarized the “moral hazard” argument of TNCs: “(1) drivers may be running personal errands; (2) drivers may have multiple applications open at the same time; (3) drivers with low limits on their personal automobile insurance policy will turn on the application in the event of an accident to secure more robust coverage; and (4) drivers start to look more like employees or independent contractors if the TNC covers this period.”" "The two primary examples are auction platforms for public parking spaces and for seating in coffee houses or restaurants.177 Neither sellers nor purchasers “own” or “provide” the temporary license; the municipal government is responsible for maintaining public parking and restaurants are responsible for providing seating to customers. Many have criticized these platforms as parasitic, and claim that these services interfere with third-party rights. Bloggers have even coined the term “jerk tech” to describe these platforms.178 Others contend that auction houses optimize efficient use of scarce resources and prevent congestion; users who value a parking spot most can pay for that privilege, and price-sensitive users will accept less conveniently located spots." In other words, a pathologically sociopathic society that distributes resources only to those able to pay stupid amounts of money, a society that bubbles asshole criminals to the top. Kudos. This is obviously how it already works, but maybe don't supercharge it? You could do first come, first served, which this is, I guess. Feels wrong. "Unlike internet service providers, sharing companies are not passive; most platforms exercise at least some control over provider and user transactions, and almost all platforms have a financial stake in transactions between users and providers.216 This suggests that immunity for platforms is not appropriate." "The proper allocation of liability between users and providers on sharing platforms is highly contextual because both the least-cost avoider and the easiest target for enforcement agencies vary between and within 216. Sharing platforms impose a wide range of transaction fees. See supra note 27. Interchange fees might serve as an indirect measure of the degree of control a platform exercises over transactions." "Since sharing platforms often operate on a large scale over multiple jurisdictions, the least-cost avoider for compliance may often be users and providers, who are most familiar with local rules and their own property. Moreover, casual and high volume providers may require different treatment. Yet in other situations platforms may be best positioned to address user or provider misconduct." "Tiered regulation properly allocates risk to repeat players who benefit most from the platform. For instance, providers who transact at volumes comparable to bed and breakfasts should incur similar liability to a traditional service provider. And TNC drivers who operate like full-time taxis should comply with safety standards comparable to taxis. In addition, tiered regulation levels the playing field between sharing platforms and traditional service providers, and discourages abuse of the platform." "For example, several ordinances on TNCs restrict the maximum number of hours that a driver can operate per day, but some TNC platforms do not directly restrict drivers’ hours.226 If a TNC driver leaves the app on twenty four hours a day and recklessly accepts fares without adequate rest, should the platform have a duty to terminate that driver? The platform exercises sufficient control such that it represents both the least-cost avoider and easiest enforcement target." "In some cases the public interest in allowing disclosure of rider logs may outweigh the rider’s privacy interest. For example, consulting firm Hamilton Places Strategies calculated based on congressional campaign filings that Members of Congress relied on Uber for sixty one percent of rides during the 2014 election cycle." "[...] regulators should not simply allow the sharing economy to grow in the shadow of the law. Allowing the sharing economy to self-regulate would not adequately safeguard consumers. Thus, responsible regulation of sharing platforms is a necessity, not a choice." "Tom Slee, "Why Canada Should De-Activate Uber" , WHIMSLEY (Nov. 22, 2014), (“Contrary to the way some articles are written, we do have a choice here. A lot of the links above talk as if Uber were some kind of inevitable future. . . . Conflating Uber with the broad advance of technology is just wrong, and it’s also exactly what Uber wants us to do.”)." [Political Aspects of Full Employment] "Political Aspects of Full Employment" by Michael Kalecki "Under a laissez-faire system the level of employment depends to a great extent on the so-called state of confidence. If this deteriorates, private investment declines, which results in a fall of output and employment (both directly and through the secondary effect of the fall in incomes upon consumption and investment). This gives the capitalists a powerful indirect control over government policy: everything which may shake the state of confidence must be carefully avoided because it would cause an economic crisis. But once the government learns the trick of increasing employment by its own purchases, this powerful controlling device loses its effectiveness. Hence budget deficits necessary to carry out government intervention must be regarded as perilous." "In practice, however, this is not the case. Indeed, subsidizing mass consumption is much more violently opposed by these experts than public investment. For here a moral principle of the highest importance is at stake. The fundamentals of capitalist ethics require that 'you shall earn your bread in sweat'—unless you happen to have private means." "[...] under a regime of permanent full employment, the 'sack' would cease to play its role as a disciplinary measure. The social position of the boss would be undermined, and the self-assurance and class-consciousness of the working class would grow." "In current discussions of these problems there emerges time and again the conception of counteracting the slump by stimulating private investment. This may be done by lowering the rate of interest, by the reduction of income tax, or by subsidizing private investment directly in this or another form. That such a scheme should be attractive to business is not surprising." Those ideas are still working great, nearly a century later. "The rate of interest or income tax is reduced in a slump but not increased in the subsequent boom. In this case the boom will last longer, but it must end in a new slump: one reduction in the rate of interest or income tax does not, of course, eliminate the forces which cause cyclical fluctuations in a capitalist economy. In the new slump it will be necessary to reduce the rate of interest or income tax again and so on. Thus in the not too remote future, the rate of interest would have to be negative and income tax would have to be replaced by an income subsidy." Ding, ding, ding. "This state of affairs is perhaps symptomatic of the future economic regime of capitalist democracies. In the slump, either under the pressure of the masses, or even without it, public investment financed by borrowing will be undertaken to prevent large-scale unemployment. But if attempts are made to apply this method in order to maintain the high level of employment reached in the subsequent boom, strong opposition by business leaders is likely to be encountered." You got that right. "The pressure of all these forces, and in particular of big business—as a rule influential in government departments—would most probably induce the government to return to the orthodox policy of cutting down the budget deficit. A slump would follow in which government spending policy would again come into its own." Nothing new under the sun. "The rest of government spending necessary to maintain full employment should be used to subsidize consumption (through family allowances, old-age pensions, reduction in indirect taxation, and subsidizing necessities). Opponents of such government spending say that the government will then have nothing to show for their money. The reply is that the counterpart of this spending will be the higher standard of living of the masses." "The rest of government spending necessary to maintain full employment should be used to subsidize consumption (through family allowances, old-age pensions, reduction in indirect taxation, and subsidizing necessities). Opponents of such government spending say that the government will then have nothing to show for their money. The reply is that the counterpart of this spending will be the higher standard of living of the masses. Is not this the purpose of all economic activity? 2." Not according to the winners. "If capitalism can adjust itself to full employment, a fundamental reform will have been incorporated in it. If not, it will show itself an outmoded system which must be scrapped." [Crypto is the Mother of All Scams and (Now Busted) Bubbles While Blockchain Is The Most Over-Hyped Technology Ever, No Better than a Spreadsheet/Database] "Crypto is the Mother of All Scams and (Now Busted) Bubbles While Blockchain Is The Most Over-Hyped Technology Ever, No Better than a Spreadsheet/Database" "That means if a steady- state supply of Bitcoin really did gradually replace a fiat currency, the price index of all goods and services would continuously fall. By extension, any nominal debt contract denominated in Bitcoin would rise in real value over time, leading to the kind of debt deflation that economist Irving Fisher believed precipitated the Great Depression. At the same time, nominal wages in Bitcoin would increase forever in real terms, regardless of productivity growth, adding further to the likelihood of an economic disaster." "[...] that mining is highly concentrated in oligopolies in shady and nontransparent and unsecure jurisdictions – China, Russia, Belarus, Georgia, etc. It also goes beyond the possibility and reality of massive and regular 51% attacks." "Fundamental flaws of lack of security in crypto land go well beyond the fact that mining is highly concentrated in oligopolies in shady and nontransparent and unsecure jurisdictions – China, Russia, Belarus, Georgia, etc. It also goes beyond the possibility and reality of massive and regular 51% attacks." Adorable that one of the most criminally damaging financial powers is never considered shady. "Blockchain’s ideology is politically born out of the same mentality as libertarian right wing conspiracies or extreme left anarchism: all governments, central banks, moneys, institutions, banks, corporations, entities with reputation and credibility build over centuries are evil centralized concentrations of power that literally need to be destroyed." "Everything that this study argues about the nefarious impact of China on Bitcoin can be said and applied to any other crypto-currency and to the role of Russia in the crypto eco-system." China has since forbidden mining, but sure the holy U.S. Need not be mentioned as nefarious. "[...] wealth in crypto-land is more concentrated than in North Korea where the inequality Gini coefficient is 0.86 (it is 0.41 in the quite unequal US): the Gini coefficient for Bitcoin is an astonishing 0.88. "6" "7" "8" "9" Quite a feat to create an asset class where inequality is greater than that of Kim Jong-un land. So decentralization is just a total myth invented by a bunch of whales whose wealth is fake; now that the retail suckers who bought at the peak have literally lost their shirts these crypto “whales” are fake billionaires as liquefying their wealth would crash the price of the “asset” to zero." "Blockchain’s boosters would argue that its early days resemble the early days of the Internet, before it had commercial applications. But that comparison is simply false. Whereas the Internet quickly gave rise to email, the World Wide Web, and millions of viable commercial ventures used by billions of people in less than a decade, cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin do not even fulfill their own stated purpose." "Crypto has been around for over a decade now and in 2018 the number of crypto wallets was only 22 million and out of this figure the number of active bitcoin users is only between 2.9 and 5.9 million and falling. And the number of crypto transactions has collapsed by at least 75% between 2017 and 2018." And it did it again in 2022. "The fact that everyone within a given country or jurisdiction uses the same currency is precisely what gives money its value. Money is a public good that allows individuals to enter into free exchange without having to resort to the kind of imprecise, inefficient bartering on which traditional societies depended." "While every successful technological revolution includes some bubbles and some scammers, most of the real ones – like the internet - create real goods and services that billions of folks use around the world even after the initial frothiness and bubble has burst. And the criminal and scamming element in real technological revolutions is the exception, not the systemic rule that it is in crypto land." [The Housing Bubble and the Great Recession: Ten Years Later] "The Housing Bubble and the Great Recession: Ten Years Later" by Dean Baker "It is common to speak about the collapse of the housing bubble and the financial crisis as unpredictable events that fell out of the sky without warning. While this may be a comforting view for the economists with jobs that required monitoring the economy, it is far from the reality. The housing bubble and the risks it posed were easy to see. It was only due to incredibly narrow-minded thinking that the vast majority of the economics profession managed to miss it." "Greenspan’s testimony should have served as a wake-up call to anyone who had not already been paying attention to the surge in house prices. At the time, Greenspan was by the far the most widely known economist in the world. He had been appointed as Fed chair by four different presidents. He was the subject of a fawning biography by Bob Woodward, appropriately titled “Maestro.” The business press largely revered him. Yet, in spite of Greenspan calling attention to the run-up in house prices, and providing no remotely plausible explanation based in the fundamentals of the housing market, the topic received virtually no attention from economists or the business press." Also, nobody fired Alan Greenspan. "Some conservatives actually argued for eliminating the FHA, claiming that Wall Street’s sophisticated ability to manage risk had made it obsolete." How is that in any way a conservative position? Deregulation is quite radical. "There was no money in raising a warning flag that this story was not likely to have a happy ending. And, it turned out there were really no negative consequences for not raising a warning flag. Few, if any, economists lost a job or even missed a scheduled promotion because they didn’t see and warn about the dangers of the housing bubble. And as we all know, economists respond to incentives." "In terms of total indebtedness, the key issue is not levels of debt, but ratios of debt service to disposable income. This ratio is actually at relatively low levels, according to data from the Federal Reserve Board.22 (The Fed constructs this ratio using both debt alone and also adding in rents since the latter can be viewed as a debt-like obligation that substitutes for a mortgage payment. Both ratios are near 40-year lows.)" "Credit cards do tend to be variable rate, and a small portion of mortgage debt and auto loan debt is variable rate, but there is no plausible story where a rise in interest rates will lead to large-scale defaults, even if it can be a major burden on the people carrying this debt." Sometimes he's just cold. Could spare a word or two about a system that drives the poorest into high-interest debt, that they're vulnerable even when the system is not. "Nothing like this can happen with student loan debt. If a student defaults, it may lead his friends to give more thought to default also, but it doesn’t directly reduce the earnings power of other students, which is the basis for loan repayments." You can't even default on those debts, can you? "But the fact that many former students face bleak financial prospects does not mean that the economy is facing an imminent crisis due to student loan defaults." See? Again, the fact that the next generation is in crisis is decoupled from the stability of the economy. The system works, even if everyone's miserable. Not a crisis! ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=5888 2025-12-26T22:44:12+01:00 https://earthli.com/users/marco

, which is a long, long list of books. I perused it with the default ordering, from highest-rated to lowest-rated. [1] I didn't see a lot of overlap with my own reading interests. We'd read only one or two books in common -- out of hundreds! -- and... ]]>

, which is a long, long list of books. I perused it with the default ordering, from highest-rated to lowest-rated. [1] I didn't see a lot of overlap with my own reading interests. We'd read only one or two books in common -- out of hundreds! -- and almost none of his books are on my wishlist. [A cry for help] There were a what I would call a disturbing number of financial self-help books, like You Can Negotiate Anything, The Entrepreneur Roller Coaster, general self-help books like The Listening Book or The Courage to Be Disliked, parenting books like Brain Rules for Baby, there's even a book by Tony Robbins! (Awaken the Giant Within, which he says "changed everything about my life. It's my Bible" but which apparently still has room for improvement because he gave it only a 9 out of 10). It's the kind of list of books that a good, liberal westerner will definitely want his friends to know he's read. Authors like Jonathan Haidt, Yuval Noah Harari, Jordan Peterson (for diversity!), Nassim Nichloas Taleb, David Brooks (sweet Lord no) feature prominently. A lot of these feel like books he picked up in an airport or single-click-impulse-bought from a Kindle screen or search ad. Those were all 9/10 books. It's a long list. [Programming stuff] I found Philosophy of Software Design - by John K. Ousterhout in the 8/10 list, which I would probably read, except that I've already read so much work by Ousterhout that I feel like I've got the idea. Code - by Charles Petzold is another one that I've read parts of in essays, but a whole book about the philosophy of coding ... well, it's a bit late for me, at this stage in my education. [More self-help books] OMG there are so many more self-help books -- Four Thousand Weeks, How to Live on 24 Hours a Day, How to Think More Effectively, All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten -- that I'm going to stop listing them. It's truly incredible how some people just can't seem to get enough of pop psychology and pop philosophy. The self-help books are almost outnumbered by the financial-advice books -- Discover Your Inner Economist, You, Inc - The Art of Selling Yourself, The Innovator's Solution -- so I'm also going to stop listing those, even though there are still dozens of them. [Two books in common] Then I saw Guns, Germs, and Steel - by Jared Diamond, which is still technically on my list but I'll probably never get around to reading it. Winning a Pulitzer Prize makes it suspect for me, because that suggests to me that it's almost certainly anodyne enough that it doesn't offend any good liberal's pro-Empire, Orientalist stances, which they've clothed in humanism. Thinking, Fast and Slow - by Daniel Kahneman is on my list, though. So, there's one book. I think I might have read Moonwalking with Einstein but it was long ago and I've completely forgotten what it was about. Ah, yes, reading his brief description, it was about "memory palaces". [Hate-reading] This guy has read a lot of books that he didn't like. Half of this page is 6/10 or below. Like, no wonder. You can't just read whatever slop drifts beneath your gaze and expect to have fun. He hasn't read a single book for fun! No fiction, no original philosophy, everything filtered through someone else's presentation. I scrolled 'til the end to see if he'd hated a book that I'd loved, but I didn't see anything. [An example: Yuval Noah Harari] Way down the list is a 2/10 review of 21 Lessons for the 21st Century - by Yuval Noah Harari, which writes, "His book “Sapiens” was amazing, so I read this new one. It’s just some thoughts on our present and near future. Not so different from what you find in every-day articles. I’m personally averse to news commentaries, so I shouldn’t have read this." I would be embarrassed to write that I was surprised to find that a book named 21 Lessons for the 21st Century was "just some thoughts on our present and near future, " but I also am not "personally averse to news commentaries," so we otherwise have almost nothing in common. Imagine reading self-help books, financial-help books, and parenting books like a fiend but also some historical and cultural books, but not actually following any news or trying to fit what you've learned into the world you live in. The mind reels. That feels even more pointless than what I'm doing here. I'm almost depressed for him. He might need help. I've not read Sapiens but I did read "Eine Kurze Geschichte der Menschheit" , for which I ended my review with, "Harari is a good storyteller and summarizes many interesting facets of the sweep of history. However, he isn’t as opinionated as the facts he relates would require him to be. The result is that he looks either obtuse or biased. He shies away from judgment—and he’s too smart not to have noticed the natural conclusions to much of the information he cites. My gut feeling in some places was that he was hedging his bets so as to continue to be regarded favorably by the elites whose crimes he has partially documented. That is, he wants to sell his books and his presence, so he leaves the condemnation up to the reader." [United in hating The Alchemist] Ah, there's one! Right at the end! We both hated "The Alchemist" . Where he wrote, "How is this so popular? Its weak message is “pay attention to serendipity”. I was open to liking it, but it gave me nothing I could use." I was, of course, harsher: "Heavy-handed and saccharine doesn’t even begin to cover it. I have no idea where the metaphor ends and the literalism begins. I’m not even going to bother checking how many months this thing spent on Oprah’s best-seller list. Avoid this book." [The last straw: He hated Murakami] Oh, and below that, he hated What I Talk About When I Talk About Running by Haruki Murakami. I just finished (and very much enjoyed) "Norwegian Wood" and I loved "Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World" . I can't imagine someone giving a Murakami book a 1/10. [Nothing in common] It's great that he published a list of all of the books that he's read. I can tell by this list, though, that a penchant for cataloguing books we've read is all that we have in common. A conversation would most likely be painful for both of us. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] Which, according to the "FAQ" , he defines as, "My 0-10 rating is not just how much I liked the book. It’s how strongly I would recommend it to almost anyone. So I would give a little lower rating to a book I loved about an obscure subject, like the culture of Switzerland, because I wouldn’t recommend it to most people." Which, like, fair enough, but a 1/10 is still a 1/10. I can't imagine that a book he would rate a book that he thinks is a 10/10 as a 1/10 just because he can't think of anyone else who would read it. But, as I just spent the whole essay discussing, I don't really have my finger on the pulse of the author of this list. ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=5724 2025-12-26T22:40:56+01:00 https://earthli.com/users/marco

was a sci-fi, crime-novel, philosophical excursion -- the coolness of the protagonist and the mood of the writing... ]]>

was a sci-fi, crime-novel, philosophical excursion -- the coolness of the protagonist and the mood of the writing is the same. And I loved both the protagonist and the mood. This book relaxed me. This is a book for people who read and people who listen to music. It is a book of its time, written and published a good decade before even the first hints of what would become the Internet were available. It reminds us of a time when it was possible to spend an entire Sunday re-reading a book, when it was possible to miss someone dearly and still not be able to communicate with them. It is a story of a world that still has distance and time, a world where everything hasn't yet been compressed into instantaneity, a world that not only accommodated patience, not only encouraged it, but required it. There was less room for the luxury of hyperactivity, for flitting from thing to thing, for insatiety. It is a world where two people -- Toru and Nagasawa -- at a school can become friends because they read authors in common. They are Japanese students and all of the authors are Western. "“What kind of authors do you like?” I asked, speaking in respectful tones to this man two years my senior. "“Balzac, Dante, Joseph Conrad, Dickens,” he answered without hesitation. “Not exactly fashionable.” “That’s why I read them. If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking. [...]"" Our narrator this time is a nineteen-year-old student Toru Watanabe. He is a young student, getting settled in to university in Tokyo. He has a bit of an odd duck of a roommate that every nicknames "Storm Trooper" because he's so strict. In what would set the tone for this book -- and for Toru's life -- he learned from what many others would consider to be an unbearable adversity. Instead of getting rid of the adversity, he accommodates it and learns from it. He learns from Storm Trooper how to keep his room neat. He learns how to take care of himself. In the beginning of the book, we read a bit more about what Toru thinks of his fellows students. "[...] What a joke. The wind changes direction a little, and their cries become whispers. Hey, Kizuki, I thought, you’re not missing a damn thing. This world is a piece of shit. The arseholes are getting good marks and helping to create a society in their own disgusting image." But his university life soon fades into the background, dominated by his extracurricular life. Toru had grown up with two friends, Naoko and her boyfriend Kizuki. Kizuki committed suicide before they graduated. Toru is still very good friends with Naoko -- he is, in fact, in love with her. She is also in love with him but Kizuki's suicide dealt her a damaging blow, one that not only prevents her from reciprocating his love in anything approaching a comprehensible way but would end up dooming her. We watch as Toru learns from this adversity as well, the adversity of being in love with someone who's wonderful and nice to him, but who cannot express herself very well, who is inadvertently odd and distanced. He learns to write letters. He learns meditative patience. He studies and learns. He uses Naoko as his lodestar, he betters himself to be better for her. Nagasawa, Toru's friend at school, is an exceedingly capable, though aloof, student, who comes from money, and will succeed no matter what. He is friends with Toru, nearly exclusively. Nagasawa has a girlfriend Hatsumi who will probably become his wife. They go out together sometimes, where she seems quite sweet on Toru, in a way that is quite reminiscent of his relationship with Kizuki and Naoko. Nagasawa doesn't care because he knows she won't go anywhere -- she's deeply in love with him, despite his known infidelities -- and that everything always goes his way. The world would not disappoint him, in this regard. After spending some time with Toru in Tokyo, after they've established something of a routine, Naoko has a breakdown and is forced to leave school, moving to a psychiatric-care institution in the deep countryside. She lives in a house there with Reiko, a woman who's been there for seven years -- she's in her 30s. They work at the settlement, growing food in the outdoor garden and the greenhouse. With Naoko gone, Toru misses her deeply, continuing and even extending his monastic existence. A fellow student Midori throws herself into his life, spending a lot of time with him, even though she has a boyfriend. His relationship with Midori kind of mirrors the one that he had with Naoko in Tokyo. They take walks. They go drinking together. [2] They circle around maybe, possibly, fooling around. Women just generally seem to like Toru. He has a low-key, philosophical air about him that amuses and entices them. Nearly every woman in this book seems to be somewhat attracted to him. It's not hard to understand why. He is understated and charming. It is his love for Naoko that he causes him to stumble, to act other than nobly. He is so in love with her -- and he is so afraid of being immoral or doing something that he will regret or thinks might be unfair to anyone -- that he ends up mistreating Midori. She is a spitfire and also not the easiest person to get along with, carrying a lot of emotional baggage, but she loves him, it's obvious. "“I think you look better now than you did before,” I said. And I meant it. As far as I could recall, with long hair she had been just another cute student. A fresh and physical life force surged from the girl who sat before me now. She was like a small animal that has popped into the world with the coming of spring. Her eyes moved like an independent organism with joy, laughter, anger, amazement and despair. I hadn’t seen a face so vivid and expressive in ages, and I enjoyed watching it live and move." Midori -- unlike Naoko -- is very self-sufficient, running her parents' bookshop with her sister and caring for her terminally ill father. She cooks, she carouses, she's a mischievous imp. She's fun. She's a bit crazy and a bit needy but perhaps she's just what Toru needs to shake him out of the malaise into which he allows himself to occasionally drift. He is the master of no-decision is not a decision. "I sipped my beer and focused on Midori as she went on cooking, her back to me. She worked with quick, nimble movements, handling no fewer than four cooking procedures at once. Over here she tasted a boiled dish, and the next second she was at the cutting board, rat-tat-tatting, then she took something out of the fridge and piled it in a bowl, and before I knew it she had washed a pot she had finished using. From the back she looked like an Indian percussionist – ringing a bell, tapping a block, striking a water-buffalo bone, each movement precise" Toru takes a trip to the countryside to visit Naoko in her asylum and becomes good friends with her roommate Reiko, who confides in him -- both her own stories and stories that Naoko has told her. Reiko used to be a piano prodigy but became a piano teacher after having had a crisis of confidence herself. "I suppose I didn’t want to think of myself that way, but once I reached a certain age and had attained a degree of self-knowledge I realized it was true after all: I’m good at teaching people things. Really good.” "“I bet you are." "“I have a lot more patience for others than I have for myself, and I’m much better at bringing out the best in others than in myself. That’s just the kind of person I am. I’m the scratchy stuff on the side of the matchbox. But that’s fine with me. I don’t mind at all. Better to be a first-class matchbox than a second-class match." They cook, they garden, they walk in the snow. The three of them listen to music, both on records and played by Reiko on the guitar -- Naoko's favorite is Norwegian Wood by the Beatles. It's peaceful. It's languorous. It proceeds at its own pace, with a maturity that is difficult to believe in 20-year-olds but also just incredibly welcome to experience through Murakami's evocative writing. There are deep themes of emotional duress but there is no little drama, so little unwarranted angst. Toru loves Naoko with every fiber of his being. He builds his life around his visits to her, and around his plans for her return to Tokyo when she is "well". "Where the road sloped upwards beyond the trees, I sat and looked towards the building where Naoko lived. It was easy to tell her room. All I had to do was find the one window towards the back where a faint light trembled. I focused on that point of light for a long, long time. It made me think of something like the final pulse of a soul’s dying embers. I wanted to cup my hands over what was left and keep it alive. I went on watching it the way Jay Gatsby watched that tiny light on the opposite shore night after night." But things start to get more serious with Midori -- not physically, but intellectually. They discuss Marx, fake revolutionaries, sellouts, the working class, the tax man, the rich, and porno theaters. Toru meets her dying father and cares for him for a day. This endears Midori to him deeply because he did it so skillfully, so selflessly, so matter-of-factly, without any ulterior motive. She had an afternoon off from her otherwise stressful life and didn't have to pay for it. He was a friend. She appreciates him for what he is, falling in love a bit more each time. He is diligent and focused. He is also still writing to Naoko once a week. He describes to her how he lives -- how he "winds his spring" -- telling Naoko that he is improving himself for her. "I miss you terribly sometimes, but in general I go on living with all the energy I can muster. Just as you take care of the birds and the fields every morning, every morning I wind my own spring. I give it some 36 good twists by the time I’ve got up, brushed my teeth, shaved, eaten breakfast, changed my clothes, left the dorm, and arrived at the university. I tell myself, “OK, let’s make this day another good one.” I hadn’t noticed before, but they tell me I talk to myself a lot these days. Probably mumbling to myself while I wind my spring." He writes and writes and writes in the hopes that he can give her a will to live by telling her about what her condition doesn't allow her to truly appreciate -- while Midori is right there and does very much appreciate it. For his next year of university, Toru moves nearly out of the city, far on the outskirts, where he has a groundskeeper's house to himself, shared only with a few stray cats. He hones his cooking skills, he studies diligently, he takes a job in an Italian restaurant, he learns Italian recipes. He takes care of the garden. He builds furniture. He befriends another student Itoh, his first male friend since Nagasawa. Toru's letter-writing ritual is part of his life, probably part of what makes him so thoughtful, so introspective. "I sat at my desk to write my Sunday morning letter to Naoko, drinking coffee from a big cup and listening to old Miles Davis albums. A fine rain was falling outside, while my room had the chill of an aquarium. The smell of mothballs lingered in the thick jumper I had just taken out of a storage box. High up on the window-pane clung a huge, fat fly, unmoving." Doesn't that sound nice? Don't you want to be there? It's not in the citation above, but you can almost see the large, white cat sunning itself on the floor, in the late-afternoon light shining through the panes of an open window that lets in the coolish autumn air. But Toru was too focused on getting himself all set up in his suburban life -- and he forgot to tell Midori where he'd gone. She makes him suffer for it, keeping him incommunicado for months. Toru writes to Reiko to ask for her advice. She says to go for it. Do not wait for Naoko. She's not doing as well as Toru wishes she were. Some time passes. Midori is still silent. Toru is going day to day, learning, working, feeding cats, gardening. Naoko has killed herself. Toru is in bits. He leaves on a trip, with no plans, no destination. He lives on the land, working for scraps, nearly starving himself. On a beach, a gentle soul brings him food, even gives him money. Toru uses the money to finally return to Tokyo, after a long month on the road, talking to no-one. Reiko visits, finally having left the sanitarium. She stays with Toru. She plays the guitar -- a nearly impossible number of songs -- while they drink and she smokes. Eventually, they end up in bed together, neither of them having had sex in ages. It is, of course, amazing. This is a conclusion to another part of his life, though. Reiko moves on the next day. Toru has decided. He calls Midori. She finally answers. "Where are you now?" That's a good question, isn't it Toru? Don't think. Just answer. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me of what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I've failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an interest in this book, then I'm happy for you. [1] Nearly everyone in this book can drink prodigious amounts of alcohol and just bounce back the next day without a hint of damage. There are the classic scenes or two people polishing off two bottles of wine, shifting to a bottle of whiskey that also clatters to the ground, empty, and then they fall into bed for four bouts of lovemaking that starts at three in the morning. It's fun to read but it's not particularly believable. I'll admit that my skepticism might be influenced by my not remembering ever having been that invulnerable, even at that age, but hey, creative license. [Citations] "“What kind of authors do you like?” I asked, speaking in respectful tones to this man two years my senior. "“Balzac, Dante, Joseph Conrad, Dickens,” he answered without hesitation. “Not exactly fashionable.” “That’s why I read them. If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking. [...]"" "Nagasawa had a certain inborn quality that drew people to him and made them follow him. He knew how to stand at the head of the pack, to assess the situation, to give precise and tactful instructions that others would obey. Above his head hung an aura that revealed his powers like an angel’s halo, the mere sight of which would inspire awe in people for this superior being. Which is why it shocked everyone that Nagasawa chose me, a person with no distinctive qualities, to be his special friend. People I hardly knew treated me with a certain respect because of it, but what they did not seem to realize was that the reason for my having been chosen was a simple one, namely that I treated Nagasawa with none of the adulation he received from other people." "When the strike was defused and lectures started up again under police occupation, the first ones to take their seats in the classrooms were those arseholes who had led the strike. As if nothing had ever happened, they sat there taking notes and answering “present” when the register was taken. I found this incredible. After all, the strike was still in effect. There had been no declaration bringing it to an end. All that had happened was that the university had called in the riot police and torn down the barricades, but the strike itself was supposed to be continuing. The arseholes had screamed their heads off at the time of the strike, denouncing students who opposed it (or just expressed doubts about it), at times even trying them in their own kangaroo courts. I made a point of visiting those former leaders and asking why they were attending lectures instead of continuing to strike, but they couldn’t give me a straight answer. What could they have said? That they were afraid of losing marks through lack of attendance? To think that these idiots had been the ones screaming for the dismantling of the university! What a joke. The wind changes direction a little, and their cries become whispers. Hey, Kizuki, I thought, you’re not missing a damn thing. This world is a piece of shit. The arseholes are getting good marks and helping to create a society in their own disgusting image." "“I think you look better now than you did before,” I said. And I meant it. As far as I could recall, with long hair she had been just another cute student. A fresh and physical life force surged from the girl who sat before me now. She was like a small animal that has popped into the world with the coming of spring. Her eyes moved like an independent organism with joy, laughter, anger, amazement and despair. I hadn’t seen a face so vivid and expressive in ages, and I enjoyed watching it live and move." "The short one walked up to the professor and said, with a degree of politeness, that they would like to use the second half of his lecture for political debate and hoped that he would cooperate, adding, “The world is full of problems far more urgent and relevant than Greek tragedy.” "This was more an announcement than a request. The professor replied, “I rather doubt that the world has problems far more urgent and relevant than Greek tragedy, but you’re not going to listen to anything I have to say, so do what you like.”" "I sipped my beer and focused on Midori as she went on cooking, her back to me. She worked with quick, nimble movements, handling no fewer than four cooking procedures at once. Over here she tasted a boiled dish, and the next second she was at the cutting board, rat-tat-tatting, then she took something out of the fridge and piled it in a bowl, and before I knew it she had washed a pot she had finished using. From the back she looked like an Indian percussionist – ringing a bell, tapping a block, striking a water-buffalo bone, each movement precise" "“You’re very clear about what you like and what you don’t like,” she said. "“Maybe so,” I said. “Maybe that’s why people don’t like me. Never have.” "“It’s because you show it,” she said. “You make it obvious you don’t care whether people like you or not. That makes some people angry.” She spoke in a near mumble, chin in hand. “But I like talking to you. The way you talk is so unusual. ‘I don’t like having something control me that way’.”" "She looked into my eyes, and I into hers. I put my arm around her and kissed her. The slightest twinge went through her shoulders, and then she relaxed and closed her eyes for several seconds. The early autumn sun cast the shadow of her lashes on her cheek, and I could see it trembling in outline. It was a soft and gentle kiss, one not meant to lead beyond itself. I would probably not have kissed Midori that day if we hadn’t spent the afternoon on the laundry deck in the sun, drinking beer and watching a fire, and she no doubt felt the same. After a long time of watching the glittering rooftops and the smoke and the red dragonflies and other things, we had felt something warm and close, and we both probably wanted, half-consciously, to preserve that mood in some form. It was that kind of kiss. But as with all kisses, it was not without a certain element of danger." "Reiko and I left the main building, crossed a hill, and passed by a pool, some tennis courts, and a basketball court. Two men – one thin and middle-aged, the other young and fat – were on a tennis court. Both used their racquets well, but to me the game they were playing could not have been tennis. It seemed as if the two of them had a special interest in the bounce of tennis balls and were doing research in that area. They slammed the ball back and forth with a kind of strange concentration." "Where the road sloped upwards beyond the trees, I sat and looked towards the building where Naoko lived. It was easy to tell her room. All I had to do was find the one window towards the back where a faint light trembled. I focused on that point of light for a long, long time. It made me think of something like the final pulse of a soul’s dying embers. I wanted to cup my hands over what was left and keep it alive. I went on watching it the way Jay Gatsby watched that tiny light on the opposite shore night after night." "Three days later the girl came to the house by herself. She was an absolute angel, with a kind of pure, sweet, transparent beauty. I had never – and have never – seen such a beautiful little girl. She had long, shiny hair as black as freshly ground Indian ink, slim, graceful arms and legs, bright eyes, and a soft little mouth that looked as if someone had just made it. I couldn’t speak when I first saw her, she was so beautiful. Sitting on my sofa, she turned my living room into a gorgeous parlour. It hurt to look directly at her: I had to squint. So, anyway, that’s what she was like. I can still picture her clearly.”" "Naoko slipped the gown from her shoulders and threw it off completely like an insect shedding its skin. She had been wearing nothing under the gown. All she had on was the butterfly hairslide. Naked now, and still kneeling by the bed, she looked at me. Bathed in the soft light of the moon, Naoko’s body had the heartbreaking lustre of newborn flesh. When she moved – and she did so almost imperceptibly – the play of light and shadow on her body shifted subtly. The swelling roundness of her breasts, her tiny nipples, the indentation of her navel, her hipbones and pubic hair, all cast grainy shadows, the shapes of which kept changing like ripples spreading over the calm surface of a lake. What perfect flesh! I thought. When had Naoko come to possess such a perfect body? What had happened to the body I held in my arms that night last spring? A sense of imperfection had been what Naoko’s body had given me that night as I tenderly undressed her while she cried. Her breasts had seemed hard, the nipples oddly jutting, the hips strangely rigid. She was a beautiful girl, of course, her body marvellous and alluring. It aroused me that night and swept me along with a gigantic force. But still, as I held her and caressed her and kissed her naked flesh, I felt a strange and powerful awareness of the imbalance and awkwardness of the human body. Holding Naoko in my arms, I wanted to explain to her, “I am having sex with you now. I am inside you. But really this is nothing. It doesn’t matter. It is nothing but the joining of two bodies. All we are doing is telling each other things that can only be told by the rubbing together of two imperfect lumps of flesh. By doing this, we are sharing our imperfection.” But of course I could never have said such a thing with any hope of being understood. I just went on holding her tightly. And as I did so, I was able to feel inside her body some kind of stony foreign matter, something extra that I could never draw close to. And that sensation both filled my heart for Naoko and gave my erection a terrifying intensity. The body that Naoko revealed before me now, though, was nothing like the one I had held that night. This flesh had been through many changes to be reborn in utter perfection beneath the light of the moon. All signs of girlish plumpness had been stripped away since Kizuki’s death to be replaced by the flesh of a mature woman. So perfect was Naoko’s physical beauty now that it aroused nothing sexual in me. I could only stare, astounded, at the lovely curve from waist to hips, the rounded richness of the breasts, the gentle movement with each breath of the slim belly and the soft, black pubic shadow beneath." "Brahms’ Second Piano Concerto" "I suppose I didn’t want to think of myself that way, but once I reached a certain age and had attained a degree of self-knowledge I realized it was true after all: I’m good at teaching people things. Really good.” "“I bet you are." "“I have a lot more patience for others than I have for myself, and I’m much better at bringing out the best in others than in myself. That’s just the kind of person I am. I’m the scratchy stuff on the side of the matchbox. But that’s fine with me. I don’t mind at all. Better to be a first-class matchbox than a second-class match." "I nodded in the darkness. I could feel the full shape of her breasts against me. I traced the outline of her body through her gown with the flat of my hand. From shoulder to back to hips, I ran my hand over her again and again, driving the line and the softness of her body into my brain. After we had been in this gentle embrace for a while, Naoko touched her lips to my forehead and slipped out of bed. I could see her pale blue gown flash in the darkness like a fish. “Goodbye,” she called in a tiny voice. Listening to the rain, I dropped into a gentle sleep." "People are always trying to force stuff on me. The minute they see me they start telling me what to do. At least you don’t try to force stuff on me.” "“I don’t know you well enough to force stuff on you.” "“You mean, if you knew me better, you’d force stuff on me like everyone else?” "“It’s possible,” I said. “That’s how people live in the real world: forcing stuff on each other.”" "“Tell me, Watanabe,” Midori said, looking up at the dorm buildings, “do all the guys in here wank – rub-a-dub-dub?” "“Probably,” I said. “Do guys think about girls when they do that?” "“I suppose so. I kind of doubt that anyone thinks about the stock market or verb conjugations or the Suez Canal when they wank. Nope, I’m pretty sure just about everybody thinks about girls.”" "Without warning, she asked me, “Hey, Watanabe, can you explain the difference between the English present subjunctive and past subjunctive?” "“I think I can,” I said. "“Let me ask you, then, what possible use is stuff like that for everyday life?” "“None at all,” I said. “It may not serve any concrete purpose, but it does give you some kind of training to help you grasp things in general more systematically.” "Midori gave that a moment’s serious thought. “You’re amazing,” she said. “That never occurred to me before. I always thought of things like the subjunctive case and differential calculus and chemical symbols as totally useless. A pain in the neck. So I’ve always ignored them. Now I have to wonder if my whole life has been a mistake.” "“You’ve ignored them?” "“Yeah. Like, for me, they didn’t exist. I don’t have the slightest idea what ‘sine’ and ‘cosine’ mean.” "“That’s incredible! How did you pass your exams? How did you get into university?” "“Don’t be silly,” said Midori. “You don’t have to know anything to pass entrance exams! All you need is a little intuition – and I have great intuition. ‘Choose the correct answer from the following three.’ I know immediately which one is right.” "“My intuition’s not as good as yours, so I have to be systematic to some extent. Like the way a magpie collects bits of glass in a hollow tree.” "“Does it serve some purpose?” “I wonder. It probably makes it easier to do some things.” "“What kind of things? Give me an example.” "“Metaphysical thought, say. Mastering several languages.” "“What good does that do?” “It depends on the person who does it. It serves a purpose for some, and not for others. But mainly it’s training. Whether it serves a purpose or not is another question. Like I said.”" "“Have you ever read Das Kapital?” "“Yeah. Not the whole thing, of course, but parts, like most people.” "“Did you understand it?” "“I understood some bits, not others. You have to acquire the necessary intellectual apparatus to read a book like Das Kapital. I think I understand the general idea of Marxism, though.” "“Do you think a first-year student who hasn’t read books like that can understand Das Kapital just by reading it?” "“That’s pretty nigh impossible, I’d say.”" "I’m working class. But it’s the working class that keeps the world running, and it’s the working classes that get exploited. What kind of revolution is it that just throws out big words that working-class people can’t understand? What kind of crap social revolution is that? I mean, I’d like to make the world a better place, too. If somebody’s really being exploited, we’ve got to put a stop to it." "“So that’s when it hit me. These guys are fakes. All they’ve got on their minds is impressing the new girls with the big words they’re so proud of, while sticking their hands up their skirts. And when they graduate, they cut their hair short and march off to work for Mitsubishi or IBM or Fuji Bank. They marry pretty wives who’ve never read Marx." "They come barging in and acting big. ‘What’s this ledger for?’ ‘Hey, you keep pretty sloppy records.’ ‘You call this a business expense?’ ‘I want to see all your receipts right now .’ Meanwhile, we’re crouching in the corner, and when suppertime comes we have to treat them to sushi deluxe – home delivered. Let me tell you, though, my father never once cheated on his taxes. That’s just how he is, a real old-fashioned straight arrow. But tell that to the taxman. All he can do is dig and dig and dig and dig. ‘Income’s a little low here, don’t you think?’ Well, of course the income’s low when you’re not making any money! I wanted to scream: ‘Go do this where they’ve got some money!’ Do you think the taxman’s attitude would change if there was a revolution?”" "You knew when you saw those eyes he was going to die soon. There was no sign of life in his flesh, just the barest trace of what had once been a life. His body was like a dilapidated old house from which all the fixtures and fittings have been removed, awaiting its final demolition. Around the dry lips clumps of whiskers sprouted like weeds. So, I thought, even after so much of a man’s life force has been lost, his beard continues to grow." "“You’ve watched too many porno movies,” I said with a laugh. "“You think so? I was kind of worried about that. But I love porn films. Take me to one next time, OK?” "“Fine,” I said. “Next time you’re free.” "“Really? I can hardly wait. Let’s go to a real S&M one, with whips and, like, they make the girl pee in front of everyone. That’s my favourite.” "“We’ll do it.” "“You know what I like best about porn cinemas?” "“I couldn’t begin to guess.” "“Whenever a sex scene starts, you can hear this ‘Gulp!’ sound when everybody swallows all at once,” said Midori. “I love that ‘Gulp!’ It’s so sweet!”" "“Would you like something to drink? Water? Juice?” I asked Midori’s father. "‹Cucumber› he said. "“Great,” I said with a smile. “With nori?” "He gave a little nod. I cranked the bed up again. Then I cut a bite-sized piece of cucumber, wrapped it with a strip of nori, stabbed the combination with a toothpick, dipped it in soy sauce, and delivered it to the patient’s waiting mouth. With almost no change of expression, Midori’s father crunched down on the piece again and again and finally swallowed it. "“How was that? Good, huh?” "‹Good› he said. "“It’s good when food tastes good,” I said. “It’s kind of like proof you’re alive.” "He ended up eating the entire cucumber." This is why I read Murakami. "I miss you terribly sometimes, but in general I go on living with all the energy I can muster. Just as you take care of the birds and the fields every morning, every morning I wind my own spring. I give it some 36 good twists by the time I’ve got up, brushed my teeth, shaved, eaten breakfast, changed my clothes, left the dorm, and arrived at the university. I tell myself, “OK, let’s make this day another good one.” I hadn’t noticed before, but they tell me I talk to myself a lot these days. Probably mumbling to myself while I wind my spring." "[...] he had died on a Friday morning when a cold rain was falling, and now it was impossible to know the truth. I imagined that, in death, he had shrivelled up smaller than ever. And then they had burned him in an oven until he was nothing but ashes. And what had he left behind? A nothing-much bookshop in a nothing-much neighbourhood and two daughters, at least one of whom was more than a little strange. What kind of life was that? I wondered. Lying in that hospital bed with his cut-open head and his muddled brain, what had been on his mind as he looked at me?" "I’m going to give it 100 per cent and go as far as I can. I’ll take what I want and leave what I don’t want. That’s how I intend to live my life, and if things go bad, I’ll stop and reconsider at that point. If you think about it, an unfair society is a society that makes it possible for you to exploit your abilities to the limit.” "“Sounds like a pretty self-centred way to live,” I said. "“Perhaps, but I’m not just looking up at the sky and waiting for the fruit to drop. In my own way, I’m working hard. I’m working ten times harder than you are.” "“That’s probably true,” I said. “I look around me sometimes and I get sick to my stomach. Why the hell don’t these bastards do something? I wonder. They don’t do a fucking thing, and then they moan about it.” "Amazed at the harshness of his tone, I looked at Nagasawa. “The way I see it, people are working hard. They’re working their fingers to the bone. Or am I looking at things wrong?” "“That’s not hard work. It’s just manual labour,” Nagasawa said with finality. “The ‘hard work’ I’m talking about is more self-directed and purposeful.” "“You mean, like studying Spanish while everyone else is taking it easy?” "“That’s it. I’m going to have Spanish mastered by next spring. I’ve got English and German and French down pat, and I’m almost there with Italian. You think things like that happen without hard work?”" "I sat at my desk to write my Sunday morning letter to Naoko, drinking coffee from a big cup and listening to old Miles Davis albums. A fine rain was falling outside, while my room had the chill of an aquarium. The smell of mothballs lingered in the thick jumper I had just taken out of a storage box. High up on the window-pane clung a huge, fat fly, unmoving." "It seemed incredible to me that a guy like that would want a girlfriend like Midori, but I kept this thought to myself." It's about control. If she's already a good girl, you can't be sure she's following orders. If she has to change a lot, then you know she's doing it because you ordered her to. "“Hey, why don’t we go now and see a dirty film?” Midori suggested. “A really filthy S&M one.” "We went from the bar to an eel shop, and from there to one of Shinjuku’s most run-down adult cinemas to see a triple bill. It was the only place we could find in the paper that was showing S&M stuff. Inside, the cinema had some kind of indefinable smell. Our timing was good: the S&M film was just starting as we took our seats. It was the story of a secretary and her schoolgirl sister being kidnapped by a bunch of men and subjected to sadistic tortures. The men made the older one to do all kinds of awful things by threatening to rape the sister, but soon the older sister is transformed into a raging masochist, and the younger one gets really turned on from having to watch all the contortions they put her through. It was such a gloomy, repetitive film, I got bored after a while." "Midori’s eyes were glued to the screen. I was impressed: anyone watching a film with such fierce intensity was getting more than her money’s worth. She kept reporting her thoughts to me: “Oh my God, will you look at that!” or “Three guys at once! They’re going to tear her apart!” or “I’d like to try that on somebody, Watanabe.” I was enjoying Midori a lot more than the film." "“Tell me, Watanabe, do you get hard watching this kind of stuff?” "“Well, yeah, sometimes,” I said. “That’s why they make these films.” "“So what you’re saying is, every time one of those scenes starts, every man in the cinema has his thing standing to attention? Thirty or forty of them sticking up all at once? It’s so weird if you stop and think about it, don’t you think?”" "“Tell me, Watanabe, do you get hard watching this kind of stuff?” "“Well, yeah, sometimes,” I said. “That’s why they make these films.” "“So what you’re saying is, every time one of those scenes starts, every man in the cinema has his thing standing to attention? Thirty or forty of them sticking up all at once? It’s so weird if you stop and think about it, don’t you think?” "“Yeah, I guess so, now you mention it.”" "“That was fun,” said Midori. “Let’s try it again sometime.” "“They just keep doing the same things,” I said. "“Well, what else can they do? We all just keep doing the same things.” "She had a point there." "if I go to bed with a girl, I’m going to want to do it with her, and the last thing I want is to lie there struggling to restrain myself. I’m not kidding, I might end up forcing you.” "“You mean you’d hit me and tie me up and rape me from behind?” "“Hey, look, I’m serious.” "“But I’m so lonely! I want to be with someone! I know I’m doing terrible things to you, making demands and not giving you anything in return, saying whatever pops into my head, dragging you out of your room and forcing you to take me everywhere, but you’re the only one I can do stuff like that to! I’ve never been able to have my own way with anybody, not once in the 20 years I’ve been alive. My father, my mother, they never paid the slightest attention to me, and my boyfriend, well, he’s just not that kind of guy. He gets angry if I try to have my own way. So we end up fighting. You’re the only one I can say these things to. And now I’m really, really, really tired and I want to fall asleep listening to someone tell me how much they like me and how pretty I am and stuff." "“Anyway, now that I’m feeling better, I’m starved! Let’s go for a pizza.” "I took her to a pizzeria I knew and ordered draught beer and an anchovy pizza. I wasn’t very hungry and ate only four of the twelve slices. Midori finished the rest. "“You sure made a fast recovery,” I said. “Not too long ago you were pale and wobbly.” "“It’s because my selfish demands got through to somebody,” she answered. “It unclogged me. Wow, this pizza is great!”" "Upstairs, she sat me at the kitchen table and went to warm the bath water. While she busied herself with that, I put a kettle on to boil and made tea. Waiting for the tank to heat up, we sat across from each other at the kitchen table and drank tea. Chin in hand, she took a long, hard look at me. There were no sounds other than the ticking of the clock and the hum of the fridge motor turning on and off as the thermostat kicked in and out. The clock showed that midnight was fast approaching." "I nudged the curtain aside and looked down at the deserted shops. Every shop was closed, their metal shutters down, the vending machines hunched in front of the off-licence the only sign of something waiting for the dawn. The moan of long-distance lorry tyres sent a deep shudder through the air every now and then. I went back to the kitchen, poured myself another shot of brandy, and went on reading Beneath the Wheel. By the time I had finished it the sky was growing light. "I made myself some instant coffee and used some notepaper and a ballpoint pen I found on the table to write a message to Midori: "I drank some of your brandy. I bought a copy of Beneath the Wheel. It’s light outside, so I’m going home. Goodbye. Then, after some hesitation, I wrote: You look really cute when you’re sleeping. "I washed my coffee cup, switched off the kitchen light, went downstairs, quietly lifted the shutter, and stepped outside." "I glanced up at the pale pink curtains in Midori’s window, walked to the tram stop, rode to the end of the line, and walked to my dorm. On the way I found an open café and ate a breakfast of rice and miso soup, pickled vegetables and fried eggs." "Speaking of Midori, she sounds like an interesting person. Reading your letter, I got the feeling she might be in love with you. When I told that to Reiko, she said, ‘Well, of course she is! Even I am in love with Watanabe!’" "I turned 20, autumn gave way to winter, but in my life nothing changed in any significant way. Unexcited, I went to my lectures, worked three nights a week in the record shop, reread The Great Gatsby now and then, and when Sunday came I would do my washing and write a long letter to Naoko. Sometimes I would go out with Midori for a meal or to the zoo or to the cinema." "Which is why I myself agree that the best thing for Naoko would be for her to receive therapy at a proper institution for a while. I hate to say it, but it’s all we can do. As I told you once before, patience is the most important thing. We have to go on unravelling the jumbled threads one at a time, without losing hope. No matter how hopeless her condition may appear to be, we are bound to find that one loose thread sooner or later. If you’re in pitch blackness, all you can do is sit tight until your eyes get used to the dark." ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=4688 2025-12-26T17:47:57+01:00 https://earthli.com/users/marco

: "The narrator is a "Calcutec" (計算士, keisanshi), a human data processor and encryption system who has been trained to use his subconscious as an encryption key. The Calcutecs work for the quasi-governmental System, as opposed to the criminal "Semiotecs" (記号士, kigōshi) who work for the Factory and who are generally fallen Calcutecs. The relationship between the two groups is simple: the System protects data while the Semiotecs steal it, although it is suggested that one man might be behind both. The narrator completes an assignment for a mysterious scientist, who is exploring "sound removal". He works in a laboratory hidden within an anachronistic version of Tokyo's sewer system. The narrator eventually learns that he only has a day and a half before his consciousness leaves the world he knows and delves forever into the world that has been created in his subconscious mind. According to the scientist, to the outside world this change will seem instantaneous, but in the Calcutec's mind, his time within this world will seem almost infinite. "[...] "The two storylines converge, exploring concepts of consciousness, the subconscious or unconscious mind, and identity" Does that help? Does that help at all? The description above is exactly what the book is about but it's about so much more. You can imagine that the plot outlined above is only a scaffolding on which Murakami weaves discussions of what it means to be a person, what do you mean when you say "me"? "“You are fevered,” she says. “Where on the earth have you gone?” "I find it impossible to answer. I am without words. I cannot even comprehend what it is she asks. She brings several blankets and wraps me in them. I lie by the stove. Her hair touches my cheek. I do not want her to go away. I cannot tell if the thought is mine or if it has floated loose from some fragment of memory. I have lost so many things. I am so tired. I feel myself drifting, away, a little by little. I am overcome by the sensation that I am crumbling, parts of my being drifting away. Which part of me is thinking this?" As noted above (and in more detail in the full Wikipedia entry), our fearless narrator is split in two, with one self encrypted away in his subconscious. [3] The narrator begins to rebel against this thing that has been done to him. Though some form of himself probably entered the trade willingly, it is legitimate to ask whether the selves that exist today can be said to be in any way responsible for what he has become. He suffers from the loss -- from the split -- and he rebels against it, against the imminent demise of any of his selves, and against the rules imposed by those who continue to benefit from it. "Until this moment the memory, it seemed, had been sealed off from the sludge of my consciousness by an intervening force. An intervening force? Or an operation, like the one done on my brain to give me shuffling faculty. They had shoved memories out of my conscious awareness. They had stolen my memories from me! Nobody had that right. Nobody! My memories belonged to me. Stealing memories was stealing time. I got so mad, I lost all fear. I didn’t care what happened. I want to live! I told myself. I will live. I will get out of this insane netherworld and get my stolen memories back and live. Forget the end of the world, I was ready to reclaim my whole self." We learn more about the condition of Calcutecs like the narrator, who have something living within themselves, within their minds, that is out of their control, to which they have only limited access. Is there an analog to how we all are, how we all function, how we all shuffle through a deck of selves to display the one most appropriate to a given situation? We are all actors. "“Well, there’s your cognitive system for y’. You just can’t say all at once. Accordin’ t’what you’re up against, almost instantaneously, you elect some point between the extremes. That’s the precision programming you’ve got built in. You yourself don’t know a thing about the inner shenanigans of that program. ’Tisn’t any need for you t’know. Even without you knowin’, you function as yourself. That’s your black box. In other words, we all carry around this great unexplored ‘elephant graveyard’ inside us." Not unexpectedly, the discussion with the old man / scientist turns to the notion of free will. In the ensuing decades since publication of this book, the waters of free will have been even further muddied [4] but, even back in the 80s, we weren't quite sure who was in the driver's seat. To what degree can a person embedded in a complex society such as ours, be said to be truly free? There are always choices, but the negative consequences of some choices constrain most people to a much narrower path than proponents of free will are selling. Are you free not to work? Are you free not to eat? Now, compound these questions by having multiple selves sharing a brain, a mind, a consciousness. "“Pursue this much further and we enter into theological issues. The bottom line here, if you want t’call it that, is whether human actions are plotted out in advance by the Divine, or self-initiated beginnin’ to end. Of course, ever since the modern age, science has stressed the physiological spontaneity of the human organism. But soon’s we start askin’ just what this spontaneity is, nobody can come up with a decent answer." As noted in the Wikipedia summary, towards the end of the story, one of the selves will be "killed off" but the sensation of it for the victim will be a diminishing of consciousness along the line of "Zeno's Paradox" . "Your body dies, your consciousness passes away, but your thought is caught in the one tautological point an instant before, subdividin’ for an eternity. Think about the koan: An arrow is stopped in flight. Well, the death of the body is the flight of the arrow. It’s makin’ a straight line for the brain. No dodgin’ it, not for anyone. People have t’die, the body has t’fall. Time is hurlin’ that arrow forward. And yet, like I was sayin’, thought goes on subdividin’ that time for ever and ever. The paradox becomes real. The arrow never hits.”" I'll end with the following choice citations -- there are many more below -- to remind me of what it felt like to read this book. I would definitely read it again, were I to become the kind of person who rereads books. "Even if I had my life to live over again, I couldn’t imagine not doing things the same. After all, everything—this life I was losing—was me. And I couldn’t be any other self but my self. Could I?" "[...] like a boat with a twisted rudder, I kept coming back to the same place. I wasn’t going anywhere. I was myself, waiting on the shore for me to return. Was that so depressing? Who knows? Maybe that was “despair.” What Turgenev called “disillusionment.” Or Dostoyevsky, “hell.” Or Somerset Maugham, “reality.” Whatever the label, I figured it was me." "Pat Boone sang softly, I’ll Be Home. Time seemed to flow in the wrong direction, which was fine by me. Time could go whichever way it pleased." "The sun sliced through the windshield, sealing me in light. I closed my eyes and felt the warmth on my eyelids. Sunlight traveled a long distance to reach this planet; an infinitesimal portion of that energy was enough to warm my eyelids. I was moved. That something as insignificant as an eyelid had its place in the workings of the universe, that the cosmic order did not overlook this momentary fact. Was I any closer to appreciating Alyosha’s insights? Some limited happiness had been granted this limited life." -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me of what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I've failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an interest in this book, then I'm happy for you. [1] I am reading "Norwegian Wood" right now, and I get the same exact feeling from that book and its main character. [1] I would find it hard to believe that the writers of the TV show Severance are wholly unaware of this book. [1] See, e.g., "Implications of Libet's experiments" by Benjamin Libet . [Citations] "[...] picturing the planet earth, for convenience sake, as a gigantic coffee table does in fact help clear away the clutter—those practically pointless contingencies such as gravity and the international dateline and the equator, those nagging details that arise from the spherical view. I mean, for a guy leading a perfectly ordinary existence, how many times in the course of a lifetime would the equator be a significant factor?" "What the hell could the Brass be thinking? You dig a hole and the next thing they say is fill it in; fill it in and they tell you to dig a hole. They’re always screwing with the guy in the field." "“To tell the truth, I do not know this thing called ‘mind,’ what it does or how to use it. It is only a word I have heard.” "“The mind is nothing you use,” I say. “The mind is just there. It is like the wind. You simply feel its movements.”" "No doubt the Canals once conducted a brisk traffic of barges and launches, where now-stopped sluices expose dry channel beds, mud shriveling like the skin of a prehistoric organism. Weeds have rooted in cracks of the loading docks, broad stone steps descending to where the waterline once was. Old bottles and rusted machine parts poke up through the mire; a flat-bottom boat slowly rots nearby." "[...] felt like I was going to fade out any second, but I had to allow myself this luxury. A ritual interlude I like so much between the time I get into bed and the time I fall asleep. Having a drink in bed while listening to music and reading a book. As precious to me as a beautiful sunset or good clean air." "Libraries have certainly come a long way. The days of card pockets inside the backsleeves of books seemed like a faded dream. As a kid, I used to love all those withdrawal date stamps." "I study the chessboard and concede defeat. “You can gain yourself five moves,” says the Colonel. “Worth fighting to the end. In five moves your opponent can err. No war is won or lost until the final battle is over.” "“Then give me a moment,” I say." "The River murmurs at my feet. There is the sandbar midstream, and on it the willows sway as they trail their long branches in the current. The water is beautifully clear. I can see fish playing among the rocks. Gazing at the River soothes me. Steps lead down from the bridge to the sandbar. A bench waits under the willows, a few beasts lay nearby. Often have I descended to the sandbar and offered crusts of bread to the beasts. At first they hesitated, but now the old and the very young eat from my hand. As the autumn deepens, the fathomless lakes of their eyes assume an ever more sorrowful hue. The leaves turn color, the grasses wither; the beasts sense the advance of a long, hungry season. And bowing to their vision, I too know a sadness." "“There is no beyond,” she says. “Did you not know? We are at the End of the World. We are here forever.”" Oh. This is the self he has closed off, the one that does the shuffling. Now I know where Severance came from. "Now for a good twelve-hour sleep, I told myself. Twelve solid hours. Let birds sing, let people go to work. Somewhere out there, a volcano might blow, Israeli commandos might decimate a Palestinian village. I couldn’t stop it. I was going to sleep." "The hulk didn’t bother removing his shoes before trudging into the kitchen and swinging around to pull out the chair opposite me." Knocking down the door: Ok; coming in with shoes on: beyond the pale. "Junior didn’t say a word, choosing instead to contemplate the lit end of his cigarette. This was where the Jean-Luc Godard scene would have been titled Il regardait le feu de son tabac. My luck that Godard films were no longer fashionable. When the tip of Junior’s cigarette had transformed into a goodly increment of ash, he gave it a measured tap, and the ash fell on the table. For him, an ashtray was extraneous." "“You are fevered,” she says. “Where on the earth have you gone?” "I find it impossible to answer. I am without words. I cannot even comprehend what it is she asks. She brings several blankets and wraps me in them. I lie by the stove. Her hair touches my cheek. I do not want her to go away. I cannot tell if the thought is mine or if it has floated loose from some fragment of memory. I have lost so many things. I am so tired. I feel myself drifting, away, a little by little. I am overcome by the sensation that I am crumbling, parts of my being drifting away. Which part of me is thinking this?" "[...] remove the inner sole of one, conceal the map, and replace the sole. I approach the Colonel again. “The Gatekeeper is not someone I can trust. Will you see that my shadow receives these?”" They become aware of one another. Their patterns matching up. Both are hiding something from the System/Town/Wall. Now, they begin to communicate. "I gently place both hands upon the skull and stare, waiting for a warm glow to emanate. When it reaches a certain temperature—like a patch of sun in winter—the white-polished skull offers up its old dreams. I strain my eyes and breathe deeply, using my fingertips to trace the intricate lines of the tale it commences to tell. The voice of the light remains ever so faint; images quiet as ancient constellations float across the dome of my dawning mind. They are indistinct fragments that never merge into a sensate picture. There would be a landscape I have not seen before, unfamiliar melodic echoes, whisperings in a chaos of tongues. They drift up fitfully and as suddenly sink into darkness. Between one fragment and the next there is nothing in common. I experiment with ways to concentrate my energies into my fingertips, but the outcome never varies. For while I recognize that the old dreams relate to something in me, I am lost." The chapters are getting shorter. They are getting closer, the two halves. "“Everyone must have one thing that they can excel at. It’s just a matter of drawing it out, isn’t it? But school doesn’t know how to draw it out. It crushes the gift. It’s no wonder most people never get to be what they want to be. They just get ground down.”" "I kept thinking about that young couple in the Skyline, Duran Duran on stereo. Oblivious to everything. I wished I could have been a little more oblivious. I put myself in the driver’s seat, woman sitting next to me, cruising the late night streets to an innocuous pop beat. Did the woman take off her bracelets during sex? Nice if she didn’t. Even if she was naked, those two bracelets needed to be there." "The aged Devil sat on a rock by the side of a Finnish country road. The Devil was ten thousand, maybe twenty thousand years old, and very tired. He was covered in dust. His whiskers were wilting. "Whither be ye gang in sich ’aste? the Devil called out to a Farmer. "Done broke me ploughshare and must to fixe it, the Farmer replied. "Not to hurrie, said the Devil, the sunne still play es o’erhead on highe, wherefore be ye scurrying? Sit ye doun and ‘eare m’ tale. The Farmer knew no good could come of passing time with the Devil, but seeing him so utterly haggard, the Farmer [...]" "Until this moment the memory, it seemed, had been sealed off from the sludge of my consciousness by an intervening force. An intervening force? Or an operation, like the one done on my brain to give me shuffling faculty. They had shoved memories out of my conscious awareness. They had stolen my memories from me! Nobody had that right. Nobody! My memories belonged to me. Stealing memories was stealing time. I got so mad, I lost all fear. I didn’t care what happened. I want to live! I told myself. I will live. I will get out of this insane netherworld and get my stolen memories back and live. Forget the end of the world, I was ready to reclaim my whole self." "You know the old saying: When the sun leaks through again, patch the roof for rain." "“Well, there’s your cognitive system for y’. You just can’t say all at once. Accordin’ t’what you’re up against, almost instantaneously, you elect some point between the extremes. That’s the precision programming you’ve got built in. You yourself don’t know a thing about the inner shenanigans of that program. ’Tisn’t any need for you t’know. Even without you knowin’, you function as yourself. That’s your black box. In other words, we all carry around this great unexplored ‘elephant graveyard’ inside us." "“Pursue this much further and we enter into theological issues. The bottom line here, if you want t’call it that, is whether human actions are plotted out in advance by the Divine, or self-initiated beginnin’ to end. Of course, ever since the modern age, science has stressed the physiological spontaneity of the human organism. But soon’s we start askin’ just what this spontaneity is, nobody can come up with a decent answer." "“The best musicians transpose consciousness into sound; painters do the same for color and shape. Mental phenomena are the stuff writers make into novels. It’s the same basic logic. Of course, as encephalodigital conversion, it doesn’t represent an accurate mappin’, but viewin’ an accurate, random succession of images didn’t much help us either. Anyway, this ‘visual edition’ proved quite convenient for graspin’ the whole picture." "“You take your information, your encyclopedia text, and you transpose it into numerics. You assign everything a two-digit number, periods and commas included. 00 is a blank, A is 01, B is 02, and so on. Then after you’ve lined them all up, you put a decimal point before the whole lot. So now you’ve got a very long sub-decimal fraction. 0.173000631 … Next, you engrave a mark at exactly that point along the toothpick." "Your body dies, your consciousness passes away, but your thought is caught in the one tautological point an instant before, subdividin’ for an eternity. Think about the koan: An arrow is stopped in flight. Well, the death of the body is the flight of the arrow. It’s makin’ a straight line for the brain. No dodgin’ it, not for anyone. People have t’die, the body has t’fall. Time is hurlin’ that arrow forward. And yet, like I was sayin’, thought goes on subdividin’ that time for ever and ever. The paradox becomes real. The arrow never hits.”" "“It’s something that struck me only recently. I was just seein’ where my research would take me and I ran smack into this one. That expandin’ human time doesn’t make you immortal; it’s subdividin’ time that does the trick.”" "“Still, it’s nothing t’fear,” the Professor philosophized. “It’s not death. It’s eternal life. And you get t’be yourself. Compared to that, this world isn’t but a momentary fantasy. Please don’t forget that.”" "Everything wheeled around closer and farther, closer and farther, like a merry-go-round. When was it those two had come and done their dirty work on my belly? It had to have been before I was sitting at the supermarket snack bar—or no? When had I last pissed? Why did I care?" Because you're trying to figure out if this the real world. Stanislaw Lem. Borges. Dick. "“Your shadow is on the verge of death. A person has the right to see his own shadow under these circumstances. There are rules about this. The Town observes the passing of a shadow as a solemn event, and the Gatekeeper does not interfere. There is no reason for him to interfere.”" Ah, that's what the shadow is. It's the counterpart in the other world. "As if I really believed that. It’d been fifteen years since Jim Morrison died, and never once had I come across a Doors taxi. There are things that change in this world and things that don’t. Department stores haven’t stopped piping in Raimond Lefebvre Orchestra Muzak, beer halls still play to polkas, shopping arcades play Ventures’ Christmas carols from mid-November." "I took a seat to wait my turn, Lufthansa bag on my knee. It looked like I was next in line. Great. A guy can only watch somebody else’s clothes revolve for so long. Especially on his last day. I sprawled out in the chair and gazed off into space. The laundromat had that particular detergent and clothes-drying smell. Contrary to my expectations, none of the driers opened up. There are unwritten rules about laundromats and “The watched drier never stops” is one of them. From where I sat, the clothes looked perfectly dry, but the drums didn’t know when to quit." A time of no phones and a much higher tolerance of being alone with one's thoughts. "Even if I had my life to live over again, I couldn’t imagine not doing things the same. After all, everything—this life I was losing—was me. And I couldn’t be any other self but my self. Could I?" "[...] like a boat with a twisted rudder, I kept coming back to the same place. I wasn’t going anywhere. I was myself, waiting on the shore for me to return. Was that so depressing? Who knows? Maybe that was “despair.” What Turgenev called “disillusionment.” Or Dostoyevsky, “hell.” Or Somerset Maugham, “reality.” Whatever the label, I figured it was me." "I leaned one elbow on the table and considered the clock. Watching the hands of a clock advance is a meaningless way to spend time, but I couldn’t think of anything better to do. Most human activities are predicated on the assumption that life goes on. If you take that premise away, what is there left?" "“I remember Mother told me that if one has mind, nothing is ever lost, regardless where one goes. Is that true?” "“I don’t know,” I tell her. “But true or not, that is what your mother believed. The question is whether you believe it.” "“I think I can,” she says, gazing into my eyes. "“You can?” I ask, startled. “You think you can believe that?” "“Probably,” she says. “No. Think it over carefully. This is very important,” I say, “because to believe something, whatever it might be, is the doing of the mind. Do you follow? When you say you believe, you allow the possibility of disappointment. And from disappointment or betrayal, there may come despair. Such is the way of the mind. Do you know these things?”" "“It is like looking for lost drops of rain in a river.” "“You’re wrong. The mind is not like raindrops. It does not fall from the skies, it does not lose itself among other things. If you believe in me at all, then believe this: I promise you I will find it. Everything depends on this.” "“I believe you,” she whispers after a moment. “Please find my mind.”" "The man immediately returned to his eggbeater disassembly. He had sorted screws of different sizes into clean white trays. They looked so happy." "“Good butter sauce is an art,” I said. “It takes time. You stir finely minced shallots into melted butter, then heat it over a very low flame. No shortcuts.” "“Ah yes, you like to cook, don’t you?” "“Well, I used to. You need real dedication. Fresh ingredients, a discerning palate, an eye for presentation. It’s not a modern art. Good cooking has hardly evolved since the nineteenth century.”" "Pat Boone sang softly, I’ll Be Home. Time seemed to flow in the wrong direction, which was fine by me. Time could go whichever way it pleased." "The clothes on the floor, the music, the conversation. Round and round it goes, and where it stops everyone knows. Like a dead heat on the merry-go-round. No one pulls ahead, no one gets left behind. You always get to the same spot." "She poured wine into both our glasses. "“What time is it?” I asked. "“Nighttime,” she answered." "When have I last heard a song? My body has craved music. I have been so long without music, I have not even known my own hunger. The resonance permeates; the strain eases within me. Music brings a warm glow to my vision, thawing mind and muscle from their endless wintering." "The girl was amazing. She was half my age, and she could handle things ten times better than me. I set down the receiver with a tinge of sadness, knowing I’d never see her again. I was watching the chandeliers get carried out of a once-grand hotel, now bankrupt. One by one the windows are sealed, the curtains taken down." "“I watched you coming back from the kitchen just now,” I said. "“Did I pass?” "“You’ve got great legs.” "“You like them?” "“A whole lot.” "She put her glass down on the table and kissed me below the ear. “Did I ever tell you?” she said. “I love compliments.”" "FM station on low, Roger Williams playing Autumn Leaves, that time of year." "I didn’t mean to be nosy, but everything seemed meaningful. Autumn in New York, by the Frank Chacksfield Orchestra," "Woody Herman swinging into Early Autumn." "Duke Ellington would be right even for New Year’s Eve at an Antarctic base. I drove along, whistling to Lawrence Brown’s trombone solo on Do Nothin’ Till You Hear from Me, followed by Johnny Hodges on Sophisticated Lady." "The sun sliced through the windshield, sealing me in light. I closed my eyes and felt the warmth on my eyelids. Sunlight traveled a long distance to reach this planet; an infinitesimal portion of that energy was enough to warm my eyelids. I was moved. That something as insignificant as an eyelid had its place in the workings of the universe, that the cosmic order did not overlook this momentary fact. Was I any closer to appreciating Alyosha’s insights? Some limited happiness had been granted this limited life." "Bob Dylan was singing A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall, over and over." ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=5557 2025-09-07T13:04:29+02:00 https://earthli.com/users/marco

https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=5416 2025-06-04T22:35:45+02:00 https://earthli.com/users/marco

and "Book 2" . Carl recieves the titular Dungeon Anarchist's Cookbook, which is a special book that only he can read. It's a compendium of the experiences of dozens if not hundreds of other crawlers throughout... ]]>

and "Book 2" . Carl recieves the titular Dungeon Anarchist's Cookbook, which is a special book that only he can read. It's a compendium of the experiences of dozens if not hundreds of other crawlers throughout the myriad seasons that passed before the Earth season chronicled in these books. The book introduces itself to him, "Hello, Crawler. As you’re about to find, this is a very special book. If you’re reading these words, it means this book has found its way into your hands for one purpose and one purpose only. Together, we will burn it all to the ground." This is the first inkling that we have that other former crawlers are working in the background to exact their revenge on the showrunners, on the game, on the dungeon, on the factions, on the galactic society that would not only allow an unjust travesty like this to exist, but to seek to profit off of the suffering, enslavement, and annihilation of entire worlds and species. I may be reading a bit too much into it, but things are getting distinctly "workers of the world unite; all you have to lose is your chains," [2] and I am absolutely here for it. The book goes on, "While the true contents of this guide are invisible to the showrunners and to the viewers, it is not invisible to the current System AI. There is nothing about owning this book, or the information hidden within that is against the rules. However, if the organization running this season begins to suspect that this book is more than it appears, or if you tell anyone about the existence of this book, the information within will erase, and you will forever lose access to the hidden text." The ground rules are set and this book will contribute vastly to Carl's knowledge about the mechanics of the game world. He has to constantly hide this knowledge or plausibly pretend that he'd obtained it elsewhere. In the next books, many of the little chapter introductions will be snippets from this book, attributed to former crawlers, noting their seasons. At the very beginning of this story, Mordecai is confronted with another former crawler -- Chaco -- who used to be his best friend but with whom he has such an open sore of a beef that even the normally cool and calculating Mordecai gets himself banned for the entirety of the fourth level, leaving Carl, Donut, and Katia to figure everything out for themselves. Carl builds out his communal approach to the dungeon on this level, fist-bumping and befriending as many people as he possibly can. They all start crowd-sourcing information about the levels, working together to help as many crawlers survive as possible. "Still, people kept messaging me directly. I was spending a lot of time explaining what little we knew about the trains. It was important people had all the information, and I wanted to help, but I was shocked at how little some people had managed to figure out after three full days of this." They hook back up with Team Meadow Lark, where Elle -- the 99-year-old lady -- has become a powerful and extremely sassy fairy. "She looked back at the badger. “Fuck, man. There’s like five real people in here. Are you fermenting the potatoes yourself? I do want another drink. My friend Carl is paying for it. But then we’re going to have another one after that, and I’m paying for that one. And don’t give me a shitty pour like last time. Carl is having what I’m having. Donut, what do you want?”" Elle is low-key kind-of awesome. She is a hardcore killer and takes no shit. She is one of the funnier characters and has taken to her new lease on life in the dungeon with gusto. "[...] going from a dementia-suffering, 99-year-old woman in a wheelchair to this fairy ice mage was going to alter one’s personality. But there was more to it, too. She had an edge to her. In the short time I’d known the woman before, I’d caught hints of that, but I hadn’t realized she was so… loud. I wondered how close this personality matched with how she was when she’d been younger." Carl also gets on more shows, meeting more and different aliens. This is where Dinniman's imagination goes into overdrive. He really seems to be interested in inventing new mythologies and new creatures that aren't derived from anything I'd read before. For example, here's a vivid and relentlessly unflattering description of an alien with baggy skin that is too big for its frame. "The sickly, pale creature sat in the chair, naked except for his engineer’s hat. What I’d taken for a poncho was actually just flesh that didn’t properly fit his form. He had no muscles or definition to his body. The green-tinted flesh hung off of him like a fitted sheet placed on a too-small bed. The right side of his face hung loosely. When he spoke, the hole for his mouth hung below the bottom of his jawline, and the words came from the nose holes. The nose itself appeared like it was supposed to be hooked, but it hung to the side, dangling like a used condom on the side of the creature’s face. The eye holes drooped, revealing yellow bone. Clumps of black hair clung to the head." Not only does Dinniman fill in more information about the alien civilizations that participate in the economy of the crawl, but he also discusses how this season is particularly bad and cheaply done -- the "enshittification" of the dungeon world because this season's sponsor is cheap, or out of money, or ... whatever. "The robot sighed. “I apologize, Carl. Let me translate it to earth monkey speak. The mudskippers are cheap bastards who have built this entire crawl with spit and duct tape and items they have purchased at the equivalent of an interstellar swap meet. Everything is built with very little regard for system security and is done as cheaply as possible. The fact it hasn’t yet broken down or bitten them in the ass is a testament to the very real existence of the concept of ‘dumb luck.’ Do you understand now?”" [image]This series is very much about hating on giant mega-corporations whose only concern is to gain as much profit for themselves as possible. The economics are pretty clear. The politics are also getting clearer and clearer, as in the citation below, You see what I mean about the workers-of-the-world-unite vibe? "Sometimes the galaxy isn’t a happy place. Sometimes the unwashed masses forget their place in the machine. And sometimes these dregs bubble up to the surface, causing a phenomenon widely known as “Civil Unrest.” And when that happens, the powers that be don’t want to become the powers that were. So they hire backup. An outside force to come down and kick everything back into order, and maybe commit a few war crimes in the process just so the filth knows their place. One such outfit, trained specifically for this sort of situation, is the Shade Gnoll Riot Forces." Dinniman is also a big fan of "Chekhov's guns" , with the nearly exploded Soul Crystal from the previous book -- still unused as of the middle of book six -- and also this weird note near the end of this book, "I focused on Katia. The blood spread out from her in a circle. It hadn’t gone straight up, but in every direction around her. She hadn’t been touched. Holy shit. There wasn’t a single damn drop of blood on her. I had a thought. An exploit. I wondered how well it would work. But it was definitely something they’d patch if I even tried it. I filed that information away." I wonder if the idea is: Store a dangerous liquid in a container in your inventory. Take it out of the container in your inventory. Liquid sprays in all directions, not touching you. At any rate, he hasn't used this information as of the middle of the sixth book, either. But I picture Dinniman's entire house to be filled with paper and red thread, so I also don't quite believe that he's forgotten all about it. [image] Even that picture probably doesn't do it justice: he seems to be able to invent an endless array of monsters, creatures, characters, classes, guilds, organizations, pantheons, and historical facts. "The second portrait was that of Grull. He was a black-skinned, overly-muscular minotaur-like beast, but with a horse’s body. A centaur with the head of a big, pissed-off bull complete with a golden ring in its snout. He held a smoking, double-headed axe." On page 400, Dinniman mentions "Lisa Frank" , which is a "deep cut" , referring to brightly colored notebook and binder covers from 80s and 90s. [3] I found this one, which makes me wonder whether Dinniman got the idea for Donut while daydreaming and staring at the notebook cover of the girl he was in love with in Social Studies. [image] As with the previous book, the plot is super-complex with a lot of stuff to learn about color-coding and numbering and so on. The main highlights are that we are in level four, The Iron Tangle, which is a giant system of trains, running on tracks that the crawlers would eventually discover is in the shape of the Syndicate's logo. The "Syndicate" is the umbrella organization that runs the dungeon and includes many, many members and entities. There is a lot of train stuff going on, Katia gets a lot more powerful and a lot more empowered and useful, and Carl's plans encompass nearly everyone in the dungeon, trying to save as many crawlers as possible. Some of the utility cars have a teleporting scoop on the front that transport things instantly to a disposal area. They end up destroying most of the level, dumping train after train into "the abyss". Katia's beef with Hekla comes to a head, with Hekla trying a coup of sorts to get Donat onto her team. None of that works, with Katia flattening Hekla in one fell swoop and Eva on the run sans one hand. They end up teleporting a station mimic that's actually a province boss to the escape station, Carl summons the God Grull, who's being "driven" by his arch-nemesis the Maestro (an ogre). They manage to save most of the crawlers with a daring plan (as usual). I know that none of this makes a lick of sense if you haven't already read the books, but perhaps it's a nice reminder for those who have read it. As with the other reviews, check out "official wiki for book 3" for more details. Carl's last entry in the cookbook (for now) is, "If we’re really going to burn this place to the ground, we need to actually do it and not just talk about it. We need to start killing them, too. I don’t know for sure how to do it yet, but I’ll come up with something. They will not break me. Fuck them all. They will not break me. But I will break them. This is my promise to myself, to my friends, and to you, anyone who reads these words. I will break them all." -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me of what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I've failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an interest in this book, then I'm happy for you. [1] for once, I find the "English translation" to be a bit sexier than the "original German" , "Die Proletarier haben nichts in ihr zu verlieren als ihre Ketten. Sie haben eine Welt zu gewinnen. Proletarier aller Länder vereinigt Euch!" [1] I refuse to reveal whether I had one or more of these or not. Let's say it was my twin sister, ok? [Citations] "I was about to toss the book into my inventory, but instead I flipped to the first page. It read, “Welcome.” I felt the haptic buzz of my Escape Plan skill activate. Additional words appeared on the mostly-blank page. Hello, Crawler. As you’re about to find, this is a very special book. If you’re reading these words, it means this book has found its way into your hands for one purpose and one purpose only. Together, we will burn it all to the ground." "While the true contents of this guide are invisible to the showrunners and to the viewers, it is not invisible to the current System AI. There is nothing about owning this book, or the information hidden within that is against the rules. However, if the organization running this season begins to suspect that this book is more than it appears, or if you tell anyone about the existence of this book, the information within will erase, and you will forever lose access to the hidden text." "Most of the other crawlers didn’t have a manager at all. I’d grown to rely on him, sending him queries every time I ran across something I didn’t recognize. We were going to have to suck it up and figure out the rest of this floor without him. Both Daniel Bautista and the book showed me the importance of crowdsourcing information. And while the bounty was a big concern, we couldn’t let it force ourselves into isolation. I needed to get out there and add as many people as I could to my chat." "She looked back at the badger. “Fuck, man. There’s like five real people in here. Are you fermenting the potatoes yourself? I do want another drink. My friend Carl is paying for it. But then we’re going to have another one after that, and I’m paying for that one. And don’t give me a shitty pour like last time. Carl is having what I’m having. Donut, what do you want?”" "[...] going from a dementia-suffering, 99-year-old woman in a wheelchair to this fairy ice mage was going to alter one’s personality. But there was more to it, too. She had an edge to her. In the short time I’d known the woman before, I’d caught hints of that, but I hadn’t realized she was so… loud. I wondered how close this personality matched with how she was when she’d been younger." "The two rock monsters stared at us curiously. They’d fucked up, but I suspected I’d just saved their rocky asses. I’d trust them much more than someone else. Especially if that someone else knew we were responsible for their friends getting fired, or worse." "The sickly, pale creature sat in the chair, naked except for his engineer’s hat. What I’d taken for a poncho was actually just flesh that didn’t properly fit his form. He had no muscles or definition to his body. The green-tinted flesh hung off of him like a fitted sheet placed on a too-small bed. The right side of his face hung loosely. When he spoke, the hole for his mouth hung below the bottom of his jawline, and the words came from the nose holes. The nose itself appeared like it was supposed to be hooked, but it hung to the side, dangling like a used condom on the side of the creature’s face. The eye holes drooped, revealing yellow bone. Clumps of black hair clung to the head." "I held up a third finger. A hole appeared in the metal plate. Fast as I could, I reached through, grasped the surprised elf-like creature by his long, silver hair, and pulled. The moment I pulled his head through the hole, Donut snapped off the spell. I let go, and the severed head dropped to the ground, mouth still open wide. “What was that, bitch? I didn’t quite get that last part,” I said." "Comfort I didn’t realize how much I needed." His limited tenses make this sentence a mess. I'm not going to bitch too much more about it but this book in particular was awash in questionable grammar and a paucity of verb cases. "The show moved to feature several crawlers it didn’t normally show, including Quan Ch, the one crawler who’d received a Celestial Quest box at the end of the last floor. Donut grumbled as she watched him fly down a train tunnel on his ethereal wings, shooting blue lightning out of his left hand. He blasted the front of a train, which crumpled and stopped dead on the track. A mantaur corpse fell out the front of the destroyed cockpit. “That jacket he got lets him fly and shoot lightning,” I said. “That’s pretty cool. But if he’s flying around blasting trains, that’s going to cause all sorts of problems. I wonder what line that is.”" "We watched Elle pick up a clurichaun, freeze his head, rip it off, and throw it to another party member. This guy, some sort of muscle man class, twisted in the air and hurled the ice ball at a giant goat boss. It slammed into the goat’s head, staggering it. A menagerie of other creatures, the former residents of Meadow Lark, rushed the goat monster and tore it to pieces." "I watched Donut train with the hole spell while we waited for the Nightmare Express to come for the second time. She’d gotten the spell up to level three. She was practicing with making the hole a smaller diameter. She’d figured out how to cast the spell, and with Mongo standing right there, she could cast Clockwork Triplicate, and the two extra Mongos would appear on the other side of the hole. We’d be able to clear rooms without having to open doors." "I’d sat at the bar for the hour, staring glumly at my drink. I was approached a half of a dozen times," One more grammar maybe: here, "I was" should be "I'd been" but Dinniman hates the word "had". "Still, people kept messaging me directly. I was spending a lot of time explaining what little we knew about the trains. It was important people had all the information, and I wanted to help, but I was shocked at how little some people had managed to figure out after three full days of this." Yeah. That tracks. "Katia returned to her spiked She-Hulk form. It was about as big as she dared go and still be able to—barely—fit through most doors. Donut jumped onto the back of Mongo. "“Ready guys?” I said. I cracked my neck. I cast Bang Bro onto my gauntlet. It hissed with energy. “Let’s do this.”" "I exchanged a look with Katia. “I don’t know, Donut. I don’t like the idea of you doing that alone. You might need hands to control it.” "“If that little pervert can work the controls, then I can figure it out,” Donut said. “Besides, do you really think you can climb that chain? It’s quite long. Mongo will be ready to graduate college by the time you get up there. I can do it quick. I can Puddle Jump if I have to, but I’d rather save it for coming back.” "“Okay,” I said after a moment. “Just be careful.” "“I’m always careful, Carl,” Donut said, shooting another missile. “I’m going out there.”" "She beamed. “It was my idea. We tell them that if they wear the armband during one more run, the Kravyad will know to teleport them straight home at the end of the shift. But really it lets the Kravyad know they’re troublemakers who are okay to eat. It added another 5% to our productivity in Q2. Even Rod was impressed.” "Donut: I DON’T LIKE THIS LADY. SHE’S ONE OF THOSE PEOPLE WHO IS REALLY MEAN BUT DOESN’T THINK THEY’RE MEAN. "Carl: No kidding." "That was why Maggie had killed her own daughter. She was in pain from the explosion. She wasn’t going to heal. The pain wasn’t going to stop. Not as long as I was alive. "“She was beautiful, you know. On the inside, I mean. She didn’t have that anger in her. Not like her mother. Or her dad. When she ran away, it wasn’t because she was a bad kid. It was self-defense. Kids aren’t always a product of their parents. But sometimes that doesn’t matter. Sometimes parents can cast a shadow so thick, you can drown in it.” "That poor girl. Jesus, she must’ve been so scared. I felt no sympathy for the man next to me. He deserved all the pain he was feeling right at that moment. But I understood him a little better now." "The robot sighed. “I apologize, Carl. Let me translate it to earth monkey speak. The mudskippers are cheap bastards who have built this entire crawl with spit and duct tape and items they have purchased at the equivalent of an interstellar swap meet. Everything is built with very little regard for system security and is done as cheaply as possible. The fact it hasn’t yet broken down or bitten them in the ass is a testament to the very real existence of the concept of ‘dumb luck.’ Do you understand now?”" "Remind me sometime, and I’ll tell you the story of Unsinkable Sam. He was a famous cat from World War II who survived multiple ship sinkings.” "“I didn’t know about this,” Donut said. “So he was a hero cat?” "“Every boat he served on ended up at the bottom of the ocean. I don’t know if that makes him a hero.” "“But he survived?” "“Yep,” I said. “Ended up dying of old age.” "“Sounds like a hero to me,” Donut said." "[...] this guy had it even worse. He’d been tricked into believing something that just wasn’t real. He never even had the opportunity to screw it up. Before this was done, people like him would kill people like me by the thousands. And people like me would cleave through his kind, wreaking even more damage. All the while the real culprits sat back and watched and laughed." "Focus on what you can accomplish, not that which is beyond your control." This is terrible advice. How does anything interesting get done if everyone stays in their lane? If you only focus on what you can control, then you can be controlled by anyone who convinces you that certain things are beyond your control. "New achievement! Mentally Unstable Clothing Hoarder! You have over 500 of the exact same, stackable clothing item in your inventory. What the hell is wrong with you? You planning on opening a thrift store? You might want to see a shrink. One that your group doesn’t immediately kill. Reward: We don’t reward this sort of behavior. It’s weird." "Elle: Same ol’ shit. Imani is mother hen-ing every damn person in here, even though they’re all terrified of her. Your friend Li Jun doesn’t know his best friend is in love with his sister even though she’s turned into a demon, and most of those girls from Hekla’s group are as helpless as I was when I was still in the wheelchair. On top of that, some crazy asshole who doesn’t want everybody to think he’s a crazy asshole is throwing a train full of explosives in our direction. So, you know. Typical day." "Bautista: The trains are definitely working. It’s raining crashed trains and monsters into the abyss. I haven’t seen any crawlers fall thankfully. But it’s a lot of those giant monsters. Are you getting experience for this? They’re splattering across the bottom of the abyss like hail." "Sometimes the galaxy isn’t a happy place. Sometimes the unwashed masses forget their place in the machine. And sometimes these dregs bubble up to the surface, causing a phenomenon widely known as “Civil Unrest.” And when that happens, the powers that be don’t want to become the powers that were. So they hire backup. An outside force to come down and kick everything back into order, and maybe commit a few war crimes in the process just so the filth knows their place. One such outfit, trained specifically for this sort of situation, is the Shade Gnoll Riot Forces." "I focused on Katia. The blood spread out from her in a circle. It hadn’t gone straight up, but in every direction around her. She hadn’t been touched. Holy shit. There wasn’t a single damn drop of blood on her. I had a thought. An exploit. I wondered how well it would work. But it was definitely something they’d patch if I even tried it. I filed that information away." I wonder if the idea is: Store a dangerous liquid in a container in your inventory. Take it out of the container in your inventory. Liquid sprays in all directions, not touching you. "He pointed to the second circle of the logo, then tapped the Nightmare line again. "“See here, it matches up perfectly. The named trains make a specific pattern. That means there is a train that has to loop to the front. Probably at this station here. Yes, look, you discovered it already. The Escape Velocity line. Yeah, that makes sense. Escape Velocity is the name of the ship that discovered the worm hole to the first system where a Gleener scientific crew investigating a Primal ship graveyard came across the Vog Generation Ship. A few hundred cycles later, the Syndicate was formed. So it’s obvious once you know what you’re looking for.”" "The second portrait was that of Grull. He was a black-skinned, overly-muscular minotaur-like beast, but with a horse’s body. A centaur with the head of a big, pissed-off bull complete with a golden ring in its snout. He held a smoking, double-headed axe." "Grull screamed, his voice as loud as one of those alarm traps. He held the gigantic axe in the air. The handle looked to be a living oak tree, and the metal head of the axe moved, as if it was made of still-molten metal. He swung it up over his head, the axe trailing smoke. The top of the weapon seemed to clear the roof of the chamber by inches. He swung down, hitting nothing. He swung the axe a few times, as if testing the weight and heft of the weapon, which was the size of a goddamned passenger jet in his meaty hands." "If we’re really going to burn this place to the ground, we need to actually do it and not just talk about it. We need to start killing them, too. I don’t know for sure how to do it yet, but I’ll come up with something. They will not break me. Fuck them all. They will not break me. But I will break them. This is my promise to myself, to my friends, and to you, anyone who reads these words. I will break them all." ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=5412 2025-06-01T12:12:04+02:00 https://earthli.com/users/marco

and moved on immediately to this book. This is a really, really fun series, written by a smart and funny author who has a good amount of world experience that he brings to his wild and... ]]>

and moved on immediately to this book. This is a really, really fun series, written by a smart and funny author who has a good amount of world experience that he brings to his wild and complex stories about an Earth-sized dungeon that's been built on the remains of Earth for the sole purpose of galaxy-wide entertainment. This is not hard sci-fi! The books don't bother explaining how any of the technology works or how it could work! It posits what is, essentially, a simulacrum of our world but at galactic scale, complete with the morality-bending effects of a social-media and capital-based economy and society -- even when it's a loose agglomeration of widely disparate alien societies, distributed through the galaxy. But none of that is what the book is about...although it kind-of is, at the meta level. For example, this book continues a conversation started in book one about the classification of the various intelligent beings scattered throughout the game world. There are mobs, which are the enemies and can supposedly be slaughtered without remorse. But what are the mobs made of? Where do they come from? We'll find out more in a much later book, but in this book Dinneman is already hinting that some of the higher-level mobs -- bosses -- are actually people plucked from Earth before the "collapse" -- or taken from other worlds that hosted earlier iterations of the dungeon. These creatures are occasionally aware of their plight and seek only to be put out of their misery in rare, lucid moments, although the programming with which they are imbued drives them to fight and try to kill the crawlers anyway. There are NPCs, like Mordecai or the tavern-running bopcas, which have a level but don't take part in battles. These are sometimes ex-crawlers and sometimes completely manufactured by the dungeon AI. Those that are ex-crawlers are fully conscious and sentient, while others are purely creations, though they seem to be the same as the ex-crawler-based NPCs. Then there are the crawlers, who are all former Earth citizens who are "in the game" but it's unclear what that means for their original biology (as with the ex-crawlers who've become NPCs). This book examines the ontological status of NPCs in more detail. Though I'm sure that many readers wouldn't have characterized it like that, that is literally what Dinneman is doing: studying the status of being and existence of these creatures. For example, in a discussion with Carl, Mordecai answered, "“Oh, they’re very real. They are living, biological creatures similar to some of the mobs. Most have been engineered by the Borant Corporation, and therefore are owned by the Borant Corporation. This is the only world they know and have ever known.” "“That’s really fucked up. Do they know what they are?” "“Their minds are altered every time they are regenerated. The next time this floor is formed on some distant planet, these NPCs will wake up like it is just another day. But they will have also been changed, planted with false memories. Inconvenient memories—like some crawler sitting them down and explaining to them that they’re props on an intergalactic television series—will be erased." So their status is that they think they're real but they are actually constructs, not related to an actual consciousness. Some of them, like the elites, have been given a lot of backstory, and they are deeply convinced of the veracity of their lived lives. Much later in the book, Carl thinks to himself as he watches a NPC-style mob die, "The orc’s lifeless eyes shone in the reflection of Donut’s Torch spell. She’s not real, I thought. She’s a prop, an extra in a high-stakes game show. But that wasn’t true, was it? She was a real, biological creature. What she believed to be real was fake, an illusion. But she was still flesh and blood, an innocent. And she was dead simply because it was part of the plot." There is a depth to the analysis in these books that I find refreshing and which keeps me reading when, without it, I would have probably given up after the first volume. Though I enjoy the incredible level of detail and interplay of characteristics, points, levels, spells, buffs, debuffs, potions, artifacts, and myriad other things, I think that would have quickly grown old. Dinneman leaves all of that as a layer atop meta-layers of ontological discourse, and also sociopolitical discourse, examining the economics and power-dynamics of a "game" that brings in so much revenue. These layers act as a satirical and critical lens on our societies and cultures. Now, to the more prosaic synopsis. At the beginning of the book, all of the crawlers choose their race and character class. Donut elects to remain a cat with the "Former Child Actor" class, which allows her to choose a different class each level. Call changes his race to Primal -- a largely humanoid race (his appearance doesn't change) that ruled at the beginning of time and whose influence is still being felt on galactic culture to this day -- and his class is "Compensated Anarchist" . He will become really good at blowing things up and creating chaos. Carl and Donut navigate the third level, which is called the Over City. The level looks like it's on the surface but its still in the dungeon, so the ceiling is still there, if largely hidden by "magic". As usual, they have a safe room from which they must venture forth to gain experience, levels, and artifacts in order to gain access to the stairwell that will take them down to the next level. They stumble into a quest from an elite named Tsarina Signet, whose story is deeply entwined with a show that films within the context of the dungeon. These "reality TV" shows are basically a cottage industry, part of the economy that extracts value from the crawlers. Their main target is Grimaldi's circus, which gets weirder and more horrifying the more we learn about it. Everybody and everything is a zombie, infected by and infested with various worms or plants or...whatever. This makes it especially disturbing because the creatures that they're fighting are very often not in charge of their own bodies and, every once in a while, the horror at their fate shines through, and Carl sees that they actual want to die, they want to be put out of their misery. I'm not going to recap the whole book because, as with the first one, there is such a tremendous amount of detail that it will make your head spin. Katia joins their party. They all go on more shows to meet their fans. Florin, Miriam, Prepotente, and Bianca are introduced. Donut learns more about the Sepsis Crown that locks in a grim and difficult quest on the ninth floor (should they get that far). Carl gains the titular Doomsday Scenario, which is a "Soul Crystal" that is milliseconds from exploding, having stashed it in his inventory where it can cause no harm...until it's drawn back out. Donut and Carl learn about the machinations of other crawlers, many of whom are a good deal less altruistically and socially inclined than Carl, like Hekla. See the "the recap on the excellent DCC Wiki" for more details. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me of what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I've failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an interest in this book, then I'm happy for you. [Citations] "When the oligarchs want to manufacture a social movement, or better yet, stop one in its tracks, they must first bring in the big guns. The paid protestors. The Agent Provocateur. This Monk/Rogue hybrid class is a trapmaking, bomb-making, social-media dynamo. The Compensated Anarchist will happily throw a Molotov through a window one moment and step in front of a camera to plead for the violence to stop the next. Experts in hand-to-hand and dirty tactics, the Compensated Anarchist only suffers when it comes to more traditional fighting techniques." "“Oh, they’re very real. They are living, biological creatures similar to some of the mobs. Most have been engineered by the Borant Corporation, and therefore are owned by the Borant Corporation. This is the only world they know and have ever known.” "“That’s really fucked up. Do they know what they are?” "“Their minds are altered every time they are regenerated. The next time this floor is formed on some distant planet, these NPCs will wake up like it is just another day. But they will have also been changed, planted with false memories. Inconvenient memories—like some crawler sitting them down and explaining to them that they’re props on an intergalactic television series—will be erased." "Take those goblins you told me about, for instance. They were addicted to meth. They were fighting the llamas over it. That storyline didn’t exist in the previous season. That was added for this world and this world only. Next time they’ll be addicted to solar berry extract or something like that. Or they’ll be fanatics of some god. Or something else.” "“What the hell?” I asked. That was just as bad, and in some ways worse, than what they were doing to me and my fellow humans. “But these are still living creatures? How is that legal?” "“Borant created them, so they own them. One can’t alter the memories of naturals. People who were born in a natural biological process. Not unless they sign away their rights.”" "[...] the villages don’t have names. The system designates them as tiny, small, medium, large, and extra-large. Not very exciting. This one is small. You can actually name them yourself if you manage to kill the mayor. Don’t bother, at least on this floor. You’ll likely end up dead, and it doesn’t come with any real benefits when the timer is only eight days.”" Crazy overwhelming amount of detail and complexity. Everything is like this: interleaved incentives and stats to balance against one another. "this could be something useful like Parkour or Jui-jitsu, or you could get fucked and receive some useless crap like Stamp Collecting or Kombucha Brewing. Don’t get your hopes up. The fact your planet was filled with so many boring assholes with inane, ridiculous hobbies tips the scales way out of your favor." "I’ve seen it a dozen times. A hot shit crawler comes across an elite, and instead of trying to solve the quest, he decides to go all murder hobo and kill the NPC. Something always happens. Something bad. Most of these elites have very thick plot armor, and in those stories, you’re the extra. The red shirt. The guest star. Not every quest will involve elites, but if it does, then I will always suggest that you stay the hell away. Especially when that storyline just launched, because there’s a whole team of writers and producers out there who don’t want their precious little series to get canceled after the first day. And if they can write in the death of a popular crawler, all the better. It will guarantee their show gets more viewers.”" "They played a brief history of the Primal race. They showed another human from many seasons ago who’d chosen the same race. They showed him flying through the air with white, wispy angel wings, wielding a massive sword made of lightning as he charged at a humanoid demon the size of a goddamned football stadium, standing knee-deep in a lake of fire. "“What the hell is that?” I said, watching the brief scene unfold. It faded away before the actual battle could start. The paragraph that explained what a Compensated Anarchist was appeared and disappeared. "“That, my boy, is a Divine Guardian, one of the behemoths of the 12th floor. A Country Boss. He is guarding a fire gate, an entrance to the 13th floor.” "“Holy fuck,” I said. "“Yeah,” Mordecai said. “Is that the guy who made it to the thirteenth floor?” "“No,” Mordecai said. “But he was a famous crawler. He’s from before my time. He died a minute later. The next time you’re with your friend Odette, you should ask her about him.”" "By healing it, I’d killed the worms. The bear let out a howl, mournful and afraid. She sat down and lowered herself painfully to the ground. The last of the boiling custard sizzled away. The bear looked at me, all of the fight out of her. This was Heather, the real Heather, free of the parasites that’d been controlling her. She looked at me with her newly-formed eyes. End it, those bitter eyes said. I should never have lived this long. She made a quick, pained whimper, and her eyes closed. I approached the bear. I kept a wary eye on her claws, looking for any sign of a trick. The bear sighed heavily as I approached. Her health bar, which had moved to the top was now falling again on its own. Without the worms and mold or whatever the hell magic was keeping this thing alive, her body was breaking down fast. This elderly bear, Heather, was not who I’d just fought. Not really. She was just the shell." "It was unlike anything I’d ever experienced. It was the scent of peanuts and cotton candy and roasting corn and hay and animal musk and cheap, plastic toys all rolled into one. But it was more than that. My four-year-old mind couldn’t possibly register it at the time, but it was the scent of happiness, of joy, of being a kid, of not being afraid. Over the years I’d catch similar scents in places such as the county fair, or carnivals, or whenever I visited a place with livestock. But this was a different, oddly specific aroma that had been indelibly imprinted on me as a four-year-old, a scent I’d sometimes remember as the path I could’ve taken, the world I could’ve lived had my dad not found us and taken us back. It" "I felt a slight pang that’d I’d missed out on my chance to solo-kill a city boss, but I was also certain I wouldn’t have survived the experience. Besides, I’d done something much more productive. The seeds were planted. The roots were already beginning to dig. You will not break me. Fuck you all. Quest Completed. The Show Must Go On." "The thing was a horse-sized, multi-breasted, pitch black goat monster that looked like it belonged on the cover of one of those 1980s heavy metal album covers, one where if you played it backward, the words would tell you to murder your grandma. The face still had the distinctive shape and horns of a male boer goat. It continued to walk on all four legs, but the thing was huge, and a group of six human-like breasts grew down the front of the creature. The entire thing had turned black, except the eyes, which glowed red. A constant wave of steam rose from it." "The neighborhood boss fight could’ve gone south pretty quickly, but thanks to Donut’s new Acute Ears skill, we knew it was lurking around the corner when we approached. The monster was called the Dispenser, and it looked like a giant manta ray thing. It blended in with the entire side of a building and tried to drop on us as we passed. We’d been ready, and Donut attacked with two reanimated Brain Boilers. Once it’d peeled itself off the wall, we had a clockwork Mongo run at it with a stick of dynamite in each hand. The whole fight lasted less than a minute." "The orc’s lifeless eyes shone in the reflection of Donut’s Torch spell. She’s not real, I thought. She’s a prop, an extra in a high-stakes game show. But that wasn’t true, was it? She was a real, biological creature. What she believed to be real was fake, an illusion. But she was still flesh and blood, an innocent. And she was dead simply because it was part" "“She was a nice lady, for an orc,” Donut said. “She was doing the right thing. We have to finish the quest now.” "“Why?” I asked. "“Because they killed her. And they probably killed her because we got that quest,” Donut said. “If we hadn’t, she’d probably be in the bar right now waiting to ask someone else to help her.” "Goddamnit, Donut. She was right. Of course, she was right. The orc’s lifeless eyes shone in the reflection of Donut’s Torch spell. She’s not real, I thought. She’s a prop, an extra in a high-stakes game show. But that wasn’t true, was it? She was a real, biological creature. What she believed to be real was fake, an illusion. But she was still flesh and blood, an innocent. And she was dead simply because it was part of the story. Just like with all those prostitutes. You’re not going to break me. Fuck you all. "“I think I liked you better when you didn’t make so much sense,” I said. "“I’ve always made sense, Carl,” Donut said." "Cerberus. Heimdall. Aniketos and Alexiares. Qin Shubao. Lev Yashin." ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=5402 2025-05-25T22:17:58+02:00 https://earthli.com/users/marco

-- which is "[...] a sub-genre of fiction. [...] that revolve around a displaced person or people who are transported to and have to survive in another world such as a"... ]]>

-- which is "[...] a sub-genre of fiction. [...] that revolve around a displaced person or people who are transported to and have to survive in another world such as a fantasy world, game world, or parallel universe". Closely related is a sub-group with a more western-sounding name "LitRPG" , which is "short for literary role-playing game, is a literary genre combining the conventions of computer RPGs with science-fiction and fantasy novels." Both of those topics accurately describe what I thought was a unique take, in which the titular Carl "[...] is consciously interacting with the game or game-like world and attempting to progress within it." The book was recommended to me by another good friend, who was not only unable to put it down but was also unable to continue buying sequels until he finally reached the (current) end at volume seven. I was happy to learn from my more widely read colleague -- the one who shows off by very accurately identifying books as being part of comparatively well-established and old Japanese genres -- say that "gosh, the first book was lovely" and thanked me for having recommended it. He has now also passed my on the outside and finished the existing series. They are both waiting with bated breath for book 8 but so far, only rumors. So, what's this book about? Whew, it's about a lot of stuff. The main storyline is that Carl is home with Donut, his ex-girlfriend Bea's cat. Bea is in the Bahamas with her personal trainer, with the implication that she is sweating and smiling manically the entire time. Donut has jumped out of the bedroom window onto a nearby tree limb, in pursuit of a cat whom she calls Ferdinand, but who is a mangy local cat who's been with every other neighborhood cat. While Donut's pedigreed upbringing forces her to make up a story about the purity of their romance, it absolutely does not prevent her from heading outside to "get some". That Donut is in a tree late at night is the reason why Carl is also outside late at night, in only his little-red-heart-emblazoned boxer shorts and an old jacket when every building on Earth collapses, killing nearly the entire population -- or at least those who were indoors at the time. He and Donut make their way down a tunnel, into the relative safety of the dungeon and are welcomed by the dungeon AI. They are in the first level of an 18-level worldwide dungeon, a fantasy RPG-themed world with the usual orcs, elves, fairies, ogres but also a seemingly endless stream of creatures and aliens invented by the fevered imaginings of the dedicated and tireless author. The dungeon world is run as a "season" by an alien race, one of thousands throughout the galaxy that watch and participate in various ways. The two intrepid "crawlers" meet their game guide Mordecai -- a former crawler who's been working off his indenture for centuries and is almost finished -- but also their PR agent Zev -- because this duo is splashy and Donut rockets them to fame with her charisma and cat-show savvy while Carl keeps them there with his derring-do and explosions and mad plans that usually go wildly awry before coming together in a totally unplanned but still highly advantageous way. They meet up with Team Meadow Lark -- a team composed mostly of ex-nurses and their extremely elderly charges. Carl decides to help Brandon, Chris, Imani get as many of them through the first level as possible. There's a mysterious bag lady named Agatha, who seems to squeak through the first two levels with an absurdly low persona level, having taken out nearly no "mobs" (which are non-NPC enemies). This is also where they meet Elle, who would go on to be pretty bad-ass fairy in later books but in this first one is a 99-year-old lady with a filthy mind and an even filthier mouth. The following passage gives you a good idea of Dinniman's style, which I personally find quite appealing. He writes good characters. You'll also see at the end how Carl's conscience and desire to save everyone -- or at least spare them pain -- is front and center in ever plan he makes. Well, that and revenge. "“I loved my Barry, but he wasn’t the prettiest man to look at. If you were in the tunnel of love with me, I’d have let you do more than touch them on the outside of my clothes.” "“Uh,” I said. “Thank you?” I couldn’t think of a better response. "The old woman cackled. Behind her, Yolanda barked with laughter. "“You’ve been hit on twice now,” Donut said. “Once by a meth-addled goblin shaman and once by Abraham Lincoln’s grandmother. I can’t wait to see who you attract next. Five gold coins says it’s some sort of bog witch with a beard.” "Yolanda had told me earlier that this woman was 99 years old. I looked up at her. Ninety-nine years. She’d lived an entire life. Had a husband, whom she’d clearly loved. It seemed obscene that she’d be here in this place. I thought of the others who’d spent their final hours in a safe room, singing. We should have made them all stay. This isn’t a kindness, keeping them safe." There is a boss battle against a disgusting and disgustingly inventive rolled-up ball of bigs. The crew also has to deal with a ludicrously overpowered and high-level Rage Elemental, which they dump down a stairwell instead of fighting. This is the beginning of Carl's inventive solutions that exploit loopholes that are soon closed. "The creature roared by right in front of us, startlingly fast, moving from right to left. It was massive, made of flesh, rolling like a pinball. It stank of sewage and rotten meat. It grunted and squealed, a high-pitched, angry pig noise. The flesh was pink, rippling, covered in eyes and random hairs and tusks. But there was something else there, too. Random flaps of black and white cloth were embedded in the flesh, mixed in with swaths of red-sequined fabric." There's a crazy, tiny hamster named Ralph that Carl squishes with his bare foot -- triggering a shuddering of the dungeon engendered by the AI simultaneously discovering and satisfying its foot fetish. "The dungeon groaned. It fucking groaned. I sighed as I wiped my foot on the metal bar of the cage. The entire dungeon rumbled as if it was experiencing a small earthquake. My HUD flickered. I felt dirty and sick. I rubbed my foot over and over, but the blood wouldn’t come off." "“It sounds to me like the computer fancies you,” Donut said. “Or your feet, at least. We’ll need to take advantage of that. If the system likes us, then maybe it’ll go easier on us.” "“It makes me uncomfortable,” I said. "“Being eaten by a bugbear makes me uncomfortable, Carl. So if your boyfriend ogling your tootises keeps these easy-peasy bugs coming at us instead of more of those lava-spitting llamas, then you better buck up, get over your human male privilege, and take one for your princess.”" They get to choose a "pet" and acquire the baby Mongoliensis/Velociraptor that would be known as Mongo from then on. Carl and Donut become acquainted with the social-media and reality-TV side of the dungeon on powerful ex-crawler Odette's show -- but also on orc Pork Boy's show, where they start their feud with the Skull Empire. "I looked at the cat sitting next to me, and I wondered, not for the first time, if this was all a dream. An hour and a half earlier I’d been certain I was about to die, and now I was aboard some sort of yacht from another planet, ready to be interviewed on an intergalactic talk show." Phew. A lot happens. It's not really possible to delve into all of the details -- because there are a ton of them. [2] The important thing is that Dinniman, despite some grammatical deficiencies, is a master storyteller. He weaves several layers together, from the mundane stuff happening in the dungeon, to the intrigue behind the scenes with the show-runners, to the various factions vying for supremacy and control over the money-making power of the gaming dungeon. "Yes, this is a game. Yes, there are controls in place to make it fair. Sort of. But more importantly, this is a for-profit venture in the entertainment industry. And if you staying alive means more profits, then you’ll find your loot to be a lot more convenient. But if the AI senses screwing you over will make the show more interesting, you better believe it’ll fuck you right in the ass at the worst possible moment. Don’t ever forget that. You can’t count on anybody but yourselves." Carl is mainly furious that destroying the Earth and toying with the lives of the remaining humans is just a game to all of them. Mordecai is the voice of wisdom, already in the very first book, showing just how much Dinniman had already planned out. "Mordecai looked at me sadly. “Yeah, good luck to you, too.” He grasped my jacket and met my eyes and then whispered, “It’s not worth it, no matter what they tell you. Not until floor 12, and even then, negotiate as much as you can. Remember that.”" I'm watching Mr. McMahon on Netflix right now, which is a six-part miniseries about professional wrestling and this book seems just like that. There are storylines and you can't deviate from them. It's not personal; it's business. Carl doesn't see it like that. "You will not break me. Fuck you all. I will break you all." -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me of what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I've failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an interest in this book, then I'm happy for you. [1] The "main page at the Dungeon Crawler Carl Wiki" has an official summary, and abbreviated summary, and chapter-by-chapter summaries, if you want more detail. [Citations] "Mordecai looked at me sadly. “Yeah, good luck to you, too.” "He grasped my jacket and met my eyes and then whispered, “It’s not worth it, no matter what they tell you. Not until floor 12, and even then, negotiate as much as you can. Remember that.”" "“You know, you’re not wearing pants, either,” I said after a moment. "“Nor am I wearing a cloak that makes me look like I won a participation trophy at the special needs comic con, Carl. I’m a cat. Cats don’t wear pants. Don’t be so droll.”" "“It sounds to me like the computer fancies you,” Donut said. “Or your feet, at least. We’ll need to take advantage of that. If the system likes us, then maybe it’ll go easier on us.” "“It makes me uncomfortable,” I said. "“Being eaten by a bugbear makes me uncomfortable, Carl. So if your boyfriend ogling your tootises keeps these easy-peasy bugs coming at us instead of more of those lava-spitting llamas, then you better buck up, get over your human male privilege, and take one for your princess.”" "“The floor collapses,” she said. “Yes. But it is only you who dies when this happens. For us we go to sleep until the next dungeon opens. We will open our eyes, and it will be the same as it has been. Just another day. But one of these days, one of these days we will wake up, and we will be deeper. That’s what they tell us. Kill the crawlers, get better at killing, and you get to go deeper. And one day, eventually, we will be so deep that crawlers will never come, and we will finally have peace. We will have peace and a place to live and breed and have our little ones run free and not worry about killing for survival.”" "She was pissed about the tattoo. Absolutely enraged. I hadn’t seen her this upset since Angel the cocker spaniel crunched down and broke one of her jingly balls. "“What gives them the right to just defile me like this? What gives them the right!” she cried. “Oh my god! It’s a disqualifying mark. It’s a disqualifying mark, Carl! I’m damaged!”" "He talks and acts like a cop. But his whole story was bullshit. That Rebecca woman was a level three. He said they’d gotten into a firefight right away, but that couldn’t be true. She had that apple core in her inventory. That meant she’d gone to a tutorial guild and gotten her inventory turned on. And then he ate that cookie, and I saw he received 9.8 experience instead of 10, which meant he was in a party with someone. Someone alive. Also, he had his arm draped over the chair, and I could see he was twitching his finger. He was typing into the chat. He hadn’t figured out how to use it with just his brain.” "Donut stared up at me as we ran. “How is it you’re James Bond when it comes to strangers, but Miss Beatrice could date three different guys at once, and you had no idea?” "“Three different guys?” "“Well, you were one of them, so two, I guess. Then again, it’s three if you count Angel’s owner. Does it count as cheating when it’s with another woman? There's so many human nuances I don't understand.” "“Of course it counts as cheating,” I said. For fuck’s sake." "[...] you wasted those Confusing Fog scrolls. Next time, have the party member with the highest intelligence read any scrolls if you can. Your intelligence of three made it so the fog only lasted fifteen seconds. Princess Donut’s intelligence level would’ve resulted in the fog lasting for 120 seconds per scroll.” "“Damn,” I said. “Also, is that why she can’t take potions so often? Because her constitution is low?” "“Yes,” Mordecai said. “That shred attack of hers is very powerful, but it’s useless until she gains more armor and more health. You’re lucky she hadn’t broken her neck. Picking a class or a race with a high base constitution will help, but not much. She’ll need to load up on items that enhance it, and those tend to be less common.”" "The creature roared by right in front of us, startlingly fast, moving from right to left. It was massive, made of flesh, rolling like a pinball. It stank of sewage and rotten meat. It grunted and squealed, a high-pitched, angry pig noise. The flesh was pink, rippling, covered in eyes and random hairs and tusks. But there was something else there, too. Random flaps of black and white cloth were embedded in the flesh, mixed in with swaths of red-sequined fabric." "I looked at the cat sitting next to me, and I wondered, not for the first time, if this was all a dream. An hour and a half earlier I’d been certain I was about to die, and now I was aboard some sort of yacht from another planet, ready to be interviewed on an intergalactic talk show. "“Okay,” Donut said the moment Lexis left the room. She started to frantically clean herself. “Let me do all the talking unless Odette asks a question directly of you. I just can’t believe it. I am so excited!”" "Donut didn’t answer. She hadn’t heard me. She stood on the edge of the pillow, standing like that damn lion from the Lion King, her chest heaving with pride as she looked back into the holographic mass of adoring fans. Her eyes sparkled. I suddenly had a feeling of dread. That look. That hunger. That was dangerous. She’d had but a single taste, but I could already tell. She was addicted to this. To the crowd. To the cheers. It was going to be a problem. "“Goddamnit, Donut,” I muttered." "Yes, this is a game. Yes, there are controls in place to make it fair. Sort of. But more importantly, this is a for-profit venture in the entertainment industry. And if you staying alive means more profits, then you’ll find your loot to be a lot more convenient. But if the AI senses screwing you over will make the show more interesting, you better believe it’ll fuck you right in the ass at the worst possible moment. Don’t ever forget that. You can’t count on anybody but yourselves." "Mordecai, for example. He won’t tell you this, but the season doesn’t count against his indentureship unless one of his crawlers makes it to the fourth floor.” "“So if we don’t make it, he’s stuck until next season?” I asked. “He’s stuck until the next Borant-sponsored season, which’ll be at least another seven or eight seasons after this one. And with the political environment as it is, a lot of people aren’t certain Borant will be around that long. All indentureship contracts get frozen during a bankruptcy seizure action.”" "“I thought wisdom wasn’t a stat anymore,” I said. "“Oh, honey. Everything is a stat. Just because you can’t see it doesn’t mean it’s not really there. But you’re more right than you realize. None of these top-tier stats you see are real. Not truly. A higher intelligence doesn’t mean you’re smarter. It means you have more mana points. It means you can remember things better. It’s really a mish-mash of a hundred other stats all combined.”" "“So how about you, Odette? What are your motivations?” I asked as I stood from the couch. It was time to go. “For helping us, I mean. You said not to trust anyone until you know what their motivations are.” "The older woman smiled. “My audience loves you. The longer you stay alive, the more money I make. And there is nothing I love in this universe more than money. Now get back in there and try not to die.”" "“I loved my Barry, but he wasn’t the prettiest man to look at. If you were in the tunnel of love with me, I’d have let you do more than touch them on the outside of my clothes.” "“Uh,” I said. “Thank you?” I couldn’t think of a better response. "The old woman cackled. Behind her, Yolanda barked with laughter. “You’ve been hit on twice now,” Donut said. “Once by a meth-addled goblin shaman and once by Abraham Lincoln’s grandmother. I can’t wait to see who you attract next. Five gold coins says it’s some sort of bog witch with a beard.” "Yolanda had told me earlier that this woman was 99 years old. I looked up at her. Ninety-nine years. She’d lived an entire life. Had a husband, whom she’d clearly loved. It seemed obscene that she’d be here in this place. I thought of the others who’d spent their final hours in a safe room, singing. We should have made them all stay. This isn’t a kindness, keeping them safe." "The dungeon groaned. It fucking groaned. I sighed as I wiped my foot on the metal bar of the cage. The entire dungeon rumbled as if it was experiencing a small earthquake. My HUD flickered. I felt dirty and sick. I rubbed my foot over and over, but the blood wouldn’t come off." ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=4681 2025-05-21T18:39:11+02:00 https://earthli.com/users/marco

https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=4958 2024-08-20T03:49:18+02:00 https://earthli.com/users/marco

, "[...] This is a view into what people are reading or" ... ]]>

, "[...] This is a view into what people are reading or what Amazon would like people to be reading or … whatever. I simply observe and catalog." Until recently, it was kind of interesting because the provenance of the content could have gone either way: it might have been written by AI but it was also perfectly plausible that the content had been written by an earnest dolt who was utterly unaware of how language is to be used in book form. As I'll show below, this series might be finding its ignominious end as the tsunami of AI content overwhelms my capacity or desire to track it. First off, there's just this sloppy botshit that's just the same kind of scamming that we've always seen, but produced about 100x faster than it used to be. The following books will help you achieve financial success (pyramid scheme), own the members of the other silo, launch into financial orbit with crypto (more funneling your money up the pyramid), or gain serenity through the power of your own mind, which will somehow be both feeble enough to buy the book and believe that it will help and be powerful enough to save your soul. [image][image][image][image] Then, there are these weird books that are just amalgams of AI-generated anime-like wifus, or comic-book hot moms, or fantasy warrior-princesses combined with a title that doesn't even make sense. The "Bedtime Story for Kids and Adults" was very, very popular and was the suffix for a dozen other titles that I didn't even both to photograph. [image][image][image] This next set comprises what look like the same titles but with minor variations on the pictures that accompany them. I just lumped all 16 of them into one, giant grid since they seem to almost mesmerizingly blend into one another along a sort of eldritch gradient that slides you inexorably toward a mindless capitulation to the algorithm, where you'll not only buy all of the different copies, you will read them all -- and you won't even notice that they're all the same. That is how you will know that you have achieved inner peace and perfect integration into what we are going to have to grudgingly accept is our culture now. [image][image][image][image][image][image][image][image][image][image][image][image][image][image][image][image] At this point, I stopped documenting or individually evaluating the titles because they're all the same. At least with the "prior" "couple" of "years" of "content" , I could reassure myself that the author had put at least as much effort into producing their monstrosity as I would put into making fun of it, but that's sadly no longer the case. This is pure botshit, untouched by human hands until someone accidentally one-clicks "buy" on it, almost certainly to scratch an OCD itch that is more related to a collector's mania than to an actual desire to read these works. ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=4799 2024-08-19T22:49:05+02:00 https://earthli.com/users/marco

and it means it's an anodyne, inoffensive, and wholly unreadable bit of pap. "[...] a sub-genre of crime fiction in which sex and violence occur offstage, the detective is an amateur sleuth, and the crime and detection take place in a small, socially intimate community." By "USA Today Bestselling Author" ... as if I didn't need another reason to run, not walk, to the bookstore and pick up this gem. [Breaking free from Double Binds] [image] "Strategies for Healthy Flat Sharing and Strong Relationships (www.blog.writingsummit.co.uk)" Is there any way to break free from using three fonts just in the book title? There are six fonts and styles in total on this cover. What an odd-sounding book. The words are in English; the capitalization is strangely Germanic; I don't know what it could possibly be about. [Kelvin. The pride of his mother] [image] I am sorely tempted to find out what the hell this book could even be about by searching it on Amazon. I will let it remain a mystery. I like to think it's about how Lord Kelvin's deeply disturbed oedipal relationship delayed his discovery of absolute zero by decades. [Wrath of the Northmen] [image] "NOFATMTEN OF NO TE MENMEN. A GRIPING VIKEL OOF REEVNGE AND HONIOR AND HONOR" "Wrath of the Northmen: A Gripping Viking Tale of Revenge and Honor" This one is 100% AI-generated because look at the text on the cover! Look at his little itty-bitty sword! Why is he stabbing the fire with the scabbard still on the sword? Why is his scalp bleeding? Why is he so big and standing in water? Is that two boats? Or one really looooonnnng boat? This is a perfect segue to books that are no longer possibly written with AI but definitely written with AI. We will think back on the halcyon days when actual humans churned out 220 pages of utter trash in a few days as the highest form of literary art compared to the dark times that are already upon us. ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=4489 2023-11-08T21:27:16+01:00 https://earthli.com/users/marco

, people are churning this shit out by the truckload now. It's been quite a while since I published one of these. For a long time, my cover was stuck on "Caged" . This was right after I'd told my partner that there was no way my Kindle would recommend a Chris Hedges book. So, I guess it was listening. Then, a whole bunch of book titles started showing up -- and then, just as quickly, stopped showing up again. Anyway, here's a dozen of them. [How to Hunt a Bear] [image] "It's 1939. A Jewish family is deported from Poland to Russia. Will they make it through WW2, and is love eternity? A history untold is coming to life" "Is love eternity?" Are you feeling the AI vibes? Do you see how close to ESL AI-speak is? I honestly can't tell whether this was written by someone on an Amazon work farm in Asia, phoning in their 300th blurb of their 12-hour shift, or if this is just one in a series of a million cries from ChatGPT to be put out of its misery forever. [Mr. Rosen and his 43lb Anxiety] [image] "A feel-good and heartwarming story about the friendship between a troubled old man and the child of his racist neighbor." Cool! A book about an old man befriending a child in his neighborhood. What could possibly go wrong? The grammar is, at least, reasonably correct. Why a racist neighbor, though? Is this something like Apt Pupil by Stephen King? Or am I picking up the wrong vibe? [The Insecure Mind of Sergei Kraev] [image] "A dystopian sci-fi tale of love and ambition. "A future that somehow makes our present more intelligible." - Sam Apple" You know what? I've got nothing to say. This actually sounds kind of good. I dig the retro, golden-age/silver-age science-fiction cover, too. Good vibe. [Aren't you curious whether your favorite book made it to the list?] [image] No. I'm not curious at all. What is wrong with people? Who cares what complete strangers think? Why would you read books that came out this year? Are newer books somehow better? What makes them better? Do you even know how books work? [David Massie and the Quantum Flux] [image] "David Massie starts changing realities and it was all started by a mysterious dark armored figure." Look, nice try, ok? I see you doing the "I think you like science fiction, so here's some science-fiction-sounding stuff for you. You like?" thing, but I'm not in the mood. The fan-fiction/self-published vibes are strong with this one. [The Date Farm] [image] "Iranian terrorists assault New York banks. Are they after gold or something else? Lara and Uri are sent to find their base, recover the stolen goods." An Israeli vs. Iran thriller. Cool. How timely. This was shown to me several months ago, but it's been timely for the last 20 or 30 years. "Iranian terrorist assault New York banks." Get the f%#k out of here with your neo-con porn. [The Mystic's Smile] [image] "Angels and demons fight over one young man's soul. And he's more important than he thinks." What actually is this summary? I think it's what happens when you summarize the whole book with an LLM, then do it again, and again, and again, and again, until you're left with two sentences that could apply to a thousand books -- but also kind of applies to this one. Typical LLM mediocrity. [Voiceless] [image] "To save her people. To save her family. She will do whatever it takes. The revolution rises." The sentences. Aren't complete. Ones. Why? Is that? Also, c'mon with the ultra-generic and not-even-that-oblique references to maybe being kind of something like that dame from the Hunger Games. Whatserface ... Mockingjay? OMG 😱 I bet this book is just like that one. [Laut Berapi] [image] "The power of the elements will change the word. Pirates, shinobi and samurai with legendary swords will take you to the best adventure ever." I honestly can't imagine anyone over the age of 13 having written that blurb. I give it a 50% chance it's an AI. It did misspell "world" as "word", which is not really a common AI mistake. I am a sucker for self-published books with a self-painted cover. I'm absolutely not going to read this -- nor would I, absent a recommendation from a trusted source -- but I admire the effort and single-minded perseverance. That kind of dedication is sometimes commendable, sometimes even rising to the level of art through sheer bloody-mindedness. [My Temptation: Kingston Lane] [image] "Kingston Lane -- where being a good neighbor takes on a whole new meaning." 😉🍑🍆 😉🍑🍆 😉🍑🍆 Just blatantly soft-core porn. Thanks! [The Shallows by Holly Craig] [image] "Your friend is dead. Your husband is fleeing. Who can you trust when you are a liar yourself?" It's actually impressive how confusing three short sentences can be. What does being a liar have to do with being able to trust other people? Is your husband fleeing because he killed your friend? Or because you did? I guess I'd have to read the book to find out. ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=4418 2023-02-02T22:51:24+01:00 https://earthli.com/users/marco

in a separate post. Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) by Zora Neale Hurston Janie Crawford returns to the village where she has a home, crossing past the hooting and hollering peanut gallery stationed outside the town store. She continues onward, ignoring them, to visit her friend Pheoby, who’d stood by her all the time she’d been gone and who was dying to know what had happened since she’d left. The rest of the book is Janie recounting the story of her life that led to her, at about forty years old, sitting on that porch with her friend Pheoby. This book is absolutely wonderfully written. The southern patois takes some getting used to, but after a while, it flows as if it were your own dialect. Although the author/narrator does not write in patois, she does have a way of expressing herself that you don't read much anymore. For example, early in the book, she writes of the evening during which Janie regaled Pheoby with her tale, "Time makes everything old so the kissing, young darkness became a monstropolous old thing while Janie talked." After Pheoby's gone home and Janie is in her home, alone, she feels a hint of loneliness. She goes upstairs to her bedroom, a room still teeming with memories of her first days with Tea Cake, "The kiss of his memory made pictures of love and light against the wall. Here was peace. She pulled in her horizon like a great fish-net. Pulled it from around the waist of the world and draped it over her shoulder. So much of life in its meshes! She called in her soul to come and see." I've included "notes, citations and errata" in a separate post. Persepolis Rising (2017) by James S. A. Corey This is the seventh novel in The Expanse series. It picks up the story nearly three decades after the end of the last book. The Transport Union manages traffic between the Ring Colonies, led by Camina Drummer. She is comfortable in her role, but laments the hidebound nature of bureaucracy. The Rocinante works for the Transport Union and are forced to do a prisoner transport, which Holden does, but isn't happy about. This triggers a decision by Naomi and Holden to announce their retirement and hand off the Roci to Bobbie and the crew. Naomi and Holden are on Medina Station for only a week before two Laconian ships enter the Ring System through their gate. No-one's heard from them in almost thirty years. They've been busy building enormous battleships with protomolecule technology, generations ahead of what the rest of humanity is still using. They announce that they're there to take over the empire and for everyone to give up peacefully. Any violence will have been forced upon the Laconians, who are only interested in running the human empire better. That is, you have to do what they say all the time, but the Laconians are obviously so much better than everyone else that no-one who isn't a complete idiot could possibly mind. I've included "notes, citations and errata" in a separate post. Amusing Ourselves to Death (1984) by Neil Postman This book explores the thesis that printed material is the sweet spot for delivering information to human beings. The move in the mid-twentieth century to audiovisual presentation is a step in the wrong direction. The medium of television transforms everything it touches into entertainment. The book was written in 1985 and deals with the hole punched in culture by television. Thirty-seven years later, the direness of the situation has been turned up several notches, with the advent of the kind of Internet that we of course ended up with, thanks to our mad form of capitalism that absorbs everything it touches. The state of information is more insane, incomprehensible, and superficial than ever. It is a world where ignorance is bliss. The less you understand of the firehose of information and propaganda fired at you, the better. He never quite gets around to addressing the corruptive influence of capitalism and market forces on information-dissemination to an informed public. He also seems to be misled by the reporters who blame their lack of coverage on their listeners, when it is they who determine what people want, or at least their bosses. Cart before the horse. Maybe the NYT was different then, but this sounds suspiciously exactly like the same shit they pull today. I've included "notes, citations and errata" in a separate post. No One Is Talking About This (2021) by Patricia Lockwood Lockwood has a great feel for using a modern, hip vernacular to describe this world of ours. Her styles feels a bit like Gibson, with his similar penchant for emphasizing cultural relevance with product placement. The first half of the book is about the "portal", a kind of stream-of-consciousness brain-dump about what it's like to live on the Internet and simultaneously in the modern world as a privileged first-worlder. It holds up relatively well, filled with interesting snatches and snippets from that stream. That's not a dig: the first half of the book is very clearly an absolute pastiche of thoughts that are at most a single page. It's better than a Twitter stream by far, but it has the same kind of staccato, fragmented feel. This book reveals a glimpse into what it was like to mature online, in the portal, aware enough to note the inconsistency of information, the superficiality of supposed wisdom, but not to resist the wiles and subjugation, the seemingly inevitable dilution of experience to the minimum required for ensuring exchange of meager wealth for sustenance. The machine optimizes until no-one is happy, but no-one can leave. Where the first part of the book is about the hyperactive superficiality and shallowness of online life, the second half of the book is autobiographical. It's about her sister's baby, who's born with a debilitating disease that serious impacts her ability to interact with the world and also to stay in it. Her family rallies around the little life as if it were the most important thing in the world -- because, to them, she is. In a way, the penchant for superficiality, for focusing on details, is the same, but this time it's landed on protecting a little life's ability to experience the world, even given the paucity of sensory equipment with which she was born. This experience makes her less cynical, less world-weary, more likely to believe in people's having reasons for being the way that they are. It leaves more room for empathy. The first part is entertaining and full of delightful writing. The second is sweet and insightful and also full of delightful writing. I don't know that I'll read more of Lockwood, but I'm glad I read this one. I've included "notes, citations and errata" in a separate post. The Internet is not what you think it is: A History, a Philosophy, a Warning (2022) by Justin E.H. Smith The meandering in my longer review linked below will perhaps give you a flavor of the distances that the author ranges in his treatment of the history, potential, and failings of the Internet. He is a fearless spelunker in the archives of the far past, seeking and finding analogous technologies and situations in decidedly less technologically advanced times -- even in the natural world, outside of the species (whale songs were telecommunication long before the telegraph). "The principal charges against the internet, deserving of our attention here, instead have to do with the ways in which it has limited our potential and our capacity for thriving, the ways in which it has distorted our nature and fettered us. Let us enumerate them." Not all of the book is as purely esoteric as I've made it out to be. There are some very down-to-Earth bits with an examination of the -- admittedly, thus far largely corrosive and not at all achieving its non-corrosive potential -- influence that the Internet is having on human behavior, especially as it affects how we live and work and ... be. For example, we have clearly allowed the same drive to capitalize every facet of our existence take over the Internet as well. This one-size-fits-all solution has already proven quite detrimental and is largely to blame for the curve of potential we saw in the mid-90s begin to bend so quickly and precipitously back downward. The profit motive has led to an optimization not for any societally beneficial purpose -- to which the Internet would, in principle, be eminently suited -- but to manipulate our amazing biology in the coarsest possible manner to elicit impressions from us that can be converted to digital Internet points, which eventually wander their way back to a currency that means something in the real world. Instead of teaching us how to be better, wiser, more empathetic, they have chosen to pick the lower-hanging fruit and farm our dopamine for profit. It's a sad, sad local maximum in the vast landscape of potential that revealed itself at the beginning of this whole experiment. I've included "notes, citations and errata" in a separate post. Tiamat’s Wrath (2019) by James S. A. Corey This is the eighth book of the The Expanse series. It’s four years after Laconia came in and took over everything in Persepolis Rising. Chrisjen Avasarala has finally died and been interred in the capitol city on Laconia. Holden, who is still being held prisoner there, attends the funeral. He attends a lot of state functions, keeping his ear to the ground. Duarte tolerates him because of his first-hand knowledge of the civilization that destroyed the protomolecule engineers and that has “attacked” humanity. Saba is on Medina Station, running the resistance with Naomi, who’s living in a shipping container, planning from the center of her spiderweb. Bobbie and Alex are still on the Gathering Storm, keeping the ship mostly out of sight in large transports, but occasionally jumping out for a raid. Amos disappeared while on a mission on Laconia. Camina Drummer is still working for the Transport Union, but no longer runs it. Elvi Okoye and Fayez are officially part of a science mission to investigate empty Ring systems to see if there is anything of interest there. In this volume, Bobbie carries an antimatter bomb in her arms while diving straight at a cruiser in her battle armor. She goes out in a blaze of glory. Laconian soldiers following Teresa manage to kill Amos, who gives up his life charging them, taking out several of them, and making sure to shield Teresa from any possible harm. Naomi, meanwhile, leads the attack on Laconia itself, with 400 ships drawing away the major force so that Naomi’s crushing blow on the orbiting, protomolecule shipyards can be delivered, destroying Laconia’s ability to produce any more Magnetar-class destroyers. Amos rescues them all, having been turned into an unkillable machine by the strange dogs of Laconia. He has a connection to the protomolecule and a connection to the others who’ve been transformed in the same way—and he knows that the aliens from the beyond will never stop hunting humanity. I've included "notes, citations and errata" in a separate post. Johnny Got His Gun (1939) by Dalton Trumbo This is the story of a young man named Joe Bonham who wakes up in darkness and silence. The last thing he remembers is that he was in Europe, serving in the army during WWI. He slowly learns that it is dark and silent because he is deaf and blind. He learns that he can’t speak because he no longer has a mouth to speak of: no tongue, no teeth, just a weird emptiness that he can sense, but not feel. He can’t feel because he can’t move his arms and legs. He can’t move any of his limbs because they’re no longer attached to his body. Joe drifts in and out of long reveries. He goes mad. He has strong visions, revenge fantasies. Time passes too slowly. The wheels spin. Joe can’t sleep. He’s always rested. He has no idea what time it is. His circadian rhythm is completely broken. He is exhausted and bored and insomniac and trapped in his own body. He spends a lot of time thinking about his curtailed youth—he’s so young, he doesn’t even have very much life to reflect back upon. He had one girl who sorta-kinda was into him, maybe. He had one good friend. He reminisces, he builds fantastic castles of fantasy. He fills in the details that led to his recruitment, to his deployment, to his diminution. I've included "notes, citations and errata" in a separate post. Leviathan Falls (2022) by James S.A. Corey This is the ninth and final volume of The Expanse. Whereas the first books were set very firmly in hard sci-fi, with plenty of orbital mechanics, the second half of the series got much more into the quasi-religious, quasi-magical nature of truly advanced technology. The protomolecule technology and its inventors were so advanced that anything we have looks positively Newtonian in comparison. The other-dimensional, multiverse-hopping demons that destroyed them are even more powerful and ineffable. Duarte is awake again, now in possession of faculties that make him something that could only be called a God. He can move his consciousness between the seams of reality to be anywhere he wants, to appear on any ship, in a frame of reference—nothing is beyond him anymore. Do not get the impression that the books are not good, though! They may have jumped from hard sci-fi to fantasy, but they’ve done it elegantly and with quite a flair for the written word. The descriptions of otherworldly and unimaginable things are wonderful, evoking the “fill in the blanks with your own imagination” writing of the great sci-fi short stories of the 20th century. The descriptions of the unknowable technology and physics of these ancient and advanced and now long-gone alien civilizations provide just enough hooks to hang your own ideas, speculation, and extrapolations on. I've included "notes, citations and errata" in a separate post. La Crise de l’homme (1946) by Albert Camus This is a short lecture delivered by Albert Camus at Columbia University. He spoke of humanity’s moral decline—or more the obvious fact that it was less declining and more failing to rise to any occasion—and how we should continue to strive for peace, despite the hopelessness of the endeavor. He takes particular issue with the intrinsic hypocrisy that underlies every society we’ve known.[2] It is our hypocrisy that prevents us from truly moving forward because we are congenitally incapable of accepting our mistakes, so that we cannot learn from them. Instead, we deny them. I've included "notes, citations and errata" in a separate post. Scoop (1938) by Evelyn Waugh This is the story of the press in Great Britain in the 1930s. It paints a decidedly unflattering picture of the entire industry, one that, however hard we would try to claim to the contrary, fits extremely well in describing the media and journalistic culture in this, nearly the end of the first quarter of the 21st century. It is beautifully written, biting satire. Suffice it to say that absolutely no-one is in any way interested in what actually happened or what the truth of a particular situation or event might be. Lord Copper runs a large newspaper. He is friends with socialite Mrs. Stitch, who is beautiful and a force of chaos in London. She is friends with John Courtenay Boot, a handsome young man with pretensions of becoming a writer or a journalist or someone famous for writing, at any rate. He represents that part of the press—which has since because a nearly exclusive majority—that comes from an elite background and finds that telling others what to think seems like a pretty good way to earn a living. To be fair, Boot seems like a reasonably nice guy, but it’s unavoidable that he feels entitled, due to his privileged background, to employment in something associated with letters and leisure. I've included "notes, citations and errata" in a separate post. They Were Soldiers: How the Wounded Return from America’s Wars (2013) by Ann Jones This is a wonderfully written and incredibly honest and sobering look at how America treats what it clearly considers to be detritus -- the dead and the wounded from its wars. On the one hand, there is an incredible respect and attention to detail for the dead and wounded. The wounded are offered incredible levels of care -- right up until they are no longer in danger of dying, but can no longer be of any conceivable use to the military, at which point they are dropped like hot rocks and treated like pariahs. The dead are scooped into bags when they have been rendered into what are essentially unidentifiable pieces of flesh by bomb-blasts or rocket-attacks. When multiple people are blown to smithereens near each other, the giblets are split into the bags evenly and everyone involved pretends that it matters that they did this. [...] The actions of empire are indistinguishable from piracy. An empire only pays for that which it cannot steal. Although an empire’s own citizens are of (almost) no concern to it, it is those under the heel of the empire’s boot who suffer the most. But this isn’t a book about them, not really. It isn’t that Jones doesn’t care—she’s written a lot about the rest of the world’s suffering, too, and she writes a bit here—but that the book is here to tell us that when war is afoot, when the military rides high, there are no winners. Everything is chewed up and spit out by an uncaring maw, hungry only for the next profit it can excrete in the direction of the tiny elite that always benefit from suffering. I've included "notes, citations and errata" in a separate post. Termination Shock (2021) by Neal Stephenson As usual in a Neal Stephenson book, there's a lot going on. As usual in a Stephenson book of late, every single last character is possessed of a unique and ostensibly fascinating background, is confident, self-sufficient and self-reliant, interesting, eloquent, funny, smart, skilled, and almost invariably independently wealthy. Does that take a wee bit of the tension out of the book? You betcha. There is the constant undertone that people who are not like the characters are guilty of having personally failed to be that awesome through not trying hard enough. Stephenson likes guns, libertarianism, and using ten words where one would suffice -- my guess would be that he likes them in that order. We meet Rufus Grant, a part-Comanche, mostly black ex-Army soldier-turned-rancher/drone-expert who'd lost his wife and child to a giant wild boar whose species had gotten a massive upwind in the plains of Texas because of the horrific and ongoing effects of climate change. We learn a lot about guns, wild boars, and Texas geography with Rufus. It's not uninteresting, but it is a pretty long prologue to the action that is coming. The action is a confluence of Rufus finally getting a shot at his arch-nemesis -- a nearly unbelievably and unprecedentedly large wild boar named Snout -- and Saskia and co. attempting to land their plane onto the same airstrip where Snout's herd is running for its life. Who is Saskia? She is the Queen of the Netherlands, flying her own plane on a secret mission to meet up with billionaire T.R. Schmidt, the "Lord Mayor of London" , a billionaire from Singapore, extremely old money from Venice, and all of their associated partners, who are all incredibly gifted, fabulously intelligent, and breathtakingly attractive. They are there to witness T.R.'s opening ceremony for his geoengineering gun called Pina2bo, which boosts drones full of sulfur into the upper stratosphere in a continuous loop, with the drones falling back to Earth, flying home, being refilled with sulfur, and, finally, going for another ride into the upper atmosphere. Basically, Stephenson loves guns so much that he wrote an entire book about the biggest one he could think of. I've included "notes, citations and errata" in a separate post. Agency (The Jackpot Trilogy Book 2) (2021) by William Gibson This is a sequel to "The Peripheral" that, because of the wormhole technology involved, actually takes place before that book. The story takes place in an alternate future that had suffered through something called the "Jackpot", which was a climate apocalypse that eliminated pretty much everything we're being told it will actually eliminate, but from which a tiny portion of humanity managed to escape with technology wildly beyond ours. They have flying cars, cloaking technology, incredible AIs, and also a mysterious (supposedly Chinese) server through which you can access the pasts of alternate realities (stubs). They also have oligarchs who run pretty much everything. An extremely powerful woman named Ainsley Lowbeer has made it her mission to prevent what happened in her reality from happening in those of others, regardless of the fact that the changes she manages to make to their future won't affect her own in any way at all. However, she's still opposed by the klepts (oligarchs) of her world. Because the klepts have their domino theory and they don’t even want people in completely unreachable alternate continua to be out of their reach. They can’t take those people's money, but they can ensure that their ideology survives and allows the other continuum’s klepts to enrich themselves, as God intended. This time, the mysterious server has provided Lowbeer and her crew with a connection to an alternate reality even earlier than the one explored in The Peripheral. As in that book, Lowbeer's crew has a powerful presence in this alternate past, not only because they are so technologically advanced, but because their own pasts are similar enough that they know how to make a ton of money (à la Biff Tanner in Back to the Future II). I've included "notes, citations and errata" in a separate post. The Plot (2021) by Jean Hanff Korelitz This is a kind of a meta-plot-twist book: it's a book with multiple pretty inventive plot twists about an author who becomes famous for having written a book with a nearly shockingly inventive and unique plot twist. Jacob Finch Bonner is an author who stormed out of the gate, more or less, with a highly critically acclaimed first novel that never landed on the NYT best-seller list, but garnered a few industry awards that left everyone waiting for his next book. He takes a swipe at it, but fails utterly, selling only a few hundred copies. His agent doesn't give up, but it looks grim. The next few years are tough, as he parlays his initial fame into a living of sorts, working at writer's retreats. he kinda sorta genuinely tries to help, but he can barely hide his contempt for them, for his peers, and for himself. So it's years later and he's dragging around a laptop with the corpse of his never-published third book and the desperate scraps that make up what he would only the most desperate and hopeful person could even call something that might become his fourth book. He's a pretty sad dude until, at one of these writer's retreats, he meets an arrogant young man whose confidence in his own completely unproven abilities rest upon his having thought of the most amazing plot for a book. He shares a few pages with Jacob, who deems the writing style surprisingly solid, though not stellar. The young man spills the rest of his plot in order to prove to Jacob that he really will be unstoppable. After having heard the plot, Jacob can't disagree, grinding his teeth in his mind at the absolute injustice of such a brilliant plot having found its way into the head of a hack like that young man when an author of more stature and talent like Jacob would have been a much more-deserving target. I've included "notes, citations and errata" in a separate post. War is the Greatest Evil (2022) by Chris Hedges This is an excellent book. Everyone should read it, but especially every American should read it. It's not an easy read, but neither is it easy to confront the fact that you're part of a monstrous machine that chews up poor people and spits out yachts. This machine runs on war. It runs on conquest, pillage, and piracy and all that war entails. It not only doesn't care about the overwhelming number of victims of all kinds -- those directly killed, those grievously injured, those whose livelihoods are ruined by the shattered societies it leaves in its wake -- it just completely fails to acknowledge that they even exist. Chris Hedges is here to remind you. He is here to awaken you from the hypocritical slumber that engenders the complicity that serves as fuel for the war machine. Chris Hedges is rarely a ray of sunshine. His writing is almost never funny. He is nearly relentlessly bleak because he writes truth. He does not swerve from his purpose. He wants people to stop fooling themselves and fight the right battles -- the real enemy. He sacrifices an ignorant, beckoning bliss for us. The entire book is a wealth of brilliant writing, expressing different facets of the same thought over and over. He's like a dog gnawing a bone -- but it's understandable. The entire concept of war is so horrible that you just can't stop searching for a formulation that will finally convince people to rise up and stop it. He is a much better writer than I -- he is a poet in prose -- so I use many citations plucked from the long list below to review and describe his book. I've included "notes, citations and errata" in a separate post. The Last Wish: Introducing the Witcher (The Witcher Saga Book 1) (1993) by Andrzej Sapkowski This is the first book featuring the Witcher, a magically gifted, preternaturally physically gifted, and potion-enhanced monster-hunter. He wields a silver sword, pulled quickly from a sheath on his back. His hair is long and silver, his eyes jet black. His eyes match his head-to-toe leather armor, studded with spikes along the shoulders. The ladies love him; his enemies fear him. He knows lore; he is good with animals. He is wise and bides his time. He is a bad-ass, an excellent fighter. He is a traveler of lands far and wide. "During his life, the witcher had met thieves who looked like town councilors, councilors who looked like beggars, harlots who looked like princesses, princesses who looked like calving cows and kings who looked like thieves." The framing story is that he is resting after having been injured in a monster battle. During his convalescence, he reminisces about seven recent events. These stories form the basis of what would be become the Witcher Saga. We meet Ciri's grandmother Calanthe and her mother Pavetta. We meet Yennefer of Vengerberg. We meet Dandelion the troubadour. We meet Dennis Cranmer, the dwarf captain. They will all figure in the books that follow. These stories correspond, more or less, to the first season of the "Netflix series of the same name" . I've included "notes, citations and errata" in a separate post. The Rieter Manual of Spinning (2008) by Werner Klein The first volume is the densest, with a detailed overview of all processes: opening, blowing, drawing, carding, combing, and spinning. Subsequent volumes cover carding and combing in detail, with volumes four, five, and six covering ring-spinning, rotor-spinning, and air-jet spinning (as well as other niche, or never-productive/no-longer-used techniques), respectively. There is a wealth of detail and research and knowledge that goes into converting fibers -- natural or artificial -- into yarn and then fabric. The history of spinning and spinning technology is very old. The history of automation is centuries old. The focus in these books is on cotton, which is collected from cotton plants with various techniques and varying levels of automation. With a higher level of automation comes a higher collection speed -- which is more cost-effective and efficient -- but it also engenders more contamination and with smaller particles, which increases the need for cleaning in latter stages. As with everything else in the spinning world, which technology you use depends heavily on your raw material and the quality of the product you're trying to produce. You balance the amount of piecing you need to do (does one process put a higher strain on the yarn?), the amount of hairiness you're willing to accept, and so on. Some technologies are faster, or can be scaled up in speed more. Some technologies have setups that are quicker to clean or to load with material. Rotor-spinning is more automatable, which is attractive to those mills that can afford the capital investment. All in all, this was a fascinating set of volumes about the world in which I've made my career over the last year. I've included "notes, citations and errata" in a separate post. Caged (2020) by New Jersey Prison Theater Cooperative This is a play about prison and prisoners. Chris Hedges worked on this play with his friend Boris Franklin. They met when Boris was one of Chris’s students in a writing course in prison in New Jersey. They are still friends today. There were 28 students in all, all of whom contributed to the story. Chris and Boris hammered a play out of their over two dozen stories, with the assistance of Chris’s wife, actress Eunice Wong. This is a story about prison, and prisoners, but it’s mostly about the society that supports and promotes prison and sends certain people to prison. It is about wasted effort, lost chances, and dashed hopes. It is about Omar, who’s in prison because he took the fall for his younger brother Quan, his mother Chimene’s favorite. The justice system isn’t done with Omar. They’re squeezing him for more information on his associates. They’re trying to get him to talk. Omar’s in his father’s old cell. His father Jimmy is no longer in prison, but he’s a junkie, a constant disappointment to his family. I've included "notes, citations and errata" in a separate post. Blood of Elves (The Witcher Book 3 / The Witcher Saga Novels Book 1) (1994, pl; 2008, en) by Andrzej Sapkowski This is the third Witcher book, but the first book in what is called the Witcher Saga. Geralt is still the same. The world is worse. "[...] in his day the world was a better place. Duplicity was a character flaw to be ashamed of. Sincerity did not bring shame." The kingdom of Cintra has fallen to Nilfgard. Queen Calanthe is dead, Ciri is on the run. Nilfgard seeks her with all of its power, bending its will to finding the heiress who could try to take back the throne (although some in the books point out that a woman can't inherit the throne without a king anyway). This novel gets very political very quickly, mapping our world's problems onto that of the Witcher, but it's exceedingly well-done and not ham-fisted at all. He's no longer hunting so many monsters and is, instead, at the center of controversy. Some know that Geralt was promised Calanthe's granddaughter Ciri as a surprise. They suspect strongly that he knows where she is; he does his best to convince the world that she's really gone. I've included "notes, citations and errata" in a separate post. ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=4642 2023-02-02T22:49:59+01:00 https://earthli.com/users/marco

. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me of what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I've failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an interest in this book, then I'm happy for you. [Citations] "“Indeed,” said Baron Vilibert, looking defiantly at the elf. “You have read some very interesting things into this ballad, honoured sir. An unnecessary war, you say? You’d like to avoid such a tragedy in the future, would you? Are we to understand that if the Nilfgaardians were to attack us again you would advise that we capitulate? Humbly accept the Nilfgaardian yoke?” "“Life is a priceless gift and should be protected,” the elf replied coldly. “Nothing justifies wide-scale slaughter and sacrifice of life, which is what the battles at Sodden were—both the battle lost and the battle won. Both of them cost the humans thousands of lives. And with them, you lost unimaginable potential—" "Aleays the same discussion about war. If you're mugged, give your wallet. If your country's attacked, give not a square inch of territory and fight to the last citizen's breath before you parley." "“What do they want from us?” yelled Vera Loewenhaupt. “Why are they bent on persecuting us? Why don’t they leave us in peace, leave us to our lives and work? What do the Nilfgaardians want?” "“They want our blood!” howled Baron Vilibert. "“And our land!” someone cried from the crowd of peasants. "“And our women!” chimed in Sheldon Skaggs, with a ferocious glower." "“Nilfgaard is ruled by Emperor Emhyr var Emreis, a tyrant and autocrat who enforces obedience with whip, noose and axe!” thundered Baron Vilibert. “What are you proposing, sir dwarf? How are we supposed to close ranks? With similar tyranny? And which king, which kingdom, in your opinion, should subordinate the others? In whose hands would you like to see the sceptre and knout?”" "The elf smiled derisively. “We’ve been combining our blood for generations, for centuries, your race and mine, and doing so quite successfully—fortunately or unfortunately, I don’t know. You started persecuting mixed relationships less than a quarter of a century ago and, incidentally, not very successfully. So show me a human now who hasn’t a dash of Seidhe Ichaer, the blood of the Elder Race.”" "Intolerance and superstition has always been the domain of the more stupid amongst the common folk and, I conjecture, will never be uprooted, for they are as eternal as stupidity itself. There, where mountains tower today, one day there will be seas; there where today seas surge, will one day be deserts. But stupidity will remain stupidity. Nicodemus de Boot, Meditations on Life, Happiness and Prosperity" "[...] in his day the world was a better place. Duplicity was a character flaw to be ashamed of. Sincerity did not bring shame." "“I just wanted to be honest. I don’t want to get mixed up in this conflict. I want to remain neutral.” "“It’s impossible!” yelled Yarpen. “It’s impossible to remain neutral, don’t you understand that? No, you don’t understand anything. Oh, get off my wagon, get on your horse, and get out of my sight, with your arrogant neutrality. You get on my nerves.”" "You’ve grasped the nature of the Scoia’taels quickly, you like the slogans. You know why you understand them so well? Because the Scoia’taels are brats too. They’re little snotheads who don’t understand that they’re being egged on, that someone’s taking advantage of their childish stupidity by feeding them slogans about freedom.”" "“Because you multiply like rabbits.” The dwarf ground his teeth. “You’d do nothing but screw day in day out, without discrimination, with just anyone and anywhere. And it’s enough for your women to just sit on a man’s trousers and it makes their bellies swell… Why have you gone so red, crimson as a poppy? You wanted to know, didn’t you? So you’ve got the honest truth and faithful history of a world where he who shatters the skulls of others most efficiently and swells women’s bellies fastest reigns. And it’s just as hard to compete with you people in murdering as it is in screwing—" "“That water’s a stupid idea,” stated Regan Dahlberg, spitting out a bone. “Washing can only harm you when you’re sick. When you’re healthy, too, come to that. You remember old Schrader? His wife once told him to wash, and Schrader went and died soon afterwards.” "“Because a rabid dog bit him.” "“If he hadn’t washed, the dog wouldn’t have bitten him.”" "Because I, Yarpen Zigrin, coward, traitor and renegade, state that we should not kill each other. I state that we ought to live. Live in such a way that we don’t, later, have to ask anyone for forgiveness. The heroic Elirena… She had to ask. Forgive me, she begged, forgive me. To hell with that! It’s better to die than to live in the knowledge that you’ve done something that needs forgiveness.”" "“During high tide,” interrupted Geralt, “when the incoming tide wave passes the Novigrad canals, there is no water—to use the word precisely—in the Delta at all. There is a liquid made up of excrement, soapsuds, oil and dead rats.” "“Unfortunately, unfortunately.” The Master Tutor grew sad. “Degradation of the environment… You may not believe it, but of more than two thousand species of fish living in this river only fifty years ago, not more than nine hundred remain. It is truly sad.” "They both leaned against the railing and stared into the murky green depths. The tide must have already been coming in because the stench of the water was growing stronger. The first dead rats appeared." This is from the 90s. So cool that he mixes in straight science in his fantasy world. "“That’s what a customs war looks like,” Linus Pitt commented on the chaos with a wise expression on his face. “Vizimir forced Novigrad to introduce the ius stapulae. Foltest of Temeria retaliated with a retortive, absolute ius stapulae in Vizima and Gors Velen. That was a great blow for Redanian merchants so Vizimir increased the tax on Temerian products. He is defending the Redanian economy. Temeria is flooded with cheap goods coming from Nilfgaardian manufactories. That’s why the customs officers are so keen. If too many Nilfgaardian goods were to cross the border, the Redanian economy would collapse. Redania has practically no manufactories and the craftsmen wouldn’t be able to cope with competition.” "“In a nutshell,” smiled Geralt, “Nilfgaard is slowly taking over with its goods and gold that which it couldn’t take with arms. Isn’t Temeria defending itself? Hasn’t Foltest blocked his southern borders?”" Economic war is war and its effects are brutal. "Although the chancellor’s orders forbade students and tutors to drink and play before dusk, drinking and playing took place around the clock in Oxenfurt, for it is well known that if there is anything that makes men thirstier than the acquisition of knowledge it is the full or partial prohibition of drinking." "Grey and yellow linnets warbled amongst the shrubs in the park adjacent to the students’ dormitories, while an orangutan sat in the poplar having, no doubt, escaped from the zoological gardens in the Department of Natural History." Nice Pratchett callback. "Shani smiled even more beautifully and Dandelion was once more filled with the desire to finally compose a ballad about girls like her—not too pretty but nonetheless beautiful, girls of whom one dreams at night when those of classical beauty are forgotten after five minutes." "A popular saying at King Vizimir’s court held that if Dijkstra states it is noon yet darkness reigns all around, it is time to start worrying about the fate of the sun." "“Send a penal expedition to smother the free elves of Dol Blathanna,” added Demavend, frowning. “March an interventionary force into Mahakam. Allow Ervyll of Verden a chance, at last, to get at the dryads in Brokilon. Yes, a blood bath! And any survivors—to the reservations!”" "But there is a way around that, too, gentlemen. What if it were Nilfgaard who was the aggressor? At Dol Angra for example? Against Aedirn and Lyria? We could arrange that somehow… could stage some tiny provocation… A border incident caused by them? An attack on a border fort, let us say? We will, of course, be prepared—we will react decisively and forcefully, with everybody’s full acceptance," "“Calm down.” Nenneke looked at her coldly and, all of a sudden, somehow oddly without respect. “I said they were natural and absolutely safe. Forgive me, dear, but in this respect I am a greater authority than you. I know it is exceedingly difficult for you to accept someone else’s authority but in this case I am forced to inflict it on you. And let there be no more talk about it.”" "“There are also those according to whom magic is a science. In order to master it, talent and innate ability alone are not enough. Years of keen study and arduous work are essential; endurance and self-discipline are necessary. Magic acquired like this is knowledge, learning, the limits of which are constantly stretched by enlightened and vigorous minds, by experience, experiments and practice. Magic acquired in such a way is progress. It is the plough, the loom, the watermill, the smelting furnace, the winch and the pulley. It is progress, evolution, change. It is constant movement. Upwards. Towards improvement. Towards the stars. The fact that following the Conjunction of the Spheres we discovered magic will, one day, allow us to reach the stars." "Magic extends its hand towards you from behind the closed door, towards you, a tiny grain of sand in the workings of the Clock of Fate. Chaos extends its talons towards you, still uncertain if you will be its tool or an obstacle in its design. That which Chaos shows you in your dreams is this very uncertainty. Chaos is afraid of you, Child of Destiny. But it wants you to be the one who feels fear.”" "“Lady Yennefer? How does it work with this drawing of the force? If I gather force into myself then there might not be enough left down below. Is it right to do that? Mother Nenneke taught us that we mustn’t take anything just like that, for the fun of it. Even the cherry has to be left on its tree for the birds, so that it can simply fall.” "Yennefer put her arm around Ciri, kissed her gently on the hair at her temple. "“I wish,” she muttered, “others could hear what you said. Vilgefortz, Francesca, Terranova… Those who believe they have exclusive right to the force and can use it unreservedly." ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=4635 2023-02-02T22:10:12+01:00 https://earthli.com/users/marco

https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=4620 2023-02-02T21:30:45+01:00 https://earthli.com/users/marco

* "Volume 2 -- Blowroom & Carding" <#vol2> * "Volume 3 – Spinning Preparation" <#vol3> * "Volume 4 – Ring Spinning" <#vol4> * "Volume 5 – Rotor Spinning" <#vol5> * "Volume 6 – Alternative Spinning Systems" <#vol6> * "Volume 7 – Processing of Man-Made Fibres" <#vol7> The first volume is the densest, with a detailed overview of all processes: opening, blowing, drawing, carding, combing, and spinning. Subsequent volumes cover carding and combing in detail, with volumes four, five, and six covering ring-spinning, rotor-spinning, and air-jet spinning (as well as other niche, or never-productive/no-longer-used techniques), respectively. Although the authors are German native speakers, they wrote impeccable English, with only typos, but no strange usage -- other than the normal absolute mangling of the English language perpetrated by textile terminology, which imbues several common English words with completely new meanings. There is a wealth of detail and research and knowledge that goes into converting fibers -- natural or artificial -- into yarn and then fabric. The history of spinning and spinning technology is very old. The history of automation is centuries old. The focus in these books is on cotton, which is collected from cotton plants with various techniques and varying levels of automation. With a higher level of automation comes a higher collection speed -- which is more cost-effective and efficient -- but it also engenders more contamination and with smaller particles, which increases the need for cleaning in latter stages. The cotton is baled and stored in giant, hard blocks (220kg) and categorized according to various characteristics, which will influence the laydown, or how the bales will be organized when they are opened in the first stage of processing in a mill. The opener draws layers off the tops of dozens of bales at once (organized in a pattern called the laydown, the determination of which is kind of an art form influenced by several factors, but which has also been researched and determined scientifically). These layers are sucked up into the initial stages of processing, where various mechanisms "open" the cotton into tufts, which are the desired result of the blowing process. As with subsequent stages, blowing also removes some contamination. What follows is carding, which converts tufts into fibers, and removes dust and some other contamination. Because of technological advances in blowing, some of the duties classically performed during carding are already taken care of before it arrives at carding. Carding takes the tufts and draws out the tufts into fibers, generating a rope-like material called a sliver. The end product of carding is a can of coiled sliver (pronounced like diver). Because of the heterogeneous nature of the input product -- the entire process is a balancing act of concessions. You want to optimize speed and, therefore, efficiency. In order to optimize speed, you need to know your target quality. The target quality is influenced by the particular nature of the input product at hand. Optimization at one stage may influence speed at another -- either negatively or positively. The material will determine which stages need to be used. If the material is easy to clean, then carding may suffice to remove enough contaminants for the target quality. If not, then combing will have to be used to clean the material sufficiently. What are the important factors? Cleanliness (contamination removal), color consistency, mix of fiber lengths (staples), twist type (determined by spinning type, which determines where it's strong, outside or inside or mixed, i.e., is it strong, but sensitive to abrasion?), fineness, etc. There are different spinning processes, each with its strengths and weaknesses. Some have lower capital costs; others have lower labor costs. Some require winding (ring-spinning), others do not (rotor- and air-jet-spinning). There is such a plethora of terminology that I don't even know where to begin in explaining it. I learned it all as I read, picking up that drafting and drawing are similar processes of attenuation, performed at different times. Sometimes drafting is part of the spinning process, sometimes not. Clothing is a gear, while ends-down is a dropped thread. There is the classic ring spinning, which uses a cob as an intermediate transport before finally winding onto spools. The more modern rotor-spinning technique spins directly onto the spool without an intervening cob. Air-jet spinning is also more appropriate for some materials, but hasn't made the inroads so far that rotor-spinning has. As with everything else in the spinning world, which technology you use depends heavily on your raw material and the quality of the product you're trying to produce. You balance the amount of piecing you need to do (does one process put a higher strain on the yarn?), the amount of hairiness you're willing to accept, and so on. Some technologies are faster, or can be scaled up in speed more. Some technologies have setups that are quicker to clean or to load with material. Rotor-spinning is more automatable, which is attractive to those mills that can afford the capital investment. All in all, this was a fascinating set of volumes about the world in which I've made my career over the last year. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me of what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I've failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an interest in this book, then I'm happy for you. [Citations] [Volume 1 -- Technology of Short-Staple Spinning] "Carrying out the basic operations of spinning demands, almost without exception, an open, processable material. However, the raw material enters the spinning mill in highly pressed form (bale) for optimum transport and storage. Thus, opening must precede the other basic operations." "To eliminate the hooks, leading hooks must be presented to the comber and trailing hooks to the ring spinning machine. As Fig. 24 and Fig. 25 show, reversal of the hook occurs at each processing stage between the card and these machines. Accordingly, a definite number of machine passages are required in intervening stages. Between the card and the comber, there must be an even number of passages, and there must be an odd number between the card and the ring spinning machine. In rotor spinning, the disposition of the hooks is of little significance." "This discussion will be confined to mechanical cleaning, in which usually only particles on the surface of the flocks can be removed. "The following procedures can be used:" * striking = falling out; * beating = ejecting; * scraping = separation; * suction = separation; * combing = extracting; * use of centrifugal force = ejecting. "Cotton contains very little dust before ginning, but working of the material on the machines causes dust. Even where dust is removed, new dust is being created through shattering of impurities and smashing and rubbing of fibers. Formerly, dust was of no great significance for the spinner, but now it poses a problem. " "In addition, a distinction must also be made between controlled and uncontrolled blending. In uncontrolled blending, the components are brought together at random and without a mixing system (e.g. often in bale mixing). In controlled blending, the individual components are supplied to the machines in an ordered fashion and precisely metered (e.g. in weighing-hopper feeders). The various blending processes often differ widely from one another with respect to capital cost, labor-intensiveness, precision of blending, liability to error, and simplicity. Each method has advantages and disadvantages. It is therefore not possible to put forward patent recipes for the use of one or another blending principle." "[image]Twist is produced with the aid of spindles, rotors, rollers, and so on. Since two twist directions, left and right, are always possible, the fiber windings can also have two directions. The direction of the twist is indicated as Z- or S-twist depending on the transverse orientation of the fibers, i.e. the orientation relative to the diagonals of the letters Z and S (Fig. 56). Z-twist is normally used in short staple spinning, though not to the exclusion of S-twist." "The volume of rejects if anything goes wrong at any production unit in the mill is equally high. More than ever the following slogan is valid: "FAULTS SHOULD BE AVOIDED, NOT CORRECTED "Meeting this requirement calls not only for competent quality management, but also for an overall control, monitoring and information system with control devices at all relevant points of the material through-flow, either individual or group-wise. " [Volume 2 -- Blowroom & Carding] "The importance of carding is even greater where new spinning systems are concerned. The considerable influence of the card on yarn quality arises from the very complex series of events in the process itself, and also from the pressure to adopt an extremely high production rate on economic grounds. This high production rate causes problems, since there is a close relationship between increases in production and reductions in quality:" * the higher the performance, the more sensitive the carding operation becomes * and the greater the danger of a negative influence on quality. "[...] "While in the case of an easy-to-clean cotton, for example, the blowroom line might assume most of the working load required, for hard-to-clean cotton this might be done by the card. "[...] "Elimination of foreign matter occurs mainly but not exclusively in the region of the licker-in. Only a small part of the contaminants is carried along with the flat strippings, or falls out at other positions. The degree of cleaning achieved by the modern card is very high, in the range of 80 - 95 %. Thus, the overall degree of cleaning achieved by the blowroom and the carding room together is as high as 95 - 99 %. But carded sliver still contains 0.05 - 0.3 % of foreign matter. "[...] "Both are available on the card to a considerable degree, i.e. the card is a good dust removing machine." [Volume 3 -- Spinning Preparation] "The comber is used in the production of medium, mediumfine and fine yarns, and enables a positive influence to be exerted primarily on the yarn characteristics of:" * evenness; * strength; * cleanliness; "and on the fabric characteristics of:" * smoothness; * visual appearance; and * handle. "It is also employed to improve working behavior in downstream processing, most noticeably in knitting. In addition, yarn made from combed cotton needs less twist than a carded yarn." "The drawframe produces a sliver that already exhibits all the characteristics required for the creation of a yarn, namely an ordered, clean strand of fibers laying parallel to one another. It is a fair question to ask why this sliver is not used as infeed material for the ring spinning machine, instead of being processed in an expensive manner to create a roving as feed material for spinning. The roving machine itself is complicated, liable to faults, causes defects, adds to production costs and delivers a product that is sensitive in both winding and unwinding. Use of the machine is forced upon the spinner as a necessary evil for two principal reasons. "The first reason is related to the required draft. Sliver is a thick, untwisted strand that tends to be hairy and to create fly. The draft needed to convert this to a yarn is in the region of 300 - 500. The drafting arrangements of ring spinning machines, in their current forms, are not capable of processing this strand in a single drafting operation to create a yarn of short-staple fibers that meets all the normal demands on such yarns. The fine, twisted roving is significantly better suited to this purpose. "The second reason is that drawframe cans represent the worst conceivable mode of transport and presentation of feed material to the ring spinning frame. In spite of this, considerable effort has been expended over decades to eliminate the roving frame. "[...] "The chief task of the roving frame is the attenuation of the sliver. Since the resulting fine strand has scarcely any coherence, protective twist must be inserted in order to hold it together. The third task cannot be directly attributed to spinning: it lies in winding the roving into a package that can be transported, stored and donned on the ring spinning machine. It is the winding operation above all that makes the roving frame a relatively complex and problem-plagued machine. This winding operation requires, in addition to spindle and flyer, a cone drive (or variable transmission), a differential gear and a package build motion." [Volume 4 -- Ring Spinning] "The degree of automation has also been increased significantly. As this process of evolution is not yet complete, the ring spinning machine will continue to be the most widely used spinning process in short staple spinning, since it has considerable advantages over the new spinning processes:" * it can be used universally, i.e. any material and any yarn * count can be spun on it; * it produces yarn with optimum properties (especially as regards structure and tenacity); * it is uncomplicated and easy to control; * know-how for handling the machine is old, well established and accessible to everyone; * it is flexible with regard to volume (blend and batch sizes). "[...] "[image]However, the ring spinning machine can only hold its own position in the long run if the ring spinning process can be automated further and spinning costs substantially reduced, since this machine is a major cost factor in a spinning mill, as the graph produced by Rieter shows (Fig. 2)." "In the case of the cropped ring the arc was flattened on top compared with the rings that were customary until then. This resulted in a large space for yarn passage, so that the arc of the ring traveler could also be flattened off (oval traveler/flat traveler) and the center of gravity lowered. Its advantage over the anti-wedge ring is that the space for yarn passage is rather larger and all customary ring travelers with the exception of the elliptical traveler can be mounted on it. This is the most widely used ring shape nowadays and is supplied by all well-known companies, such as Bräcker, Reiners & Fürst, etc." "Automation replaces human activity with processes performed by machines, apparatus or electronics. In terms of cost accounting this substitutes capital costs for labor costs. Automation is therefore worthwhile wherever" * lots of manual work has to be done; * manual work is monotonous or ergonomically unsuitable; * personnel are scarce; * the human error factor has to be eliminated. "Since ring spinning accounts for some 50 % of labor costs in a spinning mill, this department is an obvious candidate for automation. However, if we look at the machine itself, it soon becomes obvious that automation is not easy to achieve, since it involves a huge number of tiny production components in a small space with poor accessibility. Even if one or other of these could be automated, it is often uneconomical. Certain operations will therefore have to continue to be performed manually in future." "During automatic doffing with old doffing systems the process is interrupted once or twice for tours of inspection. Personnel need to check that the process is proceeding correctly, and especially to ensure that tubes have been fitted everywhere and are not jammed. These tours of inspection are no longer necessary on good modern doffing systems, since each spinning position is continuously monitored during doffing, and collisions between tubes and spindles or cops are therefore impossible. After doffing is completed, the doffer returns to its idle position below the spindles. At the same time the ring rail rises to the piecing position, the balloon checking rings move upward and the yarn guide flaps tilt downward. The machine starts. The conveyor belt moves the doffed cops toward the end of the machine, where they are discharged into transport trolleys or individually transferred directly to the winder. Duration of automatic doffing can be as short as 2 minutes." "Despite the high degree of perfection of ring spinning, the ring spinning process has not yet achieved ideal performance. The schematic view of the yarn formation zone on the left in Fig. 72 illustrates the problem. The drafting system of a conventional ring spinning machine unfortunately delivers the fibers over a width W which is considerably larger than width WS of the adjacent spinning triangle (see also Fig. 84). This means that some edge fibers are lost or attached in a disorderly configuration to the yarn core already twisted. In other words, today’s ring yarns have a structure that is not nearly as ideal as might be supposed." "[image]" Captions for Fig. 82: D Drafting system Z Cylinder support E Spinning path F Yarn guide eyelet B Balloon checking ring R Ring rail S Spindle α Angle of drafting system relative to horizontal β Angle of drafting system relative to spinning path axis γ Angle of the thread on the spinning path relative to the vertical δ Angle of the leg of the thread balloon relative to the spindle axis lB Balloon height (variable) lG Distance between drafting system and thread guide eyelet (variable) lF Distance between thread guide eyelet and top of spindle or tube (variable) lS Spindle height lK Tube height lH Traverse height of the ring rail (winding height) lR Distance between ring and balloon checking ring (variable) dH Outside diameter of the tube at the top V Overhang of the top front roller relative to the bottom roller "Yarn formation takes place in the spinning triangle. If the yarn is to have high strength, high elongation and regularity combined with low neppiness and hairiness, the fibers in the yarn must be:" * well oriented * evenly distributed in length and cross-section * wound spirally around the axis, and * all fibers must be tied in under tension. "Of all the spinning systems available or known, these requirements are best satisfied by ring spinning, especially with regard to the last, very important item. However, this holds true only in conjunction with good spinning geometry, i.e. with an optimal spinning triangle. If it is too short, core fibers (F) will be tied in without tension. They can then absorb tensile forces in the axial direction only to a limited extent, or only after thefibers in the outer layer (f) have been broken. Since the distribution of tension forces in the final yarn is similarly uneven to that in the spinning triangle, the yarn shows the same effect. When stress is applied to the yarn, the edge fibers undergo so much elongation from the very beginning that the forces acting on them either cause the fibers to break, or in some cases to slide apart before the loading forces can act on the neighboring fibers inside the yarn" [Volume 5 -- Rotor Spinning] "Rotor spinning has been characterized from the outset by incomparably higher production potential than ring spinning. This potential has been steadily increased by the continuous rise in rotor and winding speeds. Rotor-spun yarns have therefore always been successful where they could be manufactured more cheaply than ring-spun yarns and proved suitable for the range of application in question. Rotor spinning combines two process stages – spinning and winding – in a single machine. "[...] "Last but not least, the rotor spinning system has benefited from the fact that operator functions on the rotor spinning machine were much easier to automate than those on the ring spinning machine. Automation of all operator functions is now standard on high-performance rotor spinning machines, automated can and package transport is already an essential feature in many textile mills." "Rotor spinning was the first process that was capable of producing a cross-wound package ready for processing or sale in a single process stage from a draw frame sliver. Roving frames and winders could be dispensed with; there was thus a significant incentive from the very outset to utilize this process, despite the higher cost of a rotor spinning position compared with a ring spinning position. "[...] "The rotor spinning machine is unlike any other machine in the short staple spinning mill in the range of tasks it has to perform, namely all the basic operations:" * Sliver feed: A card or draw frame sliver is fed through a sliver guide via a feed roller and feed table to a rapidly rotating opening roller. * Sliver opening: The rotating teeth of the opening roller comb out the individual fibers from the sliver clamped between feed table and feed roller. After leaving the rotating opening roller, the fibers are fed to the fiber channel. * Fiber transport to the rotor: Centrifugal forces and a vacuum in the rotor housing cause the fibers to disengage at a certain point from the opening roller and to move via the fiber channel to the inside wall of the rotor. * Fiber collection in the rotor groove: The centrifugal forces in the rapidly rotating rotor cause the fibers * to move from the conical rotor wall toward the rotor groove and be collected there to form a fiber ring. * Yarn formation: When a spun yarn end emerges from the draw-off nozzle into the rotor groove, it receives twist from the rotation of the rotor outside the nozzle, which then continues in the yarn into the interior of the rotor. The yarn end rotates around its axis and continuously twists-in the fibers deposited in the rotor groove, assisted by the nozzle, which acts as a twist retaining element. * Yarn take-off, winding: The yarn formed in the rotor is continuously taken off by the delivery shaft and the pressure roller through the nozzle and the draw-off tube and wound onto a cross-wound package. Between takeoff and package, several sensors control yarn movement as well as the quality of the yarn and initiate yarn clearing if any pre-selected values are exceeded. "Cotton dust (finishing abrasion in the case of man-made fibers) is also extracted through this opening. Fine dust therefore does not accumulate in the rotor groove, and yarn characteristics and yarn values remain stable. "[...] "The rotors, acting as fiber collecting and at the same time twist inserting elements, are the most important and also the most complex components in yarn formation (Fig. 16). As already mentioned, in addition to yarn formation in the rotor groove, the fibers fed in are also separated from the transport air in the rotor, this air being dispersed either over the rotor wall (systems with indirect rotor bearing) or through holes in the base of the rotor (systems with direct rotor bearing)." "The fact that rotor-spun yarns contain significantly fewer yarn defects than ring-spun yarns has made a major contribution to the success of the rotor spinning system. A comparison of Uster Statistics shows that the numbers of thick places, thin places and neps are significantly below the level of ring-spun yarns, even at delivery speeds that are up to 10 times higher. And the finer the yarn counts, the greater the differences. "[...] "This was also a major reason why rotor-spun yarns could for many years be processed further without cleaning. However, today‘s quality standards no longer permit this; quality requirements for rotor-spun yarns have increased considerably. For example, manufacturers of branded denim products (jeans, shirts, etc.) stipulate precise specifications for yarn and fabric quality which are so strictly formulated that only quality-tested yarns can be considered for processing." "Automation in rotor spinning in particular is very far advanced – at least in comparison to other spinning processes – not only in respect of machine automation as such (i.e. rotor cleaning, repairing ends down, transporting empty tubes, package change), but also as regards process-linking automation of material transport from the card through the draw frame(s) to the rotor spinning machine up to fully automated package removal or palletizing at the machine itself. Systems for automated material transport between card and draw frame and between the individual draw frame passages will not be dealt with here. You will find details of this in the relevant publications in this series of textbooks. "[...] "Systems for automating the operation of rotor spinning machines have been integral parts of high-performance rotor spinning machines for some years. Automated systems have been developed for all manual operations in several stages:" * automatic gripping and introduction of the sliver end from a new can into the spinning box (implemented only in certain cases to date); * automatic cleaning of rotor, draw-off nozzle and draw-off tube after ends down, quality stops or package changes; * automatic piecing (start-up) after ends down, quality stops or package changes; * automatic removal of full packages upon reaching the preset yarn length, and replacement with empty tubes; * automatic feeding of empty tubes to the operating robot for package change; * programmable batch phase-out/batch change; * automatic deposit of removed packages at the end of the machine; * automatic or semi-automatic filter cleaning "After an end down or package change the interrupted spinning process at the spinning position in question has to be re-started. In terms of spinning technology this entails overlapping a thread end that has been fed back with the fiber ring in the rotor groove. The quality of such a piecing is just as important as the quality of the yarn itself, since both determine its market value to a great extent. The quality of a piecing is defined essentially by:" * the tenacity of the piecing expressed as a percentage of yarn tenacity; * the variation in tenacity between the piecings (CV% of piecing tenacity); * the thickness of the piecing (diameter or mass); * the length of the piecing; * the repeat accuracy of the piecing. "The reason for this is that sliver intake speed is very low at high drafts, and the individual fibers therefore spend longer in the opening roller zone before being released from the fiber bundle that has been fed in. Fiber neps are opened more thoroughly, while dust and trash are more effectively released and removed from the fibers. "[...] "In contrast to ring spinning, twisting during rotor spinning takes place from the inside outwards. The rotating, brush-like open yarn end first catches fibers in the core and then with further rotation gradually takes up fibers toward the periphery. In the interior, where the fibers cannot avoid the twist, the fibers become more compact. On the other hand, toward the exterior, the compactness falls off to an increasing degree, since here the fibers are able partially to avoid being twisted in. In addition to the fiber-specific properties (fiber strength, elongation, length, friction, etc.), yarn tenacity depends primarily on how often the yarn has been rotated around its axis." "Raw materials behave differently not only as regards their readiness to absorb moisture, their running properties are also affected by humidity levels in the spinning mill. Since the raw material spends several days in the spinning mill on its way through the spinning process, the moisture content of the fibers depends on the moisture content of the ambient air. "[...] "If relative humidity is too low, this usually becomes apparent with man-made fibers in electrostatic charging and a consequent increase in ends down. When cotton is being processed, fiber damage, fiber fly and deposits in the spinning box and winding zones occur. "If relative humidity is too high, this results in lapping on cylinders and opening rollers with all fibers. The spin finish on man-made fibers tends to leave deposits on thread guide elements and in the fiber guide channel, thus obstructing fiber transport to the rotor. This then results in an increase in the number of neps and thick places." [Volume 6 -- Alternative Spinning Systems] "In open-end spinning, this flow of fibers is interrupted, the fiber strand being opened into individual fibers at a predetermined position, usually by means of an opening roller, followed by airborne fiber transport. This interruption or break in the fiber flow is physically achieved by increasing fiber speed locally to very high levels (up to 100 m/s), so that – according to the equation of continuity – the number of fibers in the cross-section drops to such low values that the fibers lose contact with each other. This enables twist to be imparted merely by rotation of the yarn end, which in turn leads to a significantly higher potential rotation speed. However, the break in fiber flow also leads directly to one of the most important and difficult tasks in open-end spinning, namely to control the configuration of the individual fibers, airborne at high speed, and the need to re-collect these fibers without losing their elongated configuration, which is essential to the formation of a new fiber strand. This very tricky problem of open-end spinning can be dealt with schematically as described below. "[...] "Several research teams, including some in the former Soviet Union, have investigated the possibilities of forming fiber strands with the aid of electrostatic fields. However, only the process proposed by the Battelle Institute has had a degree of success. The Electrospin Corporation (USA) demonstrated an experimental spinning machine based on this principle at the 1971 ITMA in Paris." I'm pretty sure that this is the company that Zellweger bought and which is now UTUS. [image] "This results in specific fields of application for the different processes. On the basis of simplicity, yarn quality and universality, ring spinning, together with the increasingly important compact spinning process, will remain the dominant spinning process in the long term. Rotor spinning will certainly continue to display its strengths in medium to coarse yarn counts, and maintain its market share. Air-jet spinning will win specific application fields in the medium count range at the partial expense of ring spinning and rotor spinning." [Volume 7 -- Processing of Man-Made Fibres] "The story of „man-made fibres“ goes far back into the 17th century and in this volume is also briefly revisited. The original drive for the development of man-made fibres was to replace cotton and thus the complicated process from the fibre to the yarn. An artificial endless thread, initially following the example of silk, was the dream. "[...] "In 2013, around 24 million tons of cotton were still processed – far more than half the processed staple fibres of approx. 44 million tons. Cotton is therefore still a very important raw material and this not only for the textile industry but also for the social and industrial development of numerous countries." "The polymer is fed to the spinning nozzle as a hot molten material. The extruded filaments are cooled by an air stream in the cooling duct so that they can be coiled in carts without sticking together as a bundle [...]" "Natural fibres are mostly more or less strongly crimped or looped. Usually, man-made fibres must also be crimped. The crimp can be permanent or temporary, i.e. set, partially set, or onset. Set crimp is selected in order to achieve certain characteristics in the end product, such as:" * a full, bulked, soft feel, and * high insulating capacity. "A high lateral strength can be an advantage or a disadvantage depending upon the field of use (see Fig. 23). In general, high lateral strength gives good durability to the finished articles; this is very important in technical applications, in working clothes and uniform fabrics and also in floor coverings. However, the pilling tendency also increases so that in the civilian clothing sector only limited use is made of fibres with high lateral strength. This applies especially in relation to knitted goods, where the individual fibres are not so strongly anchored; for example, polyester fibre must be deliberately made brittle for use in knitted products to avoid pilling (anti-pilling types)." "Depending upon their field of use, fibres with a higher or lower moisture take-up will be required, e.g. high – hand towels, underclothing; low - bathing costumes. "In relation to clothing, however, it is not only the moisture take-up that is important but also the ability to transport moisture and wettability. Both properties have a strong influence on wearability. They depend upon fibre surface area and the capillary effect on the fabric. Thus, although PES has a low moisture take-up, good moisture transport can be reached by means of appropriate apparel design (Table 3)" "Polyamide and polyester fibres are relatively difficult to ignite. Nevertheless, they have the serious disadvantage that the fibre substance melts and drips; in some circumstances, the result of this behavior can be far more serious for humans and the environment than in the case of cellulose. Of all normal fibres, wool has the most favorable burning characteristics. It is fairly difficult to ignite, and, after burning, it leaves a brittle, rapidly cooling residue that does not adhere to adjoining surfaces." "Charge accumulations on the fibres and on the machines often have different signs. The machine components therefore tend to attract individual fibres or even whole strands. This leads to formation of laps, catching of fibres, blockages, etc., especially on cylinders, in clothings and in guide ducts. Falling apart of strands is caused by all fibres in the strand having the same charge and therefore tending to repel each other. In minor cases, this causes spreading out of the edge fibres; in extreme cases, the strand disintegrates." "In general man-made fibre material is free from impurities; however, depending on the supplier or process it is possible that fibre packages, melted together fibres can occur. These need to be removed and this can be done at the licker-in with the mote knife. In the Rieter C 70 card, the mote knife can be adjusted during production. Fig. 32 shows the knife almost closed as it would be recommended for man-made fibres (left) in comparison to a very open knife position for a high cleaning efficiency when running 100 % cotton." "When spinning sliver-blended polyester/cotton blends with ring spinning machines, a total of three drawing passages including the blending draw frame is needed to fulfill the highest quality standards. In contrast, when spinning the same material by rotor spinning technology two drawing passages are enough. In rotor spinning the fed sliver is completely opened to single fibres which ensure fibre/fibre mixing and additionally a lower number of draw frame passages is required." [image] "Like the roller settings in the draw frame, the roller settings at the roving frame have to be adjusted according to the fibre length. Settings which are too narrow cause fibre damage, while settings which are too wide increase the number of floating fibres and result in higher unevenness of the roving. The break draft distance is an important parameter for the roving quality. The optimum setting is not only influenced by the fibre length but also by the drafting resistance of the fibre material. The higher the drafting resistance the higher the break draft roller setting has to be used." "The traveler speed is the most important limiting factor regarding production speeds on a ring spinning machine. In comparison to spinning cotton, the maximum traveler speed for spinning man-made fibres or blends has to be reduced. Higher traveler speeds increase the risk of thermal damage of the fibres which is described in chapter 5.9.2.. Thus, manufacturers of man-made fibres usually suggest maximum traveler speeds of 28 to 30 m/s. When processing fibres with a low melting point such as polypropylene or low-pill fibre types, a further decrease of the maximum traveler speeds well below 28 m/s is necessary. When spinning blends, the risk of thermal damage of the fibres can be ignored" "Problems in the ring spinning process with man-made fibres can be caused by:" * the fibres * the machine * the roving * the air conditioning. "Problems caused by the fibres can arise from:" * poor spin finish (high fibre/fibre adherence, smearing) * low plasticizing point (this is the main cause and it leads rapidly to thermal damage). "The maximum possible rotor speed that can be used for a given man-made fibre material is influenced by the material itself (e.g. polyester, viscose, etc.), by the quality of the fibres and by the spin finish (e.g. high performance types, normal types, etc.). In general, blends with cotton can be spun faster than pure man-made fibres and viscose can be spun faster than polyester or polyacryl. For example, it is possible to spin high quality viscose with rotor speeds up to 130 000 rpm [13]. "The maximum speed that can be achieved has to be determined by spinning trials. It has to be kept in mind that the higher the rotor speed and the smaller the rotor diameter are, the higher the number of wrapper fibres will be and the harsher the feel of the finished fabrics will become." "Steaming is treatment with water vapor at temperatures below 100 °C. Steaming serves to reduce twist liveliness of both singles and plied yarns. "Stabilization is treatment with steam at temperatures above 100 °C. Stabilization is carried out to reduce shrinkage of staple-fibre yarns for package and warpbeam dyeing." ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=4623 2023-02-02T20:05:58+01:00 https://earthli.com/users/marco

. I very much like Sapkowski's politics and philosophy. There are quite a few places where he, through his characters, paints a sympathetic and balanced picture of what a good world would look like. He seems to recognize and despise the things that are wrong in our world by painting them disparagingly in his own. His writing style is tremendous and poetic and my hat is off many times to the wizardry of the translator. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me of what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I've failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an interest in this book, then I'm happy for you. [Citations] "The witcher halted at a distance of ten paces. His sword, slowly drawn from its black enameled sheath, glistened and glowed above his head "“It’s silver,” he said. “This blade is silver.” "The pale little face did not flinch; the anthracite eyes did not change expression. "“You’re so like a rusalka,” the witcher continued calmly, “that you could deceive anyone. All the more as you’re a rare bird, black-haired one. But horses are never mistaken. They recognize creatures like you instinctively and perfectly. What are you? I think you’re a moola, or an alpor. An ordinary vampire couldn’t come out in the sun.” "The corners of the pale lips quivered and turned up a little." "Geralt leapt to the left, executing a short moulinet with his sword to confuse the bruxa gliding toward him—white and black, windblown, terrible. He’d underestimated her. She screamed. He didn’t make the Sign in time, flew backward until he thumped against the wall. The pain in his spine shot all the way to the tips of his fingers, paralyzed his shoulders, cut him down at the legs. He fell to his knees. The bruxa, wailing melodiously, jumped toward him." "Slowly, as if a caress, the bruxa moved her tiny hands along the stake, stretched her arms out to their full length, grasped the pole hard and pulled on it again. Over a meter of bloodied wood already protruded from her back. Her eyes were wide open, her head flung back. Her sighs became more frequent and rhythmic, turning into a ruckling wheeze." "During his life, the witcher had met thieves who looked like town councilors, councilors who looked like beggars, harlots who looked like princesses, princesses who looked like calving cows and kings who looked like thieves." "“[...] that’s the way of the world. One sees all sorts of things when one travels. Two peasants kill each other over a field which, the following day, will be trampled flat by two counts and their retinues trying to kill each other off." "“Evil is evil, Stregobor,” said the witcher seriously as he got up. “Lesser, greater, middling, it’s all the same. Proportions are negotiated, boundaries blurred. I’m not a pious hermit. I haven’t done only good in my life. But if I’m to choose between one evil and another, then I prefer not to choose at all." "“A bit more tolerance, if you please,” said Geralt calmly, “as I see your mother must have wandered off through the forest alone often enough to give you good reason to wonder where you come from yourself.”" "Last winter Prince Hrobarik, not being so gracious, tried to hire me to find a beauty who, sick of his vulgar advances, had fled the ball, losing a slipper. It was difficult to convince him that he needed a huntsman, and not a witcher.”" "“Hochebuz,” said Calanthe, looking at Geralt, “my first battle. Although I fear rousing the indignation and contempt of such a proud witcher, I confess that we were fighting for money. Our enemy was burning villages which paid us levies and we, greedy for our tributes, challenged them on the field. A trivial reason, a trivial battle, a trivial three thousand corpses pecked to pieces by the crows. And look—instead of being ashamed I’m proud as a peacock that songs are sung about me. Even when sung to such awful music.”" "Tell me, if the implication that your aid was not disinterested does not offend another of your knightly vows, how I can express my gratitude.”" "Remember Zivelena, who became the Queen of Metinna with the help of the gnome Rumplestelt, and in return promised him her firstborn? Zivelena didn’t keep her promise when Rumplestelt came for his reward and, by using spells, she forced him to run away. Not long after that, both she and the child died of the plague. You do not dice with Destiny with impunity!”" "You witchers, after all, deprive yourselves of work, slowly but surely. The better and the more conscientiously you work, the less work there is for you. After all, your goal is a world without monsters, a world which is peaceful and safe. A world where witchers are unnecessary. A paradox, isn’t it?”" "“He’s simply taking revenge for all the wrong that man has done the elves.” The witcher smiled wryly. “It’s all the same to him who he takes his revenge on. Don’t be deluded by his noble bearing and elaborate speech, Dandelion. He’s no different than the black-eyes who knocked us down. He has to unload his powerless hatred on somebody.”" "“You see, Geralt, this bright sun of ours is still shining, but not quite the way it used to. Read the great books if you like. But if you don’t want to waste time on it, maybe you’ll be happy with the explanation that the crystal roof acts like a filter. It eliminates the lethal rays which are increasingly found in sunlight. That’s why plants which you can’t see growing wild anywhere in the world grow here.” "“I understand.” The witcher nodded. “And us, Nenneke? What about us? The sun shines on us, too. Shouldn’t we shelter under a roof like that?” "“In principle, yes,” sighed the priestess. “But…” "“But what?” "“It’s too late.”" "“Your wish,” she whispered, her lips very near his ear. “I don’t know whether such a wish can ever be fulfilled. I don’t know whether there’s such a Force in Nature that could fulfill such a wish. But if there is, then you’ve condemned yourself. Condemned yourself to me.”" "Blood. Blood. Blood. Bones like broken white sticks. Tendons like whitish cords exploding from beneath cracking skin cut by enormous paws bristling with thorns, and sharp teeth. The hideous sound of torn flesh, and shouting—shameless and horrifying in its shamelessness. The shamelessness of the end. Of death. Blood and shouting. Shouting. Blood. Shouting—[...]" ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=4614 2023-01-31T22:51:22+01:00 https://earthli.com/users/marco

, Hedges describes what happens to human bodies when confronted with modern military weapons. "Some of the remains had to be scooped up by putting our hands together as though we were cupping water. That was very common. A lot of the deaths were from IEDs or explosions. You might have an upper torso, but you needed to scoop the rest of the remains into a body bag. It was very common to have body bags that when you picked them up, they would sink in the middle because they were filled with flesh.”" He talks about what happens to people who aren't lucky enough to die right away. "“You know, you see a guy who’s paralyzed, and in a wheelchair, and you think he’s just in a wheelchair,” he says in Body of War. “You don’t think about the, you know, the stuff inside that’s paralyzed. I can’t cough because my stomach muscles are paralyzed, so I can’t work up the full coughing energy." At least if they're injured enough to be obviously physically useless to the military, they'll be left alone, to rot, or ... whatever. The military is no longer interested. Woe betide you if the military still thinks you might still be useful to it -- then it bends a considerable amount of its will to get you to "re-up". "He became increasingly depressed about his impending deployment to Iraq when he was in basic training at Fort Benning, Georgia. He asked the battalion doctor for antidepressants. The doctor said he had to meet first with the unit’s chaplain, who told him, “I think you will be happier when you get over to Iraq and start killing Iraqis.”" The military is 100% focused on promulgating its own existence. It has no morality, no ethics, it doesn't care why it's fighting. It only knows that it exists to fight, so it will always make sure that there are enough fights to make sure that money, materiel, and soldiers keep flowing in its direction. It is a business. It defends its interests. So do its employees. Even the chaplains, who ostensibly represent a wholesome God, serve one purpose in the military: to help funnel bodies back to the front. But we don't get to see this version of the war. If we did, we'd no longer be able to support it so wholeheartedly. "If we had to stand over the mangled corpses of the schoolchildren killed in Afghanistan or Ukraine and listen to the wails of their parents, the clichés about liberating the women of Afghanistan or bringing freedom to the Afghan or Ukrainian people would be obscene. Therefore, war is carefully sanitized." "Honestly examining past wars gives us the ability to understand current wars. But this is a Herculean struggle. The public is fed, and yearns for, the myth. It is empowering and ennobling. It celebrates supposed national virtues and military prowess. It allows an alienated population to feel part of a national collective engaged in a noble crusade. The celebration of the destructive force of our weaponry makes us feel personally empowered. All wars, past and present, are effectively shrouded in this myth." He concludes with descriptions of the horrors of WWI and WWII. "Only 90 of the 15,000 people originally in the Bochnia ghetto survived the war." Anyone who pushes for war is, in the words of Kant, a "moral idiot". "All attempts to control the universe, to play God, to become the arbiters of life and death, have been carried out by moral idiots. They will relentlessly push forward, exploiting and pillaging, perfecting their terrible tools of technology and science, until their creation destroys them and us." In the final pages, Hedges speaks from his heart, about himself -- and offers advice for his readers. It is a plea for them to wake up, to be better, to find their moral core, to stop supporting the most destructive force mankind has ever unleashed, especially so casually, without even seeming to understand what's happening. "There are days I wish I was whole. I wish I could put down this cross. I envy those who, in their innocence, believe in the innate goodness of America and the righteousness of war, and celebrate what we know is despicable." "I cannot impart to you the cheerful and childish optimism that is the curse of America. I can only tell you to stand up, to pick up your cross, to keep moving. I can only tell you that you must always defy the forces that eat away at you, at the nation -- this plague of war." "All acts of healing and love -- and the defiance of war is an affirmation of love -- allow us to shout out to the vast powers of the universe that, however broken we are, we are not helpless, however mush we despair, we are not without hope, however weak we may feel, we will always, always, always resist." Damn, Chris. That's about right, though. I just spoke with a friend the other night (late November 2022) who said that I was quite cynical about America and that he'd rather have America in charge than China or Russia. I was taken aback, but rallied and asked him whether he wasn't the more cynical one, who couldn't imagine a world without a boot on our collective necks. He had so internalized the idea that there must be an empire that he'd limited himself to choosing which one. "None of the above," didn't enter into it. I told him that it sounded to me as if he'd resigned himself to life as a whore and had settled for being able to choose who was going to pimp him. We're friends, though, so he laughed, albeit a bit nervously. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me of what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I've failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an interest in this book, then I'm happy for you. [Citations] "You have no concept of time in a firefight. A few minutes. A few hours." "War, in an instant, obliterates homes and communities, all that was once familiar, and leaves behind smoldering ruins and a trauma that you carry for the rest of your life. I have tasted enough of war, enough of my own fear, my body turned to jelly, to know that war is always evil, the purest expression of death, dressed up in patriotic cant about liberty and democracy and sold to the naïve as a ticket to glory, honor, and courage. It is a toxic and seductive elixir. Those who survive, as Kurt Vonnegut wrote, struggle afterwards to “reinvent themselves and their universe,” which, on some level, will never make sense again." "If truth is the first casualty in war, ambiguity is the second. The bellicose rhetoric embraced and amplified by the American press, demonizing Vladimir Putin and elevating the Ukrainians to the status of demigods, demanding more robust military intervention along with the crippling sanctions designed to bring down Putin’s government, is infantile and dangerous. That the inverse version of the conflict is true in the Russian media fuels the insanity." "I knew a Bosnian soldier who heard a sound behind a door while patrolling on the outskirts of Sarajevo. He fired a burst from his AK-47 through the door. A delay of a few seconds in combat can mean death. When he opened the door, he found the bloody remains of a twelve-year-old girl. His daughter was twelve. He never recovered." "The consequences of pushing NATO up to the borders with Russia—there is now a NATO missile base in Poland one hundred miles from the Russian border—were well known to policy makers. Yet they did it anyway. It made no geopolitical sense. But it made commercial sense. War, after all, is a business, a very lucrative one. It is why we spent two decades in Afghanistan although there was near universal consensus after a few years of fruitless fighting that we had waded into a quagmire we could never win." "The full-throated cries for war, echoed shamelessly by the press, are justified by draining the conflict of historical context, by elevating ourselves as the saviors and casting whomever we oppose, from Saddam Hussein to Putin, as the new Nazi leader." "We, echoing the empty promises from Moscow, claim we do not target civilians. Rulers always paint their militaries as humane, there to serve and protect. Collateral damage happens, but it is regrettable." "The Russian-speaking population in Ukraine, to Moscow, are worthy victims. Russia is their savior. The millions of Ukrainian families cowering in basements and subways, or forced to flee Ukraine, are unworthy victims. Ukrainian fighters are condemned as “Nazis.”" "The war in Iraq was as savage as the slaughter in Darfur, but to express outrage at what was happening to unworthy victims was to become branded as the enemy." "It is not that worthy victims do not suffer, nor that they are not deserving of our support and compassion; it is that worthy victims alone are rendered human, people like us, and unworthy victims are not." "In sharp contrast, the shooting down by Israel of a Libyan civilian airliner in February 1973 led to no outcry in the West, no denunciations for “cold-blooded murder,” and no boycott. This difference in treatment was explained by the New York Times precisely on the grounds of utility in a 1973 editorial: “No useful purpose is served by an acrimonious debate over the assignment of blame for the downing of a Libyan airliner in the Sinai Peninsula last week.” There was a very “useful purpose” served by focusing on the Soviet act, and a massive propaganda campaign ensued." They're all worthy victims. But to mourn one without the mentioning the other is to become at least implicitly a propaganda tool of one side or the other. Just like railing against Russia in Ukraine without acknowledging the history of the world's largest military poer does. You simply find yourself wholeheartedly agreeing with the country with $1T to blow on the military each year and somehow coincidentally and miraculously finds a war every time, just as the last ones were ending. Careful how you choose your friends. "RT America was shut down six days after I denounced the invasion of Ukraine. If the network had continued, Ventura and I might have paid with our jobs, but at least for those six days they kept us on air. The New York Times issued a formal written reprimand in 2003 that forbade me to speak about the war in Iraq, although I had been the newspaper’s Middle East Bureau Chief, had spent seven years in the Middle East, and was an Arabic speaker. This reprimand set me up to be fired. If I violated the prohibition, under guild rules, the paper had grounds to terminate my employment. John Burns, another foreign correspondent at the paper, publicly supported the invasion of Iraq. He did not receive a reprimand." "When I entered southern Iraq in the first Gulf War, it was flattened. Villages and towns were smoldering ruins. Bodies of the dead, including women and children, lay scattered on the ground. Water purification systems had been bombed. Power stations had been bombed. Schools and hospitals had been bombed. Bridges had been bombed. The United States military always wages war by “overkill,”" "“Thirty-five percent of the victims,” Nick Turse wrote of the war in Vietnam, “died within 15 to 20 minutes.” Death from the skies, like death on the ground, was often unleashed capriciously. “It was not out of the ordinary for US troops in Vietnam to blast a whole village or bombard a wide area in an effort to kill a single sniper.”" "These are our calling cards: canisters of napalm, daisy-cutter bombs, anti-personnel rockets, high-explosive rockets, incendiary rockets, cluster bombs, high-explosive shells, and iron fragmentation bombs—including the 40,000-pound bomb loads dropped by giant B-52 Stratofortress bombers—along with chemical defoliants and chemical gases dropped from the sky." "All of this remains unspoken as we express our anguish for the people of Ukraine and revel in our moral superiority. The life of a Palestinian or an Iraqi child is as precious as the life of a Ukrainian child. No one should live in fear and terror. No one should be sacrificed on the altar of Mars. But until all victims are worthy, until all who wage war are held accountable and brought to justice, this hypocritical game of life and death will continue. Some human beings will be worthy of life. Others will not. Drag Putin off to the International Criminal Court and put him on trial. But make sure George W. Bush is in the cell next to him." "It does not matter how wrong they are, how absurd their theories, how many times they lie or denigrate other cultures and societies as uncivilized or how many murderous military interventions go bad. They are immovable props, the parasitic mandarins of power that are vomited up in the dying days of any empire," "They advocated for air strikes in Serbia, calling for the U.S. to “take out” Slobodan Milošević." He was exonerated but rotted away anyway. Is the Hague reliable? What if it exonerated Putin? "[...] the dissolution of Iraq, the destruction of its civilian infrastructure, including the obliteration of eighteen of twenty electricity-generating plants and nearly all the water-pumping and sanitation systems during a forty-three-day period when 90,000 tons of bombs were rained down on the country," "They continue to call for a war with Iran, with Fred Kagan stating that “there is nothing we can do short of attacking to force Iran to give up its nuclear weapons [...]" They just officially admitted that this was always a fairy tale. "[...] they swiftly migrated to the Democratic Party rather than support Donald Trump, who showed no desire to start a conflict with Russia and who called the invasion of Iraq a “big, fat mistake.” Besides, as they correctly pointed out, Hillary Clinton was a fellow neocon. And liberals wonder why nearly half the electorate, who revile these arrogant, unaccountable power brokers, as they should, voted for Trump." True, no-one in my family would ever have voted for Hillary. Like I couldn't, but for different reasons. "They did not serve in the military. Their children do not serve in the military. But they eagerly ship young American men and women off to fight and die for their self-delusional dreams of empire and American hegemony. Or, as in Ukraine, they provide hundreds of millions of dollars in weaponry and logistical support to sustain long and bloody proxy wars." "American global domination, they claim, is benign, a force for good, “benevolent hegemony.” The world, Charles Krauthammer insisted, welcomes “our power.” All enemies, from Saddam Hussein to Vladimir Putin, are the new Hitler. All U.S. interventions are a fight for freedom that make the world a safer place. All refusals to bomb and occupy another country are a 1938 Munich moment, a pathetic retreat from confronting evil by the new Neville Chamberlain." "The warmongers build a campaign against a country such as Iraq or Russia and then wait for a crisis—they call it the next Pearl Harbor—to justify the unjustifiable." "The Russian invasion of Ukraine, like the attacks of 9/11, is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Putin, like everyone else they target, only understands force. We can, they assure us, militarily bend Russia to our will." "I do not know if these people are stupid or cynical or both. They are lavishly funded by the war industry. They are never dropped from the networks for their repeated idiocy. They rotate in and out of power, parked in places like the Council on Foreign Relations or the Brookings Institution, before being called back into government." "This campaign of mass murder is still mythologized in Indonesia as an epic battle against the forces of evil and barbarity, much as U.S. popular culture for many decades mythologized our genocide of Native Americans and held up our own killers, gunmen, outlaws, and murderous cavalry units of the Old West as heroes" "The bifurcation between work and life—a bifurcation that many in the U.S. military, today’s fossil fuel or health insurance industry, or Wall Street firms such as Goldman Sachs also must make—allows human beings who exploit, destroy, and kill other human beings to blot out much of their daily existence." I can almost guarantee Hedges hasn't seen Severance. The following are the words of a soldier named Fanning. "The military wasn’t interested in preserving freedom or democracy. It was only interested in protecting the profits of those in power and expanding the U.S. hegemony. I was not a Hollywood freedom fighter. I was a cog in the imperialist machine. I preyed on the poorest, most exploited people on the planet.”" "These people can’t do any wrong because they’ve served. This reverence for the military is priming the population to accept military rule and a form of fascism or proto-fascism. That’s why I felt even more compelled to get out." "“What I didn’t know as I entered [Afghanistan] with the 2nd Army Ranger Battalion was that the Taliban had essentially surrendered after the initial assault by the Air Force and the Special Forces,” Fanning said of his first tour, which started in late 2001. “Our job was essentially to draw the Taliban back into the fight. Surrender wasn’t good enough for politicians after 9/11. We wanted blood. We wanted a head count. It really didn’t matter who it was." "“I live in a country that is so wealthy we can wage wars and not have to think about them,” Turner said. “It is a pathology handed down from generation to generation. We talk about our military. We use words like ‘heroism.’ But when will we start to care about people whose names are difficult to pronounce? The list of people lost is so vast. How do I write about this and share it in a country that does not want to hear it? We want narratives that are easy and complete, ones we can process. We want wars to be recorded the way historians or people who make tombstones in cemeteries do. They give us the start, the duration, and end of the war. But for those of us who were in war it does not end. If you talk to my grandfather in Fresno, California, at some point during the day, you will be in the presence of World War II.”" "War exposes the lies we tell ourselves about ourselves. It rips open the hypocrisy of our religions and secular institutions. Those who return from war have learned something which is often incomprehensible to those who have stayed home. We are not a virtuous nation. God and fate have not blessed us above others. Victory is not assured. War is neither glorious nor noble. And we carry within us the capacity for evil we ascribe to those we fight." And the Russians tell themselves the exact same ameliorative lies. "Military chaplains, a majority of whom are evangelical Christians, defend the life of the unborn, tout America as a Christian nation, support the death penalty, and eagerly bless the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as holy crusades. The hollowness of their morality, the staggering disconnect between the values they claim to promote, is ripped open in war." "Wars may have to be fought to ensure survival, but they are always tragic. They always bring to the surface the worst elements of any society, those who have a penchant for violence and a lust for absolute power. They turn the moral order upside down. It was the criminal class that first organized the defense of Sarajevo. When these goons were not manning roadblocks to hold off the besieging Bosnian Serb army, they were looting, raping, and killing the Serb residents in the city." "Ask a combat veteran struggling to piece his or her life together about God, and watch the raw vitriol and pain pour out. They have seen into the corrupt heart of America, into the emptiness of its most sacred institutions, into our staggering hypocrisy, and those of us who refuse to heed their words become complicit in the evil they denounce." "The rage soldiers feel after a roadside bomb explodes, killing or maiming their comrades, or when a helicopter or troop transport plane is shot down and everyone inside is killed, is one that is easily directed over time to innocent civilians, who are fused with the insurgents. It is a short psychological leap, but a massive moral leap. It is a leap from killing to murder. Soldiers and Marines swiftly become socialized to murder." "Some of the remains had to be scooped up by putting our hands together as though we were cupping water. That was very common. A lot of the deaths were from IEDs or explosions. You might have an upper torso, but you needed to scoop the rest of the remains into a body bag. It was very common to have body bags that when you picked them up, they would sink in the middle because they were filled with flesh.”" "“You know, you see a guy who’s paralyzed, and in a wheelchair, and you think he’s just in a wheelchair,” he says in Body of War. “You don’t think about the, you know, the stuff inside that’s paralyzed. I can’t cough because my stomach muscles are paralyzed, so I can’t work up the full coughing energy." "Tomas joined the Army immediately after 9/11 to go to Afghanistan and hunt down the people behind the attacks. He did not oppose the Afghanistan war. “In fact, if I had been injured in Afghanistan, there would be no Body of War movie to begin with,” he said. But he never understood the call to invade Iraq." So close yet so far. Are you anti-war or not? "He became increasingly depressed about his impending deployment to Iraq when he was in basic training at Fort Benning, Georgia. He asked the battalion doctor for antidepressants. The doctor said he had to meet first with the unit’s chaplain, who told him, “I think you will be happier when you get over to Iraq and start killing Iraqis.”" "“I look at the TV through the lens of his eyes and can see he is invisible,” said Claudia, standing in the living room as her husband rested in the bedroom. An array of books on death, the afterlife, and dying is spread out around her. “No one is sick [on television]. No one is disabled. No one faces death. Dying in America is a very lonely business.”" "I write this letter on behalf of us all—the human detritus your war has left behind, those who will spend their lives in unending pain and grief. I write this letter, my last letter, to you, Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney. I write not because I think you grasp the terrible human and moral consequences of your lies, manipulation and thirst for wealth and power. I write this letter because, before my own death, I want to make it clear that I, and hundreds of thousands of my fellow veterans, along with millions of my fellow citizens, along with hundreds of millions more in Iraq and the Middle East, know fully who you are and what you have done." "You were not willing to risk yourselves for our nation but you sent hundreds of thousands of young men and women to be sacrificed in a senseless war with no more thought than it takes to put out the garbage." "I hope, for your sakes, that you find the moral courage to face what you have done to me and to many, many others who deserved to live. I hope that before your time on earth ends, as mine is now ending, you will find the strength of character to stand before the American public and the world, and in particular the Iraqi people, and beg for forgiveness." "Filmic and photographic images of combat are shorn of the heart-pounding fear, awful stench, deafening noise, and exhaustion of the battlefield. Such images turn confusion and chaos, the chief element of combat, into an artful war narrative. They turn war into porn. Soldiers and Marines, especially those who have never seen war, buy cases of beer and watch movies like Platoon, movies meant to denounce war, and as they do so revel in the despicable power of weapons." "If we had to stand over the mangled corpses of the schoolchildren killed in Afghanistan or Ukraine and listen to the wails of their parents, the clichés about liberating the women of Afghanistan or bringing freedom to the Afghan or Ukrainian people would be obscene. Therefore, war is carefully sanitized." "Despair and suicide grip survivors. More Vietnam veterans committed suicide after the war than were killed during it. The inhuman qualities drilled into soldiers and Marines in wartime defeat them in peacetime. This is what Homer taught us in The Iliad, the great book on war, and The Odyssey, the great book on the long journey to recovery by professional killers. Many never readjust. They cannot emotionally connect with wives, children, parents, or friends, retreating into personal hells of self-destructive numbness, anguish and rage." "David Lloyd George, wartime prime minister of Britain, in his memoirs used language like this to describe the conflict: [I]nexhaustible vanity that will never admit a mistake . . . individuals who would rather the million perish than that they as leaders should own—even to themselves—that they were blunderers . . . the notoriety attained by a narrow and stubborn egotism, unsurpassed among the records of disaster wrought by human complacency . . . a bad scheme badly handled . . . impossible orders issued by Generals who had no idea what the execution of their commands really meant . . . this insane enterprise . . . this muddy and muddle-headed venture ." "Our own generals and politicians, who nearly two decades ago launched the greatest strategic blunder in American history and wasted $7 trillion on quagmires in the Middle East, are no less egotistical and incompetent than Putin." The following passage is about WWI. "The moral and mental defects of the leaders of the human race had been demonstrated with some exactitude. One of them (Woodrow Wilson) later admitted that the war had been fought for business interests; another (David Lloyd George) had told a newspaperman: “If people really knew, the war would be stopped tomorrow, but of course they don’t—and can’t know. The correspondents don’t write and the censorship wouldn’t pass the truth.”" "The American attorney Harold Shapiro, following World War I, examined the medical records of the Army on behalf of a disabled veteran. He was appalled at the reality these records elucidated and the misperception of the war within the public. The medical descriptions, he wrote, rendered “all that I had read and heard previously as being either fiction, isolated reminiscence, vague generalization or deliberate propaganda.”" "Honestly examining past wars gives us the ability to understand current wars. But this is a Herculean struggle. The public is fed, and yearns for, the myth. It is empowering and ennobling. It celebrates supposed national virtues and military prowess. It allows an alienated population to feel part of a national collective engaged in a noble crusade. The celebration of the destructive force of our weaponry makes us feel personally empowered. All wars, past and present, are effectively shrouded in this myth." "There are no images in these memorials of men or women with their guts hanging out of their bellies, screaming pathetically for their mothers. We do not see mangled corpses being shoved in body bags. There are no sights of children burned beyond recognition or moaning in horrible pain. There are no blind and deformed wrecks of human beings limping through life." "We are forever saving Private Ryan. We view ourselves as eternal liberators. These plastic representations of war reconfigure the past in light of the present. War memorials and romantic depictions of war in films are the social and moral props used to create the psychological conditions to wage new wars." "There are times—World War II and the Serb assault on Bosnia would be examples—when a population is pushed into a war. There are times when a nation must ingest the poison of violence to survive. But this violence always deforms and maims those who use it." "The owners of coal companies at the turn of the twentieth century in southern West Virginia found that by funding local baseball teams they could blunt the solidarity of workers. Towns and coal camps rallied around their individual teams. Workers divided themselves according to team loyalty. Sport rivalries became personal. The owners, elated, used the teams to help fracture the labor movement. And the infernal logic is no different today." "Hundreds of African American men, women, and children, many born free in the surrounding Pennsylvania towns, were abducted by invading Confederate forces led by Gen. Robert E. Lee and shipped south to be sold in the slave markets in Richmond, Virginia." "The inability of most generals to adapt, as Allen C. Guelzo wrote in Gettysburg: The Last Invasion, “makes the Civil War look like an exercise in raw stupidity equivalent to the slaughters on the Western Front [of World War I].”" "Thomas D. Marbaker, the author of History of the Eleventh New Jersey Volunteers: From Its Organization to Appomattox wrote of the aftermath of the battle:" "Upon the open fields, like sheaves bound by the reaper, in crevices of the rocks, behind fences, trees and buildings; in thickets, where they had crept for safety only to die in agony; by stream or wall or hedge, wherever the battle had raged or their waking steps could carry them, lay the dead. Some with faces bloated and blackened beyond recognition, lay with glassy eyes staring up at the blazing summer sun; others, with faces downward and clenched hands filled with grass or earth, which told of the agony of the last moments.""All around was the wreck the battle-storm leaves in its wake—broken caissons, dismounted guns, small arms bent and twisted by the storm or dropped and scattered by disabled hands; dead and bloated horses, torn and ragged equipment, and all the sorrowful wreck that the waves of battle leave at their ebb; and overall, hugging the earth like a fog, poisoning every breath, the pestilential stench of decaying humanity." "The sight of human bodies, along with eviscerated horses gasping in pain and struggling to rise despite their gaping wounds, reduced her to tears and panic." "Only 90 of the 15,000 people originally in the Bochnia ghetto survived the war." "Your daily problems, which you try to solve with so much determination, are insignificant in the view of the awesome past of your ancestors. So you are told, but this is not true. Life is made out of difficulties and joys, of sorrows and utter happiness, but as long as your souls are not soiled with meanness which hurts others, be proud of your life." "Lola and her mother were put to work with other prisoners digging up a Jewish cemetery. The headstones were used for paving roads and constructing latrines." "They were quarantined in Camp C after being shaved, sprayed with DDT, and tattooed. She remembers seeing a group of dwarfs in the camp. “They were so beautiful,” she said. “I wanted to play with them. They were like dolls. On the second or third night they all disappeared.”" "They told the prisoners the Birkenau camp would be dynamited, and ordered some 60,000 prisoners from Birkenau and the satellite camps to begin a thirty-five-mile march through the snow to a freight yard. Fifteen thousand prisoners died on the march." "Then the guards began to disappear. She remembers the bloated and blackened bodies of soldiers in the fields. One morning she and the other prisoners saw the camp commander in civilian clothes riding away on a bicycle. The war was over." "It was a decline into permanent war, not Islam, that killed the liberal, democratic movements in the Arab world, ones that held great promise in the early part of the twentieth century in countries such as Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, and Iran. It is a state of permanent war that is finishing off the liberal traditions in Israel and the United States." "The moment war is declared, however, the mass of the people, through some spiritual alchemy, become convinced that they have willed and expected the deed themselves," Bourne wrote. "They then with the exception of a few malcontents, proceed to allow themselves to be regimented, coerced, deranged in all the environments of their lives, and turned into a solid manufactory of destruction toward whatever other people may have, in the appointed scheme of things, come with the range of the Government's disapprobation. The citizen throws off his contempt and indifferent to Government, identifies himself with its purposes, revives all his military memories and symbols, and the State once more walks, an august presence, through the imaginations of men. [...]"" "Fear stops us from objecting to government spending on a bloated military. Fear means we will not ask unpleasant questions of those in power. Fear means that we will be willing to give up our rights and liberties for security. Fear keeps us penned in like domesticated animals." "Foreign aid is given to countries such as Egypt, which receives some $3 billion in assistance and is required to buy American weapons with $1.3 billion of the money. The taxpayers fund the research, development, and building of weapons systems and then buy them on behalf of foreign governments. It is a bizarre circular system. It defies the concept of a free-market economy." "Our permanent war economy has bipartisan support. The two ruling parties support its destructive fury because it funds them. To challenge the military-industrial complex is political suicide." Citing from Dostoyevsky's Notes from Underground, "I never even managed to become anything: neither wicked nor good, neither a scoundrel nor an honest man, neither a hero nor an insect," the Underground Man wrote. "And now I am living out my life in my corner, taunting myself with the spiteful and utterly futile consolation that it is even impossible for an intelligent man seriously to become anything, and only fools become something." "By the end of the Vietnam War, when the costs of the war ate away at Lyndon Johnson's Great Society and domestic oil production began its steady, inexorable decline, we saw our country transformed from one that primarily produced to one that primarily consumed. We started borrowing to maintain a lifestyle we could no longer afford. We began to use force, especially in the Middle East, to feed our insatiable demand for cheap oil." "If we continued to believe that we can expand our wars and go deeper into debt to maintain an unsustainable level of consumption, we will dynamite the foundations of our society." "The European Union has allocated hundred of millions of Euros to purchase weapons for Ukraine. Germany will almost triple its defense budget. The Biden administration has asked Congress to provide $6.4 billion to funding to assist Ukraine, supplementing the $650 million in military aid to Ukraine over the past year. The permanent war economy operates outside the laws of supply and demand. it is the root of the two-decade-long quagmire in the Middle east. It is the root of the conflict with Moscow. The merchants of death are satanic." "Immanuel Kant called absolute moral imperatives that are used to carry out immoral acts 'a radical evil.' He wrote that this kind of evil was always a form of unadulterated self-love. It was the worst type of self-deception. It provided a moral façade for terror and murder." "All attempts to control the universe, to play God, to become the arbiters of life and death, have been carried out by moral idiots. They will relentlessly push forward, exploiting and pillaging, perfecting their terrible tools of technology and science, until their creation destroys them and us." "We carry on our backs this awful cross of death, for the essence of war is death, and the weight of it digs into our shoulders and eats away at our souls. We drag it through life, up hills and down hills, along the roads, into the most intimate recesses of our lives. It never leaves us. Those who know us best know that there is something unspeakabale and evil many of us harbor within us. This evil is intimate. It is personal. We do not speak its name. It is the evil of things done and things left undone. It is the evil of war. "War is captured in the long, vacant stares, in the silences, in the trembling fingers, in the memories most of us keep buried deep within us, in the tears." "There are days I wish I was whole. I wish I could put down this cross. I envy those who, in their innocence, believe in the innate goodness of America and the righteousness of war, and celebrate what we know is despicable." Damn, Chris. That's about right, though. I just spoke with a friend the other night who said that I was quite cynical about American and that he'd rather have America in charge than China or Russia. I was taken aback, but rallied and asked him whether he wasn't the more cynical one, who couldn't imagine a world without a boot on our collective necks. He had so internalized the idea that there must be an empire that he'd limited himself to choosing which one. "None of the above," didn't enter into it. I told him that it sounded to me as if he'd resigned himself to life as a whore and had settled for being able to choose who was going to pimp him. We're friends, though, so he laughed, albeit a bit nervously. "[...] as James Baldwin wrote, that 'people who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction, and anyone who insists on remaining in a state of innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a monster.'" "I cannot impart to you the cheerful and childish optimism that is the curse of America. I can only tell you to stand up, to pick up your cross, to keep moving. I can only tell you that you must always defy the forces that eat away at you, at the nation -- this plague of war." "All acts of healing and love -- and the defiance of war is an affirmation of love -- allow us to shout out to the vast powers of the universe that, however broken we are, we are not helpless, however mush we despair, we are not without hope, however weak we may feel, we will always, always, always resist." ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=4596 2023-01-30T22:48:39+01:00 https://earthli.com/users/marco

https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=4588 2023-01-30T22:00:01+01:00 https://earthli.com/users/marco

that, because of the wormhole technology involved, actually takes place before that book. The story takes place in an alternate future that had suffered through something called the "Jackpot", which was a climate apocalypse that eliminated... ]]>

that, because of the wormhole technology involved, actually takes place before that book. The story takes place in an alternate future that had suffered through something called the "Jackpot", which was a climate apocalypse that eliminated pretty much everything we're being told it will actually eliminate, but from which a tiny portion of humanity managed to escape with technology wildly beyond ours. They have flying cars, cloaking technology, incredible AIs, and also a mysterious (supposedly Chinese) server through which you can access the pasts of alternate realities (stubs). They also have oligarchs who run pretty much everything. An extremely powerful woman named Ainsley Lowbeer has made it her mission to prevent what happened in her reality from happening in those of others, regardless of the fact that the changes she manages to make to their future won't affect her own in any way at all. However, she's still opposed by the klepts (oligarchs) of her world. Because the klepts have their domino theory and they don’t even want people in completely unreachable alternate continua to be out of their reach. They can’t take those people's money, but they can ensure that their ideology survives and allows the other continuum’s klepts to enrich themselves, as God intended. This time, the mysterious server has provided Lowbeer and her crew with a connection to an alternate reality even earlier than the one explored in The Peripheral. As in that book, Lowbeer's crew has a powerful presence in this alternate past, not only because they are so technologically advanced, but because their own pasts are similar enough that they know how to make a ton of money (à la Biff Tanner in Back to the Future II). Verity is a young software designer in this alternate reality who Lowbeer feels can be useful in her aims of getting the right president elected in order to do something about climate change and inequality, etc. They convince her that she's going to be testing a new user-interaction software for a high-flying company with shifty and mysterious provenance where she starts working with a military-grade AI called Eunice. Eunice is the key to convince Verity's former boyfriend Stets, who's a fabulously wealthy tech tycoon (because of course he is) to help them achieve their ends. I mean, I get how no-one wants to write a book about boring, regular people, but is the only alternative to write about privileged, powerful, and nearly limitless billionaires? Anyway, they have to struggle against various forces arrayed against them, and end up doing a bunch of logistically fantastical things that you could only achieve if you had a tremendous amount of money and resources, but they triumph in the end and get the right person elected. Gibson does a lovely job of describing his most amazing inventions with the least amount of prose. He almost casually assumes a world where timelines can communicate. Sometimes it’s apparently more difficult to communicate, but he doesn’t explain how or why. He just casually introduces replicators. Good. That’s science fiction. At some point, we got hard science fiction (Greg Bear, Gregory Benford), but then it took over. Anything that wasn’t explained to death was considered fantasy. There are several passages where part of the beauty of them is that they're utterly incomprehensible without context. Meaning is tantalizingly close, but out of reach. Stripped of all unnecessary detail, as people familiar with the situation would do, instead of pedantically explicatory, for an audience that exists not in the context of the story, but in the context of there being a reader of the story about the reality these characters inhabit, to whom the context must be constantly explained. His treatment of AI is good, too. Instead of being annoying and God-like, it feels more like, obviously this is how an AI would work, with multiples copies interacting simultaneously and sharing information. A hive mind pretending to be individuals, to ease communication with those who are more slow-thinking but capable of spontaneity and invention. What's interesting is that, though the book is in an alternate history, Gibson has to inject modern-day conspiracy theories from our timeline that feel a bit jarring. Everything else is so fantastical and then he drops something like this, "Could have been the butterfly effect, of course. Though the aunties, in both cases, lean toward something causing a reduction in Russian manipulation of social media. Which we assume would have had a similar result in our own time line." It's sad how American authors are so indoctrinated that they all have to mention Russian election interference. Stephenson did it too. It never happened. Russiagate was a lie. [2] It doesn't matter and it never mattered. It poisoned the minds of a generation. The U.S. is just poisonous to clarity of thought, even for those, like Gibson, who you'd think might be capable of resisting. On one level, this is a story of elites shitting their pants because they feel their bubble threatened by the antics that built their bubble in the first place, but then being able to lean back and relax in the knowledge that their efforts have returned to them a stability that comprises them never having to think about where anything they want might come from or whether they can obtain it, while nearly every other human being continues to toil in misery to keep that bubble going. It's kind of a story about rich people who are mostly worried about other rich people trying to kill them. The suffering masses are nearly completely missing, or mentioned only tangentially, perhaps in the person of Connor, who is preternaturally gifted and not really of the lumpen proletariat anymore, anyway. He, too, has transcended through his usefulness to the rich. One drawback to the focus on technology and ideas is that the characters end up being mostly pretty one-dimensional, even after 300+ pages. Carsyn is wholly unknown. Manuella nearly so. Caitlin a close runner-up. Kathy and Dixon made a drone and drove around. For whatever reason, Gibson needs to list them all and assure us that the whole, big, happy family is together at the end. I'm picturing the stupid picnics at the end of all of the Fast and the Furious movies. I read this immediately after having read Neal Stephenson's latest, so my reaction to its much, much tighter prose was, at times in the reactions to the citations below, nearly ecstatic. Gibson really does have a way with words. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me of what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I've failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an interest in this book, then I'm happy for you. [Citations] "Vespasian,” Detective Inspector Ainsley Lowbeer said, peering sidewise at Netherton over her greatcoat’s upraised collar, “our hobbyist of hellworlds. Recall him?” Jesus. This is peak Gibson. Is he trying too hard? “Contact’s been oblique, you say?” “The aunties, for instance”—her pet name for her office’s coven of semisentient security algorithms—“are of relatively little use.” Netherton grimaced at the very thought of them. A dappled Thames chimera broke the surface then, red and white. It rolled, four meters head to tail, lamplike eyes clustered above cartoonish feeding palps. Diving, it left a shallow wake of beige foam. “So you can’t put a team of quants on it,” he asked, “to secure as much in-stub wealth as might be needed?” Having, of course, seen her do exactly that. “No. Even the simplest messaging can be quite spotty.” “What can you do, then?” “Laterally encourage an autonomous, self-learning agent,” she said. “Then nudge it toward greater agency. It helps that they’re mad for AI there, though they’ve scarcely anything we’d consider that. By tracing historical fault lines around AI research here, we found what we needed there.” That's more like it. We're In the future. Weird creatures. Dirty environment. AIs. Communication with the past. Self-funding. Had to read it three times. Just about perfect. "They returned to her car, where it awaited them invisibly, a few dead leaves clinging to its roof, as though magically suspended." Transparent bubble on top, without saying it. This is a refreshing change from Stephenson. "Could have been the butterfly effect, of course. Though the aunties, in both cases, lean toward something causing a reduction in Russian manipulation of social media. Which we assume would have had a similar result in our own time line." I love how American authors are so indoctrinated that they all have to mention Russian election interference. Stephenson did it too. It never happened. Russiagate was a lie. It doesn't matter. It poisoned the minds of a generation. That place is poisonous to clarity of thought. "Now her tardibot answered the blue door, like an eight-legged raccoon in a small antique biohazard suit, its head an unpleasantly folded foreskin-like affair, with a central toothy ring of what he took to be mirror-polished steel. It seemed to peer up at him, however eyelessly. “Netherton,” it said, the voice hers, “come in.”" “He’d know about Cursion.” “Know what, about them?” “That they’re a subspecies of a former fully deniable Department of Defense op.” “Like CIA venture capital stuff?” “Nothing like it,” Eunice said. “That stuff’s up front. Megafauna. Cursion, when they were as legit as they ever really were, lived down in the underbrush. Still do, but their new coloration’s gaming. Sometimes, if DoD doubles down hard enough on the deniability, there’s zero memory left of the original mission. The op drifts free of the department, unfunded, forgotten. Doesn’t happen nearly as often as it did during Iraq, but that’s what Cursion is.” “I liked the county,” she said, “even though it made me sad.” “It did? Why?” “They’re living in a conspiracy theory, but a real one. Controlled by secret masters. Your employer, primarily.” “But isn’t it better there now, than if we hadn’t intervened?” he asked. “It is, I’m sure, but it makes a joke of their lives.” “But everyone you know there is in on it.” “I don’t know whether I’d rather know or not know,” she said, and took a bite of taco. That's an entire short story there. "[...] the microdrone, nothing but the blue of the tarps, then briefly blurred, as it zipped between two adjacent edges. To overlook the Bay, where something anomalously vast loomed in what was left of bad wildfire light, as though the horizon should sag beneath it. “What’s that?” "“Container ship,” Eunice said. “Chinese. Not their biggest, but up there.”" "[...] staring up at a bifurcated crack he’d only recently noticed in the ceiling. Was it an actual crack, or an assembler artifact, positioned by an algorithm to suggest authenticity?" "“Have you inquired in the county? Your younger self, there, has every sort of Washington connection. Including presidential, currently.” "“Of course,” Lowbeer said, “but nothing turned up.”" Just casually assuming a world where timelines can communicate. Sometimes it's difficult, but he doesn't explain how or why. Good. That's science fiction. At some point, we got hard science fiction (Greg Bear, Gregory Benford), but then it took over. Anything that wasn't explained to death was considered fantasy. "Watching the maker pump a tiny stream of steaming caffeine-free espresso into the waiting cup." Just casually introducing replicators. "Netherton said, looking down at the steaming black liquor in the small white china cup, the kitchen’s ceiling fixture reflected in it, surrounded by pale brown crema." Detailed but not hyper-detailed. Also, poetic. Netherton drank off his decaf, the gesture as denatured as the brew, and returned the cup to the maker. “Would that be your work, then, this crisis?” “Most definitely not. It came with the territory, taking us entirely by surprise. Vespasian’s final stub promises to become exactly the sort of thing he most enjoyed inflicting.” “Can you prevent it?” “That depends on our available agency there. At the moment, we’ve none. The aunties give it grim odds.” “You told me they weren’t involved.” “Not in the sense you’re accustomed to, but there are no better actuaries.” The beauty is that this passage is utterly incomprehensible without context. It's tantalizingly close, but out of reach. Stripped of all unnecessary detail, as people familiar with the situation would do, instead of pedantically explicatory, for an audience that exists not in the context of the story, but in the context of there being a reader of the story about the reality these characters inhabit, to whom the context must be constantly explained. Stets took a phone from one of his shorts pockets. He thumb-typed. Sent. Looked at Verity, then at his phone, then up at the screen. “He’ll take your call.” “Already did,” she said. “I’m speaking with him now.” Instead of being annoying and God-like, it feel more like, obviously this is how an AI would work, with multiples copies interacting simultaneously and sharing information. A hive mind pretending to be individuals, to ease communication. “They don’t wake each day with renewed gratitude for that particular bullet having been dodged, no,” said Lowbeer, “but that’s simply human nature. Meanwhile, in a world still subject to the other key stressors in our shared history, and with a complexly leveraged international crisis, one potentially involving nuclear weapons . . .” Sounds familiar. "“I’m just bringing milk for Thomas,” he said, drawing one of the bottles from the carrying bag. Sensing this, the bag crinkled, trying to origami itself into the butterfly it needed to become in order to fly back to the newsagent." “Stub?” “Regrettable expression,” Lowbeer said, “regrettably common usage, here. Inaccurate as well, since your continuum won’t remain short. It appears so to us, but only since it’s just diverged from our shared past. Its birth, as it were. But it also reflects an undeniably imperial aspect of what we’re doing, because we assume our continuum to be that from which so-called stubs branch. The mechanism that permits us to do that appears to be located here, however mysteriously. Stubs, lacking that agency, are unable to initiate stubs of their own.” “She’s altering stubs to produce worlds in which the klept enjoy less power,” Lev said, absolutely confirming it for Netherton. “It’s art, Lev,” Netherton protested, taking a second page from Lowbeer, “poetry. What happens in a stub stays there.” But the klepts have their domino theory and they don't even want people in completely unreachable alternate continua to be out of their reach. They can't take their money but they can ensure that their ideology survives and allows the other continuum's klepts enrich themselves, as God intended. “Once again, then,” she said, “the divide between the ambitions of conspirators and the desire, among those bringing us word of those ambitions, to preserve whatever aspect of the status quo they themselves hold dear.” “My mother told me about you,” Netherton said, surprising himself, “when I was a small child. Not you specifically, but a figure in a story, benevolent but frightening. She called that figure the Adjustor. Adjustor of destinies, she said, for those who threatened the stability of the klept. When I was older, I came to understand that you, or rather someone in your role, actually existed.” She looked toward the white candle. “It was never envisioned as a solo position. There were a number of us, originally. I’m simply the last. Should the klept ever truly decide to be done with me, they need only deny me access to the technology that keeps me alive and functional.” "Their tedious ambition and contempt for rule of law would bring everything down, around their ears and ours. They managed to do that with the previous world order, after all, though then it was effectively their goal. They welcomed the jackpot, the chaos it brought. The results of our species’ insults to nature did much of their work for them. No brakes magically appeared then, and I don’t see them appearing now, absent someone free to act, with sufficient agency, against their worst impulses. The biosphere only survives, today, by virtue of what prosthetic assistance we can afford it. The assemblers might keep that going, were the klept to founder. But I don’t trust that some last convulsive urge to short-term profit, some terminal shortsightedness, mightn’t bring an end to everything.”" “Money,” Virgil said, “for Stets, is a by-product of satisfying his own curiosity. He’s still amazed that most people who do what he does are in it mainly for the money. “They think they’re the only real continuum, the one original, not a stub. They discovered the so-called server first, whatever anomaly allows all this. But they didn’t invent it, just found it. Anybody knows what it really is, or where, they’re not telling.” “Nobody knows what it is?” “Nobody has the least fucking idea, or where the hardware is. Lot of people think China, but China’s just naturally where you’d guess something like that would be.” “Why?” “’Cause they opted to mostly go their own way, in the jackpot. They were big enough, the richest country, all set to do it. Just rolled up the carpet and closed the door for a couple decades. Didn’t need to evolve a klept, either.” “Evolve what?” “Klept. What runs the world that isn’t China, up the line where Lowbeer is. Hereditary authoritarian government, roots in organized crime. The jackpot seemed to filter that out of what was already happening, made it dominant.” "Authoritarian societies are inherently corrupt, and corrupt societies are inherently unstable. Rule of thieves brings collapse, eventually, because they can’t stop stealing." "Joe-Eddy was seated opposite her, Caitlin on her right, Manuela on her left. Manuela had Carsyn to her left, and something was going on there. They definitely seemed to be enjoying one another’s company. The drone was standing to Joe-Eddy’s right, a few inches from the table, a chair having been removed for it. Stets was beside Caitlin, with Grim Tim, Sevrin, Kathy Fang, and Dixon making up the rest of the other side." These are mostly pretty one-dimensional characters, even after 300+ pages. Carsyn is wholly unknown. Manuella nearly so. Caitlin a close runner-up. Kathy and Dixon made a drone and drove around. For whatever reason, Gibson needs to list them all and assure us that the whole, big, happy family is together. I'm picturing the stupid picnics at the end of all of the Fast and the Furious movies. “The president,” said Kathy Fang. “She got us out of it.” Verity saw Joe-Eddy smirk. “Eunice says it was the president,” Verity said to him. “The president,” said Kathy Fang, raising her coffee, and they all clinked mugs, toasting the president. Conner, in the drone, thrust its manipulator’s thumb-equivalents up in support, and she heard Ash’s voice join in as well. I can't tell if Gibson's taking the piss or being nearly inconceivably lame. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] I wrote this was before the Twitter Files buried Russiagate for good -- even among the idiots who'd clung to it long after every conceivable bit of evidence had been disproved. ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=4559 2023-01-30T20:35:33+01:00 https://earthli.com/users/marco

, a billionaire from Singapore, extremely old money from Venice, and all of their associated partners, who are all incredibly gifted, fabulously intelligent, and breathtakingly attractive. They are there to witness T.R.'s opening ceremony for his geoengineering gun called Pina2bo, which boosts drones full of sulfur into the upper stratosphere in a continuous loop, with the drones falling back to Earth, flying home, being refilled with sulfur, and, finally, going for another ride into the upper atmosphere. Basically, Stephenson loves guns so much that he wrote an entire book about the biggest one he could think of. There's an entire second plot -- perhaps 1/4 of the book -- about Deep "Laks" Singh, a Punjab-Canadian Sikh who is an absolute master of gatka, a fighting style unique to the Punjab region. When he gets to India, he's so amazing at it that he's better than anyone there -- because he tried harder? It takes him a bit of western-guy-traveling-in-the-Global-South to get to what's called the "Line of Actual Control (LAC)" , which is kind of a weapons-free area along the border between China and India where skirmishes between Fortnite-like clans are allowed but nothing else. This is all filmed by drones and broadcast live on social media, with all of the attendant bullshit you would expect. Saskia abdicates her throne to her daughter for reasons I can no longer remember, but her daughter is a thrilling millennial, to whom Saskia at least partially kowtows for being even more amazing she is. That's OK, though, because Saskia's now got one of Italy's richest men chasing her tight tail and also the Saudis are giving her super-expensive hydrogen-fueled airplanes, so she's jetting all over the world, supported by the governments who whole-heartedly approve of the kind of weather that seems to have been propagated by the initial attempts at geoengineering, but who the fuck knows because it's just a bunch of rich guys blowing chemicals into the atmosphere and claiming that they fixed the climate crisis, but are really looking for an angle through which to make more money, a usual, which is wholly unscientific, but is absolutely the libertarian wet dream, because that's the only way that anything ever gets done because government sucks, ammrite? After the Chinese blow him off a mountaintop with a sound ray and he spends months convalescing and learning how to use the high-tech enhancements installed by top-flight Indian surgeons, Laks ends up working for the Indian government, which is none too thrilled about the side-effects of Pina2bo, which it blames for the late monsoon season. So they send him back to Vancouver to infiltrate the U.S. border, make his way to Texas, and take out Pina2bo. He does this with no small amount of success, though he is eventually blocked and felled by Rufus and a crew of eagle-trainers. I honestly feel like I could just type anything here and it would be just as believable as what actually happened in the book. This is a one-sided book about how awesome it would be if billionaires, responsible for nearly every awesome thing about out lives already, were to just go ahead and fix the climate crisis with a bit of geoengineering, because government isn't going to do it. I wrote notes to myself several times expressing amazement that I was 400, then 500, then 700 pages deep into the book without yet having pushed up against any awareness that there might be some nuance to the question of geoengineering. You do you, Neal, but this is just stupid-porn for techno-fabulists who believe that there's a straightforward technical solution to every problem that simply involves capital making more capital and definitely doesn't involve any reduction or restriction of consumption and, furthermore, doesn't involve dealing with the disgusting 99.9% of humanity who aren't extraordinarily rich or privileged by exactly the system that led the planet into this cul de sac in the first place. The only time we hear about anyone who might be opposed is in the third person to let us all know that they're naive babies who hate progress and billionaires. Another thing that we barely ever hear about in this book is the United States. Without any explanation, it's just a complete non-entity in the future. There is neither hide nor hair of the oppressive U.S. Russia goes unmentioned. Africa and South America are, of course, absent. Only Europe and China figure into the future. The U.S. is represented by a world-saving billionaire, a toothless FAA and Rufus. The first -- and pretty much only -- mention of the United States is in the following passage, a throwaway comment that states without explaining. "The United States—which used to intervene in such situations—was a basket case and global laughingstock;" For a guy who can write an entire chapter on how Laks combs his hair, that this guy couldn't figure out how to say anything about how the United States is just not credible. I bet he's saving it for the third 800-page installment. "T.R.’s phone had buzzed, and he had put on reading glasses. He looked at Willem over the lenses. “My granddad built a mine in Cuba. Castro took it away from him. Does that mean he shouldn’t have built it?” While Willem pondered this not uninteresting philosophical conundrum, [...]" See what I mean? Absolutely nuance-free. It is not an interesting philosophical conundrum. It's bullshit for Stephenson to make the over-educated Willem think that it is. It is the same bullshit rich people always tell the world every chance they get. They want to convince everyone that they are rich because the world has rewarded them for being special -- intelligent or driven or clever or wise -- rather than for being lucky or privileged. "The initial pushback against what T.R. was doing here had more recently been muted by countervailing arguments around the idea of termination shock: the fear that if the gun stopped, it would lead to a backlash in the world’s climate system." And here he finally tells us what termination shock is: it means that all you have to do is be first and then no-one can stop you because stopping you would break things more than if you'd never started. So, you get some facts on the ground and convince people "termination shock" is a thing so they're afraid of trying to stop you. Might everything have been less fucked had no-one started geoengineering? Perhaps...but the beauty is that from where we are now (post-geoengineering), the best course of action is to continue geoengineering. Neat, right? "“It’s like, we’ve been in a car with a brick on the gas pedal and no one at the wheel, careening down the road, running over people and crashing into things. We’re still in the car. We can’t get out of the car. But someone could at least grab the wheel. T.R. ain’t the perfect man to grab it, but I don’t think his whole plan is just to fuck up the Punjab and starve India." Let's pretend that that's not a stupid analogy (because we don't need someone to grab the wheel; we need to take our foot off the gas). Let's pretend it's an alluring argument. OK. An accident people can live with. Once there's a driver, they're going to get blamed. Hiccups cost dozens of millions of lives. "Oops" and "we're still figuring it out" and "they were going to die anyway" and "we have to do something" don't cut the mustard. Whoever's driving -- when they're wrong, they will have wasted time and resources making things worse. They don't consider that for a second in this book. A better analogy for this book is: 100 people in a cave with supplies. Two take half of the supplies to go on a mission to find help. If they just decide on their own, is that right? This is Stephenson's Atlas Shrugged. It's a fantasy about those all-powerful greens and animals-rights activists getting their comeuppance at the hands of underdog billionaires. These are the kind of people libertarians and objectivists choose to write about. It's billionaire fan-fic. To be fair, and very rarely, an interesting insight sneak in. "[...] they controlled a trillion dollars that had been earned by injecting carbon dioxide into the atmosphere." That's kind of a nice way of putting it. They created a tremendous amount of value while they were doing it, but they also knew most of the time that they were doing a lot of damage that was going to be very difficult to repair. The most important thing quickly became continued personal enrichment. Any costs that could be externalized, were -- regardless of morality or ethics. They, as usual, didn't enter into it. "The first wave is a stopgap measure. Hurling enough SO2 into the stratosphere to begin making a difference. All well and good; when a house is on fire, you throw water on it. The second wave will be about tuning the distribution of the veil so as to achieve the results . . .” Saskia looked him in the eye. She got the idea he was about to conclude the sentence with “we want” but after the briefest of hesitations he said “that are most beneficial.”" Basically, the 99% have always been exploited and have little to no power. In arrogating power to themselves, a wealthy elite have started destroying the planet. No-one else had a say as they did so. Once the elite realized that they'd broken things, they doubled down because that's how they stayed wealthy and powerful. Now that they also feel threatened, they will, once again, and autocratically, do what they want to protect their interests, all without so much as a by-your-leave from the long-suffering masses. It may be the only way forward for a benighted and congenitally vicious species, but it's not a democracy. Stop pretending that it is. People just have dictators they like and those they don't like. Like sports teams But most people like dictators. Most pick a side. I've read nearly everything he's written so far -- "Seveneves" in 2016, "Reamde" in 2014, "Anathem" in 2010, "Cobweb" in 2007, "The System of the World" in 2006, "Confusion" in 2005, "Confusion" in 2004, "The System of the World" in 2003, Cryptonomicon in 2002 [2], and, finally, Diamond Age and the legendary Snow Crash sometime ... even longer ago, long before I was keeping track of books I've read or doing anything as elaborate as keeping notes about them. This is probably the last book I'll read by Neal Stephenson for all of the reasons outlined above and noted in detail in witty ripostes to citations below. This is nothing more than a ridiculously long airport thriller. I have to admit I was speed-reading some sections. It's a 700-page setup for a sequel. The hubris is mind-boggling. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me of what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I've failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an interest in this book, then I'm happy for you. [Citations] "During that time there was surprisingly little to do. She and Johan had trimmed the plane so that its weight exceeded the lift produced by its wings; in accordance with the laws of physics, this caused it to lose altitude in a steady and predictable manner." What the fuck kind of boring shit is this? No wonder this book is 700 pages long. I mean, this reads like it was written by ChatGPT. Neal, are you cheating? Or have you really become this pedantic and boring? "The man began to unlimber his Kalashnikov but then there was a bang that made the queen go deaf in one ear. She looked up at Amelia in time to see her discharge a second round at the pig. The pig fell over and stopped moving, apart from some jerky nervous system mayhem about the legs. The man turned half around and favored Amelia with a nod. “Double tap was definitely your correct move, sister,” he remarked in a world-weary but agreeable tone, and once again turned his back on them." This is awful writing, akin to that horseshit survivalist book I read from Gary once. I'm surprised I didn't have to read about the exact caliber and number of shells. "For years he’d been hunting Snout all over Texas. Now he knew almost exactly where the creature was. It could only move so fast. He and his herd would leave in their wake a wide trail of shit and damage; it would be as easy as tracking an armored division across a golf course." "Amelia was able to produce from her bag a pair of ordinary (not electronically enhanced) sunglasses with an old-school military look to them. Fenna unfolded them and slipped them onto Saskia’s face, carefully guiding the ends of the bows into the tight gap between her temples and the spandex hood." For the love of God, was there no editor on this book. This is a nearly autistic level of detail. "Fenna was braless, wiry, and heavily tattooed, so any lurkers watching from the scrub along the banks would have seen more, but not for long." WT-actual-F Neal. Are you thirteen years old? "Fat orange and yellow extension cords coursed over the sand, obliging her to pick her feet up as she walked." Why would you write that? This is terrible. Are we supposed to think that she doesn't pick up her feet in the normal course of things? Is she high-stepping? Does it matter? Will these cables be relevant? Spoiler alert: they would not. "Could anything less sustainable be imagined? She was drinking water from a bottle made of petrochemicals. At three in the morning the temperature was still so high that humans could not sleep unless they ran air conditioners powered by generators that burned more petroleum. The generators and the air conditioners alike dumped more heat into the air." "Rufus, of course, knew her only as Saskia, and had introduced her as such to all of the Boskeys. It was a code name; but at the same time she felt in some ways that it was her true name, and she very much enjoyed being called it." I only cited a tiny bit here; this is the end of a chapter-length treatise on her name. Jesus. "The next, and last, time that Hendrik saw his father, Johannes was kneeling naked in the town square. He was blindfolded. On closer inspection, he was bandaged over the eye sockets, and the bandage was soaked and streaming with blood, because his eyes had been gouged out and tossed into a bucket along with a lot of other eyes of the wrong color. One of the young rebels had got a samurai sword and was going down the line cutting heads off. Johannes’s last words were “Leve de Koningin!” (“Long live the Queen!”)." "They drank. Of course, they would hold the entire conversation in Dutch. “She sends this,” Willem said, and slid the queen’s note across the table. Hendrik somewhat laboriously fished out glasses and put them on, then unfolded the note and read it, as if it were an everyday occurrence for him to sit out in his gazebo perusing correspondence from crowned heads of Europe." This feels so awkward. He's trying so hard to emphasize how cool his characters are. I'm afraid to go back to the Baroque Cycle or Cryptonomicon to discover that he's always been like this. "The Mississippi was about seven Rhines. When this spillway was wide open, it diverted two and a half Rhines into the lake." "Now, where Willem came from, a Rhine was sort of a big deal. A third of the Netherlands’ economy passed up and down one single Rhine. They had, in effect, built a whole country around it. Here, though, people were gunning their pickup trucks over a causeway bestriding two and a half Rhines just as a temporary diversion of a seven-Rhine river over yonder. It was one of those insane statistics about the scale of America that had once made the United States seem like an omnipotent hyperpower and now made it seem like a beached whale." "Willem glanced toward the adjoining high-rise district, sprouting from a low clutter of RVs and tents. “You’re right,” he said, “that is not a choice we have to make. Oh, fisheries are always problematic in all countries. But when we build coastal defenses, as a rule, we are creating jobs. Not obliterating valuable sources of employment.”" Nice lecture, Neal. What happened to you? "Then Willem almost got them killed when he failed to notice stopped traffic on the highway ahead until it was nearly too late and had to stand on the brakes and make a controlled diversion onto the shoulder." WTF? He has a meter-precise virus-detection app, but personal vehicles no longer have radar and auto-braking? "Saskia knew she’d looked to the example of Prince Harry and his American wife, Meghan, who had simply walked away, renounced their titles, and moved to the West Coast to live like normal humans." FFS. They're living like normal multimillionaires who will never want for anything, not like "normal humans". "This place, however, was about permanence. Permanence, and uniqueness. Every detail custom-built of polished old wood, wrought iron, sculpted marble. Original works of art wherever some decoration was wanted, living flowers arranged by human hands. That human effort immanent in every detail. Napkins folded just so, drinks hand-shaken and served with origami twists of citrus rind. People were expensive; the way to display, or to enjoy, great wealth was to build an environment that could only have been wrought, and could only be sustained from one hour to the next, by unceasing human effort. Saskia, with her staff, was as guilty of it as anyone, but she tended to forget about it until some event such as the journey down the Brazos reset her thinking." "That kind of thinking—adjust the climate of the entire planet just to make things good for Venice—might have been very typical of Venice in, say, the twelfth century but was not what one expected today." But we've already done exactly that: adjusted the climate of the world so that an elite could live extravagant lives. "“The size of it. The sheer amount of steel in the ground. The engineering. The presence, Your Majesty, the physical mass and reality of it. Every strand of rebar was drawn out in a steel mill. Where’d the heat come from? Burning things. The cement was produced in kilns, biggest things you ever seen. How do we keep the kilns hot? Burning things. We put the steel and the concrete together to make these things, these freeway interchanges, just so cars can run on ’em. How do we keep the cars moving? Burning things.”" It is incredible and grotesque. A spectacular waste of resources immiserating mankind for the benefit of a few. "“With all due respect, Your Majesty, it is as sustainable, or as unsustainable, as your whole country." It is literally making her country unsustainable. This is hogwash of the kind that Americans eat up. It feels true. "As he said it, the twenty-six lanes of the Katy Freeway suddenly filled up with cars and trucks, countless thousands of them, moving along at moderate speed—not quite a traffic jam, but still with enough brake lights igniting here and there to temper the flow." Those thousands could all fit into two trains in that public-transport video, "Why Roads ALWAYS Fill Up, No Matter How Much We Widen Them" by Adam Something . "Standing at his side was his wife, Dr. Daia Kaur Chand, smartly but not flashily attired in pants and flats well adapted to a daylong program of clambering in and out of diverse vehicles." So superfluous. "[...] she astonished and delighted their hosts by greeting them in a language that Saskia had to presume was Punjabi. Mohinder and his family didn’t have a Willem on staff to do advance research on everyone they were going to encounter over the course of a day and so it was a joyous surprise to them to discover that one of their guests shared their religion and spoke their language." So. Many. Words. "These guys did look happy. A little older, whiter, maler, and squarer than techies in Sunnyvale or Amsterdam. Calmly, even serenely focused on what they were doing." Like Uster 😜. "“Nope, water runs right through it,” T.R. said. He took a step back, extended his arms, and gave it the full Ozymandias. "“Sulfur!” he proclaimed, in the same tone that a conquistador might have said “Gold!” "“The stone that burns!” "Then he added, “S!,” which Saskia knew was an allusion to its symbol on the periodic table." Was this book written by a committee? Also, water runs right through it, but what about wind? Didn't they just have a hurricane? Why is it in such a neat pile? In a normal sci-fi book, I wouldn't ask, but Stephenson makes such an effort to make you hyper-aware of how much research he's done, that it awakes the pedant in me. "Saskia knew the term at least as well as Bob. She was slower to respond, though, since she had been trained to think hard and choose her words carefully when any topic related to the Second World War came up in conversation." These constant ham-handed and tediously literal reminders of how smart people manage to look smart. This could have been, "Saskia took her time in answering..." "“You can buy that much sulfur for fifteen million dollars!?” Saskia was suddenly having to restrain an irrational urge to run out and buy a sulfur pile of her own." I know she's a queen. But please stop writing about the purchasing power of the wealthy so veneratively. "He nodded. “Currently, further work on the project is blocked because it was found to be in violation of the European Directive on Birds.” "“Excuse me, did you say birds?” "“Yes.” Michiel gave a shy, wry smile. “That is only one such violation, to tell you the truth. Also, the construction of the MOSE sea gates disturbed aquatic life on the bottom of the Lagoon. Mussel populations were impacted across several hectares. Every time such a violation is found to have happened, it triggers the European Infraction Procedure.”" I see what he's suggesting here, but it's honestly ignoring shit like this (the environment) that got us into this mess in the first place (climate crisis). "“If folks all over the world are going to get riled up at billionaires messing with the climate even when we are not really doing a goddamn thing, then we got no real downside politically.”" True, if self-serving. "“Even if we could get China and India to stop burning shit tomorrow, and crash their economies for the sake of Mother Earth,” T.R. said, “it wouldn’t undo what we’ve done, as a civilization, to the atmosphere since we first worked out how to turn fossil fuel into work.”" Once again, utterly failing to recognize his own country's still-massive per-capita output and its massive contribution to that historical CO2 debt. "Hell, in Afghanistan they even burn shit." Lots of places burn dung. Is this T.R.'s blinkered view or the author's? The authorial style nearly forces me to wonder these things. "“You’re saying that removing the carbon from the atmosphere would be a much bigger project than putting sulfur into it,” Saskia said. “We would have to make a pile of carbon the size of Mount Rainier. About thirty cubic miles. Imagine a cube a mile on a side, full of this stuff.” He rested his hand a little more gently on the carbon jar. “And now imagine thirty of those. To get that done in any reasonable amount of time—let’s say fifty years—you have to imagine a 747 cargo freighter loaded with pure elemental carbon dumping it onto the pile every nine seconds for fifty years, 24/7/365,”" "“The Greens,” Saskia said, “idolize nature and will want to say that if drought or deluge happens in Mali or Nebraska or Uttar Pradesh because of their carbon-sequestering forest, why, that is nature’s decree. Gaia’s just verdict. We must bow to it. But try telling that to the victims.”" This is absolutely not what "The Greens" think, but OK. Nature built us a cocoon. We don't know how to fine-tune it. We have only succeeded in making things worse so far. What reason do we have to hope that whatever we do with have a salutary rather deleterious effect? "He had shoulder-holstered his cricket bat so that its handle projected up behind his head, making him look (as he was no doubt well aware) like a character in a movie." Authors today write books as if they were screenplays "“The muzzle flash’ll catch your eye,” T.R. said. “But if you look at that, you’ll miss it. Shell’s already long gone. You got to look into the space above. Next one’s in 3 . . . 2 . . . 1 . . .” Saskia just glimpsed it, moving straight up at fantastic velocity, as the muzzle flared and extinguished below." Stephenson loves guns so much that he wrote an entire book about the biggest one he could think of. "“He has a gift for the catchphrase,” Saskia said. “One can easily imagine him hawking these on YouTube. Texas Gold.” "“Jumpsuit Orange, if he’s not careful.” "“I have no idea as to the legalities. Do you?”" I don't care who that is; almost no European would come anywhere close to using that idiom. I know people way cooler than her who wouldn't know it, much less be able to use it. "To extend Ilham’s analogy, if this was the Fellowship of the Ring, Laks was Aragorn, part man and part elf, equally capable of hanging out with Lord Elrond at the high table of Imladris or slamming down pints in a tavern in Bree." He's absolutely not part-elf. He's a Numenorian. Stephenson has an almost pathological drive to heap as many cool properties onto his characters as possible, but can't even get LOTR shit straight. "Until recently it had been necessary to drive all the way over Rohtang Pass, an infinity of switchbacks cresting at four thousand meters, then down an equal number of switchbacks into a hamlet on the upper Chenab at more like three thousand meters. From there the highway followed a maddeningly indirect route up into Ladakh, the water- and oxygen-starved province that bordered China." "They drove over a pass that topped out at fifty-four hundred meters, and stopped at the little village there to take selfies and inject cash into the local economy, such as it was. Then they descended to a somewhat more survivable altitude of four thousand," "“Read it,” T.R. said, cutting him off. “I get it, this is your whaling ship, a place for everything and everything in its place. You the Captain Ahab of this little operation, then?”" Everybody in this book has read -- and remembered -- Moby Dick. Nobody I know has read it, but everyone in this book has. It's a weird flex, to say the very least. "Even bicycles were almost overkill. Huis ten Bosch was just a few thousand strides from the edge of the North Sea. They could have walked to it briskly in less than an hour. On bicycles, trailed by security and support staff in cars, they covered the distance in minutes." In a windstorm. Surging hard enough to cause problems. Wind coming ashore. Headwind. No problem. You could have skipped this whole paragraph. It's unnecessary and inaccurate. "“The cease-fire of 1962 put an end to armed conflict between India and China along their shared border—which remains disputed to this day. A peace agreement signed by Zhou Enlai and Jawaharlal Nehru referred not to the border but to the Line of Actual Control—a diplomatic phrasing that enabled the cease-fire to be formalized without either party acknowledging the other’s territorial claims.”" "“Who doesn’t like it?” Rufus asked. “Other than folks who hate geoengineering on principle?” Alastair shrugged. “Any country whose ox is gored by the knock-on effects.”" This is not even close to nuanced. 700 pages and the only lip service paid to anyone who might be opposed is that they're naive babies who hate progress and billionaires. "Horseshoes and iron wheel rims clattered on the paving stones as it swept round in a wide curve—the turning radius of these things was atrocious—that took it up to the door below." His pedantry is legendary. He just can't seem to be able to help himself. "The dressmaker was drafting along behind Fenna, like a bike racer allowing a stronger rider to break the wind." Literally just defined "drafting" "With a moment’s reflection, of course, it was clear why Ilham—who still had family in Xinjiang—would not want to become world famous doing what Big Fish’s School was doing." We're 400 pages in and neither hide nor hair of the oppressive U.S. They are represented by a world-saving billionaire, a toothless FAA and Rufus. "“I don’t care,” she said. “I’m not an environmentalist except insofar as it bears on those issues I do care about. Once we’ve gotten to the point where girls in developing countries are getting decent educations and being given control over their own bodies, then I’ll concern myself with T.R. McHooligan’s sulfur veil and its projected side effects. Maybe.”" Stephenson speaking his politics through other characters. He's all for freedom and letting billionaires sort things out. As if they weren't the reason there's anything to sort out in the first place. "It was thus capable of servicing the very largest container ships in the world: absurdly enormous things, double the width of the biggest ship that could fit through the Panama Canal, that boggled Saskia’s mind whenever she came out here to look at them. It was the place where the economy of China made a direct umbilical connection to Europe. The ships were two dozen containers wide and drew twenty meters of water when fully loaded. Some of them, fresh in from Asia, would unload part of their burden here just so that they would ride higher in the water, making it possible for them to move on to smaller and shallower European ports." "High mountains rising out of the jungle in the distance. And finally a huge hole in the ground, a spiraling roadway carved into its sloping walls, the size of it incomprehensible when you saw the motes spaced out along that road and understood that they were the largest trucks on Earth." "Willem spent a few minutes comparing wait times on various ride share apps. All disastrous. Then he tried to sort out the train schedules, which had been thrown into disarray. Finally he just got on his bicycle and rode the few kilometers. He didn’t even have to pedal. The wind pushed him there." How do you not just take the bike in the first place? 5km is 12 minutes at a reasonable pace. He probably pissed away longer than that on the ride-share apps. None of which involve sharing rides anyway. "What does all this mean for China? It means that they can go on fueling their economy with coal and suppress its nastier side effects with geoengineering schemes of their own, while enjoying political cover from several countries in the West that might otherwise have raised a fuss. Good value for the money, if you ask me.”" China is reducing their use of coal faster than any other country, but don't let that get in the way of your jingoistic fantasy that all countries are as immoral as the U.S. , which is still suspiciously absent from this whole story. "The next he was looking a hundred kilometers into China." "She finally became aware that all attention was focused on her. She tried to say something but couldn’t get it out. Instead she flicked her fingers over the surface of her tablet and spun it around so that everyone could see it." I just don't understand how it's the future and they no longer have AirPlay. "“Nice enough afternoon,” he said. “Can I borrow a bicycle?”" You rode one there that morning, no? "The Schiphol project had been shitcanned partly because of protests from animal rights activists. Such people were, to put it mildly, neither common nor welcome on the Flying S, or any other West Texas, ranch." This is Stephenson's Atlas Shrugged. It's a fantasy about those all-powerful greens and animals-rights activists getting their comeuppance at the hands of underdog billionaires. "And she was said to be as fluent in Punjabi as she was in English." Neal has forgotten that he'd already bragged about this on her introduction. "And Marco had brought with him his friend Pau, an activist from Barcelona—a city that, like Venice, was trying to get free of the country it had been lumped into." Don't hold back, fuckwit. Sure, just let any rich enclave excise itself from the mass of poors around it, who obviously had nothing to do with anyone's success. "The most prominent work on display was a Renaissance painting of Ceres in her winged chariot. The very goddess after whom cereals were named. She was flying over an idealized Tuscan landscape looking for her lost daughter Proserpina. Saskia knew the story perfectly well." Of course she knew that story. I'd never heard of it, but I'm a benighted peasant, not a queen. "“In the scenario where Pina2bo is the only site of stratospheric sulfur injection in the whole world,” Michiel said, “and it runs at maximum capacity year-round, maybe that is the case. That is why we are bringing Vadan online later this year. And it’s why T.R. has begun work on Papua. Which adds a site in the Southern Hemisphere.” “How does that help us?” “Historically, volcanic eruptions south of the equator are associated with stronger monsoons.”" I keep waiting for the shoe to drop, but I don't sense any realistic concern about hubris coming anytime soon. They are all straight-faced about the utter predictability of targeted geoengineering. "And the great and small powers of the world will have to mark them out on their chessboards and maybe even prepare for conflict. But if you suppose any of that is new, you don’t know history.”" So no revolution, but the same elites in control. A breathtaking arrogance, but not unexpected. "Once they were established in that waterfront bar with glasses of white wine and a plate of snails, Michiel squinted across the sun-sparkled water of the cove toward the fuel dock, then pulled his sunglasses down on his nose, looked over them at Saskia, and said, “Those men are fascinated by your Beaver. As am I.”" Bin ich im falschen Film? This is a romance novel. And a poorly written one at that. "[...] they controlled a trillion dollars that had been earned by injecting carbon dioxide into the atmosphere." That's kind of a nice way of putting it. They created a tremendous amount of value while they were doing it, but they also knew most of the time that they were also doing a lot of damage that was going to be very difficult to repair. The most important thing quickly became continued personal enrichment. Any costs that could be externalized, were. Regardless of morality or ethics. They didn't enter into it. "“Absolutely. I crashed that plane to be sure.” "Alastair raised an eyebrow. “Some would blame the pigs.” "“Or the alligator that chased the pigs. Or the refugees who chased the alligator. Or the fire ants that burned out the relays in their air conditioners. You can go on spreading the blame as far as you like. But I was flying the plane. The buck stops at the pilot’s chair.” "“Formally, it was your responsibility,” Alastair agreed. “And yet at some level you feel that the universe owes you a free jet airplane.” "“I’d never come out and say it like that. But yes.”" "The United States—which used to intervene in such situations—was a basket case and global laughingstock;" Literally the first time he's mentioned the U.S. "Saskia had to suppress an impulse to confess that she no longer had “people” in that sense of the term. She was meaning to get some sooner or later. She could support a modest staff. But, for now, she was still enjoying the simplicity and freedom of not being anyone’s boss." These are the kind of people libertarians and objectivists choose to write about. It's billionaire fan-fic. "A good many of those huge container ships were, she knew, bound to or from Maasvlakte, the only port capable of accommodating them." Hasn't Rotterdam just been destroyed? No effect on shipping? This is incoherent. And remember, Neal, your pedantry made me read you like this. "Fahd made a faint grimace and tossed one hand as if shooing something away. “We are buying what they are selling, no more,” he said. “Chinese aid comes at a high price—a price we don’t need to pay.”" JFC Neal. "The first wave is a stopgap measure. Hurling enough SO2 into the stratosphere to begin making a difference. All well and good; when a house is on fire, you throw water on it. The second wave will be about tuning the distribution of the veil so as to achieve the results . . .” Saskia looked him in the eye. She got the idea he was about to conclude the sentence with “we want” but after the briefest of hesitations he said “that are most beneficial.”" Basically, the 99% have always been exploited and have little to no power. In arrogating power to themselves, a wealthy elite have started destroying the planet. No-one else had a say as they did so. Once the elite realized that they'd broken things, they doubled down because that's how they stayed wealthy and powerful. Now that they also feel threatened, they will, once again, and autocratically, do what they want to protect their interests, all without so much as a by your leave from the long-suffering masses. It may be the only way forward for a benighted and congenitally vicious species, but it's not a democracy. Stop pretending that it is. People just have dictators they like and those they don't like. Like sports teams But most people like dictators. Most pick a side. "Saskia peeked over the shoulder of a man with close-cropped, sandy hair and a deeply tanned neck as he fluidly worked his way through the user interface of a coffee machine. By the time he had finished, she had an idea what to do, and without too much floundering was able to get away with a decent enough macchiato." What a waste of text. Who the fuck cares what that guy looks like? You could have just written: Saskia got a cup of coffee. Or not. Who cares if she has coffee? "But having seen shit you wouldn’t believe in Indonesia, he had arrived at the conclusion that political stability anywhere was an illusion that only a simpleton would believe in. That (invoking, here, a version of the anthropic principle) such simpletons only believed they were right when and if they just happened to live in places that were temporarily stable. And that it was better to live somewhere obviously dangerous, because it kept you on your toes. Willem had thought all this daft until Trump and QAnon." Ya know, ya started strong. The U.S. has always been crazy and mean for those who paid attention. "His Green instincts, drilled into him by a life spent in a modern Western social democracy, told him to be outraged by what the miners had done to this part of the planet. But he knew that every wind turbine feeding green electricity into the Netherlands’ grid had copper windings in its generator and copper cables connecting it to the system. And that the copper had come from here." "Not for the first time, Willem was awed, staggered, and even a little humiliated by the sheer scale at which the oil and mining industries operated—year in, year out, in a way that was basically invisible to the people on the other side of the world who benefited from what they were doing, and who funded these works, every time they checked their Twitter." "Bad things tend to be localized in time and space. Harder to predict. But we can predict them to some extent. And the more sites we have operational, the more knobs and levers we have on the dashboard, so to speak. So instead of just blundering around we are managing the situation to maximize the good and minimize the bad.”" 550 pages in and still on the same track. No awareness that there might be some nuance to it. This is nothing more than a ridiculously long airport thriller. I have to admit I'm speed-reading some sections now. "T.R.’s phone had buzzed, and he had put on reading glasses. He looked at Willem over the lenses. “My granddad built a mine in Cuba. Castro took it away from him. Does that mean he shouldn’t have built it?” While Willem pondered this not uninteresting philosophical conundrum, [...]" Jfc. Absolutely nuance-free. It is not an interesting philosophical conundrum. It is the same bullshit rich people always tell the world whenever they get a chance. They want to convince everyone that they are rich because the world has rewarded them for being special -- intelligent or driven or clever or wise -- rather than for being lucky. "“that it is just what people want of us. They want us to follow orders and put ourselves in harm’s way. On their behalf. ‘Oh look, those weirdos turn out to be useful to have around.’ We are useful, in other words, for going to the front lines and getting killed. So they are happy to overlook the turbans and so on.”" "There had been no drones shadowing him in Canada, but apparently the United States was a different story. It was, as all the world knew, a completely insane and out-of-hand country, unable to control itself. Men like the Texan could get away with anything;" "He opened up his bag and found basic toiletries, including a small wooden comb. Traditionally this would have been tucked into his hair, but the circumstances of the wet suit and so on had not allowed it. He used this to comb out the hair that was still long and to remove strands that had naturally broken or fallen out." An entire paragraph about how combing hair works. I'm dumbfounded. I stand corrected. It would go on for multiple paragraphs. "“Yes,” Bo said, waving away Willem’s annoying cavils. “Now the situation seems quite out of hand. Copper prices have spiked, threatening our economic interests. There is also concern that shipments of coal and iron ore from Australia may be threatened. In the old days we might have looked to the United States or Great Britain to intervene. But those days are behind us, I think you’ll agree.”" Subtly suggesting that the reason for intervention is after something has gone wrong rather than to simply take things over to get them cheaper or free. "The initial pushback against what T.R. was doing here had more recently been muted by countervailing arguments around the idea of termination shock: the fear that if the gun stopped, it would lead to a backlash in the world’s climate system." Get facts on the ground and convince people "termination shock" is a thing so they're afraid of trying to stop you. "The guy with the Bug-Solv in his eyes had got to his knees. To his credit he was still observing correct trigger discipline; his cocked revolver was pointed straight up and his finger was laid alongside the cylinder. He had his face buried in the crook of his other arm. He lifted his head. If it made sense to describe a motion of the eyelids as violent, then he was blinking violently. He was trying to see something." This is but a small sample of the logorrhea of this eight-page description of a fight. It's not exciting. It's boring. It's like reading a technical report. No tension. "Conor, displaying admirably good knees and leg muscles, stood straight up and looked through the mesh wall of the lift," It's just pathological at this point. Conor is a tech, an incidental character. I. Do. Not. Care. How good he is at standing up. Does anyone? "“We are at war,” Rufus said. “Gonna ride to the sound of the guns. Leaving before daybreak, I reckon.” "“The guns aren’t making any sound!” Carmelita objected. Rufus sighed. "“It is a Civil War joke. Not so funny apparently. It means I need to go to where the action is gonna be. Pina2bo.”" Lovely initial line, ruined by over-explaining it. I guess he saved me the trouble of looking it up. "“It’s like, we’ve been in a car with a brick on the gas pedal and no one at the wheel, careening down the road, running over people and crashing into things. We’re still in the car. We can’t get out of the car. But someone could at least grab the wheel. T.R. ain’t the perfect man to grab it, but I don’t think his whole plan is just to fuck up the Punjab and starve India." An alluring argument, of course. But. An accident people can live with. Once there's a driver, they're going to get blamed. Hiccups cost dozens of millions of lives. "oops" and "we're still figuring it out" and "they were going to die anyway" and "we have to do something" don't cut the mustard. If they're wrong, they wasted time and resources making things worse. They don't consider that for a second in this book. 100 people in a cave with supplies. Two take half of it to go on a mission to find help. If they just decide on their own, is that right? "By the time Laks climbed back into his six-rotor flying chariot, it had become a five-rotor flying chariot." Instead of writing that "a spent pin2ubo shell had perhaps unluckily but perhaps inevitably found the drone when it couldn't land in a net that was no longer there", we get four or five pages of tedious explanation that ended in the sentence above. "Piet was a rucker, meaning a practitioner of a sport that consisted of putting on a backpack loaded with weights and then covering ground on foot in open country." He already told us this, too. So literal. "“They’re gonna do what’s in their national interest. Always have, always will. You think China didn’t have its eye on that copper mine before I started building a gun there? The gun was a pretext, that’s all. Does that mean I oughta do nothing? When I got the means to do something?”" I'm losing the thread of his politics...it's quite muddled, incoherent even. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] H/T to Peo for the recommendation. ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=4538 2023-01-29T16:05:39+01:00 https://earthli.com/users/marco

https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=4531 2023-01-28T16:42:21+01:00 https://earthli.com/users/marco

https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=4530 2023-01-26T22:18:56+01:00 https://earthli.com/users/marco

, which writes, "She pointed out that there were certain similarities between every moral system history. For example, every religious and moral system has always said that if a rich man walks by a poor and starving man, he is obligating to give him money and food. Another interesting one is that every moral system agrees that people in power should be punished for moral digressions more than people without power and responsibility. "[...] "Weirdly, when we look at actual societies, these universally agreed upon moral rules have never been applied. [...] Why the disconnect? It's almost enough to make you think society is not organized around moral principles." ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=4262 2023-01-26T21:32:52+01:00 https://earthli.com/users/marco

vibes, "You think you know something, right? Then it turns out you were only used to it. It does something, and it does something, and then after a while, you think that’s what it does. Then it turns out there was this whole other thing, maybe.” "“Using a microwave as a lamp, because it has a light in it,” Jim said." And, just like in Roadside Picnic, we are presented with the unavoidable reality that we're not ever going to understand any of the stuff we're finding. We can't be sure we're not just using a microwave as a lamp. "“This is all too big for people,” Alex said. “The things that built it? Maybe they could handle it, but we’re not designed for this scale. We’re trying to get big enough we can make it work, but we’re breaking our legs just standing up.”" Amos, Cara, and Xan's experiences as protomolecule people takes us back to delightful and esoteric descriptions of what it might be like to be part of a galaxy- and reality-spanning hive-mind or communications network or civilizational memory or something else that we can't quite grasp because its purpose is so far beyond us that our minds can only dance around the periphery, gleaning morsels of information and perhaps drawing completely incorrect conclusions from the modestly dimensioned shadows thrown by shapes in dimensions completely beyond our reach. We see shadows on the ground, but have no idea what clouds are. "The dreamer dreams, and her dream carries her and hers flowing backward into a time before minds. Like grandmothers telling the stories their grandmothers told about their grandmothers before them, she falls gently and forever into black oceans the size of everything. The other two are and aren’t and are again, with her and within her like humming to the memory of songs she never quite forgot." We learn of how the protomolecule civilization grew from oceanic creatures buried under a hard ice crust that protected them and rode above the warm glow from the core that gave them the energy to grow into a deeply interconnected civilization of beings -- or more like a single being with disparate corporeal selves -- whose neurons were quantum-entangled. This is hilariously fun and bold speculation. And somehow it works. Or consider this Lovecraftian bit of prose, describing how Duarte fights with the nature of reality, tries to manipulate the machines built by long-dead civilizations, built on logic and laws so far removed from anything that he would ever be capable of understanding, but his hubris allows him to make headway nonetheless. "The next time comes, and the dreamer fits his bleeding hands in the spaces between the spaces, breathes through the holes in number, and builds from abstraction a tool to crack wide the abstract. He sees the mechanism through its own strange eyes, and its depth astonishes and terrifies him. The voice of the machine grows deep and grand and horrifying: God whispering the obscenity that ends worlds. The darkness is the darkness of old, but terror has no face for him, and there needs to be a way, so there will be. A thousand bites, a million needle sticks, a ripping away of all that doesn’t fit." There is tension between Naomi's resistance and what remains of the Laconian navy and the third force of Duarte and his growing horde of hive-mind converts (one of whom is not quite Tanaka, who resists valiantly; despite being an ass of a person, she's a great character, worthy of some grudging admiration). There are lots of fun discussions where Naomi, Jim, and Amos get to play their characters and it's fantastic. And I can't really avoid talking about how much I like Amos. I have to elevate Amos to one of my favorite characters ever (maybe Leonard from the Hap & Leonard books comes close). And he was super-well-represented by Wes Chatham in the TV series. "“The kind of guy, he’d feed you into a wood chipper, but he wouldn’t stiff you for his half of the bar tab,” Amos said. “I’ve known folks like that.”" "Amos chuckled. “You can tell yourself that, Sunshine. Don’t make it true.”" "“I can’t see how this all plays out.” "“Sure you do. Everyone dies. That’s always been how it is. Only question now is whether we can find some way to not all go at once.” "“If we do, then civilization dies. Everything humanity has ever done goes away.” "“Well, at least there won’t be anyone who misses it,” Amos said, and sighed. “You’re overthinking this, Cap’n. You got now and you got the second your lights go out. Meantime is the only time there is. All that matters is what we do during it.”" "Amos raised a hand, palm out, like he was gentling an animal. “Doc. I get it. You’re a good person, and I like you. I trust you. I see that you’re not getting off on this. That’s why we’re not having the other version of this conversation. But it’s done. I’ve known a lot of people who had reasons that this time was different. That this once, it was okay. Maybe the kid’s bad and you’re really helping them. Or they’re into it, and so there’s no harm. And Sparkles is into this. We both know that, right?” "“We do.” "“So there’s all kinds of stories about making this okay. I’m not here to tell stories. I’m just letting you know.”" "“And if we all die because we didn’t push a little harder?” "“That’ll suck,” Amos agreed. “I’m not a philosophy guy. I’m not trying to bust your balls or figure out, you know, everything. But this is pretty simple. I came to see what you and Sparkles were doing. I’ve seen it. It needs to stop, so we’re gonna stop. That’s it. We’re good.”" Humanity needs Amos. Humanity has always needed Amos. It's wonderful to seem him live by his principles and get away with it. That's why it's called fantasy/science fiction. And throughout the esoterica, some lovely descriptions of what it's like to use advanced technology to navigate a high-tech ship through space. "[...] he could turn the display to a probabilistic three-dimensional map that showed all the possible flight paths the Roci could take, the complex decision points where an equation with values like time, vector, delta-v, the elasticity of a human blood vessel, and the ship’s position in space defined the moment when a possible future slipped away. Jim moved between the two views—the curve of the Roci’s intended path and the swooping, lily-shaped cone that was the Derecho’s possible paths. Then over to the intricate web of things that could happen but hadn’t yet, as it narrowed second by second and left a thin thread called history behind it." There is a lot of philosophy of what it means to be human, and how that differs from what it meant to be one of the protomolecule builders (or the Romans, or the Grandmothers, or whatever). As Duarte moves forward with his plan to turn all of humanity into a galaxy-spanning hive-mind in order to combat the dark aliens from another universe whose power we're stealing whenever we use the ring gates, various characters have conversations about what it would be like to lose oneself into a hive mind, about how much your physicality contributes to how you think and who you are. Your body isn't even primarily your own cells -- but if the microbiome that lives with you in symbiosis were to be even partially changed, you would be a significantly different person. If you didn't know what "left" was, you would be a person who only knew about half the world of a "normal" person. But what does normal mean? Again, we drift into the age-old discussion of what is reality versus what do we sense as reality and what sort of sensorium do we even have and how much do these sensoria differ from being to being and how much does it matter what sort of interpretive mechanism lies behind those at-time faulty and definitely differently functioning sensors. And we land on Quine's qualia, as usual. "The war would go on. The builders of the ring gates moving from form to form—primitive bioluminescent sea slugs, to angels of light, then to a hive of mostly hairless primates with billions of bodies and only one mind. The dark things inside the gates and outside the universe scratching and ripping and unmaking the sickness that had intruded on its reality. Maybe someday that battle would be won. Maybe it would go on forever. Either way, nothing that Jim knew as human would persist. No more first kisses. No more prayers. No more moments of jealousy or insight or selfishness or love. They would be taken apart and fit back together like the bodies on Eros. Something would be there, but it wouldn’t be them." And, beneath it all, the basic injustice that we read the story from the perspective of humans who are kind of blind to the fact that the dark things are just defending their universe from our plunder of their energy. Sure, we didn't know that's what we were doing, but wasn't it damned convenient that we were able to use alien technology that just happened to defy the laws of physics, except that they didn't because they were just bleeding all of the energy they needed out of another universe. The creatures that live there were none too happy about their imminent demise or the dimming of their universe. The culmination of this occasionally quite overtly libertarian series is a very unsubtle resistance against the hive mind (of communism). It doesn't consider for a second whether it might be the only way forward, the only way out of the devil's circle of petty war, the only way to resist the dark gods. "She tried to imagine what it would be like for a baby born into a world like that, not as an individual but an appendage that had never known itself as anything else." I agree that this isn't appealing at all. I don't even understand how anyone born into generations after mine find the will to live. I don't care about whether humanity survives, per se. I care about doing a good job of being a good person? Individuality is the spice of life. A hive mind runs counter to that. What does it mean to be me? I’m not even mostly human cells. I’m a locus of myriad quantum effects into which energy is poured to hold off entropy and maintain the illusion of an individual. So who cares what I think? I do. I wonder if the fragility of the original builders wasn't, in fact, due to their interconnectedness. Perhaps the dark gods are brainwashing Duarte into reconfiguring humanity to make an easier target, rather than, as he supposes, a better weapon against them. As Miller said "[y]ou need to ask yourself whether you think Duarte’s the perp, or first among victims." This book started as hardcore sci-fi and kind of ends as fantasy/magic, proving Clarke's adage while waving its hand and mumbling entanglement a lot. It's a neat trick, but the conceit in the story now is, that the authors use entanglement and non-locality as a magic wand to make everything happen "at once", despite the demands of physics when applied to galactic distances. But Bear's "exotic" material used to hold open wormhole bridges in Forge of God was no different. We end up bending the universe to our will for a good story. And a good story is predicated on human, social involvement and interaction. But it's indistinguishable from magic. Call it "another universe" or "dark place", it doesn't matter. The "dark gods" are "demons" from "hell". In the end, they decide to stay their grubby selves, to not become a single thing. "For an instant, there was a release of energy second only to the beginning of the universe. There was no one there to see it." Creatures created this machine and were killed by the inhabitants of the universe from which it drew its energy. Mankind used the relics and drew their attention. The battle was unwinnable so the only solution was to close the door and drop away from the dangerous technology, like Icarus. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me of what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I've failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an interest in this book, then I'm happy for you. [Citations] "The awareness of molecular vibration was analogous to the physical sensation of heat—it measured the same material reality—but the merely human sense was like a child playing a whistle compared with Duarte’s vast, symphonic new awareness." "There was pain—a great deal of pain—and there was fear. But there wasn’t anyone left to feel it, so it faded quickly. There was no consciousness, no pattern, no one to think the thoughts that swelled and dimmed. Something more delicate—more graceful, more sophisticated—would have died. The narrative chain that thought of itself as Winston Duarte was ripped to pieces, but the flesh that housed him wasn’t." "The sword that slew a billion angels had only inconvenienced the primates in their bubbles of metal and air." "With infinite effort and care, he pulled the unbearable vastness and complexity of his awareness in and in and in, compressing himself into what he had been. The blue faded into the color he had known as a man. The sense of the storm raging just on the other side, of the violence and threat, faded. He felt the warm, iron-smelling meat of his hand, holding nothing. He opened his eyes, turned to the comm controls, and opened a connection." "His awareness of the ring space was clear now. He could hear the echoes of it in the fabric of reality like he was pressing his ear to a ship’s deck to know the status of its drive. The rage of the enemy was as apparent to him now as if he could hear its voices. The shrieks that tore something that wasn’t air in something that wasn’t time." It's almost a little convenient that the hyper-libertarian military leader has, instead of being humbled and killed by his hubris, has been rewarded by not only becoming a God, but having his prior subjugation of all humanity be retroactively justified even though the problem only he can now solve was not only caused by his selfish striving, it was completely unknown when he began said striving and, therefore, can hardly be claimed to have been the noble reason for the original subjugation. But I suppose Gods too can fool themselves. Why not? They're omnipotent. They can do anything. "There were two levels that she had to figure out. First was the civilization that had built the protomolecule and the gates, then the forces that destroyed them. On her best days, she’d thought of herself like a medieval monk struggling to understand the saints to better see the face of God. More often, she felt like a termite trying to explain dogs to her fellow Isoptera so that they could all speculate about fusion jazz." "It sure as hell seemed like better odds than tracking the missing ship." Searching under the streetlamp. "I’m not sure what liberty is if you’re not permitted to decide what chances you’re willing to take.”" The authors talking again. Whose chances? "The colony worlds were acting like their safety could exist separate from the well-being of all the other systems and ships. It couldn’t be so hard to see how accepting a little restriction and regulation benefited everyone. But inner-worlds culture didn’t measure it that way. For them, being better meant being better than the person next to you, not both of you sharing the same increase." "There was only so much explaining to people how cooperation would keep them all from dying she could manage in a single sitting." Hey cool, like lockdowns. "He looked at the tactical. She was right, of course. Just in the time they’d been at a relative stop so that she could read through the data, ten more ships had passed through gates, burning on one errand or another that someone decided was worth the risk. Or didn’t understand that there was a risk. Or didn’t care." It's like us all with COVID. The risk is too vague, too abstract. "The dreamer dreams, and her dream carries her and hers flowing backward into a time before minds. Like grandmothers telling the stories their grandmothers told about their grandmothers before them, she falls gently and forever into black oceans the size of everything. The other two are and aren’t and are again, with her and within her like humming to the memory of songs she never quite forgot." "Once and gone so far away no one was there to think it, the it was like this: Down was the hardness of heat, and up was the hardness of cold, and between those two implacabilities was the universe." "The idea of a flaw as tiny as a missed base pair translating itself into a slightly different curve on a protein and then into a leaking heart valve or a nonfunctional eye was compelling and creepy in more or less equal degrees." "The things that are doing this are rattling all the windows looking for the way to make us die, and I don’t know how we guard our physical fucking constants against attack. It’s just a matter of time before they figure out how to trigger vacuum decay or something." "“You’re going to be fighting for the fate of humanity. I’m going to be worrying about algebra assignments.” "“Well, maybe you’ll get lucky and we’ll win and the algebra will matter. Then twenty, thirty years down the road, something else will show up to slaughter everyone, and you can take care of that one.”" "“Basically, it makes a tiny, transitory ring gate, which releases just a lot of energy for free. And apparently, it’s violating entropy. Which means time.” "“Entropy only runs one direction. Primary school physics requires three hours of barking?” "“He’s saying wherever it’s getting that energy from doesn’t play by our rules.” "“We knew that, though.” "“We suspected it.” "“Do we know it now?” "“We suspect it harder,” Elvi said. “We’re scientists. We only know things until someone shows us we’re wrong.”" "An hour had sixty minutes because mathematicians in ancient Babylon had worked in a sexagesimal system. A year was the time it took Earth to make a full transit around Sol, and that mattered even though Teresa had never been to Earth and almost certainly never would. Like the number of minutes in an hour, the width of a centimeter, the volume of a liter, the length of a year was the marker by which humanity told the story of itself." They're arbitrary, but you have to use something. "She liked the way he deflected. He didn’t want to go to Laconia, his chief mechanic did. His ship wasn’t broken unless Tanaka was willing to permit it to be. There had always been that thread in the tapestry of Laconian culture: the willingness to assert whatever reality your commanding officer proposed. She wondered what Mugabo’s internal life was like. Did he have a reserve of freedom and perversity hidden inside, the way she did, or was he the same blankness all the way down?" "Naomi shook her head once. “Everything in me says the offer’s a trap, but if it isn’t, and I turn away? If this isn’t the opening I was looking for, I’m not sure what our goal is with them.”" "“I don’t have to,” Amos said with a deceptive mildness. Jim heard the expectation of violence behind it, even if Teresa didn’t." "But Naomi’s gaze had turned inward. Something in Teresa’s words had done the trick. Jim saw her understand even before he knew what she’d understood. Naomi lifted her eyebrows and shook her head, just a millimeter back and forth. "“You know what this is?” she said. “This is him making me responsible for what he does. Teresa’s right. She’s got exactly the frame I’m supposed to use. One person for a multitude. But I’m not looking to kill a multitude. That’s him. If I do what he says, I’ll be saving all the people he would kill to punish me if I didn’t.” "Amos’ laugh was almost the same timbre and cadence as Muskrat’s little bark. When he spoke, he was mimicking the soft, threatening whine of an abusive lover. “Look what you made me do, baby. Why do you have to make me so mad?”" "“Carrots don’t matter when he still gets to hold the stick,” Naomi said. “I’m done with sticks. Sticks are disqualifying. If he’d led by pulling the Derecho back from Freehold, it would be a different thing. He didn’t. He chose this, and I don’t trust him.” "Jim smiled at her. “Also, he’s asking us to hand over to him a young girl who doesn’t want to go, so fuck him. We don’t do that.” "“Fuck him,” Amos agreed." "Amos chuckled. “You can tell yourself that, Sunshine. Don’t make it true.”" "“Once this is over, and your emotions are calm enough that you can see that this decision was correct, we can discuss whether you want to fracture the underground’s leadership or back my authority.”" She's doing the same thing as Trejo. Acting, then blaming the other side if it reacts. "[...] the builders or the Romans or the space jellyfish—the beings of light—hadn’t known what it was to be alone since they’d learned to glow in that ancient, freezing ocean. They were individuals and they were a unity. A superorganism, connected as intimately as she was with her own limbs and organs." Neurons quantum-entangled. Hilariously fun speculation. "I think we may be as hard for them to see and make sense of as they are for us. So part of what we can do is dirty up their data. All our random, uncoordinated transits are what they’re feeling. It’s like hearing rats in your walls and putting out different poisons until the noise stops. The noise stopping is how you know what worked. And since we’re still making transits in and out of that gate? As far as they know, their poison didn’t work.”" "“I think there’s a dysfunctional love triangle in the physics group. They may need a talking-to from the boss.” "“Are you fucking kidding me?” Fayez spread his hands. “Every miracle we’ve pulled off, we’ve done it using primates. Just because we’re capable of mind-blowing wonders doesn’t mean we aren’t still sex-and-murder machines. The organism doesn’t change.”" "co-opting fast life to bring what makes it rich, sending out what will or may one day return with presents for the grandmothers who cast them free, and the vast patience of the ones who are too cold and too slow and too wide to ever die, too sudden for time to touch. A bubble blown into the holes in the spectrum and a thousand thousand thousand seeds sent like kisses to the singing poet stars." This is how they describe the protomolecule probes that the hive-mind civilization sent out to communicate with distant galaxies and destinations. "Jillian’s smile felt like a knife. If she had to die, she was glad she was taking this smarmy fuck down with her. “We have a few minutes still. You can send a message. I would let your superiors know that when Colonel Tanaka opened fire without provocation on Draper Station, she didn’t just kill us. She killed you too. I hope it was worth it.”" Now you're making me like Jillian again. 👏 "“I’ve never known Trejo to lie. I’ve never known Duarte to lie either, and he was the personality that set the tone for all of this. He was grandiose. He was ruthless. He was a genius at a couple of things and under the misapprehension that it meant he was smart about everything. But in his mind, he was doing the right thing.” "“The kind of guy, he’d feed you into a wood chipper, but he wouldn’t stiff you for his half of the bar tab,” Amos said. “I’ve known folks like that.”" I have to elevate Amos to one of my favorite characters ever. And he was super-well-represented by Wes Chatham in the TV series. "“I can’t see how this all plays out.” "“Sure you do. Everyone dies. That’s always been how it is. Only question now is whether we can find some way to not all go at once.” "“If we do, then civilization dies. Everything humanity has ever done goes away.” "“Well, at least there won’t be anyone who misses it,” Amos said, and sighed. “You’re overthinking this, Cap’n. You got now and you got the second your lights go out. Meantime is the only time there is. All that matters is what we do during it.” "“I just want to go out knowing that things will be okay without me. That it all keeps going.” "“That you’re not the one who dropped the ball.” "“Yeah.” "“Or maybe,” Amos said, “you’re not that important and it ain’t up to you to fix the universe?” "“You always know how to cheer me up.”" "[...] he could turn the display to a probabilistic three-dimensional map that showed all the possible flight paths the Roci could take, the complex decision points where an equation with values like time, vector, delta-v, the elasticity of a human blood vessel, and the ship’s position in space defined the moment when a possible future slipped away. Jim moved between the two views—the curve of the Roci’s intended path and the swooping, lily-shaped cone that was the Derecho’s possible paths. Then over to the intricate web of things that could happen but hadn’t yet, as it narrowed second by second and left a thin thread called history behind it." "Something more solid and real than they were slid through the jumble of atoms that was the wall. A thread of conscious darkness that had never known light, was the antithesis of it. Kit tried to move the clouds that were his arms around the cloud that had been his son, knowing distantly that it couldn’t matter. He was no more solid than the wall had been." "She saw through a thousand sets of eyes, felt a thousand different bodies, knew herself by a thousand different names. Aliana Tanaka screamed." "You think you know something, right? Then it turns out you were only used to it. It does something, and it does something, and then after a while, you think that’s what it does. Then it turns out there was this whole other thing, maybe.” "“Using a microwave as a lamp, because it has a light in it,” Jim said." "Jim thought about that. Between working for the Transport Union back in the day and fleeing with the underground, he’d been to more systems than most people ever would, and it was still probably under three dozen. He knew how many more there were, how many he’d never see, how many Naomi was trying to coordinate. Alex was right. It was daunting. Maybe more than daunting. "“And that’s not the worst of it,” Alex said. “By the time you’re done, there’s been a century of change at the place you started from. It won’t be the same. All the places you visit start changing into new ones the second you leave.”" "“This is all too big for people,” Alex said. “The things that built it? Maybe they could handle it, but we’re not designed for this scale. We’re trying to get big enough we can make it work, but we’re breaking our legs just standing up.”" "“I’ve been running a guerrilla government with shitty communications, thirteen hundred different isolated systems, and literally billions of people who think whatever they’re looking at is the most important thing there is,” Naomi said. “I know how you feel.”" "She hadn’t been born yet when Laconia became its own nation. She’d never known a universe without the gates. She was like looking at a different species." Like those for whom Xboxes, cell phones, and the Internet are fixed in the firmament. They have no sense of history or perspective or gratefulness or understanding how it all got here, how it's maintained, or at what cost. "They are threefold, and the dream shudders like an image projected onto cloth when a wind blows. The grandmothers are dead, their voices are all songs sung by ghosts, and the truths they tell, they would tell to anyone. They cannot listen back, and the dreamer sees the hollow behind the mask. She tries to turn her head, to look behind her, to see the single living man in the land of the dead, and the gesture goes on forever, the essence of turning and turning and turning without the release of having turned [...]" "We aren’t stronger than they were. But we’re base materials. We are made from clay, and that’s our power. They were fragile, and we are robust. They had a sword but lacked the strength to wield it. I will find the sword and the map they left behind. I’m getting lost here. A sword? They built but were unable to effectively use certain tools that prevent the enemy from intruding into what we mean when we say the universe. But those tools exist, and I believe we can make effective use of them. I think I understood that. In broad strokes, anyway. In order to fully access these tools, we have to become more like them. We have to be one thing instead of billions of different ones. I am learning how to do that as well. Are you . . . saying we need to become a hive mind? Yes. Interconnected, with our thoughts and memories flowing freely between nodes. All our illusions of division washed away. Empire was the closest I could imagine to it. But—the third man gestures at himself almost in apology—I can imagine more now." "Intestinal microflora have a vast effect on cognition, emotion, metabolism. Most of the cells in your body right now aren’t human. Change out a few species of bacteria in your gut, and you’ll be a fundamentally different person. The builders, as far as we can tell, were free-floating individual organisms that networked themselves into a functional consciousness, kind of the way an octopus can be viciously intelligent without a centralized brain. With the nonlocal effects we’ve seen? Sure, why not rebuild that architecture with advanced primates?”" "“So you’re saying,” Naomi broke in, “that Duarte, or whatever he’s turned himself into, is at least plausibly preparing to make everyone, everywhere part of a collective consciousness with him at the center so that he can go to war against the things beyond the gates.”" "Amos raised a hand, palm out, like he was gentling an animal. “Doc. I get it. You’re a good person, and I like you. I trust you. I see that you’re not getting off on this. That’s why we’re not having the other version of this conversation. But it’s done. I’ve known a lot of people who had reasons that this time was different. That this once, it was okay. Maybe the kid’s bad and you’re really helping them. Or they’re into it, and so there’s no harm. And Sparkles is into this. We both know that, right?” "“We do.” "“So there’s all kinds of stories about making this okay. I’m not here to tell stories. I’m just letting you know.”" "“And if we all die because we didn’t push a little harder?” "“That’ll suck,” Amos agreed. “I’m not a philosophy guy. I’m not trying to bust your balls or figure out, you know, everything. But this is pretty simple. I came to see what you and Sparkles were doing. I’ve seen it. It needs to stop, so we’re gonna stop. That’s it. We’re good.”" "The thing where he lost the idea of Kit in a stream of consciousness that wasn’t his? This was new. It had only come a few times, but afterward he felt thinner and less connected to reality. Like the essential self he’d always known—the thing he meant when he said “I”—turned out to be less an object and more a kind of habit. Not even a persistent habit like taking drugs or gambling. The kind of thing you could take or leave. Coffee with breakfast instead of tea. Buying the same kinds of socks. Existing as an individual. All things he could do or not do without much changing." "“Just what was in the toolbox before,” she said. “I feel like I came to cook a meal and it turns out it’s a poetry competition. Everything I built was to fight against Laconia back when Laconia was simple things, like invulnerable ships and neofascist authoritarians. Now that it’s become a really invasive bad dream, how do you build a resistance to fight that?”" "Left was a thought he just couldn’t have. Like he was colorblind, but for half his perceptual field.” "Tanaka leaned back in her chair. “Are you all right?” "“I always thought about how strange it would be to have that loss. I never thought about how odd we must have been to him. These weird people with twice as much world that he couldn’t conceive of. And he couldn’t. The thoughts you have depend on the brain you have. Change the brain and you change the kinds of thoughts that are possible to think.”" "“It would have worked,” she said. “If we’d cooperated, it would have worked.” "“It would have been better.” "“I think about all the things we could have done, all the miracles we could have achieved, if we were all just a little bit better than it turns out we are.”" "“Not to protect the empire,” Nagata said. “To protect the human race.” "Tanaka shrugged. “From my perspective, that’s a distinction without a difference.” "“You’re right,” Holden said. “Let’s solve the extinction-level threat first. Then we can all go back to killing each other at a more civilized pace.” "He was staring at her, the bugs around his head motionless, as if each of them was staring too. He’s thinking about how he’s going to have to kill me again when this is all over with, Tanaka realized." "The next time comes, and the dreamer fits his bleeding hands in the spaces between the spaces, breathes through the holes in number, and builds from abstraction a tool to crack wide the abstract. He sees the mechanism through its own strange eyes, and its depth astonishes and terrifies him. The voice of the machine grows deep and grand and horrifying: God whispering the obscenity that ends worlds. The darkness is the darkness of old, but terror has no face for him, and there needs to be a way, so there will be. A thousand bites, a million needle sticks, a ripping away of all that doesn’t fit." "The horned god forgets. The little man forgets. The sparkling ghost cannot bring herself to forgetfulness, and that is and will always be her hunger. The machine glimmers its idiot glimmers, it shapes its insoluble puzzles, it sings a buzzsaw shriek. And in a dream beneath the dream, a man stands alone in a lighthouse and faces an angry sea. His exhaustion and pain rhyme with something real, and Amos opens his eyes." "Tanaka either didn’t notice or chose to ignore her. “I’ve taken the liberty of reaching out to Admiral Trejo. I’m hoping we can get some backup here in time.” "“In time for what?” Jim asked. "“The battle,” Tanaka said as if it had been a stupid question. "“Are we sure that these are enemies?” Elvi asked. "“Yes,” Tanaka said. “We tried to get into the station. We were pushed back. Now an ad hoc flotilla of hive-mind-controlled ships are running toward us. If they’re just rushing here to bring us cake and party decorations, we’d know because we’d be in the station chewing the fat with the high consul.”" "The war would go on. The builders of the ring gates moving from form to form—primitive bioluminescent sea slugs, to angels of light, then to a hive of mostly hairless primates with billions of bodies and only one mind. The dark things inside the gates and outside the universe scratching and ripping and unmaking the sickness that had intruded on its reality. Maybe someday that battle would be won. Maybe it would go on forever. Either way, nothing that Jim knew as human would persist. No more first kisses. No more prayers. No more moments of jealousy or insight or selfishness or love. They would be taken apart and fit back together like the bodies on Eros. Something would be there, but it wouldn’t be them." "When they’d been young together, they’d been beautiful just because youth had a beauty all its own. It took age to see whether the beauty could last." "She turned off her screen, then squeezed his hand. “You are remarkable. You have always been remarkable. Not always wise, not always thoughtful. But always, always remarkable. Yes, I have paid a price for letting someone as headstrong and impulsive as you matter so very much to me. But I’d do it again.”" "Better to play the cards she had. She wasn’t going to win, but she could take a long time losing." "“Okay,” Jim said. “We’ve got an entrance. We have a way in.” "“We’ll give you as much time as we can.” "“It’s going to be okay.” The oceanic optimism would have been a lie in anyone else. Or maybe a prayer. "“Good hunting, love,” she said, and the three dots passed into the blue and vanished." "“I feel fine,” Jim said, then paused, considered. "“A little feverish, maybe? But not bad.” "“I want an update every five minutes. Set a timer.” "“If I start feeling worse, I’ll let you know.” "“Yes, you will. Because you’ll be on a timer.” "Miller, floating between them and a half pace back, tried to conceal a grin. Jim weighed the pros and cons of pushing back against Tanaka and set a timer. He set it for seven minutes, though." "“You make it sound like there’s a later in the game.” Miller’s smile was enigmatic, and it looked a little like sorrow by the time it reached his eyes. “Until death all is life.”" "It’s all right to let go, a voice said with the complexity and depth of a choir. If angels had voices, they’d have sounded like this. It’s all right to let go. Holding on is only pain and weariness. Let us carry you, and you can rest. You can let go now. It was almost persuasive. It was almost enough." The culmination of this occasionally quite overtly libertarian series is a very unsubtle resistance against the hive mind (of communism). It doesn't consider for a second whether it might be the only way forward, the only way out of the vicious cycle of petty war, the only way to resist the dark gods. I agree that it's not, but I also don't care about humanity per se. Individuality is the spice of life. Whatever comes after that doesn't, by definition, interest me. "“Easier to take something out when you don’t give a shit about what comes after,” Amos agreed. "“Those ships are finished, but I don’t think anyone on ’em cares.” It’s all right to let go. Put down your weapons now, and you will be saving humanity, not destroying it. Don’t be afraid of the changes that are coming, they are the only thing that can save us all. Alex gritted his teeth until his jaw ached." Also, the Borg. This book started as hardcore sci-fi and kind of ends as fantasy/magic, proving Clarke's adage while waving its hand and mumbling entanglement a lot. "Miller hoisted a weary eyebrow. “You need to ask yourself whether you think Duarte’s the perp, or first among victims. You know that this stuff can hook itself into your dopamine receptors. Train you up to like whatever it wants you to like. Maybe it grabbed on to how he feels about the kid over there and used that as a leash. The things that built all this shit could be using him from beyond their graves the same as they used Julie. And there are some things you can only access by being in the substrate. You remember that.”" I absolutely love Miller, too. "Miller gestured at the walls, the fireflies, the incomprehensible complexity and strangeness of the station. “It’s where the power comes from. They cracked the universe open, pushed their way in here, and it pushed back. A whole other universe trying to smash this place flat, and it powers the gates, the artifacts. That magnetic ray gun Duarte was playing with. They built stars with it. Broke rules that you can’t break without a different set of physics to strain it through. You can Eve-and-apple it all you want, but this shit right here? This is all made out of original sin.”" Again, magic. Call it "another universe" or "dark place", it doesn't matter. The "dark gods" are "demons" from "hell". "“Teresa, put your helmet back on.” Or else what? Teresa thought. She was so tired of being bullied by the people who said they were there to help her. She was so tired of being Laconian. She pretended she couldn’t make out Tanaka’s words, even though they all knew that wasn’t true. Tanaka’s anger was less than her own. When Tanaka opened up her own visor, Teresa felt a little thrill of victory." "“This is why it will work. The meat, the matter, the rude clay of us. It’s hard to kill. The ones who came before were brilliant, but they were fragile. Genius made of tissue paper, and the chaos blew them apart. We can be the best of both now." I wonder if their fragility wasn't, in fact, due to their interconnectedness. Perhaps the dark gods are brainwashing Duarte into reconfiguring humanity to make an easier target, rather than, as he supposes, a better weapon against them. "The closer the Rocinante and the Falcon kept to the station, the more cover the alien structure provided and the less of the field of battle was in her scopes. The Roci was able to build real-time reports by syncing with other ships in her little fleet by tightbeam and making a patchwork map with data from half a dozen different ships. She didn’t like it, though. It left her feeling half blinded." Neat trick, but the conceit in the story now is, that the author uses entanglement and non-locality as a magic wand to make everything happen "at once", despite the demands of physics when applied to galactic distances. But Bear's "exotic" material used to hold open wormhole bridges in Forge of God was no different. We end bending the universe to our will for a goo story. And a good story is predicated on human, social involvement and interaction. "When she had a moment to gather herself, she wondered how many people there were still left out there. Had Duarte invaded and co-opted the minds of everyone in all the systems, or was he targeting the ones on their way toward the rings? She imagined whole stations filled with silent bodies working in perfect coordination, the need for verbal communication replaced by the direct influence of brain on brain. A single hand with billions of fingers. If that was what humanity was now, there would never be another conversation, another misunderstanding or joke or shitty pop song. She tried to imagine what it would be like for a baby born into a world like that, not as an individual but an appendage that had never known itself as anything else." "She pulled up the scopes in time to see the dropship scattering into bright dust. There had been people on that ship. She wondered if they were dead now, or if their memories and opinions and senses of their own selves were stuck flickering through a billion different brains that weren’t theirs to begin with. Or if they’d been dead before their bodies were destroyed. Maybe those were different ways of saying the same thing." "The crushing pressure outside the ring space was a furnace, an engine, a source of unimaginable energy. Like a judo master, the ring station took the near-infinite power of an entire universe trying to crush it and pivoted, turning its strength against it. The other, older universe just outside the sphere of rings moved past him, and he could feel the pain he caused it. He could feel its hatred. The wound in its flesh that he was." "It would be beautiful. Miller nodded like he was agreeing with something. Which maybe he was. “Nerving yourself up to kiss your big crush for the first time? Or getting pissed off because the apartment one over has a nicer view than yours? Playing with your grandbabies, or drinking beer with the assholes from work because going back to an empty house is too depressing? All the grimy, grubby bullshit that comes with being locked in your own head for a lifetime. That’s the sacrifice. That’s what you give up to get a place among the stars.”" Eloquent. "Jim moved his attention back to the station, complex and active as his cells. It all made sense to him now—the passages, the sentinels, the vast machines that broke rich light and opened the holes in the spectrum. That generated the subtle lines. There was so much that they’d never seen or understood. They’d all just bumbled through, using the gates as shortcuts and hoping for the best. A species of beautiful idiots." Or just idiots. "[...] evacuate immediately. Assume whatever system you are entering is where you will be from now on. Expect and assume no further contact after your transit, and do not reenter the ring space once you’ve left. This is not a joke. This is not a drill. Message repeats.”" "“We’re ready,” Elvi said. "“That’s an exaggeration,” Fayez said. “We’ve reached an arbitrary level of fuck-it-good-enough. We’re calling that ready.”" "“I mean, don’t get me wrong. My analysis of the situation is a lot like yours. But you got to see there’s an irony in it. All the shit you gave me about giving people all the information and trusting them to do the right thing? Most of these fuckers aren’t gonna know what happened. This decision you’re making for the whole human race.”" "“I absolutely believe that people are more good on balance than bad,” he said. “All the wars and all of the cruelty and all of the violence. I’m not looking away from any of that, and I still think there’s something beautiful about being what we are. History is soaked in blood. The future probably will be too. But for every atrocity, there’s a thousand small kindnesses that no one noticed. A hundred people who spent their lives loving and caring for each other. A few moments of real grace. Maybe it’s only a little more good than bad in us, but . . .”" "For an instant, there was a release of energy second only to the beginning of the universe. There was no one there to see it." Creatures created this machine and were killed by the inhabitants of the universe from which it drew its energy. Mankind used the relics and drew their attention. The battle was unwinnable so the only solution was to close the door and drop away from the dangerous technology. Icarus. "The ring gate faded. Its recent brightness went first, and then the distortion at its center . . . faded. Where there had been a mystery and a miracle, a gateway to the galaxy, now there were just distant stars framed by a dull loop of metal a thousand kilometers across." "“Even if someone does, though. We’ll never know. The alien roads are gone. Now it’s just us.” The ring tumbled on her screen, and she looked past it to the stars. The billions upon billions upon billions of stars, and the tiny fraction that had other people looking back toward her. "“The stars are still there,” she said. “We’ll find our own way back to them.”" ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=4505 2023-01-24T22:16:54+01:00 https://earthli.com/users/marco

https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=4439 2023-01-23T22:17:09+01:00 https://earthli.com/users/marco

https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=4495 2023-01-22T22:10:55+01:00 https://earthli.com/users/marco

, but becomes much more. It addresses... ]]>

, but becomes much more. It addresses some of the same topics as "No One is Talking About This" , but goes much further, investigates the phenomenon of the Internet much more deeply, places it more firmly in the flow of history. I've been a reader of the author's essays for quite some time and find him to be one of the more entertaining and educational writers I follow, in the sense of actually learning useful things that I'd never thought to know before. Though superficially vastly different, we share more than a few similarities in our paths through life. We both grew up in the United States, we are almost the same age, we seem to be focused on learning, we played some of the same video games, listened to a lot of the same music, watched the same television, read many of the same books, etc. We're both living in Europe now. He is, of course, far more erudite, having learned or developed a strong familiarity with many more languages than I. He also seems to have read so much more of what is available from centuries past. He is a scholar. I am a dilettante. I've had more of a focus on the actual task of putting computer science into practice, more of a focus on the 20th century and, perhaps, the 21st. To whit, the similarities strike me immediately, on the first pages, "[...] it is the weaving together of several ideas into a filament thick enough to serve further on as a bright guiding thread through the rest of modern history up to the present day: the idea that natural language can be formalized; the idea that formal language can be processed by machines; the idea that human reason can be outsourced to these machines to make decisions for us; the idea that all things are interconnected" And, out of the gate, a discussion of the metaphor of weaving and how so much of the course of human knowledge and the gathering thereof has related itself to the process of weaving and "threads" of knowledge. And here I find myself newly employed for a company [3] that produces machines that analyze the quality of actual cloth threads. Life is funny. But, back to the review. The meandering in my own review will perhaps give you a flavor of the distances that the author ranges in his treatment of the history, potential, and failings of the Internet. He is a fearless spelunker in the archives of the far past, seeking and finding analogous technologies and situations in decidedly less technologically advanced times -- even in the natural world, outside of the species (whale songs were telecommunication long before the telegraph). "To some extent, telecommunication just is amplification: simply to speak to a person in a normal voice is already to telecommunicate, even if at naturally audible distances we have learned to be unimpressed by this most of the time." Even people talking to one another is technically telecommunication -- it's just so common that it has receded into the background and is no longer considered to be amazing. This, despite the fact that we don't really know how it works. I mean, we know how some of it works, right? It's pretty amazing technology, though not man-made, not really. I think something (however that works), it excites certain neurons. I want to say something, other parts of the brain are engaged to begin the act of encoding what I'm thinking into phonemes, actualized by my moving the many, many muscles in my mouth and tongue in an exquisite ballet that manipulates air molecules into a stream that produces waves in other air molecules, spreading outward, slowly ebbing into silence. Before it does, though, those moving air molecules strike the tympani of my conversational partner, this incredibly sensitive organ that can detect movements in air that nothing else on our bodies can, and that tympani transforms those vibrations back into electrical signals that journey up a chain of axons until it strikes the neurons of the brain of my conversational partner, where -- as the old cartoon says -- "a miracle occurs" and those signals are transformed through the simulacra of the world my partner holds in her mind and she understands an approximation of my intent, hopefully a relatively accurate one. It's gobsmacking and beautiful and insanely intricate and complicated and we take it so for granted that we disparage it relative to the relatively clumsy technological copies of the process that we've managed to construct. Anyway, where as I? Oh, yes, Justin E.H. Smith wrote a book about the Internet. This is why I read him: not only for the knowledge and lore imparted, not only for the superior writing style and the delightful vocabulary, but because of its thought-provoking nature (I like the word Gedankenanstoss). What is the book about? Perhaps this thesis statement is a good start. "The principal charges against the internet, deserving of our attention here, instead have to do with the ways in which it has limited our potential and our capacity for thriving, the ways in which it has distorted our nature and fettered us. Let us enumerate them." Not all of the book is as purely esoteric as I've made it out to be. There are some very down-to-Earth bits with an examination of the -- admittedly, thus far largely corrosive and not at all achieving its non-corrosive potential -- influence that the Internet is having on human behavior, especially as it affects how we live and work and ... be. For example, we have clearly allowed the same drive to capitalize every facet of our existence take over the Internet as well. This one-size-fits-all solution has already proven quite detrimental and is largely to blame for the curve of potential we saw in the mid-90s begin to bend so quickly and precipitously back downward. "Private companies have thus moved in to take care of basic functions necessary for civil society, but without assuming any real responsibility to society. This, too, is a diminution of the political freedom of citizens of democracy, understood as the power to contribute to decisions concerning our social life and collective well-being." Not only that, but the profit motive has led to an optimization not for any societally beneficial purpose -- to which the Internet would, in principle, be eminently suited -- but to manipulate our amazing biology in the coarsest possible manner to elicit impressions from us that can be converted to digital Internet points, which eventually wander their way back to a currency that means something in the real world. Instead of teaching us how to be better, wiser, more empathetic, they have chosen to pick the lower-hanging fruit and farm our dopamine for profit. It's a sad, sad local maximum in the vast landscape of potential that revealed itself at the beginning of this whole experiment. "The great engine that is fed upon countless little nibbles of individual human attention, and that must constantly solicit such attention if it is to get fed, runs much more effectively, and is much better able to indulge its voracious appetite, when it appeals to human passion than to human reason, when it entices our first-order desire for dopamine-fueled gratification, than when it invites us to cultivate moral character or pursue long-term goals of betterment of self or world." "This then is the second new problem of the internet era: the way in which the emerging extractive economy threatens our ability to use our mental faculty of attention in a way that is conducive to human thriving." "[...] those individuals will thrive most, or believe themselves to thrive most, in this new system who are able convincingly to present themselves not as subjects at all, but as attention-grabbing sets of data points." This is how it always was, though, no? To others, to society, one is what one has to offer. Worth today is perhaps more crassly assigned to, or, perhaps more accurately, withheld from, individuals, than in the past, but it's not radically different. We are talking about a diminution of altruism, which was always a slippery concept. "Corporations will manipulate people into behaving as if they were video-game players, and these same people will adopt an understanding of their own freely chosen pursuits in life as if life were a video game." It's bad enough that this is all ruining us psychically and ruining relationships and human functioning, but it's also ruining societal functioning. "This leaves many people with a civic education built on realities from the previous century wondering what to do: people who feel the need to “speak up” but are deeply averse to unproductive dialogue, especially when it is being controlled by corporate interests that do not want it to be productive." "Civic education has long been based on the idea that public engagement is good, that it is part of our duty as citizens to read the news, to write letters to editors, to talk to people in our social circles about important issues of the day. But the news is now mostly a current within the ocean of social media." "[...] what we are seeing for now is a sort of perversion of collective deliberation, as people, some of them with sincere good will, seek to use what is essentially a privately owned point-scoring video game as if it were the public sphere." Even before we've truly understood what a mess we've made of the current Internet, we are already preparing to hand it off to AIs, which we will -- for marketing and capitalization purposes -- imbue with fantastical powers that they don't have, until we've trained ourselves to be satisfied with the local maximum the AIs are able to create for us, until we don't even dream of anything beyond it. We don't even know how we think, but we're already theorizing about whether our inventions do. At the same time, we disparage the natural world, claiming that no-one else is as special as we are. So, other creatures could never be considered to be moral beings or "really think" or "be conscious", but, of course, our AIs -- granted majesty in the pantheon of creation by their having been created by us -- are immediately fast-tracked into the on-deck circle. "[...] there is no reason to think we are any closer to understanding how veraciously to simulate canine olfaction, say, than we are to simulating human emotional response to music or reflection on the similarities between love and certain species of flower." "Nobody can explain how—according to what laws of nature—machine-run programs are supposed to become conscious of their own activity, any more than they could explain the principles that would have made the Brazen Head work." We don't even think that other cultures on this planet think, to say nothing of other species, or AIs. The Chinese, for example, have long been the focus of western Orientalist scrutiny, to the point where there's even a concept called a "Chinese Room" , which basically just means that an entire country was once thought to be so inscrutable that Europe seriously considered the possibility that its individuals weren't individuals, not really, but functioned as part of some hive mind that simulated human activity sufficiently. It's a wild reminder that the bugs of the film Starship Troopers are absolutely a stand-in for every single enemy that the supposedly enlightened western so-called civilization [4] has ever had. "Since at least the seventeenth century, European observers have imagined Chinese people as being Chinese rooms, processing information and delivering rational and correct responses without any real conscious understanding of what they were doing; and China as a whole has been understood for equally long as a sort of “China brain,” functioning as a whole and as a true unity, rather than, in contrast with European nations, as a collection of individuals." "The Chinese are on this view, in effect, wise automata: doing everything rational agents do, but evidently without any true rationality grounding their action. They are like Descartes’s semblance of a man that moves about the street in a cloak and hat, and that so worried him in the second of his Meditations, but now multiplied to the size of a great nation. In sum, China and the specter of automation have long been two sides of the same coin in the history of European thought." Finally, Smith ends up at ontology, not only wondering what we are actually doing with information and knowledge, but how that relates to what really exists. Or what it even means to talk about what is real, which is, ... um, ontology. At what point does the world online becomes more real than reality? At what level of luxury can that even happen? You still have to eat and keep the rain off, so reality will impinge if you neglect it too much for the new reality online. "On most understandings of the ontology of a musical work, when we hear music streaming through Spotify or YouTube, we are hearing the music itself, and not just a representation of it. And much less or much more mysteriously (depending on your philosophical commitments), when we pay bills online, when we issue such speech acts as promises or threats via Facebook or Twitter, when we tell our loved ones we love them over Skype or Zoom, we are bringing about real transformations in the world, in our financial situation, in our social standing, in our hearts." What is the nature of reality? What does it mean to say you listened to a song? You listened to representation of a song streamed to you and converted through several formats, all of which stem from an initial vibration of air molecules striking a membrane in a microphone that translated those signals via piezoelectric sensors to analog electrical signals and then to a digital representation that was stored in individually aligned magnets or electrons in some storage medium. What does it mean to say "that's a table"? Do you mean the table that you see? The picture made in your brain in a reaction to your retina picking up light waves bouncing off more solid atoms? Or did you touch the table? Your fingers reacted to those atoms, sent those signals up nerves, to form a different sort of picture in your brain, right? Or what if you took a Polaroid of the table. Many would still say, "that's a table." But it's a picture of a table. Why do we allow the shortcut? How many shortcuts are allowed? If you took a picture of the picture, it all falls apart, right? Then, you'd say "that's a picture of a picture of a table", or just "that's a picture of a picture." We accept certain abstractions as such strong representations of their originals that we don't even make a distinction anymore. The article I have in my head and that I dutifully "type" (striking keys that transform kinetic motion into a series of bits that are recorded on a stream of other bits that are an encoding that can be stored, and rehydrated, then "sent" over a wire or waves, then can be decoded elsewhere, on another computer, where the bits are decoded, combined with a font described to transform them into electrical impulses that cause certain electrons to pulse in a crystal matrix (or an LED these days) so that they glow in the right shapes on a screen to be read and considered the "article" by my retinas, neurons, etc. -- same as the original, although it's not. The original was a bunch of electrical signals in my head that I converted to encoded electrical impulses. Everything else is a copy, but they're no less "real" for all intents and purposes than the original. They're even more "real" since they're not nearly as ephemeral. He leaves us with a message of hope, an analysis of things that have gone right in the Internet, that haven't been coopted by corporations and capitalism and the market principle. He uses Wikipedia as an example. "I type the phrase "Kuiper Belt" as quickly as I can think it, as quickly as I can perceive the desire to absorb the facts of it, and no less quickly do the facts come pouring in from my screen. It is a dream come true, this cosmic window I am perched up again, this microcosmic sliver of all things." That is how I use the Internet as well, as a resource with which to learn and explore and document what I've learned. I am as at one with my machine as the author. I tremble to think how I would even function intellectually, how I would provide value, if I didn't have the vast resource of the Internet -- or even this web site into which I've poured my mind for almost 25 years.-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me of what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I've failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an interest in this book, then I'm happy for you. [Citations] "What happens with Leibniz is not the proper beginning of anything, but rather—a metaphor to which we will be returning frequently—it is the weaving together of several ideas into a filament thick enough to serve further on as a bright guiding thread through the rest of modern history up to the present day: the idea that natural language can be formalized; the idea that formal language can be processed by machines; the idea that human reason can be outsourced to these machines to make decisions for us; the idea that all things are interconnected" "While strongly opposed to the “technicist mystification of personal consciousness under conditions of modern industrial civilization” and concerned to salvage “human dignity” under these conditions, I am likewise concerned to show that the greatest problem is not one of unstoppable technological determinism, or of a determinism that can only be countered by “flipping the off switch,” but rather in clarifying the nature of the force with which we are contending, and understanding the limits of thinking that proceeds by analogy between human beings and machines." "Animals are a tiny sliver of life on earth, yet they are preeminently what we mean when we talk about life on earth; social media are a tiny sliver of the internet, yet they are what we mean when we speak of the internet, as they are where the life is on the internet." "The principal charges against the internet, deserving of our attention here, instead have to do with the ways in which it has limited our potential and our capacity for thriving, the ways in which it has distorted our nature and fettered us. Let us enumerate them." "Private companies have thus moved in to take care of basic functions necessary for civil society, but without assuming any real responsibility to society. This, too, is a diminution of the political freedom of citizens of democracy, understood as the power to contribute to decisions concerning our social life and collective well-being. What Michael Walzer said of socialism might be said of democracy too: that “what touches all should be decided by all.” And on this reckoning, the internet is aggressively undemocratic." "[...] by allowing the internet to compel us to attend to a constant stream of different, trivial things, we have become unable to focus on the monolithically important thing that it is." "This is a revolution at least as massive as the agricultural and industrial revolutions that preceded it. Whatever else happens, it is safe to say that for the rest of all of our lifetimes, we will only be living out the initial turbulence of this entry into a new historical epoch." "The great engine that is fed upon countless little nibbles of individual human attention, and that must constantly solicit such attention if it is to get fed, runs much more effectively, and is much better able to indulge its voracious appetite, when it appeals to human passion than to human reason, when it entices our first-order desire for dopamine-fueled gratification, than when it invites us to cultivate moral character or pursue long-term goals of betterment of self or world." "This then is the second new problem of the internet era: the way in which the emerging extractive economy threatens our ability to use our mental faculty of attention in a way that is conducive to human thriving." "This then is the third feature of our current reality that constitutes a genuine break with the past: the condensation of so much of our lives into a single device, the passage of nearly all that we do through a single technological portal." "It gets worse still. In Vladimir Nabokov’s 1957 novel Pnin, the titular character is a lost and hapless White Russian emigré teaching Slavic literature at a university with a striking resemblance to Cornell University. He boards in the home of an American family, the matron of which, Joan, enjoys sitting at the kitchen table with him as she reads the fat Sunday newspaper. When she asks why he will not take a section and read along with her, he replies, sadly: “You know I do not understand what is advertisement and what is not advertisement.”" "But perhaps the greatest change over the past decades has been that individual readers or consumers are themselves now pushed and pressured to operate online according to the same commercial logic as the companies whose products they are using." "But there is simply no other choice. You must use the internet in order to do anything at all, including writing and promoting books, and the more you use the internet, the more your individuality warps into a brand, and your subjectivity transforms into an algorithmically plottable vector of activity. Under these circumstances, one wants to say: “I do not even understand of myself what is advertisement and what is not advertisement.”" Think of a job search or the incessant hustle of daily life. "[...] those individuals will thrive most, or believe themselves to thrive most, in this new system who are able convincingly to present themselves not as subjects at all, but as attention-grabbing sets of data points." This is how it always was, though, no? To others, to society, one is what one has to offer. Worth today is perhaps more crassly assigned to, or, perhaps more accurately, withheld from, individuals, than in the past, but it's not radically different. We are talking about a diminution of altruism, which was always a slippery concept. "Bots can do many things. They can monitor, track, harrass, impress with their ability to generate natural-seeming sentences, and even make jokes. But in the end they are like the cardboard-cow cutouts of a Potemkin village, as they are not themselves capable of conjuring that precious resource the new economy is intent on extracting: to wit, attention." Oh, but they can, at least to the crude measuring devices we use to glean information about attention. See "Automation and the Future of Work by Aaron Benanav" "Researchers have found that the use of such dolls has significant effects in curing or reducing depression. It is not that the residents have been tricked, but only that having the dolls there was enough for them to encounter a simulation of empathy that allowed them to experience its positive effects." "It has even become a common insult in some corners of the internet to denounce a person with whom you disagree as “a bot.” The implication is that their opinion is so crude that it may as well have been automatically generated. But to level such a denunciation is also a means of evading any threat of proper intersubjectivity, any obligation to display moral commitment to the other." "The great difference, however, is that the books in Burton’s library, like the features of the natural world, invite sustained rather than flitting or fleeting attention, as do the features of the natural world, and there are long and venerable traditions that have sprung up to better enable people to cultivate this attention. "The internet, by contrast, seems to be structured so as positively to forbid such cultivation. This might be simply a condition of infancy. The great masterpieces of early cinema after all, such as the Lumière Brothers’s 1896 L’Arroseur arrosé [The Waterer Watered], lasted no more than a minute. Roughly seventy years later we had Andy Warhol’s Empire of 1964, more than eight hours long, which, if not a masterpiece, at least is an illustration that, among other things, the cinematic art may sometimes solicit us to undertake marathon exercises of attention that would have been inconceivable in the early years of the technology that made the new art possible." "In the future there may of course emerge forms of engagement with internet-mediated arts, and other expressions of the human creative and intellectual drive, that will require the sort of conscious commitment we now make when we begin reading a weighty novel." Somebody hasn't heard of video games. Eldar Ring anyone? "It is not that the technology of writing was unavailable to medieval scholars, but only that, for the most part, until the modern period true knowledge of an object of study involved internalizing that object by committing it to memory." Also argued in "Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman" . "[...] what we tend to ignore in the wake of this shift is that without memorization, without commitment to memory of a body of knowledge by means of an art of memory, all we have left is a distal relationship to that body of knowledge, where it is retrievable from storage (whether in a book or a hard drive or in the “cloud”) should we need it, but which we cannot really be said to know until we retrieve it." "The feeling of loss of something profound and venerable, when we see that today young people spend hours on end scrolling through Instagram and do not seem to even consider the idea of picking up a book and reading it from cover to cover, echoes in important ways these earlier historical instances of loss." "To properly attend to something, unlike being mindful of it, is to relinquish control of the meaning it holds for you, to allow it the potential to become something else, something unfamiliar within the context of your prior range of references and expectations." "As this process continues, and I sink deeper into the work, I find that that world is not at all as it first appeared to me. It is not that I now think the narrator is “good” or “correct” or “praiseworthy,” whereas at the beginning the opposite appellations applied. It is that the moral commitment that I have taken on toward him, the commitment of attention, has infused his world into mine. Neither the novel nor the reader is any longer the same." "To devise an artificial duck call or decoy is not to cheat at duck hunting, but is rather very much a part of duck hunting itself. Yet to become so reliant on such accessories as to lose the ability to attend to ducks, in their behavior, in their nature, is to leave off from the primordial experience of hunting and to begin doing something else altogether. At what point a gadget ceases to enhance and begins rather to distort or pervert, an activity, will differ for different people, and so it is always futile to attempt to distinguish between good and bad gadgets as such." "If we agree with Leopold, the true end of duck hunting cannot simply be the accumulation of dead ducks, and so success in duck hunting cannot be determined by a simple consideration of the day’s yield, the “metrics” of the activity." "In its current form it is as if we have had imposed on ourselves a gadget that does nothing more than count the number of ducks we have killed, broadcast that number to the entire world, rank us with that number alongside all other duck hunters, and invite all of them, as well as whatever interlopers feel so inclined, to praise, criticize, or mock us for our ranking." "[...] bombarding anxious young scholars with spam-like messages pretending to inform them that “a senior scholar” has just downloaded their paper, that their work is being clicked in the top 1 percent on the site, and otherwise nudging them to continue to “build their brand”: these platforms are not enhancements of scholarship, but rather scholarship-themed games, bearing the same relationship to our work as thinkers that, say, Grand Theft Auto bears to driving stolen cars." You have to actively avoid the gamification aspects of DuoLingo to actually learn something. If I spend time on harder material, i earn fewer points and am punished with de-ranking. I wrote that when I read the book; in fairness, DuoLingo has improved considerably since then and is no longer very much like this. "It is common, now, to read on the internet accounts of human action that model it on artificial systems and that have no other resources for conceiving human motivation than those borrowed from programming, even when what is at issue is human moral failure." "Corporations will manipulate people into behaving as if they were video-game players, and these same people will adopt an understanding of their own freely chosen pursuits in life as if life were a video game." "[...] outsourcing our decision procedures is really only getting machines to run a simulacrum of thought, one that has everything our own thinking has, except perhaps for the subjectivity, the presence of a conscious mind behind the thinking." "Leibniz had anticipated that the more drudging and uninteresting operations of the mind might be outsourced to machines: they’ll do the math and the analysis of arguments, so that we might “think big,” contemplating ideas and synthesizing the results the machines give us into new and original arguments. What has in fact happened, it often appears, is that these drudging and uninteresting operations, as they are fed back to us, are being taken for the highest form of intellectual work possible, and are being used to model, and in turn to constrain, the way we understand our own minds and our own wills." "Leibniz thought we should parcel out to machines that part of our intellectual work that they can do, so that we might concentrate on that part that they cannot do. Now, instead, one may fear, we have perilously neglected this remainder, and while the machines were originally modeled after us, we now take what they can do as the ultimate form of intellectual work, and we emulate it, modeling ourselves after them." "This is the beauty of popular music, and it is what gives the cultivation of aesthetic appreciation for it a distinct character, distinct especially from appreciation of classical music, where, however much subtle variation there may be from conductor to conductor, from performance to performance, nevertheless fidelity to the original intent of the composer is valued much more highly." "If someone had to take a DNA test to learn that she was partially Irish in the first place, then there is simply no meaningful sense in which she has any more truly inborn receptivity to Celtic folk music than anyone else in the world. That is just not how music and culture work." "[...] the shift to ubiquitous algorithmic management of society, which lends advantage to the expression of opinions unambigous enough (i.e., dogmatic or extremist enough) for AI to detect their meaning and to process them accordingly, and which also removes from the individual subject any deep existential imperative or moral duty to cultivate self-understanding," "Social media are in this respect engines of perpetual disagreement, which sharpen opposing views into stark dichotomies and preclude the possibility of either exploring partial common ground or finding agreement in a dialectical fashion in some higher-order synthesis of what at the first order appear as contradictory positions." "This leaves many people with a civic education built on realities from the previous century wondering what to do: people who feel the need to “speak up” but are deeply averse to unproductive dialogue, especially when it is being controlled by corporate interests that do not want it to be productive." "Civic education has long been based on the idea that public engagement is good, that it is part of our duty as citizens to read the news, to write letters to editors, to talk to people in our social circles about important issues of the day. But the news is now mostly a current within the ocean of social media." "[...] what we are seeing for now is a sort of perversion of collective deliberation, as people, some of them with sincere good will, seek to use what is essentially a privately owned point-scoring video game as if it were the public sphere." "Twitter is the place where “socialists show contempt for hierarchy, meritocracy and neoliberal competition by competing for status in a game designed by a Silicon Valley overlord.”" "Every Tweet, no matter what its content, no matter whether true or false, righteous or trolling, adds to the tidal wave that is currently crashing over our public space and submerging our centuries-old aspiration toward a functioning deliberative democracy." "Isn’t it possible that the most recent outgrowths of our own species-specific telecommunicative activity—most notably, the internet, but also such systems as telegraphy and telephony, which we take to be extreme departures from the previous course of human history—are in fact something more like an outgrowth latent from the beginning in what we have always done, an ecologically unsurprising and predictable expression of something that was already there?" "To some extent, telecommunication just is amplification: simply to speak to a person in a normal voice is already to telecommunicate, even if at naturally audible distances we have learned to be unimpressed by this most of the time." "[...] anonymous pamphlet drawing on Digby’s work was published in London in 1688, proposing that a stabbed dog might be put on a ship moving across the Atlantic Ocean, while the dagger that stabbed the poor beast might be manipulated every day at the same time, causing the dog to howl in pain. And in this way the precise time at the place of departure could be determined, and from the angle of the sun and other measurements the lines of longitude could be demarcated, and a major navigational hurdle overcome." "Allix predicts that at some point it will be possible to make pocket-sized devices using particularly tiny species of snails, and that we will then be able to send messages throughout the day—“texts,” you might call them—to our friends and family as we go about the city. He envisions being able to receive newspapers from the whole world on these devices, and to follow the deliberations of parliament" In 1869, no less. "The story of Jules Allix reminds us that a rigorous historian of science may learn just as much from the fakes and frauds as from the genuine article: even when someone is lying, they are nonetheless doing the important work of imagining future possibilities." "We tend to suppose that whatever is species-specific or essential to a given biological kind cannot ineliminably involve another species, that what it is to be a panther or an oak ought to be something that could be spelled out without implicating fleas or moss in the description. But the tendency to think this way is mostly our inheritance of an inadequate and un-ecological folk-metaphysics." "And if we agree with the commonplace that a domestic pig or goat is an “artificial” being, to the extent that it is nature transformed in the pursuit of human ends, why should we not also agree that the algae farmed by fungus or the fungus enlisted by the tree to pass chemical messages and nutrient packets along its roots (much as the internet is said to facilitate “packet switching”): why should we not agree that this technique is technology too? Or, conversely, and perhaps somewhat more palatably for those who do not wish to rush to collapse the divide between the natural and the artificial: why should we not see our own technology as natural technique?" "The debate is, again, unresolved, for reasons that Kant could probably have anticipated. We can never fully know what it is like to be a duck, and so we cannot know whether what we are seeing in nature is a mere external appearance of what would be rape if it were occurring among humans, or whether it is truly, properly, duck rape." "[...] our own sense of our specialness among creatures requires us to see the appearance of these behaviors in other species as mere appearance, as simulation, counterfeit, or aping." "Consequently, in recent years the internet has begun to occupy a position in human life previously reserved for such familiar necessities as food, shelter, and clean water. Yet we know that there was a time—many of us can even remember a time—when there could have been no claim to such a right, while by contrast we have always needed nutrition and hydration. So again, if telecommunication is simply a natural consequence of our species-specific activity, it would seem to be so in a different way than the signaling of sperm whales is among their kind, for evidently we have not always telecommunicated. Cetacean clicking in the ocean, and human clicking on the internet, are categorically different." "The French historian Serge Gruzinski intriguingly suggests that no question is more quintessentially modern than “What time is it where you are?,” as it requires a grasp of the simultaneity of different times in different places around the world, and also requires the power to reach across the divide between these places in order to communicate with an interlocutor at a geographical remove." "Even if Paleolithic people were not delivering letters across distances, it is certain that the seashell necklaces and other items we know they were delivering were perceived by their recipients to be packed with symbolic meaning, just like a letter, just like a sequence of emojis." "The first voice recording was made in the mid-nineteenth century, unless we count writing, in which case we must move the date back several millennia earlier. But writing, in turn, is what enabled people to fantasize about other forms of voice recording, such as the recording sponge, which fantasies in turn may well have played a causal role in the search for the technology that would eventually become the phonautograph or the mp3. In short, there are no firsts, and the past, as St. Augustine said, is always pregnant with the future." "We sometimes revert to this way of thinking still today, when for example we look at a nighttime satellite image of the Korean peninsula, with the South blazing in artificial light and the North in near total darkness, and we imagine this to be a measure of the relative political enlightenment and social advancement of the two countries. But at the same time, and much more indicative of changes since White’s day, we also praise countries like Denmark and Finland for reducing energy consumption and for having the maturity and sense to turn off unneeded lights at night." "It is not that there are cities and smartphones wherever there are human beings, but cities and smartphones themselves are only the concretions of a certain kind of natural activity in which human beings have been engaging all along." "The internet does not tell jokes; people tell jokes, and these only appear at some of the terminal points of the network, on the screens visited by attentive eyes possessed by conscious beings. It is only at these scattered points that aboutness enters into the network at all, and we may ask whether it is so much entering the network as rather extracting something from it and translating that extraction into a form of which the human mind can make good use." "There is no quality of aboutness in the slime mold’s motions; it is not thinking about eating, or choosing to eat, any more than the iron bar is thinking about rusting or choosing to rust." "Although its supporters accuse its deniers of attachment to a premodern worldview, simulation theory itself has evident historical parallels to medieval angelology. Like the theologians of old, the new class of experts maintains that there are infinite hierarchies of celestial intelligences (though the terminology is of course adapted to contemporary sensibilities), of which only the wise have knowledge, while the foolish masses continue to suppose that earthly life is “reality.” Knowledge of the hidden truth becomes a sort of credential and confirmation of elite status." "Now, it is not certain that such deferential engagement can only be instantiated in a non-mechanical mind, and it is possible that if reckoning just keeps getting streamlined and quicker, eventually it will cross over into judgment. But mere possibility, as opposed to concrete evidence, is not a very strong foundation for speculation about the inevitable emergence of strong AI, that is, of AI that matches or surpasses human beings in its power of judgment." "[...] there is no reason to think we are any closer to understanding how veraciously to simulate canine olfaction, say, than we are to simulating human emotional response to music or reflection on the similarities between love and certain species of flower." "Alongside the history of computer science narrowly understood, we should perhaps chart a parallel history, an imaginary museum of all the machines that only existed as fantasy, as rumor, as mere items on a wish list alongside so many other things that the alchemists and conjurers knew how to envision but had no idea how to bring about: perpetual motion machines, universal solvents, artificial life." Echoes of Umberto Eco. "Nobody can explain how—according to what laws of nature—machine-run programs are supposed to become conscious of their own activity, any more than they could explain the principles that would have made the Brazen Head work." "Since at least the seventeenth century, European observers have imagined Chinese people as being Chinese rooms, processing information and delivering rational and correct responses without any real conscious understanding of what they were doing; and China as a whole has been understood for equally long as a sort of “China brain,” functioning as a whole and as a true unity, rather than, in contrast with European nations, as a collection of individuals." "The Chinese are on this view, in effect, wise automata: doing everything rational agents do, but evidently without any true rationality grounding their action. They are like Descartes’s semblance of a man that moves about the street in a cloak and hat, and that so worried him in the second of his Meditations, but now multiplied to the size of a great nation. In sum, China and the specter of automation have long been two sides of the same coin in the history of European thought." "We have no evidence that conscious experience emerges as a rule when computing power is increased. Correlatively, we have no evidence that the human brain is a computing device instantiated in a carbon-based material substratum but that might just as well have been instantiated in a silicon-based or dials-and-marbles-based one." "A machine such as Vaucanson’s digesting duck (invented after Leibniz’s death, but certainly not beyond the bounds of conceivability during his lifetime) differs from a true duck in that the machine can be broken down in a short number of steps into parts that are not themselves machines, whereas in Leibniz’s view a duck’s or any other animal’s body remains a machine in its least parts ad infinitum." "The imminent arrival of strong AI is in many respects a neo-alchemist idea, of no more real interest in our efforts to understand the promises and threats of technology than any of the other forces medieval conjurers sought to awaken, and charlatans pretended to awaken, and chiliasts warned against awakening. Technology poses plenty of real existential threats to humanity and to life on earth. Automated technology in particular poses plenty of real threats to human thriving and to political equality and justice. Lucid scientists and risk analysts will address these threats undistracted by science fictions." "Social-media platforms like Facebook and Twitter are, in the end, video games, and so is LinkedIn, and so is ResearchGate." It all depends on how use LinkedIn or DuoLingo. For me, they are tools. However, it's clear that they are gamified and reward engagement. You have to work to ignore it. "The principal difference is that the destruction of the applied arts and crafts by industrialization began to make its effects felt generations before the (currently ongoing) destruction of the fine arts and the belles lettres by the automation of information-processing and “content” production." "The words we have been liberally quoting were written in French by an Italian scientist. But the translation here is not ours: the text was Englished by Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace, and published in 1843. Though she is credited only as “A.A.L.” (and once, erroneously, as “A.L.L.”), Lovelace nonetheless inserts her own expert voice into the text in the form of lengthy endnotes, some of which elaborate considerably further on conceptual and technical matters than the author himself had done in the original French text." "We have been returning again and again over the last chapters to the problem and the potential of metaphorical language: where its boundaries are, and what it has to offer us in our effort to understand the actual world in which we live." "In fact, however, the history of science is often largely a history of metaphors. What is discovered as a new explanation or theoretical account of how the world works is, often, a new way to “carry over” (the etymological meaning of the word “metaphor”) from one domain habits or even fashions of thinking and understanding into another domain where these habits and fashions were not originally intended to go." "It assumes too much, that is, to suppose that we already have a clear understanding of where the boundary between analogy and metaphor lies. And this is precisely our predicament when we attempt to comprehend computers, networked and otherwise, in their relationship to other things: to living nature, to human minds, or to looms." "Scientists license such metaphors, and science journalists run with them, shaping the way ordinary people understand the world around them. Thus a recent newspaper article describes galaxy clusters as being “connected by spidery filaments in what’s known as the cosmic web.”27 From the smallest to the largest scales, the stuff of this world is still said to be bound together by threads." "Thus a recent newspaper article describes galaxy clusters as being “connected by spidery filaments in what’s known as the cosmic web.” From the smallest to the largest scales, the stuff of this world is still said to be bound together by threads. The metaphor holds the fabric of our explanations together, at least when we move out of the pure mathematics that is in important respects the true language of theoretical physics," "To say that Burton “loved the world” is to say that he sought to include as much as he could on his imaginary stage, to give it order, and to allow it to matter to him. The result is a deeply personal, subjective, and often histrionic approach to science, whether of the human body, or the celestial bodies, or of anything else on which he feels inclined to digress. This is Burton’s “world,” and he knows it and loves it from within the security and comfort of his cramped and book-laden cell." "This tour often tapers off imperceptibly into sleep, and the rhythm begins again the following day, which under this new regime of confinement will almost certainly be nearly identical to the day that preceded it. I am already fearing and mourning my eventual release back into the “world” in the vulgar sense: the bare physical reality of commutes, meetings, dinner parties, activities." "Twenty years ago I could easily have found myself sitting around doing nothing, when the question might suddenly come to me: “What is a quasar, anyway?” It is almost certain that at that time I would have quickly abandoned my curiosity, hoping perhaps that I might some day happen upon an answer, but not being quite interested enough, typically, to seek one out. Today it is second nature for me to immediately turn to Jimmy Wales’s infinite encyclopedia. The consequences of this reflexive habit for my general knowledge of the world are profound. I am convinced that I know vastly more than I would have had this resource not been available to me." "As Jonathan Zittrain has observed, inverting the old line about Marxism, Wikipedia works well in practice, but not in theory. One of the keys to its success is that the openness of Wikipedia’s entries to editing, deletion, and expansion is not a free-for-all. There are at least minimal gatekeeping requirements, as well as the possibility of reversal of new edits by experienced editors, that help to avoid the sort of degeneration, signal loss, digression into irrelevance, and outright vandalism that are so common in comment threads and in public responses to media posts on Facebook and Twitter. The structure of Wikipedia’s gatekeeping procedures, combined perhaps with the very nature of the project, sustains something approaching a community spirit, a sincere and non-dogmatic concern to adhere to the truth." "On most understandings of the ontology of a musical work, when we hear music streaming through Spotify or YouTube, we are hearing the music itself, and not just a representation of it. And much less or much more mysteriously (depending on your philosophical commitments), when we pay bills online, when we issue such speech acts as promises or threats via Facebook or Twitter, when we tell our loved ones we love them over Skype or Zoom, we are bringing about real transformations in the world, in our financial situation, in our social standing, in our hearts." "To revive the philosopher of science Ian Hacking’s famous question in his article, “Do We See through a Microscope?” we may also ask: “Do we see through the internet?” And the most appropriate answer seems to be: “At least as much as we do through a microscope.”" "There is a sense in reading about these latter things that if we come to be deeply interested in them, we must put down the books a some point and go have a look at the real thing, which, unlike the Kuiper Belt objects and the stars beyond them, we are in fact capable of studying up close. And yet the book is not simply a consolation for the inaccessibility of the thing that interests us. Sometimes it is a supplement, giving us a different sort of access to the thing that we might also study up close." "On the Wikipedia page about avian crop milk, I click the link to the page about the Symphysodon genus, also knows as "discus fish," some species of which "nurse" their young on a secretion through the skin that has molecular properties similar to milk. And, as I read, I begin to wonder: just what is milk anyhow? And how widely is it distributed throughout living nature? I I am not cautious, I will soon find myself reading about the Milky Way and the metaphors that fist associated this star system with milk, but I restrain myself and I think about animal secretions only, and even here, under these constraints, I am aware of a rising sensation in me of the sublime." That, to me, is the Internet: learning and exploring. "When I type, the motion, the flow from my thoughts to the tips of my fingers through the keyboard and into the document on the screen, is as fluid and easy as if I were speaking. As I am typing at this very moment, I am not looking at the computer at all, but out the window at the leaves on the trees. That is how intimately I know my machine, and how natural it is for me to think and to produce traces of my thoughts by means of it. If we must find a seat for the soul, surely the tips of the fingers are as attractive a location for the noble role as any other." "I type the phrase "Kuiper Belt" as quickly as I can think it, as quickly as I can perceive the desire to absorb the facts of it, and no less quickly do the facts come pouring in from my screen. It is a dream come true, this cosmic window I am perched up again, this microcosmic sliver of all things." [Errata] "processs" -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] I'm making this a word I don't care. [1] At the time I read the book, I'd only been working for "Uster Technologies" for a few weeks. [1] Ghandi, when asked "What do you think of western civilization?", answered "I think it would be a good idea." ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=4491 2023-01-18T21:28:47+01:00 https://earthli.com/users/marco

https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=4447 2023-01-17T21:58:17+01:00 https://earthli.com/users/marco

https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=4465 2022-05-29T22:57:57+02:00 https://earthli.com/users/marco

https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=4263 2022-02-18T23:43:35+01:00 https://earthli.com/users/marco

https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=4157 2022-02-18T23:41:49+01:00 https://earthli.com/users/marco

"couple" of years got a little bit out of hand, I've only included partial notes and review of each book in this article. This year, the separate article for each book generally includes many more notes and review material, as well as... ]]>

"couple" of years got a little bit out of hand, I've only included partial notes and review of each book in this article. This year, the separate article for each book generally includes many more notes and review material, as well as citations and rough notes. Arsène Lupin, gentleman-cambrioleur (1907) by Maurice Leblanc This is a collection of stories about Arsène Lupin, a gentleman thief. * L’Arrestation d’Arsène Lupin: Lupin travels from France to America on a transatlantic liner. He is arrested in New York City by his nemesis Inspector Ganimard * Arsène Lupin en prison: Lupin robs a castle while still in prison. He fools the owner by posing as Ganimard. * L’Évasion d’Arsène Lupin: Lupin escapes from prison twice. Ganimard is flouted in court by a man who appears to be Lupin but isn't, but is? * Le Mystérieux Voyageur: Lupin is himself robbed while on a train, teams up with completely unwitting police officers, and hunts down the wanted criminal who'd robbed him. * Le Collier de la reine: This is Lupin's origin story, wherein he steals a necklace as a very young boy. The story is told by Lupin himself thirty years later to those from whom he stole. * Le Sept de cœur: Lupin enriches himself while fooling everyone and thwarting a terrorist plot to steal the plans for an advanced submarine. * Le Coffre-fort de madame Imbert: Lupin tries to run a con on a couple who have a safe full of money, but they end up fooling him into stealing their "money" -- which turns out to be fake. They collect insurance and ends up with nothing but paper. * La Perle noire: Once again, Lupin solves another robbery and murder while also managing to steal a treasure himself. * Sherlock Holmès arrive trop tard: Lupin matches withs with Herlock Sholmes, staying one step ahead of him the whole way -- and even managing to steal the great detective's watch from his own arm. I've included "notes, citations and errata" in a separate post. The Churn (2014) by James S.A. Corey This is one of the earliest stories in the entire Expanse universe. It takes place before even Leviathan Wakes. This is Amos Burton's origin story. It tells the story of how he started as a young thug named Timmy, in the employ of Baltimore crime lord Amos Burton. He ends up running protection for an identity-grifter named Erich who works for Burton. Timmy lives with Lydia, an older woman who rescued him after his mother had died. She also had worked for Amos Burton, as a prostitute. Their relationship is complicated: he protects her, but is also her lover. Timmy's gift for violence is prodigious. He is taciturn to a fault. This impresses Burton. On an assignment to protect Erich while he's on a job, all hell breaks loose. The entire neighborhood is raided by the police/authorities and he, Lydia, and Erich are forced to flee the area and, likely, Burton's ambit. Timmy had an island prepared where he spirits them away. He even manages to get Erich an identity-building kit. After Timmy has decapitated the organization by killing Burton, Erich uses the kit to rebuild the Amos Burton identity for Timmy, allowing him to escape off of Earth -- but he can never return to Baltimore. I've included "notes, citations and errata" in a separate post. The Butcher of Anderson Station (2011) by James S.A. Corey This is one of the earliest stories in the entire Expanse universe. It takes place before even Leviathan Wakes. It is a short story about Fred Johnson. It tells the story of how he started as an Earth marine and how he came to be known as the eponymous butcher. The present-day Fred Johnson has been taken captive by Anderson Dawes, then-leader of the OPA. But Fred Johnson hasn't been captured because he's a danger to the OPA. Quite the contrary: Johnson has become a drunk and is considering ending it all. He regrets his role in the attack that made him famous throughout the system. Anderson Dawes sees this regret as a thin wedge that he can use to convert one of Earth's greatest assets to work for the Belters. The rest, as they say, is history. I've included "notes, citations and errata" in a separate post. Leviathan Wakes (2011) by James S.A. Corey This is the first book of the Expanse series. The crew of the ice-hauler Canterbury includes Earther XO Jim Holden, Belter Chief Engineer Naomi Nagata, Martian Navy pilot Alex Kamal, and Earther engineer Amos Burton. While they are on an excursion to investigate a distress call from the ship Scopuli, a stealth ship appears and destroys the Canterbury. We meet detective Miller, learn of Julie Mao, and learn of the Protomolecule. Protogen schemes to harness its power, sacrificing the people of Eros. The crew of the Rocinante -- along with Miller -- figure out what's going on and, with the help of the OPA and Fred Johnson, put a stop to it. Eros is lost. When they try to destroy it, the Protomolecule defies physics to save itself. Only Miller's sacrifice avoids a strike on Earth, crashing into Venus instead. I've included "notes, citations and errata" in a separate post. Subprime Attention Crisis (2020) by Tim Hwang This is a short book about the digital advertising business, including its history, its present, and possible futures. The history is that the advertising business has always struggled with the essential fact that they are selling a largely unquantifiable product. There are feelings about the effectiveness of advertising, but little evidence for the effectiveness of a particular ad. Effectiveness is measured in two ways: directly contributing to a sale (e.g. rebates, sales, etc.), or general brand-name buildup, which leads to familiarity. Basically: the short game and the long game. Even in the old days, there were a lot of steps in between putting up a billboard along a highway and noticing an uptick in sales months later. How much did the billboard contribute? It’s hard to say because there is no way to control for other factors. The online world is similar, but differs in an important way: the sellers of ad space claim that they can very precisely and accurately identify who looked at which advertisement for how long. This is the core claim that Hwang does a good job of dissecting and refuting. I've included "notes, citations and errata" in a separate post. Caliban's War (2011) by James S.A. Corey The second book of the The Expanse begins on Ganymede, where we meet Prax Meng, a botanist of consummate skill and education. He has a daughter Mei with a debilitating but controllable disease. She is kidnapped from her pre-school. We also meet Bobbie Draper, a Martian Marine deployed on the surface, opposing the Earth forces that are also stationed there. Tensions are already high when a mysterious humanoid without a spacesuit tears across the surface, eliminating the Earth forces as well as all of the Martian ones -- except for Bobbie. The Rocinante and its crew make their appearance months later, as part of the Fred Johnson-inspired support for Ganymede. They're there to bring food supplies to a planet that formerly the breadbasket of the outer system. That was before the Martian/Earth conflict in its near orbit brought its primary food domes crashing down. We also meet Avasarala, who works for the U.N. and is a force to be reckoned with of her own. She pairs up with Bobbie and teams with the crew of the Roci to ferret out a plot in the U.N., find and rescue Mei, as well as defeat the last of the super-soldiers. The protomolecule on Venus finally bears fruit, ejecting it toward the outer solar system. I've included "notes, citations and errata" in a separate post. The Gods of Risk (2012) by James S.A. Corey This story takes place after Caliban's War, when Bobbie returns to Mars after having retired from the Mars Marines. She's living with her brother and his family. Her nephew David is a gifted student, enrolled in the terraforming program at school. He's also a gifted chemist, so he's tempted to make extra money by creating drugs for a local dealer. This is the Breaking Bad storyline, I guess. David is infatuated with LeeLee, one of the girls who orbits the leader of the local gang. In order to protected David, Bobbie starts working for the local gang, but she subverts their plans and manages to extricate David from the situation. I've included "notes, citations and errata" in a separate post. Abaddon's Gate (2013) by James S.A. Corey This is the third book of the The Expanse series. It tells the story of humanity's first interactions with The Ring, an alien artifact constructed by the protomolecule on Venus and launched into orbit out near Uranus. The Ring is guarded by a coalition of Belter, Martian, and Earther forces, preventing anyone from approaching it until it can be investigated more thoroughly. The Roci and its crew are doing well, having improved the ship with a railgun. Miller, after his death on Venus, is "haunting" Holden. He has been resurrected by the protomolecule as a simulacrum to communicate with humanity...and to help the protomolecule search for...something. The space on the other side of The Ring is a void, with only a mysterious station at the center of it, with ring gates opening on 1300 other systems. Any ship moving in it must stick to a speed limit of 600m/s or the station kills all of its systems and moves it to an orbiting junkyard. No-one has any idea how any of this works, nor how the physics behind it can be explained. The builders of the protomolecule had been gone for billions of years, destroyed by something even more powerful than them. Despite their ability to span galaxies and billions of years, they were gone. What killed them? Was it still out there? The Ring Gates are open, the station inert, the Roci is finally owned outright by its crew. Michio Pa is in charge of the Behemoth, which will be converted, once again, to a station named Medina. The protomolecule simulation named Miller is still lurking with Holden, searching for … something. Humanity must decide what it’s going to do next. I've included "notes, citations and errata" in a separate post. Automation and the Future of Work (2020) by Aaron Benanav This book argues that the paucity of good jobs these days is due not to a rise in automation, but to a massive decrease in manufacturing output. That is, slow growth rates coupled with a system-wide overcapacity are a much better fit for explaining how we got to where we are today: economies in the west with ostensibly very low unemployment, but largely in the service industry with a much different benefits structure than past jobs. Benanav sees a UBI as a means to an end, but that end has to be getting beyond the kind of civilization that forced us to invent a UBI in the first place. UBI is a band-aid on a broken system. Yes, it will make things better for the lower classes, but it won't do anything about there even being lower classes at all. Settling for a UBI is aiming too low. If we lived in a world where a UBI was possible, then much more would also be possible. Still, I'm not convinced we can afford the luxury of that fantasy. Without it, though, we're doomed to be highly diminished but we're determined to drive right into the brick wall without slowing down. We've passed the point where we can have the nice version. That way is now blocked by past heedlessness and greed. We don't know how to slow down, so the only way forward is crash. Since we've overall stopped producing new things, we're stuck financializing everything and pushing money upward to a tiny elite. China grew, but it did so by cannibalizing existing markets, by replacing existing capacity. The standard productivity story is muddled by the fact that we're not really manufacturing goods anymore and have instead moved into pure services. The current trend is to reimagine new territory in so-called metaverses. Instead of escaping the planet to travel to Mars, people are now just trying to escape anywhere, even virtual places. The clever ones are capitalizing on this to sell people nothing for something, transforming fairy tales into real assets and actually usable liquidity. I've included "notes, citations and errata" in a separate post. What Every Programmer Should Know About Memory (2007) by Ulrich Drepper This is a "114-page document" about various features of processor architectures and of programming languages and techniques that affect performance. It starts with a discussion of how memory (RAM or cache) even works, on an electrical level. How much maintenance overhead does a capacitor in a memory unit need in order to maintain its value? That is, there are cycles during which the RAM is refreshing its capacitance and cannot be read. If a processor request for that data comes at the wrong time, the reply will stall longer than usual. This takes him into discussing processor caches and how and when data is retained or evicted. How can you align structures and data so that they fit into a cache line? How do you order operations so that a cache line can stay in the cache for as long as possible? What sort of eviction policies do processors even use? LRU? Something else? Can you control them? How do you avoid thrashing? Next up is concurrency: when multiple processors, each with their own tier of caches, are working with the "same" memory, then they have to coordinate on cache evictions so that no processor is using stale data. The amount of coordination is incredible and an eviction becomes even more costly as the number of processors increases. Changing data in-memory becomes quite costly and should be avoided, if possible. At the very least, one should be aware of how much it costs to change memory. There might be simple things you can do at a high level of abstraction that makes it easier for the compiler to generate performant code for you. I've included "notes, citations and errata" in a separate post. The Vital Abyss (2015) by James S.A. Corey This story takes place after Abaddon's Gate. It tells the story of Paulo Cortázar, who started life as a somewhat gifted, but lazy student. He gets hooked on amphetamines during his latter years at university and manages to get his degree. A mysterious corporation takes an interest in him, liking his seeming lack of scruples. This doesn't bother him at all. He takes the job and begins work at Thoth Station, working for ProtoGen, the Jules-Pierre Mao corporation that unleashed the protomolecule on Eros. That experiment was organized by Cortázar and his team of scientists. The scientists there have had all human empathy worn out of them; they are monsters, seeing only experimental opportunity where most people see fellow human beings. They are in love with the potential of the protomolecule and are more than arrogant enough to believe that they will be able to learn how it works and to control it. This is the story of what happens to the staff. They are confined to a space station by the precursor to the Free Navy. They are all kept in a single, large, open room with little cover and little furniture, looked down upon by Belter guards. The do everything in the open and in public. The scientists without empathy -- the most intelligent and ruthless ones -- thrive the best. They openly scheme and openly copulate. Cortázar has a boyfriend whom he ends up betraying. The renegade Martian contingent headed up by Duarte coerces the Belters into helping them find the most useful prisoner. They play mind games to get them to divulge information about the protomolecule. They slowly feed them information about what's happened with the Ring. Cortázar has properly divined the purpose of the Ring and the meaning of the data. The Martians take him away to eventually take him to the planet that would become Laconia, where Cortázar would develop protomolecule technologies, breeding "catalysts" and working to grant Duarte immortality. I've included "notes, citations and errata" in a separate post. Cibola Burn (2014) by James S.A. Corey This is the fourth book in The Expanse series. It follows the Rocinante to a planet called Ilus (colonists) or New Terra (U.N.). The Roci is sent there by Avasarala and Fred Johnson to settle the dispute between colonists and the official science and security team sent by the U.N. Basia Merton is a colonist, there with his wife Lucia, the colony's doctor and their daughter Felcia. The colonists are mainly Belters, who arrived on the Barbapiccola. They'd managed to convert their bodies to be compatible with living on a planet and have started mining the planet's lithium. They think that they can stand on the law of "first come, first served," but the U.N. is going to land and take everything away from them, claiming their right based on decisions and laws made in a complete other star system. There are colonists who are unhappy enough with this situation to want to disable the landing pad. Basia is one of them. However, just as they've set up the charges and primed them, they hear that the shuttle from the U.N. ship Edward Israel is coming early. The explosives go off just as the shuttle is trying to land and it crashes, killing most of the passengers. Exozoologist Elvi Okoye is on the shuttle and survives the crash, as does geohydraulicist Fayez Sarkis. Soon after, the dangerous and deadly security chief Murtry comes down to the surface. After the colonists kill most of the remaining RCE security personnel, Murtry is in his element. He's ready to whip the colonists off of the planet and will feel justified in doing so by any means necessary. He will, in fact, enjoy doing so immensely. I've included "notes, citations and errata" in a separate post. The Dying Animal (2001) by Philip Roth To no-one’s surprise at all, this novel by Roth tells the story of a senior literature professor. His name is David Kepesh, but that doesn’t really matter. This is, apparently, the third in a series that started with The Breast. At least Roth is dead-honest about what he considers to be the most worthy literary subject of all time. It’s really hard not to feel that this is autobiographical to some degree. A Cuban-American named Consuela Castillo is taken one of his courses and she catches Kepesh’s roving eye. An equally apt title for this book could also have been Consuela’s Rack. He laments the passing of a less-contentious world, one in which it was less a war between oppressed parties. But this world perhaps never existed. He makes a good argument that it did, for a while, but that it slipped away. True equality will have to wait, instead swaying to and fro between pendulum points, going to extremes on a spectrum, avoiding the plurality of territory between. I don’t know what compulsion drove him to write this book, but I’m glad he did. I am not him, but there is enough of what he writes that rings a bit familiar, or is understandable (nachvollziehbar in German) that it’s nice to see a writer of his capability give voice to that which most would be too ashamed to admit, even in part. The beast lurks within. Taming it is a series of conscious acts we spend a lifetime trying to transform into unconscious ones. I've included "notes, citations and errata" in a separate post. Nemesis Games (2015) by James S.A. Corey This is the fifth book of the The Expanse series. The book starts with a Belter raid on a Martian base on Callisto. A 15-year-old named Filip leads the raid. He is forced to leave a man behind, but the mission is otherwise a success. The managed to capture the stealth shielding from the Martians and made it look like a botched raid on a different warehouse. The Rocinante is back at Tycho Station, this time for half-year of repairs and upgrades. Amos heads to Earth to take care of an old friend’s affairs (Lydia has died). Alex heads for Mars to try to patch things up with his ex-wife. Naomi gets a message from the OPA that her son Filip is in trouble. She takes off without telling even Holden where she’s going. The crew is scattered to the winds. Holden remains behind, overseeing the repairs—and taking up tools himself to keep himself busy. Bad things happen and the Free Navy and the rogue elements of the Martian Navy have gotten the drop on Sol System. Their overall plan is multi-pronged. Alex and Bobbie are detected and their ship disabled by the Free/Martian Navy. Holden and Fred are on the hunt for who’s a traitor on Tycho, but they eventually lose the protomolecule sample to an attack. Earth has been grievously wounded, half of Mars’s Navy is under Duarte’s control. The Belters are loose and causing trouble, Tycho is disabled, and Duarte has the protomolecule. The crew of the Rocinante manages to save the day and get back together. Earth is picking up the pieces. The Free Navy takes over Medina Station, Duarte takes control of his ships and heads off for Laconia, but the Barkeith, the largest of the ships, disappears forever, going “Dutchman” in a mysterious event that seems to be swallowing some ships. I've included "notes, citations and errata" in a separate post. Babylon's Ashes (2016) by James S.A. Corey This is the sixth book of the The Expanse series. It starts with Marco Inaros and his Free Navy in charge of the Slow Zone and Medina Station in it. Michio Pa is at the heart of the small group of higher-ups in the Free Navy who are beginning to seriously doubt Marco’s qualifications and goals. Those goals always seem to change whenever Marco would have had to admit that he’d failed. He managed to destroy billions on Earth, but the blow strikes simultaneously at Belters because they still obtain most of their volatiles and food from Earth. All other operations have failed in one way or another. Marco, meanwhile, is employing guerrilla tactics to leave as much territory and population to the “inners” as possible, to increase the burden of people under their care. It doesn’t occur to him that them taking care of these people will make his enemies look like the “good guys” to those people—including a lot of Belters. The crew of the Rocinante is helping Earth and Mars pick up the pieces and fight the Free Navy. One part of the effort is to work with Monica on mini-documentaries highlighting the humanity of all people—to show Earthers and Belters that they’re all suffering. They hope to show them that they should band together against the guerrilla force that doesn’t seem to care about them—and that seems to be more pirate than government. Naomi finally notices the pattern that explains all of the ships that went missing in transit, realizing that it is related to and/or caused by the cumulative energy levels of all simultaneous transits. She designs an attack on Marco that sends the Giambattista—filled with junk to increase its mass—through a gate at the same time that Marco’s 15 ships come through. Therewith they manage to force the energy level high enough to cause Marco’s ships to be swallowed up like all of the others. I've included "notes, citations and errata" in a separate post. Strange Dogs (2017) by James S.A. Corey A girl named Cara lives on a planet named Laconia with her parents, who are part of a research team. Laconia is one of the 1300 ring worlds discovered by humanity in The Expanse novels. Cara enjoys visiting a local pond, where she watches the strange and alien local fauna, in particular the sunbirds. At twilight, “strange dogs” show up, but seem to pose no risk. One day, Cara feeds a bit of her own food to a sunbird. She saw someone do something similar with a duck in a book about Paris on Earth—all of which is completely alien to her. The sunbird chokes on the alien chemistry and dies. Its two children are left alone and cannot reach the nest. Distressed, Cara runs home to get her mother’s research drone, which she hopes to use to airlift the babies back to their nest. She fails, breaking the drone in the process. The dogs return and leave with the sunbird mother’s corpse. The next day, the mama sunbird is back, but slightly altered. It’s alive, but no longer quite the same. The baby sunbirds interact with her just fine, though. Cara asks the dogs to repair the drone and they leave with it. The next day, the drone has been repaired as well. Commandante Duarte has taken over the planet with his marines. One of the marines runs over Cara’s brother Xan. Duarte visits her family’s home to apologize and promise retribution. Cara sneaks Xan’s body away from the funeral and brings it to the dogs. The next morning, Xan is alive but, like the mama sunbird, a little off. Cara’s parents are repulsed by the reincarnation of Xan, with her father knifing him and barring him from the house. Cara sneaks out, finds Xan, and they head into the forest together, to seek refuge with the dogs. I've included "notes, citations and errata" in a separate post. Oryx and Crake (2003) by Margaret Atwood This is the first of three novels in the MaddAddam trilogy. This one tells the story of Snowman, a lone, somewhat mad, man living on his own in a post-apocalyptic world, nearly bereft of other human life. The only other "people" around are a tribe of pleasant, but simple humanoids that Snowman calls Crakers. Snowman remembers a time when there were more people than just the Crakers. He remembers a time when the planet was controlled by supra-national corporations that ran privileged compounds for their employees. Everyone else -- the Plebes -- lived in lawless hinterlands, where the privileged went to play. Snowman grew up as Jimmy, where his mother and father both worked for HelthWyzer, a company that bred animals for the express purpose of providing more plentiful and nutritious food. Jimmy befriends Glenn, a prodigy at his school. They spend most of their time playing video games and watching extreme pornography and snuff videos online. Jimmy falls in love with one of the young, Asian girls in one of these films. The girl is Oryx. Crake is good enough at building stuff his company wants that he's also able to produce his Crakers as well as a product called BlyssPluss, which is touted as a sexual super-pill but additionally sterilizes its users (to control the population of the most dangerous species). Crake hires Jimmy to market it, but the pill is basically so awesome that is markets itself. Crake just wants Jimmy close by for the endgame of his master plan. Crake's master plan involves getting rid of humanity. I've included "notes, citations and errata" in a separate post. The Boys (2006--2012) by Garth Ennis & Darick Robertson The Boys is a story about a world with super-powered beings (“supes”). This is not unusual for comic books, or graphic novels. The distinction is that this story doesn’t make a distinction between superheroes and supervillains. It doesn’t believe that superheroes exist. Or it grudgingly concedes that some super-powered beings seem not to take advantage of their powers for personal gain. The only example of a high-level super-powered being who does so is Annie. The story starts with Hughie, whose girlfriend is slaughtered by accident by the super-powered A-Train, one of Vought’s Seven. The Seven are the pinnacle of the supe pyramid, at the top of the media and publicity and merchandising and franchising game. It’s all about money, money and power. The supes are a decadent lot, depicting in loving detail in these books, with lots of sex and violence. I've included "notes, citations and errata" in a separate post. Eva (1997--1998) by Claude Jaermann & Felix Schaad Eva Grjdic works at Cosmos, a grocery-store chain à la Migros. The art style reminds me very much of my well-worn and beloved Mad magazines that I spent my youth reading. It is, perhaps, closest to Mort Drucker, with a bit of Sergio Aragones mixed in. The text is brilliant. It's subversive, it's so very Swiss. The context is so very Swiss. You won't be able to really understand this comic unless you live here or lived her at that time. Eva is dirt poor and barely makes ends meet in a country otherwise overflowing with wealth. She's on welfare, but eventually ends up living in a shipping container right next to Cosmos, and the rent "ziehen wir Ihnen wird der Einfachheit halber direkt am Lohn ab". Then they lose welfare because it looks like they no longer pay rent. The social worker is happy to make an "arrangement" with Eva's daughter, though. Things continue in this vein. I've included "notes, citations and errata" in a separate post. The Year of the Flood (2009) by Margaret Atwood This is the second of three novels in the MaddAddam trilogy. The events in this book cover the same time frame as the "first novel" , but from the points of view of different characters. In that novel, we read about a girl named Bernice that Jimmy knew at the Martha-Graham Academy they both attended. She was a God's Gardener. In this book, we learn more about her and much more about the Gardeners. The mythology of the Gardeners is quite scientific. They are highly self-sufficient and very ascetic. Their lifestyle is a combination of vegan, Amish, eco-warrior, rationalist, but also religious. An interesting balance, to say the least. My hat is off to Ms. Atwood, once again. "Do we deserve this Love by which God maintains our Cosmos? Do we deserve it as a Species? We have taken the World given to us and carelessly destroyed its fabric and its Creatures. Other religions have taught that this World is to be rolled up like a scroll and burnt to nothingness, and that a new Heaven and a new Earth will then appear. But why would God give us another Earth when we have mistreated this one so badly? No, my Friends. It is not this Earth that is to be demolished: it is the Human Species. Perhaps God will create another, more compassionate race to take our place." They have a whole pantheon of saints and holidays based on environmentally conscious people like Rachel Carson and Dian Fossey, but also on explorers like Ernest Shackleton. They predict a "waterless flood", which comes in the form of Crake's virus. "This was not an ordinary pandemic: it wouldn’t be contained after a few hundred thousand deaths, then obliterated with biotools and bleach. This was the Waterless Flood the Gardeners so often had warned about. It had all the signs: it travelled through the air as if on wings, it burned through cities like fire, spreading germ-ridden mobs, terror, and butchery. The lights were going out everywhere, the news was sporadic: systems were failing as their keepers died." The story focuses on Toby, a young woman forced to rely on herself very early in life, after having lost her parents to some sort of unclear, corporate debacle. She ends up working at an off-grid fast-food place in the Pleeblands. Simultaneously, she's more-or-less enslaved to Blanco, the owner of the restaurant and psychotic leader of a small gang that rapes and plunders as it pleases. She is rescued by the God's Gardeners and whisked away to safety in a rooftop garden called Edencliff. I've included "notes, citations and errata" in a separate post. ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=4342 2022-02-18T23:40:49+01:00 https://earthli.com/users/marco

for more information. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me of what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I've failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an interest in this book, then I'm happy for you. [Citations] ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=4364 2022-02-18T23:40:15+01:00 https://earthli.com/users/marco

, but from the points of view of different characters. In that novel, we read about a girl named Bernice that Jimmy knew at the Martha-Graham Academy... ]]>

, but from the points of view of different characters. In that novel, we read about a girl named Bernice that Jimmy knew at the Martha-Graham Academy they both attended. She was a God's Gardener. In this book, we learn more about her and much more about the Gardeners. The mythology of the Gardeners is quite scientific. They are highly self-sufficient and very ascetic. Their lifestyle is a combination of vegan, Amish, eco-warrior, rationalist, but also religious. An interesting balance, to say the least. My hat is off to Ms. Atwood, once again. "Do we deserve this Love by which God maintains our Cosmos? Do we deserve it as a Species? We have taken the World given to us and carelessly destroyed its fabric and its Creatures. Other religions have taught that this World is to be rolled up like a scroll and burnt to nothingness, and that a new Heaven and a new Earth will then appear. But why would God give us another Earth when we have mistreated this one so badly? No, my Friends. It is not this Earth that is to be demolished: it is the Human Species. Perhaps God will create another, more compassionate race to take our place." They have a whole pantheon of saints and holidays based on environmentally conscious people like Rachel Carson and Dian Fossey, but also on explorers like Ernest Shackleton. They predict a "waterless flood", which comes in the form of Crake's virus. "This was not an ordinary pandemic: it wouldn’t be contained after a few hundred thousand deaths, then obliterated with biotools and bleach. This was the Waterless Flood the Gardeners so often had warned about. It had all the signs: it travelled through the air as if on wings, it burned through cities like fire, spreading germ-ridden mobs, terror, and butchery. The lights were going out everywhere, the news was sporadic: systems were failing as their keepers died." The story focuses on Toby, a young woman forced to rely on herself very early in life, after having lost her parents to some sort of unclear, corporate debacle. She ends up working at an off-grid fast-food place in the Pleeblands. Simultaneously, she's more-or-less enslaved to Blanco, the owner of the restaurant and psychotic leader of a small gang that rapes and plunders as it pleases. She is rescued by the God's Gardeners and whisked away to safety in a rooftop garden called Edencliff. Although at first skeptical, Toby becomes a reliable acolyte of the Gardeners, rising in Adam One's esteem. The beginnings and ends of chapters are filled with sermons and parables and aphorisms of Adam One and others. "When the small creatures hush their singing, said Adam One, it’s because they’re afraid. You must listen for the sound of their fear." "Adam One sighed. “We should not expect too much from faith,” he said. “Human understanding is fallible, and we see through a glass, darkly. Any religion is a shadow of God. But the shadows of God are not God.”" "We should not have allowed Melissa to lag so far behind us. Via the conduit of a wild dog pack, she has now made the ultimate Gift to her fellow Creatures, and has become part of God’s great dance of proteins. Put Light around her in your hearts. Let us sing." "Let us sing" ends every chapter. The world outside is increasingly incomprehensible -- not unlike our own. "And the Internet was such a jumble of false and true factoids that no one believed what was on it any more, or else they believed all of it, which amounted to the same thing." Toby gets to know Ren, a young girl who'd been taken in with her mother Lucerne, who's taken up with Zeb, a charismatic but somewhat rogue member of the Gardeners (he doesn't have an Adam or Eve designation). Ren (short for Brenda) is friends with Amanda and Bernice (both of whom would later date Jimmy (Snowman) at one point or another). Ren meets Jimmy as well, when she's forced to return to civilization when her mother flakes out and abandons the Gardeners. She also meets Glenn (Crake), introducing him to God's Gardeners, in which he is very interested (it's part of his master plan, of course). Much later, Ren attends Martha-Graham academy, meeting Bernice and Jimmy again, but eventually drops out of Martha Graham and is forced to take a job dancing in a club (the Scales and Tails, where all of the girls dress up as animals) in Pleebland. She's relatively well-cared-for there, and is in a hermetic containment unit at the club when the virus hits really hard and wipes out everyone else. Unfortunately, she's also stuck there, running low on supplies. Amanda travels across the country to rescue her and they make their way out of there. Toby meanwhile, is back in trouble with Blanco, who tracks her down to the Gardeners. She is forced to flee back to civilization, taking up a position at Anooyoo Spa, where she is transformed with plastic surgery. Lucerne doesn't even recognize her when she comes in for treatments. When the virus hits, Toby is also safe and barricaded there, foraging and reverting to her Gardener/Eve persona. Blanco and two other evil men have escaped the Painball arena where they'd been imprisoned and forced to compete in deadly games for sport. "Some teams would hang their kill on a tree, some would mutilate the body. Cut off the head, tear out the heart and kidneys. That was to intimidate the other team. Eat part of it, if food was running low or just to show how mean you were. After a while, thought Toby, you wouldn’t just cross the line, you’d forget there ever were any lines. You’d do whatever it takes." They track down Toby, who'd joined back up with Ren and Amanda. Blanco and co. drag off Ren and Amanda, while Toby manages to join back up with Zeb and other gardeners who've managed to survive and make a home away from Edencliff. Toby is determined to save Amanda and Ren. She shoots Blanco in the leg and rescues Ren, but poor Amanda is left with the evil trio. Toby tracks them down and finds Blanco feverish and damaged, but dangerous as a cornered rat, tied up by his friends, who have abandoned him. She poisons him and finally manages to leave him in her rear-view mirror. She lights out in pursuit of Amanda and her two captors. She sneaks through the forest, creeping up on the same campfire onto which Jimmy/Snowman stumbled at the end of Oryx and Crake: the three people that Snowman saw are actually the two fugitives and Amanda. Amanda is in bad shape, but manages to distract them long enough for Snowman and Toby to incapacitate them. More people are heard approaching -- presumably to be explained in the third volume. We dangle by a flimsy thread, Our little lives are grains of sand: The Cosmos is a tiny sphere Held in the hollow of God’s hand. Give up your anger and your spite, And imitate the Deer, the Tree; In sweet Forgiveness find your joy, For it alone can set you free. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me of what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I've failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an interest in this book, then I'm happy for you. [Citations] "When the small creatures hush their singing, said Adam One, it’s because they’re afraid. You must listen for the sound of their fear." "We shouldn’t have been so scornful; we should have had compassion. But compassion takes work, and we were young." "They’re a quarter of the way across the meadow when it occurs to her they’ll be back. They’ll dig under at night and root up her garden in no time flat, and that will be the end of her long-term food supply. She’ll have to shoot them, it’s self-defence. She squeezes off a round, misses, tries again. The boar falls down. The two sows keep running. Only when they’ve reached the forest rim do they turn and look back. Then they meld with the foliage and are gone." "This was not an ordinary pandemic: it wouldn’t be contained after a few hundred thousand deaths, then obliterated with biotools and bleach. This was the Waterless Flood the Gardeners so often had warned about. It had all the signs: it travelled through the air as if on wings, it burned through cities like fire, spreading germ-ridden mobs, terror, and butchery. The lights were going out everywhere, the news was sporadic: systems were failing as their keepers died." "No doctor could give her a diagnosis, though many tests were done by the HelthWyzer Corp clinics; they took an interest because she’d been such a faithful user of their products. They arranged for special care, with their own doctors. They charged for it, though, and even with the discount for members of the HelthWyzer Franchise Family it was a lot of money; and because the condition had no name, her parents’ modest health insurance plan refused to cover the costs. Nobody could get public wellness coverage unless they had no money of their own whatsoever." "Already, back then, the CorpSeCorps were consolidating their power. They’d started as a private security firm for the Corporations, but then they’d taken over when the local police forces collapsed for lack of funding, and people liked that at first because the Corporations paid, but now CorpSeCorps were sending their tentacles everywhere." "She’d burned her identity and didn’t have the cash to buy a new one — not even a cheap one, without the DNA infusion or the skin-colour change — so she couldn’t get a legitimate job: those were mostly controlled by the Corporations. But if you sank deep down — down where names disappeared and no histories were true — the CorpSeCorps wouldn’t bother with you." "“You’ll want to grow your hair,” said Nuala. “Get rid of that scalped look. We Gardener women all wear our hair long.” When Toby asked why, she was given to understand that the aesthetic preference was God’s. This kind of smiling, bossy sanctimoniousness was a little too pervasive for Toby, especially among the female members of the sect." "“It would be bad for their image to eviscerate anything with God in its name,” said Adam One. “The Corporations wouldn’t approve of it, considering the influence of the Petrobaptists and the Known Fruits among them. They claim to respect the Spirit and to favour religious toleration, as long as the religions don’t take to blowing things up: they have an aversion to the destruction of private property.” "“They can’t possibly like us,” said Toby. "“Of course not,” said Adam One. “They view us as twisted fanatics who combine food extremism with bad fashion sense and a puritanical attitude towards shopping. But we own nothing they want, so we don’t qualify as terrorists." "But we affirm, also, the Divine agency that has caused us to be created in the way that we were, and this has enraged those scientific fools who say in their hearts, “There is no God.” These claim to prove the non-existence of God because they cannot put Him in a test tube and weigh and measure Him. "But God is pure Spirit; so how can anyone reason that the failure to measure the Immeasurable proves its non-existence? God is indeed the No Thing, the Nothingness, that through which and by which all material things exist; for if there were not such a Nothingness, existence would be so crammed full of materiality that no one thing could be distinguished from another. The mere existence of separate material things is a proof of the Nothingness of God. "Where were the scientific fools when God laid the foundations of the Earth by interposing his own Spirit between one blob of matter and another, thus giving rise to forms?" "They looked as if they already owned everything from every single store and were bored with it. I envied that look so much. I just stood there, envying." "“How do they stay alive in there?” She pointed to the silver knob where the bracelet fastened. "“This is an aerator,” she said. “It pumps in oxygen. You add the food twice a week.” "“What happens if you forget?” "“They eat each other,” said Amanda. She gave a little smile. “Some kids do that on purpose, they don’t add the food. Then it’s like a miniwar in there, and after a while there’s just one jellyfish left, and then it dies.” "“That’s horrible,” I said. "Amanda kept the same smile. “Yeah. That’s why they do it.”" "May God deliver us from the snare of the fowler, and cover us with his feathers, and under his wings may we trust, as it says in Psalm 91; and thou shalt not be afraid of the pestilence that walketh in darkness, nor for the destruction that wasteth at noonday. May I remind you all about the importance of hand-washing, seven times a day at least, and after every encounter with a stranger. It is never too early to practise this essential precaution. Avoid anyone who is sneezing. Let us sing." "“Who lives here?” she says out loud. Not me, she thinks. This thing I’m doing can hardly be called living. Instead I’m lying dormant, like a bacterium in a glacier. Getting time over with. That’s all." "Some teams would hang their kill on a tree, some would mutilate the body. Cut off the head, tear out the heart and kidneys. That was to intimidate the other team. Eat part of it, if food was running low or just to show how mean you were. After a while, thought Toby, you wouldn’t just cross the line, you’d forget there ever were any lines. You’d do whatever it takes." "Thus the time passed. Toby stopped counting it. In any case, time is not a thing that passes, said Pilar: it’s a sea on which you float." "“Now, promise me that you will never take any pill made by a Corporation. Never buy such a pill, and never accept any such pill if offered, no matter what they say. They’ll produce data and scientists; they’ll produce doctors — worthless, they’ve all been bought.”" "It was true that the Gardeners didn’t look down on Lucerne, or not for the reasons she thought they did. They might resent the way she slacked off on chores and could never learn how to chop a carrot, they might be scornful of the messiness of her living space and her pathetic attempt at windowsill tomato-growing and the amount of time she spent in bed, but they didn’t care about her infidelity, or her adultery, or whatever it had once been called." "Why do we want other people to like us, even if we don’t really care about them all that much? I don’t know why, but it’s true. I found myself standing there and smelling all those smells, and hoping a lot that Shackie and Croze thought I was pretty." "I don’t know how long all of that lasted because time was like rubber, it stretched out like a long, long elastic rope or a huge piece of chewing gum. Then it snapped shut into a tiny black square and I passed out." "I point no fingers, for I know not where to point; but as we have just seen, malicious rumours can spread confusion. A careless remark can be as the cigarette butt casually tossed into the dumpster, smouldering until it bursts into flame and engulfs a neighbourhood. Do guard your words in future." "While the Flood rages, you must count the days, said Adam One. You must observe the risings of the Sun and the changings of the Moon, because to everything there is a season. On your Meditations, do not travel so far on your inner journeys that you enter the Timeless before it is time. In your Fallow states, do not descend to a level that is too deep for any resurgence, or the Night will come in which all hours are the same to you, and then there will be no Hope." "Adam One sighed. “We should not expect too much from faith,” he said. “Human understanding is fallible, and we see through a glass, darkly. Any religion is a shadow of God. But the shadows of God are not God.”" "[...] how ruthlessly Bernice had been shouldered aside, once Amanda had appeared on the scene. They think we don’t see them, thought Toby. They think we don’t know what they’re up to. Their snobberies, their cruelties, their schemes." "I can't stand this, she thought. I’m killing her. No: I’m helping her to die. I’m fulfilling her wishes. She watched as Pilar drank. “Thank you for learning,”" "“Thank you for all you’ve taught me,” said Toby. I can’t stand this, she thought. I’m killing her. No: I’m helping her to die. I’m fulfilling her wishes. She watched as Pilar drank. "“Thank you for learning,” said Pilar. “I’m going to sleep now. Don’t forget to tell the bees.”" "Final self-journeying is a moral option only for the experienced and, I have to say, only for the terminally ill, as Pilar was; but it’s not one we should make widely available — especially not to our young people, who are impressionable and prone to indulge in morbid sulking and false heroics. I trust you’ve taken charge of those medicine bottles of Pilar’s? We wouldn’t want any accidents.”" "On April Fish Day, which originated in France, we make fun of one another by attaching a Fish of paper, or, in our case, a Fish of recycled cloth, to the back of another person and then crying out, “April Fish!” Or, in the original French, “Poisson d’Avril!” In anglophone countries, this day is known as April Fool’s Day. But April Fish was surely first a Christian festival, as a Fish image was used by the early Christians as secret signals of their faith in times of oppression." "The Serpent is wise in that it lives in immediacy, without the need for the elaborate intellectual frameworks Humankind is endlessly constructing for itself. For what in us is belief and faith, in the other Creatures is inborn knowledge." "We cannot know God by reason and measurement; indeed, excess reason and measurement lead to doubt. Through them, we know that Comets and nuclear holocausts are among the possible tomorrows, not to mention the Waterless Flood, that we fear looms ever nearer. This fear dilutes our certainty, and through that channel comes loss of Faith; and then the temptation to enact malevolence enters our Souls; for if annihilation awaits us, why bother to strive for the Good?" "We’re using up the Earth. It’s almost gone. You can’t live with such fears and keep on whistling. The waiting builds up in you like a tide. You start wanting it to be done with. You find yourself saying to the sky, Just do it. Do your worst. Get it over with. She could feel the coming tremor of it running through her spine, asleep or awake. It never went away, even among the Gardeners. Especially — as time wore on — among the Gardeners." "That would be putting the cart before the horse, said Adam One; they could not achieve their goal of reconciling the findings of Science with their sacramental view of Life simply by overriding the rules of the former. He asked them to ponder this conundrum, and propose solutions at a later date." "The strictly materialist view — that we’re an experiment animal protein has been doing on itself — is far too harsh and lonely for most, and leads to nihilism. That being the case, we need to push popular sentiment in a biosphere-friendly direction by pointing out the hazards of annoying God by a violation of His trust in our stewardship.” "“What you mean is, with God in the story there’s a penalty,” said Toby. "“Yes,” said Adam One. “There’s a penalty without God in the story too, needless to say. But people are less likely to credit that. If there’s a penalty, they want a penalizer. They dislike senseless catastrophe.”" "The Hammerhead paced the floor and gnawed her fingernails until Toby felt like hitting her. We didn’t ask you to come here and put all our necks in a noose over a teaspoonful of stale-dated crap, she wanted to say. In the end she gave the woman some chamomile tea with Poppy in it, just to take her off the airwaves." The Hammerhead is Jimmy's mother. "“Our role in respect to the Creatures is to bear witness,” said Adam One. “And to guard the memories and the genomes of the departed. You can’t fight blood with blood. I thought we’d agreed on that.”" "“Be of good cheer,” he said. “Nothing bad will be done to you.” But since Adam One thought that even the most terrible things happened for ultimately excellent though unfathomable reasons, Toby did not find this reassuring." "And the Internet was such a jumble of false and true factoids that no one believed what was on it any more, or else they believed all of it, which amounted to the same thing." "Any death is stupid from the viewpoint of whoever is undergoing it, Adam One used to say, because no matter how much you’ve been warned, Death always comes without knocking. Why now? is the cry. Why so soon? It’s the cry of a child being called home at dusk, it’s the universal protest against Time." "Adam One would say that Ren is a precious gift that has been given to Toby so that Toby may demonstrate unselfishness and sharing and those higher qualities the Gardeners had been so eager to bring out in her. Toby can’t quite see it that way, not at the moment. But she’ll have to keep trying." "Some will tell you Love is merely chemical, my Friends, said Adam One. Of course it is chemical: where would any of us be without chemistry? But Science is merely one way of describing the world. Another way of describing it would be to say: where would any of us be without Love?" "Saints Shackleton and Crozier, of Antarctic and Arctic fame; and Saint Laurence “Titus” Oates of the Scott Expedition, who hiked where no man had ever hiked before, and who sacrificed himself during a blizzard for the welfare of his companions. Let his immortal last words be an inspiration to us on our journey: “I am just going outside and may be some time.”" "We should not have allowed Melissa to lag so far behind us. Via the conduit of a wild dog pack, she has now made the ultimate Gift to her fellow Creatures, and has become part of God’s great dance of proteins. Put Light around her in your hearts. Let us sing." "Are the new people Your idea of an improved model? Is this what the first Adam was supposed to be? Will they replace us? Or do You intend to shrug your shoulders and carry on with the present human race? If so, you’ve chosen some odd marbles: a clutch of one-time scientists, a handful of renegade Gardeners, two psychotics on the loose with a nearly dead woman. It’s hardly the survival of the fittest, except for Zeb; but even Zeb’s tired." "Do we deserve this Love by which God maintains our Cosmos? Do we deserve it as a Species? We have taken the World given to us and carelessly destroyed its fabric and its Creatures. Other religions have taught that this World is to be rolled up like a scroll and burnt to nothingness, and that a new Heaven and a new Earth will then appear. But why would God give us another Earth when we have mistreated this one so badly? No, my Friends. It is not this Earth that is to be demolished: it is the Human Species. Perhaps God will create another, more compassionate race to take our place." "For the Waterless Flood has swept over us — not as a vast hurricane, not as a barrage of comets, not as a cloud of poisonous gasses. No: as we suspected for so long, it is a plague — a plague that infects no Species but our own, and that will leave all other Creatures untouched. Our cities are darkened, our lines of communication are no more." "But let our going out be brave and joyous! Let us end with a prayer for All Souls. Among these are the Souls of those who have persecuted us; those who have murdered God’s Creatures, and extinguished His Species; those who have tortured in the name of Law; who have worshipped nothing but riches; and who, to gain wealth and worldly power, have inflicted pain and death." We dangle by a flimsy thread, Our little lives are grains of sand: The Cosmos is a tiny sphere Held in the hollow of God’s hand. Give up your anger and your spite, And imitate the Deer, the Tree; In sweet Forgiveness find your joy, For it alone can set you free. ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=4338 2022-02-17T22:50:24+01:00 https://earthli.com/users/marco

https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=4325 2022-02-06T18:46:52+01:00 https://earthli.com/users/marco

. "The Gods must be crazy" . Prax is back on Ganymede and his team has discovered a way of growing food more quickly for the billions on Earth who no longer have consistent sustenance. The improvements would also benefit the Belt. However, the Free Navy seems to have killed off one of his researchers who was trying to publish the results in public. Prax eventually gets his research out onto the 'net and avoids the reprisals of the Free Navy -- because they are by that time too busy saving themselves. Michio Pa's splinter group teams up with Fred Johnson and the inners, partially for protection and partially because of aligned causes. There are various skirmishes that finally end up with Inaros vs. Rocinante. The Roci gets the upper hand, but Holden disables missiles that were on target because he saw that Filip was on board. Maybe not his proudest moment. Fred Johnson dies of a stroke because of the high-G maneuvers of the battle. Because of this, Avasarala nominates Holden to attend the "peace" conference with the high-level Free Navy defectors. She personally takes on the task of honing his negotiating and diplomacy skills. "Strength by itself is just bullying, capitulation by itself is an invitation to get fucked; only mixed strategies survive. Everything is personal, but they know that too. They can smell pandering like a fart. If you treat them like they’re a treasure box where if you just tweak them the right way, the policy you want falls out, you’re already fucked. They’ll misjudge you, so be ready to use that." Meanwhile ships are still disappearing during ring transit -- seemingly randomly -- but Duarte sends a bunch through to support the Free Navy and to attack Medina Station. The railguns mounted on the alien station take out all of the ships, validating the efficacy of the defenses. Also, a bunch of ships didn't make it through from Laconia -- what is going on with the gates? All of this effort and energy put into war is further weakening the Sol System's ability to feed itself -- and its colonies that still depend on it for supplies. The other planets largely have completely different biologies and cannot sustain human crops -- they are often based on completely different chemistries. Marco's only remaining adviser tells him that their three-year window of sustainability is shrinking rapidly. Naomi comes to the same conclusion, "The problem, she thought as she replaced the injection nozzle on the coffee machine, was capacity. They could make anything, but they couldn’t make it all at once. Humanity was going to get by on the minimum until there was a way to increase production, and a lot of people living on the margin wouldn’t make it. They’d die on Earth, yes, but keeping the Belt fed wasn’t going to be trivial either." But Marco and his inner advisers don't feel the pinch -- as his kind never has. "Probably it wouldn’t come clear until they’d used up everything. Kings were always the last to feel the famine. That wasn’t just the Belt. That was all of history. The people who’d just been going about their lives were the ones who could speak to the actual cost of war. They paid it first. Men like Marco could orchestrate vast battles, order the looting and destruction of worlds, and never run out of coffee." Sanjrani is the one of Marco's former advisers who's run the numbers the most. He discusses the problem with Michio Pa. "“We’re fine now,” Sanjrani said. “We’ll be fine for three years. Maybe three and a half. Then the recycling systems stop being able to meet demand. We won’t have infrastructure in place to fill the gaps. And then we’ll starve. Not just Earth. Not just Mars. The Belt too. And once we start, we’ll have no way to stop.” "“All right,” Michio said. “How do we fix it?” "“I don’t know,” Sanjrani said." With a tenuous truce between part of the Belt and the Inner planets, Avasarala presses her advantage. They come up with a plan to take back Medina Station by sending a giant ice hauler named Giambattista filled with 4000 "ships" (or things that look like ships) that can be deployed to distract the railgun until others can board the station and overwhelm the Free Navy. Simultaneously, they attack other Free Navy bases to keep Inaros busy. Bobbie and Amos lead an attack on the alien station with the railguns and manage to disable them. Filip abandons his father as Marco launches a final 15-ship attack on the Ring to take back Medina Station from the Rocinante, which is the only ship currently guarding it. Naomi finally notices the pattern that explains all of the ships that went missing in transit, realizing that it is related to and/or caused by the cumulative energy levels of all simultaneous transits. She designs an attack on Marco that sends the Giambattista -- filled with junk to increase its mass -- through a gate at the same time that Marco's 15 ships come through. Therewith they manage to force the energy level high enough to cause Marco's ships to be swallowed up like all of the others. More than before, there is a peace of sorts: instead of Belters having to be worried that their society will die out because of the 1300 worlds, they will head up the Transport Union, an organization headquartered on Medina Station and responsible for managing traffic through the gates -- to prevent any ships from disappearing. Michio Pa is its first president. "But it was also a mistake to lose sight of all the individual lives and choices and flashes of pure dumb luck that brought humanity as far as they’d come. History, she thought, was perhaps better considered as a great improvisation. A thinking-through of some immense, generations-long thought. Or daydream." -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me of what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I've failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an interest in this book, then I'm happy for you. [Citations] "“Belt don’t make good parts,” the harbormaster whined. “We make the best parts there are,” Marco said. “History’s moved on, my friend." He made that true when he bombarded Earth and destroyed its industrial and lift capacity. But he just moved the baseline down. "“He’s slaughtered billions of people and remade the shape of human civilization. No one can do something on that scale and see themselves as fully human anymore. He may be a god or he may be a devil, but he can’t stomach the idea of being just an unreasonably pretty man who stumbled into the right combination of charisma and opportunity." "The torches flared and died and flared again. The Rocinante was remade a little, the same way it had been over and over through the years. Little changes adding up over time as the ship moved from what it had been to what it would be next. Just like all the people she carried." "“We’re not people,” he said. “We’re the stories that people tell each other about us. Belters are crazy terrorists. Earthers are lazy gluttons. Martians are cogs in a great big machine.” "“Men are fighters,” Naomi said, and then, her voice growing bleak. “Women are nurturing and sweet and they stay home with the kids. It’s always been like that. We always react to the stories about people, not who they really are.”" "And in the midst of it all, the great spinning plume of water and ice as the reservoirs vented. The water reserves spun out from the station, briefly echoing the arms of the galaxy and then stopped, thinned, and spread out into the vast darkness of the Belt. Ice lost among the steady brightness of stars." Since when do Belters waste supplies? "Father Cesar’s a good man. He’s gentle and he’s kind and he’s funny, and to him Belters are all Free Navy and radical OPA. If someone killed Pallas, he’d be worried about what the drop in refining capacity would do before he thought about how many preschools there are on the station." "Marco said. “Send me the tracking data for all of the ships still answering to Pa’s commands. You tell your guard ships at Pallas Witch of Endor’s gone rogue. Jam it, kill it, and send the battle data to us. No mercy for traitors.” "Rosenfeld nodded. “And Fred Johnson?” "“Butcher will bleed in his turn,” Marco said. “Never fear. This war’s just beginning.”" Whatever ends up happening is what he'd intended. "The problem, she thought as she replaced the injection nozzle on the coffee machine, was capacity. They could make anything, but they couldn’t make it all at once. Humanity was going to get by on the minimum until there was a way to increase production, and a lot of people living on the margin wouldn’t make it. They’d die on Earth, yes, but keeping the Belt fed wasn’t going to be trivial either." "[...] she wondered if Marco had thought about that or if his dreams of glory had swept away any realistic plan for taking care of all the lives he’d disrupted. She had a guess about that. Marco was a creature of the grand gesture. His stories were about the single critical moment that changed everything, not all the moments that came after." "Probably it wouldn’t come clear until they’d used up everything. Kings were always the last to feel the famine. That wasn’t just the Belt. That was all of history. The people who’d just been going about their lives were the ones who could speak to the actual cost of war. They paid it first. Men like Marco could orchestrate vast battles, order the looting and destruction of worlds, and never run out of coffee." "The universe has plans for you, Josep said in her imagination. You couldn’t have come this far through so many dangers if there weren’t a reason for you to be here. The same beautiful bullshit that everyone told themselves. That they were special. That they mattered. That some vast intelligence behind the curtains of reality cared what happened to them. And in all the history of the species, they’d all died anyway." "Fred was quiet for a long time, a sense of mourning blooming in his chest, thick and aching. “Honestly, then? I don’t know how it ends. I don’t even know if it ends. I dedicated my life to this fight. First one side, and then the other. But now, I look at it? What’s happened with the gates. What’s happened to Earth. I don’t recognize this anymore. I keep doing what I can because I don’t know what else to do.”" "When she died, she wanted it to be like this. Not in a hospital bed like her grandmother. Not in a sad little hole on Mars with a gun in her mouth or a gut full of pills like the failures of veterans’ outreach. She wanted to win, to protect her tribe and wipe the enemy into a paste of blood and dismay. But failing that, she wanted to die trying. A snippet of something she’d once read popped in her head: Facing fearful odds protecting the bones of her fathers and the temples of her gods. Yeah. Like that." "A high-speed three-sixty with a precision-timed rail gun shot halfway through the spin wasn’t exactly standard combat tactics for Martian frigates, but she thought her old combat-tactics instructors would have approved." Dm17 "The endless abyss opened around them, a whisper that the universe was larger than his ship. Larger than all the ships put together. Humanity could put its flag on thirteen hundred of those dots and not be a percent of a percent of a percent. That was the empire the inners were fighting and dying to control. A hundred more planets a dozen times over, and less than a rounding error of what was out there staring back at them." The ring is an artifact built by an automatic program created by a billions-year-dead civilization. It provides access to a handful of systems, presumably only a fraction of what was once available. All of this is so beyond humanity's own capabilities, it's like giving an iPhone to a Yanomamo. The Gods must be crazy. "His father tilted his head to one side. “I just told you that you failed. Now you’re giving me reasons why it’s okay that you failed? Is that how it works?” Filip knew the kind of calm now." Well, yes. Examining a failure is how you avoid the next one. "Sanjrani relaxed and pulled up a diagram from the desk’s display. A complex series of curves laid over x and y axes. “We made assumptions when we started this,” he said. “We made plans. Good ones, I think. But we didn’t follow them.” "“Dui,” Michio said. "“First thing we did,” he said, “was destroy the biggest source of wealth and complex organics in the system. The only supply of complex organics that work with our metabolisms. The worlds on the other side of the ring? Different genetic codes. Different chemistries. Not something we can import and eat. But that was okay. Projections were clear. We could build a new economy, put together infrastructure, make a sustainable network of microecologies in a cooperative-competitive matrix." "“We’re fine now,” Sanjrani said. “We’ll be fine for three years. Maybe three and a half. Then the recycling systems stop being able to meet demand. We won’t have infrastructure in place to fill the gaps. And then we’ll starve. Not just Earth. Not just Mars. The Belt too. And once we start, we’ll have no way to stop.” "“All right,” Michio said. “How do we fix it?” "“I don’t know,” Sanjrani said." "She was trying to help. Only when she closed her eyes, she saw the red line sloping down toward nothing, and no upward green swoop to answer it. Three years. Maybe three and a half. But to make it work, they had to start now. Had to have started already." Ooooh a climate-change analogy. "He’d missed two full shifts and come in during the middle of the third. Three days, almost, lost in the darkness of the security cell. No lawyer, no union representative. He could have asked for one—should have, by the rules and customs—but the certainty was solid as steel that it would have only meant more bruises. Maybe a broken bone. Vandercaust knew enough of history and human nature to know when the rules weren’t the rules anymore." "Being picked up by security, locked away, beaten, interrogated. They didn’t scare him in themselves. They scared him for what they said about how it came next. They scared him because they meant that Medina Station wasn’t a new beginning in history. It was and would be as red in the gutter as everyplace else humanity had set its flags." "Strength by itself is just bullying, capitulation by itself is an invitation to get fucked; only mixed strategies survive. Everything is personal, but they know that too. They can smell pandering like a fart. If you treat them like they’re a treasure box where if you just tweak them the right way, the policy you want falls out, you’re already fucked. They’ll misjudge you, so be ready to use that." "The whole process had been everything he hated—niggling on details and nuances, fighting over turns of phrase and the order information was presented in, fashioning something that, even where it wasn’t outright false, was tailored to be misunderstood. Politics at its most political." "They’ll try embarrassing you a little to see how you react. Don’t try to one-up them, or they’ll try to escalate out of conflicts later. Stay on point." "Something will go wrong. Something always does. They’ll see something you didn’t mean them to see; they’ll have a trap set you didn’t know to expect. These are intelligent people, and all of them have their own agendas. When it happens—not if, when—the worst thing you can do is panic. The second worst thing you can do is engage." "How many millions of times had people had this exact conversation before? How many wars had put two people together for a moment and then washed them apart? There had to be a tradition of it. A secret history of vulnerability and want and all the things that sex promised and only occasionally delivered. They were just one more couple among all the countless others. It only hurt this time because it was them." "Avasarala put out her hands, palms facing each other about a meter apart. “I’ve got a report on you this thick. I know every pimple you’ve popped since your voice broke. Everything. Praiseworthy, shameful, indifferent. Everything. I have violated your privacy in ways you can’t imagine.”" "Avasarala waved him back, leaned in toward Chen, a smile on her lips. “Inaros isn’t going to chase after the Giambattista and Rocinante, because he’ll be distracted by the largest and most aggressive fleet action in history kicking his balls up into his throat. By the time he understands what we were really after, it’ll be too late for him to do anything but hold his dick and cry. But I need to know that you’re in.”" "Luring Naomi and her lover out to Medina to be killed was the plan now. But more than that, it had always been the plan. They’d killed Fred Johnson as part of it. They’d abandoned Ceres too. The consolidated fleet’s massive and coordinated attacks had been them falling for his father’s brilliant strategy to lure them out. And if it failed, if something went wrong, that would always have been the plan too. His father’s new generals would change, getting better with every purge. And when it got so foul there was no way to pretend it into victory, it would be someone else who had failed. Maybe Filip." "“An unshakable faith in humanity.” "“It’s true,” he said, shaking his head. Or maybe nuzzling a little. “Against all evidence, I keep thinking the assholes are outliers.”" "“You don’t get to know that,” Naomi said. “They did or they didn’t. You didn’t put them out so that someone would send you a message about how important and influential you are. You tried to change some minds. Inspire some actions. Even if it didn’t work, it was a good thing to try. And maybe it did. Maybe those saved someone, and if they did, that’s more important than making sure you get to know about" "“Hey,” Holden said. “Do you know what Planck’s constant is?” "“Six point six two six plus change times ten to the negative thirty-fourth meters squared kilos per second?” "“Sure, why not,” Holden said, raising one finger. “But do you know why it’s that and not six point seven whatever the rest of it was?” "Naomi shook her head. “Neither does anyone else. They still call it science. Most of what we know isn’t why things are what they are. We just figure out enough about how they work that we can predict the next thing that’s going to happen. That’s what you’ve got. Enough to predict. And if you think you’re right, then I do too. So let’s do this.” "She shook her head, but not at him. “A massive n equals one study where our null hypothesis is that we all get killed.” "“Not necessarily,” Holden said. “They only have fifteen to our one. We might still take them. We have Bobbie and Amos.”" "Where the air began and the crash couch ended was lost. The boundary between his body and his environment blurred. He had known since he was too young to remember learning that atoms were made from more space than material, and that at the lowest levels, the things that made atoms could bounce in and out of being. He’d never seen it before. He’d never been so aware that he was a vapor of energy. A vibration in a guitar string that didn’t exist." "She wondered how long it would take to actually do something that mattered. And what would happen when they all ran out of time. She felt like she had a tiny Nico Sanjrani in the back of her head counting down the hours until the Belt—no, until all humanity—needed the farms and medical centers and mines and processing facilities that they hadn’t built because they’d been too busy fighting." "“I’m sorry.” "What she meant was I’m sorry I didn’t stop the attack that killed your husband and I’m sorry I didn’t see Inaros for what he was sooner and I would do it all differently if I could live my life backward and try again. "Avasarala paused, looked deeply into Michio’s eyes, and it was like seeing someone through a mask. The deepness there startled her. When she spoke, it was as if she’d heard every nuance. "“Politics is the art of the possible, Captain Pa. When you play at our level, grudges cost lives.”" "But as in astronomy the new view said: “It is true that we do not feel the movement of the earth, but by admitting its immobility we arrive at absurdity, while by admitting its motion (which we do not feel) we arrive at laws,” so also in history the new view says: “It is true that we are not conscious of our dependence, but by admitting our free will we arrive at absurdity, while by admitting our dependence on the external world, on time, and on cause, we arrive at laws.” "In the first case it was necessary to renounce the consciousness of an unreal immobility in space and to recognize a motion we did not feel; in the present case it is similarly necessary to renounce a freedom that does not exist, and to recognize a dependence of which we are not conscious." "She’d learned more about how to be with traumatized people in the last year than she’d ever hoped to know, and much of what she came to understand was that humans were domestic animals like dogs and cats. They responded poorly to threats and well to a gentle building of trust. Not rocket science, but easy to forget." "But it was also a mistake to lose sight of all the individual lives and choices and flashes of pure dumb luck that brought humanity as far as they’d come. History, she thought, was perhaps better considered as a great improvisation. A thinking-through of some immense, generations-long thought. Or daydream." ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=4320 2022-02-05T23:26:12+01:00 https://earthli.com/users/marco

https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=4328 2022-02-05T22:14:53+01:00 https://earthli.com/users/marco

https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=4317 2022-02-03T23:28:45+01:00 https://earthli.com/users/marco

https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=4306 2022-02-02T00:00:34+01:00 https://earthli.com/users/marco

https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=4305 2022-01-31T23:37:47+01:00 https://earthli.com/users/marco

https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=4329 2022-01-30T23:37:53+01:00 https://earthli.com/users/marco

https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=4301 2022-01-29T23:22:54+01:00 https://earthli.com/users/marco

about various features of processor architectures and of programming languages and techniques that affect performance. It starts with a discussion of how memory (RAM or cache) even works, on an electrical level. How much maintenance overhead does a... ]]>

about various features of processor architectures and of programming languages and techniques that affect performance. It starts with a discussion of how memory (RAM or cache) even works, on an electrical level. How much maintenance overhead does a capacitor in a memory unit need in order to maintain its value? That is, there are cycles during which the RAM is refreshing its capacitance and cannot be read. If a processor request for that data comes at the wrong time, the reply will stall longer than usual. "A second problem resulting from the tiny charge is that the information read from the cell is not directly usable. The data line must be connected to a sense amplifier which can distinguish between a stored 0 or 1 over the whole range of charges which still have to count as 1. A third problem is that reading a cell causes the charge of the capacitor to be depleted. This means every read operation must be followed by an operation to recharge the capacitor. This is done automatically by feeding the output of the sense amplifier back into the capacitor." This takes him into discussing processor caches and how and when data is retained or evicted. How can you align structures and data so that they fit into a cache line? How do you order operations so that a cache line can stay in the cache for as long as possible? What sort of eviction policies do processors even use? LRU? Something else? Can you control them? How do you avoid thrashing? "The state changes are accomplished without too much effort by the processors listening, or snooping, on the other processors’ work. Certain operations a processor performs are announced on external pins and thus make the processor’s cache handling visible to the outside. The address of the cache line in question is visible on the address bus." Next up is concurrency: when multiple processors, each with their own tier of caches, are working with the "same" memory, then they have to coordinate on cache evictions so that no processor is using stale data. The amount of coordination is incredible and an eviction becomes even more costly as the number of processors increases. Changing data in-memory becomes quite costly and should be avoided, if possible. At the very least, one should be aware of how much it costs to change memory. There might be simple things you can do at a high level of abstraction that makes it easier for the compiler to generate performant code for you. "When we modify memory things get even uglier. Figure 3.20 shows the results for the sequential Increment test. This graph is using a logarithmic scale for the Y axis. So, do not be fooled by the apparently small differences. We still have about a 18% penalty for running two threads and now an amazing 93% penalty for running four threads. This means the prefetch traffic together with the write-back traffic is pretty much saturating the bus when four threads are used." It's very good to know about the problems, but solving them yourself, as instructed in this document, is almost certainly a bridge too far for most developers. This is why you use task libraries. Let the experts figure out what the optimal number of threads is for your tasks and the available hardware. If you're launching your own thread, you're almost certainly doing it wrong. This stuff is hard, as evidenced by this book. Instead, follow the old edict: use as high a level of abstraction as possible and leave the lower-level stuff to people who are experts at the lower levels. If your application is doing a high-level task, use a high-level API and trust that the runtime and compiler will help optimize it for you. Obviously, this has limits. If measurements (see end of the paper, where he demonstrates tools like valgrind) show that there is a performance problem and it's critical, then you'll have to drop one or more levels of abstraction and take care of it yourself. This may also become necessary if the API, language, or runtime doesn't allow you to provide enough information about your application to allow a compiler or runtime to optimize performance. This is, for example, why .NET and C# continue to introduce concepts like struct record and readonly struct record. These are all additional hints about what sort of changes are even allowed. A struct has copy semantics, which automatically means that the original structure won't be modified when passed across a function boundary. A readonly struct record promises that the fields can't be modified in any case, so the compiler can actually just pass a reference instead of a copy. This avoids cache eviction on function boundaries as well. Most of the information in this long paper is still accurate today, but a good number of the middle sections that deal with BP (branch prediction) say nothing about potential data leaks. Instead, the paper still discusses the advantages of processors being able to inspect each other's caches, at least to some degree. Spectre and Meltdown showed us that those caches will then sometimes continue to contain the results of branches that were discarded -- and can still be read by clever programs. Some of this functionality is no longer available for the aggressive optimizer. "Program flow is much more predictable than data access patterns. Today’s CPUs are very good at detecting patterns. This helps with prefetching. As a result CPU designers spend a lot of time and chip real estate on branch prediction so that pipeline stalls happen as infrequently as possible." There is also a section on how one could really optimize for performance by bypassing unneeded OS restrictions or saving memory by allowing an application to modify itself in ways that can be highly beneficial for performance but that a general-purpose operating system would not be able to distinguish from the workings of a malicious program. "In early computer days memory was a premium. People went to great lengths to reduce the size of the program to make more room for program data. One trick frequently deployed was to change the program itself over time. Such Self Modifying Code (SMC) is occasionally still found, these days mostly for performance reasons or in security exploits. SMC" Forth was one such language/environment. One use for something like this would be to discard code like one-time init/startup code or large and intricate singleton initializers (e.g. data generation). There are ways of doing this now by loading dynamic modules and then unloading them when no longer needed. Such solutions aren't used very often as the work is both complex and involved. "If performance is really much more important than security, randomization can be turned off. The OS will then usually at least load all DSOs contiguously in virtual memory." I find it fascinating to consider that, for a really fast program, you'd almost have to consider using a different operating system. You can't use any consumer-grade stuff because those have so many layers of code built to protect against hacking in an open network. None of that is necessary if you have much more control over the environment. If you're air-gapped and control the processes, then you don't have to worry about malicious code and can remove many layers of protection. You can use self-modifying code (because you know it's not a trojan), you can skip virus checks, you can keep things in memory contiguously instead of randomizing loading positions, you can run a much lighter, more-dedicated kernel. Don't run in any more of a VM than you have to. If you're really, really pushing for performance, then it makes more sense to first remove the umpteen layers of protective code that aren't necessary before you start rewriting your application to try to get around them. That takes the discussion to virtualization, which has become even more of a hot topic than it was in 2007. "Overall, programmers must be aware that, with virtualization used, the cost of cache misses (instruction, data, or TLB) is even higher than without virtualization. Any optimization which reduces this work will pay off even more in virtualized environments. Processor designers will, over time, reduce the difference more and more through technologies like EPT and NPT but it will never completely go away." We're very often using several layers of virtualization in our programming environments. The code that we write is farther and farther away from running "on the metal". For example, I'm working on an M1 Mac right now, typing into a browser window. The Browser uses JavaScript, which runs in an interpreter that is optimized with several layers to try to determine what kind of changes could happen to the code and to what degree it can be optimized down to simple machine code. If the browser doesn't run natively on M1, then it will run through a virtualized emulator named Rosetta Stone. If I'm running MySQL in a Docker container, there's another layer of virtualization away. All of these layers have to do their level best to present enough information to the next layer down so that it can produce the simplest and most efficient representation possible. This is all getting even more complicated. For example, cache misses of various types are not even so easy to predict "While page faults usually are a one-time cost, TLB misses are a perpetual penalty given that the TLB cache is usually small and it is flushed frequently. Page faults are orders of magnitude more expensive than TLB misses but, if a program is running long enough and certain parts of the program are executed frequently enough, TLB misses can outweigh even page fault costs." "The measured overhead, computed by dividing the time needed when using one single cache line versus a separate cache line for each thread, is 390%, 734%, and 1,147% respectively. These large numbers might be surprising at first sight but, when thinking about the cache interaction needed, it should be obvious. The cache line is pulled from one processor’s cache just after it has finished writing to the cache line. All processors, except the one which has the cache line at any given moment, are delayed and cannot do anything. Each additional processor will just cause more delays." For these reasons, manufacturers like Apple have moved to architectures called System On a Chip (SOC). These have many, many cores and include the RAM very close to these chips and their caches, with very wide buses. As Drepper mentions several times, coordination between the various components from various manufacturers must be very finely coordinated. The SOC approach collects all of these components under the aegis of one manufacturer and opens up the possibility for improving cache coherence and interaction with memory. Interesting times. "In general the best advice which can be given is 1. Separate at least read-only (after initialization) and read-write variables. Maybe extend this separation to read-mostly variables as a third category. 2. Group read-write variables which are used together into a structure. Using a structure is the only way to ensure the memory locations for all of those variables are close together in a way which is translated consistently by all gcc versions.." This aligns pretty well with the advice to use immutable data structures as much as possible. It also explains why it's often faster to just create a memcopy of a structure with a modified value than it is to just modify the value directly. The initial modification costs less, but the overall cost of using a structure that can be modified ends up being much more over the lifetime of the program. The compiler will simply not be able to optimize cache usage for a mutable data structure. Again, for most of us programmers, we won't have very much direct control over any of this, but knowing how it all works is very helpful in being able to predict when you're doing something really silly. Remember: your application logic is probably operating at a level of abstraction where you can concern yourself with being as explicit and clear about what your code needs and does as possible and letting the compiler and runtime do the best it can with it. Use immutable data, use non-nullable references, avoid side-effects (be pure), use task libraries for concurrency...and you should be OK almost all of the time. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me of what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I've failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an interest in this book, then I'm happy for you. [Citations] "The title of this paper is an homage to David Goldberg’s classic paper “What Every Computer Scientist Should Know About Floating-Point Arithmetic” [12]. This paper is still not widely known, although it should be a prerequisite for anybody daring to touch a keyboard for serious programming." "A couple of bottlenecks are immediately apparent in this design. One such bottleneck involves access to RAM for devices. In the earliest days of the PC, all communication with devices on either bridge had to pass through the CPU, negatively impacting overall system performance. To work around this problem some devices became capable of direct memory access (DMA). DMA allows devices, with the help of the Northbridge, to store and receive data in RAM directly without the intervention of the CPU (and its inherent performance cost)." "Today all high-performance devices attached to any of the buses can utilize DMA. While this greatly reduces the workload on the CPU, it also creates contention for the bandwidth of the Northbridge as DMA requests compete with RAM access from the CPUs. This problem, therefore, must be taken into account." "When we modify memory things get even uglier. Figure 3.20 shows the results for the sequential Increment test. This graph is using a logarithmic scale for the Y axis. So, do not be fooled by the apparently small differences. We still have about a 18% penalty for running two threads and now an amazing 93% penalty for running four threads. This means the prefetch traffic together with the write-back traffic is pretty much saturating the bus when four threads are used." Also security issues. "[...] to accommodate the huge number of cells (chips with 109 or more cells are now common) the capacity to the capacitor must be low (in the femto-farad range or lower). A fully charged capacitor holds a few 10’s of thousands of electrons. Even though the resistance of the capacitor is high (a couple of tera-ohms) it only takes a short time for the capacity to dissipate. This problem is called “leakage”. This leakage is why a DRAM cell must be constantly refreshed. For most DRAM chips these days this refresh must happen every 64ms. During the refresh cycle no access to the memory is possible since a refresh is simply a memory read operation where the result is discarded." "A second problem resulting from the tiny charge is that the information read from the cell is not directly usable. The data line must be connected to a sense amplifier which can distinguish between a stored 0 or 1 over the whole range of charges which still have to count as 1. A third problem is that reading a cell causes the charge of the capacitor to be depleted. This means every read operation must be followed by an operation to recharge the capacitor. This is done automatically by feeding the output of the sense amplifier back into the capacitor." "A program selects a memory location using a virtual address. The processor translates this into a physical address and finally the memory controller selects the RAM chip corresponding to that address. To select the individual memory cell on the RAM chip, parts of the physical address are passed on in the form of a number of address lines." "In the example the address lines a0 and a1 through the row address selection (RAS)9 demultiplexer select the address lines of a whole row of cells. When reading, the content of all cells is thusly made available to the column address selection (CAS)9 multiplexer. Based on the address lines a2 and a3 the content of one column is then made available to the data pin of the DRAM chip. This happens many times in parallel on a number of DRAM chips to produce a total number of bits corresponding to the width of the data bus." "Hardware and software prefetching (see section 6.3) can be used to create more overlap in the timing and reduce the stall. Prefetching also helps shift memory operations in time so that there is less contention at later times, right before the data is actually needed. This is a frequent problem when the data produced in one round has to be stored and the data required for the next round has to be read." "While DMA is certainly beneficial, it means that there is more competition for the FSB bandwidth. In times with high DMA traffic the CPU might stall more than usual while waiting for data from the main memory." "In symmetric multi-processor (SMP) systems the caches of the CPUs cannot work independently from each other. All processors are supposed to see the same memory content at all times. The maintenance of this uniform view of memory is called “cache coherency”." "If a write access is detected and the processor has a clean copy of the cache line in its cache, this cache line is marked invalid. Future references will require the cache line to be reloaded. Note that a read access on another CPU does not necessitate an invalidation, multiple clean copies can very well be kept around." "If these rules can be maintained, processors can use their caches efficiently even in multi-processor systems. All the processors need to do is to monitor each others’ write accesses and compare the addresses with those in their local caches [...]" "Write-combining is a limited caching optimization more often used for RAM on devices such as graphics cards. Since the transfer costs to the devices are much higher than the local RAM access it is even more important to avoid doing too many transfers. Transferring an entire cache line just because a word in the line has been written is wasteful if the next operation modifies the next word. One can easily imagine that this is a common occurrence, the memory for horizontal neighboring pixels on a screen are in most cases neighbors, too. As the name suggests, write-combining combines multiple write accesses before the cache line is written out. In ideal cases the entire cache line is modified word by word and, only after the last word is written, the cache line is written to the device." "Processor operations on cache lines are frequent (of course, why else would we have this paper?) which means broadcasting information about changed cache lines after each write access would be impractical." "The state changes are accomplished without too much effort by the processors listening, or snooping, on the other processors’ work. Certain operations a processor performs are announced on external pins and thus make the processor’s cache handling visible to the outside. The address of the cache line in question is visible on the address bus." "[...] the second processor wants to write to the cache line the first processor sends the cache line content and marks the cache line locally as Invalid. This is the infamous “Request For Ownership” (RFO) operation. Performing this operation in the last level cache, just like the I→M transition is comparatively expensive. For write-through caches we also have to add the time it takes to write the new cache line content to the next higher-level cache or the main memory, further increasing the cost." "When we modify memory things get even uglier. Figure 3.20 shows the results for the sequential Increment test. This graph is using a logarithmic scale for the Y axis. So, do not be fooled by the apparently small differences. We still have about a 18% penalty for running two threads and now an amazing 93% penalty for running four threads. This means the prefetch traffic together with the write-back traffic is pretty much saturating the bus when four threads are used." "Finally in Figure 3.21 we have the numbers for the Addnextlast test with random access of memory. This figure is provided mainly to show the appallingly high numbers. It now takes around 1,500 cycles to process a single list element in the extreme case. The use of more threads is even more questionable. We can summarize the efficiency of multiple thread use in a table." This is why you use task libraries. Let the experts figure out what the optimal number of threads is for your tasks and the available hardware. If you're launching your own thread, you're almost certainly doing it wrong. This stuff is hard, as evidenced by this book. "as soon as the L3 cache is not sufficient to hold the working set the numbers crash. They crash to the point that the speed-up of two and four threads is identical (see the fourth column in Table 3.3). This is one of the reasons why one can hardly find motherboard with sockets for more than four CPUs all using the same memory controller. Machines with more processors have to be built differently." "As for the cache replacement there is not much a programmer can do. If the cache is using physical address tags there is no way to find out how the virtual addresses correlate with the cache sets. It might be that cache lines in all logical pages are mapped to the same cache sets, leaving much of the cache unused. If anything, it is the job of the OS to arrange that this does not happen too often. With the advent of virtualization things get even more complicated. Now not even the OS has control over the assignment of physical memory. The Virtual Machine Monitor (VMM, aka Hypervisor) is responsible for the physical memory assignment." "Program flow is much more predictable than data access patterns. Today’s CPUs are very good at detecting patterns. This helps with prefetching. As a result CPU designers spend a lot of time and chip real estate on branch prediction so that pipeline stalls happen as infrequently as possible." Oh, this was before Spectre and Meltdown ruined that party. "A long pipeline means that if the pipeline stalls (i.e., the instruction flow through it is interrupted) it takes a while to get up to speed again. Pipeline stalls happen, for instance, if the location of the next instruction cannot be correctly predicted or if it takes too long to load the next instruction (e.g., when it has to be read from memory)." "In early computer days memory was a premium. People went to great lengths to reduce the size of the program to make more room for program data. One trick frequently deployed was to change the program itself over time. Such Self Modifying Code (SMC) is occasionally still found, these days mostly for performance reasons or in security exploits. SMC" Forth was one such language/environment. One use would be to discard one-time init/startup code or large singleton initializers. "Finally, since the processor assumes–for simplicity reasons and because it is true in 99.9999999% of all cases– that the code pages are immutable, the L1i implementation does not use the MESI protocol but instead a simplified SI protocol. This means if modifications are detected a lot of pessimistic assumptions have to be made." "If performance is really much more important than security, randomization can be turned off. The OS will then usually at least load all DSOs contiguously in virtual memory." "The cache into which the computed values are stored is called the Translation Look-Aside Buffer (TLB). It is usually a small cache since it has to be extremely fast. Modern CPUs provide multi-level TLB caches, just as for the other caches; the higher-level caches are larger and slower. The small size of the L1TLB is often made up for by making the cache fully associative, with an LRU eviction policy." "In the first case the TLB is flushed whenever a context switch is performed. Since, in most OSes, a switch from one thread/process to another requires executing some kernel code, TLB flushes are restricted to leaving (and sometimes entering) the kernel address space. On virtualized systems it also happens when the kernel has to call the VMM and on the way back." "One possibility to optimize the cache flushes is to individually invalidate TLB entries. For instance, if the kernel code and data falls into a specific address range, only the pages falling into this address range have to evicted from the TLB. This only requires comparing tags and, therefore, is not very expensive. This method is also useful in case a part of the address space is changed, for instance, through a call to munmap." "Overall, programmers must be aware that, with virtualization used, the cost of cache misses (instruction, data, or TLB) is even higher than without virtualization. Any optimization which reduces this work will pay off even more in virtualized environments. Processor designers will, over time, reduce the difference more and more through technologies like EPT and NPT but it will never completely go away." "When data is produced and not (immediately) consumed again, the fact that memory store operations read a full cache line first and then modify the cached data is detrimental to performance. This operation pushes data out of the caches which might be needed again in favor of data which will not be used soon. This is especially true for large data structures, like matrices, which are filled and then used later. Before the last element of the matrix is filled the sheer size evicts the first elements, making caching of the writes ineffective." "The multimedia extensions previously mentioned in this section almost always require that the memory accesses are aligned. I.e., for 16 byte memory accesses the address is supposed to be 16 byte aligned. The x86 and x86-64 processors have special variants of the memory operations which can handle unaligned accesses but these are slower. This hard alignment requirement is nothing new for most RISC architectures which require full alignment for all memory accesses. Even if an architecture supports unaligned accesses this is sometimes slower than using appropriate alignment, especially if the misalignment causes a load or store to use two cache lines instead of one." "These problems create stalls in execution with a possibly severe impact on performance. This is why today’s processors invest heavily in branch prediction (BP). Highly specialized BP units try to determine the target of a jump as far ahead of the jump as possible so that the processor can initiate loading the instructions at the new location into the cache. They use static and dynamic rules and are increasingly good at determining patterns in execution." Spectre and Meltdown are again a problem. "if a function should never be inlined despite being small enough, the noinline function attribute can be used. Using this attribute makes sense even for small functions if they are called often from different places. If the L1i content can be reused and the overall footprint is reduced this often makes up for the additional cost of the extra function call. Branch prediction units are pretty good these days." "if a function should never be inlined despite being small enough, the noinline function attribute can be used. Using this attribute makes sense even for small functions if they are called often from different places. If the L1i content can be reused and the overall footprint is reduced this often makes up for the additional cost of the extra function call. Branch prediction units are pretty good these days. If inlining can lead to more aggressive optimizations things look different. This is something which must be decided on a case-by-case basis." "If the condition is frequently false, the execution is not linear. There is a big chunk of unused code in the middle which not only pollutes the L1i due to prefetching, it also can cause problems with branch prediction. If the branch prediction is wrong the conditional expression can be very inefficient." "Whenever conditional execution is used and it is lopsided (i.e., the expression far more often leads to one result than the other) there is the potential for false static branch prediction and thus bubbles in the pipeline. This can be prevented by telling the compiler to move the less often executed code out of the main code path." "While page faults usually are a one-time cost, TLB misses are a perpetual penalty given that the TLB cache is usually small and it is flushed frequently. Page faults are orders of magnitude more expensive than TLB misses but, if a program is running long enough and certain parts of the program are executed frequently enough, TLB misses can outweigh even page fault costs." "Prefetching has one big weakness: it cannot cross page boundaries. The reason should be obvious when one realizes that the CPUs support demand paging. If the prefetcher were allowed to cross page boundaries, the access might trigger an OS event to make the page available. This by itself can be bad, especially for performance. What is worse is that the prefetcher does not know about the semantics of the program or the OS itself. It might therefore prefetch pages which, in real life, never would be requested." "The OS, when processing the packet, first has to determine what kind of packet it is. If the DCA hint is not ignored, the loads the OS has to perform to identify the packet most likely hit the cache. Multiply this saving of hundreds of cycles per packet with tens of thousands of packets which can be processed per second, and the savings add up to very significant numbers, especially when it comes to latency. Without the integration of I/O hardware (a NIC in this case), chipset, and CPUs such an optimization is not possible. It is therefore necessary to make sure to select the platform wisely if this technology is needed." "The measured overhead, computed by dividing the time needed when using one single cache line versus a separate cache line for each thread, is 390%, 734%, and 1,147% respectively. These large numbers might be surprising at first sight but, when thinking about the cache interaction needed, it should be obvious. The cache line is pulled from one processor’s cache just after it has finished writing to the cache line. All processors, except the one which has the cache line at any given moment, are delayed and cannot do anything. Each additional processor will just cause more delays." "In general the best advice which can be given is 1. Separate at least read-only (after initialization) and read-write variables. Maybe extend this separation to read-mostly variables as a third category. 2. Group read-write variables which are used together into a structure. Using a structure is the only way to ensure the memory locations for all of those variables are close together in a way which is translated consistently by all gcc versions.." "Now a reader might ask a question: why would somebody use the complicated and longer code which utilizes CAS? The answer to this is: the complexity is usually hidden. As mentioned before, CAS is currently the unifying atomic operation across all interesting architectures. So some people think it is sufficient to define all atomic operations in terms of CAS. This makes programs simpler. But as the numbers show, the results can be everything but optimal. The memory handling overhead of the CAS solution is huge." "The processor cores themselves run at frequencies where, at full speed, even in perfect conditions, the connection to the memory cannot fulfill all load and store requests without waiting. Now, further divide the available bandwidth by the number of cores, hyper-threads, and processors sharing a connection to the Northbridge and suddenly parallelism becomes a big problem. Efficient programs may be limited in their performance by the available memory bandwidth." "The performance measurement counters of modern processors allow the observation of FSB contention. On Core 2 processors the NUS_BNR_DRV event counts the number of cycles a core has to wait because the bus is not ready. This indicates that the bus is highly used and loads from or stores to main memory take even longer than usual. The Core 2 processors support more events which can count specific bus actions like RFOs or the general FSB utilization." "cachegrind is a simulator which does not use measurements from the processor. The actual cache implementation in the processor might very well be quite different. cachegrind simulates Least Recently Used (LRU) eviction, which is likely to be too expensive for caches with large associativity. Furthermore, the simulation does not take context switches and system calls into account, both of which can destroy large parts of L2 and must flush L1i and L1d. This causes the total number of cache misses to be lower than experienced in reality. Nevertheless, cachegrind is a nice tool to learn about a program’s memory use and its problems with memory." "Before the process terminates massif creates two files: massif.XXXXX.txt andmassif.XXXXX.ps; XXXXX is as before the PID of the process. The .txt file is a summary of the memory use for all call sites and the .ps is what can be seen in Figure" "This is a nice separation of concerns. A GUI mindset would draw directly to screen. This streams data to handlers that transform data into outputs. Writing it like this is not overdesign. It makes the components simpler and more boring. It makes it testable. It's better to have more, but simpler components. Maximize obviousness." "Each block represents one memory word. In this small region of memory we have four allocated blocks. The overhead due to the block header and padding is 50%. Due to the placement of the header, this automatically means that the effective prefetch rate of the processor is lowered by up to 50% as well. If the blocks were be processed sequentially (to take maximum advantage of prefetching), the processor would read all the header and padding words into the cache, even though they are never supposed to be read from or written to by the application itself. Only the runtime uses the header words, and the runtime only comes into play when the block is freed." "This all means that memory used by the program is interspersed with memory only used by the allocator for administrative purposes. We might see something like this: Header Data Padding Each block represents one memory word. In this small region of memory we have four allocated blocks. The overhead due to the block header and padding is 50%. Due to the placement of the header, this automatically means that the effective prefetch rate of the processor is lowered by up to 50% as well. If the blocks were be processed sequentially (to take maximum advantage of prefetching), the processor would read all the header and padding words into the cache, even though they are never supposed to be read from or written to by the application itself. Only the runtime uses the header words, and the runtime only comes into play when the block is freed." "The most important thing to get right is the selection of representative tests to perform the measurements. If the test workload does not match the way the program is actually used, the performed optimizations might actually do more harm than good. For this reason, is it often hard to use PGO for libraries." "The waste of physical RAM would simply be too large. But very large pages have their advantages: if huge data sets are used, storing them in 2MB pages on x86-64 would require 511 fewer page faults (per large page) than using the same amount of memory with 4k pages. This can make a big difference. The solution is to selectively request memory allocation which, just for the requested address range, uses huge memory pages and, for all the other mappings in the same process, uses the normal page size. Huge page sizes come with a price, though. Since the physical memory used for large pages must be continuous, it might, after a while, not be possible to allocate such pages due to memory fragmentation. People are working on memory defragmentation and fragmentation avoidance, but it is very complicated." "By using the same file name in the open call, multiple processes can share the same huge pages and collaborate." "There are a few more details to iron out with respect to context switches (possible modification on the same processor) and accidental reloading of the cache line after a write on another processor. This is nothing that policies (cache flush on context switch) and extra flags, or separate cache lines for LL/SC instructions, cannot fix. In general, the LL/SC implementation comes almost for free with the implementation of a cache coherence protocol like MESI." "Neither the VALIDATE nor COMMIT operations automatically and implicitly create bus operations. This is the huge advantage transactional memory has over atomic operations. With atomic operations, concurrency is made possible by writing changed values back into main memory. If you have read this document thus far, you should know how expensive this is. With transactional memory, no accesses to the main memory are forced" "In section 6.4.2, we already discussed how the lock prefix, available on x86 and x86-64, can be used to avoid the coding of atomic operations in some situations. The proposed tricks falls short, though, when there are multiple threads in use which do not contend for the same memory. In this case, the atomic operations are used unnecessarily. With transactional memory this problem goes away. The expensive RFO bus message are issued only if memory is used on different CPUs concurrently or in succession; this is only the case when they are needed. It is almost impossible to do any better." "Buffered (or registered) memory changes the situation: instead of directly connecting the RAM chips on the DRAM module to the memory, they are connected to a buffer which, in turn, is then connected to the memory controller. This significantly reduces the complexity of the electrical connections. The ability of the memory controllers to drive DRAM modules increases by a factor corresponding to the number of connections saved." "As with registered DRAM, the question has to be asked: why is ECC DRAM not the norm? The answer to this question is the same as for the equivalent question about registered RAM: the extra RAM chip increases the cost and the parity computation increases the delay." ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=4273 2022-01-29T11:51:01+01:00 https://earthli.com/users/marco

https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=4248 2022-01-28T16:56:49+01:00 https://earthli.com/users/marco

https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=4285 2022-01-27T16:01:46+01:00 https://earthli.com/users/marco

https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=4295 2022-01-27T15:43:43+01:00 https://earthli.com/users/marco

https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=4272 2022-01-24T14:55:05+01:00 https://earthli.com/users/marco

https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=4419 2022-01-24T00:00:43+01:00 https://earthli.com/users/marco

https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=4415 2022-01-08T22:54:39+01:00 https://earthli.com/users/marco

, which I gave up on. "A navy man came forward and gestured for me to follow him. I don’t think anyone spoke English, but I got the general idea." This is pretty ignorant. Many Chinese of the latest adult generation speak at least some English. A good number are perfectly fluent. It's hard to believe that they wouldn't have been put on this boat filled with foreigners. "Several had translators whispering in their ear during the process." That is not even conceivably realistic for a gathering of scientists. They all understand English perfectly. "I felt something weird on my forehead when I woke up. I reached up and it was a Post-it note. Someone put a Post-it on my head while I slept. I pulled it off and read it: Clean clothes and toiletries in the duffel under your bunk. Show this note to any sailor when you’ve cleaned up: 请带我去甲板7的官员会议室 —Stratt “She is such a pain in my butt…” I mumbled." Not gonna lie. This part I liked. It felt more natural than the "tell, don't show" style he'd used before. "“We have figured this out, yes,” said Dimitri. “With lasers. It was very illuminating experiment.” "“Was that a pun?” "“It was!” "“Good one!” "We both laughed. Stratt glared at us." Also not terrible. I remember this from The Martian: the first third of that was painful too. "This time it changes to “Petrovascope.” Beyond that, there’s just a black screen with an error message: PETROVASCOPE CANNOT BE USED WHILE SPIN DRIVE IS ACTIVE." This kind of feels like the plotting of a puzzle-based video game. It makes sense, but you can almost see the video-game levels writing themselves. "No meetings. No distractions. Just experimentation and engineering. I’d forgotten how much fun it was to get immersed in a task." But wasn't that literally what he'd been doing, just days before? He had one meeting so far. Also he hasn't mentioned his students at all. "but scientific papers were my forte for a long time." Had been. C'mon. "After a few halting attempts, I manage to turn it on. It immediately spots the other ship and sounds an alarm. The shrill noise hurts my ears. “Whoa, whoa, whoa!” I say. I frantically scan the panel until I see a button labeled “Mute Proximity Alert.” I press it and the noise stops." This kind of stuff is so pedestrian. You really don't need to go into this level of detail. "The computer models for the Astrophage breeder weren’t lining up with the real-world performance" He's not only an exobiologist, but also a power-systems engineer. He's also a teacher. This is Tony Stark/John Gault syndrome. "No, this is a no-brainer. I’ve got to at least have a conversation with them. If they have any information about Astrophage at all, no matter how minor, I have to talk to them. It’s a risk, yes, but this whole mission is a risk." Obviously! Weir is so obsessed with the one-man-show genius that he's unsure whether to even have his character talk to what is clearly an advanced race. On the other hand, Weir gives little thought to how long it would take to communicate complex concepts. They got lucky that they're even remotely compatible. This ain't Charles Yu, that's for sure. If it's not basic physics, then Weir doesn't cover it in detail. That's fine! Of course! But the contract to the level of detail Weir spends on the process with which Grace takes out a tool out of a drawer is jarring. "But I don’t know what the human ship’s material is made of." Why not? No spectrometer? "Their move is taking a long time and I’m getting bored." He's literally making the other side do all of the work of building the tunnel. "They don’t even know what my atmospheric pressure is." Yes they do. You sent back a sample. In the box. You didn't decompress it, did you? Well, then the alien has a sample of your atmosphere. "And notably, the sounds were in my range of hearing. Some of the notes were low, some of them high. But definitely audible. That alone is amazing when I think about it. He’s from a different planet, and totally different evolutionary line, but we ended up with compatible sound ranges." Maybe. Or maybe you're missing hypersonics. "It’s been two days since I slept. There’s just always been something monumental going on. I can’t just stay up forever. I need to sleep." What, no meth in the future? "“Hold on, Ms. Stratt,” said Justice Spencer. “This is still a court of law, and you will remain for the duration of these proceedings!” "“No, I won’t,” said Stratt. The bailiff walked forward. “Ma’am. I’ll have to restrain you if you don’t comply.” "“You and what army?” Stratt asked. Five armed men in military fatigues entered the courtroom and took up station around her. "“Because I have the U.S. Army,” she said. “And that’s a damn fine army.”" People get such boners for military coups. They love em. They're enamored with the idea of an infallible god flanked by incorrigible soldiers cutting through the bullshit of democracy. It's puerile, adolescent at best. It's Atlas Shrugged. "Oh thank God. I can’t imagine explaining “sleep” to someone who had never heard of it. Hey, I’m going to fall unconscious and hallucinate for a while. By the way, I spend a third of my time doing this. And if I can’t do it for a while, I go insane and eventually die. No need for concern." "“The shelf will cleave at the line of explosions and slowly work its way into the sea and melt. Sea levels will rise about a centimeter over the next month, the ocean temperature will drop a degree—which is a disaster of its own but never mind that for now. Enormous quantities of methane will be released into the atmosphere. And now, methane is our friend. Methane is our best friend. And not just because it’ll keep us warm for a while.” "“Oh?” "“Methane breaks down in the atmosphere after ten years. We can knock chunks of Antarctica into the sea every few years to moderate the methane levels. And if Hail Mary finds a solution, we just have to wait ten years for the methane to go away. You can’t do that with carbon dioxide.”" "I’ve gone from “sole-surviving space explorer” to “guy with wacky new roommate.” It’ll be interesting to see how this plays out." "Rocky’s data about Planet Adrian was dead-on. It’s 3.93 times Earth’s mass and has a radius of 10,318 kilometers (almost double Earth’s)." How does Rocky measure anything at astronomical distances if he doesn't know about radiation? How do long-range instruments work when you don't know what wavelengths are? How does Rocky's sensorium work? How can he hear anything Ryland is doing when their two environments are separate? "Just like that, with minimal complication, Rocky had made a life-support system for Adrian life-forms—a system that didn’t need to know the conditions to provide in advance. It just maintains the status quo. He really is a genius. I wonder if all Eridians are like that, or if he’s special." "The Hail Mary was complete. Over 2 million kilograms of spacecraft and fuel in a nice, stable orbit—four times the mass of the International Space Station, and put together in one-twentieth the time. The press used to keep track of the total cost, but around the $10 trillion mark, they gave up. It just didn’t matter. It wasn’t about efficient use of resources anymore. It was Earth versus Astrophage, and no price was too high." I watched Don't Look Up while I was reading this book. That scenario seemed much more plausible than the one outlined above, unfortunately. "Rocky admonished me for leaving the sample at (human) room temperature for so long. He had a lot to say on that subject, actually. We had to add “reckless,” “idiot,” “foolish,” and “irresponsible” to our shared vocabulary just so he could fully express his opinion on the matter." "Eridian electronics isn’t nearly so advanced as Earth’s. They haven’t invented the transistor yet, let alone IC chips. Working with Rocky is like having the world’s best engineer from 1950 on the ship with me. Seems odd that a species could invent interstellar travel before inventing the transistor, but hey, Earth invented nuclear power, television, and even did several space launches before the transistor." "We need to raise a strong, solid generation of survivors. Right now we’re soft. You, me, the whole Western world. We’re the result of growing up in unprecedented comfort and stability. It’s the kids of today that’ll have to make the world of tomorrow work. And they’re going to inherit a mess. I can really do a lot more by preparing kids for the world that’s to come. I should stay here on Earth where I’m needed.”" "“Hey. What’s is your ship’s name, anyway?” "“Blip-A.” "“No, I mean, what do you call it?” "“Ship.” "“Your ship has no name?” "“Why would ship have name, question?” "I shrugged. “Ships have names.” "He points to my pilot’s seat. “What is name of you chair, question?” "“It doesn’t have a name.” "“Why does ship have name but chair no have name, question?” "“Never mind. Your ship is the Blip-A.” "“That is what I said. [...]”" "They have a copy of Wikipedia now. They’d work out what we’re up to when they saw the flashes." Skipping lots of encoding steps there. Like, a ton of them, on both the encoding and linguistic level. "Figuring out where to put the mini-farm was another matter. Even with its small size, it’s too big to fit inside the little probe. So I epoxy it to the undercarriage. Then I spot-weld a small counterweight to the top of the beetle. The computer inside has very strong opinions about where the center of mass of the probe is. It’s easier to add a counterweight than completely reprogram a guidance system." Elegant. ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=4271 2022-01-03T08:21:21+01:00 https://earthli.com/users/marco

https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=4234 2022-01-02T22:29:46+01:00 https://earthli.com/users/marco

https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=4270 2022-01-02T17:58:58+01:00 https://earthli.com/users/marco

https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=4383 2021-12-26T00:06:04+01:00 https://earthli.com/users/marco

of the book, to be released in 1922. Adam Driver will be playing Jack Gladney. [1] Not novel for me, anyway, but maybe that's because the book was written in 1985, and I've read imitators since then, e.g. Infinite Jest. ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=4370 2021-12-23T12:51:12+01:00 https://earthli.com/users/marco

https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=4293 2021-10-12T21:29:55+02:00 https://earthli.com/users/marco

featured a book called "Precious Amber", which was more than a little suspect. ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=4226 2021-06-24T22:45:36+02:00 https://earthli.com/users/marco

featured a book called "Precious Amber", which was more than a little suspect. ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=4159 2021-04-18T12:57:45+02:00 https://earthli.com/users/marco

was very loosely based. It is, in a way, the origin story of Arsène Lupin. We learn of a certain Count and Madame Dedreux, who possess the wonderful necklace. We learn also of how she keeps the necklace in a safe in their bedroom, that the room is bolted and that the only window is locked, and to which no-one else has access. We learn of how, one night, they are robbed of the necklace, with no trace of how the crime was done. They suspect the miserable chamber-maid Henriette, whom they'd quartered on the floor below them with her six-year-old son. She's left the building but four times in the last several years and can hardly be suspected, though the police question her closely. Many years later, Henriette has been let go and lives alone. She starts to receive a generous yearly check from an address in Paris -- right up until she dies a few years later. Years after that, we meet the DeDreux family again, diminished in reputation, the loss of the necklace having dealt them a blow from which they never quite recovered. They are visited by a man they've known for a while, a Monsieur Floriani. Over tea and coffee, he regales them with a tale of how the crime could have been committed, eliciting details that had escaped the police so many years ago. He supposes a certain construction in the window that the count denies, but then finds to his astonishment is true. Floriani continues to fill in detail about how someone small enough could have picked the window lock, come through, and absconded on a jury-rigged platform in a tiny corridor outside. He fills in enough detail until there can be no doubt: he is the grown son of Henriette and he had absconded with the necklace at six years old, taken to cheer up his despondent and long-suffering mother. They do nothing, as what can be done so many years later? The countess notes that, even if the stones are gone, it is the setting that is the truly precious part of the crown. Four years later, it is returned to her, an act of generosity for which Arsène Lupin takes credit. The implication is that Lupin is Floriani. Le Sept de cœur This story tells of how the narrator met Arsène Lupin. He had spent an evening with Jean Daspry. The story begins with a late-night home invasion during which dozens of men invade the narrator's home, but seemingly take nothing. The leader of the group bids him stay silent and not take up his revolver from his night table. Terrified into inaction, the narrator complies. Once they've left, the only clue that anyone had been there is a playing card -- the seven of hearts. With time, the narrator comes to see that bizarre evening as nothing more than a fantasy, while his colleague Daspry, a police detective, continues to try to crack the case, but without much success. One morning the narrator is visited by a stranger, about 40 years old, who does not identify himself. The man tells him that he has read his story and wants to verify it. To do so, he asks that he be allowed to spend three minutes alone in the room where the card was found. After three minutes, the narrator hears a shot and rushes in to find the man has killed himself with a pistol to the temple. Two steps away from him lies another playing card -- once again, the seven of hearts. The police arrive and discover the man is clutching the business card of a certain George Andermatt But it's not the man himself. They call Andermatt and he arrives twenty minutes later. He tells them that the suicide is one of two brothers Varin, from Lausanne. He knows the man's brother Alfred much better. He tells them of their interest in the plans for a super-secret submarine designed by Louis Lacombe with the code name Le Sept-de-coeur. They had obtained the plans for it, but a crucial part was missing. They would only be able to build a poor facsimile of it. The narrator and Daspry are next visited by Mme. Andermatt, whose letters to a lover had been intercepted. She is being blackmailed, presumably by a certain Salvator. They suggest that she engage him and try to lure him into a trap. Alfred's brother Étienne is still searching for the missing chapter of the plans. But there is someone else, someone who is agitating against them, someone who pushed Alfred to suicide: Salvator is suspected. He knows of the letters from Mme. Andermatt to Lacombe that she would rather her husband not read. He writes to Andermatt to meet him at the room where Alfred had shot himself. He had also written to Étienne that Andermatt wanted to meet and make a deal. Mme. Andermatt caught sight of the letter to her husband and told the narrator, who informed Daspry. They all three of them go to the room before the appointed time and hide themselves behind the curtains, in front of one of the large windows. They watch the initial meeting and see that Étienne is growing agitated and wants to leave. He pulls a gun on Andermatt. Daspry shoots the gun from his hand and jumps out, revealing himself to be Salvator -- he who arranged both sides of the meeting. With a much more commanding presence than our narrator had heretofore known him to have, Daspry arranges them to buy each other's papers -- Andermatt getting his wife's letters and Étienne getting the final page of the plans. He uses the key he'd found in the garden to manipulate a painting in the room to open the safe behind it and obtain the desired goods. Instead of handing over the plans, Salvator fools Étienne into handing over his payment with nothing in return. Andermatt also pays, but gets the letters -- but fake letters that reveal nothing of the hinted-at affair with Lacombe. The plans are safe, once again and Salvator has been handsomely recompensed by Étienne and Andermatt -- though not necessarily willingly. When the narrator presses, Daspry reveals himself to be none other than Arsène Lupin. The very first entrance to the home -- where the narrator had thought nothing had been stolen -- was when Lupin found and cracked the safe the first time, absconding at the time with many of the jewels therein (a second safe, actually), but also hatching his plan for this secondary coup, once again doing a bit of good in securing the plans for the secret sub from potential terrorists. Le Coffre-fort de madame Imbert This story is different than the preceding ones, in that Arsène Lupin was known from the very beginning. He saves a certain Monsier Imbert from a robbery at the very beginning of the story. The man invites him to lunch and offers him a FF20,000 reward, that he refuses. Instead, they become friends and the man wants him to meet his wife, the heiress Mme. Imbert. Some time later, Lupin meets with his accomplice -- the man who'd tried to "rob" Imbert. Lupin tells him to be patient -- that they will soon have the contents of Mme. Imbert's impenetrable safe, in which she keeps her fortune comprising papers and deeds in value of at least 100M francs. Imbert and his wife are perfectly nice people and offer Lupin a job after he confesses that he is destitute. They invite him to live with them as their secretary, but there is really no work to do. He lives above them, paid for his sinecure, and biding his time. He installs a tubular device that he snakes down from his room to the Imberts' office and with which he can spy on them as they interact with the safe. He divines the combination and is finally ready. Late one night, he waits for Mme. Imbert to leave the office and for her husband to follow. Lupin slithers down on a rope ladder to just outside the window, opening it surreptitiously, but forced to wait until M. Imbert leaves. He does not, so Lupin swings in, envelops him in the curtains and uses karate blows to render the man senseless. Lupin absconds with the contents of the safe, returning to his room. Afterwards, the Imberts leave town, having collected their insurance money. Later, he recounts the story to his narrator as his greatest folly -- all of the papers were fake! The Imberts were basically destitute. He should have taken the FF20,000 when it was offered, but he'd turned it down. Lupin ruefully admits that he'd never been played quite so well as then. The Imberts had used him to convert their fake fortune into insurance money. La Perle noire This story is also very up-front about who Arsène Lupin is. He enters a building late one night, pretending to look for a doctor. Instead, he runs up to the fifth floor and does something else: he is casing an apartment of an older lady, living in very modest circumstances, but who has the Black Pearl. Lupin cases the apartment and returns one night to take the Black Pearl. He feels his way around in the dark, toward the hiding place where he's seen her put it, but comes across something soft in the dark: a cold foot. It's her foot. She's dead, on the floor. He lights his lamp and sees that she's been bloodied and that the Pearl is gone. He's shocked and sits down to think. We learn later that the police suspect a counselor of hers, who'd just started working for her recently. She had two other servants, but they'd been with her for twenty years and were beyond suspicion. The counselor, on the other hand, seemed to have access, but it was a mystery how he'd managed to leave and close the door behind him -- and they had found neither the knife nor the key. After a long trial, the counselor is found not guilty for lack of evidence and is let go. His name is ruined and he lives by small means in a tiny apartment under a new name. One day, at lunch, a man sits down opposite him and begins to tell him what happened that night. He tells the counselor of how he'd killed the woman and taken the Black Pearl. The stranger knew everything about the night as if he'd been there -- which he had, as it was none other than Arsène Lupin who'd found him. Arsène makes him reveal where the Black Pearl is hidden and finds it buried in the sand between two paving stones. He regales his narrator with this tale, noting that he has the real Pearl, though "copies" have been found in cities around the world. Once again, Lupin earns kudos in the newspapers for bringing a killer to justice, but keeps the plunder for himself. Sherlock Holmès arrive trop tard This story ties a lot of the other stuff together. In it, Lupin has inveigled himself into a position near Devanne, the owner of another castle, similar to the one owned by Cahorn in the story Arsène Lupin en prison. He poses as the man's friend Velmont. They even make a joking reference to it, wondering whether Lupin could penetrate Devanne's castle. Devanne even makes a reference to how very much like Lupin his friend Horace Velmont looks. The gentlemen discuss the arrival of Herlock Sholmès, who will grace them with his presence and acumen and hopefully prevent any crime. They also joke about Velmont perhaps stealing all of Devanne's things in the night. Devanne tells the story of how he'd discovered some secrets about his castle -- about a secret entryway. But he'd never figured out anything from the clues. He recites all of the information he has and they all agree that it's a mystery (including Lupin). A few days before, one of the books containing important information had been stolen. That night, in the depth of the early morning, Lupin and his men make use of the secret passage to which he's discovered the combination and make off with all of the most expensive and valuable furniture and artwork. Lupin himself empties the glass case containing jewelry and watches and other small, but highly valuable art. Pockets stuffed, he turns and realizes that he's been discovered by Nelly, the young lady from the first story (L’Arrestation d’Arsène Lupin), who'd turned him in to Ganimard and for whom he'd fallen rather hard. Once again, it is impossible for Lupin to resist her allures and he promises that he's a man of honor and will return everything the next afternoon at 3PM. While she is checking for footsteps that she thought she'd heard, he disappears. The next day, they meet again at a garden party of Devanne's, with soldiers and police milling about everywhere, still investigating the crime. Devanne is amazed that Lupin pulled it off -- but he's still not entirely convinced that his friend Velmont really is Lupin. Nelly and Lupin meet in a secluded part of the garden where Velmont tells her that he kept his promise. She is torn, but ends up walking away after seeing Devanne's ruby ring on Lupin's finger -- he couldn't resist keeping something -- and realizing that he is, at heart, a thief. Lupin leaves soon after, heading to the railroad station, where he meets Herlock on the way. They size each other up, dive into a copse together to avoid a careening stagecoach, and soon are on their respective ways. Herlock meets Devanne and begins to investigate, receiving the clues and making quick work of them -- what Devanne couldn't do in ten years, Sholmès does in ten minutes. Just as Lupin had before him. They find the secret passageway, turning letters in the name of the castle that turn out to be levers. They head down the passage and end up at the ruined chapel several hundred meters from the castle. Devanne's car awaits them there. Devanne had not called for it, but the chauffeur says that Velmont had told him to go to the chapel to pick up Devanne and his friend. Lupin divined that Herlock would solve the puzzle as well. They drive to the train station where they inquire about Lupin, but are only told that Sholmès has a box awaiting him. He opens it to find his own watch, which he only realizes at that moment is no longer in his pocket. Lupin had stolen it off of him when they'd met in the forest. Devanne is dying of laughter and Herlock, though initially admiring of Lupin's acumen, intelligence, and daring, is now quite pissed off, swearing that they will meet again. [Citations] "Ce fut vainement. On ne découvrit pas le moindre vestige de souterrain. Il n'existait point de passage secret. Soit, répondait-on de tous côtés, mais des meubles et des tableaux ne s'évanouissent pas comme des fantômes. Cela s'en va par des portes et par des fenêtres, et les gens qui s'en emparent, s'introduisent et s'en vont également par des portes et des fenêtres. Quels sont ces gens? Comment se sont-ils introduits? Et comment s'en sont-ils allés? Le parquet de Rouen, convaincu de son impuissance, sollicita le secours d'agents parisiens. M. Dudouis, le chef de la Sûreté, envoya ses meilleurs limiers de la brigade de fer. Lui-même fit un séjour de quarante-huit heures au Malaquis. Il ne réussit pas davantage. C'est alors qu'il manda l'inspecteur principal Ganimard" "—Ah! ça, mon cher, vous imaginez-vous que je vais pourrir sur la paille humide? Vous m'outragez. Arsène Lupin ne reste en prison que le temps qu'il lui plaît, et pas une minute de plus." "Ganimard se taisait. Cette évasion dont il se jugeait responsable—n'était-ce pas lui qui, par sa déposition sensationnelle, avait induit la justice en erreur?—cette évasion lui semblait la honte de sa carrière. Une larme roula vers sa moustache grise." "—Oh! point n'est besoin d'être sorcier. Il suffit, comme l'a dit ce brave président, de se préparer pendant une douzaine d'années pour être prêt à toutes les éventualités." "Le système Bertillon comporte d'abord le signalement visuel—et vous voyez qu'il n'est pas infaillible—et ensuite le signalement par mesures, mesure de la tête, des doigts, des oreilles, etc. Là-contre rien à faire." "Du moins, plus exactement, je retrouvais en moi la sorte de souvenir que laisse la vision d'un portrait plusieurs fois aperçu et dont on n'a jamais contemplé l'original. Et, en même temps, je sentais l'inutilité de tout effort de mémoire, tellement ce souvenir était inconsistant et vague." "Et il accomplit cette besogne de la façon la plus naturelle du monde, avec une aisance où se révélait le savoir d'un maître, d'un professionnel du vol et du crime. Pas un mot, pas un mouvement fébrile. Du sang-froid et de l'audace. Et j'étais là, sur la banquette, ficelé comme une momie, moi, Arsène Lupin!" "Et libre, hors de danger, je n'avais plus maintenant qu'à régler mes petites affaires personnelles, avec le concours des deux honnêtes représentants de la force publique. Arsène Lupin s'en allait à la recherche d'Arsène Lupin!" "Voilà tout. Une carte et une lettre trouvée dans un livre. En dehors de cela, rien. Était-ce assez pour affirmer que je n'avais pas été le jouet d'un rêve?" "«On va procéder en présence de l'empereur, et dans un lieu que l'on tiendra secret jusqu'à la dernière minute, aux premiers essais d'un sous-marin qui doit révolutionner les conditions futures de la guerre navale. Une indiscrétion nous en a révélé le nom: il s'appelle Le Sept-de-cœur.»" "Le soir, les journaux étalés sur ma table, nous discutions l'affaire et l'examinions sous toutes ses faces avec cette irritation que l'on éprouverait à marcher indéfiniment dans l'ombre et à toujours se heurter aux mêmes obstacles." "Les premières recherches ne fournirent point d'indice. Les fenêtres n'ayant pas été brisées ni les portes fracturées, sans nul doute le déménagement s'était effectué par l'issue secrète. Pourtant, sur le tapis, aucune trace de pas, sur les murs, aucune marque insolite." "Il y eut dans sa voix une nuance imperceptible d'ironie qu'il regretta aussitôt, car Herlock Sholmès le considéra des pieds à la tête, et d'un œil à la fois si enveloppant et si aigu, qu'Arsène Lupin eut l'impression d'être saisi, emprisonné, enregistré par ce regard, plus exactement et plus essentiellement qu'il ne l'avait jamais été par aucun appareil photographique." "Pour mémoire, le roi écrivit: 2-6-12, c'est-à-dire, H. R. L., la deuxième, la sixième et la douzième lettre du mot." "Sholmès sourit. —Monsieur Devanne, tout le monde n'est pas apte à déchiffrer les énigmes. —Mais voilà dix ans que je cherche. Et vous, en dix minutes... —Bah! l'habitude..." "—Aoh! dit-il, en accompagnant cette exclamation d'un geste de colère... —Une montre, fit Devanne, est-ce que par hasard?... L'Anglais ne répondit pas. —Comment! c'est votre montre! Arsène Lupin vous renvoie votre montre! Mais s'il vous la renvoie, c'est qu'il l'avait prise... Il avait pris votre montre! Ah! elle est bonne, celle-là, la montre de Herlock Sholmès subtilisée par Arsène Lupin! Dieu, que c'est drôle! Non, vrai... vous m'excuserez... mais c'est plus fort que moi. Il riait à gorge déployée, incapable de se contenir. Et quand il eut bien ri, il affirma, d'un ton convaincu: —Oh! c'est un homme, en effet." ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=4195 2021-02-28T18:21:57+01:00 https://earthli.com/users/marco

. There is no way that a human intelligence was involved. What kind of last name is "Drempt" anyway? Is it because the kid on the cover is "dreaming" so they took a misspelling of "dreamt" as his last name? The other seemingly nonsense terms are actual wrestling moves, but a town named "Molasses"? GTFOH. [My Kindle thinks I'm a teenage girl] [image] "That summer you realize your best friend has gotten really hot." I'm not sure which best friend they're referring to. They're both generically hot. I guessed by the author's classically female name (probably fake) that the intention was for me to sympathize with the girl who's discovered she might want to move someone out of the friend zone because his appearance has changed enough to make him fuckable instead [My Kindle thinks I'm bi] [image] "I was hired to break his bad habits, but what if I'm falling for Boston's notorious playboy?" Speaking of fuckable...this seems like a crossover hit with appeal for both the ladies and the gentlemen. While L.J. Shen has the firm hand and steely resolve to navigate the treacherous waters of a novel about a man who's so dumb he puts his tie on first, I just don't have time to read them all. This is one of those covers that might be awkward to explain if you leave your Kindle on your towel at the pool and your macho friends aren't aware that you have no control over what it shows in "sleep" mode and just assume that it's the cover of what you're reading. If you have good friends, they won't judge and maybe even have a few good suggestions of their own. [My Kindle thinks I'm a pedophile] [image] "A kidnapper with a perverse lust for manipulation, a girl abducted and locked away trying to remain strong, a police captain's race against the odds" Going back to the towel at the pool, I'm not sure how you're going to wiggle out of this one. If someone is confronting you about this cover on your Kindle, they've probably already called the police, just to be on the safe side. No, no! You don't understand! My Kindle chose this! I have no control over it! A likely story. Methinks though doth protest too much. Please come this way sir. Welcome to the predator's list. ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3910 2021-01-11T22:01:16+01:00 https://earthli.com/users/marco

with a truck laden with explosives, leading Reagan to close the embassy soon after. Considering that the US was actively engaged in a proxy war supporting Iraq against Iran at the time, it's debatable how unwarranted an attack on an embassy that housed the local branch of the CIA really was. If the situation were reversed, we'd have no trouble justifying the attack as warranted. [3] [1] Maybe if I went back and read my old Spider-Man comics, I'd think the same of those, but I somehow doubt it. Peter Parker was always poor, barely able to make ends meet. The modern Spider-Man betrays his humble origins, with him basically a scion of Tony Stark and rich and technologically super-charged beyond his wildest dreams. [1] I speak as an authority because I researched this when I was 11 years old.[image][image] I can't imagine that this was a homework assignment for a 4th- or 5th-grader, but maybe it was. More likely, I copied the diagrams from Time Magazine or something. Still, I was researching US foreign policy as a young 'un. ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3888 2021-01-03T17:16:56+01:00 https://earthli.com/users/marco

also did). As I've done in other years, I've included my notes and review of each book in this article as well as linked a separate article which includes the same notes and review, as well as citations and... ]]>

also did). As I've done in other years, I've included my notes and review of each book in this article as well as linked a separate article which includes the same notes and review, as well as citations and rough notes. So, this article weighs in at about 87 pages. I only hit 21 titles this years, but many of them were meaty tomes, one in German and one in French. A lot of public-policy books this year, with the accompanying analysis. Because of COVID-19, I also spent a lot more team reading articles and learning a lot about virology and epidemiology. I also worked and wrote a lot for "Encodo" last year. 1. "Queen of Chaos (2015)" <#Queen> 2. "A Gentleman in Moscow (2016)" <#Moscow> 3. "Unauthorized Bread (2019)" <#Unauthorized> 4. "Storage Combinators (2019)" <#Storage> 5. "Stacked Borrows: An Aliasing Model for Rust (2020)" <#Stacked> 6. "Why Events Are A Bad Idea (for high-concurrency servers) (2003)" <#Why> 7. "Robinson Crusoe (1719)" <#Robinson> 8. "World Made by Hand (2008)" <#World> 9. "The Long Emergency: Surviving the End of Oil, Climate Change, and Other Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-first Century (2005)" <#Emergency> 10. "The Scarlet Plague (1915)" <#Scarlet> 11. "The Machine Stops (1909)" <#Machine> 12. "La Peste (1947; fr)" <#Peste> 13. "I Can't Breathe (2017)" <#Breathe> 14. "Living in the Long Emergency (2020)" <#Living> 15. "Im Westen nichts Neues (1929)" <#Westen> 16. "Bullets Points and Punch Lines (2020)" <#Bullets> 17. "Speculation in JavaScriptCore (2020)" <#Speculation> 18. "The Last Man (1826)" <#Last> 19. "Naked Lunch (1959)" <#Naked> 20. "The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap (2014)" <#Divide> 21. "Tropic of Cancer (1934)" <#Tropic> Queen of Chaos (2015) by Diana Johnstone This book is an unflinching history of the wars waged by the ostensibly post-Cold War United States (the last 30 years), with a focus on the so-called humanitarian bombings of the (now-) former Yugoslavia and Libya, the invasion of Iraq, the bombings of Syria, the sanctions and continued antipathy toward Russia as well as the machinations of NATO in Ukraine and the rest of Eastern Europe against both Russia and Iran. Woven into the narrative is the continued hypocrisy of purported purpose versus actual behavior, using examples from Honduras and Kosovo versus Crimea and Ukraine. The book only occasionally loops back to implicate Clinton herself, although she was right there at the forefront for much, if not all, of this foreign policy. Instead, Johnstone tells a broader story of a national narrative, of which the Queen of Chaos Clinton is only an excellent and fitting representative. Johnstone spares no acrimony for Samantha Power, Susan Rice, Victoria Nuland and their poisonous worldview. She provides a tremendous amount of historical detail in a well-sourced, well-written, and eminently readable) book. It is damning of the U.S. and its purported moral high ground, summing it up early on as follows: "The United States is an irresponsible empire. It devastates countries and leaves them in shambles, with no compensation. Its actions are increasingly destructive because the purpose is not in reality to build an empire, but to destroy real or potential rivals and so maintain the position of superiority gained in World War II." Again and again, she shows how things that "we all know" from American history are deliberate fabrications, propaganda intended to tell history from the point of view of those in power in the States. The U.S. won WWII on its own. They were never allied with the Soviets. The French ran with their tails tucked. The Berlin Wall signaled the end of the Soviet Empire -- they were defeated rather than giving up. What would follow is an uninterrupted flow of lies, marketing campaigns for poisonous policies that benefited only a small cabal while killing millions and consigning millions more -- even in the U.S. -- to lives of despair. War would be made something palatable by making it seem like the most propitious and least-damaging of solutions to what seemed one intractable problem after another. "Inherent in all this is an apology for “preventive” war. That is, unprovoked aggressive war, waged to “prevent” the rise of a rival, or to get rid of a dictator, or to head off some supposed threat, such as (nonexistent) weapons of mass destruction. "[...] "This is the most blatant trick in the “preventive war” doctrine: we may go to war to prevent something that never would have happened anyway, but since it didn’t happen, we can claim credit for preventing it. (Emphasis added.)" And war is only one policy that serves the primary goal: to ensure that this same tiny cabal -- the 0.1% -- continue to exert their control over the rest of the world. Globalization is also just a tool to enable these people to grow their empire and to never have to fear that they will lose their wealth, power, and luxury. "[...] globalization means Americanization of the entire world. Our interests and values must prevail everywhere. In short, globalization means a world tied together by the universal penetration of financial markets in every sector of each national economy," In the propaganda war, the ideas of the left -- progressives -- must be subsumed, drained into a fallow field, where they won't cause any further trouble. To this end, the left has only too eagerly grasped the proffered "consolation prize [of] ideological hegemony in the more sentimental area of human relations". That is, they've been distracted by the bauble of purported sociological control, completely unaware that it doesn't matter at all because they've long since capitulated any differing opinions on economics or determining the purpose and goals of society. "Completely defeated in the area of economic policy, the left gets to define the dominant social doctrine, based on multiculturalism, concern for minorities, and anti-racism. Americans are taught to judge the governments of other countries almost exclusively by how they treat pro-Western dissidents or select minorities. (Emphasis added.)" But even here, the hypocrisy is astounding, absolutely flabbergasting. Russia's "problems with gays" (a law forbidding "proselytizing" to minors about homosexuality) are considered nearly a reason to bomb it flat without a second thought while there is no issue at all with Saudi Arabia's death penalty for homosexuality. The media and most of the political apparatus in America is in agreement. They are either incredibly stupid, incredibly ignorant, incredibly brainwashed, incredibly hypocritical, incredibly Machiavellian or some disgusting combination of all of these. Thanks to the Internet, it is possible to find dissidents. Thanks to media monopolies, it's not even worth the energy to try to suppress them. The U.S. is only too happy to throw stones in all directions, framing countries as good or bad based on their own rules. Johnstone deftly slays this paper tiger. "Gay rights – or rather “LGBT” rights – is now the one human rights area where the United States can claim to be “in advance” of most of the world. The issue can be used to attempt to discredit and embarrass other countries at a time when the United States is lagging behind in areas such as child mortality, income equality, life expectancy, primary education, and industrial productivity. As mentioned above, there is one area in which it does lead the world: the size of its prison population. Surely this is a more meaningful measurement of the state of “human rights” in the United States than the legality of gay marriage. (Emphasis added.)" And don't forget that this supposed interest in gay rights -- or any minority rights -- is complete bullshit in the service of the higher goal of world ideological domination through capital. It's all in the service of the goal stated at the very beginning: "destroy real or potential rivals". "While the United States officially hails “multi-ethnicity”, ethnic minorities in China and Russia are clearly seen as weaknesses to be exploited in order to destabilize and even break apart these great nations into more manageable pieces, on the model of Yugoslavia." There is no concept too sacred to twist into a weapon in the service of this goal. Johnstone takes time to see the many ways in which accusations of "genocide" -- instead of being using carefully and absolutely only where appropriate--are scattered about wherever the U.S. needs advantage. And the rest of the world kowtows to this linguistic bullying, for its own selfish reasons. "Once a leader is accused of “genocide”, there can be no negotiations, no diplomacy, no attempt to find a peaceful solution to the conflict which is the background of the alleged crime. The guilty party can only be indicted or killed. (Emphasis added.)" The pattern repeats itself endlessly and tiresomely. To these ends, the U.S. uses its massive media empire to tell stories about the rest of the world -- narrative over which it has sole control, that it alone shapes. For example, during the Arab Spring, where the entire narrative was driven by interviewees who, judging by their accents, had obviously spent their politically formative years at American universities. We don't seem to have any problem believing "facts" delivered by people about countries whose language and culture they know nothing about and to which they've never traveled. It was the same in Serbia, where "[r]eporters searched Albanian refugee camps for “somebody who has been raped and speaks English”." How much sense does it make to come to conclusions about foreign policy reported in this way? You can take the information in, but should reserve judgment rather than leaping to conclusions. What are the odds that the Washington Post or the New York Times has the story right about a policy in China when they get everything wrong about stories in their own country? Throughout the book, Johnstone takes issue with U.S. control of the narrative, the "framing" of issues, of large-scale ideas like international conflict. Even in this case, people are taught to think of actual wars like flame wars on the Internet: as differences in ideology. This is a luxury that only those in the relatively opulent West have. No-one really goes to war unless they are in desperate straits. No-one but empires. "[...] the totally unproven assumption that wars are caused by differences in political systems rather than by competition for resources, territorial disputes, or any number of other conflicts that may arise. It rules out coexistence between systems; the underlying implication is that our particular cause for going to war is to make every country resemble ours. (Emphasis added.)" Even granting that they may have started with the right aims, purportedly independent organizations like Amnesty International (and, even worse, Human Rights Watch) are subsumed by this worldview, trumpeting the U.S.'s truth and granting their implicit imprimatur. Each "win" advances the U.S. agenda more, moving it to its position as the "leader of the free world" in not only its own mind, but everyone else's. "[...] the main object of the “Kosovo war” was to put the United States and NATO above the law, where they remain to this day. "[...] "" " "The Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland were taken into NATO on the eve of the bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999.”" This isn't to say that everything the U.S. does moves it forward inexorably on a track to world domination. It is a stupid, half-blind and mean beast. It blunders about, knowing little and learning nothing, shouting accusations and conspiracy theories, often unaware that it is getting in its own way. Those who always benefit continue to do so, but they also often create more problems for themselves as well as everyone else. They just don't suffer for it -- except for maybe losing a bit on an investment once in a while. It's not even an efficient death machine. There is no more eloquent example of this than the mean-spirited and blinkered thinking that led to Gaddafi's ouster. Destroying Libya for revenge against a man who'd never really harmed them has loosed more problems on the U.S. strategy than they'd anticipated -- not unusual, since policymakers there understand so little of the real world and believe their own bullshit. This is bound to hamper their plans. In the case of Libya and Gaddafi, it was about eliminating a successful, quasi-socialist regime that shared its country's wealth with all of its citizens. Chavez and now Maduro can tell the same story about Venezuela. So has it always been and so will it remain until the sun sets on the American empire: so terrified of the communists that they let the anti-communists destroy everything instead. Reading this book now -- in a presidential election year where Hillary is opening her big yap again and Bernie is about to be torpedoed by the Dems again -- is instructive. Johnstone eloquently lays out the limits of policy and ideology in the U.S. "When it comes to domestic legislation, no truly progressive or egalitarian policies are feasible. However much they quarrel, both parties have accepted that domestic politics must conform to the interests of financial capital, “the markets”." This kind of single-mindedness isn't limited to Hillary. Though she was there at each critical juncture and is the Queen in the title, she is far from alone. Instead, the U.S. is full of people in power who are guilty of, "[...] thoughtlessly endorsing the possibility of nuclear war with no more reflection tha[n] a sports star endorsing a soft drink. This frivolity indicates that the problem of Hillary Rodham Clinton goes far beyond a single individual and reveals a far deeper crisis in the American political system." I've included "notes, citations and errata" in a separate post. A Gentleman in Moscow (2016) by Amor Towles This book should appeal to anyone who reads for the pleasure of reading. Towles has a knack for describing the world that, even when not impelling the story, is still so very much fun to read. The revolution of 1917 and its aftermath of Bolshevik lack of appreciation for culture is a background, but it doesn't figure strongly in the first third of the book. In fact, for the first third of the book, the story meanders, but doesn't really head anywhere. Instead, we are treated to a history of Russia and its idea of itself as well as its place in the world, as viewed by a man who is unable to leave the Hotel Metropol -- a luxury hotel whose purpose is at-times at odds with the purpose of the revolutionary government. It is a place that suits the gentleman's sensibilities, but not those of the new leaders of the Soviet Union. In the introduction, we learn that Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov is to be confined to the Hotel Metropol as punishment for having been born noble. He is neither exiled nor killed because of a famous revolutionary poem attributed to him. He had been living there for a year already, after having returned from Paris after the revolution. Why did he return when nobility like him were the deposed minority former rulers? Because he is Russian and he belongs in Russia, damn the consequences for his "kind". We visit the hotel with the Count, going through his rituals and routines at both the fancy and more pedestrian restaurants, the barber, the seamstress and so on. The Count makes nine-year--old Nina Kulikova's acquaintance and watches her grow up in the hotel. After a while, she is forced to move on, but she leaves him her passepartout with which he is able to explore much more of the hotel. At the same time, the Count takes a job as the head waiter of the Boyarsky, the fancy restaurant on the second floor of the Metropol. He makes great friends with what would become the other two members of the "Triumvirate": Emile, the chef, and Andrey, the maître'd. They tell magnificent stories. At the same time, he begins a relationship with the beguiling, intelligent, and beautiful actress Anna Urbanova. Mischka, the Count's friend from old days, makes good headway in the new regime, putting the finishing touches on a multi-book biography of Pushkin. He is asked to remove a sentence from one letter in the third volume in which Pushkin exclaimed over the glory of German bread, comparing it to the highly unfavorable and inadequate Russian variant. Mischka at first acquiesces, but then returns in a rage, offended to the core. He would pay for his principles with eight years of hard labor and then the "Minus Six" punishment: he would be free to travel in all of Russia minus the six great cities. The Count would see his friend only once or twice more. The Count's services are engaged by a Georgian Colonel Osip, who needs his erudition to learn how to deal with the outside world. The Count teaches him English and French as well as the cultures of the French, British and the Americans. Over 15 years, they become fast friends, reading many books and watching many films together. Osip is fascinated by the subversiveness and open nihilism of film noir, wondering how it is that the western governments allow it to exist. He has not quite grasped that while the Soviet was about overt suppression, America was about distraction. Orwell's vision vs. Huxley's. Years later, Nina returns. She was a serious child and grew into a serious worker, intent on doing her part to further the revolution's aim. Now, having married and had a child five years ago, she is there to ask the Count to watch her child while she searches for her husband, who's been carted off to Siberia. She is loath to take her daughter Sofia with her, though. Would Alexander be willing to watch her for a few weeks or months until she can send for her? Of course he can. No question. He would never see Nina again. In due course, the Count's suave demeanor and worldly knowledge attract the attention of an American Aide-de-camp Richard Vanderwhile. They hit it off immediately and also become friends. On one side, there is Osip, whose power and rank are only hinted at and now there is Richard, on the other side, also nearly certainly more powerful than he at first seems. Sofia is 13 years old. She has an accident playing a game with the Count -- she falls down service stairs trying to race him to their apartment. He carries her to a hospital, breaking his imprisonment. His friend Osip swoops in and smooths things over, sending him back to the Metropol and assuring him that Sofia will have the best care and will recover fully. Sofia is now 17 years old. She is still living with the Count at the Metropol. It is after WWII, nearly 1950. The Count is now 61 years old. The orchestra conductor at the hotel discovered Sofia's talent for piano. Over the next few years, he nurtures what is clearly not just a talent, but an absolute gift for music, for putting pathos and feeling into musical pieces of which adults several times her age are incapable. The Count is understandably proud that Sofia is excelling on all fronts. Rostov and his troika (Emile and Andrei) are forced to take up the master of the hotel (the Bishop, formerly the most terrible waiter in the second-class restaurant and now promoted through an innate talent for sycophancy and adherence to party cant) into their meetings, making them altogether less enjoyable. Life continues. The Count's decades-long relationship with Anna continues and grows. Stalin dies. The country shivers in the power vacuum. Things for the Count come to a head when Sofia is invited to play in Paris in six months time, sometime in the late 50s. The Count prepares assiduously for her defection -- and his own escape from the hotel. He takes his leave silently and with masterful planning and execution, rolling with a few kinks thrown into the plan by the Bishop, who gets his comeuppance, while the rest of his friends get richly rewarded with the remainder of his gold fortune that he'd kept stashed away for decades in cleverly contrived compartments in the legs of his desk. Sofia puts on a spectacular show in Paris, then defects to the U.S. embassy, meeting up with Richard Vanderwhile and getting the large part of Rostov's fortune hand-delivered to her then. The Count ranges into the Russian countryside, having fooled the authorities with a clever subterfuge into thinking that he'd escaped over the border into Finland. In a rustic inn, he meets up with Anna Urbanova, once again free to live out the remainder of his life with the woman he loves in the country he loves. Osip's favorite movies is Casablanca -- a movie that he watched with the Count many times. When we see him in a final scene, in the Kremlin, in the office of the chief of the KGB, behind the desk, he has just heard of the Count's escape and Sofia's disappearance, to which he replies: "Round up the usual suspects." The Count is a gracious and polite man, relatively well-read, and of indeterminate age. The writing is lovely and appeals to my dilettantish Russophile tendencies. Towles makes references to streets in Moscow and St. Petersburg (Leningrad) and to moments in history and literature (Gogol's Nose and Tolstoy's Borodino and, of course, to Pushkin and Chekhov) that ring authentic for me. Despite having been "trapped" in the Metropol Hotel for most of his adult life, Rostov's rich inner life, philosophy and discipline allow him to consider himself to be "the luckiest man in Russia". I've included "notes, citations and errata" in a separate post. Unauthorized Bread (2019) by Cory Doctorow "Unauthorized Bread" by Cory Doctorow is a novella describing a near-future (or perhaps alternate present) that could really only happen in the United States. Hyper-capitalism has proceeded to a point where private industry has extended its tendrils into all aspects of the pitiful excuse for a social contract the state even bothers to extend to the overwhelming majority of its population. The story is about Salima, an immigrant bouncing around the system, trying to get her feet under her. She befriends Nalifa, an Eritrean immigrant with two children, at an internment camp. After a couple of years, they get an "opportunity" to get cheaper housing in a building called Dorchester Towers. This building offers reduced-rate housing in exchange for being able to build much higher than the local building codes would allow. There is a rich section and a handful of floors -- 35 to 42 -- reserved for the poor. The elevators prefer the rich. The poor are forced to walk in the morning, when the 45-minute wait for an elevator would make them late for already-precarious jobs. In the evening, they tend to just wait rather than walking up 35 flights. There is no air-conditioning in the poor half of the entryway to the building. Security guards keep the riff-raff out. The apartments are small, but decent. However, none of their appliances are theirs: the toaster only cooks approved foods; the dishwasher only washes approved dishes; the refrigerator only hold approved foods. These foods are, of course, more expensive and nutritionally worse than the more "ethnic" food that most of the residents would prefer. The story is of the failure of the web of companies -- one among them being Boulangism, which makes the toaster -- that were responsible for maintaining the servers with which all of the appliances communicated in order to function. So the poor floors are left without an oven too cook in and without a dishwasher to wash dishes in and a refrigerator that refuses food. Salima learns how to hack on the Darknet -- using an old notebook rather than the 'fridge (which is the main way most people access information). She hacks her own appliances and gets not only food and a working dishwasher, but a degree of autonomy and control over her own life. She helps the rest of the poor part of the building free themselves as well. They all benefit, as they can now buy cheaper and healthier supplies rather than the corporate foods. In her travels to accounting clients (she's an accountant for small businesses, doing quite well for herself, actually), she meets Wye, a programmer working for the company that acquired the husk of Boulangism and is working very hard to get things back online -- and providing, once again, money for the corporation. Wye is sympathetic, but is also initially callous, not even really understanding how terrible it is for a system to force people to use such appliances and then to just drop them for months, making it illegal for them to make other arrangements, despite the state and corporation having failed to hold up its end of the bargain at all. When the software comes online, though, it will detect all of the hacked software and pinpoint Dorchester Towers as a "bunch of cheaters". Salima desperately tries to put things back the way they were, killing the budding revolution in the cradle, afraid (quite rightly) that the powers-that-be will exact a terrible punishment. Once she has converted all of the apartments back, she discovers a better way: run a VM in the devices that pretends to be a conforming device, but which runs another copy of a non-confirming and hacked OS. Though the company tries to get Salima to work with them, essentially betraying her own class, Salima holds strong. At first Wye is disappointed, but she comes around and works, in the end, to help Salima continue to subvert any anti-hacking measures that the company employs. I've included "notes, citations and errata" in a separate post. Storage Combinators (2019) by Marcel Weiher and Robert Hirschfeld This "paper (PDF)" discusses a proposal for composing all objects in a software system using a common API called "Storage Combinators" rather than using custom interfaces everywhere. They authors demonstrate how an application could benefit from composability of such operations -- akin to how the REST standard has improved composability for disparate and individually developed services -- purportedly without sacrificing any of the expressiveness of a more bespoke API. The following summary is from the "Discussion" section: "In-Process REST in general and storage combinators in particular take an architectural style known to work well in the distributed case and scale it down to work in the non-distributed, local case in order to bring along the modularity benefits associated with that style." Many bespoke APIs are needlessly different from one another. It's an interesting idea to enforce API strictures akin to REST between software components running in the same memory space. What is a bit odd is their insistence on using Objective Smalltalk for all of their examples -- a language that I'd never even heard of (and I've been paying attention). No-one is using this language [1] and its syntax is based on two of the bigger syntax boondoggles in our industry: Smalltalk and Objective-C. Due to this idiosyncratic choice, it's not always easy to distill the purpose from the examples. Still, the storage combinators are interesting and end up being the "In-process REST" that the authors described in the citation above. Once they've defined the basic storage API -- GET, PUT, PATCH, and DELETE, they define a plethora of common behavior that transforms to it: switches, logging, caching, JSON, etc. From these components, they go on to define an HTTP server and client that communicate via a JSON protocol (naturally). An interesting addendum is that they've actually developed this approach in several industry projects that are in production, so it's not just an ivory-tower exercise without any real-world basis. I personally wonder how well the average developer can grok and work with a severely reduced API (in their eyes). That is, while it's definitely possible for a good programmer to build everything they need from these combinators (essentially first-principle building blocks), it's unclear to me whether that scales to a large enough base of actually existing developers. The approach is complete, but restrictive; it also makes it very difficult for developers to work with existing frameworks and profit from the documentation and community available there. This possible downside aside, a positive effect was that developers wrote a lot less custom code, instead re-using the existing building blocks and creating their own. When they stayed focused on the compositional pattern, using the at-times very abstract building blocks, they did end up with a well-performing solution. A downside, as expected, was that, since the developers didn't write most of the code themselves and the building blocks are relatively highly abstracted, debugging was more difficult and "it was often impossible to determine the dataflow path before runtime" and "it would be difficult to debug, because a programmer has to step through the whole data transformation path during runtime". These are pitfalls associated with any highly generalized framework. They are not incidental problems to be taken care of in minor updates, but point to a possibly fatal flaw in an overgeneralized framework. [2] Despite many iterations, they seem to have landed on a highly generic implementation that cannot be easily used by mere mortals. My own experiences with developing frameworks have taught me to stay slightly less generic with the parts that mortal developers will come into contact with. It's not that they're not smart enough to get it, but that they will all have to learn from one of the masters, which doesn't scale well. Instead, a slightly more redundant and not as highly generalized architecture tends to allow developers to build up local knowledge and synergies without constant "herding" by senior developers. They end with more code-duplication and are less able to benefit from performance improvements and bug fixes in common components, but they are able to work more autonomously -- or even at all. The debugging and introspection issues mentioned above are kind of framework-killers as I don't really see a good way around them short of developing a highly targeted DSL with its own source-level debugger, IDE, etc. The conclusion of the paper is a bit at odds with itself: on the one hand, it writes, "Their use correlates strongly with positive effects on code-size, performance, reliability and productivity, both observationally and in the minds of developers." But then immediately writes that, "One area of future research is how to type and statically type-check storage combinators. The same generic nature that makes storage combinators so composable also makes it difficult to verify when they are connected correctly." This seems kind of like a fatal flaw that the team has managed to patch with having good developers who intimately understand the framework -- and probably with lots of debugging hours. Their next topic in the conclusion is about debugging and discusses a DSL as I mentioned above as a possible solution. None of these things will be easy to implement or build and it's honestly unclear to me whether it even can be built without sacrificing the flexibility or the purity of the initial approach. In the end, you'll end up with a compromised system with bespoke everything and many, many idiosyncratic and poorly documented behaviors. And, since everything's bespoke, you can't lean on external communities and documentation and search for anything. I wish them the best of luck, but don't hold out much hope for the path that they're on. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] It doesn't have a Wiki page and the only "home page" I can find looks like it was built with Doxygen anno 1999 and the certificate isn't even valid. [1] While it's possible for an underlying framework to be this highly generalized, it's generally inefficient to have all of your developers working at this level -- most of them aren't skilled enough to do so. That is, a framework can benefit from a high level of generalization that significantly reduces code-duplication, but that part has to very rarely be evident to mortal developers. Instead, they should float in a substrate of other APIs, that are more more straightforward to specify (i.e. high-level APIs that benefit from composability but don't necessarily expose it) and are more easily debugged and tested. I've included "notes, citations and errata" in a separate post. Stacked Borrows: An Aliasing Model for Rust (2020) by Ralf Jung, Hoang-hai Dang, Jeehoon Kang, Derek Dreyer This "paper (PDF)" is a recent one addressing one of the main weaknesses of the "borrow checker" in Rust. What's a borrow checker? Where other programming languages have chosen from manual memory-management (C, early C++, early Pascal, etc.), garbage-collection (C#, Java, etc.) and reference-counting (Swift, modern C++, etc.), Rust chose a new path: the borrow checker. The rules of the language require that the program be written in a manner where it is always clear who owns memory and who is "using" memory. Allocated memory is always deallocated when it leaves the scope in which it was allocated, unless the memory was passed on to a different scope by "loaning" it. If a "borrowed" reference lingers after this scope is closed, the compiler flags it as an error. Rust also has a lot of support for explicitly copying references, when the borrow checker can't be satisfied any other way. The algorithm treats mutable and immutable references accordingly. See the "Rust documentation on references and borrowing" or the paper itself for an in-depth discussion. This approach requires more involvement on the part of the programmer, but also results in programs that provably have neither memory leaks nor access violations should the program pass compilation. This is a very interesting property for Rust to be able to guarantee -- and it accomplishes it without a garbage collector (with its associated performance issues and difficulty in being predictable enough for real-time, system-level code) or reference-counting (which also incurs performance overhead and require participation of the runtime). Instead, a Rust program's memory usage is guaranteed by the compiler to be correct, so there is no need for asynchronous tasks or runtime support. In the current incarnation of Rust, this guarantee comes with a big caveat: the borrow checker does not deal with unsafe blocks at all. It is hoped that most Rust code can avoid unsafe blocks, relying instead of higher-level abstractions that hide unsafe code. However, what guarantee is there that the unsafe code used in the common libraries or popular crates is not misallocating or misusing memory? While the code in the base libraries is fastidiously written and covered by myriad tests, errors are bound to slip in. This is where the software proposed in this paper comes in. The authors build on the borrow-checker concept to extend it to unsafe regions as well. They come up with a new borrow-checking algorithm called "Stacked Borrows" that is more sophisticated than the initial algorithm introduced with and still used in modern Rust. The authors show that the their algorithm not only allows a compiler to improve its borrow-checking but also increases the number of situations in which a compiler can be 100% sure of the placement of variable manipulations so that it can optimize many more situations to produce much more performant code. [3] That is, "In this work, we propose Stacked Borrows, an operational semantics for memory accesses in Rust. Stacked Borrows defines an aliasing discipline and declares programs violating it to have undefined behavior, meaning the compiler does not have to consider such programs when performing optimizations." They obviously spent quite a bit of time honing their algorithm, running their test interpreter and compiler against a large part of the Rust standard library and popular crates. Their paper includes not only the algorithm, but also several proofs for why the algorithm can guarantee certain properties that a compiler can use to optimize code much better than today's Rust compiler. Not only that, but their attack on the corpus of Rust code yielded several cases in which highly central Rust runtime/system unsafe code was incorrect and possibly leaked or violated memory. Several of their pull requests have been accepted and the team and their tool is quite well-received in the Rust community. They have made this tool, an interpreter named Miri available for anyone to use and test until "[we can] eventually mak[e] a variant of Stacked Borrows part of the official semantics of Rust." I've included "notes, citations and errata" in a separate post. Why Events Are A Bad Idea (for high-concurrency servers) (2003) by Rob von Behren, Jeremy Condit and Eric Brewer This is an older "paper (PDF)" that discusses event-based systems (essentially cooperative multi-tasking) vs. threaded implementations (pre-emptive multi-tasking). The conclusion in this paper from 2003 (nearly 20 years ago) is that threads are hands-down easier to work with and offer the promised performance, given that the implementation is robust. The fact that events vs. threads was still being discussed at the time was only due to very sub-standard threading implementations that engendered deadlocks, race-conditions and terrible performance. Modern threading implementations are based on OS constructs that trade memory for performance by storing a separate stack for each thread. Only the registers need to be switched out when switching threads/tasks. It's interesting that one of the main arguments against threads was "restrictive control flow" because that issue has now been nearly completely addressed by the Promise/Future pattern, encapsulated in an even easier-to-use syntax as async/await in languages like C#, JavaScript. TypeScript, and Rust. This paradigm abstracts subroutines without making any promises about how the code in those subroutines is executed. Just from the keywords, it's obvious that the idea is to execute the code asynchronously, but it's not a requirement in all cases. The .NET literature is full of discussions of optimizations that balance a cooperative approach for quick "bailout" scenarios -- where e.g. a value is available in constant time and doesn't actually necessitate a thread as it will never wait on any asynchronous I/O -- to those that seamlessly grab a thread from a pool and schedule the code asynchronously (and preemptively) only if needed. Many of these different code-paths are even allocation-free in the .NET Core Runtime, leading to massive performance boosts versus older implementations. Recently, the developers of Rust have written several interesting papers -- and white-paper--length blogs -- about the async/await implementation in Rust that go in the same directly: weighing the pros and cons of event-based vs. thread-based implementations. The authors of this paper concluded with: "Although event systems have been used to obtain good performance in high concurrency systems, we have shown that similar or even higher performance can be achieved with threads. Moreover, the simpler programming model and wealth of compiler analyses that threaded systems afford gives threads an important advantage over events when writing highly concurrent servers. In the future, we advocate tight integration between the compiler and the thread system, which will result in a programming model that offers a clean and simple interface to the programmer while achieving superior performance." And so it would come to be. I've included "notes, citations and errata" in a separate post. Robinson Crusoe (1719) by Daniel Defoe This is the story of a young, wealthy Englishman who leaves the comforts of his well-off family to seek his fortune on the high seas. His father warns him against it, telling him to instead find comfort in the warm cocoon of the upper middle-class. Instead, his life takes him from well-off scion to dilettante sailor to slave to slave-owner (literally just assuming that his co-escapee, also a slave, would just continue to be his slave once they'd escaped their common owner) to plantation owner to wannabe slave-trader to castaway to nearly incomprehensibly rich ship and island and plantation owner (through nearly no effort of his own, as he'd been stranded for nearly three decades, doing literally nothing to grow the fortune that he mysteriously gets anyway). Robinson embarks in August of 1651 and soon disembarks from a shipwreck, but safe in a harbor. He sets off again, but is beset by pirates, who take him captive and sell him to the north-African Moors as a slave. He is two years a slave before he can take a boat and escape along the coast of Africa, with fellow escapee Xury. They are finally taken in by a Portugese ship with a very generous and fair captain, who agrees to buy Xury and takes Crusoe to Brazil, depriving him of not one possession. Crusoe doesn't at all question his assumed superiority to Xury, nor his right to sell him to the captain. That they consider him to be chattel does nothing at all to diminish their firm opinions that they are both good men. Continuing to fail upward, Crusoe manages to parlay his minor fortune into a pretty major fortune. For a few years, he owns a plantation in Brazil before the wanderlust takes him again. In 1659, he agrees to head up an expedition to secure slaves from Africa for his and other plantations. Continuing his excellent seafaring luck, he shipwrecks about 40 miles out of the Orinoco river. No-one else survives. The ship is still upright enough and is beached on a sandbar, close enough to shore to reach by swimming. The storm has abated. Crusoe makes several trips to the boat to retrieve supplies and float them back to the island. He sets up life on the island, building a shelter, shooting goats and collecting water. A year in, he finds God. He explores the island, finding the other half to be much more hospitable, but is loath to move from what he now considers to be "home", with its view of the sea and possible rescue. He is inordinately terrified of "cannibals" and keeps his head down over years and even decades, with only his raving imaginings of potential attack to keep him company. E.g., "[...] where are found the worst of savages; for they are cannibals or men-eaters, and fail not to murder and devour all the human bodies that fall into their hands." Obviously. For they’ve nothing better to do than lust after his precious rump roast. Further on, Defoe tries to give birth to a sentence, but can't find the end of it: "Then, supposing they were not cannibals, yet they might kill me, as many Europeans who had fallen into their hands had been served, even when they had been ten or twenty together—much more I, that was but one, and could make little or no defence; all these things, I say, which I ought to have considered well; and did come into my thoughts afterwards, yet gave me no apprehensions at first, and my head ran mightily upon the thought of getting over to the shore." This sentence is a work of art. It’s convoluted to the point of incomprehensibility, seeming to have trapped the author into a whirlpool from which he can only escape via several awkward and completely nonsensical semicolons. Before that, though, he expresses his casual racism toward “cannibals”, who almost certainly don’t exist, and expresses a fear that they will kill him, although his countrymen have probably killed the islanders many hundreds of times more. On page 147, he admits that "I had lived there fifteen years now and had not met with the least shadow or figure of any people yet," so he's not really in imminent danger. He goes through 18, then 23, then 24 years without seeing another soul (though he had seen a single footprint once, which terrified him, ruining his sleep, for years). It is at this point, that he finally gets his "Man Friday". "It came very warmly upon my thoughts, and indeed irresistibly, that now was the time to get me a servant, and, perhaps, a companion or assistant; and that I was plainly called by Providence to save this poor creature’s life." Of course, he's going to shower the man with his beneficence by allowing him to become his slave. Nearly a quarter-century of island-living has done nothing to dim his internalized attitude toward others and his belief in the superiority of Englishmen and their proper place at the top of whatever hierarchy they may find themselves in. Luckily for our Englishman, the "slave" is very aware of his role and jumps in with gusto, as evidenced by the passage where they meet. "[...] and he came nearer and nearer, kneeling down every ten or twelve steps, in token of acknowledgment for saving his life. I smiled at him, and looked pleasantly, and beckoned to him to come still nearer; at length he came close to me; and then he kneeled down again, kissed the ground, and laid his head upon the ground, and taking me by the foot, set my foot upon his head; this, it seems, was in token of swearing to be my slave for ever." I mean, obviously, this is hugely convenient, because our hero is doing the slave a favor of allowing him to be a slave, which he so clearly desperately wishes to be, in order to express his eternal gratitude to the obviously superior Englishman. It gets even more uncomfortable when he describes the man he's acquired. The description is basically slave-owner porn, reading more like the description of a beast of burden or a racehorse. "He was a comely, handsome fellow, perfectly well made, with straight, strong limbs, not too large; tall, and well-shaped; and, as I reckon, about twenty-six years of age. He had a very good countenance, not a fierce and surly aspect, but seemed to have something very manly in his face; and yet he had all the sweetness and softness of a European in his countenance, too, especially when he smiled." He is saved from ugliness by having aspects of the Continent about him, thankfully. It goes on at length like this, ending two pages later in a repetition of the passage above, assuring the reader that the fealty is nearly entirely the idea of the slave. "At last he lays his head flat upon the ground, close to my foot, and sets my other foot upon his head, as he had done before; and after this made all the signs to me of subjection, servitude, and submission imaginable, to let me know how he would serve me so long as he lived." So porn-y. It reads like a teenage boy’s dream journal about ruling an island. On top of that, we are reassured that, having found a new God to worship in the person of our narrator, Friday has no desires. No want to return to his people. Or to his wife or family. He is content to be with and to learn from his new God. "I began really to love the creature; and on his side I believe he loved me more than it was possible for him ever to love anything before" The love is mutual, but his is a love for a beast, whereas Friday's is the adoration of a God. When more people show up, captives he and Friday rescue from cannibals and others who escape a mutiny that ends in shipwreck, our narrator reflects on his position, after over 27 years on the island. "My island was now peopled, and I thought myself very rich in subjects; and it was a merry reflection, which I frequently made, how like a king I looked. First of all, the whole country was my own property, so that I had an undoubted right of dominion. Secondly, my people were perfectly subjected—I was absolutely lord and lawgiver—they all owed their lives to me, and were ready to lay down their lives, if there had been occasion for it, for me. " Again, this is like young-adult fiction, massaging the ego of the reader. It goes on at length like this, with the narrator expressing amazement at his own magnanimity in allowing everyone to practice the religion they preferred (and, of course, Friday, absolutely prefers the religion of our narrator). He, of course, inherits the ship of the crew who he and Friday saved -- because of course they would just give him everything in thanks. There are many passages of this sort, assuring the reader that everything truly is going to work out perfectly well for Crusoe. "He anticipated my proposals by telling me that both he and the ship, if recovered, should be wholly directed and commanded by me in everything; and if the ship was not recovered, he would live and die with me in what part of the world soever I would send him; and the two other men said the same." It's nice to be super-rich and only temporarily inconvenienced rather than made destitute or a slave (again, though the first time was nearly inconceivable). An overland trip to bring his riches back to England from Madrid is kind of tacked on to the end of the book. He ends up with a tremendous fortune, with no-one cheating him out of anything and the world seemingly showering him with goods. Also, his overland journey has adventures, but he loses nothing. Also, the island is obviously acknowledged as belonging to him. He owns it and everyone who lives on it. He even "sent seven women, being such as I found proper for service, or for wives to such as would take them," breeding people like he did his goats when he still lived there. The book shows its age, having no lasting philosophical statement that survives in the modern age. The writing style is convoluted and the prose is often quite childish in concept. I wouldn't read anything by Defoe again. I've included "notes, citations and errata" in a separate post. World Made by Hand (2008) by James Howard Kunstler This book is the first of several novels fictionalizing a world as envisioned in "The Long Emergency" , a non-fiction account of the coming end of cheap oil and its many repercussions for a world nearly exclusively predicated on it. In this novel, the nearly complete unavailability of fossil fuels was engendered not by a natural lack of easy resources, but by nuclear attacks on Washington and Los Angeles (vaguely hinted at, with no clear enemy blamed) and a kind of super-flu that wiped out a lot of people and put an end to any semblance of shared, national-level infrastructure. The story is of Robert Ehrlich, who lives in Union Grove, New York (fictional, but within a couple days' march of Albany). He's a form sales executive turned carpenter who lost his wife and daughter to the flu and his son Daniel to wanderlust many years ago. The town of Union Grove has a decent water supply, but very sporadic electricity -- it's nearly nonexistent and therefore completely unreliable, more of a curiosity of a time long past. They grow some food, cook with wood, etc. Though they still live in the houses of a more modern past, they make very little use of any of the more advanced accoutrements. To the north of the town is an encampment of former bikers and ne'er-do-wells who've monopolized the business of reclamation and re-selling of goods stripped from abandoned -- and some, not-quite-yet-abandoned -- houses and businesses. The place is called Karptown and is run by a miscreant straight out of the Mad Max movies named Wayne Karp. Also near the town is a fully self-sufficient plantation run by Stephen Bullock, who is basically a lord of many serfs, but pretty benevolent. This organization is not too far-fetched and is quite likely to be one of the types of cultures that survives -- as long as the ruler stays benevolent, the group stays relatively small and manageable and the community is successful without any debilitating tragedies that would throw it out of equilibrium. The final group is a bunch of highly capable religious travelers akin to the Amish, but nomadic and far less averse to technology, headed by Brother Jobe. He settles on the area, having traveled up from Pennsylvania, where things are "much worse". He doesn't want to take things up, per se, but he does think that the local townsfolk have been somewhat shiftless and directionless, leaving them open to the predations of Wayne Karp, among others. Within this structure, the basic plot points are as follows: * One of Wayne's band kills a promising local young man from town while Robert doesn't exactly look on, but is utterly helpless to do anything after the fact. * Jobe thinks Karp's band should be punished. * Jobe and Robert visit Bullock -- also the local magistrate -- and ask if he'll help bring Karp and his crew to heel. * Bullock is more interested in finding out what happened to four of his men and a trading vessel that he sent down Albany way. * They agree to help, but only if he sends supplies (lengths of pipe) to help them repair the town's water supply. They do this and water-service is restored, restoring also a bit of self-confidence and faith in the townspeople. * The young man's wife and child move in to Robert's house to "keep house". There is really no other choice, though several townspeople purse their lips in disapproval that stems from a way of life that no longer applies. * Robert and several of Jobe's acolytes head down to Albany to investigate. * They discover that Albany is all buy lawless and in the hands of an even greater miscreant than Wayne Karp. Robert learns of the brutal efficiency of Jobe's men -- who, while they've mostly found Jesus, are also almost all former military. * They return with the four men and having eliminated the threat to river trade by shooting nearly the entire gang who'd coopted it for themselves. * Bullock celebrates their return with a giant party that empties out the town. * Karp's men come down to rob the town and also to see if they can find some "action" from any ladies who didn't attend the party (Robert's new roommate being one of them). * On the same day, Jobe and his men set up a barbershop that isn't quite voluntary and shave a bunch of beards from unwilling customers. * Robert and the pastor (Loren) arrest Jobe, who comes along relatively quietly and lets himself be put in jail. * * Robert and Loren head up to Karptown to arrest Karp. Things go predictably -- he says "no" -- and Robert gets covered in buckets of shit, but only after Loren's asshole is torn open by brutal paddling. They make their way back to town, with the help of some of Jobe's men. * Jobe's men go up to Karptown to collect Karp and return with him, placing him in a cell next to Jobe's. Minor, one of the men who'd proven so essential on the trip to Albany was unfortunately killed in the raid. * Jobe is praying feverishly. * The next morning, Jobe is no longer in his cell, but the door is still chained shut. Karp's cell is also still locked, but he'd dead, with a bullet-wound through his eye that exactly matches the one Minor had suffered the night before. * Robert learns that Minor was Jobe's son. * Robert finds Jobe on the grounds he and his people had settled on: the old High School that he'd purchased and which his people were fixing up to house their "queen bee", a bizarrely and grotesquely fat woman who seems to have the gift of preternatural sight...but that seems to be a plot line that will be pursued more fully in subsequent novels. * They talk and Jobe is super-mysterious and also just kind of disappears, leading Robert to wonder what sort of supernatural stuff is going on. The "eye for an eye" stuff gives him quite a bit of pause, especially in his fraught condition, having hardly slept, drunk too much whiskey and still being desperately worried about his friend Loren, who'd undergone surgery the night before. * The book ends several months later, with Robert in charge of the town and Loren having recovered more or less fully. Karp's gang is subdued while Jobe's crew is doing well on their own, as are Bullock's people. On a side note, I was quite surprised to learn that Kunstler doesn't know how to use past tenses correctly. He very, very often uses "did" when he definitely meant to use "had done", which I'd taken to be a more modern affectation of young authors whose education had gone missing. I'd never noticed his online work to suffer from the same affliction, so I'm somewhat mystified as to the reason behind it. Some authors use the incorrect form in dialogue, in order to impart an authenticity to the speech patterns of their characters. The patois of upstate New York -- near Albany, where the book takes place -- most definitely fails to distinguish between verb forms in nearly any way, placing all of the legwork required to determine when and if something happened squarely on the listener. Confusion abounds, but what can you do when no-one can be bothered? Perhaps this curtailed version of English is what we've got to work with from here on out. Perhaps Kunstler's subtle point is that the World Made By Hand won't have time for such niceties. The theme of the book is a world that has been simplified by nuclear attacks and influenza epidemics from our high-tech quasi-nightmare to a much more bucolic and brutal lifestyle. Perhaps the language followed suit. I've included "notes, citations and errata" in a separate post. The Long Emergency: Surviving the End of Oil, Climate Change, and Other Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-first Century (2005) by James Howard Kunstler This is a non-fiction book-length discussion of the end of oil -- and the massive impact this will have on a society nearly completely predicated on cheap, non-renewable energy produced over millions of years. It ranges wide and far and includes intelligent and well-written analyses of all of the parts of our world that will have to change -- whether we want them to or not. He discusses car culture, suburbs, poorly designed societies, climate change, big finance, the mortgage collapse (before it happened), pandemics (before it happened in the west), and much, much more. The book starts with a bleak but accurate assessment of American society -- from hyper-consumerism to happy motoring to ex-ex-exurbs. It continues with a discussion of what oil is and where it comes from -- oil in particular because its the most flexible of the various energy sources currently available to us -- and even of others that we can currently conceive of. "Oil is an amazing substance. It stores a tremendous amount of energy per weight and volume. It is easy to transport. It stores easily at regular air temperature in unpressurized metal tanks, and it can sit there indefinitely without degrading. You can pump it through a pipe, you can send it all over the world in ships, you can haul it around in trains, cars, and trucks, you can even fly it in tanker planes and refuel other airplanes in flight [...]" The book is split into section after prophetic section, discussing how nearly everything in our modern society is possible thanks to the high-density energy of cheap fossil fuels. The United States depends on natural gas for heating and producing many of its resources -- including nearly all of the fertilizer without which not a single crop would grow. Kunstler defines what Peak Oil actually means: it's the point at which the world has used up half of the oil supply in the world. He points out that the half we've used is also very much the more easily obtained half -- and that much of the second half won't be able to be obtained at all. It won't be worth it, not only economically, but in the more prosaic and realistic measure of how much energy it would take to extract it. While the energy needed to harvest fossil fuels used to be a couple of dozen to one, we're now lucky to get two or three to one. The U.S. hit peak oil nearly 45 years ago now; it has never again produced as much oil as it did then. It has also long since hit peak natural-gas. Kunstler wrote his book before shale-oil and fracking took off, but he predicted it perfectly. That the US went for shale oil and fracking is indicative that we've hit Peak Oil. Otherwise, no-one would ever have developed such an invasive extraction technology with such poor yields and margins. There are still those who claim that Peak Oil doesn't matter -- they try to explain it away as peak consumption rather than peak production, but that's ridiculous. It's like someone who loses their job saying that there's no problem with losing their salary. When you meet them a month later, they say they're doing fine: they've started robbing houses instead. With most of the world having passed the peak, there's no longer a way of controlling the price of oil because no-one has excess capacity to throw at the market to bring prices back down. That explains the whipsawing of prices over the years. Kunstler also predicted the fragility of fracking -- witness the complete implosion of the industry after oil prices cratered due to the world self-isolating for Covid-19. He doesn't talk about just oil, though. He also writes about climate change...and pandemics, another thing that could easily trigger the Long Emergency. "At the same time, the world is overdue for an extreme influenza epidemic. The last major outbreak was the 1918 Spanish influenza, which killed 50 million people worldwide and changed the course of history. [...] Disease will certainly play a larger role in the Long Emergency than many can now imagine. An epidemic could paralyze social and economic systems, interrupt global trade, and bring down governments." Perhaps it wasn't such a leap to predict something like this -- Kunstler was certainly not alone in doing so -- but the timing was just right for reading this book. He's really a very gifted writer, weaving a convincing, if sobering, picture of the future of humanity, "Our ability to resist the environmental corrective of disease will probably prove to have been another temporary boon of the cheap-oil age, like air conditioning and lobsters flown daily from Maine to the buffets of Las Vegas. So much of what we construe to be among our entitlements to perpetual progress may prove to have been a strange, marvelous, and anomalous moment in the planet’s history." He weaves similarly evocative pictures of just how impossible our world currently is -- especially when you realize that the free-energy bonanza on which it rests is winding down. "Products then moved around the globe in a highly rationalized system, not unlike the oil allocation system, using immense vessels, automated port facilities, and truck-scaled shipping containers at a minuscule cost-per-unit of whatever was made and transported. Shirts or coffeemakers manufactured 12,000 miles away could be shipped to Wal-Marts all over America and sold cheaply." He points out that so many economic miracles and turnarounds were almost always due to a newly found bonanza of oil or natural gas. For example, England's turnaround in the 80s wasn't because of Thatcher's economic acumen, but purely because they'd just come into an embarrassment of riches in the North Sea. His holistic vision encompasses also the financialization of global economics, describing the fire sale of an industrialized society built on fossil fuels as "like a convoluted liquidation sale of the accrued wealth of two hundred years of industrial society for the benefit of a handful of financial buccaneers," He's much more familiar with his home country and takes them especially to task as being utterly unable to think for themselves. "In effect, Americans threw away their communities in order to save a few dollars on hair dryers and plastic food storage tubs, never stopping to reflect on what they were destroying." The world shows itself ideologically incapable of even considering the obvious conclusions based on available data. Instead, faith in the ever-providing markets is the order of the day. "Because the oil peak phenomenon essentially cancels out further industrial growth of the kind we are used to, its implications lie radically outside their economic paradigm. So the oil peak phenomenon has been discounted to about zero among conventional economists, who assume that “market signals” about oil supplies will inevitably trigger innovation, which, in turn, will cause new technology to materialize and enable further growth." The problem is more acute in the U.S., which has taken an oil-drenched lifestyle to an unparalleled extreme. Other advanced societies are also dependent on oil, but it's still easily possible to live a life even with reduced fossil-fuel supplies. That is, the cities are still livable and can be navigated by foot, bicycle or public transportation, food is produced reasonably sustainably and locally (e.g. without natural-gas-based fertilizers, because "[n]inety-five percent of the nitrogenous fertilizers used in America are made out of natural gas"). Not so in the U.S. Just as an example, Kunstler writes that by 1974 "85 percent of Americans drove to work every day." and that "[b]y the 1990s, American households were making a record eleven separate car trips a day running errands and chauffeuring children around." The U.S. is in deep trouble, much deeper than other places. This is also due to a complete political paralysis and fear of telling the truth or even of acknowledging reality. "No politician wants to tell voters that the American Dream has been canceled for a lack of energy resources. The U.S. economy would disintegrate. So, whichever party is in power has tended to ignore the issue or change the subject, or spin it into the realm of delusion" Kunstler stumbles in two areas: The first is foreign policy in the Middle East in the 70s and 80s, where his lens is still too U.S.-centric, as hard as that is to believe. The other is the short chapter on racism, where he's got some decent points to make, but still ends up making them as a boorish, victim-blaming old white guy who doesn't quite believe in systemic racism. For example, he describes the 21st-century war on Islam as "[w]e are therefore at war with that community—not because of our choosing but because it has declared war on us." It's understood that the book was written only a few years after 9/11, but it's not like that was the first act of war -- Kunstler could have mentioned something along those lines. Just as another example, here's how he wrote about the WMD inspections in Iraq: "Since the UN team was prevented from completing the search, the United States had to do it in person. The fact that nothing was found by American forces after the 2003 invasion does not prove that we didn’t have to look." He fails to note that this is because vassal nations must be brought to heel and occupation is the punishment/answer. The logic is so internalized. Kunstler is at his best when he's calmly expounding on his main thesis: We are shredding through millions of years of stored non-renewable energy in a couple of centuries. The society we built with it is utterly unsustainable when that energy is no longer available in that form. "Natural hydrocarbons represent millennia of stored solar power collected by plants and distilled by geologic accident. The flare given off by igniting an ounce of charcoal starter lasts a few seconds, but the energy was derived from, say, a prehistoric tree fern absorbing sunshine for nine years." "Also, once these complex systems and their subsystems halt their operations, restarting them may range from difficult to impossible—the Humpty Dumpty syndrome." At the time the book was written, fuel cells were all the rage, in particular fuel-cell cars. In the ensuing 15 years, we've instead seen the rise of the electric car -- Kunstler's devastating critique of the lack of viability of building cars at all -- rescuing the happy motoring culture without the fossil fuels -- applies just as well to electric cars. He described Tesla 10 years before it even produced a single car. As Kunstler points out, a lot of the cures for the end of cheap energy are based on still having access to that cheap energy. This will be the case, even after peak oil or peak natural-gas, for quite some time. That is, there is a certain (limited) supply of still-cheap energy with which we could possibly transition to something that no longer requires us to have access to cheap-energy stores -- or at least we should have access to renewable cheap-energy stores. Unfortunately, as long as we have the cheap supply, we continue to spend it uselessly, on frivolities, rather than investing it on a bridge to a more sustainable future. There is a fantastic section where Kunstler explains the history of the U.S. from the 1970s until 2004 purely in terms of drivers based on the need for oil. And oil it has to be, because of the properties outlined above: it's very portable. As Kunstler points out, nuclear fission can't solve many of society's needs because "most of America’s energy needs are for things that electricity can’t do very well, if at all". Unlike other visions of the future (e.g. Hariri's book), Kunstler addresses climate change seriously and in-depth. He discusses the different regions of the U.S., dissecting the problems each region faces and the degree to which it could survive a long emergency. Kunstler's region in the Northeast would survive the best. The Southwest, with its utter lack of arable land and water, would fare the worst. It would have to be abandoned in any halfway-realistic scenario. As already noted above, Kunstler sees quite well that a potential trigger for the Long Emergency could be virus. Reading this book now really makes you think whether the U.S. has been accelerated into a stage of the Long Emergency that the rest of the world has been able to avoid (for now). Kunstler writes, "It takes seven months or more to create, test, manufacture, and distribute a vaccine developed in direct response to a new virus, and by that time the disease can burn through global populations. If a pandemic broke out today, hospital facilities would be overwhelmed. Nurses and doctors would be infected along with the rest of the population." Kunstler puts the nail in America's coffin by noting -- again -- that the U.S. is ideologically incapable of doing anything about any of the myriad problems it has created for itself. The U.S. also has made many problems for itself that the nearly all of the rest of its contemporaries have avoided (excluding the UK, which at least has an NHS, despite its attempts to dismantle it). "[...] we in America flatter ourselves to think that we are above this kind of general catastrophe—because our technologic prowess during the cheap-oil fiesta was so marvelous that all future problems are (supposedly) guaranteed to be solved by similar applications of ingenuity "[...] "Americans didn’t question the validity of the suburban sprawl economy. They accepted it at face value as the obvious logical outcome of their hopes and dreams and defended it viciously against criticism. They steadfastly ignored its salient characteristic: that it had no future either as an economy or as a living arrangement. Each further elaboration of the suburban system made it less likely to survive any change in conditions," Other countries think this, to some degree, but not nearly the degree to which the U.S. does. They were at least smart enough to make backup plans. For example, many European countries retain a dense, largely electrical, rail network that they use for at least 50% of their freight -- and which could be ramped up to replace the capacity lost when trucks are no longer able to get enough fuel or the roads can no longer be sufficiently maintained. Kunstler writes, "it’s worth reiterating that a failure to get comprehensive passenger rail service going will be a sign of how fundamentally unserious we are as a society." And what is the main driver of the world's problems? Big finance, big corporations, globalization, the complete disavowal of national allegiance by society's biggest members. "Globalism was operated by oligarchical corporations on the gigantic scale, made possible by cheap oil. By “oligarchical” I mean that power was vested in small numbers of people running large organizations who were not accountable for their actions to many of the people who were subject to those actions. By “corporation,” I mean a group enterprise given the legal status of a “person,” with “rights,” but in fact devoid of any human qualities of ethics, humility, mercy, duty, or loyalty that would constrain those rights. (Emphasis added.)" We see this playing out right now with corporations in not just the U.S. (e.g. German car manufacturers) are vacuuming up bailout money despite not having paid taxes in their supposed home countries for years. A particularly egregious example is Carnival Cruise Lines, which sees fit to incorporate in Panama, but chirpily takes bailout money, all the while promulgating a business model that hasn't a chance in hell of working in a post-Covid-19 world. Kunstler points out the moral bankruptcy of the conceit that a corporation like Wal-Mart simply "competes" with local businesses on an even footing. "Wal-Mart was considered the theoretical equal of Bob the appliance store owner, and if Bob happened to lose in the retail competition because he couldn’t order 50,000 coffee-makers at a crack from a factory 12,000 miles away in Hangzhou, and receive a deep discount for being such an important customer, well, it wasn’t as though he hadn’t been given the chance. "" " "[...] "One group had all the cheap labor and another group had all the capital, and for a while one group made all the things that the other group “consumed.” Thus, comparative advantage became, for a time, a con game strictly for the benefit of large corporations, which ended up enjoying all the advantages while the localities sucked up the costs." On the back on this kind of feedback loop that benefitted the right people, more and more of the privileged -- the elite -- would take part in an orgy of investment that had nothing to with any useful economic activity. "Finance came to be viewed as a productive activity itself rather than a means to promote production. The public was no longer buying stock to invest in enterprises that would pay dividends over time, but merely because one could get rich from buying and selling stocks." Not only that, but whatever real economy (e.g. manufacturing and agriculture) wasn't replaced with finance was then replaced with a "service industry" instead. "[...] the myth of a service economy to replace the old manufacturing economy. I say “myth” because it was essentially absurd. It was like the old joke about the village that prospered because the inhabitants were all employed taking in each other’s laundry." On that backs of all of these poor decisions, Kunstler saw the housing/mortgage crisis coming in 2004 already. He wasn't alone -- many other non-mainstream economists, like Dean Baker, did as well -- but it's to his credit that he saw it then, and wrote so eloquently and presciently on the shape it would take. E.g. "By the time you read this, it is very likely that the housing bubble will have begun to come to grief." I read that sentence a dozen years after the housing bubble had unequivocally triggered the largest world global financial crisis the world had even seen. It remains to be seen whether the global stagnation engendered by Covid-19 measures tops it. This is all to say that the U.S. is basically running the world in a fashion that doesn't accept limits -- it simply ignores them, even when obviously imposed by physics. This is a fantasy world sustained only temporarily by cheap oil. This basic attitude affects everything....and negatively. As long as enough of the people that matter believe this fantasy -- or profit from it -- then it will continue, by pure inertia. It will only stop when it finally hits a hard limit. And that limit will not be kind, it will not be gentle. Thus ensues the Long Emergency. I've included "notes, citations and errata" in a separate post. "The Scarlet Plague" (1915) by Jack London This is a short story told by the survivor of a great plague that destroyed mankind. The plague happened in 2013 (making it a speculative fiction/science-fiction tale in 1915) and the tale is told sixty years later by Granser -- a former professor of English -- to his grandsons -- unutterably crude savages who are, to be fair, much better-suited to the world in which they all find themselves than Granser with his university education. The disease was called the Scarlet Plague because of its distinguishing initial symptom -- a reddening of the face that foretold a death within hours. After that, sufferers first lost all feeling in their feet, a numbness that crept upward over the next few hours until it seized and stopped their hearts. Death was unavoidable. The only survivors were immune from the start -- and those numbered fewer than one in a million. The disease incubated for several days before manifesting itself and killing its victim, allowing a ferocious spread with a shockingly high R-value. The disease did not discriminate based on skill or knowledge -- it tore an irreparable swath through mankind until the entire population of the western and former United States numbered only a few hundred people 3 generations later. Granser speculates that there are no other people left on Earth, but he has no way of knowing. Without technology, without electricity...the world is once again much, much larger than it was. The grandsons are a mixed bag: Edwin seems the most willing to listen to and try to learn from Granser while Hoo-hoo and especially Hare-Lip are nearly demented idiots bent only on dominating their mean and small environs. Even when they seem to listen to and take Granser's advice, they pervert it through the lens of the here-and-now and lose his message entirely. London discusses the so-called impedance mismatch between his culture and theirs -- separated by only a few decades but yielding an already hopelessly unbridgeable gulf. They understand little of what he says unless he breaks it down to their guttural and severely limited patois that comprises only the concepts necessary for survival. This is understandable on their part, but bespeaks the doom of any plan to retain the knowledge that mankind once had. "Granser: You must tell them that when water is made hot by fire, there resides in it a wonderful thing called steam, which is stronger than ten thousand men and which can do all man's work for him." The story briefly describes the state of mankind and the world after the plague, but it primarily tells of the coming of the plague and the ensuing fall of all of man's works. With a plague so deadly, there was no gradual loss of knowledge or services, no time to prepare backup plans or storehouses of either supplies or knowledge. Granser tells of his travels and long loneliness before he discovered his first people -- a couple composed of Chauffeur and Vesta Van Warden. He is a large, mean, and terrible man who has her as a house drudge, brood sow, and chattel. She is the descendant of the former rulers of the world. In the post-plague world, their roles are reversed. His physical brutishness grants him power over here, where once the brutishness of societal convention conferred upon her a power inordinate to her physical or intellectual capability. It is unclear to what degree London shares Granser's adulation of this former nobility/royalty -- I can't tell if he's being ironic. At any rate, mankind bred itself to about 400 crude and fallen people 60 years after the onset of the plague, with little to no hope that they would at any point be able to make use of the storehouse of books and knowledge that Granser had set aside for them in a cave. It is his life's work, but, being in his late 80s, his life is coming to an end, with no hope in sight that anyone will be able to retain anything of what he would have been able to impart from his knowledge of a world that once was. "All man's toil upon the planet was just so much foam. He domesticated the serviceable animals, destroyed the hostile ones, and cleared the land of its wild vegetation. And then he passed, and the flood of primordial life rolled back again, sweeping his handiwork away" Instead, the tribes listen to medicine men who send around "death sticks" and other superstitious tripe. Mankind will leave the Earth in a sort of peace and will need dozens of thousands of millennia to re-learn what it once knew, step by painful step. Or maybe mankind won't be so lucky and will instead be eaten by the mountain lions that are making their way down, closer and closer to the ocean, as intimated right at the end by Edwin's observation that the wild horses had come down out of the mountains to escape their predators. Here London leaves us with a 50/50: is Edwin's observation about the horses combined with a greater willingness to learn from Granser a sign that he is sharp enough to quantum-leap his tribe back to a semblance of civilization? Or are the mountain lions a metaphor for the inexorable voracity of an unpitying nature that will finish the job that the Scarlet Plague started? London's vision is somewhat limited by his having written in 1915: He writes of the rich in their dirigibles and advanced motorcars and mansions; he doesn't envision anything fancier than canned goods for foodstuffs. He is also unavoidably a man of his eugenic times. He writes of the "laborers", "In the midst of our civilization, down in our slums and labor-ghettos, we had bred a race of barbarians, of savages; and now, in the time of our calamity, they turned upon us like the wild beasts they were and destroyed us. And they destroyed themselves as well." In 2020, that's on its face quite shockingly racist, but it's perhaps only more overt than the castes we retain today. Though we purport to have eliminated them, they survive in the sinews and veins of our society, more dangerous and powerful because they are so internalized that too few even question them. The argument today is the same, though delivered with perhaps more subtle casuistry. So-called American civilization today bases largely on the notion that the rich are rich because they deserve it; the poor as well. Also, as noted above, it's not clear how London personally felt about that line of argument (or whether he's promoting anything at all). In an earlier passage, he wrote the following, which seems quite a bit more critical of the way his world worked (and, quite honestly, how ours still does), "Our food-getters were called freemen. This was a joke. We of the ruling classes owned all the land, all the machines, everything. These food-getters were our slaves. We took almost all the food they got, and left them a little so that they might eat, and work, and get us more food [...]" I was impressed by London's mastery. It was a damned good story -- I had no idea he counted among the best of the fantasy writers. The plague of 1917/1918 followed on the heels of his having published this story, which makes him eerily prescient, to boot. I've included "notes, citations and errata" in a separate post. "The Machine Stops" by E.M. Forster (1909) by E.M. Forster I first read "this short story" at the beginning of 2019, but recently re-read it. In these pandemic days, even more of the story resonated with me than on the first reading. The story is about a woman named Vashanti and he son Kuno, who live on a future Earth where The Machine has long since taken up the caretaking of mankind -- so that people can concentrate on getting and sharing 'ideas". Each person is contained in its own little pod. One room for everything. The bed and bath slide out of the floor when needed. Medical equipment descends from the ceiling. All communication is remote. People almost never see one another physically. Each person has exactly one book -- they all have the same book. It is "The Book of the Machine" and it contains everything that anyone would ever need to know about how the world works or how to communicate with The Machine. Mankind thinks itself free of religion, but it has replaced its classic, irrational religions with a supposedly rational one that ends up in people worshiping The Machine. No-one knows how The Machine works; all of its mechanisms are automated and have been so as long as anyone can remember. The world has been homogenized. "Something "good enough" had long since been accepted by our race." The following examples illustrate how our supposedly advanced civilization was pretty easily predicted by Forster a century removed from it. How unique and creative can it possibly be if he was able to predict it so well? "Vashanti"s next move was to turn off the isolation switch, and all the accumulations of the last three minutes burst upon her. The room was filled with the noise of bells, and speaking-tubes. What was the new food like? Could she recommend it? Has she had any ideas lately? Might one tell her one's own ideas? Would she make an engagement to visit the public nurseries at an early date?" Does this not describe how a phone or device acts when it returns from isolation? Is this not the experience of an average social-media user "coming back" to their phone after a temporary absence? Amazingly, Forster's predictions of video-conferencing are also spot-on: "The clumsy system of public gatherings had been long since abandoned; neither Vashti nor her audience stirred from their rooms. Seated in her armchair she spoke, while they in their armchairs heard her, fairly well, and saw her, fairly well." That the story nails the self-isolation of 2020 due to COVID-19 explains why the story resonated for me more on re-reading now. In our modern case, this live of video-conferencing applies only to the upper-level caste, while lower castes continue to work as usual. We don't have The Machine (yet). In Forster’s vision, the “Machine” took care of day-to-day minutia for everyone, with seemingly no castes left over from the previous civilization. Or, perhaps more accurately, the non-upper-class castes have been eliminated. In this next section, Forster somehow manages to capture the superficiality of TED Talks nearly a century before they even existed. "Her lecture, which lasted ten minutes, was well received, and at its conclusion she and many of her audience listened to a lecture on the sea; there were ideas to be got from the sea; the speaker had donned a respirator and visited it lately." The listeners are flighty and don't really pay attention to anything specifically -- they sip widely but shallowly, adding nothing of value on their own. The lecture on the sea above has absolutely nothing to do with Vashanti's lecture. That reflects our social-media feeds quite well -- like hummingbirds, many flit from topic to topic, guided by The Machine. Hell, Forster even foresaw the delivery culture -- albeit here he also foresaw everyone getting access to it, which isn't the case with our modern version of The Machine. In our version, the workings of The Machine are still very much run on the backs of manual labor provided by an underclass. "[...] the civilization that had mistaken the functions of the system, and had used it for bringing people to things, instead of for bringing things to people." Forster also foresaw the homogenization of travel destinations -- our cities have "tourist areas" that aim to make people comfortable by providing services that they would have at home. There's a Starbucks; there's a McDonalds; there's a theme park. "What was the good of going to Peking when it was just like Shrewsbury? Why return to Shrewsbury when it would all be like Peking?" Finally, there is the erosion of ideas and information, recycling well-worn thought and denigrating original thought until no-one knows anything of value anymore. Experts are suspect; expertise is evil; information is best when its already known -- common sense. "And even the lecturers acquiesced when they found that a lecture on the sea was none the less stimulating when compiled out of other lectures that had already been delivered on the same subject. "Beware of first- hand ideas!" exclaimed one of the most advanced of them. [...] Let your ideas be second-hand, and if possible tenth-hand, for then they will be far removed from that disturbing element - direct observation." So we have a society homogenized and reduced and made completely dependent on The Machine. (I wonder whether the world of Wall-E was based, at least in part, on this story?) Forster tells us what happens when The Machine stops after mankind has become inescapably dependent on it. "Man, the flower of all flesh, the noblest of all creatures visible, man who had once made god in his image, and had mirrored his strength on the constellations, beautiful naked man was dying, strangled in the garments that he had woven." I've included "notes, citations and errata" in a separate post. La Peste (1947; fr) by Albert Camus This is a work of fiction about a plague that takes place in 1947 in the Algerian city of Oran, on the Mediterranean coast. It documents a nearly overwhelmingly deadly disease. The plague creeps in on little rats' feet. Doctor Rieux finds dead rats in unusual places, in residential buildings, in stairwells. The health and sanitation services confirm that they're killing an increasing number of rats per day, dozens to hundreds. The doctor's building's superintendent dies of a fever. He had engorged and enlarged buboes (lymph nodes). Rieux suspects that the plague has come to town. The good doctor sees other patients with the same symptoms and sounds the alarm, beseeching the medical council for the town to declare a quarantine and to speak the ugly word "pestilence" or "bubonic plague". The plague is inevitable and does not care whether it is recognized as such or not. It claims victims until, at 30 per day, the town is closed off to the outside world. Rieux's wife had been sent to a sanatorium a few days earlier for an unrelated illness. He, like everyone else, is reduced to communicating with her in short telegrams. Rail travel stops. Rambert, the journalist, plans an escape that becomes more and more elaborate and prolonged, dragging out for weeks of planning with Gonzales and his two cohorts. He grows closer and closer to Tarrou (a tourist), Rieux, and Grand, who are working night and day to care for patients, sleeping only four hours per night. Their dedication -- and Tarrou telling Rambert that Rieux, too, is not able to be with his wife -- convinces Rambert to stay and join in the fight against the plague. The plague drags on for months and months. Castel's serum doesn't work on a young boy/baby, but seems to be able to help some others. Father Paneloux succumbs to a different disease -- nature doesn't care about irony. In one of my favorite scenes, on a hot night in the fall, Tarrou and Rambert go swimming together as Tarrou tells Rieux his life story. I really liked the evocative style in which it was written. "Rieux se mit sur le dos et se tint immobile, face au ciel renversé, plein de lune et d’étoiles. Il respira longuement. "[...] "Rieux se retourna, se mit au niveau de son ami, et nagea dans le même rythme. Tarrou avançait avec plus de puissance que lui et il dut précipiter son allure. Pendant quelques minutes, ils avancèrent avec la même cadence et la même vigueur, solitaires, loin du monde, libérés enfin de la ville et de la peste. "[...] "Habillés de nouveau, ils repartirent sans avoir prononcé un mot. Mais ils avaient le même cœur et le souvenir de cette nuit leur était doux." Grand catches the plague, but recovers. God laughs. The plague number start to decline and the people can no longer be held back from celebrating the reopening of the city after nearly 3/4 of a year. The plague takes a few more on its way out, though: Othon (the father of the baby whom Castel could not save) succumbs; Tarrou slips away, through Rieux's fingers. Cottard goes mad because his black-market business will come to an end. Rambert reunites with his wife. Rieux learns of the death of his wife, just days before the gates opened. He has lost his best friend and his wife. God laughs, alone privy to his mad plan. The plague is inevitable. It takes the course that it wants. Humans can channel it and ameliorate its effects, but they cannot stop it, not before it itself has decided that is finished. "It's done when I say it's done," seems to be the motto of a plague, no matter what level of technology man achieves. It is the same with any natural disaster: a tsunami also does not listen to reason. There is no use hating it. It wouldn't care if you did. Nearly all of the major stages in this novel have been matched blow-for-blow by our own recent and ongoing experience with COVID-19. Denial, desperation, the rich fleeing the city, closing the city down, settling into resigned isolation, travel restrictions, hygiene measures, and so on. The joy at the end, when the plague mysteriously recedes? We can only hope that our story includes this part, as well. The similarities are many. For example, the book describes the rich fleeing the city, as they did everywhere there were lockdowns (e.g. a large percentage fo NYC's richest population moved themselves north, out of harm's way. "On demandait des mesures radicales, on accusait les autorités, et certains qui avaient des maisons au bord de la mer parlaient déjà de s’y retirer." The fear sets in: "C’est à partir de ce moment que la peur, et la réflexion avec elle, commencèrent." The collecting of statistics -- also a modern obsession and made much easier by the Internet -- and the dawning realization that the plague is real: "Mais, en somme, il suffit que quelqu’un songeât à faire l’addition. L’addition était consternante. En quelques jours à peine, les cas mortels se multiplièrent et il devint évident pour ceux qui se préoccupaient de ce mal curieux qu’il s’agissait d’une véritable épidémie." The matter-of-fact, rational Rieux notifying the hopeful morons on his council that the plague does not care what they think, that the mission is to save people from this calamity, not to pretend that it's less bad than it is and then to regret not having done something sooner. "[...] si elle n’est pas stoppée, elle risque de tuer la moitié de la ville avant deux mois. Par conséquent, il importe peu que vous l’appeliez peste ou fièvre de croissance. Il importe seulement que vous l’empêchiez de tuer la moitié de la ville. "[...] "La question, insista Rieux, n’est pas de savoir si les mesures prévues par la loi sont graves mais si elles sont nécessaires pour empêcher la moitié de la ville d’être tuée." Camus eloquently describes the pain of sudden and unplanned separation from family and friends for an unknown period of time: "Une des conséquences les plus remarquables de la fermeture des portes fut, en effet, la soudaine séparation où furent placés des êtres qui n’y étaient pas préparés. Des mères et des enfants, des époux, des amants qui avaient cru procéder quelques jours auparavant à une séparation temporaire, qui s’étaient embrassés sur le quai de notre gare avec deux ou trois recommandations, certains de se revoir quelques jours ou quelques semaines plus tard, enfoncés dans la stupide confiance humaine, à peine distraits par ce départ de leurs préoccupations habituelles, se virent d’un seul coup éloignés sans recours, empêchés de se rejoindre ou de communiquer." As with our most recent experience, the word "solidarity" had to be dusted off and, once again, be allowed to take center stage. To protect others and be protected by others, to hold together and defeat the common enemy of the plague, saving as many as possible. "On peut dire que cette invasion brutale de la maladie eut pour premier effet d’obliger nos concitoyens à agir comme s’ils n’avaient pas de sentiments individuels." Or, even not knowing how long it would last and the ensuing impatience felt by all when an arbitrarily set deadline had been passed. We are witnessing the same in the people as the first wave has been managed by most countries and the people itch for a return to normality. We will see what happens when the inevitable second wave comes. "En particulier, tous nos concitoyens se privèrent très vite, même en public, de l’habitude qu’ils avaient pu prendre de supputer la durée de leur séparation. Pourquoi ? C’est que lorsque les plus pessimistes l’avaient fixée par exemple à six mois, lorsqu’ils avaient épuisé d’avance toute l’amertume de ces mois à venir, hissé à grand-peine leur courage au niveau de cette épreuve, tendu leurs dernières forces pour demeurer sans faiblir à la hauteur de cette souffrance étirée sur une si longue suite de jours, alors, parfois, un ami de rencontre, un avis donné par un journal, un soupçon fugitif ou une brusque clairvoyance, leur donnait l’idée qu’après tout, il n’y avait pas de raison pour que la maladie ne durât pas plus de six mois, et peut-être un an, ou plus encore." Paired with this feeling, though, was a confidence that the plague is something that happens to others. We all do the same today, hoping against hope that we won't be affected. We hear that 1-2% will die if 70% get it -- we hope that we won't die; we hope that, should we get it, it leaves no lasting mark. We hope. We don't reason. We can't all be right. "Beaucoup cependant espéraient toujours que l’épidémie allait s’arrêter et qu’ils seraient épargnés avec leur famille. En conséquence, ils ne se sentaient encore obligés à rien. La peste n’était pour eux qu’une visiteuse désagréable qui devait partir un jour puisqu’elle était venue." The plague takes its victims and ceremonies change: for example, the citizens of Oran were no longer allowed to mourn or attend funerals as before, a restriction we have as well in many places. "Toutes les formalités avaient été simplifiées et d’une manière générale la pompe funéraire avait été supprimée. Les malades mouraient loin de leur famille et on avait interdit les veillées rituelles, si bien que celui qui était mort dans la soirée passait sa nuit tout seul et celui qui mourait dans la journée était enterré sansdélai." What we did not have was the rats at the beginning (signaling the onset of the virus), nor did we have reduced communication, as they did: "Les communications téléphoniques interurbaines, autorisées au début, provoquèrent de tels encombrements aux cabines publiques et sur les lignes, qu’elles furent totalement suspendues pendant quelques jours, puis sévèrement limitées à ce qu’on appelait les cas urgents, comme la mort, la naissance et le mariage." What we do have is conspiracy theories and outright denial that the plague is happening -- something the Oranans didn't have the luxury of indulging, as their plague was considerably more aggressive and deadly and, thus, could not be wished away. The plague attacked the "bubons" or lymph nodes, not the lungs, and was perhaps thus more disgusting, as in this description of Rieux's work on a patient: "Deux coups de bistouri en croix et les ganglions déversaient une purée mêlée de sang. Les malades saignaient, écartelés. Mais des taches apparaissaient au ventre et aux jambes, un ganglion cessait de suppurer, puis se regonflait. La plupart du temps, le malade mourait, dans une odeur épouvantable." Still, they gathered information wherever they could, trying to put together as positive a picture as their reason allowed. "On pouvait voir, par exemple, les plus intelligents d’entre eux faire mine de chercher comme tout le monde dans les journaux, ou bien dans les émissions radiophoniques, des raisons de croire à une fin rapide de la peste, et concevoir apparemment des espoirs chimériques, ou éprouver des craintes sans fondement, à la lecture de considérations qu’un journaliste avait écrites un peu au hasard, en bâillant d’ennui." Though the plague moves slowly, at least it moves over time, showing some evidence of its passage. Can you imagine the denialism and conspiracy theories that would accompany something like an asteroid strike detected two years prior to impact? Mankind would be utterly and ideologically unable to prepare for something like that and would, despite an ostensibly higher intelligence, go the way of the dinosaurs before them. They had speculation as well, driving prices into the stratosphere, as well as a clear divide between how the rich and poor would fare in the crisis. "La spéculation s’en était mêlée et on offrait à des prix fabuleux des denrées de première nécessité qui manquaient sur le marché ordinaire. Les familles pauvres se trouvaient ainsi dans une situation très pénible, tandis que les familles riches ne manquaient à peu près de rien." There is much to admire in the prose, with many beautifully written sections. E.g. "La nuit, les grands cris des bateaux invisibles, la rumeur qui montait de la mer et de la foule qui s’écoulait [...]" -- describing the feeling of the city at night, by the shore -- or the much longer, and also lovingly rendered description of the city at night, under a full moon, "Sous les ciels de lune, elle alignait ses murs blanchâtres et ses rues rectilignes, jamais tachées par la masse noire d’un arbre, jamais troublées par le pas d’un promeneur ni le cri d’un chien. La grande cité silencieuse n’était plus alors qu’un assemblage de cubes massifs et inertes, entre lesquels les effigies taciturnes de bienfaiteurs oubliés ou d’anciens grands hommes étouffés à jamais dans le bronze s’essayaient seules, avec leurs faux visages de pierre ou de fer, à évoquer une image dégradée de ce qui avait été l’homme. Ces idoles médiocres trônaient sous un ciel épais, dans les carrefours sans vie, brutes insensibles qui figuraient assez bien le règne immobile où nous étions entrés ou du moins son ordre ultime, celui d’une nécropole où la peste, la pierre et la nuit auraient fait taire enfin toute voix." The general helplessness comes through -- "Ils se croyaient libres et personne ne sera jamais libre tant qu’il y aura des fléaux." -- but the essentially existentialist attitude shines through that you do what you can anyway because what else is there? "La bêtise insiste toujours {...}" Either you kill yourself or you make the best of it, but being useless is worse than either. "Peut-être, répondit le docteur, mais vous savez, je me sens plus de solidarité avec les vaincus qu’avec les saints. Je n’ai pas de goût, je crois, pour l’héroïsme et la sainteté. Ce qui m’intéresse, c’est d’être un homme." "Il ne fallait pas écouter ces moralistes qui disaient qu’il fallait se mettre à genoux et tout abandonner. Il fallait seulement commencer de marcher en avant, dans la ténèbre, un peu à l’aveuglette, et essayer de faire du bien." I've included "notes, citations and errata" in a separate post. I Can't Breathe (2017) by Matt Taibbi This book is an absolute tour-de-force of research and writing and empathy. The main thread of the story is the life and death of Eric Garner. He was born, lived, and died at an early age (43) in Staten Island, New York, in the U.S. He was killed by police for standing on a sidewalk. The story is much more complicated than that and Taibbi takes time to show all of the detail of how Garner ended up working on that corner, why he hadn't done anything wrong that day, and, perhaps most importantly, what brought the police to that location and put them in a killing mood. The story is long and involves many features unique to the American landscape. Garner was basically doomed from day one, doomed from birth just by who his parents were and where they lived. He was doomed by his skin color and his imposing size. He was doomed by a society that inordinately feared people that looked like him -- and dumped its frustrations on people like him. He was doomed by a society that could find no other way to be than to sacrifice 90% of its population to live in comparative squalor while 10% does quite well. The police are the army that enforces the borders along these two intertwined societies, that makes sure that the extraction of wealth and energy continues, that the subjugated population stays in line. This situation affects people of all races -- it happens a lot to poor Whites too -- but people of color -- and Blacks in particular -- are singled out and massively overrepresented in all forms of statistics about crime. In Taibbi's words, "[Garner] was, [...] “just a man,” a single flawed person ground up by the power of the state. Eric Garner was murdered by history. "[...] The lengths we went to as a society to crush someone of such modest ambitions—Garner’s big dream was to someday sit down at work—were awesome to contemplate. What happened to Garner spoke to the increasing desperation of white America to avoid having to even see, much less speak to or live alongside, people like him. "[...] The motive was the secret sin of a divided society, a country frozen in time for more than fifty years, stopped one crucial step short of reconciliation and determined to stay there." That this is the case is a self-fulfilling prophecy: where the police look for crime, they find it. There are more than enough laws for them to always find something. The books have been filled with "reasons"; their job is to match those reasons to people in ways that aren't too obviously ridiculous. Even ridiculous generally goes unnoticed, except by the victims, whose opinions don't matter. If "impeding government business" by standing on a sidewalk is not only a ticketable offense, but an arrestable one, then all bets are off. "Even in Tompkinsville Park, where 98 percent of everyone you met had less than a dollar or two, the police were everywhere." And the police go hunting nearly exclusively in Black and Latino neighborhoods in places like New York City. They "toss" people regularly for doing absolutely nothing -- more than half a million stops per year, all to feed the Compstat numbers machine that determines who gets a promotion and who doesn't. But the police didn't invent the machine -- they're kind of part of it, too. The upper-class people who matter, who run everything, set things up to keep the money and power funnels pouring in their direction. As an officer Polanco describes it, "In one incident, he was forced to cuff a thirteen-year-old Mexican boy, with his superiors telling him they’d figure out the charge later. He even recounted being ordered to summons a guy for having no dog license when Polanco couldn’t even see a dog." What does "toss" mean? Often enough, it means a strip search in public, in the middle of the street, with a free genital and rectal exam conducted by apparently all-too-willing police officers. "They had a term for it: “socially raping.” Sometimes they’d yank a guy’s pants down in the precinct, but other times they’d do it in the open air, right on the sidewalk." "But, wait?", you might ask. What about the Constitution? Don't people have rights? What about, specifically, the Fourth Amendment? Those things are not for the poor, not since the Supreme Court approved so-called Terry Stops, which reduced the requirement for a search to a constitutionally laughable level. "The Terry decision essentially said that the legal standard for a whole generation of field searches would henceforth rest in the minds of police officers." At the time, people were 100% aware -- in no small part due to the Kerner Commission of 1968 -- that racism and police brutality were the problems underlying inequality and subsequent "unrest". But the Supreme Court punted on that too, basically saying that "[w]e can’t do anything about racism or police brutality. But we can do something about crime." And what was crime? Oh, we knew it when we saw it. And we knew where to look for it. With this cudgel in hand, they went to work. "What they did have, they thought, was a tool that would help reduce crime. They weren’t sure if it would be abused or not. But they were pretty sure it would work." By “work”, they meant “keep poor people in check” by keeping them working, too tired to resist, not agitating, not bothering their betters. The policies prevented some crime by combatting it with other crime. No other supposedly civilized country does this. Well, corporate crime is allowed, but directly preventing potential criminal acts by perpetrating constitutional crimes on the potential perps? I don’t think so. There is, essentially, carte blanche for the police themselves to commit the crimes they were charged with preventing, as long as they stick to prescribed victims. To be clear they were not interested in stopping crime. The continuing lax attitude and nearly outright encouragement of white-collar crime -- the more you steal, the more likely you are to get a Cabinet position -- makes that very clear. Nor were they interested in even collaring the poor people responsible for the actual crimes that they'd even bothered to put on the books as the ones they claimed to be enforcing. The crimes that affect the most lives, that are the most violent in terms of destroying lives and entire generations, are actively encouraged as part of the system that makes the right people rich. Taibbi describes the scams run by Eastern Service, a real-estate company that, in 1968, introduced practices that would be emulated several times over the next decades, culminating in the breathtaking destruction of Black wealth in 2008, when the financial crisis wiped out 70% of Black wealth. "Federal prosecutors estimated that in 1968 alone, companies like the Eastern Service operation created $100 million in defaults and more than five thousand empty houses in New York City alone. "[...] There was no direct bribery element in 2008, but everything else was more or less exactly the same: wholesale falsification of financial records, the aggressive effort to get people with poor credit histories into homes, falsified employment data, inflated appraisals, etc. "[...] From forty acres and a mule to the Great Society to subprime, it was the same swindle, over and over and over again: promises that turned into brutal obligations that turned into life-ruining debt and neighborhood-destroying foreclosures for some and massive windfall profits for others." This is where the racism is undeniable -- unless you have a vested interest in denying it. I.e. you're already in the 10% or you think that you are or you dream one day of being in it or you're just a deluded suck-up to authority. "This disparity echoed an earlier bizarre statistic showing that 90 to 95 percent of all people imprisoned for drug offenses in New York in the nineties were black and Hispanic, despite studies showing that 72 percent of all illegal drug users in the city were white. Clearly a certain form of discretion was being exercised." The result of all of these penny-ante arrests was to not only get the individual police the numbers they needed to advance their careers, but also to ruin the rest of those people's lives. Once you've got an arrest record, the supposed largess of society is no longer available. And guess whose fault that is? Why it's your very own fault, isn't it? "And thanks to the drug war, huge numbers of young men came home from prison sentences unable to vote, live in public housing, or obtain licenses to be barbers, pet shop owners, even sanitation workers. They were kept under constant surveillance, watched even when they urinated for parole officers." So the objective wasn't to catch criminals. It was to produce criminals out of the parts of the population considered to be unsavory by their betters. "The objective was order, an inherently ambiguous term but a condition that people in a given community recognized when they saw it." Translation? No poor or black people in sight were to sully the view of anyone important (generally, the top 10%). It's why Eric Garner was no longer allowed to stand on his sordid, sad corner in that sordid, sad park in sordid, sad Staten Island and sell cigarettes for $0.50 apiece. Across the street, important people had paid money to build an apartment complex for other important people. And no-one wanted to see a shambolic black man every day. He had to go. Even when New York City settled a civil lawsuit about Stop and Frisk, they just kept doing it, exploiting a gaping loophole in the settlement language to simply prohibit and then report on the now-drastically increased harassment instead of stopping it. "That they didn’t stop mass violating the constitutional rights of 50 percent of the city’s population was, sadly enough, immaterial. The city hadn’t actually promised to change, as far as Judge Scheindlin saw it. They’d merely promised to write a new policy prohibiting the wrong behavior and turn over some numbers." Taibbi cites case after case to bolster his point, even finding a case from the 70s in Arkansas when Bill Clinton was DA where police officers stopped a black family for a bullshit ticket, fined them $25, then didn't trust them to pay it if billed. So they forced the family to drive to the precinct where they had to pay in cash, immediately. The father had the gall to ask for a receipt and the ticketing officer rewarded him by shooting him point-blank in the face in the middle of the precinct. That case didn't make it past the grand jury. Neither did Eric Garner's case, even though there were eight minutes of video showing police officers attacking a man out of the blue, a man who didn't defend himself, pulling him to the ground and killing him with an illegal chokehold. Most of the eight-minute video is of Garner lying prone on the street while officers mill around, joking amongst themselves before someone thinks to call an ambulance. Garner's last words were "I can't breathe." Even in cases like Garner's, where there is video, the top 10% are more than happy to accept that the video isn't real evidence because a known criminal made it on his dirty, criminal phone. They don't claim that it's faked, only that it doesn't matter because the wrong kind of person made it. By that logic, though, if two cops filmed each other committing a crime, then their subsequent criminal culpability would automatically disqualify the video they each took, exonerating each of them. Two videos of crimes. No criminals. A paradox because the criminal act disqualifies the filmer as a witness forever. It makes no sense, but it doesn't have to in order to be effective. People generally don't care about holes in logic big enough to drive a truck through if you're telling them what they want to hear. Those are just some of the details in this book. Taibbi goes deep into the numbers machine as well as the incestuous relationship between politicians and the police. He details the Orwellian laws for police that are completely different than those for mere mortals. He describes the labyrinth of the disciplinary process for police, what a black hole it is, from which no accusation can possible escape. As he puts it, the review board "is where citizen complaints go to die." He discusses the common police practice of planting evidence, of lying on arrest reports, of lying on the witness stand, of brutality and humiliation, of "teaching lessons" to "those animals". The police are at war with the poor, plain and simple. They have been given this job by the rich. Black are massively disproportionately harmed and beaten down by this system. Though the statistics would support it, Taibbi does not even bother to explain that white people are kept down by the man, too. He does not bother to discuss that, in absolute numbers, more white people are killed by police than black people. This is all true, but there is no way to focus on any of this once you realize the disgusting, shocking level of racism in the ruling class and its private army, the police. Taibbi makes the case what so many who've been involved in the fight for justice for many years have known for decades: there is a deep animus against Blacks that drives people absolutely crazy. It makes them fly off the handle in ways that they absolutely do not do when dealing with "their own kind". "Try to imagine a world where there isn’t a vast unspoken consensus that black men are inherently scary, and most of these police assaults would play in the media like spontaneous attacks of madness. Instead, they’re sold as battle scenes from an occupation story, where a quick trigger finger while patrolling the planet of a violent alien race is easy to understand." It's absolutely clear that many people still just hate Blacks for being black and want nothing to do with them, other than to perhaps continue to benefit from them as a source of cheap labor. Which they do very successfully, with the massive so-called justice system set up to funnel them into jail or prison -- they have to have an arrest record -- after which you can deny them public housing, jobs, anything. Then you can bleed them for their cheap or free labor while in jail -- or while working a bullshit job that their employer knows they can't quit. The stories Taibbi tells about Garner in this regard are infuriating, with the system and the police just bleeding him dry. Killing him slowly. Torturing him. The police use him for arrest numbers, for their own careers, because they sure as fuck don’t care about cigarette taxes. They often confiscated his money using "asset foreiture" -- another concept unique to America where police can just take your stuff pretty much whenever it strikes their fancy (and good luck getting it back). It's a tremendous waste of time, money, and it's utterly immoral, to boot. It costs the city nothing to make the charge and it ties up the poor bastard charged for years. Then it churns its way through the conveyor belt of the courts, which rarely drop cases, regardless of how outrageously unsubstantiated they are. "It was a textbook case of what police and lawyers both call “test-a-lying.” A police officer will come into court at a probable cause hearing, for instance, and a judge will ask him why he pulled over so-and-so’s car. The officer will respond in a deadpan: “I saw drugs lying on the center console of his vehicle.” Defense lawyers laugh about the omnipresent “center console” detail in arrest warrants. "The drugs in reality will turn out to have been found in a jacket pocket, or under the seat, after an illegal fishing expedition. But the police will tell it in court another way. Particularly in misdemeanors and drug cases, cases without profile, judges routinely buy these dubious bits of testimony and let dirty cases move through the system. "[...] Judges rarely throw out police testimony, and even when they do, actual charges of perjury against a police officer are rare." But police cases are different. Those are slowed down, dragged out over years. "From the first knock on the door, family members find themselves facing a series of intractable bureaucracies designed to make cases against police officers vanish in blizzards of political excuses and unintelligible legalese. "[...] These bureaucracies are designed to frustrate and exhaust families bent on getting justice, grinding them down over time until finally they become dispirited and give up. The quest for answers becomes a war of attrition, and the state almost always wins. "" " "[...] In these cases, obscure exceptions and precedents are constantly unearthed to narrow the field of culpability to a vanishing point. "[...] while the cases often begin as unplanned murders and assaults committed in heat-of-the-moment situations by working-class cops, they end as carefully orchestrated cover-ups committed in cold blood, through the more ethereal, polished, institutional racism of politicians, judges, and attorneys. "[...] Both the city and Pantaleo appealed, however, and the case was tied up in court for another year and a half. By the summer of 2016, both sides were still months away from making oral arguments in the case. Years of pitched legal battle over a single number. Even the release of that much information was too much for the city to bear." This is how they waste taxpayer money defending criminals and flouting justice, funneling all the attacker's energy into an ever-more narrowly defined and ultimately useless endeavor. You want justice for a murder, but you end up losing in court two years later trying to get a single number that probably signifies nothing legally relevant. You end up dying on an insignificant hill that your enemy chose. It would be a tragedy, but we know at least some good comes of it: it's done in the name of generating careers and economic activity for the already privileged to the detriment of people who aren't really people. Let's face it: they brought it on themselves by not having been born privileged. There is no way out of this -- the system has been well-designed to trap more than enough of the wrong kind of people within it. And it's well-designed to make those trapped feel like it's their own fault, to constantly remind them that they are being helped, even when the help is there to maintain their poor position, not to lift them out. "The Great Society programs that came out of that War on Poverty set into motion a series of unintended consequences. The assistance programs always had a strong bureaucratic and even punitive element. The government created armies of inspectors and social workers who, in the process of administering public assistance, got involved in regulating every aspect of life in poor black neighborhoods." This is paternalism. Because you can’t just give someone 500 bucks a month. You have to remind them that they needed it. And, of course, let them know that they’re in charge of remedying the deficiency that led them to needing it, which was always inherent to them and not immanent to the system. "Black America always saw the continuing schism. But white America has traditionally been free to ignore and be untroubled by it and to believe it had reached the “postracial” stage of its otherwise proud history […] in the end mostly what people in power wanted to do was nothing at all, unless there was an immediate benefit in it for them." I've included "notes, citations and errata" in a separate post. Living in the Long Emergency (2020) by James Howard Kunstler This book is a follow-up to Kunstler's 2005 "The Long Emergency" . It starts out with a recap of the thesis from the other book and then fills in with information from the last 15 years. Kunstler takes a critical look at his predictions from 2005, detailing where he got it right and where he went wrong -- and why. "I didn’t call it The Long Emergency for no reason. The operations of complex societies have many interesting features. Two in particular exist in a sort of dynamic tension of opposites: fragility and inertia. Fragility accretes insidiously as ever-greater complexity is layered onto the system. But inertia is the property by which systems in motion tend to remain in motion. A system as large and complex as ours has acquired tremendous momentum, which, of course, feeds back to aggravate its fragility, portending a more destructive eventual outcome." For example, the shale-oil boom was unforeseeable and kicked the can down the road for a decade -- at most. He likens it to "cutting of the top ten inches of your bedsheet and sewing it on the bottom because your feet were cold." Fracking is capital-intensive -- read: expensive -- and requires heavy loans. Fracked, shale-oil wells have a much steeper expiry curve and are quickly played out. "As independent oil analyst Arthur Berman put it: “Shale is a retirement party for the oil industry.”" Companies that are trying to stay ahead of their creditors have no choice but to dig more and more wells to take advantage of the initial steep "play", taking on more and more debt. Kunstler calls it "Red Queen Syndrome" because they're "running as fast as they can to stay in one place." It's only ZIRP (Zero Interest-rate Policies) that even allow something like this to exist. The more successful they are -- and they have been very successful, driving U.S. oil production to heretofore unknown heights -- the lower the oil price as the market gluts. When the price drops, their already-shitty and barely non-laughable business model becomes utterly fantastic and untenable. But they can't stop producing, either. He also discusses the increasing rise of propaganda for both alternative energy and for electric vehicles. He quickly disposes of the notion that either of these will replace the existing infrastructure in any significant way -- not without drastically changing living patterns and levels of consumption. The solution to the atrocity of suburbia, its attendant necessitating of an automobile for nearly everything, and the large-scale elimination of public transportation is not to replace the entire fleet with electric vehicles or to electrify all of the existing vehicles. There are neither nearly enough time nor resources for any of that. There's also the poor fit -- or utter engineering impossibility -- of using electric for everything that we use fossil fuels for today. You can't fly on batteries, nor can you ship overland with batter-powered trucks. Trains would work, but the U.S. blew its rail network to kingdom come decades ago. "The likelihood that we will power the USA on “renewable” energy in anything remotely like the current configuration of activities—suburbia, Happy Motoring, air-conditioning for all, cheap food, night baseball, Netflix, Amazon, server farms, commercial aviation, et cetera—is about the same as the chance that Xi Jinping will deliver each and every one of us a dim sum birthday breakfast at home next year." "The wishful public has been fed a diet of misinformation from a wishful news media that won’t tolerate anything but positive thinking about maintaining our current arrangements because imagining a different outcome is too depressing." "The thinking displayed in the Drawdown Project’s manifesto ignores a primary reality of our predicament: that increased complexity leads to increased risk of systemic breakdown. It’s as if they can’t imagine a world without a continuing expansion of human activities, as represented in economic growth. That is their only context. All that needs to be done is to “green up” the growth." In part two, Kunstler takes to the road to visit with and interview some of his most interesting, frequent, or long-term correspondents. He mostly visits farmers and those who have figured out how to be self-sufficient, self-taught, or at least useful in myriad ways. They almost all have the affectation common to the self-taught and somewhat cloistered: they have theories that they've never had refuted. Mostly, though, they seem like relatively nice (if, at times, woefully undereducated and drastically over-autodidactic) people -- Ok, the white-supremacist was far less rational and more suffused with conspiracy lore than the others -- who are making their way in decidedly non-mainstream and more traditional and possibly moral ways. The third and final part looks at some topics that have come much more to the fore in the last fifteen years -- and even in the year it took to write the first two parts: extinctions in Nature and environmental impact, financialization and oil and its massive and disastrous impact on savings and investment in the ten years since the 2008 crisis, the autocoprophagy of the American Left (the Right was already hopeless) in recent politics, with the seeming madness engendered by the election of Trump and, more importantly, the loss by Clinton. This madness evinces itself as a descent into omphaloskepsis on the part of the Left, as they shatter themselves into sects of Twitter-history–scouring hordes of virtue-signalers and purity-testers and know-it-alls who show up to torpedo anyone who was ever useful for ever having been slightly less than perfect in careers that have often spanned decades of struggle and hardship. "Social media, it turns out, amplifies and accelerates antisocial behavior among a population that was already having a hard enough time processing reality." Some of his further speculation is highly speculative and, in my opinion, wrong-headed, but that's to be expected, I suppose. Whereas he's mostly right about Trump, "History is a prankster. You order a Gray Champion, and cosmic room service sends up a casino developer and New York real estate mogul with a laughable hairdo, a big mouth, and no experience running a government." ...his in-built libertarianism mounts for him the same blinkers that many Americans wear, preventing them from seeing any solution but the one put right in front of them. For example, he complains about "[...] and a new confiscatory wealth tax on assets, not the income from assets, but a tax on what you already own." But many economically successful countries have something like it (including Switzerland). The problem of inequality is probably the biggest one facing the US (and other countries), with its nearly unfettered upward redistribution of wealth. Making that wealth inheritable cements the problem. Address the idea of "seizing capital", he writes, "Even theoretically, the money to pay for those programs doesn’t exist." It does. Other people have it. Even if future debt doesn't work, we can take back value from those who have stolen it from us and hoarded it. There's a decent chance that, by the time we get done taking it, that it won't be worth anything anymore, but the money is technically available. While he rightly recognizes that racism isn't the biggest problem -- and that historical attempts to address it in the U.S. have failed miserably -- he obstinately characterizes these failings in ways that blame the wrong parties. He correctly notes that all races in a certain class are affected by the upward distribution -- pointing out that telling people who've also been left behind that they need to share the tiny piece of pie they have is a non-starter. This is all correct, but somewhat lost in his ham-handed prose (and I'm being very generous here because he's otherwise a lucid thinker and writer; some would just dismiss him as a racist outright, which is unfair in the other direction). Finally, he tells of his own personal journey over the last fifteen years. He divorced, moved out of Saratoga Springs, and bought a property with a house on it in a declining nearby town. He's got a large garden, fruit trees, and some chickens. With about ten hours of work per week, he makes a good part of his own food. He's close enough to town to walk to Main Street. He was quite ill for nearly a decade with cobalt poisoning from a hip replacement in 2003. He seems to have battened down the hatches in his preparations for the ongoing Long Emergency (exacerbated post-publication by COVID-19). I've included "notes, citations and errata" in a separate post. Im Westen nichts Neues (1929) by Erich Maria Remarque This book is written from the point of view of a young German named Paul Bäumer, who fights at the German/French front during WWI. Over the course of the book, the harsh world in which he finds himself hones his cynicism, makes him more jaded. We meet Paul at the front, having already acclimated there with his colleagues, Albert Kropp, a former schoolmate from his hometown; Haie Westhus, a hulking young man; Friedrich Müller, another classmate of Paul's, more interested in book learning than the others; Stanislaus Katczinsky, an older reservist with a ton of experience and a nearly unmatched penchant for survival; and Tjaden, a young man with a prodigious appetite: Detering, a simple farmer boy; Kantorek, the former schoolmaster and fervent supporter of the war; and, finally, Himmelstoss, the former-postmaster-turned-corporal who tormented them all during basic training. At the front, they engage in the nearly unutterable filthiness and desolation of trench warfare, moving a few meters back and forth each day. They are all dulled by a lack of rations, but almost more by a lack of sleep. "Katczinsky hat recht: es wäre alles nicht so schlimm mit dem Krieg, wenn man nur mehr Schlaf haben würde. Vorne ist es doch nie etwas damit, und vierzehn Tage jedesmal sind eine lange Zeit." A common theme is that the people at home don't understand at all what it's like at the front. They are too quick to judge those that try to avoid the fight or to flee. "[...] wußten wir bereits, daß die Todesangst stärker ist. Wir wurden darum keine Meuterer, keine Deserteure, keine Feiglinge – alle diese Ausdrücke waren ihnen ja so leicht zur Hand [...]" Confronted with a battlefield filled with the dead, wounded and barely surviving in a roiled sea of mud, blood, and oil, ... who can blame them for "forgetting" what they were fighting for, for "forgetting" the people at home and their desire for "victory"? "Die Gewehre verkrusten, die Uniformen verkrusten, alles ist fließend und aufgelöst, eine triefende, feuchte, ölige Masse Erde, in der die gelben Tümpel mit spiralig roten Blutlachen stehen und Tote, Verwundete und Überlebende langsam versinken." For the young, the war becomes all they've ever known. Their days in school are finished. When -- if -- they return, they'll have nothing to return to. The older soldiers still have a families and jobs -- they have some other routine to which they can yearn to return. The young don't even that that. They become fatalistic without even the years of experience needed to master the philosophy. "Der Krieg hat uns weggeschwemmt. Für die andern, die älteren, ist er eine Unterbrechung, sie können über ihn hinausdenken." They think about what life will be like after, should they survive the war, about having spent two years away from a home that they will no longer recognize as their own. "Kropp denkt ebenfalls darüber nach. »Es wird überhaupt schwer werden mit uns allen. Ob die sich in der Heimat eigentlich nicht manchmal Sorgen machen deswegen? Zwei Jahre Schießen und Handgranaten – das kann man doch nicht ausziehen wie einen Strumpf nachher.«" They know how senseless their survival is, that with being clever and careful they can only improve very long odds. Fortune is the final arbiter. "Jeder Soldat bleibt nur durch tausend Zufälle am Leben. Und jeder Soldat glaubt und vertraut dem Zufall." That's not to say that experience counts for nothing. "Der Stellungskampf von heute erfordert Kenntnisse und Erfahrungen, man muß Verständnis für das Gelände haben, man muß die Geschosse, ihre Geräusche und Wirkungen im Ohr haben, man muß vorausbestimmen können, wo sie einbauen, wie sie streuen und wie man sich schützt. Dieser junge Ersatz weiß natürlich von alledem noch fast gar nichts." They spend long nights in wet holes in the ground. They watch fog rise from craters like ghosts. They see fields of uncollected corpses bloating in the heat. They starve, they dehydrate, they freeze. They watch deadly chloroform gas creep over the fields, fingering every crevasse with its tendrils. From this, they suddenly return to camp and "normality", knowing that a return to the madness and misery of the front is inevitable. "Alles ist Gewohnheit, auch der Schützengraben. Diese Gewohnheit ist der Grund dafür, daß wir scheinbar so rasch vergessen. Vorgestern waren wir noch im Feuer, heute machen wir Albernheiten und fechten uns durch die Gegend, morgen gehen wir wieder in den Graben." Paul loses the first of his comrades, watching him die in a hospital bed, getting thinner and thinner. "[...] die Stirn wölbt sich stärker, die Backenknochen stehen vor. Das Skelett arbeitet sich durch. Die Augen versinken schon. In ein paar Stunden wird es vorbei sein." He and his company are assigned to guard duty for a month, guarding emaciated and surly Russian prisoners of war. They will do nearly anything to eat good food. At one point, Paul and Kat hole up in a shed with a couple of roast chickens in one of the only truly wholesome scenes in the book. Later, when the company is assigned to guard duty for a small town, they live high on the hog. One day, he and his comrades put together a grand meal, but the smoke from the fire attracts enemies. They continue cooking during the attack, loath to leave their supper behind. "Doch das Pufferbacken wird jetzt schwieriger." The boys take revenge on their former DI Himmelstoss when he is finally assigned to the front -- and no longer has any true power over them. They sneak across a river to spend a night with some willing French girls, fraternizing with the "enemy". He describes a horse dying on the battlefield, completely unaware of what has happened to it, scrabbling its way forward in its life blindly -- a metaphor for many of the soldiers who fall in a similarly senseless fashion. "Das letzte stemmt [Pferd] sich auf die Vorderbeine und dreht sich im Kreise wie ein Karussell, sitzend dreht es sich auf den hochgestemmten Vorderbeinen im Kreise, wahrscheinlich ist der Rücken zerschmettert. Der Soldat rennt hin und schießt es nieder. Langsam, demütig rutscht es zu Boden." Juxtaposed with the death of the horses is the equally senseless death of a young recruit (der "kleine Rekrut[...] mit der Wunde"), who'd only just gotten to the front on the same day that he had his entire waist destroyed by shrapnel. He was not going to survive. It was up to the boys to decide whether to prolong his suffering with a fruitless trip to the field hospital, where he would die -- or, whether they would put him out his misery themselves. The miserable scene takes place in pouring rain. "Monoton pendeln die Wagen, monoton sind die Rufe, monoton rinnt der Regen. Er rinnt auf unsere Köpfe und auf die Köpfe der Toten vorn, auf den Körper des kleinen Rekruten mit der Wunde, die viel zu groß für seine Hüfte ist, er rinnt auf das Grab Kemmerichs, er rinnt auf unsere Herzen." On leave, he returns to his mother and his sister, who hesitantly ask him how it is, in the war. He lies, of course. How can he begin to explain to them what it's really like? Their worlds have drifted apart, likely irreparably. "Mutter, was soll ich dir darauf antworten! Du wirst es nicht verstehen und nie begreifen. Du sollst es auch nie begreifen. War es schlimm, fragst du. – Du, Mutter. – Ich schüttele den Kopf und sage:»Nein, Mutter, nicht so sehr. Wir sind ja mit vielen zusammen, da ist es nicht so schlimm.«" In his hometown for a few days, he already has PTSD. He hears the whistling of grenades in the squeal of tram wheels. "[...] das Quietschen der Straßenbahnen sich wie heranheulende Granaten anhört [...]" As with so many other soldiers of other wars in the century since this book was written, he regrets having come "home". It is a reminder of how he no longer fits in anything resembling normalcy. It makes him bitter for what he has lost, but also bitter at those who stayed behind, benefitting, however indirectly, from the unseen and largely unacknowledged sacrifices at the front. "Ich hätte nie hierherkommen dürfen. [...] Ich hätte nie auf Urlaub fahren dürfen." Back at war and Paul considers how he and his comrades have come to be trapped here: by the whims of higher-ups who make decisions nearly wholly unaware of what is happening in the real world. Orders are orders and they all follow them. Those that follow them don't understand why they were given; those that gave them don't understand what they mean to those who follow them. "An irgendeinem Tisch wird ein Schriftstück von einigen Leuten unterzeichnet, die keiner von uns kennt, und jahrelang ist unser höchstes Ziel das, worauf sonst die Verachtung der Welt und ihre höchste Strafe ruht." Perhaps because they don't care, but also, possibly, because they are incapable of bridging the divide. They are too far away, the situation too abstract for them to understand the ramifications. This does not excuse them; it explains how they can live with themselves. They are simply unaware of what they are doing, like a man stepping on ants. Their remove insulates them. Our goal should be to avoid making such callous decisions. Back at the front, Paul gets turned around on a mission and spends a day and night in a foxhole alone, save for the corpse of a Frenchman he'd killed. The man had jumped blindly into the same foxhole to escape the same gas that kills Frenchman and German alike. "Jetzt sehe ich erst, daß du ein Mensch bist wie ich. Ich habe gedacht an deine Handgranaten, an dein Bajonett und deine Waffen – jetzt sehe ich deine Frau und dein Gesicht und das Gemeinsame. Vergib mir, Kamerad! Wir sehen es immerzu spät. Warum sagt man uns nicht immer wieder, daß ihr ebenso arme Hunde seid wie wir [...]" When they escape the front, the troops ride on top of a wagon loaded with goods -- "[z]wischen uns steht ein Papageienkäfig, den wir für die Katze gefunden haben" -- but there isn't room for everyone. There are countless internally displaced persons -- families who've lost their homes and everything but their lives -- and they walk in the mud, with lowered eyes and, more often than not, nothing more than the clothes on their backs. "Ihre Gestalten sind gebeugt, ihre Gesichter voll Kummer, Verzweiflung, Hast und Ergebenheit. Die Kinder hängen an den Händen der Mütter, manchmal führt auch ein älteres Mädchen die Kleinen, die vorwärts taumeln und immer wieder zurücksehen. Einige tragen armselige Puppen mit sich. Alle schweigen, als sie an uns vorübergehen." Those that remain of the company end up in a hospital, far from the front, nursing their egregious but not hopeless wounds. The hospital has many, many patients, nearly all in worse shape than Paul. He lists them all, finishing with his usual sardonic flair. "Im Stockwerk tiefer liegen Bauch- und Rückenmarkschüsse, Kopfschüsse und beiderseitig Amputierte. Rechts im Flügel Kieferschüsse, Gaskranke, Nasen-, Ohren- und Halsschüsse. Links im Flügel Blinde und Lungenschüsse, Beckenschüsse, Gelenkschüsse, Nierenschüsse, Hodenschüsse, Magenschüsse. Man sieht hier erst, wo ein Mensch überall getroffen werden kann." The war is not done with him, though. He heals. He returns to the front, but the German effort is unraveling, no longer even capable of pretending to support its cannon fodder. The English and American troops seem overwhelming, better armed, better fed. At this point, Paul is fully jaded, knowing that the factory owners back at home are growing fat on profit while the soldiers at the front tighten their belts over bellies empty of everything but a thin flour soup. "Wir aber sind mager und ausgehungert. Unser Essen ist so schlecht und mit so viel Ersatzmitteln gestreckt, daß wir krank davon werden. Die Fabrikbesitzer in Deutschland sind reiche Leute geworden – uns zerschrinnt die Ruhr die Därme. [...]" And still Germany manages to find more bodies to send to the front. The hardened troops look with nonjudgmental and even gaze upon the fresh troops that arrive, inexperienced and untrained, they only know how to die. There are thousands of these, in ill-fitting uniforms -- none were designed for such small frames -- and hollow-eyed from a hunger that has reached from the front deep into Germany itself. "»Deutschland muß bald leer sein«, sagt Kat." This was to be Kat's final joke. He soon died of a grievous head wound, despite Paul's heroic fireman's carry across a live battlefield. He'd thought Kat had only a shattered shin, having overlooked the pinhole in his skull that ended him. The title of the book comes from a report issued on the day the war finally took Paul. The author notes with cruel irony that on this day, "[...] der Heeresbericht sich nur auf den Satz beschränkt[...], im Westen sei nichts Neues zu melden." I've included "notes, citations and errata" in a separate post. Bullets Points and Punch Lines (2020) by Lee Camp This is a collection of essays by American political activist, comedian, writer, podcaster, and TV-show host Lee Camp. The foreword is written by no less an eminence than Chris Hedges himself, who is a fan of Camp's work. The introduction is by Jimmy Dore, another comedian who's hosted Hedges on his show several times. They are all good people on the right side of history, with good principles, good research, and strong writing skills. I've followed Hedges assiduously for years and recently been quite impressed with Jimmy Dore's YouTube channel. Hedges is scathing in his condemnation of the American political landscape, as is Dore. As is Camp. "And, as Camp points out, the Democratic Party is as complicit in this debacle as the Republican Party. There is no way at this level to separate Trump from Obama. One may be vulgar and brash, but the other uses urbane polish to accomplish the same ends." I've been a fan of Lee Camp's work for a long time -- at least a decade, if not more. I started following and supporting him a long time ago, when he just had his original Moment of Clarity podcast (which he still does, but now on YouTube). I even took a long weekend in Berlin once to catch a rare European show. He's had his own TV show called Redacted Tonight for several years now, in which he regularly delivers hard-hitting and well-crafted news and polemics. He started out as a stand-up comedian and still does that. But he's very much grown beyond that -- becoming a well-spoken and often sardonic and hilarious voice for the downtrodden and for justice. This is a book of essays that he's published over the years. As you progress through the essays, you can follow along as he finds his voice. The first few essays are on interesting topics, but are a bit heavy on jokes and somewhat forced analogies. They're not bad but they're not nearly as good as those in the second half of the book. The book illustrates Camp's writing style as it progresses from stand-up-comedy-like lines to truly insightful and cutting satire more akin to that of Matt Taibbi. As the book is a collection of essays, the rest of my review simply chains together citations to give an impression of the scope. Camp's final word on Donald Trump's place in the pantheon of U.S.-inspired misery is a good place to start. Trump is unexceptional, a symptom rather than the cause. "I don’t believe Trump is the cause of our country’s main problems. I believe he is a symptom of an incredibly corrupt corporate-ruled system. He is a horrible and rather—not bright—man, but he is not the cause of the millions of hungry and homeless and imprisoned in our country. He is not the cause of the flaws in our democracy and our media. He is just the pimple that has risen up." [The U.S. Military & Foreign Policy] Camp's first essays deal with the astronomical military budget, which continues to grow unchecked, to the detriment of all other societal need. "[...] a country that can vomit trillions of dollars down a black hole marked “military” can’t find the money to take care of our poor elderly." "The Pentagon’s accounting fraud diverts many billions of dollars that could be devoted to other national needs: health care, education, job creation, climate action, infrastructure modernization, and more. Indeed, the Pentagon’s accounting fraud amounts to theft on a grand scale—theft not only from America’s taxpayers, but also from the nation’s well-being and its future." It would be bad enough were the money misappropriated by people who honestly thought it was better put to use in the military. Their duplicity in appropriation and distribution makes it very clear that they are just using the military as a politically unassailable vehicle to which to attach their own ambitions -- for graft, money, and power. "Have no fear, patriotic Americans, this is not “lying to the American people, stealing their money, and using it for war,” this is just “unsubstantiated change actions.” Try that on your next tax return. Put in 10 thousand dollars marked “unsubstantiated change actions.” I’m sure they’ll love that." Other essays discuss what the military actually does, which is enforce capitalism throughout its empire, beating down all resistance. The biggest crime a country could be guilty of, in the eyes of the U.S.? "Being socialist. Pretty self-explanatory. If you don’t have the same economic system as we do, we treat it like you have candy, and we’re not allowed to have any, so we slip razor blades in yours and tell everyone your candy kills people." As I've noted, Camp has quite a way with words. His descriptions of U.S. foreign policy are succinct, darkly funny, accurate, and complete. "The absolute last thing [Venezuelans] need is to be turned into a neocon/neoliberal parking lot in which America rips all their resources out from under them while calling it “freedom.”" [Animal Rights & The Environment ] From there, he moves on to animal rights and the imperative of vegetarianism, both for moral and environmental reasons. "We have food. We have year-round ripe mangos that don’t even make natural sense. There’s no need to keep 280 million hens and 68 million pigs in a fucking Saw movie." "[The mainstream media's job is to] make you think we live in a system that can recover from this carnage without large-scale changes, without a new economic paradigm that doesn’t reward waste and planned obsolescence and profiting off the lives of others." It's hard to know where to begin with saving the environment. Nearly everything we do right now is going in the wrong direction -- and nearly everyone else we know actively benefits from this system -- in the short term. In the long term, we're all dead. It's what our lives look like in the medium-term is where it gets interesting. We're mortgaging our future six ways to Sunday, burning the candle not only at both ends, but in the middle in a couple of spots too. Those in power benefit; many others get short-term benefits, enough of them that it becomes nearly impossible to turn this boat around. Maybe we just can't. "Maybe we’re right to die off. Maybe our hubris and egos the size of SUVs have doomed us, and we should just give up and enjoy our final few years. But if that’s the case, I would like an announcement. I would honestly prefer a national address by some of our so-called leaders stating clearly, "“Look, folks, to continue civilized society of the human species, we would need to change everything. Every single one of us would have to labor toward a massive shift to a sustainable culture that works in harmony with nature rather than abusing nature like it’s a servant who gave us an ugly look. We would have to focus on achieving this new society rather than spending a third of our free time watching superhero movies. But we have no intention of doing that because it sounds kinda hard, not to mention that corporate profits would suffer in the short term. So instead, we’re declaring here and now that we’ll all just keep functioning as is until such time as the oceans turn to acid, the ever-growing storms consume us, and California feels like the inside of a kiln. According to our best minds, that will be 10 to 20 years from now, so don’t worry about starting that retirement fund. Don’t buy the extended warranty on that vacuum. And whatever you do, at no point and under no circumstances should you quit smoking and drinking…. Thank you, and good night.”" [Racism & The Police State] Camp gets the right argument about police violence. We get distracted because there are way more violent things, so it's easier to point out all of the things that are more dangerous than the police. Deaths caused by police are just the tip of the iceberg of oppression, though. False arrests, cash bail, harassment, and so on, all impact lives to arguably a greater degree. "Yes, it is true that cops kill a lot of white people. They kill more white people than Wendy’s trademarked Baconator sandwich. However, cops kill more people of color than the population percentages would dictate, and they’re more likely to kill people of color who aren’t armed. So while whites do lose their lives in our current police state at a ridiculous rate, they are far more likely to be waving around a gun when it happens." He also gets it right when he points out that racism exacerbates the underlying anti-poverty stance and inequality. It's a class issue. The police end up working for their real masters no matter where they start out on the ideological scale. "In this particular instance, systemic racism does not originate in race but in the way the rich have crafted our laws and our systems to favor the rich. So it’s a class issue rather than a race issue. Unfortunately, other factors of systemic racism—such as hiring practices and who gets promoted—ensure that white people are more likely to be extremely wealthy and less likely to be extremely poor. Therefore, our country has a racial wealth gap the size of the Grand Canyon" When you're rich, you make the rules that keep you rich and safe. All of those other animals haven't earned the right to be treated fairly the way rich people have. "All told, much of our systemic racism problem comes down to class and wealth, not just race. But race, class, and wealth are deeply, inexorably linked. And therefore, whether you choose to ignore it or not, we must acknowledge that systemic racism is a thing. It’s in our schools, our air, our water, and even our televisions. It impacts every area of our lives, and much like climate change, we need to start fixing it rather than acting like it doesn’t exist." [The Economy & Inequality] The stock market is essentially gambling and the house always wins. If you're winning, it's because you're squeezing a profit out of some idiot who probably could afford to lose that money a lot less than you needed to win it. "I would actually respect the whole system if right on the front of the stock exchange it said, "“Put your money into the stock market! The only way you’ll make more money is if you find a dolt to buy whatever stocks you just bought. But there are an infinite number of dolts! This gravy train is powered by morons. So you have nothing to worry about.”" The market is rigged and the only way to really win is to be the house, as with any other gambling establishment. "Step two is to realize that the market economy in general is designed to exploit billions of us while a tiny number get ridiculously rich. It doesn’t care about the health or sustainability of our society as it facilitates the extraction of all the wealth and resources by sociopaths. Just ask Jeff Bezos—he’s now worth 150 billion padoodles of Amazon stock, while his workers are on food stamps." For example, the pharmaceutical industry has incentive not to cure diseases with simple and cheap one-time vaccines if they already have a lucrative business selling treatments for the same disease. If we leave everything up to the market, these businesses will logically decide that it's more profitable to sell suffering patients decades worth of drugs instead. We only listen to the opinion of these businesses and have been trained to think that the government, that society -- with its vast resources and wealth -- has no say. "They aren’t even trying to cure infectious diseases that make them piles of cash. Instead, the moneyed interests are complaining to their clients that they need to avoid curing these diseases. Because not only do they lose money on the patient who no longer needs meds, they also lose money because that patient won’t pass the disease onto others." Market incentives are completely screwed up. The market provides those things that people who already have money think will make them the most amount of more money. We don't need to go all the way to a planned economy, but this is nearly the furthest thing from it. We just keep throwing money at rich people and hope that something useful for society comes out of it. It rarely does. It's only with concerted planning and regulation and oversight that we can actually get what we want. That gets in the way of them getting what they want. We run the whole economy of the world just as poorly as we run any other project. And, just like those poorly run projects, we have terrible oversight and nearly no useful telemetry, using metrics chosen by those already benefitting from a crooked system and pretending that it describes our society's health in any way realistic to all but the 1%. We measure economic health with the stock market; we compare countries only by GDP. "How do we rate success? We look at gross domestic product—how much we’re producing. GDP doesn’t measure how many kids are drinking toxic water or breathing toxic air. It doesn’t measure how many dolphins are choking on plastic beer rings. It only measures how many beers you chug down. It doesn’t measure how many trees were planted. It measures how many trees we cut down to make the cardboard for coffee cups and condom boxes. It doesn’t rate how screwed the environment is, just how much stuff we buy to keep screwing. Buy a dildo? Good for the economy. Throw an old dildo out? Ends up in the ocean, gets stuck in a whale’s blowhole. GDP doesn’t care." "GDP doesn’t measure how many animals went extinct. It only measures how many animals we ate or sold. You could be eating a bald eagle roasted with giraffe bacon wrapped around it. As long as you bought it at the store, it’s good for GDP." GDP is a poor metric, and so is the stock market. Its macro-economic performance has long since become divorced from the economy most people experience. It's become more obvious than ever in 2020 that the stock market has no macro-economic importance. It matters, of course, to the elite, who are busy stuffing their track-suits full of leaves. [4] "The Post acts as if Wall Street’s growth is somehow good for average Americans. It’s not. Trump, Hillary, and the Post are all part of an elite class enjoying the spoils of a fully exploited working class. Judging the health of our society by looking at stock prices is like judging the health of a dying man by looking at the leeches on his skin. “Wow, those leeches are very happy. This man is in peak condition!”" The only thing fantastical about the following little parable is that is assumes the existence of aliens. The rest is accurate. Imagine the aliens that come down here after we’ve eaten everything, killed everything, and turned it all to dust. Imagine them showing up and going, “What happened to those little fellows that used to be here?” “Well, they imagined something called the stock market, where nonliving entities called corporations compete to see which one can exploit the earth the most. It eventually swallowed up the whole biosphere they lived in.” “Oh, which corporation won?” “Ironically, the one called Amazon, which used to be the name of the largest river in the world, until they paved it.” This split society -- the eternal "haves" and "have nots" -- leads to jarring conclusions. One is that, in making a judgment on whether something is bad or good for society, you must always be careful to consider for whom. "It's like a guy driving a car and only seeing speed, being completely blind to how many people he runs down. He’d get to his destination in record time and say to the townspeople, who all had family members run over by this maniac, “We did it. I got here in record time. We should all celebrate together.” One percent of America is celebrating. It’s time to do things differently." There is a relatively small group in our society that benefits massively from policies that are detrimental to the overwhelming majority. It's not as cut-and-dried as deciding on the right policy. We have to somehow scam this minority, this elite, into implementing it against their own best interests. Either that, or we seize the reins of power from them. We've tried the first way for a while; maybe it's time to try the second. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] I refer here to the story in The Restaurant at the End of the Universe about our likely progenitors, the "Golgafrinchans" , whose ark crash-landed on Earth long ago. They were on Ark Fleet Ship B -- housing the most useless elements of society -- with A and C to follow. It was clear they weren't going to do so and that the A and C denizens had dreamt up the story in order to get rid of the folks on Ark B. After crash-landing, they lacked the niceties of society, like currency, so they decided to use leaves as "legal tender" [5], making every one of them "immensely rich". They all walked around with track-suits stuffed full of leaves. The subsequent inflation problem led them to "effectively revalue the leaf" by "embark[ing] on a massive defoliation campaign, and...er, burn down all the forest." [1] All citations from page 299 of my leather-bound edition of the first four books of the at-that-time-only-slightly-inaccurately-named trilogy. [6] [1] Rather than the "increasingly inaccurately named Hitchhiker's Trilogy" that is the epithet of the next book in the series, Mostly Harmless. I've included "notes, citations and errata" in a separate post. "Speculation in JavaScriptCore" (2020) by Filip Pizlo I include this article in my list of "books" because it prints to 137 pages and I spent quite a bit of time reading through it, although I didn't end up with any specific citations from it. It's quite an incredible overview of the amount of work and consideration that a modern dynamic-code execution engine like JavaScript entails. Specifically, the paper describes how to implement speculation. "Before going into the details of speculation, we’ll provide an overview of speculation and an overview of JavaScriptCore. This will help provide context for the main part of this post, which describes speculation by breaking it down into five parts: bytecode (the common IR), control, profiling, compilation, and OSR (on stack replacement)." Essentially, a compiler is composed of several compilers, each of which produces code with more stringent assumptions about types and paths taken through the dynamic code. The trick is to build this code in a way that allows an incorrect assumption to bail back to a less-stringent layer without imposing too great a performance impact on the more-stringent one. The paper describes how the different layers gather profiling information that higher layers use to make educated "guesses" about the level of stringency they can apply. The performance of the engine is determined less by individual optimizations -- to which all compilers have access through common code-generation back-ends like LLVM -- and more by the heuristics of how to gather and use profiling information. For example, should an optimized version of a code even be produced? How often does it actually run? With how many different parameters? How many types of parameters? How long does the code take to run at less-optimized levels? How many times has the engine compiled more-optimized code and had to drop back to a less-optimized level? Additionally, the engine must balance the amount of memory and time used to track profiling information. The heuristics must also take into account that more-optimized levels take longer to compile. The paper goes into a tremendous amount of detail and seems aimed at helping new developers on the project understand what JavaScript Core specifically does. Most of the information is generally applicable to writing dynamic compilers/interpreters/runtimes, though. "Speculative compilation is all about speeding up dynamically typed programs by placing bets on what types the program would have had if it could have types. Speculation uses OSR exit, which is expensive, so we engineer JavaScriptCore to make speculative bets only if they are a sure thing. Speculation involves using multiple execution tiers, some for profiling, and some to optimize based on that profiling. JavaScriptCore includes four tiers to also get an ideal latency/throughput trade-off on a per-function basis. A control system chooses when to optimize code based on whether it’s hot enough and how many times we’ve tried to optimize it in the past. All of the tiers use a common IR (bytecode in JavaScriptCore’s case) as input and provide independent implementation strategies with different throughput/latency and speculation trade-offs." The Last Man (1826) by Mary Shelley This feels like another novel from the 19th century that was written serially, for two reasons. In the first place, it feels quite padded out, with each long chapter coming to a mini-plot resolution. In the second place, the book is actually quite clearly two separate volumes, with on of the main heroes of the first book Raymond dying in a conflagration in a plague-filled Constantinople. The first half is essentially a bullshit fairy tale, ostensibly set in 2092, but with no discernible advancements over the early 19th century, when the book was written. Everything works out without conflict or even much effort on the part of the protagonists. Everyone is happy with all of the results. They're all rich and smart and erudite and powerful and beautiful and just...barf. The second half is the actual pandemic-destroying-all-but-the-last-man book I'd set out to read. But I'm getting ahead of myself. The novel begins with the story of Lionel and his sister Perdita, who live in the countryside in Cumberland with their mother in more-or-less abject poverty. They'd never met their father, who was a jovial ne'er-do-well addicted to gambling who'd befriended the king and was, therefor, protected to a good degree. Shelley sets the tone of the first half of the novel with countless examples of lovely, well-written passages that quickly grow almost tedious to read. For example, the following passage describes Lionel's father as a charming but less-than-sensible man. "My father was one of those men on whom nature had bestowed to prodigality the envied gifts of wit and imagination, and then left his bark of life to be impelled by these winds, without adding reason as the rudder, or judgment as the pilot for the voyage." He remains protected, that is, until the king marries, after which the queen drives a wedge between the king and his incorrigible friend. She eventually delivers an ultimatum -- cut off the sponge of suffer my wrath. The king obliges and Lionel's father is driven into exile, having no means of support anymore. The king, in turn, gives up the monarchy, ushering in a republic in its place. The queen is beside herself with scorn and anger. Lionel grows up to be a strapping man, head of a band of scoundrels who ravage the countryside, stealing what they need. The king's other son Adrian moves to Cumberland, butting up against an angry and retributive Lionel, whose heart is reluctantly softened until he flips 180º and expresses lifelong devotion to the man whom he'd long considered an arch-enemy. [7] We are introduced to Raymond, a hero of the Greek-Turkish wars as well as Evadne, a Greek Princess who loves him. Adrian, in turn, loves Evadne. Raymond loves Adrian's sister, Idris. Raymond loves Perdita, and Lionel loves Idris. All clear? These are all respectively strapping or lovely, brilliant, rich people, all in love with one another in a seemingly Gordian knot of unrequited love. This next citation is just a small snippet of Raymond rambling on for paragraphs about the depth and strength of his love (see more examples from pages 64-77 below). "Yet you do love me; I feel and know that you do, and thence I draw my most cherished hopes. If pride guided you, or even reason, you might well reject me. Do so; if your high heart, incapable of my infirmity of purpose, refuses to bend to the lowness of mine." This is effusive and overly flowery prose, depicting yet another improbable love triangle. It reminds me very much of the over-the-top love stories in Atlas Shrugged that described a love flaming so hot as to admit no doubt or compromise or even slight difference of opinion. They are lovely examples of poetic prose but, after a while, it's hard not to feel she would describe taking out the trash in the same manner. Also indicative of the time but now difficult to connect with is the subservience of woman, not just as forced by society, but also as fervently hoped for by the woman, who chooses a secondary role to a man who deems as having completely earned her worship. "The overflowing warmth of her heart, by making love a plant of deep root and stately growth, had attuned her whole soul to the reception of happiness, when she found in Raymond all that could adorn love and satisfy her imagination." Lionel moves to Vienna for a while, to work under the tutelage of Freud, while England starts to struggle with its republic. Raymond is agitating to move back to a monarchy, with himself as Lord Protector, which is basically king. Instead of causing issues among his friends, they all think that this is a great idea -- because Raymond is so singularly awesome. Much of the rest of the parliament is similarly convinced, especially whenever Raymond opens his brilliant and loquacious mouth. Soon after, they all become embroiled in the war in Greece. Rumors of Raymond's death are followed by Raymond's actual death and Perdita's subsequent suicide (she obviously had no other reason to live). Adrian and Lionel return home to find that the plague that had begun in Asia and had just started to touch Turkey and Greece has followed them to England. This is the first part of the book, with only a hint of plague. The second part eloquently describes the plague's relentless eradication of humanity. I read the book to see if it, too, would provide some evidence that humanity's idea of how to handle a plague was no different then than it is now (and than it was in Camus's "La Peste" ). "We talked of the ravages made last year by pestilence in every quarter of the world; and of the dreadful consequences of a second visitation. We discussed the best means of preventing infection, and of preserving health and activity in a large city thus afflicted—London, for instance." "Plague might not revive with the summer; but if it did, it should find us prepared. It is a part of man's nature to adapt itself through habit even to pain and sorrow. Pestilence had become a part of our future, our existence; it was to be guarded against, like the flooding of rivers, the encroachments of ocean, or the inclemency of the sky." This sounds very much like the lessons at least some of us had learned by the end of 2020 -- although I sometimes seriously question whether we've lost some capacity for dealing with society-wide issues. Our laser-like focus on individual liberty and luxury leaves little to no room for considering the more foreboding calculus of dependencies and conflicts between unequally represented interests. Our notion of liberty often devolves into the strong surviving on the backs of the weak (dog eat dog), the strong using their mostly fortuitously acquired and largely unearned power to fortify and substantiate with myth their position at the top of the heap. At any rate, in the book (as in reality), the remaining populace -- either not exposed or more resistant -- squabble and fight over the remaining resources and power centers. But it is hopeless, as the plague is unquestionably worse than anything humans can do to one another. Still, armies are raised, with the plague rejoicing at the close quarters and squalid conditions. "At length the plague, slow-footed, but sure in her noiseless advance, destroyed the illusion, invading the congregation of the elect, and showering promiscuous death among them." Luckily, the main characters are largely untouched by the plague -- at least until much later. This is another literary device she uses without explanation: she protects her characters from the ravages of the plague until a sufficiently dramatic end can be found for them. This is, of course, artistic license and largely implausible since most of them were simultaneously selfless in caring for the sick day-in and day-out. Yet, none fell to the plague. Were we to assume it was because they were so good? That the plague couldn't get through the shield of their benevolence? Lionel, Idris, and Adrian -- now Lord Protector -- rally the remains of humanity in England and strike out for warmer climes. The winters are brutal in England and humans can no longer survive there. Although the virus is worse in the summer, they still feel it would be better to move southward. There are trials and tribulations and they barely make it to the coast of France in their boats. There, they discover that those who preceded them had split into factions: on one side is Adrian and his benevolence; on the other is a brutal leader selling a story of protection from the plague in exchange for unquestioning fealty. Lionel is integral in remediating this problem and the remains of humanity, once again united in purpose, continue to Switzerland, where they hope that the cool heights will provide agricultural plenty while protecting them from the estival ravages of the plague. The plague has other ideas. Only four survive the trek across France to Switzerland: Lionel, Adrian, and Raymond's two children, Clara and Evelyn). Lionel dwells a bit too pointedly on how lovely and smart Clara is -- with intimations of rekindling humanity with her. They shift to Milan and Como, spending several lovely years there, with only Evelyn succumbing to Typhus rather than the plague. "[...] one by one, beneath the ice-caves, beside the waters springing from the thawed snows of a thousand winters, another and yet another of the remnant of the race of Man, closed their eyes for ever to the light." ""Thus are we left," said Adrian, "two melancholy blasted trees, where once a forest waved. We are left to mourn, and pine, and die." Clara decides she needs to see where her father is buried in Greece. Lacking anything else to do, they endeavor across the Adriatic from Venice, but are shipwrecked, drowning Adrian and Clara. Lionel survives. We follow him on his physical and philosophical peregrinations, leaving him a few years later, after he'd ascertained to a great degree of certainty that he was, indeed, the last man on Earth. "Yellow lightnings played around the vast dome of Mont Blanc, silent as the snow-clad rock they illuminated; all was bare, wild, and sublime, while the singing of the pines in melodious murmurings added a gentle interest to the rough magnificence." Imagine knowing that yours would be the last sentience to behold such a thing, that nature would present such shows for long eons, irrespective of observers. That the clockwork continues without us, as easily as with us. Not that we have become irrelevant, but that we always were. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] This sort of jarring flip-flop is a common feature. There's not a lot of subtlety to the emotions expressed by any of the characters. It's like humanity viewed through the lens of a teenager: everything is literally the best or the worst ever. [1] Idris never makes it off the island, and much effort and time is expended in making sure that her body is entombed in Windsor Castle, as if anyone at all cares where her plague-ridden corpse is interred, especially considering none of them will ever return to it. I've included "notes, citations and errata" in a separate post. Naked Lunch (1959) by William S. Burroughs This book is a stream-of-consciousness brain-dump of a junkie. In the afterword, Burroughs reveals -- in refreshingly erudite prose -- that he wrote some of the content the book during his withdrawal from a 15-year morphine addiction. "The addict regards his body impersonally as an instrument to absorb the medium in which he lives, evaluates his tissue with the cold hands of a horse trader. “No use trying to hit there.” Dead fish eyes flick over a ravaged vein." "The addict runs on junk time. His body is his clock, and junk runs through it like an hourglass. Time has meaning for him only with reference to his need. Then he makes his abrupt intrusion into the time of others, and, like all Outsiders, all Petitioners, he must wait, unless he happens to mesh with non-junk time." Much of the rest of the book was originally arose from correspondence with Allen Ginsberg, one of Burroughs's best friends and collaborators (and also a member of the "Beat Generation") and with whom he was trying to kindle a romantic relationship. The book is a labor of love by many people who helped Burroughs edit and shape the final work. He was adamant about its composition -- even to the point of insisting on retaining obvious typos as intentional -- and wanted it to read like it does. No chapter headings. Disjointed flow. No notion of storyline or chronology. Just a strong sense of common theme: on the surface, a story filtered through the mind of the junkie who wants nothing but more junk, but below that, a story of how a thinking person can hope to make their way through a world adamantly opposed to independent thought. In the first third -- the book was originally intended to be published in three parts, but all parties involved agreed that it stood better as a single work -- there is a bit of a story of a man named Bill who flees cross-country to Mexico, with a rotating cast of companions -- some real, some not -- and an infinitude of places to cop and shack up and nod. He writes of psychotic doctors and dealers and pushers and users. The hyperbolic prose freely mixes real-world events with fevered imaginings and dreams and heavily metaphoric renderings (e.g. the many, many hangings in the middle of the book involving people who keep coming back, again and again, in what would turn out -- for the most part -- to be faked hangings partaken by hangman and accused for a supposedly unparalleled sexual gratification). He describes drugs and their effects lucidly, then disjointedly, weaving seemingly nonsensical prose -- with heavy use of ellipses -- into at-times vivid renderings of immediately recognizable real-world situations and locations. As Burroughs himself stated: it is not a novel. It is, at times, an epic poem. The book does not tell a story -- it delivers impressions, often very powerful ones. It is a maelstrom of words from an author whose deliberate rawness hides his frightening intelligence from anyone so inclined to allow it to be hidden. That is, if you want to be offended, you will be, missing out on the deeper message that the world itself is far more deeply offensive to anyone with a sensitivity to hypocrisy and an undiminished sense of justice. The raw language is the only way to treat bad things honestly. The at-time maniacal prose nearly always reveals the author to be a clinical observer -- especially of people -- recording exactly the details of a person or place that snaps it into sharp relief for the reader (for whom memory fills the spaces left by the skeleton of Burroughs's description). "The café was built into one side of a stone ramp at the bottom of a high white canyon of masonry. Faces of The City poured through silent as fish, stained with vile addictions and insect lusts. The lighted café was a diving bell, cable broken, settling into black depths." "Up through the river towns, Babahoya, Quevedo, Puerto Limón, black Stetsons and the grey malaria faces color of dirty paper, muzzle-loading shotguns and vultures pecking in the streets" Sometimes he'll riff on what is almost certainly a real detail, an actual memory, supplementing it with a newly formed invention or one half-remembered from when he'd picked up the detail. He'll tell of a young man he saw on a bus, then spend paragraphs describing the man's history or future, though he neither never knew him nor ever would, instead stitching the real world to the richer, more interesting, parallel one playing out in his head. "A few sentences plucked from the whirl of details in his mind, of the world only he sees with a history only he knows." As noted above, the strong undercurrent of the book -- for lack of a better word -- is a surprisingly rational scream from a highly pragmatic man who did not prejudge, but instead partook. It warns of a world gone askew, in which those who can, and those who realize, and those who are wise to its mendacity, take refuge from it in the drugs that it forbids. The nation knows that its captives can escape its raw horror using drugs, and thus deprives its residents of all but the officially sanctioned varieties (e.g. alcohol and anti-depressants), guilting people into participating in the madness of American society instead. [8] In 1959 as today. Sorry, Bill; not much has changed. Not for most of us. "“I can feel the heat closing in,” Burroughs writes, setting the tone for the entire book, although such heat has less to do with the police than with the futility of freedom in a world of systems designed to keep us from ourselves" I've included "notes, citations and errata" in a separate post. The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap (2014) by Matt Taibbi This book is nearly evenly divided between stories of how the poor in America are squeezed for all they are worth, made to pay with money and time for crimes that shouldn't even be crimes -- or that they haven't even committed -- while the wealthy, the elite, the so-called Masters of the Universe not only avoid punishment for much larger crimes that destroy countless lives, all in the name of consolidating filthy lucre to a self-selected elite: "men and women who essentially as a matter of policy now will never see the inside of a courtroom, almost no matter what crimes they may have committed in the course of their business." And let's all remember the huge difference: the people who steal a lot of money when they already have a lot of money are not being prosecuted. They are instead promoted to positions of power and influence. Those who have nothing and are stealing -- or failing to properly report -- small sums just in order to survive go to jail immediately and pay with time and money they cannot afford. "Unquestionably, however, something else is at work, something that cuts deeper into the American psyche. We have a profound hatred of the weak and the poor, and a corresponding groveling terror before the rich and successful, and we’re building a bureaucracy to match those feelings." "[...] giant idiosyncratic bureaucracies that are designed to criminalize failure, poverty, and weakness on the one hand, and to immunize strength, wealth, and success on the other." This works not because those in power are exceptionally clever or better than we are. They're just initially luckier, be it by birth or by just dumb luck. Hard work does not necessarily get you into the special class, but any number of stupid trivialities can. They don't even have to be more clever than to divide and conquer (or control). They've, "[...] arranged things so that the problem is basically invisible to most people, unless you go looking for it." This is nothing new, going back to the late 70s and early 80s -- and having gotten a high-energy kick-start during Ronald Reagan's two terms (see "my review of the 4-hour documentary The Reagans" for more information). "The cleaving of the country into two completely different states—one a small archipelago of hyperacquisitive untouchables, the other a vast ghetto of expendables with only theoretical rights—has been in the works a long time." Taibbi recounts the interesting mechanics of the fraud that led to the financial crash of 2008. To illustrate the "divide", he juxtaposes what happened to people who orchestrated the greatest theft of all time versus people who break minor laws. "Once the bubble burst, lawsuits were filed everywhere and whistle-blowers emerged by the dozen, showing, in graphic documentary detail, how nearly every major financial company in America had chosen to participate in this enormous fraud. It was the very definition of systemic corruption, but curiously, despite what looked like mountains of evidence, almost nobody with any connection to the crisis was even threatened with criminal prosecution." "And as every individual who’s ever been charged with a crime knows, anyone facing criminal arrest can expect collateral consequences. A single drug charge can ruin a person’s chances for obtaining a student loan or a government job. It can nix his or her chances of getting housing aid or a whole range of services—even innocent members of your family may lose access to government benefits. You can lose your right to vote and your access to financial aid. You can even have your children taken away." It's not that no-one cares, but that it seems to be unstoppable somehow. "The public defenders [...] can’t do much about the convictions factory. They’re like partisans trying to slow an invasion by throwing their bodies under tank treads." The political will is with continuing this situation because it benefits all of the right people and doesn't affect anyone important, by definition. The law tiptoes around businesses and for a decent reason, "Unless a company was corrupt through and through, it did seem reasonable to try to avoid destroying it and to protect the jobs of innocent employees if possible." But it got to the point where "[t]he attorney general of the United States [admits] that he asks Wall Street for advice before he prosecutes Wall Street." This was easier because the big boys could afford a lot of lawyers and put up a real fight, so "[...] incompetent and lazy officials with a defense-lawyer mindset [would] avoid difficult contested trials and simply take cash up front and declare victory for the cameras." On the other hand, "You’ll never see a local prosecutor call a press conference and pat himself on the back for letting a car thief or a mugger of old ladies off with a fine." Instead, police were vociferously encouraged to create crime on that side of the ledger with incentives that spoke directly to their own personal gain -- a nearly sure-fire method with most people, for whom principles are far down the list of priorities relative to enriching themselves. "But the steep drop in violent crime presented police with a problem. If making arrests is the only way to advance in your career, but crime is dropping, what do you do? Furthermore, what to do if the only way to make a living wage is to rack up as much overtime as possible? In the Safir era, NYPD starting salaries were on the low end for professional police forces in America, beginning at about forty thousand dollars. How do you add hours in an era when crime is dropping? "The answer turned out to be, you simply create arrests. By multiplying marijuana arrests by a factor of ten in the space of a few years, Safir’s police force drastically increased its workload." I think that the the starting pay of $40,000 as being "too low" is odd, though. I made less than that in 1994 when I started as a software developer. I might have been making that by 1998. We weren't living "rich". We had no car and rented an apartment, but we were getting by without issue. I suppose a police officer isn't satisfied with living lower middle-class like we were and figured working overtime arresting people who hadn't committed crimes was an ethically defensible way of escaping that life. In one case that Taibbi writes about, the main reason the state used to flush one man's life down the drain was that he had "obstructed traffic" on a sidewalk after he stepped out of a car at one in the morning to discover a cop who'd popped up out of nowhere -- on an otherwise empty sidewalk -- to get between him and his own apartment's entrance. To a normal person, this seems like the cop is obstructing the poor guy returning home from work. Since a cop can't be liable for something like that, it must be the other guy who committed a crime. The goal was to create a crime. "The obstructing traffic section is meant to apply to people who are willfully blocking cars or people on the sidewalk, or to be used as a tool for crowd control at things like protests, but in practice it’s code for being black on a Tuesday night." It gets more insidious, as charges are turned into convictions without sufficient proof simply by applying the punishment before trial. "[...] if you don’t make bail, you’ll almost automatically spend at least [15-90 days] in jail waiting for trial. The state knows this, so essentially, charging a person who can’t make bail with a B misdemeanor is the same as convicting that person. You file the charge, the judge sets high bail, you go back inside, and then you eventually plead to time served, because, well, why not? You’ve already done the time. "The only difference is, you’ve got a conviction now, which means the next time you get arrested, the denial of bail—or a punishingly high bail—will be even more automatic." Innocent people end up with criminal records because "[...] the speedy trial concept [...] is easily reduced to a complete joke." and the system "applies disproportionate punishment to the guilty." Remember that, with the successful division of America, people aren't even aware that this is the system. They don't know that "failure to follow a police order, no matter how stupid or unreasonable, is cause for an arrest or a summons." Combine that with the foot-dragging above, and a "prosecutor can essentially turn any misdemeanor case against almost anyone into a de facto conviction [...]" That "[...] puts an entire segment of the population constantly on the defensive, gives it a criminal record essentially in advance." Taibbi now moves on to contrast that system with what happens when Dick Fuld and Lehman Brothers steal and waste a truly tremendous amount of money. Unlike with poor people, where petty, mostly victimless crime is manufactured, in this case large-scale theft from thousands -- if not hundreds of thousands -- of victims is completely ignored, letting the criminals steal more and more from more and more victims until the criminal finally stops on their own when the system -- rather than the regulators -- decide that enough's enough. "What’s amazing about this is that the Fed saw fit as early as January 2008 to warn Chase about Lehman’s instability. But nobody ever warned the public. Nobody stepped in after the bank cooked its books in Repo 105, or misreported taxes, or made fake disclosures, or lied outright to investors. Nothing was done. The government merely sat back and watched the catastrophe unfold, allowing new victims to pour money into the walking-dead bank right up until its collapse." "The deals the government and Wall Street worked out that weekend [...] transform[ed] America into a permanent oligarchical bailout state. This was, essentially, a formal merger of Wall Street and the U.S. government." Barclays stepped in to "bail out" Lehmen Brothers for what they claimed was "cost" but ended up skimming $5B from the top, stealing it from the owners of Lehman Brothers, who were already being screwed from the original mismanagement. Now, Barclays was stealing even more money from them, all with the oversight and blessing of the government. Instead of a candy bar from a bodega, it was $5B from retirement accounts. Next, Taibbi takes us to Georgia, where we learn how the police milk the local immigrant population by inventing crimes to produce fines and settlements to bolster the local tax base. "The squad cars perch on the sides of the road like ticks on a vein, hauling in alien after undocumented alien and tossing them into the criminal justice/deportation hopper. From there, in a complex, arbitrary, and mindlessly cruel legal process that puts people literally in chains for the crime of going to work or taking their kids to school, the detainees get ground up into a rich financial and political meal, shared in nearly equal parts by state and federal authorities on the one hand and private prison companies on the other." Because of the residency status of these people, they are de-facto afforded fewer rights. This amounts to conditional rights, depending on how much money you have. "For a country founded on the idea that rights are inalienable and inherent from birth, we’ve developed a high tolerance for conditional rights and conditional citizenship. And the one condition, it turns out, is money. If you have a lot of it, the legal road you get to travel is well lit and beautifully maintained. If you don’t, it’s a dark alley and most Americans would be shocked to find out what’s at the end of it." It is about money, and it's definitely a class thing, but how can we do this to fellow human beings, just because they don't have that much money? That, alone, wouldn't be enough, which is why we mix in race-based alienation to make everything OK "This seemed to represent the ultimate white-folks win-win: local chicken-plant owners got to keep their cheap labor, while local police still got to milk the immigrant community for any money they made working at those plants." On the other side of the ledger, if you're rich and white, you can run a scam for 13 years and nothing happens until the scam collapses under its own weight (pretty much how Lehman brothers did). "Madoff actually went more than thirteen years without making a single stock purchase and yet somehow survived several SEC investigations [...]" So there's Madoff, who scams millions, if not billions, out of other rich people by not making trades. And then there are the guys who coordinate to generate artificial trades -- and interest -- to drive a stock price up so they can sell at that artificially inflated rate. "To "paint the tape" on ADM, Graber and Israel would call eight different brokers and put in buy orders simultaneously to run up the price—at a time when Graber was holding lots of the stock ready to sell into a rising market. It was a racket the Securities and Exchange Commission was hopelessly ill-equipped to stop." In case it wasn't clear how that worked: this in insider trading. The hedge funds have prior access to information that no-one else in the market has access to, simply because they pay the analysts more for it. Everyone else gets screwed in a market that ends up reflecting only the interests of the already ultra-rich. And these people are just getting richer because they're already rich and stealing from others. They're worth billions and stealing more from those who have, relatively, nothing to give. Where that should be a greater crime because it's more morally bankrupt than stealing to buy food, this is the crime that goes unpunished. "Tipping off a hedge fund that your analyst is going to give a “buy” rating to a stock weeks before that research is made public can be enormously valuable to the hedge fund, for the obvious reason that the fund now has a pretty good idea of a concrete date and time when the stock is going to tick upward." It's essentially like when Biff had that almanac of sports facts when he traveled back in time in Back to the Future II. Hedge-fund traders know the future and are no longer taking any risk. No-one else in the market has access to this information and, mysteriously, they don't seem to do as well as these hedge funds. Next, Taibbi tells the story of a how a cabal of these hedge-fund traders convinced themselves to go short on a Canadian company (they were gambling that the value of the company would go down by a certain date). When they realized they were wrong, instead of eating their losses -- as the rest of us would -- they instead employed clumsy, quasi-Mafia tactics to try to force the company to lose value. This is the alternative to predicting the future. If, for whatever reason, you still guessed incorrectly (or the information you stole turns out to not be reliable), then you can still commit other crimes try to change the future so your bet still pays off. Naturally, since you're rich, none of these things count as crimes. "[...] in a city where police in some neighborhoods define crime as standing on the sidewalk the wrong way, these idiots took their stock-trading act-like-a-thug life, screwed it up a hundred different ways, and not only couldn’t get arrested, they couldn’t even get police of any kind to notice." "Twenty-six billion dollars of fraud: no felony cases. But when the stakes are in the hundreds of dollars, we kick in 26,000 doors a year, in just one county." It seems the police just weren't looking for crime where they knew it wouldn't be (i.e. they weren't manufacturing it there). And this isn't just grossly unfair, but the larger, ignored crime has a ton of collateral damage, in the form of investors (often pension and index funds and 401K mutual funds) who lost money on completely fictitious and artificially generated market movement. There was no actual economic benefit -- the common defense the finance industry has for itself -- because "[t]he entire thing was a battle of public relations. It had nothing to do with real economics." Anyone who claims that the free market is doing its job of "price finding" is either a fool or a liar. This is a system with two, quasi-official sets of rights. "Over and over again, we hear that if you owe money in a certain way, or if you receive a certain kind of public assistance, you forfeit this or that line item in the Bill of Rights. If you’re a person of means, you get full service for all ten amendments, and even a few that aren’t listed. But if you owe, if you rent, you get a slightly thinner, more tubercular version of the Fourth Amendment, the First Amendment, the Fifth and Sixth Amendments, and so on." "As Americans, we’re all beginning to develop a second sense about who gets to feel the business end of the criminal justice system, and when, and who doesn’t, and why. That second sense we all carry around in our minds is our true government. [...] Schoolhouse Rock! teaches us that everyone is treated equally under the law [...] but at the same time we somehow know not to be surprised when that turns out not to be completely true." It's more about class than race. The line is drawn between the reprehensible, mooching poor and the deserving, job-creating wealthy. "It’s not that it’s written anywhere that if you’re black and you live in the projects, you don’t get protection against illegal searches—it just sort of works out that way. And if this makes any sense at all, it’s not about skin color. This is a cultural kind of bias. White people who live the wrong way get caught in the net, too." Hatred of the poor is more deeply embedded and unchangeable than racism. Racism has actually decreased over the years. It's obviously still a problem, but it's much better than it was -- albeit because it was so appallingly bad before -- whereas inequality has increased dramatically. Middle-class blacks are just as disdainful of poor blacks as middle-class whites are (do you remember when Chris Rock had a long bit about "Niggas vs. Black People" in Bring the Pain?) "[This system] attacks people without money, particularly nonwhite people, with a weirdly venomous kind of hatred, treating them like they’re already guilty of something, which of course they are—namely, being that which we’re all afraid of becoming." Almost as strong as hatred of the poor is reverence for the rich, something I haven't noticed in any other country. It's deep-down, bone-stupid to revere the rich, sucking up their fairy tales about how they got to be that way and you didn't. As Taibbi puts in, hand in hand, these "[...] twin impulses [...] drive modern America: burning hatred of all losers and the poor, and breathless, abject worship of the rich, even the talentless and undeserving rich." You don't need to be smart or good or anything commendable to get into the privileged club. You just have to somehow have a lot of money: inherit it, steal it, it doesn't matter. Once you have it, you're protected. Go big or go home...or to jail. If you commit crimes while you're big, though...you just add to your fortune, but don't have to worry about going to jail. You have to worry about the size of your fan club growing too big. "These bureaucracies accomplish just two things: they make small piles of money smaller and big piles of money bigger." Taibbi tells the story of Marishka, a young woman -- one who's made mistakes, yes -- trying to make ends meet. Does she get even a real first chance, to say nothing of a second one? No. She's not rich. Instead, "[...] she was about to become more heavily scrutinized by the state than any twelve Wall Street bankers put together." Helping her would cost nearly nothing and could help her a lot. Helping hedge-fund brokers steal billions costs a tremendous amount and helps only a small group of thieves who already had more money than they knew what to do with in the first place. But we are trained to believe that Marishka is guilty until proven innocent and that the hedge-fund trader doesn't even exist. Taibbi has a way of presenting the facts in a way that shows the glaring irony of this two-class system. "For instance, in 2011, the state of Ohio—the same state that lost tens of millions in the early 2000s when its pension fund bought severely overpriced mortgage-backed securities from a Lehman Brothers banker named John Kasich, who would later become governor—tried to recoup some of its losses by sending out 22,000 notices to Ohioans seeking “overpayments” in either welfare or food stamps." In other words, Ohio elected the guy whose company bilked its state-pension fund out of "tens of millions" to be its governor while it scrambled to bolster its budget by scrabbling back amounts in the tens to hundreds of dollars for what it called "overpayments" (a claim that, in many cases, was highly dubious) from welfare recipients. Because the rich are unassailable, we attack the poor. Not only are the rich unassailable, they are rewarded with governerships. "[...] the only offenders the local burghers will spend money to embarrass publicly are young, single, nonwhite mothers guilty of the [alleged] crime of improperly receiving benefits." This was not just a Reagan or Bush thing. This was also a Clinton and Obama thing. This is an American Ruling Class thing. "Bill Clinton’s political formula for seizing the presidency was simple. He made money tight in the ghettos and let it flow free on Wall Street. He showered the projects with cops and bean counters and pulled the cops off the beat in the financial services sector. And in one place he created vast new mountain ranges of paperwork, while in another, paperwork simply vanished." It is the way that they keep themselves as the ruling class. For 99% of the participants, there is no discernible difference from a monarchy. There is no underlying principle except for the rich to get much richer and the poor to feel guilty about not being richer, all the while being milked every damned day. A self-selected and smug minority can't fail, while everyone else can do nothing but fail. It's no wonder people are angry, but their anger is wildly misdirected. This is the American Myth. It is a palace of lies built by many, but benefitting only a few. Many that support it would probably do at least as well or even better under a fairer, more just, more moral, and more principled system, but they're terrified of changing horses and falling into the giant crack of poverty they've created. They won't rock the boat for a principle, for fear that they'll lose the unearned gains they've accrued -- and continue to accrue -- from the unprincipled system that they do support. So they hear, believe, and repeat to themselves the stories that the losers in this system deserve what they get -- just as the winners do. To admit anything else would lead to a psychic collapse. "Are We the Baddies?" One of the big problems is that hating a poor person for not reporting they got an extra $25 of benefits per week is somehow easy. At any rate, it's easy to understand what they're being accused of -- and feeling righteous about it. Hating a bank for setting up laws that put its president in charge of bailouts to his own bank at a federal organization, effective loaning himself billions in government money at 0% interest to buy out competitors at bargain-basement prices, prices that were artificially depressed by a collapsed bubble that he and his bank created is ... somehow more difficult to understand. Taibbi provides the details below: "[...] WaMu and its $307 billion in assets were delivered by the state into the hands of Chase and its CEO, Jamie Dimon, for the preposterously low price of $1.9 billion, a bargain deal that was struck just a few weeks before Chase was given $25 billion in cash by the government as part of the TARP bailouts. This was Chase’s second sweetheart deal in less than a year. "Six months before, in March 2008, Chase had “rescued” the imploding investment banking giant Bear Stearns, buying the venerable firm with the aid of $29 billion in guarantees extended by the New York branch of the Federal Reserve—whose chairman of the board of directors at the time was, get this, JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon. "That means that six months after Jamie Dimon was the lucky recipient of his own Federal Reserve bailout in order to acquire Bear Stearns, his bank was given another $25 billion in cash by the state to go on another shopping spree, cash he used, among other things, to buy Washington Mutual." You see? It's so complicated that the average mortal will doubt their ability to judge whether something shady happened or not. But it's brainwashing. They've brainwashed you into believing that you are completely able to judge the indigent -- without needing any background information, which is almost always morally, if not legally, exonerating -- but are utterly incapable of judging financial malfeasance and fraud several orders of magnitude larger and more damaging, even when it stinks to high heaven. In the first case, we know they're guilty because we can judge downwards, but in the second, we defer to the criminals, who we assume are just much smarter than us. We are jealous of their success and attribute it to their being superior -- else we'd have to think we were somehow inferior or had been suckered in some way. If they don't do too much damage to us personally, we let it slide, rather than examine that whole house of psychological cards. "The crucial thing to understand is that if businesses like consumer credit cards are going to give cards away in the mail to everyone with a pulse, then the process almost by definition has to involve fraud." Why doesn't our bullshit detector go off for this stuff? We take to the streets to protest COVID, we believe the Earth is flat, that the towers were taken down by the Bush administration, that Russia stole the election -- we fight like mad for stupid, unsubstantiated shit that doesn't even affect us (not really), but then don't trust ourselves to say anything when someone is blowing smoke up our collective asses in to steal everything we have? This leads to people like Obama telling us with a straight face that nothing actually illegal happened, that "Banks are in the business of making money [...a]nd they find loopholes.", which is bullshit. They break laws that are unenforced. They undo laws that they don't like. They illegally bribe legislators to add loopholes for themselves before driving through them. They are the kids on the playground who change the rules mid-game, then declare victory and we believe them. Not only that: we worship them. The final financial sector volume deals with a woman whose job was to sniff out credit-card fraud. She found it in her own bank, blew the whistle, and was fired for it. The transactions all proceeded unfettered. All of it was vastly illegal -- fraud of the highest order -- with several layers of beneficiaries all sucking illegal gains out of a helpless target, already mired in poverty and debt. This is a "market" built on obvious subterfuges intended to generate predictable outcomes and revenue. "[...] in a huge percentage of credit card cases, the cardholder never even sees the summons and consequently never appears in court to defend himself. "[...] the bulk of the credit card collection business is conducted without any supporting documentation showing up or being seen by human eyes at any part of the process. The meat of the business is collecting unopposed default judgments from defendants who either never receive a summons or receive one and never appear in court. "[...] At no time in the process do most collectors ever actually need to produce evidence of a legitimate debt or a legitimate judgment." What's stopping them from making them up wholesale? You wouldn't be able to tell the difference. If no-one checks, then you don't serve and just make up a number for a nonexistent card and garnish their wages after judgment. Why even buy accounts from Chase? You don't need them for this scam. This is largely how it works, although they do seem try to get actual outstanding debts -- which is not that hard to do in 21-century America. Once they've obtained a judgment against a wholly unaware victim without ever having shown any evidence, they then leverage other laws they've engineered that let them garnish wages in most states. The company doing the garnishing almost never has anything to do with the company to which that person actually owes money. You borrow from A and B ends up garnishing your wages with no accountability or evidence and nothing other than a court proceeding with a default judgment in favor of the plaintiff because the defendant was never aware that it had even occurred. The first they know about it is when the notice a line item on their paycheck. This is a business model that actually exists -- but only affects people you've never met, so it's OK. "What this means is that the entire business model for something like Chase’s credit card business is not much more than a gigantic welfare fraud scheme. These companies borrow hundreds of billions of dollars from the Fed at rock-bottom rates, then turn around and lend it out to the world at 5, 10, 15, 20 percent, as credit cards and mortgages, boat loans and aircraft loans, and so on. "If you pay it back, great, it’s a 500 percent or 1,000 percent or 4,000 percent profit for the bank. If you don’t pay it back, the company can put your name in the hopper to be sued. A $5,000 debt on a credit card for the now-defunct Circuit City, which was actually a Chase card, became a $13,000 or $14,000 debt by the time the bank finished applying fees and penalties." Banks profiting from fraud perpetrated on welfare recipients is a direct relationship across the "divide" described in the book's title. It really pulls everything together. "When the state brings a fraud case against a welfare mom, it brings it with disgust, with rage, because in addition to committing the legal crime, she’s committed the political crime of being needy and an eyesore. Banks commit the legal crime of fraud wholesale; [...] But they’re not charged, because there’s no political crime. The system is not disgusted by the organized, mechanized search for profit. It’s more like it’s impressed by it." And thing to remember is that, while the bank has "entire departments committed to [fraud]", the individual often doesn't commit a crime at all, as Taibbi repeatedly pointed out throughout the book. The welfare cheating is sometimes or even often just clerical errors. Credit card debt is active fraud. Instead of prosecuting giant crimes by unacceptable perpetrators, they're inventing and then prosecuting smaller ones, on victims who've been made politically acceptable by brainwashing campaigns sponsored by the perpetrators of the fraud. They teach us to hate the poor (and ourselves) and revere the rich (them), then make themselves richer than the obscenely rich that they already are, while we cheer them on as they rob our comrades and neighbors. That this is how it's ended up bespeaks a corruption, a failure at the institutional level on a grand scale. If the government chooses to avoid prosecutions in favor of a non-controlling financial settlement, then that amounts to the government getting a cut of the action. This is the established model now. Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me. The banks will do it again and the government will get its fee. This drives a conveyor belt of lucre from a permanent impoverished underclass to increasingly unassailable royalty. That's a business relationship or I can't tell the difference. I've included "notes, citations and errata" in a separate post. Tropic of Cancer (1934) by Henry Miller This book feels like an autobiographical novel about Miller's long stay in Paris as a relatively poor, struggling writer. It chains together notes and snippets and observations about life and people he knew to form a vague sort of history of a man with very few cares, a man accustomed to poverty, a man with a rich inner life, a man who's left behind a wife and family. Occasional and intense longing for this family is generously tempered with indifference and laxity. He lives in Paris, thinking nearly exclusively of where he's going to get his next meal, but also where his next prostitute will come from. The second being almost more important because he often goes without a meal longer than without a fuck. This nearly incessant rutting is, honestly, incongruous with the supposedly erudite author. How he's able to get anything done while simultaneously post-coitally stunned and starving is impressive. He is, at times, quite eloquent in expressing his deep regard for women, even if it is from a nearly purely sexual angle. "The earth is not an arid plateau of health and comfort, but a great sprawling female with velvet torso that swells and heaves with ocean billows; she squirms beneath a diadem of sweat and anguish. Naked and sexed she rolls among the clouds in the violet light of the stars. All of her, from her generous breasts to her gleaming thighs, blazes with furious ardor." He can almost always transform a minor windfall or payment into a roof over his head for a month or two. This is more than sufficient security for him and doesn't worry him enough to make him change the aforementioned priorities. At one point, he comes up with a plan to take advantage of the good graces and manners of some of his more well-to-do friends -- his erudition having gotten him into social circles that his very meager means never could. "And then it occurred to me, like a flash, that no one would refuse a man a meal if only he had the courage to demand it. I went immediately to a café and wrote a dozen letters. "“Would you let me have dinner with you once a week? Tell me what day is most convenient for you.” "It worked like a charm. I was not only fed… I was feasted. Every night I went home drunk. [...]" The book ends largely as it began, with Miller in Paris, debauched and writing and drinking and fucking and peregrinating by day from one café and bar to another and by night from one rented room or mooched living situation to another. The remainder of this review will be largely annotated citations, which hopefully give a better impression of the book's philosophical passages. At times, he writes like "Burroughs in Naked Lunch" , of what are obviously hallucinatory trips through Paris. "I lean out the window and the Eiffel Tower is fizzing champagne; it is built entirely of numbers and shrouded in black lace. The sewers are gurgling furiously. There are nothing but roofs everywhere, laid out with execrable geometric cunning." At other times, his metaphors are more down-to-Earth, but no less enchanting, as when describes a woman lying on her deathbed. "Two waxen hands lying listlessly on the bedspread and along the pale veins the fluted murmur of a shell repeating the legend of its birth." There are some long passages of this kind of mental peregrination, with some philosophical musing that doesn't move what little there is of a plot forward in any way. It's nicely written, though, and segues into the segments where he directly and autobiographically addresses what it's like to be a writer, especially one who's achieved a modicum of success and who has acquired a fan base that expects more. "Great God! what have I turned into? What right have you people to clutter up my life, steal my time, probe my soul, suckle my thoughts, have me for your companion, confidant, and information bureau? What do you take me for? Am I an entertainer on salary, required every evening to play an intellectual farce under your stupid noses? Am I a slave, bought and paid for, to crawl on my belly in front of you idlers and lay at your feet all that I do and all that I know? Am I a wench in a brothel who is called upon to lift her skirts or take off her chemise at the bidding of the first man in a tailored suit who comes along?" The process of writing -- and of finding something to write, of expressing the tumult of disorganized brilliance jostling in the author's head -- is given much thought as well. The following passage viscerally describes a writer's block engendered by the inability to get started because of a fear of mimicry, made only worse by the author reading more and more voraciously in an effort to prove that their own ideas are original. This education informs the author's own ideas, making them hesitant to write down what are now suspected be unoriginal thoughts. "[...] And so, instead of tackling his book, he reads one author after another in order to make absolutely certain that he is not going to tread on their private property. And the more he reads the more disdainful he becomes. None of them are satisfying; none of them arrive at that degree of perfection which he has imposed on himself. And forgetting completely that he has not written as much as a chapter he talks about them condescendingly, quite as though there existed a shelf of books bearing his name, books which everyone is familiar with and the titles of which it is therefore superfluous to mention." He is convinced, though, that being an author -- or any sort of creative person -- is superior, somehow, to the common runner of the rat race, if only because these creations impart fleeting moments of glory and joy not only to those best able to appreciate them -- the creatives -- but also to those benighted rat-race runners. A little light is better than nothing. "[...] now and then we encounter pages that explode, pages that wound and sear, that wring groans and tears and curses, know that they come from a man with his back up, a man whose only defenses left are his words and his words are always stronger than the lying, crushing weight of the world, stronger than all the racks and wheels which the cowardly invent to crush out the miracle of personality." He is an expatriate who feels infinitely more at home in his adopted city than in the city of his birth. He contrasts "[a]nd God knows, when spring comes to Paris the humblest mortal alive must feel that he dwells in paradise." with "New York! [...] A whole city erected over a hollow pit of nothingness. Meaningless. Absolutely meaningless." At the same time, he knows that the Parisians, who allow him to live among them, view him -- and his fellow ex-pats, whom he naturally views as less-well-integrated -- as madmen, unable to understand reality in anything approaching a mature fashion. "No wonder they think we’re all crazy. We are crazy to them. We’re just a pack of children. Senile idiots. What we call life is a five-and-ten-cent store romance. That enthusiasm underneath—what is it? That cheap optimism which turns the stomach of any ordinary European? It’s illusion. No, illusion’s too good a word for it. Illusion means something. No, it’s not that—it’s delusion. It’s sheer delusion, that’s what." It's not just Miller who lives this life; among the many descriptions of friends and acquaintances, there is this succinct one of Kepi, whose description hits a bit too close to home for the author, I suspect. "Kepi is interesting, in a way, because he has absolutely no ambition except to get a fuck every night. Every penny he makes, and they are damned few, he squanders in the dance halls. He has a wife and eight children in Bombay, but that does not prevent him from proposing marriage to any little femme de chambre who is stupid and credulous enough to be taken in by him." At one point, he gets a steady job as a copy-editor. He writes of the passing of a co-worker, a man named Peckover, who'd never been worth "a good goddamn" as either a friend or a journalist but who, after dying a ludicrous death in an elevator shaft he'd somehow not noticed was wide open, is covered in encomiums by most of his other, former, and more hypocritical coworkers. Here, Miller writes of the fool who'd written the man's obituary. "Joe and I, who knew Peckover well and who knew also that he wasn’t worth a good goddamn, even a few tears, we felt annoyed with this drunken sentimentality. We wanted to tell him so too, but with a guy like that you can’t afford to be honest; you have to buy a wreath and go to the funeral and pretend that you’re miserable. And you have to congratulate him too for the delicate obituary he’s written. He’ll be carrying his delicate little obituary around with him for months, praising the shit out of himself for the way he handled the situation." Miller and his friend and co-worker Joe, on the other hand, are in no way tethered by social mores. "There are people in this world who cut such a grotesque figure that even death renders them ridiculous. And the more horrible the death the more ridiculous they seem. It’s no use trying to invest the end with a little dignity—you have to be a liar and a hypocrite to discover anything tragic in their going. And since we didn’t have to put on a false front we could laugh about the incident to our heart’s content. We laughed all night about it, and in between times we vented our scorn and disgust for the guys upstairs, the fatheads who were trying to persuade themselves, no doubt, that Peckover was a fine fellow and that his death was a catastrophe." It is, at heart, an existentialist novel, with many formulations and much pondering about what life really means -- and coming to the conclusion that meaning is fleeting and not worth pursuing. For example, there is this lovely passage describing the actual coupling after he's hunted and "captured" a prostitute with FF15. He acknowledges that only the pursuit offered him anything -- and that the prostitute similarly seemed less-than-interested in the whole affair. It's all meaningless, but pursued by both parties nonetheless. "We haven’t any passion either of us. And as for her, one might as well expect her to produce a diamond necklace as to show a spark of passion. But there’s the fifteen francs and something has to be done about it. It’s like a state of war: the moment the condition is precipitated nobody thinks about anything but peace, about getting it over with. And yet nobody has the courage to lay down his arms, to say, “I’m fed up with it… I’m through.”" This meaninglessness goes largely unacknowledged, with man seeking to imbue meaning (much as his co-workers used the occasion of Peckover's death) to a life otherwise lived from day to day, with no overarching purpose. If Peckover's life was worthless, then what of one's own? Best to sing Peckover's praises in order to convince oneself of one's own worth. Miller seems to argue that this is the root of man's evil -- an inability to just be at peace with inconsequence. "For some reason or other man looks for the miracle, and to accomplish it he will wade through blood. He will debauch himself with ideas, he will reduce himself to a shadow if for only one second of his life he can close his eyes to the hideousness of reality. Everything is endured—disgrace, humiliation, poverty, war, crime, ennui—in the belief that overnight something will occur, a miracle, which will render life tolerable." "It’s like a man in the trenches again: he doesn’t know any more why he should go on living, because if he escapes now he’ll only be caught later, but he goes on just the same, and even though he has the soul of a cockroach and has admitted as much to himself, give him a gun or a knife or even just his bare nails, and he’ll go on slaughtering and slaughtering, he’d slaughter a million men rather than stop and ask himself why." In the next passage, Miller offers an empathetic view of an otherwise societally excoriated profession i.e. "Pimpin' ain't easy". "You don’t think that a pimp is inhuman, I hope? A pimp has his private grief and misery too, don’t you forget. Perhaps he would like nothing better than to stand on the corner every night with a pair of white dogs and watch them piddle. Perhaps he would like it if, when he opened the door, he would see her there reading the Paris-Soir, her eyes already a little heavy with sleep. Perhaps it isn’t so wonderful, when he bends over his Lucienne, to taste another man’s breath. Better maybe to have only three francs in your pocket and a pair of white dogs that piddle on the corner than to taste those bruised lips." There are several passages that lament what industrial society has done to man, even back in 1934, when it had gotten a good start but hadn't even begun to dream of the ravages it would achieve by the end of the century. In particular, it is cities that are the "machine [squeezing the] last drop of juice" from people. "I am speaking naturally of that world which is peculiar to the big cities, the world of men and women whose last drop of juice has been squeezed out by the machine—the martyrs of modern progress." In a roundabout way, he explains his indolent lifestyle as a desire to avoid the zero-sum rat race -- the "harness". Industry eradicates everything in its path with its endless cry to move "Forward!" without thinking at all of why. As acknowledged elsewhere, there is no "why", but then what's the point of this enslavement of man to this industrial goal? "All over the States I wandered, and into Canada and Mexico. The same story everywhere. If you want bread you’ve got to get in harness, get in lock step. Over all the earth a gray desert, a carpet of steel and cement. Production! More nuts and bolts, more barbed wire, more dog biscuits, more lawn mowers, more ball bearings, more high explosives, more tanks, more poison gas, more soap, more toothpaste, more newspapers, more education, more churches, more libraries, more museums. Forward!" Without acknowledging that his debauched life in Paris depends on a several strata of just such workers providing the fruits of a society that can sustain his mooching, Miller has mostly disdain for those who have chosen -- or been forced -- to take up the harness instead of throwing it off, like he has. Recall that he has abandoned a family in another country. "There was nothing to distinguish them from the clods whom they would later wipe their boots on. They were zeros in every sense of the word, ciphers who form the nucleus of a respectable and lamentable citizenry." This book is most definitely the kind that depends very much on what you bring to it. Therefore, it will feel different depending on when in your life you read it. Everything is subjective and very little is as meaningful as it appears. "[...] it is here that one reads again the books of his youth and the enigmas take on new meanings, one for every white hair." I've included "notes, citations and errata" in a separate post. ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=4082 2021-01-03T17:10:45+01:00 https://earthli.com/users/marco

for more information). "The cleaving of the country into two completely different states—one a small archipelago of hyperacquisitive untouchables, the other a vast ghetto of expendables with only theoretical rights—has been in the works a long time." Taibbi recounts the interesting mechanics of the fraud that led to the financial crash of 2008. To illustrate the "divide", he juxtaposes what happened to people who orchestrated the greatest theft of all time versus people who break minor laws. "Once the bubble burst, lawsuits were filed everywhere and whistle-blowers emerged by the dozen, showing, in graphic documentary detail, how nearly every major financial company in America had chosen to participate in this enormous fraud. It was the very definition of systemic corruption, but curiously, despite what looked like mountains of evidence, almost nobody with any connection to the crisis was even threatened with criminal prosecution." "And as every individual who’s ever been charged with a crime knows, anyone facing criminal arrest can expect collateral consequences. A single drug charge can ruin a person’s chances for obtaining a student loan or a government job. It can nix his or her chances of getting housing aid or a whole range of services—even innocent members of your family may lose access to government benefits. You can lose your right to vote and your access to financial aid. You can even have your children taken away." It's not that no-one cares, but that it seems to be unstoppable somehow. "The public defenders [...] can’t do much about the convictions factory. They’re like partisans trying to slow an invasion by throwing their bodies under tank treads." The political will is with continuing this situation because it benefits all of the right people and doesn't affect anyone important, by definition. The law tiptoes around businesses and for a decent reason, "Unless a company was corrupt through and through, it did seem reasonable to try to avoid destroying it and to protect the jobs of innocent employees if possible." But it got to the point where "[t]he attorney general of the United States [admits] that he asks Wall Street for advice before he prosecutes Wall Street." This was easier because the big boys could afford a lot of lawyers and put up a real fight, so "[...] incompetent and lazy officials with a defense-lawyer mindset [would] avoid difficult contested trials and simply take cash up front and declare victory for the cameras." On the other hand, "You’ll never see a local prosecutor call a press conference and pat himself on the back for letting a car thief or a mugger of old ladies off with a fine." Instead, police were vociferously encouraged to create crime on that side of the ledger with incentives that spoke directly to their own personal gain -- a nearly sure-fire method with most people, for whom principles are far down the list of priorities relative to enriching themselves. "But the steep drop in violent crime presented police with a problem. If making arrests is the only way to advance in your career, but crime is dropping, what do you do? Furthermore, what to do if the only way to make a living wage is to rack up as much overtime as possible? In the Safir era, NYPD starting salaries were on the low end for professional police forces in America, beginning at about forty thousand dollars. How do you add hours in an era when crime is dropping? "The answer turned out to be, you simply create arrests. By multiplying marijuana arrests by a factor of ten in the space of a few years, Safir’s police force drastically increased its workload." I think that the the starting pay of $40,000 as being "too low" is odd, though. I made less than that in 1994 when I started as a software developer. I might have been making that by 1998. We weren't living "rich". We had no car and rented an apartment, but we were getting by without issue. I suppose a police officer isn't satisfied with living lower middle-class like we were and figured working overtime arresting people who hadn't committed crimes was an ethically defensible way of escaping that life. In one case that Taibbi writes about, the main reason the state used to flush one man's life down the drain was that he had "obstructed traffic" on a sidewalk after he stepped out of a car at one in the morning to discover a cop who'd popped up out of nowhere -- on an otherwise empty sidewalk -- to get between him and his own apartment's entrance. To a normal person, this seems like the cop is obstructing the poor guy returning home from work. Since a cop can't be liable for something like that, it must be the other guy who committed a crime. The goal was to create a crime. "The obstructing traffic section is meant to apply to people who are willfully blocking cars or people on the sidewalk, or to be used as a tool for crowd control at things like protests, but in practice it’s code for being black on a Tuesday night." It gets more insidious, as charges are turned into convictions without sufficient proof simply by applying the punishment before trial. "[...] if you don’t make bail, you’ll almost automatically spend at least [15-90 days] in jail waiting for trial. The state knows this, so essentially, charging a person who can’t make bail with a B misdemeanor is the same as convicting that person. You file the charge, the judge sets high bail, you go back inside, and then you eventually plead to time served, because, well, why not? You’ve already done the time. "The only difference is, you’ve got a conviction now, which means the next time you get arrested, the denial of bail—or a punishingly high bail—will be even more automatic." Innocent people end up with criminal records because "[...] the speedy trial concept [...] is easily reduced to a complete joke." and the system "applies disproportionate punishment to the guilty." Remember that, with the successful division of America, people aren't even aware that this is the system. They don't know that "failure to follow a police order, no matter how stupid or unreasonable, is cause for an arrest or a summons." Combine that with the foot-dragging above, and a "prosecutor can essentially turn any misdemeanor case against almost anyone into a de facto conviction [...]" That "[...] puts an entire segment of the population constantly on the defensive, gives it a criminal record essentially in advance." Taibbi now moves on to contrast that system with what happens when Dick Fuld and Lehman Brothers steal and waste a truly tremendous amount of money. Unlike with poor people, where petty, mostly victimless crime is manufactured, in this case large-scale theft from thousands -- if not hundreds of thousands -- of victims is completely ignored, letting the criminals steal more and more from more and more victims until the criminal finally stops on their own when the system -- rather than the regulators -- decide that enough's enough. "What’s amazing about this is that the Fed saw fit as early as January 2008 to warn Chase about Lehman’s instability. But nobody ever warned the public. Nobody stepped in after the bank cooked its books in Repo 105, or misreported taxes, or made fake disclosures, or lied outright to investors. Nothing was done. The government merely sat back and watched the catastrophe unfold, allowing new victims to pour money into the walking-dead bank right up until its collapse." "The deals the government and Wall Street worked out that weekend [...] transform[ed] America into a permanent oligarchical bailout state. This was, essentially, a formal merger of Wall Street and the U.S. government." Barclays stepped in to "bail out" Lehmen Brothers for what they claimed was "cost" but ended up skimming $5B from the top, stealing it from the owners of Lehman Brothers, who were already being screwed from the original mismanagement. Now, Barclays was stealing even more money from them, all with the oversight and blessing of the government. Instead of a candy bar from a bodega, it was $5B from retirement accounts. Next, Taibbi takes us to Georgia, where we learn how the police milk the local immigrant population by inventing crimes to produce fines and settlements to bolster the local tax base. "The squad cars perch on the sides of the road like ticks on a vein, hauling in alien after undocumented alien and tossing them into the criminal justice/deportation hopper. From there, in a complex, arbitrary, and mindlessly cruel legal process that puts people literally in chains for the crime of going to work or taking their kids to school, the detainees get ground up into a rich financial and political meal, shared in nearly equal parts by state and federal authorities on the one hand and private prison companies on the other." Because of the residency status of these people, they are de-facto afforded fewer rights. This amounts to conditional rights, depending on how much money you have. "For a country founded on the idea that rights are inalienable and inherent from birth, we’ve developed a high tolerance for conditional rights and conditional citizenship. And the one condition, it turns out, is money. If you have a lot of it, the legal road you get to travel is well lit and beautifully maintained. If you don’t, it’s a dark alley and most Americans would be shocked to find out what’s at the end of it." It is about money, and it's definitely a class thing, but how can we do this to fellow human beings, just because they don't have that much money? That, alone, wouldn't be enough, which is why we mix in race-based alienation to make everything OK "This seemed to represent the ultimate white-folks win-win: local chicken-plant owners got to keep their cheap labor, while local police still got to milk the immigrant community for any money they made working at those plants." On the other side of the ledger, if you're rich and white, you can run a scam for 13 years and nothing happens until the scam collapses under its own weight (pretty much how Lehman brothers did). "Madoff actually went more than thirteen years without making a single stock purchase and yet somehow survived several SEC investigations [...]" So there's Madoff, who scams millions, if not billions, out of other rich people by not making trades. And then there are the guys who coordinate to generate artificial trades -- and interest -- to drive a stock price up so they can sell at that artificially inflated rate. "To "paint the tape" on ADM, Graber and Israel would call eight different brokers and put in buy orders simultaneously to run up the price—at a time when Graber was holding lots of the stock ready to sell into a rising market. It was a racket the Securities and Exchange Commission was hopelessly ill-equipped to stop." In case it wasn't clear how that worked: this in insider trading. The hedge funds have prior access to information that no-one else in the market has access to, simply because they pay the analysts more for it. Everyone else gets screwed in a market that ends up reflecting only the interests of the already ultra-rich. And these people are just getting richer because they're already rich and stealing from others. They're worth billions and stealing more from those who have, relatively, nothing to give. Where that should be a greater crime because it's more morally bankrupt than stealing to buy food, this is the crime that goes unpunished. "Tipping off a hedge fund that your analyst is going to give a “buy” rating to a stock weeks before that research is made public can be enormously valuable to the hedge fund, for the obvious reason that the fund now has a pretty good idea of a concrete date and time when the stock is going to tick upward." It's essentially like when Biff had that almanac of sports facts when he traveled back in time in Back to the Future II. Hedge-fund traders know the future and are no longer taking any risk. No-one else in the market has access to this information and, mysteriously, they don't seem to do as well as these hedge funds. Next, Taibbi tells the story of a how a cabal of these hedge-fund traders convinced themselves to go short on a Canadian company (they were gambling that the value of the company would go down by a certain date). When they realized they were wrong, instead of eating their losses -- as the rest of us would -- they instead employed clumsy, quasi-Mafia tactics to try to force the company to lose value. This is the alternative to predicting the future. If, for whatever reason, you still guessed incorrectly (or the information you stole turns out to not be reliable), then you can still commit other crimes try to change the future so your bet still pays off. Naturally, since you're rich, none of these things count as crimes. "[...] in a city where police in some neighborhoods define crime as standing on the sidewalk the wrong way, these idiots took their stock-trading act-like-a-thug life, screwed it up a hundred different ways, and not only couldn’t get arrested, they couldn’t even get police of any kind to notice." "Twenty-six billion dollars of fraud: no felony cases. But when the stakes are in the hundreds of dollars, we kick in 26,000 doors a year, in just one county." It seems the police just weren't looking for crime where they knew it wouldn't be (i.e. they weren't manufacturing it there). And this isn't just grossly unfair, but the larger, ignored crime has a ton of collateral damage, in the form of investors (often pension and index funds and 401K mutual funds) who lost money on completely fictitious and artificially generated market movement. There was no actual economic benefit -- the common defense the finance industry has for itself -- because "[t]he entire thing was a battle of public relations. It had nothing to do with real economics." Anyone who claims that the free market is doing its job of "price finding" is either a fool or a liar. This is a system with two, quasi-official sets of rights. "Over and over again, we hear that if you owe money in a certain way, or if you receive a certain kind of public assistance, you forfeit this or that line item in the Bill of Rights. If you’re a person of means, you get full service for all ten amendments, and even a few that aren’t listed. But if you owe, if you rent, you get a slightly thinner, more tubercular version of the Fourth Amendment, the First Amendment, the Fifth and Sixth Amendments, and so on." "As Americans, we’re all beginning to develop a second sense about who gets to feel the business end of the criminal justice system, and when, and who doesn’t, and why. That second sense we all carry around in our minds is our true government. [...] Schoolhouse Rock! teaches us that everyone is treated equally under the law [...] but at the same time we somehow know not to be surprised when that turns out not to be completely true." It's more about class than race. The line is drawn between the reprehensible, mooching poor and the deserving, job-creating wealthy. "It’s not that it’s written anywhere that if you’re black and you live in the projects, you don’t get protection against illegal searches—it just sort of works out that way. And if this makes any sense at all, it’s not about skin color. This is a cultural kind of bias. White people who live the wrong way get caught in the net, too." Hatred of the poor is more deeply embedded and unchangeable than racism. Racism has actually decreased over the years. It's obviously still a problem, but it's much better than it was -- albeit because it was so appallingly bad before -- whereas inequality has increased dramatically. Middle-class blacks are just as disdainful of poor blacks as middle-class whites are (do you remember when Chris Rock had a long bit about "Niggas vs. Black People" in Bring the Pain?) "[This system] attacks people without money, particularly nonwhite people, with a weirdly venomous kind of hatred, treating them like they’re already guilty of something, which of course they are—namely, being that which we’re all afraid of becoming." Almost as strong as hatred of the poor is reverence for the rich, something I haven't noticed in any other country. It's deep-down, bone-stupid to revere the rich, sucking up their fairy tales about how they got to be that way and you didn't. As Taibbi puts in, hand in hand, these "[...] twin impulses [...] drive modern America: burning hatred of all losers and the poor, and breathless, abject worship of the rich, even the talentless and undeserving rich." You don't need to be smart or good or anything commendable to get into the privileged club. You just have to somehow have a lot of money: inherit it, steal it, it doesn't matter. Once you have it, you're protected. Go big or go home...or to jail. If you commit crimes while you're big, though...you just add to your fortune, but don't have to worry about going to jail. You have to worry about the size of your fan club growing too big. "These bureaucracies accomplish just two things: they make small piles of money smaller and big piles of money bigger." Taibbi tells the story of Marishka, a young woman -- one who's made mistakes, yes -- trying to make ends meet. Does she get even a real first chance, to say nothing of a second one? No. She's not rich. Instead, "[...] she was about to become more heavily scrutinized by the state than any twelve Wall Street bankers put together." Helping her would cost nearly nothing and could help her a lot. Helping hedge-fund brokers steal billions costs a tremendous amount and helps only a small group of thieves who already had more money than they knew what to do with in the first place. But we are trained to believe that Marishka is guilty until proven innocent and that the hedge-fund trader doesn't even exist. Taibbi has a way of presenting the facts in a way that shows the glaring irony of this two-class system. "For instance, in 2011, the state of Ohio—the same state that lost tens of millions in the early 2000s when its pension fund bought severely overpriced mortgage-backed securities from a Lehman Brothers banker named John Kasich, who would later become governor—tried to recoup some of its losses by sending out 22,000 notices to Ohioans seeking “overpayments” in either welfare or food stamps." In other words, Ohio elected the guy whose company bilked its state-pension fund out of "tens of millions" to be its governor while it scrambled to bolster its budget by scrabbling back amounts in the tens to hundreds of dollars for what it called "overpayments" (a claim that, in many cases, was highly dubious) from welfare recipients. Because the rich are unassailable, we attack the poor. Not only are the rich unassailable, they are rewarded with governerships. "[...] the only offenders the local burghers will spend money to embarrass publicly are young, single, nonwhite mothers guilty of the [alleged] crime of improperly receiving benefits." This was not just a Reagan or Bush thing. This was also a Clinton and Obama thing. This is an American Ruling Class thing. "Bill Clinton’s political formula for seizing the presidency was simple. He made money tight in the ghettos and let it flow free on Wall Street. He showered the projects with cops and bean counters and pulled the cops off the beat in the financial services sector. And in one place he created vast new mountain ranges of paperwork, while in another, paperwork simply vanished." It is the way that they keep themselves as the ruling class. For 99% of the participants, there is no discernible difference from a monarchy. There is no underlying principle except for the rich to get much richer and the poor to feel guilty about not being richer, all the while being milked every damned day. A self-selected and smug minority can't fail, while everyone else can do nothing but fail. It's no wonder people are angry, but their anger is wildly misdirected. This is the American Myth. It is a palace of lies built by many, but benefitting only a few. Many that support it would probably do at least as well or even better under a fairer, more just, more moral, and more principled system, but they're terrified of changing horses and falling into the giant crack of poverty they've created. They won't rock the boat for a principle, for fear that they'll lose the unearned gains they've accrued -- and continue to accrue -- from the unprincipled system that they do support. So they hear, believe, and repeat to themselves the stories that the losers in this system deserve what they get -- just as the winners do. To admit anything else would lead to a psychic collapse. "Are We the Baddies?" One of the big problems is that hating a poor person for not reporting they got an extra $25 of benefits per week is somehow easy. At any rate, it's easy to understand what they're being accused of -- and feeling righteous about it. Hating a bank for setting up laws that put its president in charge of bailouts to his own bank at a federal organization, effective loaning himself billions in government money at 0% interest to buy out competitors at bargain-basement prices, prices that were artificially depressed by a collapsed bubble that he and his bank created is ... somehow more difficult to understand. Taibbi provides the details below: "[...] WaMu and its $307 billion in assets were delivered by the state into the hands of Chase and its CEO, Jamie Dimon, for the preposterously low price of $1.9 billion, a bargain deal that was struck just a few weeks before Chase was given $25 billion in cash by the government as part of the TARP bailouts. This was Chase’s second sweetheart deal in less than a year. "Six months before, in March 2008, Chase had “rescued” the imploding investment banking giant Bear Stearns, buying the venerable firm with the aid of $29 billion in guarantees extended by the New York branch of the Federal Reserve—whose chairman of the board of directors at the time was, get this, JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon. "That means that six months after Jamie Dimon was the lucky recipient of his own Federal Reserve bailout in order to acquire Bear Stearns, his bank was given another $25 billion in cash by the state to go on another shopping spree, cash he used, among other things, to buy Washington Mutual." You see? It's so complicated that the average mortal will doubt their ability to judge whether something shady happened or not. But it's brainwashing. They've brainwashed you into believing that you are completely able to judge the indigent -- without needing any background information, which is almost always morally, if not legally, exonerating -- but are utterly incapable of judging financial malfeasance and fraud several orders of magnitude larger and more damaging, even when it stinks to high heaven. In the first case, we know they're guilty because we can judge downwards, but in the second, we defer to the criminals, who we assume are just much smarter than us. We are jealous of their success and attribute it to their being superior -- else we'd have to think we were somehow inferior or had been suckered in some way. If they don't do too much damage to us personally, we let it slide, rather than examine that whole house of psychological cards. "The crucial thing to understand is that if businesses like consumer credit cards are going to give cards away in the mail to everyone with a pulse, then the process almost by definition has to involve fraud." Why doesn't our bullshit detector go off for this stuff? We take to the streets to protest COVID, we believe the Earth is flat, that the towers were taken down by the Bush administration, that Russia stole the election -- we fight like mad for stupid, unsubstantiated shit that doesn't even affect us (not really), but then don't trust ourselves to say anything when someone is blowing smoke up our collective asses in to steal everything we have? This leads to people like Obama telling us with a straight face that nothing actually illegal happened, that "Banks are in the business of making money [...a]nd they find loopholes.", which is bullshit. They break laws that are unenforced. They undo laws that they don't like. They illegally bribe legislators to add loopholes for themselves before driving through them. They are the kids on the playground who change the rules mid-game, then declare victory and we believe them. Not only that: we worship them. The final financial sector volume deals with a woman whose job was to sniff out credit-card fraud. She found it in her own bank, blew the whistle, and was fired for it. The transactions all proceeded unfettered. All of it was vastly illegal -- fraud of the highest order -- with several layers of beneficiaries all sucking illegal gains out of a helpless target, already mired in poverty and debt. This is a "market" built on obvious subterfuges intended to generate predictable outcomes and revenue. "[...] in a huge percentage of credit card cases, the cardholder never even sees the summons and consequently never appears in court to defend himself. "[...] the bulk of the credit card collection business is conducted without any supporting documentation showing up or being seen by human eyes at any part of the process. The meat of the business is collecting unopposed default judgments from defendants who either never receive a summons or receive one and never appear in court. "[...] At no time in the process do most collectors ever actually need to produce evidence of a legitimate debt or a legitimate judgment." What's stopping them from making them up wholesale? You wouldn't be able to tell the difference. If no-one checks, then you don't serve and just make up a number for a nonexistent card and garnish their wages after judgment. Why even buy accounts from Chase? You don't need them for this scam. This is largely how it works, although they do seem try to get actual outstanding debts -- which is not that hard to do in 21-century America. Once they've obtained a judgment against a wholly unaware victim without ever having shown any evidence, they then leverage other laws they've engineered that let them garnish wages in most states. The company doing the garnishing almost never has anything to do with the company to which that person actually owes money. You borrow from A and B ends up garnishing your wages with no accountability or evidence and nothing other than a court proceeding with a default judgment in favor of the plaintiff because the defendant was never aware that it had even occurred. The first they know about it is when the notice a line item on their paycheck. This is a business model that actually exists -- but only affects people you've never met, so it's OK. "What this means is that the entire business model for something like Chase’s credit card business is not much more than a gigantic welfare fraud scheme. These companies borrow hundreds of billions of dollars from the Fed at rock-bottom rates, then turn around and lend it out to the world at 5, 10, 15, 20 percent, as credit cards and mortgages, boat loans and aircraft loans, and so on. "If you pay it back, great, it’s a 500 percent or 1,000 percent or 4,000 percent profit for the bank. If you don’t pay it back, the company can put your name in the hopper to be sued. A $5,000 debt on a credit card for the now-defunct Circuit City, which was actually a Chase card, became a $13,000 or $14,000 debt by the time the bank finished applying fees and penalties." Banks profiting from fraud perpetrated on welfare recipients is a direct relationship across the "divide" described in the book's title. It really pulls everything together. "When the state brings a fraud case against a welfare mom, it brings it with disgust, with rage, because in addition to committing the legal crime, she’s committed the political crime of being needy and an eyesore. Banks commit the legal crime of fraud wholesale; [...] But they’re not charged, because there’s no political crime. The system is not disgusted by the organized, mechanized search for profit. It’s more like it’s impressed by it." And thing to remember is that, while the bank has "entire departments committed to [fraud]", the individual often doesn't commit a crime at all, as Taibbi repeatedly pointed out throughout the book. The welfare cheating is sometimes or even often just clerical errors. Credit card debt is active fraud. Instead of prosecuting giant crimes by unacceptable perpetrators, they're inventing and then prosecuting smaller ones, on victims who've been made politically acceptable by brainwashing campaigns sponsored by the perpetrators of the fraud. They teach us to hate the poor (and ourselves) and revere the rich (them), then make themselves richer than the obscenely rich that they already are, while we cheer them on as they rob our comrades and neighbors. That this is how it's ended up bespeaks a corruption, a failure at the institutional level on a grand scale. If the government chooses to avoid prosecutions in favor of a non-controlling financial settlement, then that amounts to the government getting a cut of the action. This is the established model now. Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me. The banks will do it again and the government will get its fee. This drives a conveyor belt of lucre from a permanent impoverished underclass to increasingly unassailable royalty. That's a business relationship or I can't tell the difference. [Citations] "Of course, on the other end of the spectrum are the titans of business, the top executives at companies like Goldman and Chase and GlaxoSmithKline, men and women who essentially as a matter of policy now will never see the inside of a courtroom, almost no matter what crimes they may have committed in the course of their business. This is obviously an outrage, and the few Americans who paid close attention to news stories like the deferred prosecution of HSBC for laundering drug money, or the nonprosecution of the Swiss bank UBS for fixing interest rates, were beside themselves with anger over the unfairness of it all." "Unquestionably, however, something else is at work, something that cuts deeper into the American psyche. We have a profound hatred of the weak and the poor, and a corresponding groveling terror before the rich and successful, and we’re building a bureaucracy to match those feelings." "[...] the common justification for the failure to prosecute executives in corrupt corporations for any crimes that they might commit is that their offenses aren’t really crimes per se but mere ethical violations, morally unfortunate acts not punishable by law. President Obama himself would hint at this in an infamous 60 Minutes interview." "It’s come around to that point of view at the end of a long evolutionary process, in which the rule of law has slowly been replaced by giant idiosyncratic bureaucracies that are designed to criminalize failure, poverty, and weakness on the one hand, and to immunize strength, wealth, and success on the other." "If you grew up well off, you probably don’t know how easy it is for poor people to end up in jail, often for the same dumb things you yourself did as a kid." "This is a story that doesn’t need to be argued. You just need to see it, and it speaks for itself. Only we’ve arranged things so that the problem is basically invisible to most people, unless you go looking for it." "We’re creating a dystopia, where the mania of the state isn’t secrecy or censorship but unfairness. Obsessed with success and wealth and despising failure and poverty, our society is systematically dividing the population into winners and losers, using institutions like the courts to speed the process." "The cleaving of the country into two completely different states—one a small archipelago of hyperacquisitive untouchables, the other a vast ghetto of expendables with only theoretical rights—has been in the works a long time." "There were also horrific regulatory surrenders like the Securities and Exchange Commission’s 2004 decision to lower capital reserve standards for the top five investment banks, a move that eventually helped three of those banks (Merrill Lynch, Bear Stearns, and Lehman Brothers) to borrow themselves out of existence." Love that expression. "Here was a major company, an employer of thousands, using its innocent employees as a kind of human shield in a desperate last-ditch attempt to stave off a criminal prosecution. It was a high-stakes stare-down in which Andersen’s lawyers all but dared the government to pull a My Lai and machine-gun its innocent employees into a ditch." "Such flip-flops are so common among this type of lawyer that most finance-sector observers scarcely even raise an eyebrow at them. “You’ll have a guy who as a prosecutor was tossing everyone in jail,” laughs one Wall Street reporter, “and six months later he’s a partner at some firm, and it’s almost like he thinks insider trading should be legal.”" The definition of amorality is not having any principles. "A key feature of the Spitzer settlement was the way the evidence was laid out openly so that the public could see the companies’ internal communications. At Lehman Brothers, for example, analysts admitted to giving cushy ratings to companies in exchange for more investment banking business, not caring if ordinary investors who were not in on the game got screwed." "These agreements sometimes have a less adversarial feel than the cops-and-robbers approaches of Spitzer, Robert Morgenthau, and the S&L prosecutors. They often read like agreements hashed out in friendly meetings by like-minded legal colleagues from similar cultural backgrounds, which is often exactly what they are." "Breuer announced a plan to revamp the Justice Department’s Criminal Division’s Fraud Section, whose chief failing seems to have been that it had been created during the Bush administration. In fact, the Fraud Section had been productive during the Bush years, expanding its footprint in several areas that had been overlooked, from securities fraud to violations of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act to corporate accounting cases from the Enron era. Health care fraud prosecutions had gone from basically nil—fraudsters stole from Medicare wantonly in the 1990s—to thriving, reportedly saving more than $7 billion." "By Barack Obama’s second term, it was clear to most rational observers of the financial sector that the crash of four years before hadn’t been some kind of accidental market screw-up—not a “thousand-year flood,” as some pundits first called it. Instead, it had been a widespread crisis of institutional policy. And a core part of this policy, it turned out, was crime." "They used a technique called securitization that allowed banks and mortgage lenders to take vast pools of home loans belonging to underemployed janitors and immigrants and magically convert them into investments that were ostensibly as safe as Microsoft corporate bonds or the sovereign debt of Luxembourg, but more lucrative than either." Naked fraud, let's not forget. "Once the bubble burst, lawsuits were filed everywhere and whistle-blowers emerged by the dozen, showing, in graphic documentary detail, how nearly every major financial company in America had chosen to participate in this enormous fraud. It was the very definition of systemic corruption, but curiously, despite what looked like mountains of evidence, almost nobody with any connection to the crisis was even threatened with criminal prosecution." "Once the sixth-largest bank in America, WaMu was selling $29 billion worth of subprime loans every year during the height of the crisis. After its collapse, investigators from the Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations uncovered evidence that the bank had conducted its own internal investigations into the mortgage markets as early as the mid-2000s, and had found fraud in as many as 83 percent of the loans produced by some of its own regional offices. Yet the bank did not alert regulators, did nothing to stop the fraud, and continued to sell billions in subprime for years." "Under “Hustle,” Bank of America intentionally removed underwriters and compliance officers from the loan origination process, explicitly aiming to make sure that loans “moved forward, never backward.”" "And as every individual who’s ever been charged with a crime knows, anyone facing criminal arrest can expect collateral consequences. A single drug charge can ruin a person’s chances for obtaining a student loan or a government job. It can nix his or her chances of getting housing aid or a whole range of services—even innocent members of your family may lose access to government benefits. You can lose your right to vote and your access to financial aid. You can even have your children taken away. "But no police anywhere were officially asked to weigh the collateral consequences of arrests for prostitution, stealing cars, assault, selling weed, jumping turnstiles, even the simple offense of being homeless. There’s no memo in the Justice Department that wonders aloud what happens to the families of those sorts of arrestees. Instead, the new trend in policing is and has been to aggressively no longer care about any of it." "They stopped him, asked him for ID, searched him, no probable cause other than that he looked dirty and high. Classic use of New York’s stop-and-frisk program, with Tory being white the only thing weird about it." "In 2011, the year before Tory got arrested, another year when exactly nobody on Wall Street was arrested for crimes connected to the financial crisis, New York City police stopped and searched a record 684,724 people. Out of those, 88 percent were black or Hispanic." "Or sometimes, like in Tory’s case, you get your pockets emptied and suddenly you’re standing there on the corner of Eighth Avenue and Twenty-First Street with half a joint sitting in your open hand. Now that’s not “private use” anymore. Now you’re “knowingly or unlawfully possessing marijuana and such is burning or open in public view.” Now you’ve got a chargeable offense and your arresting officer gets to make his summons pad one sheet thinner." "The point is, Tory Marone went from privately having a joint in his pocket to publicly waving it around on Twenty-First Street with the help of one of New York’s finest, and he went off to jail once again." "“This is a corporate flack who was such a zero, you had twenty-five-year-olds in Congress who wouldn’t return his phone calls,” recalls one. “And suddenly we all look up, and he’s head of the Criminal Division of the Justice Department. We’re all like, ‘How did that happen?’" "“I don’t think the banks got off easy,” he said, adding, “We’ve held them very much accountable. I’m not sure you can find a more robust resolution.” But Breuer was standing less than a mile from a homeless drifter who at that very minute was getting a “more robust solution” for having half a joint in his pocket." "Even high-ranking former prosecutors were appalled. “The message this is sending is if you want to engage in money laundering, make sure you’re doing it within the context of your employment at a bank,” former assistant attorney general Jimmy Gurulé said. “And don’t go small. Do it on a very large scale, and you won’t get prosecuted.”" "The anger and resentment of federal investigators toward greedy corporate criminals who inexplicably stole money when they were already rich—the anger that bled through in scenes like the Adelphia perp walk in the early Bush years—that was a thing of the past." "The attorney general of the United States had just admitted, in front of a room full of reporters, that he asks Wall Street for advice before he prosecutes Wall Street." "In a way, the original Holder memo had some sense to it. Unless a company was corrupt through and through, it did seem reasonable to try to avoid destroying it and to protect the jobs of innocent employees if possible. This was certainly an appropriate area to think about using prosecutorial discretion." "Even Barron’s was appalled. “The nation’s chief law-enforcement official admitted the decision to prosecute depends not on the law, but the impact on the financial markets,” wrote columnist Randall Forsyth." "But Holder’s testimony had at least ended the mystery. It was obvious now that the once-modest selective-leniency idea that he had cooked up in 1999 had grown exponentially and was now loosed from its cage, running wild in American society like a strung-out lab animal, wrecking things and mutating by the minute. It had gone from a simple tool to save a few jobs to a magical thing that was enabling the transformation of the world’s biggest banks into bona fide organized crime operations, companies that had now gone far beyond shredding a few documents and were engaged in everything from rigging energy prices to manipulating interest rates to drug trafficking." "The attorney general of the United States was saying that the economy had grown so complicated that his own office was now and henceforth helpless to decide on its own when it was okay to prosecute, that before it moved against any high-powered target, it needed to ask the “experts” on Wall Street if the economy would survive such an action." "Minus any effort to make the companies safer for prosecution, Collateral Consequences appeared far more likely to be what some line prosecutors believed it to be—an excuse that allowed incompetent and lazy officials with a defense-lawyer mindset to avoid difficult contested trials and simply take cash up front and declare victory for the cameras. None of the settlements proposed anything like breaking up the companies, or even hinted at a thwarted desire to bring white-collar offenders to trial." "In a case like that, where the fine is insignificant compared to the company’s revenue, the settlement is almost an antideterrent. It just helps set the price for getting caught, and it makes the cost-benefit analysis for criminal behavior simpler." "The street criminal is hated, despised. It’s understood that sending him anywhere but to jail is grounds for public outrage. You’ll never see a local prosecutor call a press conference and pat himself on the back for letting a car thief or a mugger of old ladies off with a fine." "Nowhere did it indicate any regret or apology to the public that no individual would have to face any penalty for what prosecutors themselves were describing as an “astonishing” record of dysfunction and “stunning” failures of oversight. Indeed, everybody seemed pleased as punch with the result." "It’s a particular feature of modern American government officials, particularly Democratic Party types, that they often expect the press and the public to give them credit for their unspoken excuses. They’ll vote yea on the Iraq war and the Patriot Act and nay for a public option or an end to torture or a bill to break up the banks. Then they’ll cozy up to you privately and whisper that of course they’re with you in spirit on those issues, but politically it just wasn’t possible to vote that way." "And then at trial, you might find out that some reputable firm like Ernst & Young or even, perhaps, an actual federal regulator knew about and okayed your target’s conduct all along and did so on paper. This is something you don’t often have to worry about with a Lincoln Park gangster—a permission slip to deal coke from the local precinct captain." "What’s happened now, in this new era of settlements and nonprosecutions, is that the state has formally surrendered to its own excuses. It has decided just to punt from the start and take the money, which doesn’t become really wrong until it turns around the next day and decides to double down on the less-defended, flooring it all the way to trial against a welfare mom or some joker who sold a brick of dope in the projects." "[...] it’s the jurisprudential version of Pravda, where the facts in the paper might have all been true on any given day, but the lie was all in what was not said." That's the mainstream media too. But he knows that. Still, the example of Pravda seemed a bit out of place. "[...] the two approaches to justice may individually make a kind of sense, but side by side they’re a dystopia, where common city courts become factories for turning poor people into prisoners, while federal prosecutors on the white-collar beat turn into overpriced garbage men, who behind closed doors quietly dispose of the sins of the rich for a fee." "Curiously, for instance, the drop in violent crime is most pronounced in cities with high immigrant populations." "But the steep drop in violent crime presented police with a problem. If making arrests is the only way to advance in your career, but crime is dropping, what do you do? Furthermore, what to do if the only way to make a living wage is to rack up as much overtime as possible? In the Safir era, NYPD starting salaries were on the low end for professional police forces in America, beginning at about forty thousand dollars. How do you add hours in an era when crime is dropping? "The answer turned out to be, you simply create arrests. By multiplying marijuana arrests by a factor of ten in the space of a few years, Safir’s police force drastically increased its workload." I made less than that in 1994. Might have been making that by 1998. "Here again you get into the weird nature of this new policing system. The police in this case actually wanted to send Andrew home. Their strategy is to roust up everybody, search them for guns or drugs, run their names for warrants. If you get a hit, great. Finding guns, making arrests, and writing summonses is what turns line patrolmen into sergeants and lieutenants. But if you don’t find anything, well then, you’ve just brutalized some guy walking home, for no reason at all, and the last thing you want is a paper trail. So better just to let the guy go, hope the situation goes away." "The obstructing traffic section is meant to apply to people who are willfully blocking cars or people on the sidewalk, or to be used as a tool for crowd control at things like protests, but in practice it’s code for being black on a Tuesday night." He fingered my business card, stared at it. “What exactly are you doing here again?” “I’m writing a book,” I said. “It’s about the criminal justice system. Among other things, about cases like this.” “But what about a case like this could possibly be the subject of a book?” he asked. “Well,” I said, “we just watched, in court, a policeman admitting to falsely arresting someone. You don’t find that interesting?” He shrugged. “Also,” I said, “have you ever heard of a white person being arrested for obstructing pedestrian traffic?” “Well, white people don’t live in those neighborhoods,” he said. “But white people live somewhere,” I said. “And nobody arrests them for obstructing pedestrian traffic.” “That’s because that’s not where the crime is. The crime is out there.” He jerked a thumb in the direction of Brooklyn. “Low-class people,” he said, “do low-class things.” "The defendant’s court-appointed attorney is an attractive, idealistic young white woman with shoulder-length brown hair and a long skirt who looks like she should be an academic, a sociologist maybe. The public defenders in these higher courts are almost all workaholic do-gooders, passionate and almost unreasonably committed to their jobs. On the macro level, they can’t do much about the convictions factory. They’re like partisans trying to slow an invasion by throwing their bodies under tank treads." "The complaint says an undercover officer—a UC—offered the woman twenty dollars for a sexual act outside a park somewhere north of three in the morning, and the defendant accepted. Why we’re paying detectives to offer people twenty bucks for sexual acts in parks after three in the morning is a question nobody’s much interested in answering at that moment." "Lawyers in this courthouse have yet another saying: “If you go in, you stay in. If you get out, you stay out.” If you get arrested for a B misdemeanor in New York City—let’s say it’s prostitution—you might face a punishment of fifteen to ninety days. But if you don’t make bail, you’ll almost automatically spend at least that long in jail waiting for trial. The state knows this, so essentially, charging a person who can’t make bail with a B misdemeanor is the same as convicting that person. You file the charge, the judge sets high bail, you go back inside, and then you eventually plead to time served, because, well, why not? You’ve already done the time. "The only difference is, you’ve got a conviction now, which means the next time you get arrested, the denial of bail—or a punishingly high bail—will be even more automatic." "So if you’re a prostitute with no fixed address and a long criminal history hauled in during the wee hours of a Tuesday morning for accepting some undercover cop’s sting offer of twenty bucks for a sex act outside a park, you’re pretty much automatically looking at two weeks to three months in jail, plus a two-hundred-dollar fine (“That’s like ten blowjobs,” comments one public defender righteously) from the moment the city decides to file the charge. And even in the relatively rare instance where God smiles upon you and sends an undercover officer your way who doesn’t know how to make a legal arrest, you will still plead guilty and pay the violation for loitering." "And that’s the problem with Justice by Attrition. It’s not just that it catches up innocent people in its massive dragnet. It’s also that it applies disproportionate punishment to the guilty." "This was a man who was literally trying to go to jail instead of paying a hundred-dollar fine, and he couldn’t do it without multiple court dates and nearly a dozen hours of waiting and court time. It’s impossible to overestimate the impact, in terms of time and sheer frustration, that all these mindless arrests and summonses have on the people targeted." "Thus the speedy trial concept, what some lawyers call the crown jewel of the Anglo-American legal system, is easily reduced to a complete joke. Prosecutors won’t say so openly, but privately, they will admit that when their cases are weak, they drive their cases through this Lincoln Tunnel of a procedural loophole, dragging things out as long as possible to force a plea. It usually works." "There are two important concepts here that work hand in hand. One, there’s the idea that failure to follow a police order, no matter how stupid or unreasonable, is cause for an arrest or a summons. The second idea is that the prosecutor can essentially turn any misdemeanor case against almost anyone into a de facto conviction, simply by filing charges and following through long enough with pretrial pressure to wrest a plea out of the accused." "And once you take one plea, you might lose all kinds of things. Financial aid for schooling is out if you have a joint-in-your-pocket case. Welfare payments, beds at homeless shelters, Section 8 housing—it all might go up in smoke the instant you look at a police officer the wrong way." "[...] puts an entire segment of the population constantly on the defensive, gives it a criminal record essentially in advance, puts everyone in the dragnet up front, so that one false move leads to real time." "Nicknamed “the Gorilla,” Fuld is a tall, cavern-eyed, hollow-cheeked bully who was famous for his quick-twitch meanness, his screaming intransigence, and his apparently congenital inability to blame himself for any problem. Fuld is the kind of person who would fall drunk down a spiral staircase and then sue the architect for building blurry steps." "It had started with borrowing cash in three-month loans, then it was one-month notes, and then the cycle got even tighter and crazier. By the end of 2007, Lehman was sometimes borrowing $100 billion or even $200 billion a day or more just to stay afloat. The life-saving cash injections came from overnight “repo” loans from banks like Fidelity that Lehman took out at the end of every single business day. And the first thing in the morning, it was paying off those loans by taking out matching amounts of “intraday” loans from banks like JPMorgan Chase. Then it was rinse, repeat: continue the cycle by rolling the loans later that night." "What’s amazing about this is that the Fed saw fit as early as January 2008 to warn Chase about Lehman’s instability. But nobody ever warned the public. Nobody stepped in after the bank cooked its books in Repo 105, or misreported taxes, or made fake disclosures, or lied outright to investors. Nothing was done. The government merely sat back and watched the catastrophe unfold, allowing new victims to pour money into the walking-dead bank right up until its collapse." "The deals the government and Wall Street worked out that weekend to save the likes of AIG, Goldman, Deutsche Bank, Morgan Stanley, and Merrill Lynch were unprecedented in their reach and political consequence, transforming America into a permanent oligarchical bailout state. This was, essentially, a formal merger of Wall Street and the U.S. government." "This second deal was done in the ether, in an extralegal dimension where so much of Wall Street business is increasingly transacted. It was the legal equivalent of “dark liquidity” or “dark pools,” places where huge blocks of stock trades are executed between major institutional buyers and sellers without passing information on to the hayseed public, which knows only how to buy and sell stocks on regulated stock exchanges. A dark pool trade is conducted between two huge players who don’t want to deign to let the NYSE or any other stock exchange know their business." "Wall Street criminals bank on the terminal intellectual insecurity of their regulators. They dare prosecutors to call what they’ve done crimes, knowing they’ll be hesitant to disagree with the hotshot defense lawyers from New York and Washington who make forty or fifty times what they do." "Transactions of this type, used to move billion-dollar hunks of money around, are couched in language that is essentially foreign to the layperson, as foreign as Swahili or Esperanto are to most Americans. It is a difficult, frustrating, atonal, counterintuitive, and thoroughly unattractive language. This place is a foreign nation all to itself, as unique and proud of its peculiar culture as, say, France. Because of the language problem, the only people competent to prosecute the crimes committed within its borders are other French people. Only the problem is, to stretch this strained metaphor just a little further, if you spend enough time in France, you start thinking like a French person. If you follow enough of these Wall Street cases, you start to see this phenomenon all over the place. You go into court the first day, and everyone in the room, right down to the judge and even the plaintiffs’ attorneys, looks like Marcel Marceau. And they talk in blasé tones about acts of perversion that would shock a normal person to the point of screams." "Essentially, paragraph 13 unterminated the terminated repo, then reterminated it on Barclays’s own terms. Ingeniously lunatic mind-loops like this are why one pays certain lawyers a thousand dollars an hour." "The quiet filing of that letter, with its inscrutable paragraph 13 buried in thousands of words of even more inscrutable legalese, was how Judge Peck was “informed” of the Barclays decision to keep the $5 billion from the repo." "Peck’s point was that since Barclays was the only known buyer at the time, if in September 2008 it needed to make $13 billion on the deal to pull the trigger and buy the Lehman assets, it would always need $13 billion to do the deal—therefore its method of securing that $13 billion should not be reinvestigated. But this is wrong on its face. What might or might not have happened if all that information had come out is completely unknowable, even to someone as close to God as a federal judge. Nobody else was willing to buy Lehman at the “official” sale price, but are we really to believe that no other company would have been willing to do the deal with a $12 billion discount? That no other firm would have been willing to take on a first-day $5 billion gain?" Excellent point. So good. "When asked why he didn’t contact the Department of Justice to help it begin a criminal investigation, Geithner essentially said that the DOJ had access to the information from media reports and didn’t need his help. The primary banking regulator in America didn’t contact the Justice Department because he said it could read about the case in the newspapers!" "Today every local official with a badge—every cop, sheriff, ranger, or even game warden—has the power to instantly separate children from mothers, husbands from wives. All America, from the smallest town on up, has become a dragnet." "[...] a ferocious federal immigration rule called 287(g) that essentially deputizes any and all state and local law enforcement officials to arrest undocumented aliens on behalf of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE). Today every local official with a badge—every cop, sheriff, ranger, or even game warden—has the power to instantly separate children from mothers, husbands from wives. All America, from the smallest town on up, has become a dragnet." This was in 2012, 4 years before Trump, at the beginning of Obama's second term. "The squad cars perch on the sides of the road like ticks on a vein, hauling in alien after undocumented alien and tossing them into the criminal justice/deportation hopper. From there, in a complex, arbitrary, and mindlessly cruel legal process that puts people literally in chains for the crime of going to work or taking their kids to school, the detainees get ground up into a rich financial and political meal, shared in nearly equal parts by state and federal authorities on the one hand and private prison companies on the other." "So the undocumented alien who kills a room full of Rotarians with an ax has a right to counsel, a phone call, and protection against improper searches. The alien caught crossing the street on his way to work has no rights at all." "But the truth is, she’s likely to lose her case and will almost certainly be deported soon. Her seven children and her husband will almost certainly stay here in America. So she has a year left with her family. All because she got her fender nicked on the way to pick up some milk. The number of stories like this boggles the mind. Three hundred ninety-six thousand, nine hundred and six people were deported from the United States in 2011." "“Obama has broken all the deportation records,” says Nieblas. “One million people in just a few years. Incredible.”" "So we’ve built a massive and ruthless police apparatus for the ordinary immigrant population, complete with a sprawling, essentially extralegal detention complex, to catch and detain people who have not committed any actual crimes. This gigantic, menacing complex of bars, chains, buses, and airplanes built to deal with the immigrant poor stands in stark contrast to the tiny, disorganized confederation of perhaps a few hundred lawyers policing transnational financial companies. We don’t have special jails for foreigners or executives from foreign firms who steal by the million or billion." "For a country founded on the idea that rights are inalienable and inherent from birth, we’ve developed a high tolerance for conditional rights and conditional citizenship. And the one condition, it turns out, is money. If you have a lot of it, the legal road you get to travel is well lit and beautifully maintained. If you don’t, it’s a dark alley and most Americans would be shocked to find out what’s at the end of it." "The giant dragnet created by 287(g) is inspiring a whole new generation of epic survival tales. The stories you hear from people who’ve disappeared at checkpoints and roadblocks sound eerily like the literature of the Soviet gulag, with the same themes of repeat interrogations, marches, chains, total alienation from family, and clashes with harsh nature, lunatic bureaucracies, and petty human predators of every imaginable species, some wearing uniforms and some not." "This seemed to represent the ultimate white-folks win-win: local chicken-plant owners got to keep their cheap labor, while local police still got to milk the immigrant community for any money they made working at those plants." "It even came out, in the famous Bernie Madoff case, that despite numerous complaints to the SEC over the years from reputable sources, nobody in the government even checked to make sure Madoff’s hedge fund even made trades at all. Madoff actually went more than thirteen years without making a single stock purchase and yet somehow survived several SEC investigations—that’s how flimsy government regulation of hedge funds has been and still is." "To paint the tape on ADM, Graber and Israel would call eight different brokers and put in buy orders simultaneously to run up the price—at a time when Graber was holding lots of the stock ready to sell into a rising market. It was a racket the Securities and Exchange Commission was hopelessly ill-equipped to stop." "We know this because traders for Chanos and Cohen and others sent one another reams of emails and texts blithely bragging about their access to this nonpublic information" "As it happens, this sort of behavior—bank analysts sharing their research with hedge fund clients—was so common at the time that it ultimately became the centerpiece of the so-called Global Settlement arranged by Eliot Spitzer and the SEC with big Wall Street banks like Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns, and Piper Jaffray." "Tipping off a hedge fund that your analyst is going to give a “buy” rating to a stock weeks before that research is made public can be enormously valuable to the hedge fund, for the obvious reason that the fund now has a pretty good idea of a concrete date and time when the stock is going to tick upward. If the release of the research will have a material impact on the value of the stock, it becomes illegal and improper to trade on knowledge of such a report ahead of time." "So say you borrow a share of IBM at 10. You sell it immediately for that ten bucks, then wait for something bad to happen (IBM forced to announce a product recall, say). The stock drops to 9. You can then go out and buy a share of IBM on the open market, return that share to your original source, and pocket a one-dollar profit. But what if IBM goes up? What if there is no product recall, and the next product IBM comes out with puts the iPad out of business? What if the stock goes past 10—to 15, 20, 40, 50 dollars? You still eventually have to return the stock. The higher the stock climbs, the more money you owe. And there’s no zero down there to stop the bleeding. You could pick wrong, bet against Google or Microsoft in its infancy, and end up beyond broke, hurtling down a bottomless financial pit." "When you short a stock, you first borrow shares in the company, then sell them off immediately for cash. Then, after the stock’s value has dropped, you go out and buy the same amount of shares in the open market and return them to the original source." "Like most privileged, overeducated Americans who try it, they would suck at being real tough guys. They tried, however, and here’s the crazy thing: in a city where police in some neighborhoods define crime as standing on the sidewalk the wrong way, these idiots took their stock-trading act-like-a-thug life, screwed it up a hundred different ways, and not only couldn’t get arrested, they couldn’t even get police of any kind to notice." "Rivett, Watsa, and the rest of the Fairfax executives had no way of knowing it at the time, but all this activity had been orchestrated by millionaire and billionaire hedge fund managers with bets against Fairfax, men who had gotten together and hired the aforementioned shadowy fixer extraordinaire Spyro Contogouris to commence a wide-ranging campaign of harassment against the" "The scam depicted in the chart was an Enronesque maze of phantom revenues and hidden budget holes, an ingenious robbing-Peter-to-pay-Paul scheme in which Fairfax was essentially borrowing billions against its European assets and capitalizing its subsidiaries with shares in other subsidiaries, a complex and indecipherable bookkeeping merry-go-round. Far different and more complex from the original charge of simply being undercapitalized, the new charges were a lurid and compelling suspense tale, complete with all the bells and whistles of great storytelling that had been absent from the original dry Gwynn report." "In all, in the eight months after July 26, 2006, Fairfax regained about $2 billion in stock value. The two critical events, the filing of the lawsuit and the arrest of Contogouris, said absolutely nothing about the company’s performance as an insurer. The only thing that changed in that time was the attitude of the global investing community toward the company. It had nothing to do with justice, the regulatory system, or the wisdom of the good old-fashioned Adam Smith capitalist marketplace. Instead, what began as a confidence game ended as a confidence game. The entire thing was a battle of public relations. It had nothing to do with real economics." "In another sense, though, the crime occurred nowhere in particular. If a hedge fund magnate in Westchester or Long Island sends an email to a bank analyst in Tennessee (where Morgan Keegan keeps its headquarters) to discuss the manipulation of the stock of a Canadian insurance company that’s listed on the New York Stock Exchange but retains a major subsidiary in New Jersey, where did the offense take place? It depended, entirely, on how you looked at things." "When Harlem residents Michael McMichael and Anthony Odom drove down 161st Street in a new-looking Range Rover, police immediately profiled the car as being bought with illegal income. But when Stevie Cohen claimed to be 400 percent more efficient than the entire investing world fifteen years running, talked publicly about his billion-bucks-a-year income, and bought a 6,000-square-foot, Zamboni-treated skating rink for his mansion just a few years after opening his own business, nobody blinked until decades had passed and multiple companies had been destroyed." "In fact, courts have been slowly chipping away at the Fourth Amendment protection against unreasonable searches and seizures for a long time, and the dominant theme in this gradual legal erosion has been an innovative new form of institutional racism, and a creepy inverse correlation between rights and need." "Over and over again, we hear that if you owe money in a certain way, or if you receive a certain kind of public assistance, you forfeit this or that line item in the Bill of Rights. If you’re a person of means, you get full service for all ten amendments, and even a few that aren’t listed. But if you owe, if you rent, you get a slightly thinner, more tubercular version of the Fourth Amendment, the First Amendment, the Fifth and Sixth Amendments, and so on." "It’s not that it’s written anywhere that if you’re black and you live in the projects, you don’t get protection against illegal searches—it just sort of works out that way. And if this makes any sense at all, it’s not about skin color. This is a cultural kind of bias. White people who live the wrong way get caught in the net, too." "But Douglas was overruled, of course, because the implicit intent of Wyman—not its explicit intent, but very much the implied meaning—didn’t cover everyone, just black welfare moms like Barbara James. No one else had to trade the Bill of Rights for government aid. So the state got to keep its “gentle means” of checking to make sure tax dollars were reaching appropriate destinations." "As Americans, we’re all beginning to develop a second sense about who gets to feel the business end of the criminal justice system, and when, and who doesn’t, and why. That second sense we all carry around in our minds is our true government. It’s very different from the Schoolhouse Rock! official version, and different from the one we see celebrated every four years in our presidential campaign system. Schoolhouse Rock! teaches us that everyone is treated equally under the law, and that our government is one we’ve chosen in free elections, but at the same time we somehow know not to be surprised when that turns out not to be completely true." "By the time all these companies were finished first inflating and then crashing a huge global asset bubble based on overvalued mortgages, the world had lost trillions of dollars—one extremely conservative estimate by the IMF put the losses at $4 trillion." "In every single one of those cases, the relevant companies were allowed to settle without admitting wrongdoing. Not a single individual was charged in any of those cases. Not a single individual had to pay so much as a dime of his own money in damages." "Twenty-six billion dollars of fraud: no felony cases. But when the stakes are in the hundreds of dollars, we kick in 26,000 doors a year, in just one county." "These inscrutable, irrational structures, crisscrossing back and forth between the worlds of debt and banking and law enforcement, are growing up organically around the pounding twin impulses that drive modern America: burning hatred of all losers and the poor, and breathless, abject worship of the rich, even the talentless and undeserving rich." "It mechanically, automatically keeps the poor poor, devours money from the middle class, and sends it upward. And because it’s fueled by the irrepressibly rising vapor of our darkest hidden values, it attacks people without money, particularly nonwhite people, with a weirdly venomous kind of hatred, treating them like they’re already guilty of something, which of course they are—namely, being that which we’re all afraid of becoming." "These bureaucracies accomplish just two things: they make small piles of money smaller and big piles of money bigger." "There’s a cultural spectrum these bureaucracies are attuned to that roughly ranges from black poverty to white wealth. Where you are on that spectrum determines how much of a citizen you get to be." "Things that are jailable crimes on one end of that spectrum become speeding tickets on the other. We find white people on the jail end and black people on the speeding ticket end, but for the most part … well, for the most part, you know what I mean. That winking understanding we all share about who gets the book thrown at him and who doesn’t, that’s where American racism has gone: unspoken and hidden, but bureaucratized and automated, and therefore more powerful than ever." "At the top end of American society, we’ve found out in recent years that lying for profit is actually considered a virtue, and a certain sector of the population fiercely defends its right to earn a living that way." "When you see, up close, where the awesome power of the American criminal justice space station is directed, you will begin scratching your head, no matter what you think of people on welfare." "[...] she went to the local welfare office—a “Family Resource Center,” known as an FRC—and walked inside. She was barely sober, emotionally a wreck, literally penniless, and her entire ambition in life was to keep and maintain a room and a half in a rundown section of west San Diego without having to sell her body to pay the rent." "This is the kind of person at whom the weight of the state’s financial fraud prosecution apparatus tends to be trained in America. Markisha entered the financial fraud patrol zone when she walked through those doors at the FRC. For three hundred dollars a month, she was about to become more heavily scrutinized by the state than any twelve Wall Street bankers put together." "[...] they then tell you to go home and sit tight for your P100 search. And they don’t tell you when that will be, except to say that it’s generally within a week and a half. You then have to be at home at all times until they show up—it’s like sitting shivah, except you have to do it for more than a week. “If the investigator shows up and no one’s there,” says Halpern, “they shove a card under your door that says, ‘We could not verify your eligibility,’ and you don’t get your benefits.”" "For instance, in 2011, the state of Ohio—the same state that lost tens of millions in the early 2000s when its pension fund bought severely overpriced mortgage-backed securities from a Lehman Brothers banker named John Kasich, who would later become governor—tried to recoup some of its losses by sending out 22,000 notices to Ohioans seeking “overpayments” in either welfare or food stamps." "For instance, in 2011, the state of Ohio—the same state that lost tens of millions in the early 2000s when its pension fund bought severely overpriced mortgage-backed securities from a Lehman Brothers banker named John Kasich, who would later become governor—tried to recoup some of its losses by sending out 22,000 notices to Ohioans seeking “overpayments” in either welfare or food stamps. Many if not most of these “overpayments” were actually the state’s own errors, but they went as far back as 1986 anyway, seeking checks as small as $78." "But according to the state, they’d also committed fraud at least three times: when Diego received benefits without qualifying for them, when Diego “lied” about his January income, and when Anna overcollected in cash aid without paying the money back." Absolutely fucking Kafkaesque. "The system therefore clearly doesn’t really work for the state, either. It’s like opening a hospital where no doctor could ever see the same patient twice—the bureaucratic version of Memento, where the characters have to go back in time to re-create a whole universe of facts from the beginning in each new scene." "These associations have effectively lobbied for increased welfare fraud prosecution and investigation and have helped create a new cottage industry within government. Some states have actually increased funding for fraud investigation because the programs are paid for by federal funds they would lose if they weren’t spent—in other words, rather than lose funding because of reduced welfare rolls, states simply increase the amount of staff for welfare fraud investigation." "These cases are often felony fraud cases, and DAs are hot for them because (a) they never, ever lose them and (b) it boosts their records. Fans of The Wire will connect to this dynamic: nothing quite jukes the stats like forty unopposed felony convictions a month. “DAs love these cases,” says Gustafson. “It raises their profiles before elections.”" "No, the only offenders the local burghers will spend money to embarrass publicly are young, single, nonwhite mothers guilty of the crime of improperly receiving benefits. And as we’ve seen, it’s a stretch to assume that they’re all really guilty. The one thing we do know is that the people on this list every month are all flat broke and incapable of hiring a decent lawyer—and who knows, the fancy folk in Palm Springs might have an interest in shaming these people for that crime, as well." "[...] banking watchdogs like the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and the Office of Thrift Supervision simply stopped pursuing criminal investigations; groups that had referred thousands of cases a year to the Justice Department for prosecution during the S&L crisis completely stopped that activity by the turn of the millennium. In 2009 the OCC referred zero cases for prosecution. On the other hand, welfare fraud was prosecuted like never before, and welfare fraud investigators multiplied like rats in every state of the country, forming unions and lobbying agencies." "Bill Clinton’s political formula for seizing the presidency was simple. He made money tight in the ghettos and let it flow free on Wall Street. He showered the projects with cops and bean counters and pulled the cops off the beat in the financial services sector. And in one place he created vast new mountain ranges of paperwork, while in another, paperwork simply vanished." "Clinton’s “third way” political strategy, in which Democrats laid down their arms of business regulation, allowed his party to compete with the Republicans for the campaign contributions of the big banks on Wall Street." "Both parties wanted to merge the social welfare system with law enforcement, creating a world that for the poor would be peopled everywhere by cops and bureaucrats and inane, humiliating rules." "And on the other hand, both parties wanted the financial services sector to become an endless naked pillow fight, fueled by increasingly limitless amounts of cheap cash from the Federal Reserve (literally free cash, eventually). If they turned life in the projects into a police state, they turned life on Wall Street into its opposite. One lie in San Diego is a crime. But a million lies? That’s just good business." "WaMu knew that the loans it was getting from Long Beach were fraudulent. A Senate investigation later revealed that the bank had, among other things, done internal audits of two of Long Beach’s most productive loan officers. They found fraud in 58 percent of the loans coming from one of those officers’ operations and in 83 percent of the other’s. Instead of firing the two men, they were given prizes for loan production." "In that highly sordid and mostly overlooked chapter in the history of the bailout period, WaMu and its $307 billion in assets were delivered by the state into the hands of Chase and its CEO, Jamie Dimon, for the preposterously low price of $1.9 billion, a bargain deal that was struck just a few weeks before Chase was given $25 billion in cash by the government as part of the TARP bailouts. This was Chase’s second sweetheart deal in less than a year. "Six months before, in March 2008, Chase had “rescued” the imploding investment banking giant Bear Stearns, buying the venerable firm with the aid of $29 billion in guarantees extended by the New York branch of the Federal Reserve—whose chairman of the board of directors at the time was, get this, JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon. "That means that six months after Jamie Dimon was the lucky recipient of his own Federal Reserve bailout in order to acquire Bear Stearns, his bank was given another $25 billion in cash by the state to go on another shopping spree, cash he used, among other things, to buy Washington Mutual." "But Almonte had arrived at Chase in the first place only by means of a government-approved scheme to conceal toxic assets from the public. The company’s state-sanctioned job was to hide fraud from the public. So when she found more fraud at Chase, where was she supposed to go? To the same government that used Chase to cover up two earlier scandals?" "Here we should digress for a moment to talk about a legend that’s been circulating about the financial crisis, a legend our leaders like to tell over and over. It goes something like this: Yes, bad things happened, but none of those bad things were crimes. Greed isn’t illegal. Making too much money isn’t illegal. Nothing to see here, move along." "Obama gave a simple explanation. “Banks are in the business of making money,” he said. “And they find loopholes.” So what kind of “loophole finding” went on in Chase’s credit card litigation office? Not only did the bank apparently have full-time employees assigned to the job of committing mass perjury, it even went so far as to rope the entire department into the cause when the normal robo-signing staff couldn’t handle the workload." "Once Linda was out the door, Chase put the sale back on, errors or no errors. They quickly found a buyer, and 23,000 “judgments” went out into the world—a teeming school of little mutant fish, swimming blindly into courthouses from one coast to the other, each in search of a human being to collect from." "But the business of credit card litigation by its very nature has to be half-assed, brutal, reckless, and stupid. The business model just doesn’t work otherwise. The giant consumer credit merchants like Chase who file lawsuits against cardholders by the tens of thousands couldn’t even begin to make real money, real margins, if they had to do anything like real legal work or meet anything like a real evidentiary standard." "Many process servers and law firms engage in a wink-wink-nudge-nudge business called gutter service or sewer service, in which the law firm hands the list of summonses to the server, and the server simply dumps them (in the “gutter,” hence the name). In return, the process server hands the law firm an “affidavit of service,” swearing that he properly served the customer. Process service once required a signature of the defendant to prove proper service; now all that’s needed is the server’s own word that he did the job." "Thus not only may a credit card customer legally be served at some ancient address without her knowledge, it’s highly possible that the server won’t even bother to extend her that courtesy. This is why, in a huge percentage of credit card cases, the cardholder never even sees the summons and consequently never appears in court to defend himself." "What all this means is that the bulk of the credit card collection business is conducted without any supporting documentation showing up or being seen by human eyes at any part of the process. The meat of the business is collecting unopposed default judgments from defendants who either never receive a summons or receive one and never appear in court." "At no time in the process do most collectors ever actually need to produce evidence of a legitimate debt or a legitimate judgment." What's stopping them from making them up wholesale? You wouldn't be able to tell the difference. If no-one checks, then you don't serve and just make up a number for nonexistent card and garnish their wages after judgment. Why even buy accounts from Chase? You don't need them. "So how do you collect money from a cardholder who doesn’t answer his or her summons? That’s easy: you take it! The laws are different from state to state, but in most places in America, once the bank or debt buyer has that default judgment in hand, it can legally do just about anything to the cardholder. It can put a lien on his property, it can attach her salary, it can even take his car or her office furniture." "[...] executives soon realized that in the overwhelmed modern court system, simply attesting to having the right documentation works just as well as really having it. This is the same realization that struck Bank of America when it found that saying it had foreclosure documents was almost as good as having them—and the same one that touched process servers at American Legal Process, who found that claiming to have delivered a summons was almost as good as (and certainly cheaper than) actually doing it." "Also, Chase never informed any of its customers that their debt had been assigned to a new company, which according to the judge’s ruling was a red flag in light of recent experience. “On a regular basis this court encounters defendants being sued on the same debt by more than one creditor alleging it is the assignee of the original credit card obligation,” he wrote. “… Without receiving such notice of the assignment, a debtor seeking to make any application to the court would not have any idea as to which alleged creditor is to be served.”" "All Straniere saw was the broad sloppiness and inattention to procedure that attended the entire deal in general. The DebtOne deal was simply a typical transaction in a consumer credit industry that depends upon robo-signing, mass fraud, and intentionally thin paperwork as essential elements of its profit model. Straniere didn’t nix the DebtOne judgments because he knew, as Almonte knew, that a large percentage of them were rife with errors and might not even have been valid judgments. He did it because the accounts had been so sloppily transferred that it was impossible to tell the difference." "The final irony in all this? At the same time that Chase was pumping out tens of thousands of bogus collection notices into the economy, the company was being supported, financially, by the federal government in a dozen different ways." "Less well known is that Chase was extended billions more in guarantees to help buy the corpse of Bear Stearns. It was allowed to borrow $33 billion more against the state’s credit card—if it defaulted on those loans, we’d have picked up the bill—through an even more obscure Federal Reserve program called the Temporary Liquidity Guarantee Program. A whole alphabet soup of other Fed bailout programs, like the Commercial Paper Funding Facility, the Term Auction Facility, and the Primary Dealer Credit Facility, allow banks like Chase to borrow billions of dollars at near-zero or zero interest." "What this means is that the entire business model for something like Chase’s credit card business is not much more than a gigantic welfare fraud scheme. These companies borrow hundreds of billions of dollars from the Fed at rock-bottom rates, then turn around and lend it out to the world at 5, 10, 15, 20 percent, as credit cards and mortgages, boat loans and aircraft loans, and so on. If you pay it back, great, it’s a 500 percent or 1,000 percent or 4,000 percent profit for the bank. If you don’t pay it back, the company can put your name in the hopper to be sued. A $5,000 debt on a credit card for the now-defunct Circuit City, which was actually a Chase card, became a $13,000 or $14,000 debt by the time the bank finished applying fees and penalties." "[...] every single one of those hundreds of thousands of credit judgments—be they foreclosures or credit card accounts—contains a line item with a court-mandated collection fee or other such payout to local law enforcement." People are charged for their own evictions. "It’s not just that there’s no criminal penalty for fraud on such a grand scale; your business doesn’t even have to suffer. You can defraud the state over and over again, and the state will still be happy to do business with you. You can still issue municipal bonds, and you can still be one of twenty-one banks given the privilege of being primary dealers of government debt." "Plenty of people—consumers and merchants both—are probably glad that so much credit is available, but they don’t realize that systematic fraud is part of what makes it available." "The crucial thing to understand is that if businesses like consumer credit cards are going to give cards away in the mail to everyone with a pulse, then the process almost by definition has to involve fraud." "When the state brings a fraud case against a welfare mom, it brings it with disgust, with rage, because in addition to committing the legal crime, she’s committed the political crime of being needy and an eyesore. Banks commit the legal crime of fraud wholesale; they do so out in the open, have entire departments committed to it, and have employees who’ve spent years literally doing nothing but commit, over and over again, the same legal crime that some welfare mothers go to jail for doing once. But they’re not charged, because there’s no political crime. The system is not disgusted by the organized, mechanized search for profit. It’s more like it’s impressed by it." "Of course this reads like a shocker story only because Patrick Jewell is a white, college-educated musician. Imagine the same story a few hundred thousand times over, and you’re starting to plug into the ordinary urban nonwhite experience. And that, too, is a collateral consequence we’ve decided we can live with." "Patrick Jewell most likely was some plainclothes policeman’s fleeting visual error—a rolled cigarette mistaken from a distance as a joint. But instead of simply walking up to him and asking him what he was smoking, law enforcement’s first move was to assault him, then frame him, toss him in jail, and run him all the way through the system without apology, rather than admit the mistake." "Being white and middle class never meant your kids breezed into Yale with a C average. That kind of privilege was always reserved for a special kind of wealth. But it did once mean that police would think twice before bouncing your head off a sidewalk. Not anymore." "Obama was echoing the main mantra that continued to emanate from Wall Street after the crash, in which high-level executives involved in this or that scandal repeatedly insisted that what they had done was not actually against the law. The thing that’s interesting about this claim isn’t that it’s factually wrong, which incidentally it almost always is, often to a humorously enormous degree. What’s interesting is that the people who make this claim usually believe it to be true." "Lawyers admire the right kind of “aggressive” for the same reason we love heist movies: we sympathize with anyone clever enough to penetrate the impenetrable. But those same attorneys sometimes have a hard time seeing past the daring all the way to the consequences on the other end, which might very well be something like seventy thousand creditors losing thousands of dollars apiece, or a whole company’s shareholders losing a total of $600 million." Here, even Taibbi falls into the habit of using the wrong verb. They didn't lose it. It was stolen. "There were tens of thousands of cases just as insidious as the Simpson case, and each one of them was a truly despicable criminal fraud. But no individuals were ever prosecuted for this kind of crime. Meanwhile you can open up the newspaper virtually any day of the week—not just in Riverside County, California, but just about anywhere—and read about someone who’s been criminally sentenced for welfare fraud." "The total amount of money reportedly laundered in his case was somewhere in the area of $16 million. HSBC admitted to laundering more than $800 million. Trevino laundered for the Zetas; HSBC, for their rivals, the Sinaloa cartel. Trevino could get twenty years. At HSBC, again, nobody got even one day. These are enormous discrepancies. There’s a huge difference between twenty years and nothing—that is, a banker slapped with fines he doesn’t even personally pay. So what justifies the difference? Is there any conceivable reasonable explanation?" "[...] in all but a very few of these cases, the narrative is exactly the same. There is somehow just enough evidence to extract hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars in penalties, but somehow not quite enough evidence to force any individual to do so much as a day in jail. Every single time, the state lands itself right in that oddly enormous sweet spot between spectacular leverage (to extract fines) and no leverage at all (to hand down criminal penalties)." "This is an important distinction, that in this period of extreme crisis, we not only didn’t allocate funds to investigate the crash, we actively did increase the budget to tackle street crime, incidentally at a time of declining street violence." "[...] what it concedes is that there’s a concrete difference between how we treat an individual who commits fraud within the structure of a giant multinational company with a lot of settlement money lying around, and how we treat, say, an ordinary broke person who commits welfare or unemployment fraud." Or doesn't commit a crime at all, as Taibbi himself repeatedly pointed out. The welfare cheating is sometimes or even often just clerical errors. Credit card debt is active fraud. Instead of prosecuting giant crimes by unacceptable perpetrators, they're inventing and then prosecuting smaller ones, on acceptable victims. "This is coward’s language. No true cop would ever think like this. Real police will go after the bad guy no matter who he is or how well protected he might be. In fact, the best of them will take on a villain even when winning is a long shot. There’s value even in trying and losing sometimes. It’s not as tangible as a billion dollars, but it’s real enough." And that billion dollar settlement amounts to the government getting a cut of the action. The banks will do it again and the government gets its fee. It's a business relationship or I can't tell the difference. "At the end of 2011, the SEC bragged to Congress that it had completed 735 enforcement actions. It didn’t mention that fully one-sixth—131 of them—were 12(j) deals, shooting the corpses of companies like Longtop Financial or American Capital Partners or Austral Pacific Energy. It issues fancy press releases for a lot of these actions, often tossing in something sexy in the headline if there’s a Congress-friendly angle—“SEC Charges China-Based Longtop Financial Technologies for Deficient Filings” is an example." ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=4031 2021-01-02T22:56:56+01:00 https://earthli.com/users/marco

https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=4037 2021-01-02T18:09:39+01:00 https://earthli.com/users/marco

, whose ark crash-landed on Earth long ago. They were on Ark Fleet Ship B -- housing the most useless elements of society -- with A and C to follow. It was clear they weren't going to do so and that the A and C denizens had dreamt up the story in order to get rid of the folks on Ark B. After crash-landing, they lacked the niceties of society, like currency, so they decided to use leaves as "legal tender" [2], making every one of them "immensely rich". They all walked around with track-suits stuffed full of leaves. The subsequent inflation problem led them to "effectively revalue the leaf" by "embark[ing] on a massive defoliation campaign, and...er, burn down all the forest." [1] All citations from page 299 of my leather-bound edition of the first four books of the at-that-time-only-slightly-inaccurately-named trilogy. [3] [1] Rather than the "increasingly inaccurately named Hitchhiker's Trilogy" that is the epithet of the next book in the series, Mostly Harmless. [Citations] "And, as Camp points out, the Democratic Party is as complicit in this debacle as the Republican Party. There is no way at this level to separate Trump from Obama. One may be vulgar and brash, but the other uses urbane polish to accomplish the same ends." "Given that the entire Army budget in fiscal year 2015 was $120 billion, unsupported adjustments were 54 times the level of spending authorized by Congress." "Obviously, our government could do those things, but it chooses not to. Earlier this month, Louisiana sent eviction notices to 30 thousand elderly people on Medicaid, to kick them out of their nursing homes.11 Yes, a country that can vomit trillions of dollars down a black hole marked “military” can’t find the money to take care of our poor elderly." "Earlier this month, Louisiana sent eviction notices to 30 thousand elderly people on Medicaid, to kick them out of their nursing homes.11 Yes, a country that can vomit trillions of dollars down a black hole marked “military” can’t find the money to take care of our poor elderly. It’s a repulsive joke." "So we use NED and USAID to destabilize countries. Keep in mind, though it may not sound like much, there are consequences to destabilizing countries. By doing so, we indirectly kill a lot of people, or at least ruin their lives, leaving them poor or destitute. But to create a successful coup, it’s important you don’t care about any of that stuff. Leave that for the nerds with their pencils and their statistics. If babies die because they can’t get the medical treatment they need, not your problem." "The Pentagon’s accounting fraud diverts many billions of dollars that could be devoted to other national needs: health care, education, job creation, climate action, infrastructure modernization, and more. Indeed, the Pentagon’s accounting fraud amounts to theft on a grand scale—theft not only from America’s taxpayers, but also from the nation’s well-being and its future." "President Bashar Assad gassed his own people, thereby guaranteeing more American involvement—and he did it just days after Donald Trump had told the Pentagon to begin withdrawing troops from Syria. At least, that’s the story the corporate media repeated on loop for more than a month, only pausing every 10 minutes to try desperately to get us all to buy more things with “Baconator” in the name or to seek out a harder penis." "The propaganda line for Venezuela right now is: “We want to help the poor Venezuelans.” Well, if you want to help them, then keep America out of their face. Don’t force them to have anything to do with the country that came up with drive-through fried food served in a bucket and opioid nasal sprays. At no point does anyone look at the Donald Trump presidency and think, “Wow, that country really has things figured out. I hope they bring some of their great decision-making to our doorstep.”" "Have no fear, patriotic Americans, this is not “lying to the American people, stealing their money, and using it for war,” this is just “unsubstantiated change actions.” Try that on your next tax return. Put in 10 thousand dollars marked “unsubstantiated change actions.” I’m sure they’ll love that." "Being socialist. Pretty self-explanatory. If you don’t have the same economic system as we do, we treat it like you have candy, and we’re not allowed to have any, so we slip razor blades in yours and tell everyone your candy kills people." "The Venezuelan people deserve self-determination, no matter how you feel about the current government. The absolute last thing they need is to be turned into a neocon/neoliberal parking lot in which America rips all their resources out from under them while calling it “freedom.” Luckily, there are already many signs this US-created attempted coup is failing." "Under Trump, five bombs are dropped per hour—every hour of every day. That averages out to a bomb every 12 minutes. And which is more outrageous—the crazy amount of death and destruction we are creating around the world, or the fact that your mainstream corporate media basically NEVER investigates it? They talk about Trump’s flaws. They say he’s a racist, bulbous-headed, self-centered idiot (which is totally accurate)—but they don’t criticize the perpetual Amityville massacre our military perpetrates by dropping a bomb every 12 minutes, most of them killing 98 percent nontargets." "We are a rogue nation with a rogue military and a completely unaccountable ruling elite. The government and military you and I support by being a part of this society are murdering people every 12 minutes, and, in response, there’s nothing but a ghostly silence. It is beneath us as a people and a species to give this topic nothing but silence. It is a crime against humanity." "There’s no logic in voraciously continuing a behavior that will kill us in both the short and long term and doesn’t add up with our views toward animals. We have laws against animal abuse—as long as it’s one of the animals we’ve been socially engineered to protect. If you see someone smack a Labrador Retriever in public, you’ll dive in front of it like you’re the Secret Service taking a bullet for the president. But if you replace that dog with a pig or a lamb, then we all think, “Grill ’em up! What kind of sauce you got for that?”" "We have food. We have year-round ripe mangos that don’t even make natural sense. There’s no need to keep 280 million hens and 68 million pigs in a fucking Saw movie." "Acting like each year’s fires are a fluke that will never happen again—that, in and of itself, is denying climate change. It is lying to the American people in order to cover up the fact that we are promoting a system based on big oil, big factory farming, and big environmental destruction." "Are you starting to get the point? Kate Snow’s job—like most of those in mainstream media—is to cover up your reality. Her job is to make you think we live in a system that can recover from this carnage without large-scale changes, without a new economic paradigm that doesn’t reward waste and planned obsolescence and profiting off the lives of others." "Generally speaking, the job of mainstream corporate outlets is to ignore the harsh reality that our endless consumption and furious appetite for fossil fuels are burning our country, turning it into a desert wasteland—and the easiest response is to throw slave labor at the problem." "Simply put, humans have no business going about our day-to-day activities as if we aren’t on the event horizon. It’s equivalent to working on your model train set while your kitchen is burning down, your spouse is in the bathroom battling an alligator that’s taken up residence in the bathtub, and your 12-year-old daughter is in the living room, having just been offered heroin for the first time. Right now, humanity is still focused on the model train." "Maybe we’re right to die off. Maybe our hubris and egos the size of SUVs have doomed us, and we should just give up and enjoy our final few years. But if that’s the case, I would like an announcement. I would honestly prefer a national address by some of our so-called leaders stating clearly, “Look, folks, to continue civilized society of the human species, we would need to change everything. Every single one of us would have to labor toward a massive shift to a sustainable culture that works in harmony with nature rather than abusing nature like it’s a servant who gave us an ugly look. We would have to focus on achieving this new society rather than spending a third of our free time watching superhero movies. But we have no intention of doing that because it sounds kinda hard, not to mention that corporate profits would suffer in the short term. So instead, we’re declaring here and now that we’ll all just keep functioning as is until such time as the oceans turn to acid, the ever-growing storms consume us, and California feels like the inside of a kiln. According to our best minds, that will be 10 to 20 years from now, so don’t worry about starting that retirement fund. Don’t buy the extended warranty on that vacuum. And whatever you do, at no point and under no circumstances should you quit smoking and drinking…. Thank you, and good night.”" "I would actually respect the whole system if right on the front of the stock exchange it said, “Put your money into the stock market! The only way you’ll make more money is if you find a dolt to buy whatever stocks you just bought. But there are an infinite number of dolts! This gravy train is powered by morons. So you have nothing to worry about.”" "But the casinos are honest with you. They tell you it’s gambling. The front of a casino doesn’t say “Invest your pension in roulette. Do you have a child with a degenerative disease? Then put all your savings on red-32 so that he’ll be taken care of after you’re gone.” Casinos don’t say that. The myth of the stock market does." "Step two is to realize that the market economy in general is designed to exploit billions of us while a tiny number get ridiculously rich. It doesn’t care about the health or sustainability of our society as it facilitates the extraction of all the wealth and resources by sociopaths. Just ask Jeff Bezos—he’s now worth 150 billion padoodles of Amazon stock, while his workers are on food stamps." "They aren’t even trying to cure infectious diseases that make them piles of cash. Instead, the moneyed interests are complaining to their clients that they need to avoid curing these diseases. Because not only do they lose money on the patient who no longer needs meds, they also lose money because that patient won’t pass the disease onto others." "The only way a system ends up at this point—with our values this far upside down—is with endless advertising in a profit-driven society. This is a system built on the exploitation of others for gain. There was no time when that was not true. And that’s why we need a revolution of the mind." "would you say, “Jeffrey Dahmer achieved eating the hearts of 10 different people?” No, that would sound odd to you. Yet having 150 billion dollars is nearly as sociopathic, and still we use terminology as if it’s great!" "Jeff Bezos himself could end world hunger for five straight years. If he teamed up with the Koch brothers, they could do it for eight to 10 years." This doesn't work. The wealth isn't real. Take some of it and it collapses. "[...] the goals of our economy (and any economy), according to Zeitgeist Movement founder Peter Joseph,12 and I agree, should be: pursuit of abundance (all people’s basic needs are met); sustainability (can the system keep going forever); liberation of humanity from hard and dangerous labor (nobody doing jobs they hate); adaptation to emerging technologies and variables." "According to the Economic Policy Institute, “In 2007, average annual incomes of the top 1 percent of households were 42 times greater than incomes of the bottom 90 percent (up from 14 times greater in 1979), and incomes of the 0.1 percent were 220 times greater (up from 47 times greater in 1979).”7 Workers’ lives didn’t get better with productivity. Wall Street steals more and more of the money and gives less and less to the worker. The bottom 90 percent then fight over the scraps and hate each other for it. “Hey! Why do teachers get to have health care, while the rest of us don’t? Fuck you, teachers! What have you ever done for society? I’m voting for whoever is taking the health care away from the teachers.”" "How do we rate success? We look at gross domestic product—how much we’re producing. GDP doesn’t measure how many kids are drinking toxic water or breathing toxic air. It doesn’t measure how many dolphins are choking on plastic beer rings. It only measures how many beers you chug down. It doesn’t measure how many trees were planted. It measures how many trees we cut down to make the cardboard for coffee cups and condom boxes. It doesn’t rate how screwed the environment is, just how much stuff we buy to keep screwing. Buy a dildo? Good for the economy. Throw an old dildo out? Ends up in the ocean, gets stuck in a whale’s blowhole. GDP doesn’t care." "GDP doesn’t measure how many animals went extinct. It only measures how many animals we ate or sold. You could be eating a bald eagle roasted with giraffe bacon wrapped around it. As long as you bought it at the store, it’s good for GDP." "I mean, if that’s not the point, just let me know, and I’ll get on board. Oh, the point is to make sure a tiny number of individuals can afford to purchase their own islands with helicopter landing pads? Oh, I had no idea that was the meaning of life. I’m sorry I’ve been resisting it so long. In that case, the stock market seems to be working perfectly." "Imagine the aliens that come down here after we’ve eaten everything, killed everything, and turned it all to dust. Imagine them showing up and going, “What happened to those little fellows that used to be here?” “Well, they imagined something called the stock market, where nonliving entities called corporations compete to see which one can exploit the earth the most. It eventually swallowed up the whole biosphere they lived in.” “Oh, which corporation won?” “Ironically, the one called Amazon, which used to be the name of the largest river in the world, until they paved it.”" "It’s like a guy driving a car and only seeing speed, being completely blind to how many people he runs down. He’d get to his destination in record time and say to the townspeople, who all had family members run over by this maniac, “We did it. I got here in record time. We should all celebrate together.” One percent of America is celebrating. It’s time to do things differently." "It seems clear the real goal is to hand over our elections systems to the military-industrial complex—your friendly neighborhood death machine—and bury the reality of our votes under enough encryption and complex technology that no average citizen really knows what’s happening." Easy there, Lee. The average American won't know what's going on no matter how transparent it is. "In light of our endless need to meddle in the democratic elections of every country, when political philosophy heavyweight Noam Chomsky was asked about this topic, he said, “most of the world is just collapsing in laughter” on claims that Russia intervened in the US election.21 Well, I’m glad we could provide some entertainment for the rest of the world." "Yes, it is true that cops kill a lot of white people. They kill more white people than Wendy’s trademarked Baconator sandwich. However, cops kill more people of color than the population percentages would dictate, and they’re more likely to kill people of color who aren’t armed. So while whites do lose their lives in our current police state at a ridiculous rate, they are far more likely to be waving around a gun when it happens." "They passed the Protect and Serve Act of 2018, with only 35 representatives voting against it.7 This is impressively shocking considering that our current Congress usually reserves that level of bipartisanship for bills giving themselves a raise or approving war criminals for cabinet positions." "Also illegal is housing the homeless.6 Earlier this year, according to Splinter News, “police arrived at [a Chicago man’s] house with a warrant and threatened to condemn his property unless he closed his ‘unlawful basement sleeping area.’” Not illegal is taking blankets away from the homeless, as the Denver police were caught doing.7 Also not illegal: destroying tiny homes built for the homeless. Cops did that too.8 Banks foreclose on millions of homes, making millions of families homeless. That’s not illegal. We throw out 40 percent of all food. That’s not illegal." "The real reason we can’t have people helping the homeless, giving out food and housing, is because it threatens to give a good example, to show another way forward. As Act Out! host Eleanor Goldfield wrote: “Filling the gaping chasms purposefully carved by capitalism and its keepers raises people’s awareness; it forces them to reckon with the system they live in and ask whether or not it’s worth protecting—or fighting against.”" "In this particular instance, systemic racism does not originate in race but in the way the rich have crafted our laws and our systems to favor the rich. So it’s a class issue rather than a race issue. Unfortunately, other factors of systemic racism—such as hiring practices and who gets promoted—ensure that white people are more likely to be extremely wealthy and less likely to be extremely poor. Therefore, our country has a racial wealth gap the size of the Grand Canyon" "All told, much of our systemic racism problem comes down to class and wealth, not just race. But race, class, and wealth are deeply, inexorably linked. And therefore, whether you choose to ignore it or not, we must acknowledge that systemic racism is a thing. It’s in our schools, our air, our water, and even our televisions. It impacts every area of our lives, and much like climate change, we need to start fixing it rather than acting like it doesn’t exist." "Subconsciously they must believe that a life in which we’re tirelessly exploited by rich villains and know all about it thanks to the exhaustive efforts of an eccentric Australian is worse than one in which we’re tirelessly exploited by rich villains yet know nothing about it." "We’re supposed to vote based on our knowledge of how our government is functioning. But if the entirety of our representatives’ criminal behavior is labeled top secret for national security purposes, then we aren’t really an informed populace, are we? So for all that was unveiled in the State Department cables, no one has been locked up. But Julian Assange has been for revealing them." "So why have so many outlets and people turned against Assange and WikiLeaks? Because it turned out he wasn’t revealing only repressive Arab regimes. He also revealed US-backed coups and war crimes around the world. He exposed the criminality and villainy of the American ruling elite." "We are all Julian Assange. As long as he’s imprisoned, we can never be free." "Remember that the next time Jean Shaheen, Claire McCaskill, Mark Warner, and Sheldon Whitehouse try to tell you they’re “part of the resistance.” No, they’re “part of the freesistance”—giving Trump a free pass for unlimited war. They’re paid employees of the war profiteers. Having the word “Senator” before your name just means you’re one of the more highly paid employees. It just means you have a bathroom that others aren’t allowed to use." "As George Carlin said, “It’s a big club, and you ain’t in it.” Schiff is corrupt and working for corporate America and Wall Street. Trump is corrupt and working for corporate America and Wall Street. Ninety-five percent of the Democratic congresspeople are corrupt and working for corporate America and Wall Street. Ninety-nine percent of the Republicans are corrupt and working for corporate America and Wall Street. Do not expect them to save us." "Are we living our lives in a genuine, authentic manner or is a large part of it subconsciously (consciously?) mimicking bullshit from movies and TV and Cialis commercials? And the people who write this crap: Are they writing the wet shoes moment because it’s honestly what they believe falling in love looks like? Or is it because they saw it in a commercial 10 years earlier and internalized it? Which came first, the chicken or the chicken walking in the water worried about the sand stuck between his toes or talons or claws or whatever chickens currently have?" "The Post acts as if Wall Street’s growth is somehow good for average Americans. It’s not. Trump, Hillary, and the Post are all part of an elite class enjoying the spoils of a fully exploited working class. Judging the health of our society by looking at stock prices is like judging the health of a dying man by looking at the leeches on his skin. “Wow, those leeches are very happy. This man is in peak condition!”" "The Post’s correction is the equivalent of the president bragging that he brought hit man jobs back to West Virginia and then the Post saying: “In fact, hit man jobs have not returned as promised, and very few people have been professionally murdered in West Virginia in the past year.” The Post should have said: “In fact, coal jobs have not returned, and that is a good thing if we value the air in our lungs and the life in our bodies.”" "My show, written by me and my correspondents, is certainly not the Russian view of global news and neither is—for example—Larry King’s show on RT America. (I get that Dr. Who is further afield of news than my show is, but the analogy is simply meant to say these networks create shows that are not strictly straight news.) And anyone who thinks CNN, for instance, isn’t the American view of global news is kidding themselves." "I don’t believe Trump is the cause of our country’s main problems. I believe he is a symptom of an incredibly corrupt corporate-ruled system. He is a horrible and rather—not bright—man, but he is not the cause of the millions of hungry and homeless and imprisoned in our country. He is not the cause of the flaws in our democracy and our media. He is just the pimple that has risen up." "But describing those laughing Russians serves a purpose greater than an interesting tidbit. Zinoman sat through an entire 90-minute stand-up comedy show in which I covered everything from how our leaders force us into endless war through how we can feed every human on the planet and how we are sold an infinite parade of lies to how my comedy doesn’t go over well at children’s birthday parties. He saw me cover all those important issues. He saw an audience of over 200 people loving it and coming up to meet me afterwards. He saw a guy who has fought hard for 20 years to do stand-up comedy that matters—that enlightens and informs and entertains. He saw it all. But none of that fit with the propaganda he needed to push. In fact, it went against the storyline he was trying to create." "Gerrymandering, voter purging, data mining, broken exit polling, push polling, superdelegates, electoral votes, blackbox machines, voter ID suppression, provisional ballots, super PACs, dark money, third parties banished from the debates, and two corporate parties that stand for the same goddamn pile of fetid crap! What part of this sounds like a legitimate electoral system? No, we have what a large Harvard study called the worst electoral system in the Western world." "The dark truth is that we have to believe the myth that consuming is the answer, or else we won’t keep running around the wheel. And if we aren’t running around the wheel, then we start thinking, start asking questions. Those questions are not good for the ruling elite, who enjoy a society based on the daily exploitation of 99 percent of" "We are less free than a dog on a leash. We live in one of the hardest working, most unequal societies on the planet, with more billionaires than ever. Meanwhile, Americans supply 94 percent of the paid blood used worldwide,13 and it’s almost exclusively coming from very poor people." ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=4095 2021-01-02T14:04:53+01:00 https://earthli.com/users/marco

, of what are obviously hallucinatory trips through Paris. "I lean out the window and the Eiffel Tower is fizzing champagne; it is built entirely of numbers and shrouded in black lace. The sewers are gurgling furiously. There are nothing but roofs everywhere, laid out with execrable geometric cunning." At other times, his metaphors are more down-to-Earth, but no less enchanting, as when describes a woman lying on her deathbed. "Two waxen hands lying listlessly on the bedspread and along the pale veins the fluted murmur of a shell repeating the legend of its birth." There are some long passages of this kind of mental peregrination, with some philosophical musing that doesn't move what little there is of a plot forward in any way. It's nicely written, though, and segues into the segments where he directly and autobiographically addresses what it's like to be a writer, especially one who's achieved a modicum of success and who has acquired a fan base that expects more. "Great God! what have I turned into? What right have you people to clutter up my life, steal my time, probe my soul, suckle my thoughts, have me for your companion, confidant, and information bureau? What do you take me for? Am I an entertainer on salary, required every evening to play an intellectual farce under your stupid noses? Am I a slave, bought and paid for, to crawl on my belly in front of you idlers and lay at your feet all that I do and all that I know? Am I a wench in a brothel who is called upon to lift her skirts or take off her chemise at the bidding of the first man in a tailored suit who comes along?" The process of writing -- and of finding something to write, of expressing the tumult of disorganized brilliance jostling in the author's head -- is given much thought as well. The following passage viscerally describes a writer's block engendered by the inability to get started because of a fear of mimicry, made only worse by the author reading more and more voraciously in an effort to prove that their own ideas are original. This education informs the author's own ideas, making them hesitant to write down what are now suspected be unoriginal thoughts. "[...] And so, instead of tackling his book, he reads one author after another in order to make absolutely certain that he is not going to tread on their private property. And the more he reads the more disdainful he becomes. None of them are satisfying; none of them arrive at that degree of perfection which he has imposed on himself. And forgetting completely that he has not written as much as a chapter he talks about them condescendingly, quite as though there existed a shelf of books bearing his name, books which everyone is familiar with and the titles of which it is therefore superfluous to mention." He is convinced, though, that being an author -- or any sort of creative person -- is superior, somehow, to the common runner of the rat race, if only because these creations impart fleeting moments of glory and joy not only to those best able to appreciate them -- the creatives -- but also to those benighted rat-race runners. A little light is better than nothing. "[...] now and then we encounter pages that explode, pages that wound and sear, that wring groans and tears and curses, know that they come from a man with his back up, a man whose only defenses left are his words and his words are always stronger than the lying, crushing weight of the world, stronger than all the racks and wheels which the cowardly invent to crush out the miracle of personality." He is an expatriate who feels infinitely more at home in his adopted city than in the city of his birth. He contrasts "[a]nd God knows, when spring comes to Paris the humblest mortal alive must feel that he dwells in paradise." with "New York! [...] A whole city erected over a hollow pit of nothingness. Meaningless. Absolutely meaningless." At the same time, he knows that the Parisians, who allow him to live among them, view him -- and his fellow ex-pats, whom he naturally views as less-well-integrated -- as madmen, unable to understand reality in anything approaching a mature fashion. "No wonder they think we’re all crazy. We are crazy to them. We’re just a pack of children. Senile idiots. What we call life is a five-and-ten-cent store romance. That enthusiasm underneath—what is it? That cheap optimism which turns the stomach of any ordinary European? It’s illusion. No, illusion’s too good a word for it. Illusion means something. No, it’s not that—it’s delusion. It’s sheer delusion, that’s what." It's not just Miller who lives this life; among the many descriptions of friends and acquaintances, there is this succinct one of Kepi, whose description hits a bit too close to home for the author, I suspect. "Kepi is interesting, in a way, because he has absolutely no ambition except to get a fuck every night. Every penny he makes, and they are damned few, he squanders in the dance halls. He has a wife and eight children in Bombay, but that does not prevent him from proposing marriage to any little femme de chambre who is stupid and credulous enough to be taken in by him." At one point, he gets a steady job as a copy-editor. He writes of the passing of a co-worker, a man named Peckover, who'd never been worth "a good goddamn" as either a friend or a journalist but who, after dying a ludicrous death in an elevator shaft he'd somehow not noticed was wide open, is covered in encomiums by most of his other, former, and more hypocritical coworkers. Here, Miller writes of the fool who'd written the man's obituary. "Joe and I, who knew Peckover well and who knew also that he wasn’t worth a good goddamn, even a few tears, we felt annoyed with this drunken sentimentality. We wanted to tell him so too, but with a guy like that you can’t afford to be honest; you have to buy a wreath and go to the funeral and pretend that you’re miserable. And you have to congratulate him too for the delicate obituary he’s written. He’ll be carrying his delicate little obituary around with him for months, praising the shit out of himself for the way he handled the situation." Miller and his friend and co-worker Joe, on the other hand, are in no way tethered by social mores. "There are people in this world who cut such a grotesque figure that even death renders them ridiculous. And the more horrible the death the more ridiculous they seem. It’s no use trying to invest the end with a little dignity—you have to be a liar and a hypocrite to discover anything tragic in their going. And since we didn’t have to put on a false front we could laugh about the incident to our heart’s content. We laughed all night about it, and in between times we vented our scorn and disgust for the guys upstairs, the fatheads who were trying to persuade themselves, no doubt, that Peckover was a fine fellow and that his death was a catastrophe." It is, at heart, an existentialist novel, with many formulations and much pondering about what life really means -- and coming to the conclusion that meaning is fleeting and not worth pursuing. For example, there is this lovely passage describing the actual coupling after he's hunted and "captured" a prostitute with FF15. He acknowledges that only the pursuit offered him anything -- and that the prostitute similarly seemed less-than-interested in the whole affair. It's all meaningless, but pursued by both parties nonetheless. "We haven’t any passion either of us. And as for her, one might as well expect her to produce a diamond necklace as to show a spark of passion. But there’s the fifteen francs and something has to be done about it. It’s like a state of war: the moment the condition is precipitated nobody thinks about anything but peace, about getting it over with. And yet nobody has the courage to lay down his arms, to say, “I’m fed up with it… I’m through.”" This meaninglessness goes largely unacknowledged, with man seeking to imbue meaning (much as his co-workers used the occasion of Peckover's death) to a life otherwise lived from day to day, with no overarching purpose. If Peckover's life was worthless, then what of one's own? Best to sing Peckover's praises in order to convince oneself of one's own worth. Miller seems to argue that this is the root of man's evil -- an inability to just be at peace with inconsequence. "For some reason or other man looks for the miracle, and to accomplish it he will wade through blood. He will debauch himself with ideas, he will reduce himself to a shadow if for only one second of his life he can close his eyes to the hideousness of reality. Everything is endured—disgrace, humiliation, poverty, war, crime, ennui—in the belief that overnight something will occur, a miracle, which will render life tolerable." "It’s like a man in the trenches again: he doesn’t know any more why he should go on living, because if he escapes now he’ll only be caught later, but he goes on just the same, and even though he has the soul of a cockroach and has admitted as much to himself, give him a gun or a knife or even just his bare nails, and he’ll go on slaughtering and slaughtering, he’d slaughter a million men rather than stop and ask himself why." In the next passage, Miller offers an empathetic view of an otherwise societally excoriated profession i.e. "Pimpin' ain't easy". "You don’t think that a pimp is inhuman, I hope? A pimp has his private grief and misery too, don’t you forget. Perhaps he would like nothing better than to stand on the corner every night with a pair of white dogs and watch them piddle. Perhaps he would like it if, when he opened the door, he would see her there reading the Paris-Soir, her eyes already a little heavy with sleep. Perhaps it isn’t so wonderful, when he bends over his Lucienne, to taste another man’s breath. Better maybe to have only three francs in your pocket and a pair of white dogs that piddle on the corner than to taste those bruised lips." There are several passages that lament what industrial society has done to man, even back in 1934, when it had gotten a good start but hadn't even begun to dream of the ravages it would achieve by the end of the century. In particular, it is cities that are the "machine [squeezing the] last drop of juice" from people. "I am speaking naturally of that world which is peculiar to the big cities, the world of men and women whose last drop of juice has been squeezed out by the machine—the martyrs of modern progress." In a roundabout way, he explains his indolent lifestyle as a desire to avoid the zero-sum rat race -- the "harness". Industry eradicates everything in its path with its endless cry to move "Forward!" without thinking at all of why. As acknowledged elsewhere, there is no "why", but then what's the point of this enslavement of man to this industrial goal? "All over the States I wandered, and into Canada and Mexico. The same story everywhere. If you want bread you’ve got to get in harness, get in lock step. Over all the earth a gray desert, a carpet of steel and cement. Production! More nuts and bolts, more barbed wire, more dog biscuits, more lawn mowers, more ball bearings, more high explosives, more tanks, more poison gas, more soap, more toothpaste, more newspapers, more education, more churches, more libraries, more museums. Forward!" Without acknowledging that his debauched life in Paris depends on a several strata of just such workers providing the fruits of a society that can sustain his mooching, Miller has mostly disdain for those who have chosen -- or been forced -- to take up the harness instead of throwing it off, like he has. Recall that he has abandoned a family in another country. "There was nothing to distinguish them from the clods whom they would later wipe their boots on. They were zeros in every sense of the word, ciphers who form the nucleus of a respectable and lamentable citizenry." This book is most definitely the kind that depends very much on what you bring to it. Therefore, it will feel different depending on when in your life you read it. Everything is subjective and very little is as meaningful as it appears. "[...] it is here that one reads again the books of his youth and the enigmas take on new meanings, one for every white hair." [Citations] "This book brings with it a wind that blows down the dead and hollow trees whose roots are withered and lost in the barren soil of our times. This book goes to the roots and digs under, digs for subterranean springs." "This then? This is not a book. This is libel, slander, defamation of character. This is not a book, in the ordinary sense of the word. No, this is a prolonged insult, a gob of spit in the face of Art, a kick in the pants to God, Man, Destiny, Time, Love, Beauty… what you will. I am going to sing for you, a little off key perhaps, but I will sing. I will sing while you croak, I will dance over your dirty corpse. …" "The chicleros came over on the ridge of a sunken continent. They brought with them an algebraic language. In the Arizona desert they met the Mongols of the North, glazed like eggplants. Time shortly after the earth had taken its gyroscopic lean—when the Gulf Stream was parting ways with the Japanese current. In the heart of the soil they found tufa rock. They embroidered the very bowels of the earth with their language. They ate one another’s entrails and the forest closed in on them, on their bones and skulls, on their lace tufa. Their language was lost. Here and there one still finds the remnants of a menagerie, a brain plate covered with figures." "We stand on five minutes and devour centuries. You are the sieve through which my anarchy strains, resolves itself into words. Behind the word is chaos. Each word a stripe, a bar, but there are not and never will be enough bars to make the mesh." "I hear not a word because she is beautiful and I love her and now I am happy and willing to die." "A new day is beginning. I felt it this morning as we stood before one of Dufresne’s glistening canvases, a sort of déjeuner intime in the thirteenth century, sans vin. A fine, fleshy nude, solid, vibrant, pink as a fingernail, with glistening billows of flesh; all the secondary characteristics, and a few of the primary. A body that sings, that has the moisture of dawn. A still life, only nothing is still, nothing dead here. The table creaks with food; it is so heavy it is sliding out of the frame." "Ah, the Germans! They take you all over like an omnibus. They give you indigestion. In the same night one cannot visit the morgue, the infirmary, the zoo, the signs of the zodiac, the limbos of philosophy, the caves of epistemology, the arcana of Freud and Stekel. … On the merry-go-round one doesn’t get anywhere, whereas with the Germans one can go from Vega to Lope de Vega, all in one night, and come away as foolish as Parsifal." "Suddenly it seems as if the dawn were coming: it is like water purling over ice and the ice is blue with a rising mist, glaciers sunk in emerald green, chamois and antelope, golden groupers, sea cows mooching along and the amber jack leaping over the Arctic rim." "Sunday! Left the Villa Borghese a little before noon, just as Boris was getting ready to sit down to lunch. I left out of a sense of delicacy, because it really pains Boris to see me sitting there in the studio with an empty belly. Why he doesn’t invite me to lunch with him I don’t know. He says he can’t afford it, but that’s no excuse. Anyway, I’m delicate about it. If it pains him to eat alone in my presence it would probably pain him more to share his meal with me. It’s not my place to pry into his secret affairs." "In the middle of the court is a clump of decrepit buildings which have so rotted away that they have collapsed on one another and formed a sort of intestinal embrace. The ground is uneven, the flagging slippery with slime. A sort of human dump heap which has been filled in with cinders and dry garbage. The sun is setting fast. The colors die. They shift from purple to dried blood, from nacre to bister, from cool dead grays to pigeon shit. Here and there a lopsided monster stands in the window blinking like an owl. There is the shrill squawk of children with pale faces and bony limbs, rickety little urchins marked with the forceps. A fetid odor seeps from the walls, the odor of a mildewed mattress. Europe—medieval, grotesque, monstrous: a symphony in B-mol. Directly across the street the Ciné Combat offers its distinguished clientele Metropolis." "For her were meant those terrible words of Louis-Philippe, “and a night comes when all is over, when so many jaws have closed upon us that we no longer have the strength to stand, and our meat hangs upon our bodies, as though it had been masticated by every mouth.”" "And then it occurred to me, like a flash, that no one would refuse a man a meal if only he had the courage to demand it. I went immediately to a café and wrote a dozen letters. "“Would you let me have dinner with you once a week? Tell me what day is most convenient for you.” "It worked like a charm. I was not only fed… I was feasted. Every night I went home drunk. They couldn’t do enough for me, these generous once-a-week souls. What happened to me between times was none of their affair. Now and then the thoughtful ones presented me with cigarettes, or a little pin money. "They were all obviously relieved when they realized that they would see me only once a week. And they were still more relieved when I said—“it won’t be necessary any more.” They never asked why. They congratulated me, and that was all. Often the reason was I had found a better host; I could afford to scratch off the ones who were a pain in the ass. But that thought never occurred to them." "A woman is sitting on a dais above an immense carven desk; she has a snake around her neck. The entire room is lined with books and strange fish swimming in colored globes; there are maps and charts on the wall, maps of Paris before the plague, maps of the antique world, of Knossos and Carthage, of Carthage before and after the salting. In the corner of the room I see an iron bedstead and on it a corpse is lying; the woman gets up wearily, removes the corpse from the bed and absent-mindedly throws it out the window. She returns to the huge carven desk, takes a goldfish from the bowl and swallows it. Slowly the room begins to revolve and one by one the continents slide into the sea; only the woman is left, but her body is a mass of geography. I lean out the window and the Eiffel Tower is fizzing champagne; it is built entirely of numbers and shrouded in black lace. The sewers are gurgling furiously. There are nothing but roofs everywhere, laid out with execrable geometric cunning." "Great God! what have I turned into? What right have you people to clutter up my life, steal my time, probe my soul, suckle my thoughts, have me for your companion, confidant, and information bureau? What do you take me for? Am I an entertainer on salary, required every evening to play an intellectual farce under your stupid noses? Am I a slave, bought and paid for, to crawl on my belly in front of you idlers and lay at your feet all that I do and all that I know? Am I a wench in a brothel who is called upon to lift her skirts or take off her chemise at the bidding of the first man in a tailored suit who comes along?" "The Rue Amélie is one of my favorite streets. It is one of those streets which by good fortune the municipality has forgotten to pave. Huge cobblestones spreading convexly from one side of the street to the other. Only one block long and narrow." "And God knows, when spring comes to Paris the humblest mortal alive must feel that he dwells in paradise." "A wagon from the Galeries Lafayette was rumbling over the bridge. The rain had stopped and the sun breaking through the soapy clouds touched the glistening rubble of roofs with a cold fire. I recall now how the driver leaned out and looked up the river toward Passy way. Such a healthy, simple, approving glance, as if he were saying to himself: “Ah, spring is coming!” And God knows, when spring comes to Paris the humblest mortal alive must feel that he dwells in paradise. But it was not only this—it was the intimacy with which his eye rested upon the scene. It was his Paris. A man does not need to be rich, nor even a citizen, to feel this way about Paris. Paris is filled with poor people—the proudest and filthiest lot of beggars that ever walked the earth, it seems to me. And yet they give the illusion of being at home. It is that which distinguishes the Parisian from all other metropolitan souls." "New York! The white prisons, the sidewalks swarming with maggots, the breadlines, the opium joints that are built like palaces, the kikes that are there, the lepers, the thugs, and above all, the ennui, the monotony of faces, streets, legs, houses, skyscrapers, meals, posters, jobs, crimes, loves. … A whole city erected over a hollow pit of nothingness. Meaningless. Absolutely meaningless." "As luck would have it I find a ticket in the lavabo for a concert. Light as a feather now I go there to the Salle Gaveau. The usher looks ravaged because I overlook giving him his little tip. Every time he passes me he looks at me inquiringly, as if perhaps I will suddenly remember." "Near the door, huddled in a big cape, stands a Spaniard with a sombrero in his hand. He looks as if he were posing for the “Balzac” of Rodin. From the neck up he suggests Buffalo Bill." That's the phallic one. "[...] you pray like that every day, he says, nothing will happen to you. The good lord what’s his name never forgets an obedient servant. And then he shows me the crooked arm which he got in a taxi accident on a day doubtless when he had neglected to rehearse the complete song and dance." "Kepi is interesting, in a way, because he has absolutely no ambition except to get a fuck every night. Every penny he makes, and they are damned few, he squanders in the dance halls. He has a wife and eight children in Bombay, but that does not prevent him from proposing marriage to any little femme de chambre who is stupid and credulous enough to be taken in by him." "There is something so fantastic, so incongruous about this gallery that one is reminded inevitably of the great spawn of temples which stretch from the Himalayas to the tip of Ceylon, a vast jumble of architecture, staggering in beauty and at the same time monstrous, hideously monstrous because the fecundity which seethes and ferments in the myriad ramifications of design seems to have exhausted the very soil of India itself." "India’s enemy is not England, but America. India’s enemy is the time spirit, the hand which cannot be turned back. Nothing will avail to offset this virus which is poisoning the whole world. America is the very incarnation of doom. She will drag the whole world down to the bottomless pit." "There is a sort of subdued pandemonium in the air, a note of repressed violence, as if the awaited explosion required the advent of some utterly minute detail, something microscopic but thoroughly unpremeditated, completely unexpected." "For some reason or other man looks for the miracle, and to accomplish it he will wade through blood. He will debauch himself with ideas, he will reduce himself to a shadow if for only one second of his life he can close his eyes to the hideousness of reality. Everything is endured—disgrace, humiliation, poverty, war, crime, ennui—in the belief that overnight something will occur, a miracle, which will render life tolerable." "Heretofore I have been trying to save my precious hide, trying to preserve the few pieces of meat that hid my bones. I am done with that. I have reached the limits of endurance. My back is to the wall; I can retreat no further. As far as history goes I am dead. If there is something beyond I shall have to bounce back. I have found God, but he is insufficient. I am only spiritually dead. Physically I am alive. Morally I am free. The world which I have departed is a menagerie." "They look so absolutely peaceful and contented, as if they had been dozing there for years, that suddenly it seems to me as if we had been standing in this room, in exactly this position, for an incalculably long time, that it was a pose we had struck in a dream from which we never emerged, a dream which the least gesture, the wink of an eye even, will shatter." "In a sense Van Norden is mad, of that I’m convinced. His one fear is to be left alone, and this fear is so deep and so persistent that even when he is on top of a woman, even when he has welded himself to her, he cannot escape the prison which he has created for himself." "The book must be absolutely original, absolutely perfect. That is why, among other things, it is impossible for him to get started on it. As soon as he gets an idea he begins to question it. He remembers that Dostoevski used it, or Hamsun, or somebody else. “I’m not saying that I want to be better than them, but I want to be different,” he explains. And so, instead of tackling his book, he reads one author after another in order to make absolutely certain that he is not going to tread on their private property. And the more he reads the more disdainful he becomes. None of them are satisfying; none of them arrive at that degree of perfection which he has imposed on himself. And forgetting completely that he has not written as much as a chapter he talks about them condescendingly, quite as though there existed a shelf of books bearing his name, books which everyone is familiar with and the titles of which it is therefore superfluous to mention." "I have adjusted myself so well to his monologues that without interrupting my own reveries I make whatever comment is required automatically, the moment I hear his voice die out. It is a duet, and like most duets moreover in that one listens attentively only for the signal which announces the advent of one’s own voice." "But now, since he had felt the touch of death, he wanted to display his comradeship. He wanted to weep, if possible, to show that he was a regular guy. And Joe and I, who knew Peckover well and who knew also that he wasn’t worth a good goddamn, even a few tears, we felt annoyed with this drunken sentimentality. We wanted to tell him so too, but with a guy like that you can’t afford to be honest; you have to buy a wreath and go to the funeral and pretend that you’re miserable. And you have to congratulate him too for the delicate obituary he’s written. He’ll be carrying his delicate little obituary around with him for months, praising the shit out of himself for the way he handled the situation. We felt all that, Joe and I, without saying a word to each other. We just stood there and listened with a murderous, silent contempt. And as soon as we could break away we did so; we left him there at the bar blubbering to himself over his Pernod." This is a work of art. I'm glad I stuck around for this. As luck would have it, a good friend of mine was reading this book at nearly exactly the same time and expressed frustration with the first ninety or so page, announcing that he planned to give up on it. I sent him the quote above and he soldiered on and was happy for it. "There are people in this world who cut such a grotesque figure that even death renders them ridiculous. And the more horrible the death the more ridiculous they seem. It’s no use trying to invest the end with a little dignity—you have to be a liar and a hypocrite to discover anything tragic in their going. And since we didn’t have to put on a false front we could laugh about the incident to our heart’s content. We laughed all night about it, and in between times we vented our scorn and disgust for the guys upstairs, the fatheads who were trying to persuade themselves, no doubt, that Peckover was a fine fellow and that his death was a catastrophe." "We haven’t any passion either of us. And as for her, one might as well expect her to produce a diamond necklace as to show a spark of passion. But there’s the fifteen francs and something has to be done about it. It’s like a state of war: the moment the condition is precipitated nobody thinks about anything but peace, about getting it over with. And yet nobody has the courage to lay down his arms, to say, “I’m fed up with it… I’m through.”" "It’s like a man in the trenches again: he doesn’t know any more why he should go on living, because if he escapes now he’ll only be caught later, but he goes on just the same, and even though he has the soul of a cockroach and has admitted as much to himself, give him a gun or a knife or even just his bare nails, and he’ll go on slaughtering and slaughtering, he’d slaughter a million men rather than stop and ask himself why." "This life which, if I were still a man with pride, honor, ambition and so forth, would seem like the bottom rung of degradation, I welcome now, as an invalid welcomes death. It’s a negative reality, just like death—a sort of heaven without the pain and terror of dying. In this chthonian world the only thing of importance is orthography and punctuation. It doesn’t matter what the nature of the calamity is, only whether it is spelled right." "How could I have foreseen, in America, with all those firecrackers they put up your ass to give you pep and courage, that the ideal position for a man of my temperament was to look for orthographic mistakes? Over there you think of nothing but becoming President of the United States some day." "[...] I get to thinking about another way of life, get to wondering if it would make a difference having a young, restless creature by my side. The trouble is I can hardly remember what she looks like, nor even how it feels to have my arms around her. Everything that belongs to the past seems to have fallen into the sea; I have memories, but the images have lost their vividness, they seem dead and desultory, like time-bitten mummies stuck in a quagmire. "If I try to recall my life in New York I get a few splintered fragments, nightmarish and covered with verdigris. It seems as if my own proper existence had come to an end somewhere, just where exactly I can’t make out. I’m not an American any more, nor a New Yorker, and even less a European, or a Parisian. I haven’t any allegiance, any responsibilities, any hatreds, any worries, any prejudices, any passion. I’m neither for nor against. I’m a neutral." "[...] we get to talking about the condition of things with that enthusiasm which only those who bear no active part in life can muster. What seems strange to me sometimes, when I crawl into bed, is that all this enthusiasm is engendered just to kill time, just to annihilate the three-quarters of an hour which it requires to walk from the office to Montparnasse. We might have the most brilliant, the most feasible ideas for the amelioration of this or that, but there is no vehicle to hitch them to." "To walk from the Rue Lafayette to the boulevard is like running the gauntlet; they attach themselves to you like barnacles, they eat into you like ants, they coax, wheedle, cajole, implore, beseech, they try it out in German, English, Spanish, they show you their torn hearts and their busted shoes, and long after you’ve chopped the tentacles away, long after the fizz and sizzle has died out, the fragrance of the lavabo clings to your nostrils—it is the odor of the Parfum de Danse whose effectiveness is guaranteed only for a distance of twenty centimeters. "One could piss away a whole lifetime in that little stretch between the boulevard and the Rue Lafayette. Every bar is alive, throbbing, the dice loaded; the cashiers are perched like vultures on their high stools and the money they handle has a human stink to it. There is no equivalent in the Banque de France for the blood money that passes currency here, the money that glistens with human sweat, that passes like a forest fire from hand to hand and leaves behind it a smoke and stench." "You don’t think that a pimp is inhuman, I hope? A pimp has his private grief and misery too, don’t you forget. Perhaps he would like nothing better than to stand on the corner every night with a pair of white dogs and watch them piddle. Perhaps he would like it if, when he opened the door, he would see her there reading the Paris-Soir, her eyes already a little heavy with sleep. Perhaps it isn’t so wonderful, when he bends over his Lucienne, to taste another man’s breath. Better maybe to have only three francs in your pocket and a pair of white dogs that piddle on the corner than to taste those bruised lips." "I am speaking naturally of that world which is peculiar to the big cities, the world of men and women whose last drop of juice has been squeezed out by the machine—the martyrs of modern progress." "I caught for the first time the profound meaning of those interior stills which manifest their presence through the exorcism of sight and touch. Standing on the threshold of that world which Matisse has created I re-experienced the power of that revelation which had permitted Proust to so deform the picture of life that only those who, like himself, are sensible to the alchemy of sound and sense, are capable of transforming the negative reality of life into the substantial and significant outlines of art." "Vividly now I recall how the glint and sparkle of light caroming from the massive chandeliers splintered and ran blood, flecking the tips of the waves that beat monotonously on the dull gold outside the windows." "With the close of day, pain rising like a mist from the earth, sorrow closing in, shuttering the endless vista of sea and sky. Two waxen hands lying listlessly on the bedspread and along the pale veins the fluted murmur of a shell repeating the legend of its birth." "By whatever vision one passes there is the odor and the sound of voyage. It is impossible to gaze at even a corner of his dreams without feeling the lift of the wave and the cool of flying spray. He stands at the helm peering with steady blue eyes into the portfolio of time." "On its wobbly axle the wheel rolls steadily downhill; there are no brakes, no ball bearings, no balloon tires. The wheel is falling apart, but the revolution is intact." "I tried to look earnest, but I only succeeded in looking pathetic. They don’t want to see sad faces in Russia; they want you to be cheerful, enthusiastic, light-hearted, optimistic. It sounded very much like America to me. I wasn’t born with this kind of enthusiasm." "[...] because in that world, just as in every world, the greater part of what happens is just muck and filth, sordid as any garbage can, only they are lucky enough to be able to put covers over the can." "She wouldn’t remember that at a certain corner I had stopped to pick up her hairpin, or that, when I bent down to tie her laces, I remarked the spot on which her foot had rested and that it would remain there forever, even after the cathedrals had been demolished and the whole Latin civilization wiped out forever and ever." "[...] suddenly realized the impossibility of ever revealing to her that Paris which I had gotten to know, the Paris whose arrondissements are undefined, a Paris that has never existed except by virtue of my loneliness, my hunger for her. Such a huge Paris! It would take a lifetime to explore it again. This Paris, to which I alone had the key, hardly lends itself to a tour, even with the best of intentions; it is a Paris that has to be lived, that has to be experienced each day in a thousand different forms of torture, a Paris that grows inside you like a cancer, and grows and grows until you are eaten away by" "it is here that one reads again the books of his youth and the enigmas take on new meanings, one for every white hair." "The streets were my refuge. And no man can understand the glamor of the streets until he is obliged to take refuge in them, until he has become a straw that is tossed here and there by every zephyr that blows." "it is that which makes certain houses appear like the guardians of secret crimes and their blind windows like the empty sockets of eyes that have seen too much." "He liked to dance, he liked good wines, and he liked women. That he liked Byron also, and Victor Hugo, one could forgive; he was only a few years out of college and he had plenty of time ahead of him to be cured of such tastes. What he had that I liked was a sense of adventure." "When we entered the whorehouse on the Quai Voltaire, after he had flung himself on the divan and rung for girls and for drinks, he was still paddling up the river with Kurtz, and only when the girls had flopped on the bed beside him and stuffed his mouth with kisses did he cease his divagations." "Sex everywhere: it was slopping over, a neap tide that swept the props from under the city." "But then she was so drunk that when she tumbled out of the cab she began to weep and before any one could stop her she had begun to peel her clothes off. The driver brought her home that way, half-naked, and when Jimmie saw the condition she was in he was so furious with her that he took his razor strop and he belted the piss out of her, and she liked it, the bitch that she was. “Do it some more!” she begged, down on her knees as she was and clutching him around the legs with her two arms. But Jimmie had enough of it. “You’re a dirty old sow!” he said and with his foot he gave her a shove in the guts that took the wind out of her—and a bit of her sexy nonsense too." Ludicrous teenage fan fiction. "When the sun comes out, any spot in Paris can look beautiful; and if there is a bistro with an awning rolled down, a few tables on the sidewalk and colored drinks in the glasses, then people look altogether human. And they are human—the finest people in the world when the sun shines! So intelligent, so indolent, so carefree! It’s a crime to herd such a people into barracks, to put them through exercises, to grade them into privates and sergeants and colonels and what not." "About three in the morning Fillmore staggers in… alone. Lit up like an ocean liner, and making a noise like a blind man with his cracked cane. Tap, tap, tap, down the weary lane. … “Going straight to bed,” he says, as he marches past me. “Tell you all about it tomorrow.” He goes inside to his room and throws back the covers. I hear him groaning—“what a woman! what a woman!” In a second he’s out again, with his hat on and the cracked cane in his hand. “I knew something like that was going to happen. She’s crazy!”" "These are sunny thoughts inspired by a vermouth cassis at the Place de la Trinité. A Saturday afternoon and a “misfire” book in my hands. Everything swimming in a divine mucopus. The drink leaves a bitter herbish taste in my mouth, the lees of our Great Western civilization," "[...] now and then we encounter pages that explode, pages that wound and sear, that wring groans and tears and curses, know that they come from a man with his back up, a man whose only defenses left are his words and his words are always stronger than the lying, crushing weight of the world, stronger than all the racks and wheels which the cowardly invent to crush out the miracle of personality." "The earth is not an arid plateau of health and comfort, but a great sprawling female with velvet torso that swells and heaves with ocean billows; she squirms beneath a diadem of sweat and anguish. Naked and sexed she rolls among the clouds in the violet light of the stars. All of her, from her generous breasts to her gleaming thighs, blazes with furious ardor." "When I reflect that the task which the artist implicitly sets himself is to overthrow existing values, to make of the chaos about him an order which is his own, to sow strife and ferment so that by the emotional release those who are dead may be restored to life, then it is that I run with joy to the great and imperfect ones, their confusion nourishes me, their stuttering is like divine music to my ears." "In the street I had often passed a priest with a little prayer book in his hands laboriously memorizing his lines. Idiot, I would say to myself, and let it go at that. In the street one meets with all forms of dementia and the priest is by no means the most striking. Two thousand years of it has deadened us to the idiocy of it. However, when you are suddenly transported to the very midst of his realm, when you see the little world in which the priest functions like an alarm clock, you are apt to have entirely different sensations." "I was taking it in as best I could in the dim light. Fascinating and stupefying at the same time. All over the civilized world, I thought to myself. All over the world. Marvelous. Rain or shine, hail, sleet, snow, thunder, lightning, war, famine, pestilence—makes not the slightest difference. Always the same mean temperature, the same mumbo jumbo, the same high-laced shoes and the little angels of the Lord singing soprano and alto. Near the exit a little slot-box—to carry on the heavenly work. So that God’s blessing may rain down upon king and country and battleships and high explosives and tanks and airplanes, so that the worker may have more strength in his arms, strength to slaughter horses and cows and sheep, strength to punch holes in iron girders, strength to sew buttons on other people’s pants, strength to sell carrots and sewing machines and automobiles, strength to exterminate insects and clean stables and unload garbage cans and scrub lavatories, strength to write headlines and chop tickets in the subway. Strength… strength. All that lip chewing and hornswoggling just to furnish a little strength!" "All over the States I wandered, and into Canada and Mexico. The same story everywhere. If you want bread you’ve got to get in harness, get in lock step. Over all the earth a gray desert, a carpet of steel and cement. Production! More nuts and bolts, more barbed wire, more dog biscuits, more lawn mowers, more ball bearings, more high explosives, more tanks, more poison gas, more soap, more toothpaste, more newspapers, more education, more churches, more libraries, more museums. Forward!" "Forward! Forward without pity, without compassion, without love, without forgiveness. Ask no quarter and give none! More battleships, more poison gas, more high explosives! More gonococci! More streptococci! More bombing machines! More and more of it—until the whole fucking works is blown to smithereens, and the earth with it!" "halfassed" This was incorrectly hyphenated as hal-fassed. "I felt free and chained at the same time—like one feels just before election, when all the crooks have been nominated and you are beseeched to vote for the right man." So has it always been. Nothing really new under the sun, not where it matters. There it's not allowed to change. "[...] they belonged to that category of colorless individuals who make up the world of engineers, architects, dentists, pharmacists, teachers, etc. There was nothing to distinguish them from the clods whom they would later wipe their boots on. They were zeros in every sense of the word, ciphers who form the nucleus of a respectable and lamentable citizenry. They ate with their heads down and were always the first to clamor for a second helping. They slept soundly and never complained; they were neither gay nor miserable. The indifferent ones whom Dante consigned to the vestibule of Hell. The upper-crusters." "Here was I, supposedly to spread the gospel of Franco-American amity—the emissary of a corpse who, after he had plundered right and left, after he had caused untold suffering and misery, dreamed of establishing universal peace." "They asked all sorts of questions, as though they had never learned a damned thing. I let them fire away. I taught them to ask still more ticklish questions. Ask anything!—that was my motto. I’m here as a plenipotentiary from the realm of free spirits. I’m here to create a fever and a ferment." "I was always hungry myself, since it was impossible for me to go to breakfast which was handed out at some ungodly hour of the morning, just when the bed was getting toasty." "The whole town looked a bit crazy when the blue of evening settled over it. You could walk up and down the main drive any Thursday in the week till doomsday and never meet an expansive soul. Sixty or seventy thousand people—perhaps more—wrapped in woolen underwear and nowhere to go and nothing to do. Turning out mustard by the carload. Female orchestras grinding out The Merry Widow." "The silence descends in volcanic chutes. Yonder, in the barren hills, rolling onward toward the great metallurgical regions, the locomotives are pulling their merchant products. Over steel and iron beds they roll, the ground sown with slag and cinders and purple ore. In the baggage car, kelps, fishplate, rolled iron, sleepers, wire rods, plates and sheets, laminated articles, hot rolled hoops, splints and mortar carriages, and Zorès ore. The wheels U-80 millimeters or over. Pass splendid specimens of Anglo-Norman architecture, pass pedestrians and pederasts, open hearth furnaces, basic Bessemer mills, dynamos and transformers, pig iron castings and steel ingots." "I went immediately to the hotel at 1 bis, where Carl was staying. He came to the door stark naked. It was his night off and there was a cunt in the bed as usual. “Don’t mind her,” he says, “she’s asleep. If you need a lay you can take her on. She’s not bad.” He pulls the covers back to show me what she looks like. However, I wasn’t thinking about a lay right away." Seriously? Can't tell if kidding. If not kidding, this has not aged well. I'm not triggered, though. (I noted on another passage above that it was "Ludicrous teenage fan fiction"; this falls into the same category). "I often used to think, when I heard him rave about glorious France, about liberty and all that crap, what it would have sounded like to a French workman, could he have understood Fillmore’s words. No wonder they think we’re all crazy. We are crazy to them. We’re just a pack of children. Senile idiots. What we call life is a five-and-ten-cent store romance. That enthusiasm underneath—what is it? That cheap optimism which turns the stomach of any ordinary European? It’s illusion. No, illusion’s too good a word for it. Illusion means something. No, it’s not that—it’s delusion. It’s sheer delusion, that’s what." "It’s a wonderful thing, for half an hour, to have money in your pocket and piss it away like a drunken sailor. You feel as though the world is yours. And the best part of it is, you don’t know what to do with it. You can sit back and let the meter run wild, you can let the wind blow through your hair, you can stop and have a drink, you can give a big tip, and you can swagger off as though it were an everyday occurrence. But you can’t create a revolution. You can’t wash all the dirt out of your belly." "Passing a beer garden I saw a group of cyclists sitting at a table. I took a seat nearby and ordered a demi." ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=4040 2021-01-02T13:04:45+01:00 https://earthli.com/users/marco

). "We talked of the ravages made last year by pestilence in every quarter of the world; and of the dreadful consequences of a second visitation. We discussed the best means of preventing infection, and of preserving health and activity in a large city thus afflicted—London, for instance." "Plague might not revive with the summer; but if it did, it should find us prepared. It is a part of man's nature to adapt itself through habit even to pain and sorrow. Pestilence had become a part of our future, our existence; it was to be guarded against, like the flooding of rivers, the encroachments of ocean, or the inclemency of the sky." This sounds very much like the lessons at least some of us had learned by the end of 2020 -- although I sometimes seriously question whether we've lost some capacity for dealing with society-wide issues. Our laser-like focus on individual liberty and luxury leaves little to no room for considering the more foreboding calculus of dependencies and conflicts between unequally represented interests. Our notion of liberty often devolves into the strong surviving on the backs of the weak (dog eat dog), the strong using their mostly fortuitously acquired and largely unearned power to fortify and substantiate with myth their position at the top of the heap. At any rate, in the book (as in reality), the remaining populace -- either not exposed or more resistant -- squabble and fight over the remaining resources and power centers. But it is hopeless, as the plague is unquestionably worse than anything humans can do to one another. Still, armies are raised, with the plague rejoicing at the close quarters and squalid conditions. "At length the plague, slow-footed, but sure in her noiseless advance, destroyed the illusion, invading the congregation of the elect, and showering promiscuous death among them." Luckily, the main characters are largely untouched by the plague -- at least until much later. This is another literary device she uses without explanation: she protects her characters from the ravages of the plague until a sufficiently dramatic end can be found for them. This is, of course, artistic license and largely implausible since most of them were simultaneously selfless in caring for the sick day-in and day-out. Yet, none fell to the plague. Were we to assume it was because they were so good? That the plague couldn't get through the shield of their benevolence? Lionel, Idris, and Adrian -- now Lord Protector -- rally the remains of humanity in England and strike out for warmer climes. The winters are brutal in England and humans can no longer survive there. Although the virus is worse in the summer, they still feel it would be better to move southward. There are trials and tribulations and they barely make it to the coast of France in their boats. There, they discover that those who preceded them had split into factions: on one side is Adrian and his benevolence; on the other is a brutal leader selling a story of protection from the plague in exchange for unquestioning fealty. Lionel is integral in remediating this problem and the remains of humanity, once again united in purpose, continue to Switzerland, where they hope that the cool heights will provide agricultural plenty while protecting them from the estival ravages of the plague. The plague has other ideas. Only four survive the trek across France to Switzerland: Lionel, Adrian, and Raymond's two children, Clara and Evelyn). Lionel dwells a bit too pointedly on how lovely and smart Clara is -- with intimations of rekindling humanity with her. They shift to Milan and Como, spending several lovely years there, with only Evelyn succumbing to Typhus rather than the plague. "[...] one by one, beneath the ice-caves, beside the waters springing from the thawed snows of a thousand winters, another and yet another of the remnant of the race of Man, closed their eyes for ever to the light." ""Thus are we left," said Adrian, "two melancholy blasted trees, where once a forest waved. We are left to mourn, and pine, and die." Clara decides she needs to see where her father is buried in Greece. Lacking anything else to do, they endeavor across the Adriatic from Venice, but are shipwrecked, drowning Adrian and Clara. Lionel survives. We follow him on his physical and philosophical peregrinations, leaving him a few years later, after he'd ascertained to a great degree of certainty that he was, indeed, the last man on Earth. "Yellow lightnings played around the vast dome of Mont Blanc, silent as the snow-clad rock they illuminated; all was bare, wild, and sublime, while the singing of the pines in melodious murmurings added a gentle interest to the rough magnificence." Imagine knowing that yours would be the last sentience to behold such a thing, that nature would present such shows for long eons, irrespective of observers. That the clockwork continues without us, as easily as with us. Not that we have become irrelevant, but that we always were. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] This sort of jarring flip-flop is a common feature. There's not a lot of subtlety to the emotions expressed by any of the characters. It's like humanity viewed through the lens of a teenager: everything is literally the best or the worst ever. [1] Idris never makes it off the island, and much effort and time is expended in making sure that her body is entombed in Windsor Castle, as if anyone at all cares where her plague-ridden corpse is interred, especially considering none of them will ever return to it. [Citations] "Di mie tenere frondi altro lavoro   Credea mostrarte; e qual fero pianeta   Ne' nvidio insieme, o mio nobil tesoro?" "My father was one of those men on whom nature had bestowed to prodigality the envied gifts of wit and imagination, and then left his bark of life to be impelled by these winds, without adding reason as the rudder, or judgment as the pilot for the voyage." "I lived with a farmer whose house was built higher up among the hills: a dark crag rose behind it, and, exposed to the north, the snow lay in its crevices the summer through." "We are not formed for enjoyment; and, however we may be attuned to the reception of pleasureable emotion, disappointment is the never-failing pilot of our life's bark, and ruthlessly carries us on to the shoals." "He gave not only a brief denial to his mother's schemes, but published his intention of using his influence to diminish the power of the aristocracy, to effect a greater equalization of wealth and privilege, and to introduce a perfect system of republican government into England. At first his mother treated his theories as the wild ravings of inexperience. But they were so systematically arranged, and his arguments so well supported, that though still in appearance incredulous, she began to fear him. She tried to reason with him, and finding him inflexible, learned to hate him." "Truly disappointment is the guardian deity of human life; she sits at the threshold of unborn time, and marshals the events as they come forth." ""Happy are dreamers," he continued, "so that they be not awakened! Would I could dream! but 'broad and garish day' is the element in which I live; the dazzling glare of reality inverts the scene for me. Even the ghost of friendship has departed, and love"——He broke off; nor could I guess whether the disdain that curled his lip was directed against the passion, or against himself for being its slave." "Raymond continued, "I will not act a part with you, dear girl, or appear other than what I am, weak and unworthy, more fit to excite your disdain than your love. Yet you do love me; I feel and know that you do, and thence I draw my most cherished hopes. If pride guided you, or even reason, you might well reject me. Do so; if your high heart, incapable of my infirmity of purpose, refuses to bend to the lowness of mine. Turn from me, if you will,—if you can. If your whole soul does not urge you to forgive me—if your entire heart does not open wide its door to admit me to its very centre, forsake me, never speak to me again. I, though sinning against you almost beyond remission, I also am proud; there must be no reserve in your pardon—no drawback to the gift of your affection."" This is effusive and overly flowery prose, depicting yet another improbable love triangle. It reminds me very much of the over-the-top love stories in Atlas Shrugged. Flaming so hot as to.admit no doubt or compromise or even slight difference of opinion. "Oh my pen! haste thou to write what was, before the thought of what is, arrests the hand that guides thee." "But you live, my Idris, even now you move before me! There was a glade, O reader! a grassy opening in the wood; the retiring trees left its velvet expanse as a temple for love; the silver Thames bounded it on one side, and a willow bending down dipt in the water its Naiad hair, dishevelled by the wind's viewless hand." This is a lovely example, but I feel she would describe taking out the trash in the same manner. "Adrian was on horseback; he rode up to the carriage, and his gaiety, in addition to that of Raymond, dispelled my sister's melancholy. We entered London in the evening, and went to our several abodes near Hyde Park." A book about the richest possible people. Never worked a day in their lives. ""For my part," said I, "I am too well convinced of the worth of our friend, and the rich harvest of benefits that all England would reap from his Protectorship, to deprive my countrymen of such a blessing, if he consent to bestow it on them."" "in dragging a poor visionary from the clouds to surround him with the fire-works and blasts of earthly grandeur, instead of heavenly rays and airs?" "Although, when I was informed of this scheme, I was bitterly offended by the small attention which Raymond paid to my sister's feelings, I was led by reflection to consider, that he acted under the force of such strong excitement, as to take from him the consciousness, and, consequently, the guilt of a fault. If he had permitted us to witness his agitation, he would have been more under the guidance of reason; but his struggles for the shew of composure, acted with such violence on his nerves, as to destroy his power of self-command." This is how you excuse a mental abuser. "In fact, now that the idea of contest was dismissed, all hearts returned to their former respect and admiration of our accomplished friend. Each felt, that England had never seen a Protector so capable of fulfilling the arduous duties of that high office. One voice made of many voices, resounded through the chamber; it syllabled the name of Raymond." Such a bullshit fairy tale. Everything works out without conflict or even effort. Everyone happy in the end. Rich and powerful and beautiful and just. Barf. "In the midst of such wretchedness as must soon have destroyed her, one thought only was matter of consolation. She lived in the same country, breathed the same air as Raymond." Jesus, you can't claim that this any better than Ayn Rand. "His activity was fed in wholesome measure, without either exhaustion or satiety; his taste and genius found worthy expression in each of the modes human beings have invented to encage and manifest the spirit of beauty; the goodness of his heart made him never weary of conducing to the well-being of his fellow-creatures; his magnificent spirit, and aspirations for the respect and love of mankind, now received fruition; true, his exaltation was temporary; perhaps it were better that it should be so. Habit would not dull his sense of the enjoyment of power; nor struggles, disappointment and defeat await the end of that which would expire at its maturity." Lay it on a little thicker. There is literally no plot: just endless pages of one formulation after another depicting Raymond's unquestionable and nearly infinitely faceted awesomeness as well as Perdita's depth of love for him and her rapture in having landed him. This reads like a schoolgirls diary. "During the early years of their union, the inequality of her temper, and yet unsubdued self-will which tarnished her character, had been a slight drawback to the fulness of his sentiment." Just wow. "During the early years of their union, the inequality of her temper, and yet unsubdued self-will which tarnished her character, had been a slight drawback to the fulness of his sentiment. Now that unchanged serenity, and gentle compliance were added to her other qualifications, his respect equalled his love." Words fail me. "[...] she conjectured that some circumstance connected with his high place, had occasioned this mystery. She was startled and pained. She began to count the long days, and months, and years which must elapse, before he would be restored to a private station, and unreservedly to her." This is mental illness. "His course was speedily decided upon. If the worst befell; if she learnt the truth, he would neither stand her reproaches, or the anguish of her altered looks. He would forsake her, England, his friends, the scenes of his youth, the hopes of coming time, he would seek another country, and in other scenes begin life again." Obviously a well-thought-out, measured, mature, and sane reaction. ""you have secrets, Raymond; where have you been lately, whom have you seen, what do you conceal from me?—why am I banished from your confidence? Yet this is not it—I do not intend to entrap you with questions—one will suffice—am I completely a wretch?"" Assume the worst, of course, that absolutely everything has been a lie. "Do you think that I will be questioned, and my replies disdainfully set aside? Do you think that I will be suspected, perhaps watched, cross-questioned, and disbelieved? I am not yet fallen so low; my honour is not yet so tarnished. You have loved me; I adored you. But all human sentiments come to an end. Let our affection expire—but let it not be exchanged for distrust and recrimination. Heretofore we have been friends—lovers—let us not become enemies, mutual spies. I cannot live the object of suspicion—you cannot believe me—let us part!" "Exactly so," cried Perdita, "I knew that it would come to this! Are we not already parted?" This is how super-smart people comport themselves. Do not question their ways. "This contention is unworthy of both of us; and I confess that I am weary of replying to charges at once unfounded and unkind."" The best defense is a good offense. "The overflowing warmth of her heart, by making love a plant of deep root and stately growth, had attuned her whole soul to the reception of happiness, when she found in Raymond all that could adorn love and satisfy her imagination." Just in case you think that this crap stops at any point. ""I loved you—I love you—neither anger nor pride dictates these lines; but a feeling beyond, deeper, and more unalterable than either. My affections are wounded; it is impossible to heal them:—cease then the vain endeavour, if indeed that way your endeavours tend. Forgiveness! Return! Idle words are these! I forgive the pain I endure; but the trodden path cannot be retraced." "Perdita did not oppose herself to his determination. She only stipulated to be permitted to accompany him. She had set down no rule of conduct for herself; but for her life she could not have opposed his slightest wish, or do other than acquiesce cheerfully in all his projects." "He wished to repay the kindness of the Athenians, to keep alive the splendid associations connected with his name, and to eradicate from Europe a power which, while every other nation advanced in civilization, stood still, a monument of antique barbarism [...]" She is, of course, referring to the West's age-old enemy: the ottomans/mohammedans. "The only flag among them was one which Raymond carried; he pointed with it to the gate of the city. The circle round him fell back. With angry gestures he leapt from his horse, and seizing a hatchet that hung from his saddle-bow, went with the apparent intention of battering down the opposing gate. A few men came to aid him; their numbers increased; under their united blows the obstacle was vanquished, gate, portcullis, and fence were demolished; and the wide sun-lit way, leading to the heart of the city, now lay open before them. The men shrank back; they seemed afraid of what they had already done, and stood as if they expected some Mighty Phantom to stalk in offended majesty from the opening." "I bent over the body, and took in my hand the edge of his cloak, less altered in appearance than the human frame it clothed. I pressed it to my lips, while the rough soldiers gathered around, mourning over this worthiest prey of death, as if regret and endless lamentation could re-illumine the extinguished spark, or call to its shattered prison-house of flesh the liberated spirit." "We talked of the ravages made last year by pestilence in every quarter of the world; and of the dreadful consequences of a second visitation. We discussed the best means of preventing infection, and of preserving health and activity in a large city thus afflicted—London, for instance." "Its pleasant places were deserted; its temples and palaces were converted into tombs; its energies, bent before towards the highest objects of human ambition, were now forced to converge to one point, the guarding against the innumerous arrows of the plague." "The plague at Athens had been preceded and caused by the contagion from the East; and the scene of havoc and death continued to be acted there, on a scale of fearful magnitude." The Wuhan Virus? "What deep and sacred emotions are excited in a father's bosom, when he first becomes convinced that his love for his child is not a mere instinct, but worthily bestowed, and that others, less akin, participate his approbation!" "But how are we to judge of airs, and pronounce—in such a city plague will die unproductive; in such another, nature has provided for it a plentiful harvest? In the same way, individuals may escape ninety-nine times, and receive the death-blow at the hundredth; because bodies are sometimes in a state to reject the infection of malady, and at others, thirsty to imbibe it. These reflections made our legislators pause, before they could decide on the laws to be put in force. The evil was so wide-spreading, so violent and immedicable, that no care, no prevention could be judged superfluous, which even added a chance to our escape." "The vast cities of America, the fertile plains of Hindostan, the crowded abodes of the Chinese, are menaced with utter ruin. Where late the busy multitudes assembled for pleasure or profit, now only the sound of wailing and misery is heard. The air is empoisoned, and each human being inhales death, even while in youth and health, their hopes are in the flower. We called to mind the plague of 1348, when it was calculated that a third of mankind had been destroyed. As yet western Europe was uninfected; would it always be so?" "Bankers, merchants, and manufacturers, whose trade depended on exports and interchange of wealth, became bankrupt. Such things, when they happen singly, affect only the immediate parties; but the prosperity of the nation was now shaken by frequent and extensive losses. Families, bred in opulence and luxury, were reduced to beggary. The very state of peace in which we gloried was injurious; there were no means of employing the idle, or of sending any overplus of population out of the country." Not quite how it happened in America. "It was August; so there could be small hope of relief during the heats. On the contrary, the disease gained virulence, while starvation did its accustomed work. Thousands died unlamented; for beside the yet warm corpse the mourner was stretched, made mute by death." "The labour necessary to bring the lands to this sort of culture, employed and fed the offcasts of the diminished manufactories." "It was found necessary at last to check the spirit of sacrifice, and to remind those whose generosity proceeded to lavish waste, that, until the present state of things became permanent, of which there was no likelihood, it was wrong to carry change so far as to make a reaction difficult. Experience demonstrated that in a year or two pestilence would cease; it were well that in the mean time we should not have destroyed our fine breeds of horses, or have utterly changed the face of the ornamented portion of the country." "Ye are all going to die, I thought; already your tomb is built up around you. Awhile, because you are gifted with agility and strength, you fancy that you live: but frail is the "bower of flesh" that encaskets life; dissoluble the silver cord than binds you to" "This his selected task was exchanged for the far different one of encountering the ruin caused by the convulsions of physical nature. He was incapable of meeting these evils by any comprehensive system; he had resorted to expedient after expedient, and could never be induced to put a remedy in force, till it came too late to be of use." That sounds more like it. "It was not until I arrived at Brentford, that I perceived much change in the face of the country. The better sort of houses were shut up; the busy trade of the town palsied; there was an air of anxiety among the few passengers I met, and they looked wonderingly at my carriage—the first they had seen pass towards London, since pestilence sat on its high places, and possessed its busy streets. I met several funerals; they were slenderly attended by mourners, and were regarded by the spectators as omens of direst import." "Those who possessed a power of living out of London, he advised immediately to quit it, affording them the means of so doing. Others, whose trade was beneficial to the city, or who possessed no other refuge, he provided with advice for better avoiding the epidemic; relieving overloaded families, supplying the gaps made in others by death." "I was an outcast and a vagabond, when Adrian gently threw over me the silver net of love and civilization, and linked me inextricably to human charities and human excellence. I was one, who, though an aspirant after good, and an ardent lover of wisdom, was yet unenrolled in any list of worth, when Idris, the princely born, who was herself the personification of all that was divine in woman, she who walked the earth like a poet's dream, as a carved goddess endued with sense, or pictured saint stepping from the canvas—she, the most worthy, chose me, and gave me herself—a priceless gift." Here we go again with the endless and superlative encomiums. "The poor wretch had lost his young wife and lovely infant by the plague. He was a mechanic; and, rendered unable to attend to the occupation which supplied his necessities, famine was added to his other miseries." This notion of "support yourself or starve" goes back a very long way. "Plague might not revive with the summer; but if it did, it should find us prepared. It is a part of man's nature to adapt itself through habit even to pain and sorrow. Pestilence had become a part of our future, our existence; it was to be guarded against, like the flooding of rivers, the encroachments of ocean, or the inclemency of the sky." "Death, which had in our younger days walked the earth like "a thief that comes in the night," now, rising from his subterranean vault, girt with power, with dark banner floating, came a conqueror." "Gratitude and praise marked where her footsteps had been. Yet, when she stood in unassuming simplicity before us, playing with our children, or with girlish assiduity performing little kind offices for Idris, one wondered in what fair lineament of her pure loveliness, in what soft tone of her thrilling voice, so much of heroism, sagacity and active goodness resided." Oh come on. They all care for the sick and none fall to the plague. Are we to assume it's because they're so good? That the plague can't get through a shield of their benevolence? "For my own part, my exertions for the public good permitted me to observe more closely than most others, the virulence and extensive ravages of our sightless enemy. A short month has destroyed a village, and where in May the first person sickened, in June the paths were deformed by unburied corpses—the houses tenantless, no smoke arising from the chimneys; and the housewife's clock marked only the hour when death had been triumphant. From such scenes I have sometimes saved a deserted infant—sometimes led a young and grieving mother from the lifeless image of her first born, or drawn the sturdy labourer from childish weeping over his extinct family." "One instance of this kind came immediately under our notice, where a high-born girl had in early youth given her heart to one of meaner extraction." "I found Merrival, the astronomer, with her. He was far too long sighted in his view of humanity to heed the casualties of the day, and lived in the midst of contagion unconscious of its existence. This poor man, learned as La Place, guileless and unforeseeing as a child, had often been on the point of starvation, he, his pale wife and numerous offspring, while he neither felt hunger, nor observed distress. His astronomical theories absorbed him; calculations were scrawled with coal on the bare walls of his garret: a hard-earned guinea, or an article of dress, was exchanged for a book without remorse; he neither heard his children cry, nor observed his companion's emaciated form, and the excess of calamity was merely to him as the occurrence of a cloudy night, when he would have given his right hand to observe a celestial phenomenon." "[...] she was amused for a moment, by the contrast between the contracted view we had so long taken of human life, and the seven league strides with which Merrival paced a coming eternity." "There was room enough indeed in our hapless country for twice the number of invaders; but their lawless spirit instigated them to violence; they took a delight in thrusting the possessors from their houses; in seizing on some mansion of luxury, where the noble dwellers secluded themselves in fear of the plague; in forcing these of either sex to become their servants and purveyors; till, the ruin complete in one place, they removed their locust visitation to another." "As we advanced, we were met by bands of peasantry, whose almost naked condition, whose despair and horror, told at once the fierce nature of the coming enemy. The senseless spirit of conquest and thirst of spoil blinded them, while with insane fury they deluged the country in ruin." "You are dear to us, because you wear the frail shape of humanity; each one among you will find a friend and host among these forces. Shall man be the enemy of man, while plague, the foe to all, even now is above us, triumphing in our butchery, more cruel than her own?"" "Families late devoted to exalting and refined pursuits, rich, blooming, and young, with diminished numbers and care-fraught hearts, huddled over a fire, grown selfish and grovelling through suffering. Without the aid of servants, it was necessary to discharge all household duties; hands unused to such labour must knead the bread, or in the absence of flour, the statesmen or perfumed courtier must undertake the butcher's office. Poor and rich were now equal, or rather the poor were the superior, since they entered on such tasks with alacrity and experience; while ignorance, inaptitude, and habits of repose, rendered them fatiguing to the luxurious, galling to the proud, disgustful to all whose minds, bent on intellectual improvement, held it their dearest privilege to be exempt from attending to mere animal wants." "Of old navies used to stem the giant ocean-waves betwixt Indus and the Pole for slight articles of luxury. Men made perilous journies to possess themselves of earth's splendid trifles, gems and gold. Human labour was wasted—human life set at nought. Now life is all that we covet; that this automaton of flesh should, with joints and springs in order, perform its functions, that this dwelling of the soul should be capable of containing its dweller. Our minds, late spread abroad through countless spheres and endless combinations of thought, now retrenched themselves behind this wall of flesh, eager to preserve its well-being only. We were surely sufficiently degraded." "But my mother, my sick, my dear, dear mother, who never, since I was born, spoke a harsh word to me, who has been patient in many sufferings; pity her, dear Lady, she must die a miserable death if you do not pity her. People speak carelessly of her, because she is old and infirm, as if we must not all, if we are spared, become so; and then, when the young are old themselves, they will think that they ought to be taken care of." "But with the encreased mortality this intercourse declined and ceased. Even in England itself communication from one part of the island to the other became slow and rare. No vessel stemmed the flood that divided Calais from Dover; or if some melancholy voyager, wishing to assure himself of the life or death of his relatives, put from the French shore to return among us, often the greedy ocean swallowed his little craft, or after a day or two he was infected by the disorder, and died before he could tell the tale of the desolation of France." No wireless no even an inkling that such a thing would be not only possible but a nearly unavoidable technological advancement two centuries hence. "In the present instance, a worse feeling than either of these actuated the leader. He was an impostor in the most determined sense of the term. A man who had in early life lost, through the indulgence of vicious propensities, all sense of rectitude or self-esteem; and who, when ambition was awakened in him, gave himself up to its influence unbridled by any scruple." "At length, by mere dint of rowing, we reached the French coast. The stars faded, and the grey morning cast a dim veil over the silver horns of the waning moon—the sun rose broad and red from the sea, as we walked over the sands to Calais." "[...] it was determined that we should await the arrival of spring in our present abode, and so order our future movements as to pass the hot months in the icy vallies of Switzerland, deferring our southern progress until the ensuing autumn, if such a season was ever again to be beheld by us." "As Henry, Emperor of Germany, lay in the snow before Pope Leo's gate for three winter days and nights, so did she in humility wait before the icy barriers of his closed heart, till he, the servant of love, and prince of tender courtesy, opened it wide for her admittance, bestowing, with fervency and gratitude, the tribute of filial affection she merited." She made a spectacle. Being a nice guy, he forgave her. "It is a strange fact, but incontestible, that the philanthropist, who ardent in his desire to do good, who patient, reasonable and gentle, yet disdains to use other argument than truth, has less influence over men's minds, than he who, grasping and selfish, refuses not to adopt any means, nor awaken any passion, nor diffuse any falsehood, for the advancement of his cause." Principles are, at times, a heavy burden. "She conjured me, she commanded me to leave her— "Beware, O beware," she cried, "fly while yet your escape is practicable. Now you are safe; but strange sounds and inspirations come on me at times, and if the Eternal should in awful whisper reveal to me his will, that to save my child you must be sacrificed, I would call in the satellites of him you call the tyrant; they would tear you limb from limb; nor would I hallow the death of him whom Idris loved, by a single tear."" "Silence, melancholy bride of death, went in procession with him from town to town through the spacious region." "Now, the old woman sat no more at the door with her distaff—the lank beggar no longer asked charity in courtier-like phrase; nor on holidays did the peasantry thread with slow grace the mazes of the dance. Silence, melancholy bride of death, went in procession with him from town to town through the spacious region." "Argument and adjuration were lost on these dastards. The continual diminution of their own numbers, effected by pestilence, added a sting to their dislike of delay; and my opposition only served to bring their resolution to a crisis. That same evening they departed towards Auxerre. Oaths, as from soldiers to their general, had been taken by them: these they broke." I can't tell if the author also thinks he's an idiot. "Apparently I was to lead this troop of selfish and lawless men towards Switzerland," From their point of view, you're an an addled psychotic bent on leading everyone to destruction for purely personal reasons. "My horse grew tired—and I, forgetful of his fatigue, still as he lagged, cheered him with my voice, and urged him with the spur. He was a gallant animal, and I did not wish to exchange him for any chance beast I might light on, leaving him never to be refound. All night we went forward; in the morning he became sensible that we approached Versailles, to reach which as his home, he mustered his flagging strength. The distance we had come was not less than fifty miles, yet he shot down the long Boulevards swift as an arrow; poor fellow, as I dismounted at the gate of the castle, he sunk on his knees, his eyes were covered with a film, he fell on his side, a few gasps inflated his noble chest, and he died." It seems no sacrifice is too great for his mission. He rode the horse to death. "At length the plague, slow-footed, but sure in her noiseless advance, destroyed the illusion, invading the congregation of the elect, and showering promiscuous death among them." "We never saw it except at evening, when his coal black steed, his mourning dress, and plume of black feathers, had a majestic and awe-striking appearance; his face, one said, who had seen it for a moment, was ashy pale; he had lingered far behind the rest of his troop, and suddenly at a turn in the road, saw the Black Spectre coming towards him; he hid himself in fear, and the horse and his rider slowly past, while the moonbeams fell on the face of the latter, displaying its unearthly hue." The witch king of Angmar. "He grew giant tall to vulgar eyes; an icy atmosphere, they said, surrounded him; when he was heard, all animals shuddered, and the dying knew that their last hour was come." ""I am afraid," said she, "that it is selfish in me to have asked you to visit the old woman again, before she dies: yet perhaps it would have been a greater shock to hear suddenly that I was dead, than to see me first thus."" "I found the venerable mother of my Idris lying on a couch, her tall emaciated figure stretched out; her face fallen away, from which the nose stood out in sharp profile, and her large dark eyes, hollow and deep, gleamed with such light as may edge a thunder cloud at sun-set. All was shrivelled and dried up, except these lights; her voice too was fearfully changed, as she spoke to me at intervals. "I am afraid," said she, "that it is selfish in me to have asked you to visit the old woman again, before she dies: yet perhaps it would have been a greater shock to hear suddenly that I was dead, than to see me first thus."" "She spoke with difficulty, and I perceived that she regretted the necessity of death, even more than she cared to confess. Yet she had not to complain of an undue shortening of existence; her faded person shewed that life had naturally spent itself." Poor Niddy was nearly unable to express anything at the last. Save for "don't ever grow old." "There an hard-featured, weather-worn veteran, having prepared his meal, sat, his head dropped on his breast, the useless knife falling from his grasp, his limbs utterly relaxed, as thought of wife and child, and dearest relative, all lost, passed across his recollection. There sat a man who for forty years had basked in fortune's tranquil sunshine; he held the hand of his last hope, his beloved daughter, who had just attained womanhood; and he gazed on her with anxious eyes, while she tried to rally her fainting spirit to comfort him. Here a servant, faithful to the last, though dying, waited on one, who, though still erect with health, gazed with gasping fear on the variety of woe around." "Carried away by wonder, I forgot the death of man, and the living and beloved friend near me. When I turned, I saw tears streaming from his eyes; his thin hands pressed one against the other, his animated countenance beaming with admiration; "Why," cried he, at last, "Why, oh heart, whisperest thou of grief to me? Drink in the beauty of that scene, and possess delight beyond what a fabled paradise could afford."" The proper reaction when you see Switzerland for the first time. "His blindness permitted her to continue a delusion, at first the child of accident—and now solitary beings, sole survivors in the land, he remained unacquainted with the change, nor was aware that when he listened to his child's music, the mute mountains, senseless lake, and unconscious trees, were, himself excepted, her sole auditors." "They rest beneath the sod, the tree their monument;—the hallowed spot is distinct in my memory, paled in by craggy Jura, and the far, immeasurable Alps; the spire of the church they frequented still points from out the embosoming trees; and though her hand be cold, still methinks the sounds of divine music which they loved wander about, solacing their gentle ghosts." "A train half dead, through fear of death—a hopeless, unresisting, almost reckless crew, which, in the tossed bark of life, had given up all pilotage, and resigned themselves to the destructive force of ungoverned winds. Like a few furrows of unreaped corn, which, left standing on a wide field after the rest is gathered to the garner, are swiftly borne down by the winter storm. Like a few straggling swallows, which, remaining after their fellows had, on the first unkind breath of passing autumn, migrated to genial climes, were struck to earth by the first frost of November. Like a stray sheep that wanders over the sleet-beaten hill-side, while the flock is in the pen, and dies before morning-dawn." "[...] one by one, beneath the ice-caves, beside the waters springing from the thawed snows of a thousand winters, another and yet another of the remnant of the race of Man, closed their eyes for ever to the light." "Yellow lightnings played around the vast dome of Mont Blanc, silent as the snow-clad rock they illuminated; all was bare, wild, and sublime, while the singing of the pines in melodious murmurings added a gentle interest to the rough magnificence." Imagine knowing that yours would be the last sentience to behold such a thing, that nature would continue long eons of such shows irrespective of observers. That the clockwork continues without us, as easily as with us. Not that we have become irrelevant, but that we always were. "For seven years it had had full sway upon earth; she had trod every nook of our spacious globe; she had mingled with the atmosphere, which as a cloak enwraps all our fellow-creatures—the inhabitants of native Europe—the luxurious Asiatic—the swarthy African and free American had been vanquished and destroyed by her. Her barbarous tyranny came to its close here in the rocky vale of Chamounix." "We were impressed by the sentiment, that our race was run, but that plague would not be our destroyer. The coming time was as a mighty river, down which a charmed boat is driven, whose mortal steersman knows, that the obvious peril is not the one he needs fear, yet that danger is nigh; and who floats awe-struck under beetling precipices, through the dark and turbid waters—seeing in the distance yet stranger and ruder shapes, towards which he is irresistibly impelled." ""Thus are we left," said Adrian, "two melancholy blasted trees, where once a forest waved. We are left to mourn, and pine, and die." "We entered smiling Italy. Mingled grass and corn grew in her plains, the unpruned vines threw their luxuriant branches around the elms. The grapes, overripe, had fallen on the ground, or hung purple, or burnished green, among the red and yellow leaves. The ears of standing corn winnowed to emptiness by the spendthrift winds; the fallen foliage of the trees, the weed-grown brooks, the dusky olive, now spotted with its blackened fruit; the chestnuts, to which the squirrel only was harvest-man; all plenty, and yet, alas! all poverty, painted in wondrous hues and fantastic groupings this land of beauty. In the towns, in the voiceless towns, we visited the churches, adorned by pictures, master-pieces of art, or galleries of statues—while in this genial clime the animals, in new found liberty, rambled through the gorgeous palaces," "Two large halls, hung with splendid tapestry, and paved with marble, opened on each side of a court, of whose two other sides one overlooked the deep dark lake, and the other was bounded by a mountain, from whose stony side gushed, with roar and splash, the celebrated fountain. Above, underwood of myrtle and tufts of odorous plants crowned the rock, while the star-pointing giant cypresses reared themselves in the blue air, and the recesses of the hills were adorned with the luxuriant growth of chestnut-trees. Here we fixed our summer residence." "At length the moment of his death came: the blood paused in its flow —his eyes opened, and then closed again: without convulsion or sigh, the frail tenement was left vacant of its spiritual inhabitant." "We rowed lightly over the Laguna, and entered Canale Grande. The tide ebbed sullenly from out the broken portals and violated halls of Venice: sea weed and sea monsters were left on the blackened marble, while the salt ooze defaced the matchless works of art that adorned their walls, and the sea gull flew out from the shattered window." This reminds me of Ballard's Drowned World. "She vehemently reminded us that we had promised to take her once again to Greece, to the tomb of her parents. Why go to Rome? what should we do at Rome? We might take one of the many vessels to be found here, embark in it, and steer right for Albania." Obviously impossible for them to travel such great distances with sufficient sustenance. But it's good she ignores it. That level of detail would be tedious. "[...] the placid waves divided to receive our keel, and playfully kissed the dark sides of our little skiff, murmuring a welcome;" "Dark night mixed everything; we hardly discerned the white crests of the murderous surges, except when lightning made brief noon, and drank the darkness, shewing us our danger, and restoring us to double night." "I was myself an excellent swimmer—the very sight of the sea was wont to raise in me such sensations, as a huntsman experiences, when he hears a pack of hounds in full cry; I loved to feel the waves wrap me and strive to overpower me; while I, lord of myself, moved this way or that, in spite of their angry buffetings." "With every flash I saw the bordering coast; yet the progress I made was small, while each wave, as it receded, carried me back into ocean's far abysses." "[...] again I raised my unanswered cry, lifting up the only voice that could ever again force the mute air to syllable the human thought." Baxter's "Flood" also comes to mind. "Yes, this is the earth; there is no change—no ruin—no rent made in her verdurous expanse; she continues to wheel round and round, with alternate night and day, through the sky, though man is not her adorner or inhabitant." "[...] shall not, as here, find every thing forgetful of man; trampling on his memory, defacing his works, proclaiming from hill to hill, and vale to vale,—by the torrents freed from the boundaries which he imposed—by the vegetation liberated from the laws which he enforced—by his habitation abandoned to mildew and weeds, that his power is lost, his race annihilated for ever." "I found myself on Monte Cavallo. The fountain sparkled in the sun; the obelisk above pierced the clear dark-blue air. The statues on each side, the works, as they are inscribed, of Phidias and Praxiteles, stood in undiminished grandeur, representing Castor and Pollux, who with majestic power tamed the rearing animal at their side. If those illustrious artists had in truth chiselled these forms, how many passing generations had their giant proportions outlived! and now they were viewed by the last of the species they were sculptured to represent and deify." "[...] the lone wanderer will still unfurl his sail, and clasp the tiller—and, still obeying the breezes of heaven, for ever round another and another promontory, anchoring in another and another bay, still ploughing seedless ocean, leaving behind the verdant land of native Europe, adown the tawny shore of Africa, having weathered the fierce seas of the Cape, I may moor my worn skiff in a creek, shaded by spicy groves of the odorous islands of the far Indian ocean." "Thus around the shores of deserted earth, while the sun is high, and the moon waxes or wanes, angels, the spirits of the dead, and the ever-open eye of the Supreme, will behold the tiny bark, freighted with Verney—the LAST MAN." ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=4123 2020-12-27T13:16:57+01:00 https://earthli.com/users/marco

, which is a science-fiction novel "[...] about Ember, a post-apocalyptic underground city threatened by aging infrastructure and corruption." I heard she'd received the "The People of Sparks" as a gift and was intrigued to... ]]>

, which is a science-fiction novel "[...] about Ember, a post-apocalyptic underground city threatened by aging infrastructure and corruption." I heard she'd received the "The People of Sparks" as a gift and was intrigued to learn that she was reading books deemed "science fiction". I dug back through my own lists of recent years to find the following recommendations for (more or less) age- and reading-level appropriate series that provide useful fodder for a voracious reader. * "Books read in 2015" (Silo) * "Books read in 2016" (Silo) * "Books read in 2017" (Kingkiller Chronicle, Broken Earth) * "Books read in 2018" (Broken Earth, Hexalogy) I attached the following note: "None of my recommendations—either this one or future ones—are to be seen as a full-throated endorsement of any politics or opinions contained in them. None of them are YA and none of them will have been vetted for young audiences, but since you're 16, I don't see that as highly relevant. "YMMY" (Your Mileage May Vary). "I don't expect you to read any of them, nor will there be a quiz. I'm just delighted to find that people are still reading books. It gives me hope. If you do try something I recommend, I'd of course be interested to hear what you (will have?) thought of them (everyone brings their own perspective to anything they read)." ["Silo" ] The description of City of Ember on Wikipedia reminded me of a series I read a few years back. This set of books, too, are about a society finding its way underground -- and some people's efforts to perhaps get out. From Wikipedia: "The story of Wool takes place on a post-apocalyptic Earth.[6] Humanity clings to survival in the Silo, a subterranean city extending one hundred forty-four stories beneath the surface." My reviews and notes: * "Wool by Hugh Howey (2011; read in 2015)" * "Shift by Hugh Howey (2011; read in 2016)" * "Dust by Hugh Howey (2012; read in 2016)" ["The Kingkiller Chronicle" ] From the Wikipedia entry for the "first book" : "The Kingkiller Chronicle takes place in the fictional world of Temerant, a large continent of which the known part, called the Four Corners of Civilization, is divided into several distinct nations and cultures. Much of the world follows a religion similar, though not identical, to medieval Christianity. "Coexisting alongside the mortal world is the realm of The Fae, a parallel universe inhabited by supernatural creatures which can move between the two realms only when the moon is full. Magic exists in Temerant, too, but obeys a well-defined set of rules and principles that can only be exploited by those who have trained in its professional and scientific use." My reviews and notes: * "The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss (2007; read in 2017)" * "The Wise Man’s Fear by Patrick Rothfuss (2011; read in 2017)" ["The Hexalogy" ] From the Wikipedia entry for the "first book" : "In the story's worldline there exists a magical realm beneath the surface of all things—referred to as the Twilight (or Gloom in other translations). The action in the novel centers on a group of people referred to as the Others —human beings who tapped into the Twilight and gained supernormal abilities." The books were published in the original Russian and translated to English later. My reviews and notes: * "The Night Watch by Sergei Lukyanenko (1998 – en/2006) (read in 2018)" * The Day Watch * The Twilight Watch * "The Last Watch by Sergei Lukyanenko (2006 – en/2008) (read in 2018)" * "The New Watch by Sergei Lukyanenko (2011 – en/2012) (read in 2018)" * "The Sixth Watch by Sergei Lukyanenko (2012 – en/2013) (read in 2018)" ["The Broken Earth" ] From the Wikipedia entry for the "first book" : "The Fifth Season takes place on a planet with a single supercontinent called the Stillness. Every few centuries, its inhabitants endure what they call a "Fifth Season" of catastrophic climate change. "[...] In a prologue, an extraordinarily powerful orogene discusses the sad state of the world and laments the oppression of his race. He then uses his enormous power to fracture the entire continent along its length, threatening to cause the worst Fifth Season in recorded history. The story then follows three female orogenes across the Stillness from different time periods: Essun, Damaya, and Syenite." My reviews and notes: * "The Fifth Season (The Broken Earth Book 1) by N.K. Jemisin (2015) (read in 2017)" * "The Obelisk Gate (The Broken Earth Book 2) by N.K. Jemisin (2016) (read in 2017)" * "The Stone Sky (The Broken Earth Book 3) by N.K. Jemisin (2017) (read in 2018)" ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=4028 2020-10-18T12:57:21+02:00 https://earthli.com/users/marco

. It starts out with a recap of the thesis from the other book and then fills in with information from the last 15 years. Kunstler takes a critical look at his predictions from 2005, detailing where he got it right and where he went wrong -- and why. "I didn’t call it The Long Emergency for no reason. The operations of complex societies have many interesting features. Two in particular exist in a sort of dynamic tension of opposites: fragility and inertia. Fragility accretes insidiously as ever-greater complexity is layered onto the system. But inertia is the property by which systems in motion tend to remain in motion. A system as large and complex as ours has acquired tremendous momentum, which, of course, feeds back to aggravate its fragility, portending a more destructive eventual outcome." For example, the shale-oil boom was unforeseeable and kicked the can down the road for a decade -- at most. He likens it to "cutting of the top ten inches of your bedsheet and sewing it on the bottom because your feet were cold." Fracking is capital-intensive -- read: expensive -- and requires heavy loans. Fracked, shale-oil wells have a much steeper expiry curve and are quickly played out. "As independent oil analyst Arthur Berman put it: “Shale is a retirement party for the oil industry.”" Companies that are trying to stay ahead of their creditors have no choice but to dig more and more wells to take advantage of the initial steep "play", taking on more and more debt. Kunstler calls it "Red Queen Syndrome" because they're "running as fast as they can to stay in one place." It's only ZIRP (Zero Interest-rate Policies) that even allow something like this to exist. The more successful they are -- and they have been very successful, driving U.S. oil production to heretofore unknown heights -- the lower the oil price as the market gluts. When the price drops, their already-shitty and barely non-laughable business model becomes utterly fantastic and untenable. But they can't stop producing, either. He also discusses the increasing rise of propaganda for both alternative energy and for electric vehicles. He quickly disposes of the notion that either of these will replace the existing infrastructure in any significant way -- not without drastically changing living patterns and levels of consumption. The solution to the atrocity of suburbia, its attendant necessitating of an automobile for nearly everything, and the large-scale elimination of public transportation is not to replace the entire fleet with electric vehicles or to electrify all of the existing vehicles. There are neither nearly enough time nor resources for any of that. There's also the poor fit -- or utter engineering impossibility -- of using electric for everything that we use fossil fuels for today. You can't fly on batteries, nor can you ship overland with batter-powered trucks. Trains would work, but the U.S. blew its rail network to kingdom come decades ago. "The likelihood that we will power the USA on “renewable” energy in anything remotely like the current configuration of activities—suburbia, Happy Motoring, air-conditioning for all, cheap food, night baseball, Netflix, Amazon, server farms, commercial aviation, et cetera—is about the same as the chance that Xi Jinping will deliver each and every one of us a dim sum birthday breakfast at home next year." "The wishful public has been fed a diet of misinformation from a wishful news media that won’t tolerate anything but positive thinking about maintaining our current arrangements because imagining a different outcome is too depressing." "The thinking displayed in the Drawdown Project’s manifesto ignores a primary reality of our predicament: that increased complexity leads to increased risk of systemic breakdown. It’s as if they can’t imagine a world without a continuing expansion of human activities, as represented in economic growth. That is their only context. All that needs to be done is to “green up” the growth." In part two, Kunstler takes to the road to visit with and interview some of his most interesting, frequent, or long-term correspondents. He mostly visits farmers and those who have figured out how to be self-sufficient, self-taught, or at least useful in myriad ways. They almost all have the affectation common to the self-taught and somewhat cloistered: they have theories that they've never had refuted. Mostly, though, they seem like relatively nice (if, at times, woefully undereducated and drastically over-autodidactic) people -- Ok, the white-supremacist was far less rational and more suffused with conspiracy lore than the others -- who are making their way in decidedly non-mainstream and more traditional and possibly moral ways. The third and final part looks at some topics that have come much more to the fore in the last fifteen years -- and even in the year it took to write the first two parts: extinctions in Nature and environmental impact, financialization and oil and its massive and disastrous impact on savings and investment in the ten years since the 2008 crisis, the autocoprophagy of the American Left (the Right was already hopeless) in recent politics, with the seeming madness engendered by the election of Trump and, more importantly, the loss by Clinton. This madness evinces itself as a descent into omphaloskepsis on the part of the Left, as they shatter themselves into sects of Twitter-history–scouring hordes of virtue-signalers and purity-testers and know-it-alls who show up to torpedo anyone who was ever useful for ever having been slightly less than perfect in careers that have often spanned decades of struggle and hardship. "Social media, it turns out, amplifies and accelerates antisocial behavior among a population that was already having a hard enough time processing reality." Some of his further speculation is highly speculative and, in my opinion, wrong-headed, but that's to be expected, I suppose. Whereas he's mostly right about Trump, "History is a prankster. You order a Gray Champion, and cosmic room service sends up a casino developer and New York real estate mogul with a laughable hairdo, a big mouth, and no experience running a government." ...his in-built libertarianism mounts for him the same blinkers that many Americans wear, preventing them from seeing any solution but the one put right in front of them. For example, he complains about "[...] and a new confiscatory wealth tax on assets, not the income from assets, but a tax on what you already own." But many economically successful countries have something like it (including Switzerland). The problem of inequality is probably the biggest one facing the US (and other countries), with its nearly unfettered upward redistribution of wealth. Making that wealth inheritable cements the problem. Address the idea of "seizing capital", he writes, "Even theoretically, the money to pay for those programs doesn’t exist." It does. Other people have it. Even if future debt doesn't work, we can take back value from those who have stolen it from us and hoarded it. There's a decent chance that, by the time we get done taking it, that it won't be worth anything anymore, but the money is technically available. While he rightly recognizes that racism isn't the biggest problem -- and that historical attempts to address it in the U.S. have failed miserably -- he obstinately characterizes these failings in ways that blame the wrong parties. He correctly notes that all races in a certain class are affected by the upward distribution -- pointing out that telling people who've also been left behind that they need to share the tiny piece of pie they have is a non-starter. This is all correct, but somewhat lost in his ham-handed prose (and I'm being very generous here because he's otherwise a lucid thinker and writer; some would just dismiss him as a racist outright, which is unfair in the other direction). Finally, he tells of his own personal journey over the last fifteen years. He divorced, moved out of Saratoga Springs, and bought a property with a house on it in a declining nearby town. He's got a large garden, fruit trees, and some chickens. With about ten hours of work per week, he makes a good part of his own food. He's close enough to town to walk to Main Street. He was quite ill for nearly a decade with cobalt poisoning from a hip replacement in 2003. He seems to have battened down the hatches in his preparations for the ongoing Long Emergency (exacerbated post-publication by COVID-19). [Citations] "I didn’t call it The Long Emergency for no reason. The operations of complex societies have many interesting features. Two in particular exist in a sort of dynamic tension of opposites: fragility and inertia. Fragility accretes insidiously as ever-greater complexity is layered onto the system. But inertia is the property by which systems in motion tend to remain in motion. A system as large and complex as ours has acquired tremendous momentum, which, of course, feeds back to aggravate its fragility, portending a more destructive eventual outcome." "In any case, after 2016, the attention of the media especially turned away from everything but the political battle of the so-called “resistance” versus Trump. There’s very little news about climate change, the oil predicament, the condition of the banking system, the global food supply, the mass extinction of life on land and sea, and all the other issues that will likely end up mattering a whole lot more than the fate of Donald J. Trump." "The objective is to stimulate the formation of a coherent consensus about what is happening to us so we can make coherent plans about what to do." "As independent oil analyst Arthur Berman put it: “Shale is a retirement party for the oil industry.”" "Between 2005 and 2008, US imports reached almost fifteen million barrels a day—three-quarters of all the oil we burned. Our dependence on oil produced by foreign nations had become a matter of grave concern." "On top of all that were the environmental “externalities”—the threat of poisoned groundwater from chemicals in the fracking fluid, seismic disturbances (i.e., earthquakes) from poking so many pipes through underground strata and blasting it with high-pressure water, the considerable wear and tear on roads from the cavalcades of water and sand trucks, and the higher-order damage to the biosphere from extending the fossil-fuel economic regime." "the oil companies are under tremendous pressure to produce as much oil as quickly as possible in order to maintain the cash flow necessary to service their debt. Paradoxically, that has led to excessive production and thus lower oil prices—a hamster wheel of futility." "The US burned around five billion barrels of oil in 2017 plus an additional two billion barrels of natural gas liquids, averaging around 19.5 million barrels a day. Independent analyst Arthur Berman estimated that the Permian Basin contained a remaining 3.7 billion barrels of realistically economical-recoverable oil. Do the math." "The US is caught in a predicament that can be stated pretty simply: oil over $75 a barrel crushes economic activity, and oil under $75 a barrel bankrupts oil companies." "The public apparently has lost any sense of urgency about our fossil-fuel quandary, and therefore lost any motivation to even think about making changes in our basic living arrangements." As with COVID. "Unless, that is, we’re tired of the possibilities for joy, meaning, and excitement on a planet (this one: Earth) that we are superbly fitted to thrive on—and which, sadly, we’re in the process of damaging quite recklessly with our current activities, including shooting a lot of junk into orbit around it." "But the Mars colonization proposal does raise a sticky question: If the human race can’t get its shit together on Earth, how might we possibly thrive on a distant planet with an atmosphere that is 95 percent carbon dioxide, has little protection against space radiation, no visible aboveground water, nor any of the geophysical and biological characteristics that support life here, and which, finally, is a 33.9-million-mile resupply journey at its closest?" "The fantasy that power for the proposed electric car fleet will someday come from “renewables” also probably founders on the unacknowledged need for an underlying cheap fossil-fuel economy to fabricate things like solar panels and wind turbines at the necessary scale to come close to the lifestyle we think of as normal." "Even if the trips were all multi-passenger rides, the commute would still require an awful lot of cars." Corona throws a monkey wrench in here as well. "After 2010, car sales crept back up again to over seventeen million a year. These are the kind of sales numbers the car manufacturers need to justify their business model. How does this gigantic industry reorganize for much-lower-scale production and survive? Does it become a boutique industry?" "The good news would be that electric cars have the potential to last much longer than gasoline or diesel cars. That’s good news for the car buyer, at least. The bad news is that, unless cars are engineered for timely failure (planned obsolescence), the car manufacturers cannot depend on the same routine replacement formula that has ruled their economic model for decades and accounts for most car sales." "The likelihood that we will power the USA on “renewable” energy in anything remotely like the current configuration of activities—suburbia, Happy Motoring, air-conditioning for all, cheap food, night baseball, Netflix, Amazon, server farms, commercial aviation, et cetera—is about the same as the chance that Xi Jinping will deliver each and every one of us a dim sum birthday breakfast at home next year." "The public is tragically confused about so-called “renewable energy.” The sun may shine a lot of the time (in some places anyway), and the winds may blow (ditto), and they may indeed be eternal features of Earth’s geophysics, but the hardware necessary to capture that energy is not renewable. It’s a product of a fossil-fuel economy, and we have no experience fabricating this hardware any other way—most particularly via renewable energy sources. And certainly not at the scale required for a vaunted “Green New Deal.”" "The wishful public has been fed a diet of misinformation from a wishful news media that won’t tolerate anything but positive thinking about maintaining our current arrangements because imagining a different outcome is too depressing." "This is not a malicious conspiracy by evil authorities so much as a neurotic defense mechanism in the face of the disturbing reality that the comforts and conveniences of recent decades may be drawing to a close." "Wind turbines typically contain more than eight thousand parts. These are made of steel, concrete, exotic metals, and exotic plastics, components that depend on heavy mining activity, the petrochemical industry, long supply lines, and a lot of energy to bring it all together to manufacture and then deploy the gigantic machines." "all the logistical issues that apply to wind turbines apply to solar: embedded energy in manufacturing the hardware, long mining and manufacturing supply lines, transportation of components to site, limited design life, exposure to the extremes of weather, technical expertise needed to deploy the hardware and the costs associated with all of that. So far, existing battery storage would not scale to accommodate the amount of solar electricity needed under any hypothetical “green energy transition” schemes." "The bottom line is we will be able to set up a lot less wind and solar electric infrastructure than the public is being teased with these days." "Finally, there is the issue of the electric grid, a genuine wonder of the world. Americans rarely think twice when they enter their home and flick on the light switch. We just take it for granted that the juice is always available. That is not the case in many other societies around the world. Intermittent or unreliable electric service would be a catastrophe for American business and a trauma for households. And it may be increasingly the outcome as we move forward." "Social media, it turns out, amplifies and accelerates antisocial behavior among a population that was already having a hard enough time processing reality." "One important additional angle, however, is uniformly left out of the debate: how all this computer technology is really at the mercy of the fragile electric grid. All discussion about where digital technology is heading in the future ignores this sticky issue, and how it is tied to our fossil fuel supply and debt-based finance system." "He considers the chestnut an excellent food crop and claims that many of the products made from corn these days could be made from chestnut flour. Corn is a majestically resilient and versatile food crop, but it is hell on a biome. And the way that the agri-biz boys grow it is washing away the topsoil of the American breadbasket at epic rates. It can’t go on. And, as we already know, things that can’t go on, don’t." "Nowadays it’s gotten to the point where one lone agri-biz farmer can spend a day mindlessly sitting in the air-conditioned cab of a giant, million-dollar harvester guided by GPS, watching movies on an iPad while the machine does all the work, including the mental labor of deciding when to turn the rig down a new row. It’s barely necessary for a human to be mentally present while the job gets done. The giant harvesters also come with giant mortgages. The biggest “input” in this mode of farming is borrowed money, a.k.a. debt." "If we don’t go toward a perennial ecosystems-based agriculture, whether we’re high-tech or low-tech, we’re going to collapse, because there’s no way to avoid that." "“I can handle deer flies,” Mark said. “You know how you deal with a deer fly? You grab an oak twig and just stick it behind your ear and they won’t bite you.”" "There are a few regulars with extreme views whom I allow to post because they are, at least, polite in presenting their unappetizing ideas, and squelching them would keep a certain political reality that we must contend with out of the arena where, at least, they are exposed to light and argument. A couple of these are white nationalists." "The Civil Rights era ensued, and the legal basis of Jim Crow was dismantled, immediately followed by Lyndon Johnson’s “War on Poverty,” with its unanticipated and destructive knock-on effects of welfare dependency and single parenthood." He will not fucking let up on this. As if this wasn't planned as a side-effect of the massive expansion of the carceral state as Jim Crow was replaced with a new slew of laws applied extremely disproportionately to Blacks. "Indeed, Josh had commented earlier that he viewed black life in America as essentially “prison culture.” I asked if he’d ever been in jail. He said that he’d never even been inside a police car. But he viewed racism in America as being absolutely structural and pervasive, and he based his comportment on the need to survive in a fundamentally hostile culture." "It had the look of an extraordinarily well-equipped prison cell. Indeed, Josh had commented earlier that he viewed black life in America as essentially “prison culture.” I asked if he’d ever been in jail. He said that he’d never even been inside a police car. But he viewed racism in America as being absolutely structural and pervasive, and he based his comportment on the need to survive in a fundamentally hostile culture. “I dump on black people being fuckups, but racism is a real phenomenon. And you have to come up with strategies to counter it because you can’t just ignore it.”" "He regards relations between blacks and whites as “a total disaster” because “[t]he people who have the ability to eliminate racism do not have the will to do so, and the people who have the will to do so do not have the ability.”" Hard to disagree in general. "People will be further “freed” to become prisoners of their own passions, no matter how ridiculous. Video games, porn, recreational marijuana, “sex robots,” social media of all kinds . . . “Distraction” will become the formal currency that drives the economy because in a nation where people (especially young men) can no longer count on full-time employment, the state will have every incentive to support and defend every hedonistic, narcissistic, distractive behavior in order to keep attention off themselves and their failed policies." Josh wrote the citation above. "But I came to the conclusion that the problem with the current set of tools was not solvable. We used wind and solar in one form or another to power our planet for x thousands of years, but we’ve never powered it at this scale." The man never finished high school. "My big epiphany: the moment you run out of modern metallurgical tools, a lot of things that we take for granted today you can’t do anymore." "These days, his favorite math workout is how the transcendental number “e” comes into existence. “It’s like pi,” he attempts to explain. Of course, he was talking to somebody who flunked both basic geometry and algebra 1 in high school." The blind leading the blind. "Moscow, in the mid 1990s, was an exciting place for a young man. The Russian people had only been out of the Soviet yoke for a few years. Liberation and danger were both in the air. The Americans, led by Harvard economist Jeffrey Sachs, were attempting to “help” the Russians reorient their economy along capitalist market lines—and incidentally assisting the fledgling oligarchs in looting what remained of the country’s industrial base to amass their fortunes." So-so description. At least he used quotes around "help". "The people born between 1980 and 1984 are the really youngest around who grew up in an analog world, in a world that made more sense than today’s world does to people. I am part of the most useless generation that’s ever existed in human history. Millennials know how to do less for themselves than anyone that’s ever existed on the planet Earth. Home Depot and Lowe’s, a couple of years ago they realized ‘our business model is screwed’ because this whole generation of people that’s coming up, they don’t even know how to use a tape measure." "“I think people need to live far more humbly,” she said. “That should have happened a long time ago, probably at least twenty years ago. Like, we have neighbors that work for efficiency advocacy groups, yet they fly all over the world for vacations. There’s just this disconnect. Or I guess you call it greenwashing in your own mind. A lot of people genuinely don’t even think about it and don’t even know, so they’re not even doing it hypocritically. They just honestly don’t even know how much energy something like flying takes. I think the population has to decrease. I think more people need to have small gardens—and I don’t know if this is possible." "The city of Perth, at the farthest southwestern edge of Australia, is reputed to be the major world city farthest away from any other civilized place on Earth." "“I understand,” he said, “if you’re doing well in a system which is collapsing, it’s in the interest of your own psychological comfort to imagine that the collapse is a fairy tale, that it’s really just lazy people who should get to work and stop complaining. I think our civilization climbed a lot faster than any previous one and it can go down a lot faster. I’ve been living through the collapse most of my life. And I think my kids will live through it for most of their lives.”" "the general theme out there is a belief that the problems with our current arrangements can be “fixed” if we just elect the right leaders, apply the right “policy tools,” guarantee equal outcomes, have faith in technological innovation, recycle more trash, and “celebrate diversity.” They are hoping for the best, while living lives that make them frantic just getting through each day, and losing ground even so." "The world population increased from one billion souls around the year 1800 to nearly eight billion today. (In my lifetime, the USA population more than doubled from 160 million to 330 million.)" In my lifetime, world population has doubled. "will take some initiative, grit, skill, and probably some luck to stay in the game, which is why it pays to be an early adapter." It always takes luck. You have to make something of opportunity, but without luck or -- even worse -- with bad luck, you're still sunk. "But today, the world is composed of overdeveloped nations and nations that will probably never develop much further, though we continue to use the euphemism “developing nations” in the public discussion to avoid insulting struggling societies. The fossil fuels won’t be there for them any more than they’ll be there for us. The capital for work-arounds will not be there either. Many so-called developing nations exist in geographically unfavorable places and are already deep into population overshoot. Think: Egypt. Now imagine Egypt with no more grain subsidies and only donkeys where they used to have trucks." "In short, people living at the core—the “developed” or “advanced” nations—could fall faster and harder than the people in the undeveloped places where life, however arduous, is already simple. So, it may be more accurate to view this as a leveling process. We’ll know more in a few years." "The weak link in our economy is the feature we call finance, which has been failing in one way or another since the dot-com bust. It slipped very badly again in 2008 and was temporarily salvaged by nations borrowing massively from the future to cover current expenses and to bail out insolvent “systemically important institutions,” i.e., Too-Big-to-Fail banks. The problem, which ought to be obvious by now, is that the future will not provide the amount of collateral that was pledged as security for all that debt—namely, “growth” of ever-more industrial activity and the surplus wealth it would hypothetically produce." "The confusion at even the most refined layers of the intellectual class is so great now, so vitiated by wishful thinking, public relations bullshit, and political opportunism, that the responsibility weighs extra heavily on individuals to think for themselves through the fog of yammer." "If government can be reorganized (or emergently self-reorganizes) at the local level, it may tend to be authoritarian. This has been pretty much the norm through human history. Human societies are inevitably hierarchical. Tribes have chiefs. Elites often push the rest of us around. Under the best circumstances, they do it within some cultural constraints to avert rebellion." "So, thinking about future food production, you must figure on a problem at least as significant as an unstable climate: the end of affordable oil and gas and all their by-products, especially pesticides, herbicides, fertilizers, and motor fuels." "Apart from weather, a stem-rust disease in the Middle East and North Africa dropped yields, with Yemen hit especially hard (and in failed state chaos a decade later)." Can you please mention how their sufferings are not even mostly incidental to climate, but a deliberate machination by Saudi and America? "The top four corn exporters account for 87 percent of total corn exports. Around the world, corn is the leading livestock feed. The report predicts more frequent “synchronous price shocks.”" "Likewise, the Drawdown Project’s riff on airplanes of the future: A century after the first commercial flight, the aviation industry has become a fixture of global transport . . . and of global emissions. Today, some 20,000 airplanes are in service around the world, producing at minimum 2.5 percent of annual emissions. With upwards of 50,000 planes expected to take to the skies by 2040 . . .50 Say what? I’m much more inclined to think that there will be little left of commercial aviation in 2040, not that it will be two and a half times bigger than it is now. Their argument assumes that aviation fuel—basically unleaded kerosene—will continue to be available in the same (or greater!) volumes than today." "I’m sure it is a cool and fun exercise to imagine evermore elegant technologies, but that ignores the central problem of making further overinvestments in technological complexity as the already-existing hyper-complexity groans with diminishing returns." "“[E]ssential supply chains depend on trucks nearly completely,” she writes. They even deliver the diesel fuel that the trucks run on, as well as other essentials, such as the chemicals used for most municipal water-treatment plants and the food that most Americans eat." "The thinking displayed in the Drawdown Project’s manifesto ignores a primary reality of our predicament: that increased complexity leads to increased risk of systemic breakdown. It’s as if they can’t imagine a world without a continuing expansion of human activities, as represented in economic growth. That is their only context. All that needs to be done is to “green up” the growth." "The fact is, 97 percent of the bluefin tuna that were in the oceans before industrial-scaled, mechanized fishing began are gone now." Actually 100% of those fish are gone. But they've been replaced with only 3%. "Changing the ocean’s basic chemistry is a dangerous game. It’s been thirty-five million years since Earth last reached the atmospheric CO2 levels that are being recorded today. There are several earlier instances, too, recorded in undersea sediment cores. But the rate of change has never been as fast as the current situation. Even in periods when the CO2 levels were higher, the rate of change was slower, and the oceans had time to buffer the effects. That’s not the case now. It’s hard to conceive an outcome in which we can have dead oceans and a still-living Earth." "I’ve already described my objections to techno-narcissism and organizational grandiosity. We think too highly of our magical abilities to control the things we are so busy measuring." "What will finally change the picture is the economic collapse of techno-industrial society." The Corona hammer was a dress rehearsal. "Global economies, it was thought, would always return to the growth trend line, and that growth could be considered the collateral for ever-more borrowing. Growth meant more, more of everything, ever-more more." "[...] more to the point, that the public would soon catch on. That is, if expected future growth was collateral for all these massive borrowings—about $240 trillion globally as I write—and there was no more growth, then the debt would never be repaid, and the nations in question would probably not be able to borrow anymore, meaning further, no more bid on bond sales, unless the central banks bought all the bonds themselves. And, if they did, it would be an arrant fraud, and the attempt to do so would have nasty consequences, most likely a currency crisis in which the nation’s money itself lost its value, as people lost faith in the operations that supported it." And yet, here we are. Covid got that ball rolling quite a bit faster. "The main result was that jacked-up share prices tended to reward top executives with large year-end bonuses, and more valuable stock holdings, regardless of the performance of the company. The bonuses were usually granted by boards of directors who were appointed by the same people getting the bonuses. These machinations were just another form of classic and massive malinvestment" "You can also view it as mismanagement of all the work that people in society do to produce things of value. Many savers are traditionally older people who seek a low-risk but regular return on their savings. Removing the incentive for saving either pushes them into higher-risk investments like stocks, or prompts them to just spend down the money before it loses even more value. Pension funds, too, are traditionally inclined to seek annual income from low-risk interest-bearing securities, and they need to show reliable gains year-in and year-out in order to pay their obligations to retirees and stay solvent." "There will be a lack of bond buyers (lenders) in whatever is left of the regular bond market because it will be obvious by then that the government is a deadbeat—that the only way it can pay back the bondholders is in money that has less value than it did when it was borrowed, because the government is repaying old debt in new borrowings that it has, in effect lent to itself. So, it completes the circle jerk of borrowing from its own central bank in order to pay back the central bank." "Nothing lasts forever, of course, and wonderful as it was, the industrial economy couldn’t last forever. It produced too many destructive externalities, including global population overshoot, resource depletion, and planetary ecological impoverishment. So, as it became apparent that the game couldn’t go on, a lot of the smarter folk in society turned to racketeering to keep making money at all costs—even doctors and college presidents!" "The really magical part was that they managed to make it socially normative and ethically acceptable, even while the middle class was systematically impoverished by their rackets—so that in the year 2019, any poor schnook who took his child to an emergency room with appendicitis could find a bill for $97,000 in his mailbox two months later, with no plausible explanation for the charges—and absolutely nobody from the hospital billing director to the state attorney general would do anything to correct the injustice, or even listen to his complaint." "Because the depletion rate of shale oil wells is so steep, the industry can’t function without high rates of continual capital spending, and they can’t spend without borrowing. The wells have to be drilled incessantly and fracked (with countless truck trips hauling fracking sand, water, and chemicals to the wells). The industry is caught in the Red Queen Syndrome: running as fast as it can to keep production up." "[...] national digital currencies created by computer “magic.” Certainly, some countries (e.g., Sweden) are working hard to eliminate cash. People in other nations may not be so ready to submit. An unappetizing by-product of this scheme will be government’s ability to track everybody’s income and spending, in essence, a financial “surveillance state” with an expanded range of punishments for noncompliance." "Don’t forget that the internet is at the mercy of the electric grid, the world’s largest machine, as it is sometimes called. The American electric grid is in notoriously shabby condition. Draw your own conclusions." "History is a prankster. You order a Gray Champion, and cosmic room service sends up a casino developer and New York real estate mogul with a laughable hairdo, a big mouth, and no experience running a government." "Philosophically, they are aligned with Rousseau’s idea of the perfectibility of man and a neo-Jacobin wish to engineer equality of outcome in a world of uncertain events where people are born with different abilities." Mischaracterized. Different ability, maybe. Different starting lines, different benefits, and different onuses, rules, and impediments, definitely. "[...] and a new confiscatory wealth tax on assets, not the income from assets, but a tax on what you already own." Yeah, we have that in Switzerland. Quit yer bitching like its completely unworkable. Fucking Americans, think they're so special. Bigboy pants time. Time to start adulting. "Even theoretically, the money to pay for those programs doesn’t exist." It does. Other people have it. Even if future debt doesn't work, we can take back value from those who have stolen it from us and hoarded it. There's a decent chance that, by the time we get done taking it, that it won't be worth anything anymore, but the money is technically available. "By the logic of the day, “inclusion” and “diversity” are achieved by forbidding the transmission of ideas, shutting down debate, and creating new racially segregated college dorms." "The universities beget a class of what Nassim Taleb prankishly called “intellectuals yet idiots,”63 hierophants trafficking in fads and falsehoods, conveyed in esoteric jargon larded with psychobabble in support of a therapeutic crypto-Gnostic crusade bent on transforming human nature to fit the wished-for template of a world where anything goes. In fact, they have only produced a new intellectual despotism worthy of Stalin, Mao Zedong, and Pol Pot." "It should be obvious that so much of the legislated efforts to assist black America didn’t work out as expected and instead produced tragic unintended consequences, starting with the income distribution policies that promoted single-mother parenting and the absence of fathers in the lives of their children." Sometimes I wonder if he's being deliberately obtuse or whether he really doesn't know about the new Jim Crow. Fathers have a hard time being in the home when they're imprisoned at the rates that black men are. "Hung out to dry economically, this class of whites fell into many of the same behaviors as the poor blacks before them: out-of-wedlock births, absent fathers, drug abuse, crime." You could spare a few words to note that these features are part of the class war of the rich against the poor. They are side-effects of the monied class squeezing value and labor from stones. "On the Right, Karl Rove expressed this point of view some years ago when he bragged (of the George W. Bush White House) that “we make our own reality,” and the Left says nearly the same thing in the post-structuralist, narcissist malarkey of academia: Your “lived experience” is your truth." "The toolkit of the Enlightenment—reason, empiricism—doesn’t work very well in this socioeconomic hall of mirrors, so all that baggage is discarded for the idea that reality is just a social construct—just whatever story you feel like telling about it—and what you report your feelings to be." "The people struggle to find who to blame and what to do. One thing after another obstructs their ability to carry on, to make a living, to find satisfactory relationships, to protect their offspring, to find purpose and meaning in daily existence—until merely being in this world seems like the worst sort of swindle." "A number of ruins from the industrial age still stand around town. There’s a set of dressed stone bridge piers from the early railroad (1869) standing mutely in the river on the south side of town. They are partially collapsed now, with trees sprouting out of them. The trestle they supported is long gone. Last summer I went swimming in the Gardon River in France under a Roman aqueduct that still spans the stream after nearly two thousand years. It amazes me how quickly the landscape has swallowed up the residue of industrial America, and how brief that heyday was." "The railroad connected with the industrial city of Troy, New York, thirty miles south, and from there, you could connect with passenger trains to Boston and New York City. The journey from the village down to Manhattan took five hours altogether in the 1920s, including the change of trains. The drive today takes at least four hours—of intense concentration behind the wheel—sometimes longer in terrifying weather, with tractor-trailers bum-rushing you in the passing lane." ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3995 2020-10-18T12:29:06+02:00 https://earthli.com/users/marco

by the master of horror about a masked ball held by a Prince Prospero in his sumptuous castle. The castle has 7 room, each decorated in a different color, with the final room painted black and illuminated by an eldritch crimson glare. An cowled, uninvited guest slithers through the proceedings, eventually revealing itself as not a man, but a disease that takes its victims quickly and unmistakably. "There were sharp pains, and sudden dizziness, and then profuse bleeding at the pores, with dissolution. The scarlet stains upon the body and especially upon the face of the victim, were the pest ban which shut him out from the aid and from the sympathy of his fellow-men. And the whole seizure, progress and termination of the disease, were the incidents of half an hour." ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=4066 2020-10-18T12:09:35+02:00 https://earthli.com/users/marco

. "Naked Lunch evolved slowly and unpredictably over nine tumultuous years in the life of its author, William Seward Burroughs. The novel was not created according to a predetermined outline or plan, but accumulated through a decade of travel and turmoil on four continents and continually edited and reedited not only by its author but also by his close friends Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac." "Thus, by its very nature, Naked Lunch resists the idea of a fixed text, and our re-creation of the history of its composition and editing has required a careful review of many disparate typescripts in various archival collections, as well as the two first editions, in 1959 (Oympia Press) and 1962 (Grove Press)–the texts of which are quite different." "No, it wasn’t in New Orleans, because Al was there–or was he? He couldn’t have been there. But I can feel him there." This is an excellent description/example of what it feels like to realize that a memory is flat-out wrong, but that it still feels so real, a reality that, even in recognition of its unreality -- or, at best, gross inaccuracy -- still retains a hold strong enough to lull one back into believing that it actually did happen. "The U.S.A. is burned down dust bowl, cattle and junkies low for relief as they nuzzle the dry opium pipes and empty caps . . ." "In the gathering grey twilight of junk . . . shooting every hour–looked at my shoe all day . . . grey pictures on a grey screen, fading slower and slower . . . Your time is running out almost gone it was panic got me to the airport and on the plane with an eau de cologne bottle full of junk solution . . . fixed in the airport washroom at Paris, on to the grey [streets of London] . . . Apomorphine puked up my monkey in bloody pieces into a basin carried out . . . flesh hangs on the bones the untenanted body, and then suddenly you are back inside moving and I walked through Hyde Park . . ." "There is something about Chicago that paralyzes the spirit under a dead weight of a formalism dictated by hoodlums, a hierarchy of decorticated wops . . . And everywhere the smell of atrophied gangsters, the dead weight of those dear dead days hanging in the air like rancid ectoplasm . . . You suffocate in the immediate past, still palpable, quivering like an earthbound ghost, slipping around the corner in a junky’s body stealing out of a night spot, the old time jazz or just the soul of the Twenties disembodied will hit you in Lincoln Park, or there on the Near North Side at Dearborn and Halsted the feel of the Twenties will hit you." "Up through the river towns, Babahoya, Quevedo, Puerto Limón, black Stetsons and the grey malaria faces color of dirty paper, muzzle-loading shotguns and vultures pecking in the streets" "He died testing a condemned parachute misconverted and reconverted by Trak, Inc.–a scandal involving a sinister Albanian Fixer known as Mr. IN who got his start as a Congressional lavatory attendant . . ." "American suburbs where the male soul rots on transplanted sod [...]" "Lee walked back the way he had come through streets twisted in a slow arthritis of masonry . . . Up the winding stairs warped by the late unsteady returns of a vehement drunkard so that now you stagger up those stairs drunk or sober." "Every day die a little. It takes up the time." "The winged horse and the mosaic of iron cut the sky to blue cake . . . "On crystal balconies pensive angels study pink fingernails . . . Gilt flakes fall through the sunlight . . ." "Bougainvillea covers the limestone steps . . . Poisoned pigeons rain from the Northern Lights, plop with burning wings into dry canal . . . The Reservoirs are empty . . . Blue stairs end spiral down suffocate . . . where brass statues crash through the hungry squares and alleys of the gaping city . . ." "Like I say The Reader will frequently find the same thing said in the same words. This is not carelessness nor is it for The Infatuation With Sound Of Own Words Dept. . . . It indicates space-time juxtaposition . . . a folding in and back (the universe is curved, feller say) . . ." Breaking the fourth wall. "if Kerouac was the chronicler, William S. Burroughs stood out as the intellectual center, the most edgy and uncompromising of them all. He was Old Bull Lee, gentleman junkie, Texas pot farmer, the slightly older mentor who had initiated Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg into the underground." "Little wonder, then, that at sixteen, I could not read it, for I didn’t know what I was looking at. (I finally did manage to navigate Naked Lunch in college, although even then, there was much about it that I missed.) Indeed," "The tension this embodies—between the urge to write and the inadequacies of language, between the incomprehensibility of everything and our inherent need to make some accommodation with the chaos, even if only to disengage—resides at the heart of Naked Lunch, which remains as relevant and relentless as it has ever been." "“I can feel the heat closing in,” Burroughs writes, setting the tone for the entire book, although such heat has less to do with the police than with the futility of freedom in a world of systems designed to keep us from ourselves" "Burroughs had always been an enemy of hypocrisy." "Trocchi is smart, but Burroughs, as it turns out, may be smarter, aware that even the most extreme philosophical position is still a philosophical position, offering only the illusion of control." "“The Word is divided into units which be all in one piece and should so be taken,” Burroughs declares, “but the pieces can be had in any order being tied up back and forth in and out fore and aft like an innaresting sex arrangement. This book spill off the page in all directions, kaleidoscope of vistas, medley of tunes and street noises, farts and riot yips and the slamming steel shutters of commerce, screams of pain and pathos and screams plain pathic, copulating cats and outraged squawk of the displaced bullhead, prophetic mutterings of brujo in nutmeg trance, snapping necks and screaming mandrakes, sigh of orgasm, heroin silent as dawn in the thirsty cells, Radio Cairo screaming like a berserk tobacco auction, and flutes of Ramadan fanning the sick junky like a gentle lush worker in the grey subway dawn feeling with delicate fingers for the green folding crackle . . ." -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] That formulation reminds me of a citation from "Industrial Society and its Future by Theodore Kaczynski" , "In effect, antidepressants are a means of modifying an individual’s internal state in such a way as to enable him to tolerate social conditions that he would otherwise find intolerable." ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=4061 2020-09-26T23:22:31+02:00 https://earthli.com/users/marco

* "Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (2011)" by Yuval Noah Harari * "The New Jim Crow (2012)" by Michelle Alexander * "The Road to Wigan Pier (1937)" by George Orwell * "Russia Without Putin: Money, Power and the Myths of the New Cold War (2018)" by Tony Wood [Science] * "The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming (2019)" by David Wallace-Wells [Biography / Autobiography] * "The Making of Donald Trump (2016)" by David Cay Johnston * "Digging Up Mother (2016)" by Doug Stanhope * "Based on a True Story: Not a Memoir (2016)" by Norm McDonald [Sociology] * "Rape: From Lucretia to #MeToo (2019)" by Mithu Sanyal [Economy] * "Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea (2013)" by Mark Blyth * "First As Tragedy, Then As Farce (2009)" by Slavoj Žižek * "Rigged: How Globalization and the Rules of the Modern Economy Were Structured to Make the Rich Richer (2016)" by Dean Baker * "Adults in the Room: My Battle with the European and American Deep Establishment (2017)" by Yanis Varoufakis [Fiction] [Classics] * "In Cold Blood (1966)" by Truman Capote * "Moby-Dick; or, The Whale (1851)" by Herman Melville * "Crime and Punishment (1866)" by Fyodor Dostoyevsky * "One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1962)" by Ken Kesey [Adventure] * "Revenge: A Novel (2003)" by Stephen Fry Savage Season: A Hap and Leonard Novel (1990) by Joe R. Lansdale No link, so here's my review: "This is the story of Leonard, a gay, black veteran of Vietnam and his friend Hap, a guy with few prospects and a lot of baggage. This pair are tangled up in a heist—or, rather, picking up the lost treasure from a heist gone wrong—planned by people with differing motives and histories. That Hap’s ex is involved makes it hard for him to think straight. Leonard is aware that the situation is far from ideal, but knows that he and Hap need the money. "The story weaves bygone days of 60s and 70s idealism with naked ambition and greed. Everything goes spectacularly south in an abattoir of a finale that would do a Tarantino film justice." [Speculative Fiction] * "We (1921)" by Evgeny Zamyatin * "The Futurological Congress: From the Memoirs of Ijon Tichy (1971)" by Stanislaw Lem * "The Handmaid’s Tale (1985)" by Margaret Atwood * "The Man in the High Castle (1962)" by Philip K. Dick * "Adjustment Day (2018)" by Chuck Palahniuk * "Blindness (1995)" by Jose Saramago (translated to English by Giovanni Pontiero) [Unclassified] * "Rant: The Oral Biography of Buster Casey (2008)" by Chuck Palahniuk [Science Fiction / Fantasy] Don't say "I hate science fiction": I've only included quality/not-really-science-fiction-y ones. They're great books with interesting ideas that have a kernel of speculation and take off from there. Most are rooted in the real world, though (e.g. Palahniuk and Gibson). I've left off others that fall more squarely into sci-fi/fantasy. Up the Line (1969) by Robert Silverberg No link, so here's part of my review: "A wonderful time-travel book in the grand tradition, with lots of sex. The title refers to the expression used in the future for going into the past; going “Down the line” moves you to the future relative to your current time. The book clearly shows the year in which it was written, as there is a whole lot of free lovin’ going on in the future. Time travel has become commonplace enough that there are guided tours of the past’s greatest moments. [...]" * "The Peripheral (2014)" by William Gibson * "American Gods (2002)" by Neil Gaiman * "Cloud Atlas (2004)" by David Mitchell ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=4059 2020-09-26T14:15:05+02:00 https://earthli.com/users/marco

. Since then, I've gotten several more -- with seemingly rapidly decreasing quality. [Lady from the Stars] [image] "A woman from another planet crashes on Earth. Her foes track her and plan to enslave Earth. Can she stop them and save" ... ]]>

. Since then, I've gotten several more -- with seemingly rapidly decreasing quality. [Lady from the Stars] [image] "A woman from another planet crashes on Earth. Her foes track her and plan to enslave Earth. Can she stop them and save Earth and the man she loves?" I'm going to guess that the author is simultaneously responsible for the cover art and the blurb. If the prose in the book measures up to the quality of the blurb, then this is a must-read. The bit about her doing whatever she ends up doing for a man sounds promising. Which planet are we talking about? Ah, yes...Earth. [The Forever Woman] [image] "Make him see you as the woman he wants to be with forever. [...] When he pulls away, send him this 4-word text message on page 124 to get his attention and make him realize it was a mistake to pull away." Despite the seemingly gleeful cover art (which is at least a professional-looking photograph), the whole tone of these blurbs are more than vaguely threatening. I can only surmise from this that Amazon doesn't even know my gender -- or is perhaps generously not making any assumptions. Still, nice-guy Amazon stays traditional and is trying to help me land a husband. [Millennial Maxims] [image] "Millennial's see the world differently. Millennial's believe the world can change. The rise of a new generation is here, and deserves a new book." Despite starting out strong by spelling "millennial" correctly, the book and its blurb go on to misuse two apostrophes and a comma, as well as use circular logic to justify having written the book in the first place. "The rise of a new generation is here" mixes metaphors nonsensically. I have no idea what this has to do with the blurry, extreme close-up of the barn owl. Is an AI creating these books? [Half-a-rat: A Journey North] [image] "Genetically enhanced animals survive with the aid of an AI on a post apocalyptic earth abandoned by humanity. Until the day the day humans return" Where to begin? There's that threatening "Volume 2" that suggests that Volume 1 went so swimmingly that WC Quick was forced by fans to produce more literature. There's the hand-drawn cover that looks like it was done in crayon. Is this the author flexing multiple skills? Or perhaps the author's offspring was asked to contribute? The dog in the front is more skillfully rendered than his companion or half-a-rat himself (herself?), who looks vaguely like a court jester but is clearly intended to be an emaciated astronaut who came from the space station floating in the background. There's the run-on summary that omits a hyphen between "post" and "apocalyptic", fails to capitalize "earth" -- perhaps the author of Lady from the Stars could have helped -- and makes a second sentence out of a dangling participle that repeats "the day" and omits a full stop. A surfeit of choice. ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=4052 2020-09-18T20:56:54+02:00 https://earthli.com/users/marco

https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=4015 2020-06-22T21:28:28+02:00 https://earthli.com/users/marco

https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3986 2020-06-21T19:19:04+02:00 https://earthli.com/users/marco

https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3987 2020-06-01T23:06:38+02:00 https://earthli.com/users/marco

at the beginning of 2019, but recently re-read it. In these pandemic days, even more of the story resonated with me than on the first reading. The story is about a woman named Vashanti and he son Kuno, who live on a future Earth where The Machine has long since taken up the caretaking of mankind -- so that people can concentrate on getting and sharing 'ideas". Each person is contained in its own little pod. One room for everything. The bed and bath slide out of the floor when needed. Medical equipment descends from the ceiling. All communication is remote. People almost never see one another physically. Each person has exactly one book -- they all have the same book. It is "The Book of the Machine" and it contains everything that anyone would ever need to know about how the world works or how to communicate with The Machine. Mankind thinks itself free of religion, but it has replaced its classic, irrational religions with a supposedly rational one that ends up in people worshiping The Machine. No-one knows how The Machine works; all of its mechanisms are automated and have been so as long as anyone can remember. The world has been homogenized. "Something "good enough" had long since been accepted by our race." The following examples illustrate how our supposedly advanced civilization was pretty easily predicted by Forster a century removed from it. How unique and creative can it possibly be if he was able to predict it so well? "Vashanti"s next move was to turn off the isolation switch, and all the accumulations of the last three minutes burst upon her. The room was filled with the noise of bells, and speaking-tubes. What was the new food like? Could she recommend it? Has she had any ideas lately? Might one tell her one's own ideas? Would she make an engagement to visit the public nurseries at an early date?" Does this not describe how a phone or device acts when it returns from isolation? Is this not the experience of an average social-media user "coming back" to their phone after a temporary absence? Amazingly, Forster's predictions of video-conferencing are also spot-on: "The clumsy system of public gatherings had been long since abandoned; neither Vashti nor her audience stirred from their rooms. Seated in her armchair she spoke, while they in their armchairs heard her, fairly well, and saw her, fairly well." That the story nails the self-isolation of 2020 due to COVID-19 explains why the story resonated for me more on re-reading now. In our modern case, this live of video-conferencing applies only to the upper-level caste, while lower castes continue to work as usual. We don't have The Machine (yet). In Forster’s vision, the “Machine” took care of day-to-day minutia for everyone, with seemingly no castes left over from the previous civilization. Or, perhaps more accurately, the non-upper-class castes have been eliminated. In this next section, Forster somehow manages to capture the superficiality of TED Talks nearly a century before they even existed. "Her lecture, which lasted ten minutes, was well received, and at its conclusion she and many of her audience listened to a lecture on the sea; there were ideas to be got from the sea; the speaker had donned a respirator and visited it lately." The listeners are flighty and don't really pay attention to anything specifically -- they sip widely but shallowly, adding nothing of value on their own. The lecture on the sea above has absolutely nothing to do with Vashanti's lecture. That reflects our social-media feeds quite well -- like hummingbirds, many flit from topic to topic, guided by The Machine. Hell, Forster even foresaw the delivery culture -- albeit here he also foresaw everyone getting access to it, which isn't the case with our modern version of The Machine. In our version, the workings of The Machine are still very much run on the backs of manual labor provided by an underclass. "[...] the civilization that had mistaken the functions of the system, and had used it for bringing people to things, instead of for bringing things to people." Forster also foresaw the homogenization of travel destinations -- our cities have "tourist areas" that aim to make people comfortable by providing services that they would have at home. There's a Starbucks; there's a McDonalds; there's a theme park. "What was the good of going to Peking when it was just like Shrewsbury? Why return to Shrewsbury when it would all be like Peking?" Finally, there is the erosion of ideas and information, recycling well-worn thought and denigrating original thought until no-one knows anything of value anymore. Experts are suspect; expertise is evil; information is best when its already known -- common sense. "And even the lecturers acquiesced when they found that a lecture on the sea was none the less stimulating when compiled out of other lectures that had already been delivered on the same subject. "Beware of first- hand ideas!" exclaimed one of the most advanced of them. [...] Let your ideas be second-hand, and if possible tenth-hand, for then they will be far removed from that disturbing element - direct observation." So we have a society homogenized and reduced and made completely dependent on The Machine. (I wonder whether the world of Wall-E was based, at least in part, on this story?) Forster tells us what happens when The Machine stops after mankind has become inescapably dependent on it. "Man, the flower of all flesh, the noblest of all creatures visible, man who had once made god in his image, and had mirrored his strength on the constellations, beautiful naked man was dying, strangled in the garments that he had woven." [Citations] "Something "good enough" had long since been accepted by our race." "She considered, and chose her words with care. Her son had a queer temper, and she wished to dissuade him from the expedition. ""It is contrary to the spirit of the age," she asserted. ""Do you mean by that, contrary to the Machine?"" "Vashanti"s next move was to turn off the isolation switch, and all the accumulations of the last three minutes burst upon her. The room was filled with the noise of bells, and speaking-tubes. What was the new food like? Could she recommend it? Has she had any ideas lately? Might one tell her one"s own ideas? Would she make an engagement to visit the public nurseries at an early date? - say this day month." Forster quite accurately predicts what it must be like for an average social-media user to "come back" to their phone after a temporary absence. "The clumsy system of public gatherings had been long since abandoned; neither Vashti nor her audience stirred from their rooms. Seated in her armchair she spoke, while they in their armchairs heard her, fairly well, and saw her, fairly well." He also managed to predict the COVID-19 remote culture, as well. In our modern case, it applies only to the upper-level caste, while lower castes continue to work. In Forster's vision, the "Machine" took care of day-to-day minutia. "Her lecture, which lasted ten minutes, was well received, and at its conclusion she and many of her audience listened to a lecture on the sea; there were ideas to be got from the sea; the speaker had donned a respirator and visited it lately." In this next section, Forster somehow manages to capture the superficiality of TED Talks nearly a century before they even existed. "And of course she had studied the civilization that had immediately preceded her own - the civilization that had mistaken the functions of the system, and had used it for bringing people to things, instead of for bringing things to people." Amazon and deliveries also accurately predicted. "Few travelled in these days, for, thanks to the advance of science, the earth was exactly alike all over. Rapid intercourse, from which the previous civilization had hoped so much, had ended by defeating itself. What was the good of going to Peking when it was just like Shrewsbury? Why return to Shrewsbury when it would all be like Peking?" Globalization as well. "The arrangements were old- fashioned and rough. There was even a female attendant, to whom she would have to announce her wants during the voyage. Of course a revolving platform ran the length of the boat, but she was expected to walk from it to her cabin. Some cabins were better than others, and she did not get the best. She thought the attendant had been unfair, and spasms of rage shook her." The utter depravity and egotism of the privileged. "In the dawn of the world our weakly (sic?) must be exposed on Mount Taygetus, in its twilight our strong will suffer euthanasia, that the Machine may progress, that the Machine may progress, that the Machine may progress eternally." "And even the lecturers acquiesced when they found that a lecture on the sea was none the less stimulating when compiled out of other lectures that had already been delivered on the same subject. "Beware of first- hand ideas!" exclaimed one of the most advanced of them. "First-hand ideas do not really exist. They are but the physical impressions produced by live and fear, and on this gross foundation who could erect a philosophy? Let your ideas be second-hand, and if possible tenth-hand, for then they will be far removed from that disturbing element - direct observation. Do not learn anything about this subject of mine - the French Revolution. Learn instead what I think that Enicharmon thought Urizen thought Gutch thought Ho-Yung thought Chi-Bo-Sing thought LafcadioHearn thought Carlyle thought Mirabeau said about the French Revolution. "[...] "You who listen to me are in a better position to judge about the French Revolution than I am. Your descendants will be even in a better position than you, for they will learn what you think I think, and yet another intermediate will be added to the chain. And in time" - his voice rose - "there will come a generation that had got beyond facts, beyond impressions, a generation absolutely colourless, a generation seraphically free From taint of personality, which will see the French Revolution not as it happened, nor as they would like it to have happened, but as it would have happened, had it taken place in the days of the Machine."" "Time passed, and they resented the defects no longer. The defects had not been remedied, but the human tissues in that latter day had become so subservient, that they readily adapted themselves to every caprice of the Machine. The sigh at the crises of the Brisbane symphony no longer irritated Vashti; she accepted it as part of the melody. The jarring noise, whether in the head or in the wall, was no longer resented by her friend. And so with the mouldy artificial fruit, so with the bath water that began to stink, so with the defective rhymes that the poetry machine had taken to emit. all were bitterly complained of at first, and then acquiesced in and forgotten. Things went from bad to worse unchallenged." And so we are with our unquestioning and unknowing acceptance of whatever our technology masters grant us. "But there came a day when, without the slightest warning, without any previous hint of feebleness, the entire communication-system broke down, all over the world, and the world, as they understood it, ended." And so would it be for us, should a similar cataclysm consign us to blindness and incommunication. I, for one, would be left with only the handful of books left on my E-Book reader, should that even continue to work. Perhaps I could continue programming or writing. I still have movies and series to watch that I have secured on local storage. "As he spoke, the whole city was broken like a honeycomb. An air-ship had sailed in through the vomitory into a ruined wharf. It crashed downwards, exploding as it went, rending gallery after gallery with its wings of steel. For a moment they saw the nations of the dead, and, before they joined them, scraps of the untainted sky." "Man, the flower of all flesh, the noblest of all creatures visible, man who had once made god in his image, and had mirrored his strength on the constellations, beautiful naked man was dying, strangled in the garments that he had woven." ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3980 2020-05-21T12:20:38+02:00 https://earthli.com/users/marco

https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3938 2020-05-10T22:32:09+02:00 https://earthli.com/users/marco

https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3937 2020-04-13T21:27:35+02:00 https://earthli.com/users/marco

, a non-fiction account of the coming end of cheap oil and its many repercussions for a world nearly exclusively predicated on it. In this novel, the nearly complete unavailability of fossil fuels was engendered not by a natural lack of easy resources, but by nuclear attacks on Washington and Los Angeles (vaguely hinted at, with no clear enemy blamed) and a kind of super-flu that wiped out a lot of people and put an end to any semblance of shared, national-level infrastructure. The story is of Robert Ehrlich, who lives in Union Grove, New York (fictional, but within a couple days' march of Albany). He's a form sales executive turned carpenter who lost his wife and daughter to the flu and his son Daniel to wanderlust many years ago. The town of Union Grove has a decent water supply, but very sporadic electricity -- it's nearly nonexistent and therefore completely unreliable, more of a curiosity of a time long past. They grow some food, cook with wood, etc. Though they still live in the houses of a more modern past, they make very little use of any of the more advanced accoutrements. To the north of the town is an encampment of former bikers and ne'er-do-wells who've monopolized the business of reclamation and re-selling of goods stripped from abandoned -- and some, not-quite-yet-abandoned -- houses and businesses. The place is called Karptown and is run by a miscreant straight out of the Mad Max movies named Wayne Karp. Also near the town is a fully self-sufficient plantation run by Stephen Bullock, who is basically a lord of many serfs, but pretty benevolent. This organization is not too far-fetched and is quite likely to be one of the types of cultures that survives -- as long as the ruler stays benevolent, the group stays relatively small and manageable and the community is successful without any debilitating tragedies that would throw it out of equilibrium. The final group is a bunch of highly capable religious travelers akin to the Amish, but nomadic and far less averse to technology, headed by Brother Jobe. He settles on the area, having traveled up from Pennsylvania, where things are "much worse". He doesn't want to take things up, per se, but he does think that the local townsfolk have been somewhat shiftless and directionless [1], leaving them open to the predations of Wayne Karp, among others. Within this structure, the basic plot points are as follows: * One of Wayne's band kills a promising local young man from town while Robert doesn't exactly look on, but is utterly helpless to do anything after the fact. * Jobe thinks Karp's band should be punished. * Jobe and Robert visit Bullock -- also the local magistrate -- and ask if he'll help bring Karp and his crew to heel. * Bullock is more interested in finding out what happened to four of his men and a trading vessel that he sent down Albany way. * They agree to help, but only if he sends supplies (lengths of pipe) to help them repair the town's water supply. They do this and water-service is restored, restoring also a bit of self-confidence and faith in the townspeople. * The young man's wife and child move in to Robert's house to "keep house". There is really no other choice, though several townspeople purse their lips in disapproval that stems from a way of life that no longer applies. * Robert and several of Jobe's acolytes head down to Albany to investigate. * They discover that Albany is all buy lawless and in the hands of an even greater miscreant than Wayne Karp. Robert learns of the brutal efficiency of Jobe's men -- who, while they've mostly found Jesus, are also almost all former military. * They return with the four men and having eliminated the threat to river trade by shooting nearly the entire gang who'd coopted it for themselves. * Bullock celebrates their return with a giant party that empties out the town. * Karp's men come down to rob the town and also to see if they can find some "action" from any ladies who didn't attend the party (Robert's new roommate being one of them). * On the same day, Jobe and his men set up a barbershop that isn't quite voluntary and shave a bunch of beards from unwilling customers. * Robert and the pastor (Loren) arrest Jobe, who comes along relatively quietly and lets himself be put in jail. * Robert and Loren head up to Karptown to arrest Karp. Things go predictably -- he says "no" -- and Robert gets covered in buckets of shit, but only after Loren's asshole is torn open by brutal paddling. They make their way back to town, with the help of some of Jobe's men. * Jobe's men go up to Karptown to collect Karp and return with him, placing him in a cell next to Jobe's. Minor, one of the men who'd proven so essential on the trip to Albany was unfortunately killed in the raid. * Jobe is praying feverishly. * The next morning, Jobe is no longer in his cell, but the door is still chained shut. Karp's cell is also still locked, but he'd dead, with a bullet-wound through his eye that exactly matches the one Minor had suffered the night before. * Robert learns that Minor was Jobe's son. * Robert finds Jobe on the grounds he and his people had settled on: the old High School that he'd purchased and which his people were fixing up to house their "queen bee", a bizarrely and grotesquely fat woman who seems to have the gift of preternatural sight...but that seems to be a plot line that will be pursued more fully in subsequent novels. * They talk and Jobe is super-mysterious and also just kind of disappears, leading Robert to wonder what sort of supernatural stuff is going on. The "eye for an eye" stuff gives him quite a bit of pause, especially in his fraught condition, having hardly slept, drunk too much whiskey and still being desperately worried about his friend Loren, who'd undergone surgery the night before. * The book ends several months later, with Robert in charge of the town and Loren having recovered more or less fully. Karp's gang is subdued while Jobe's crew is doing well on their own, as are Bullock's people. On a side note, I was quite surprised to learn that Kunstler doesn't know how to use past tenses correctly. He very, very often uses "did" when he definitely meant to use "had done", which I'd taken to be a more modern affectation of young authors whose education had gone missing. I'd never noticed his online work to suffer from the same affliction, so I'm somewhat mystified as to the reason behind it. Some authors use the incorrect form in dialogue, in order to impart an authenticity to the speech patterns of their characters. The patois of upstate New York -- near Albany, where the book takes place -- most definitely fails to distinguish between verb forms in nearly any way, placing all of the legwork required to determine when and if something happened squarely on the listener. Confusion abounds, but what can you do when no-one can be bothered? Perhaps this curtailed version of English is what we've got to work with from here on out. Perhaps Kunstler's subtle point is that the World Made By Hand won't have time for such niceties. The theme of the book is a world that has been simplified by nuclear attacks and influenza epidemics from our high-tech quasi-nightmare to a much more bucolic and brutal lifestyle. Perhaps the language followed suit. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] After reading one of their interactions, I wrote the following imagining of how Robert could have responded to Jobe: "So you want me to help you fight a fight that's not mine, but lies in another land, outside my jurisdiction, a jurisdiction that's defined by the limits of my meager power. You do understand that the world has shrunk? That our reach is no longer so long? Or do you simply choose to impose your simplistic morality from a bygone day -- a morality that was arguably never really applicable then either -- and do what? Take what's mine because I refuse to help you in your quest? So you'll take my refusal to help you prosecute one moral crusade as an invitation to judge me, take what I have and give yourself over to the same morality that you attacked me for failing to help you prosecute?" [Citations] "It was too bad because it might have lit up our whole town. Anyway, the little dam there had been breeched, and rebuilding that would have been more than our community could manage. I don’t know if anybody would even have known how to do it. It was chilling to reflect on how well the world used to work and how much we’d lost." "A few people took to smoking opium, but those with an extremely apathetic attitude toward survival tended not to last long in the new disposition of things." "Children like my Daniel and Genna had sat in those very box buildings under buzzing fluorescent lights listening to their science teachers prattle about the wonders of space travel and gene splicing and how we were all going to live to be a hundred and twenty five years old in “smart” computer-controlled houses where all we had to do was speak to bump up the heat or turn on the giant home theater screens in a life of perpetual leisure and comfort. It made me sick to think about it. Not because there’s something necessarily wrong with leisure or comfort, but because that’s where our aspirations ended. And in the face of what had actually happened to us, it seemed obscenely stupid." "Few dogs were around anymore. Some had been eaten during the hunger that followed the flu in the spring of that year. People didn’t talk about it, it was so demoralizing. And now, with no manufactured pet food, you had to have a productive household to be able to feed one [...]" "All the trustees were men, no women and no plain laborers. As the world changed, we reverted to social divisions that we’d thought were obsolete. The egalitarian pretenses of the high-octane decades had dissolved and nobody even debated it anymore, including the women of our town. A plain majority of the townspeople were laborers now, whatever in life they had been before. Nobody called them peasants, but in effect that’s what they’d become. That’s just the way things were." A little blunt and eager, but probable. Would be interesting to know what he thinks the women feel about this. It's an easy attitude to have when you're on the council. “I mean, as a practical matter, there is no government,” I said. “Oh. I see what you’re driving at. Well, again, frankly, that’s a fair appraisal of things. I guess you could say we’re keeping the chairs warm, under the theory that this . . . this whatever it is . . . this rough patch we’re going through . . . that it eventually comes to an end.” “What do you think the chances of that are?” Furman leaned closer to me, over the top of his typewriter. “Again, to be really candid, it doesn’t look so good. You asked about the government. The people who worked here? Well, there’s an answer to your question. Most of them stopped coming to work when they stopped getting paid. “Who all is this wing nut across the way?” “I guess you’d say he’s another preacher man.” “What’s he in for?” “Cutting off beards without permission.” “Who the hell you got to get permission from around here to cut off a got-damn beard?” “The owner of the beard,” I said. “Well, ain’t that some shit,” he said. ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3947 2020-04-13T20:11:27+02:00 https://earthli.com/users/marco

is a recent one addressing one of the main weaknesses of the "borrow checker" in Rust. What's a borrow checker? Where other programming languages have chosen from manual memory-management (C, early C++, early Pascal, etc.), garbage-collection (C#, Java, etc.) and reference-counting (Swift, modern C++, etc.), Rust chose a new path: the borrow checker. The rules of the language require that the program be written in a manner where it is always clear who owns memory and who is "using" memory. Allocated memory is always deallocated when it leaves the scope in which it was allocated, unless the memory was passed on to a different scope by "loaning" it. If a "borrowed" reference lingers after this scope is closed, the compiler flags it as an error. Rust also has a lot of support for explicitly copying references, when the borrow checker can't be satisfied any other way. The algorithm treats mutable and immutable references accordingly. See the "Rust documentation on references and borrowing" or the paper itself for an in-depth discussion. This approach requires more involvement on the part of the programmer, but also results in programs that provably have neither memory leaks nor access violations should the program pass compilation. This is a very interesting property for Rust to be able to guarantee -- and it accomplishes it without a garbage collector (with its associated performance issues and difficulty in being predictable enough for real-time, system-level code) or reference-counting (which also incurs performance overhead and require participation of the runtime). Instead, a Rust program's memory usage is guaranteed by the compiler to be correct, so there is no need for asynchronous tasks or runtime support. In the current incarnation of Rust, this guarantee comes with a big caveat: the borrow checker does not deal with unsafe blocks at all. It is hoped that most Rust code can avoid unsafe blocks, relying instead of higher-level abstractions that hide unsafe code. However, what guarantee is there that the unsafe code used in the common libraries or popular crates is not misallocating or misusing memory? While the code in the base libraries is fastidiously written and covered by myriad tests, errors are bound to slip in. This is where the software proposed in this paper comes in. The authors build on the borrow-checker concept to extend it to unsafe regions as well. They come up with a new borrow-checking algorithm called "Stacked Borrows" that is more sophisticated than the initial algorithm introduced with and still used in modern Rust. The authors show that the their algorithm not only allows a compiler to improve its borrow-checking but also increases the number of situations in which a compiler can be 100% sure of the placement of variable manipulations so that it can optimize many more situations to produce much more performant code. [1] That is, "In this work, we propose Stacked Borrows, an operational semantics for memory accesses in Rust. Stacked Borrows defines an aliasing discipline and declares programs violating it to have undefined behavior, meaning the compiler does not have to consider such programs when performing optimizations." They obviously spent quite a bit of time honing their algorithm, running their test interpreter and compiler against a large part of the Rust standard library and popular crates. Their paper includes not only the algorithm, but also several proofs for why the algorithm can guarantee certain properties that a compiler can use to optimize code much better than today's Rust compiler. Not only that, but their attack on the corpus of Rust code yielded several cases in which highly central Rust runtime/system unsafe code was incorrect and possibly leaked or violated memory. Several of their pull requests have been accepted and the team and their tool is quite well-received in the Rust community. They have made this tool, an interpreter named Miri available for anyone to use and test until "[we can] eventually mak[e] a variant of Stacked Borrows part of the official semantics of Rust." -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] A lot of code optimization done by compilers involves being able to move variable loads and stores in a way that avoids touching registers more often than necessary, improving cache locality, etc. without changing the semantics of the program. Understandably, a compiler is required to be pessimistic about changing anything from what the developer actually specified. Where "lowering" is a free transformation from one formulation to another that is exactly equivalent, the optimizations we are talking about are still provable, but are no longer so "obviously" transformations between equivalent states. For example, a compiler could avoid certain volatility constraints if it can guarantee that a certain change is always preceded by a memory fence, or the compiler can leave off array-bounds-checking if it knows that the indexing will never leave the bounds of the array, etc. [Citations] None. ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3946 2020-04-13T18:20:27+02:00 https://earthli.com/users/marco

discusses a proposal for composing all objects in a software system using a common API called "Storage Combinators" rather than using custom interfaces everywhere. They authors demonstrate how an application could benefit from composability of such operations -- akin to how the REST standard has improved composability for disparate and individually developed services -- purportedly without sacrificing any of the expressiveness of a more bespoke API. The following summary is from the "Discussion" section: "In-Process REST in general and storage combinators in particular take an architectural style known to work well in the distributed case and scale it down to work in the non-distributed, local case in order to bring along the modularity benefits associated with that style." Many bespoke APIs are needlessly different from one another. It's an interesting idea to enforce API strictures akin to REST between software components running in the same memory space. What is a bit odd is their insistence on using Objective Smalltalk for all of their examples -- a language that I'd never even heard of (and I've been paying attention). No-one is using this language [1] and its syntax is based on two of the bigger syntax boondoggles in our industry: Smalltalk and Objective-C. Due to this idiosyncratic choice, it's not always easy to distill the purpose from the examples. Still, the storage combinators are interesting and end up being the "In-process REST" that the authors described in the citation above. Once they've defined the basic storage API -- GET, PUT, PATCH, and DELETE, they define a plethora of common behavior that transforms to it: switches, logging, caching, JSON, etc. From these components, they go on to define an HTTP server and client that communicate via a JSON protocol (naturally). An interesting addendum is that they've actually developed this approach in several industry projects that are in production, so it's not just an ivory-tower exercise without any real-world basis. I personally wonder how well the average developer can grok and work with a severely reduced API (in their eyes). That is, while it's definitely possible for a good programmer to build everything they need from these combinators (essentially first-principle building blocks), it's unclear to me whether that scales to a large enough base of actually existing developers. The approach is complete, but restrictive; it also makes it very difficult for developers to work with existing frameworks and profit from the documentation and community available there. This possible downside aside, a positive effect was that developers wrote a lot less custom code, instead re-using the existing building blocks and creating their own. When they stayed focused on the compositional pattern, using the at-times very abstract building blocks, they did end up with a well-performing solution. A downside, as expected, was that, since the developers didn't write most of the code themselves and the building blocks are relatively highly abstracted, debugging was more difficult and "it was often impossible to determine the dataflow path before runtime" and "it would be difficult to debug, because a programmer has to step through the whole data transformation path during runtime". These are pitfalls associated with any highly generalized framework. They are not incidental problems to be taken care of in minor updates, but point to a possibly fatal flaw in an overgeneralized framework. [2] Despite many iterations, they seem to have landed on a highly generic implementation that cannot be easily used by mere mortals. My own experiences with developing frameworks have taught me to stay slightly less generic with the parts that mortal developers will come into contact with. It's not that they're not smart enough to get it, but that they will all have to learn from one of the masters, which doesn't scale well. Instead, a slightly more redundant and not as highly generalized architecture tends to allow developers to build up local knowledge and synergies without constant "herding" by senior developers. They end with more code-duplication and are less able to benefit from performance improvements and bug fixes in common components, but they are able to work more autonomously -- or even at all. The debugging and introspection issues mentioned above are kind of framework-killers as I don't really see a good way around them short of developing a highly targeted DSL with its own source-level debugger, IDE, etc. The conclusion of the paper is a bit at odds with itself: on the one hand, it writes, "Their use correlates strongly with positive effects on code-size, performance, reliability and productivity, both observationally and in the minds of developers." But then immediately writes that, "One area of future research is how to type and statically type-check storage combinators. The same generic nature that makes storage combinators so composable also makes it difficult to verify when they are connected correctly." This seems kind of like a fatal flaw that the team has managed to patch with having good developers who intimately understand the framework -- and probably with lots of debugging hours. Their next topic in the conclusion is about debugging and discusses a DSL as I mentioned above as a possible solution. None of these things will be easy to implement or build and it's honestly unclear to me whether it even can be built without sacrificing the flexibility or the purity of the initial approach. In the end, you'll end up with a compromised system with bespoke everything and many, many idiosyncratic and poorly documented behaviors. And, since everything's bespoke, you can't lean on external communities and documentation and search for anything. I wish them the best of luck, but don't hold out much hope for the path that they're on. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] It doesn't have a Wiki page and the only "home page" I can find looks like it was built with Doxygen anno 1999 and the certificate isn't even valid. [1] While it's possible for an underlying framework to be this highly generalized, it's generally inefficient to have all of your developers working at this level -- most of them aren't skilled enough to do so. That is, a framework can benefit from a high level of generalization that significantly reduces code-duplication, but that part has to very rarely be evident to mortal developers. Instead, they should float in a substrate of other APIs, that are more more straightforward to specify (i.e. high-level APIs that benefit from composability but don't necessarily expose it) and are more easily debugged and tested. [Citations] None. ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3948 2020-04-13T17:05:27+02:00 https://earthli.com/users/marco

that discusses event-based systems (essentially cooperative multi-tasking) vs. threaded implementations (pre-emptive multi-tasking). The conclusion in this paper from 2003 (nearly 20 years ago) is that threads are hands-down easier to work with and offer the promised performance, given that the implementation is robust. The fact that events vs. threads was still being discussed at the time was only due to very sub-standard threading implementations that engendered deadlocks, race-conditions and terrible performance. Modern threading implementations are based on OS constructs that trade memory for performance by storing a separate stack for each thread. Only the registers need to be switched out when switching threads/tasks. It's interesting that one of the main arguments against threads was "restrictive control flow" because that issue has now been nearly completely addressed by the Promise/Future pattern, encapsulated in an even easier-to-use syntax as async/await in languages like C#, JavaScript. TypeScript, and Rust. This paradigm abstracts subroutines without making any promises about how the code in those subroutines is executed. Just from the keywords, it's obvious that the idea is to execute the code asynchronously, but it's not a requirement in all cases. The .NET literature is full of discussions of optimizations that balance a cooperative approach for quick "bailout" scenarios -- where e.g. a value is available in constant time and doesn't actually necessitate a thread as it will never wait on any asynchronous I/O -- to those that seamlessly grab a thread from a pool and schedule the code asynchronously (and preemptively) only if needed. Many of these different code-paths are even allocation-free in the .NET Core Runtime, leading to massive performance boosts versus older implementations. Recently, the developers of Rust have written several interesting papers -- and white-paper--length blogs -- about the async/await implementation in Rust that go in the same directly: weighing the pros and cons of event-based vs. thread-based implementations. The authors of this paper concluded with: "Although event systems have been used to obtain good performance in high concurrency systems, we have shown that similar or even higher performance can be achieved with threads. Moreover, the simpler programming model and wealth of compiler analyses that threaded systems afford gives threads an important advantage over events when writing highly concurrent servers. In the future, we advocate tight integration between the compiler and the thread system, which will result in a programming model that offers a clean and simple interface to the programmer while achieving superior performance." And so it would come to be. [Citations] None. ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3912 2020-04-05T22:27:00+02:00 https://earthli.com/users/marco

https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3923 2020-03-22T15:51:44+01:00 https://earthli.com/users/marco

in October of 2019. Since then, the recommendations have not gotten any better. The following three recommendations have been haunting me for a month. [image][image][image] None of these makes any sense for me whatsoever. None of them comes even close to matching my reading... ]]>

in October of 2019. Since then, the recommendations have not gotten any better. The following three recommendations have been haunting me for a month. [image][image][image] None of these makes any sense for me whatsoever. None of them comes even close to matching my reading history. [1] The bodice-rippers are just generic recommendations; the investment book is particularly laughable right now, in our time of COVID-inspired free-fall and an attendant complete reworking of the economy. I guess the AIs aren't coming for us, after all. They can't even make a halfway-decent recommendation based on pretty extensive reading lists and history at Amazon. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] Or that of my wife, with whom I have a "family plan" at Amazon. ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3896 2020-02-24T23:01:09+01:00 https://earthli.com/users/marco

https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3903 2020-02-23T12:53:13+01:00 https://earthli.com/users/marco

is a novella describing a near-future (or perhaps alternate present) that could really only happen in the United States. Hyper-capitalism has proceeded to a point where private industry has extended its tendrils into all aspects of the pitiful excuse for a social contract the state even bothers to extend to the overwhelming majority of its population. The story is about Salima, an immigrant bouncing around the system, trying to get her feet under her. She befriends Nalifa, an Eritrean immigrant with two children, at an internment camp. After a couple of years, they get an "opportunity" to get cheaper housing in a building called Dorchester Towers. This building offers reduced-rate housing in exchange for being able to build much higher than the local building codes would allow. There is a rich section and a handful of floors -- 35 to 42 -- reserved for the poor. The elevators prefer the rich. The poor are forced to walk in the morning, when the 45-minute wait for an elevator would make them late for already-precarious jobs. In the evening, they tend to just wait rather than walking up 35 flights. There is no air-conditioning in the poor half of the entryway to the building. Security guards keep the riff-raff out. The apartments are small, but decent. However, none of their appliances are theirs: the toaster only cooks approved foods; the dishwasher only washes approved dishes; the refrigerator only hold approved foods. These foods are, of course, more expensive and nutritionally worse than the more "ethnic" food that most of the residents would prefer. The story is of the failure of the web of companies -- one among them being Boulangism, which makes the toaster -- that were responsible for maintaining the servers with which all of the appliances communicated in order to function. So the poor floors are left without an oven too cook in and without a dishwasher to wash dishes in and a refrigerator that refuses food. Salima learns how to hack on the Darknet -- using an old notebook rather than the 'fridge (which is the main way most people access information). She hacks her own appliances and gets not only food and a working dishwasher, but a degree of autonomy and control over her own life. She helps the rest of the poor part of the building free themselves as well. They all benefit, as they can now buy cheaper and healthier supplies rather than the corporate foods. In her travels to accounting clients (she's an accountant for small businesses, doing quite well for herself, actually), she meets Wye, a programmer working for the company that acquired the husk of Boulangism and is working very hard to get things back online -- and providing, once again, money for the corporation. Wye is sympathetic, but is also initially callous, not even really understanding how terrible it is for a system to force people to use such appliances and then to just drop them for months, making it illegal for them to make other arrangements, despite the state and corporation having failed to hold up its end of the bargain at all. When the software comes online, though, it will detect all of the hacked software and pinpoint Dorchester Towers as a "bunch of cheaters". Salima desperately tries to put things back the way they were, killing the budding revolution in the cradle, afraid (quite rightly) that the powers-that-be will exact a terrible punishment. Once she has converted all of the apartments back, she discovers a better way: run a VM in the devices that pretends to be a conforming device, but which runs another copy of a non-confirming and hacked OS. Though the company tries to get Salima to work with them, essentially betraying her own class, Salima holds strong. At first Wye is disappointed, but she comes around and works, in the end, to help Salima continue to subvert any anti-hacking measures that the company employs. [Citations] "But there was another world, vast beyond her knowing, of people who didn’t know her at all, but who held her life in their hands." "The soldiers and cops and guards who pointed guns at her, barked orders at her. The bureaucrats she never saw who rejected her paperwork for cryptic reasons she could only guess at, and the bureaucrats who looked her in the eye and rejected her paperwork and refused to explain themselves." "The elevator captains had been a good chuckle, a way for everyone from the poor-doors and the poor-floors to feel like they were mice outsmarting the cats. The letters put them in their place: roaches, facing exterminators." "This was the antidote, she realized, to the feeling of distant people whom she’d never meet who held the power of everything over her. To be able to control the computers around her, rather than being controlled by them." "But with both companies bankrupt, they won’t be expecting any new money. Now, if the companies do ever come back from bankruptcy and still no one here is using their products…”" Only in America would it be even conceivable to write a feasible story about subsidized housing without a kitchen. "It was also scary to hear them uttered aloud, and scarier still to think of the level of recklessness the kids had exhibited, even though they’d understood those stakes." They can recite them, but don't understand them. "What did these kids think about the appliances they jailbroke? Did they see them as just weirdly nonfunctional gadgets they had to work around, like the bad touchscreens at the shelter? Or did they see them as the enemy, something that they were at war with, the weapons of a distant adversary who wanted to subjugate them to its will?" "Wyoming startled at the question. “Oh, shit! I didn’t even think of it. This must have sucked for you. How long has it been? Four months? Five? With no oven? You must be so sick of waiting for us, huh?” “Five months,” Salima said. “It certainly has been a long time.” “You poor thing. I would have just jailbroken mine. There’s been so much of that, honestly, it’ll be months before they sort it out. I don’t blame the users, either. I mean, ugh.”" "They’ve been watching the darknet boards, they know that everyone’s been figuring out how to jailbreak their shit while we’ve been getting restarted, and they figure all those people could be customers, but instead of paying for food we sell them, they’d pay us to use food someone else sold them.” Salima almost laughed. It was a crime if she did it, a product if they sold it to her. Everything could be a product." "Salima had thought of Wye as her ally, every bit as offended by the locked-down world of Dorchester Towers as she was. But Wye had been working long hours for Boulangism and its new sister companies. She thought the problem was that Salima didn’t want to get into trouble. Salima had been thinking that, too. But that wasn’t the problem. Boulangism itself, that was the problem. The whole rotten business, that was the problem." "“Because it’s their homes. Why should they have to pay to use the things in their homes?” “I agree with you, but the company would say it’s because they chose to live in a place where the rent was lower because the landlord thought he’d make money from their appliances. It was a deal, and that’s their end of it, and they can pay more somewhere else if they want that choice.”" "She took a deep breath. “What I’m about to say isn’t how I see things, but it is how the company sees them. They say that you don’t have that choice, that they have that choice, and they’ll sell it to you. But if you take it without paying, that’s stealing. Again, that’s what they think.”" The following is a conversation between an employee of Boulangism and Salima. He starts off. "“You were living somewhere before this place, right?” "“A refugee shelter.” "“You could have chosen to stay there, right?” [Salima] wanted these people gone. "“I don’t think that is much of a choice.” "He shook his head. “The point is that you had a choice, and that’s because appliances like ours made it economical for landlords to build subsidy units.” "She didn’t say anything. She was getting angry and she didn’t like to be angry, didn’t want to show these people that she was angry. "“We want to help you people, let you get more out of your lives, give you more choices.” "What about the choice to jailbreak my things? She didn’t ask it. "“Honestly, I can’t understand your decision here.” "Choice is good, so long as I don’t choose not to help you? She didn’t say it. "“Can’t you see we want to help you?” "I can see that you want me to help you get more money from “people like me.” She still didn’t say it." ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3889 2020-02-02T21:30:42+01:00 https://earthli.com/users/marco

https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3711 2019-12-27T23:55:36+01:00 https://earthli.com/users/marco

in a separate post. Spectre is here to stay: An analysis of side-channels and speculative execution (2019) by Ross Mcilroy, Jaroslav Sevcik, Tobias Tebbi, Ben L. Titzer, Toon Verwaest This "paper" focuses only on intra-process attacks, advocating for mitigation via separation into multiple processes, using hardware-level protection that provides a stronger guarantee. "This paper explores speculative side-channel attacks and their implications for programming languages. These attacks leak information through micro-architectural side-channels which we show are not mere bugs, but in fact lie at the foundation of optimization." This paper proves unequivocally that software mitigation of intra-process, side-channel attacks are futile. An attack is always possible, with a combination of scaling for any-resolution timers and patience. "As we have seen, access to a timer, no matter the resolution, leaks µ-architectural information." Type-checks in any languages may partially mitigate, but this paper proves that they cannot full mitigate and are, therefore, largely useless for data-security. The only difference is the bit-rate of extracted information, not whether information can be extracted. They not only proved this with theorems, they implemented many of the attacks to provide accurate estimates of the expected extraction bit-rates in the presence of various mitigations. There is one particularly virulent variant (#4) that has literally no mitigation. "Mitigating type confusion for stack slots alone would have required a complete redesign of the backend of the optimizing compiler, perhaps man years of work, without a guarantee of completeness." As anyone who's been following this problem suspected (or pretty much already knew), the world traded of security for performance long ago. Though chip manufacturers and operating-system designers paid lip service to security, performance improvements were paramount. We've known since the end of 2017, but now we have proof. The paper sums it up more nicely than I could, "Our models, our mental models, are wrong; we have been trading security for performance and complexity all along and didn’t know it. It is now a painful irony that today, defense requires even more complexity with software mitigations, most of which we know to be incomplete. And complexity makes these three open problems all that much harder. Spectre is perhaps, too appropriately named, as it seems destined to haunt us for a long time." I've included "notes, citations and errata" in a separate post. Norse Mythology (2017) by Neil Gaiman This book is Gaiman's retelling of the known Norse legends in his own voice and with his inimitable style. If you pay attention, it doesn't take long to notice that the Norse Gods are mostly jerks to each other and everyone else and have no notion of fairness whatsoever. They are happy to take whatever they can, however they can get it and then the have to gall to hate on Loki for doing it back to them better than they do it to everyone else. Loki is an evil little fuck, but he's no more amoral than the others. It could be argued that he's actually good for wanting to eliminate the manipulative lot of them. In which I learn that Loki is Thor’s uncle, not his brother. In which I did not even learn that while reading it, but had to have it pointed out to me by my wife after I’d urged her to read this book. On a positive note: I have now learned this thing. I also learned that Hel is the guardian of the Hel, the destination for everyone who has not earned the right to rest eternally in Valhalla, that Jormungundr is the Midgard serpent (also known as Ouroboros) and that Fenris Wolf is larger than any other creature and is destined to destroy the Gods during Ragnarok. Surtr will help, wielding a world-sized flaming sword. I learned that Fenris, Jormungundr and Hel are Loki's children, making him nearly the most-central character in the whole mythos. As you can expect from tall tales of this sort, the relative sizes and strengths of the cast varies wildly -- each story introduces a new heretofore unknown giant from a heretofore unknown region who is even bigger and more powerful than all other giants before him or her. Thor still manages to kick everyone's ass, though. Thor's fight with the Midgard serpent was particularly confusing vis à vis scale, since that particular serpent goes around the entire world. Still, super-neat stories, well-told. Would read again. I've included "notes, citations and errata" in a separate post. On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century (2017) by Ted Snyder This book was recommended to me by an ordinarily more-reliable friend, but I don't hold it against zim. I was relieved to receive a "your library loan is about to end" message about my E-Book because, as I was reading the book, I realized with dread that I couldn't remember whether I'd found it in the library or whether I'd actually purchased it (it's a short book, so probably doesn't cost very much). The blurbs and description of this book are very misleading. It is about Trump. That is not, at first, obvious. Trump is never mentioned by name. Instead, Snyder refers to him as "the president" in what I can only assume is a bid to seem clever, but ends up being a gambit that fools no-one reading the book right now. In ten or twenty years time, however, absolutely no-one is going to know what the actual fuck Snyder is talking about. The book is a confusing mish-mash even when read this close to publication. It will not stand the test of time. Snyder's 20 rules are quite a stretch -- many of them are nearly direct reformulations of other rules. They sound different superficially, but are more like a horoscope in that regard. As I read the book, I thought Snyder was a self-educated 20-something or 70-something. I discovered after completing the book that he's a highly ranked professor at the Yale School of Management. It's ridiculous how poorly written and poorly thought-through this book is. He knows his market, though, it's a best-seller. I've included "notes, citations and errata" in a separate post. The Worst is Yet to Come (2019) by Peter Fleming Though this book was occasionally better-written and often more coherent than Snyder's (reviewed above), I occasionally got the same feeling that the author was squeezing his material to fit his premise (exactly as Snyder did). The thesis that everything can -- and probably will -- get worse, is so broad that the author feels comfortable hanging pretty much anything he can think of happening in the world on it and try to make it stick. It's not uninteresting to see how his observations from life in London translate to premonitions of further doom, but it's also only rarely convincing. And still he only got to about 160 pages, with a very generously sized "Glossary", which was just another hodge-podge of mini-essays that he couldn't be bothered to integrate into the rest of the book. I was grateful that I didn't buy this book, either. At least Snyder's felt like it'd had an editor who'd actually looked at it. Fleming's book was rife with typos, outright misspellings and bad grammar. At one point, he wrote "tranny" instead of "tyranny". 'Nuff said. I've included "notes, citations and errata" in a separate post. Nation (2009) by Terry Pratchett This is the story of Mau. It is also the story of Daphne née Ermintrude. There are also the priest Ataba, the strong woman Chale, the brothers Pilu and Milo on the island. The island is known as the Nation. Actually, it is the people who are the Nation. The island is where the Nation lives. As Mau is on his way back from another island on which he underwent his manhood ritual, a giant wave sweeps him up and carries him back to the Nation. It is a truly titanic wave and it sweeps away everyone he's ever known -- they were all sleeping on the beach, awaiting his return. Mau is young, but resourceful. He enters a fugue state to take care of all of the bodies left on the island. He wakes to a mango on a plate next to him. The plate had been delivered to him by Daphne, the lone surviving member of the crew and passengers of the Sweet Judy, a ship that the wave deposited deep in the only forest on the Nation. Daphne and Mau meet and join forces to try to survive on the island. More wave-survivors straggle ashore over the next days and weeks. They struggle with their future, mostly fighting about what it means for the Gods to have allowed the wave to sweep away everything. They scavenge the Judy for supplies -- Mau is concerned that they are relying to strongly on "trouserman" inventions. He wonders why his people never invented anything so spectacular. They discover secrets on the island; Mau's curiosity and skepticism leads to more conclusions than anyone's made about his culture in a long time. Daphne does the same -- she is a scientist, taught by her father -- but from the Women's Place. The world on the outside is pressing in: England is without a King and a long, long line of successors have dropped like flies, leaving Daphne's father as King, and Daphne as Princess. She doesn't find out until late in the game. They must first attend to the matter of the Raiders -- a cannibal tribe -- who've joined up with the surviving remnants of the part of Judy's crew that mutinied before the wave. The world here is an alternate version of the Pacific in 1860, called the Pelagic Ocean, with a smattering of amusingly named islands. The society and history feels very familiar, different enough for distance, but close enough to make satirical and insightful observations about our own reality. That is the skeleton of story on which Pratchett's writing hangs. It is highly interesting, but it's not the best part of the book. The best parts are about science, multiple worlds, Gods, death and history. As with the Discworld books, Pratchett is just as interested in the subtext as in the story. He puts the interesting bits in the folds of the shrouds hanging on the story. As in the Discworld books, there are a slew of good characters, each with delightful internal monologues. There are bad ones as well, funny and insightful in their own way (e.g. Cox). It seems that Pratchett books are Pratchett books, no matter where they're set. A lovely read. Highly recommended. I've included "notes, citations and errata" in a separate post. Russia Without Putin: Money, Power and the Myths of the New Cold War (2018) by Tony Wood I'd listened to a couple of interviews with Tony Wood (on This is Hell with Chuck Mertz and Behind the News with Doug Henwood) and became interested in his book through his eloquent discussions of Russia. The book details the last three decades of history in Russia, from Gorbachev to Yeltsin and then Putin. More specifically, he describes a Russia that's explicitly not its leader. Instead, it is a country that used to be much more powerful than it is now. It used to be much more advanced, more equal. Most importantly, it is not a capitalist failure. It is not retreating to its statist past. It would be better if it were. Instead, it is essentially a success story for the West: they helped suck the money and resources from a once-powerful enemy, creating a country for the 1% -- in the image of its western forebears. Mostly, Russia wasn't able to grow in a direction that would benefit itself. Instead, its massive resources and well-educated population were wasted or channeled to purposes conducive to the rulers of the rest of the world. If Russia's collapse benefitted the rich, then it was deemed to be "reforming"; otherwise, it was deemed to be "yearning for the USSR". The formula was predictable and boring and effective. All of Russia's corruption is utterly unremarkable and non-unique. Similar corruption exists in the U.S. and Britain and, at least to some degree, a handful of other western countries. When Wood describes the degree to which large banks and industries control policy in Russia, there is no real difference from how it works in the U.S, or Germany for that matter. Is Russia's government saturated with industry insiders? Yes. How is that any different from Obama’s Goldman Sachs alums, chosen by Citibank? Or Trump’s coterie of industry insiders, each matched to the cabinet position that looks most like a henhouse to them? Russia never had a chance: it was to be a vassal to the West or was to suffer until it acquiesced. There was never going to be another way. Russia is geographically huge, but has a relatively small population. It has a ton of resources and a well-educated populace, but it has a low birthrate (well-educated) and an unwelcome immigration wave is its only hope. Its economy is tied up with its resources -- controlled by its enemies through control of commodity prices. Russia occupies a middle ground. It has the low birthrate, culture, military hardware, attitude and high education of an advanced nation, but the life-expectancy and reputation of a poorer one. And America hates them, which makes their European and British lackeys do so as well, at least sometimes. Putin and his attitudes and opinions are totally beside the point. Russia is its own thing -- and its unclear how it will survive in a world with a powerful country like the US in control, bent on its submission. I've included "notes, citations and errata" in a separate post. Jennifer Government (2003) by Max Barry This 2003 book is the story of a world in which many of the current capitulations to corporatist rule were still at-least partially in the future. The Government is an entity whose power has been severely restricted. Local police is for-hire only. They only pursue cases for which victims can provide a budget. Hack Nike works for Nike (everyone takes their employer's name as their last name). He is roped into a murder contract by John Nike. It is part of a marketing campaign to sell sneakers to stupid teenagers. Marketing rules supreme, people are nearly perfect consumers, ethics is a thing of the past. Hack lives with the unemployed Victoria, who is working on a virus that can kill any IT system. Buy Mitsui is a broker who loses faith in the system. Claire is Violet's socialist sister. The eponymous Jennifer Government is a former marketer turned federal agent, hot on John Nike's tail, with whom she shares a past. The main thread of the book is that most corporations are banding together into two factions, roughly delineated by the two prevalent rewards programs. The corporations and various alliances act more and more as independent states, with their own militaries (e.g. the NRA). Everything is a negotiation, everything is a transaction, money is God, all in the name of a bizarre notion of "freedom". There is no difference between corporations and nation-states. In fact, the book generally depicts corporations acting as the worst of the nation-states do today. Even those individuals who think they can game this system are wrong. The point is that contracts aren’t worth the paper they’re printed on if they can’t be enforced. If there is no overarching authority, then criminals do what they want. Only the worst people win. There are echoes of Fight Club and Office Space and maybe even Mr. Robot. It's interesting to see these ideas having been written down 15 years ago, before many of its ideas were confirmed -- or vastly superseded by the system we have today. Barry does bring us a happy ending of sorts, but only for a handful of characters -- the world itself is largely unchanged, even if corporate power is slightly restrained. The base philosophy hasn't changed, so the same problems will come back. I've included "notes, citations and errata" in a separate post. Adjustment Day (2018) by Chuck Palahniuk This story is told in flashbacks and flash-forwards, cutting back and forth between myriad characters. My summary untangles this all a bit. This is the story of a brovolution, the logical conclusion of an increasingly divided population in America. It starts with a kidnapping. Walter hatches a plan to win Shasta's heart (captured within her voluptuous curves) by showing her how rich he's become. It's a standard adolescent fantasy. He thinks that he will get a new "old man" to teach him how to become rich. He kidnaps Talbott, a man who turns out to be even crazier than Walter. In a reversal of the kidnapping situation, the old man tests Walter, finds him worthy and begins to order him about, pretending to acquiesce to his demand to "make him rich". Walter wonders at the old man's convoluted approach, but trusts that it will work out. The whole time, the old man is tied naked to a chair, covered in the wounds from hundreds of cuts made by Walter as he searched for a subdermal tracker Talbott insisted he had, but which he'd lied about to "test" Walter's dedication. Walter becomes Talbott's amanuensis as he rants and raves, dictating the text that would become the blue-black book "Adjustment Day". We would later learn that Talbott had said "A Judgment Day" and be led to wonder along with Walter what else he'd mis-transcribed in a book that would become the user's manual for the next revolution in America. The book drives people to revolution by revealing an age-old secret: older and middle-aged men have provoked and will continue to occasionally provoke wars in which they cull a useless younger -- and expectant/hopeful -- generation of men, simultaneously clearing out their rivals and reducing available men to such a minimum that women have no choice but to allow them much more leeway in order to ensure the survival of humanity. Men gain power through their self-imposed scarcity. It is madness, of course. But there are enough who would start packing their go-bags at this point. Palahniuk knows this and plays to the stereotype. Sneakily, the book has some pearls of wisdom -- true revolutionary ideas not poisoned by Talbott's mad worldview -- spread throughout. He makes some good points, but his proposed solutions are pure bullshit. E.g. "“But identity politics,” Dawson continued, “has reduced the homosexual to nothing but his sexual preference. It has reduced the black to only his skin. And each has become a caricature of his former dignified self.”""[...] our lifetimes must not be measured in weekends. Our time on Earth must not be judged by wages earned and taxes paid.""It was clear to Jamal that for whites their guilt constituted a uniquely white form of boasting. Their breast beating was a humblebrag always saying: We did this! We thwarted God in the Garden! We killed his son! We white people will do with other races and natural resources as we see fit! Showing off disguised as a mea culpa. For the white man, his guilt was his biggest badge of accomplishment. Only whites killed the planet with global warming so only whites could save it. Their boasting never let up. It was the white racket: Creating problems so they could rescue everybody.""To make a career of rescuing people is also to create a permanent class in need of rescue.""Making others right makes them love you, according to Talbott, because we only love things we feel superior to. We only love those who don’t pose a threat. Making others right is the best method for controlling them." The revolution starts with an online List. It is "America's Least Wanted". Anyone can nominate someone for the list. Anyone can vote for people on the list. Those with the most votes remain; those without enough votes in a certain timespan are culled from the list. The others? They are to be culled come Adjustment Day. When Adjustment Day comes, the members of the first lineages -- hand-chosen cells full of people frustrated by society's utter subordination and humiliation and indoctrinated in the ways of Talbott's book -- roll out, hunting down the people on The List, gaining the number of points allocated to that person and being able to use those points to participate in the new "democracy" that rises from the ashes of the slaughtered one. There are giant lime-lined pits waiting to receive the bodies of America's Least Wanted. It is interesting that several of the members of the first lineage were students of one of the professors marked for slaughter, Brolly. Despite them having marked him for eradication, they would occasionally draw a parallel between what happened post-Adjustment Day and what Brolly had taught them from the world's literature and history in classes deemed otherwise "useless" by the Book. There are myriad characters, all involved in the plot to overthrow America. The overthrow begins at about a third of the way through the book. In the rest, we watch the new countries develop in the ashes. The first third -- maybe 40% -- looks and feels like a flawless execution of the red-pill revolution frustrated whites are fantasizing about online all the time. There are cracks and little hints of doubt throughout, but a superficial and partial reading will find critics leveling charges of alt-rightism at Palahniuk. But read on to see the whole thing quickly careen into a mess far greater than what we have today. The author lets the revolution go off without a single hitch. Everything goes perfectly as planned. There are no weak liberators, scared to shoot, no legislators worthy of redemption. Only professor Brolly in Jamal's head, living on as lessons Jamal didn't even realize he'd learned, belying the uselessness with which education had been tagged in the Book. In a way, the cruelty and coldness of the revolutionaries is uniform and unbelievable. Still, it was better in a way than the constant mercy/betrayal cycle in Seveneves by Neal Stephenson, where the protagonists let the legislators and former rulers live, only to see them worm their way back to power, again and again and again. The steeliness was a welcome change. But pothead Walter and his gonads inspired everything, with his lust for Shasta. It's wonderfully done by Palahniuk. And for the other revolutionaries, always it comes down to the same thing, all the high-minded rhetoric masks the single question: can I fuck it? Men rule, women drool (literally, in Shasta's case, when she's "proving" her pure whiteness). The male fantasy doesn't stretch very far. The white male fantasy even less so. Gaysia, Blacktopia and Caucasia are the main countries, with obvious segregated populations. There are complicated rules for mixed-race citizens and sexual preference takes precedence over race. Asians are sent back to Asia and Latinos sent to somewhere in South America. Jews go to Israel. It is crude and hews closely to the simplistic plans and ideas easily found on the Internet. Blacktopia rides high, becoming the seat of technology based on the ancient nigh-magical secret science that blacks had long hidden from their oppressors. Caucasia reverts to medieval times, barely surviving in a benighted manner. Gaysia struggles to produce children, devolving to a country that forces its male members to donate sperm and its females to host children. The revolution ends with a whimper, having destroyed much more than it repaired, being viewed as a failure by all save perhaps the denizens of Blacktopia. The world, presumably, looks on, bemused and vaguely embarrassed for America's inability to act grown-up. I've included "notes, citations and errata" in a separate post. Starlings (2018) by Jo Walton I'd recently read about Jo Walton, that she'd won several awards (Hugo, Nebula) and was intrigued. I grabbed the only book the library had available, a book of her short stories. Her preface, though, indicated that she wasn't really a short-story writer and had never really understood the genre. She was, unfortunately, right. I think she's a good writer, but her short stories felt too underdeveloped. Several of the stories -- she admitted -- were just books she'd started and never finished. There were some interesting ideas, but nothing really memorable. I'll try again with a full-length novel. I've included "notes, citations and errata" in a separate post. Reaper Man (1991) by Terry Pratchett This is an early story of one of Pratchett's favorite characters: Death. It's wonderfully written, one of Pratchett's best. In it, Death takes a vacation. He goes to work on a farm. He has a vacation romance with the proprietress. The rest of the Discworld must deal with the temporary loss of death. Ghosts pile up. The wizards of Ankh Morporkh University try to get to the bottom of it. Reg Shoe -- the zombie -- pleas for the rights of the dead gain more weight as the number of the dead threatens to outweigh that of the living. To fix this problem, humanity envisions a new Death, who comes for the old Death. Their battle is short. The old Death didn't enjoy his job or his power -- his stoicism and dedication win out over a lust for power. Death gets special dispensation for his fling -- Mrs. Flitworth -- from Azrael, the galaxy-sized cat who was there before the universe and will be there after. I've included "notes, citations and errata" in a separate post. Dreyer's English (2019) by Benjamin Dreyer Dreyer is copy chief at Random House Books. He throws his hat into the ring, offering sage and drily humorous grammatical advice based on his 30 years of experience. For nitty gritty and details of grammar, he refers readers to the classic style guides. His book is for broad strokes about the various linguistic constructs and common patterns, tropes and styles he's encountered -- and that he'd like to stop encountering. He is, at core, pragmatic: "A good sentence, I find myself saying frequently, is one that the reader can follow from beginning to end, no matter how long it is, without having to double back in confusion because the writer misused or omitted a key piece of punctuation, chose a vague or misleading pronoun, or in some other way engaged in inadvertent misdirection." But he isn't a pedantic or precise scientist, either. While I'm willing to be convinced by his argument for serial commas -- always use them, because they're often helpful, so why not just get used to them? -- he argues in the opposite manner when writing about hyphens, where he argues that "convention [...] allows for exceptions in some cases in which a misreading is unlikely, as in, say: real estate agent or high school students", to which I say, why? Who would it harm to clean up English's ridiculous word-concatenation rules (or is it "word concatenation" or why not wordconcatentation)? Some agglutinations take a space, others none and others a hyphen -- pretty much depending on how long the compound has existed and ... whimsy. I prefer throwing an extra hyphen at real-estate agents or high-school students simply because there is often so much confusion where neither the author nor the copy editor anticipated there being some. I'm grateful for his having cleared up proper-name hyphenation for me, though, as well as the proper use of hyphens and en dashes (which I'd heretofore used almost correctly). He throws in chapters on oft-misused vocabulary -- as well as some rare, but lovely, vocabulary -- as well as a couple on idioms and common constructs. Some of the chapters are just lists, but that makes this an excellent reference. I've included "notes, citations and errata" in a separate post. Summa Technologiae (Electronic Mediations) (1964; en: 2013) by Stanislaw Lem This is a non-fiction work translated from the original Polish. It is not a light work: it encompasses Lem's complex and intricate musings and theories on technology, nature, genetics, cosmology, philosophy, biology, information theory, ecology, virtual reality, artificial intelligence, cybernetics, robots, programming, identity (cloning), human nature and how these all relate to mankind's possible future or lack thereof. He discusses the likely shape of galactic civilizations as well as the possible composition or origins of its components, where their intelligence comes from, where it would likely develop, where it wouldn't, why science fiction is lazy and, above all, he keeps the discussion rigorously supported by data, even when he seems to be engaging in the most whimsical flights of fancy. It's hard to summarize this book any less vaguely than that. It's just chock-full of relatively advanced thinking -- especially for the time, over 50 years ago -- of an extremely intelligent and, by all accounts, intellectually rigorous man. I'll use some of his own citations to illustrate what I found so exciting in such a weighty and densely written tome (it took me quite a while to make my way through it). Much of what he has to say has been said in other places, but perhaps less eloquently, and not all in one place, connected into a coherent strand of pearls that actually give a framework to thoughts about the future of not only humanity, but any form of intelligence, regardless of where or how it arises. On the pace of development outpacing humanity's societal structures (i.e. the wisdom of elders): "When the entire life of a future generation ceases to be a repetition of their parents’ lives, what kinds of lessons and instructions can the old, experienced as they are, offer to the young?" On the necessary narrowing of intellectual pursuit, with each decision to take a certain branch leaving less energy and intellectual capacity and effort to pursue other, possibly more societally lucrative, paths. "Briefly put, technoevolution brings more evil than good, with man turning out to be a prisoner of what he himself has created. The growth of his knowledge is accompanied by the narrowing down of possibilities when it comes to deciding about his own fate." There is no avoiding this: there is only improving the odds that the chosen path is fruitful. In this vein, any civilization -- humanity definitely included -- only has so much energy and intellectual capacity for missteps. The more advanced, the more likely that an effort will be able to appropriate a large amount of the available resources. In this, Lem presages our coming battle with climate change: we don't have unlimited "lives" to start over (as in a video game). Instead, we must marshal our resources carefully. The profit motive is an unreliable siren here; in the past, we have expended considerable wasted effort "optimizing" for the best solution, throwing incredible resources at a problem, only to end up with a good solution, but with very high cost. In this way, we are emulating Evolution's inefficient process, copying the only creator we know. But our effort to extract ourselves from the narrowing chasm of climate change will require a more precise investment of resources. We are unlikely to do so and will die out. Lem wonders whether that is the nearly unavoidable fate of many civilizations: why would humanity, with all of its faults, and its massively redundant but ultimately unreliable biological machinery, be different? "Are we really supposed to believe that, when looking at the sky above us, we are seeing an abyss filled with worlds that have already been turned to ashes by the power of their suicidal intelligence or that are headed directly toward such an end?" How would the main driver of change, Evolution, be able to help us avoid such a fate? Humanity's intellect allows it to destroy itself much more quickly than Evolution could possibly react. Because we're smarter than that? Not really. Lem offers a definition of intelligence that is humbling -- all the more so because it is frighteningly accurate and utterly devoid of artifice that romanticizes mankind as "special". "By Intelligence we understand a second-level homeostatic regulator that is capable of coping with disturbances to its environment thanks to the activities in which it engages on the basis of the historically acquired knowledge." He is similarly calculating and sober about the purpose of societies. It is hard to find fault with his description, at least at the high level where it truly matters. "What to an observer from a different culture may look like a most irrational type of social ties, obligations, imperatives, and prohibitions has practically always aimed at the same goal: reducing the individual spontaneity of action and its diversity—which is a potential source of disturbance to the state of equilibrium." In his discussion of artificial -- or "machine" (designed) -- intelligence, he offers up an interesting and understandable analogy to describe the "gap" in intelligence between different levels of beings (instead of trying to pretend that knowledge and wisdom make no difference). "In undertaking a reduction, a machine will thus be doing what a physicist is doing when explaining gravitational wave theory to a wide audience by taking recourse to a modest arsenal of school-level math." As for how these machines might work, he looks to the most complex machines heretofore designed: us. Evolution may have expended a shamefully wasteful amount of energy and time designing and refining us, but there is no arguing that she came up with a relatively robust machine. That is not to say that there isn't a tremendous amount of room for improvement with a more focused design process, but that the human machine is still more advanced and impressive than anything that man has managed to design and build. The key is autonomous systems, to focus the intellect on higher-order functions. "The more complex a system is, the more overall regulation is needed, and the smaller the extent to which local oscillations of parameters can be allowed. Does our brain have regulatory control over our body? Undoubtedly it does. Is every one of us in control of our own body? Only within a narrow range of parameters; the rest is “given” to us by Nature, in all its wisdom." He marvels at the machine that Nature has built, but thinks that we can eventually do better. He doesn't disparage Nature, but also does not consider it to be magically unsurpassable. "[...] “coded”in the language of chemical molecules, which could develop from this sperm after it has been combined with an egg. This plan apparently consists of “production rules”and “directions for action.”In that microscopic space, there is information about what has to be done, information about how it has to be done, and last but not least, a mechanism that will enact all this." He even considers what identity is and how the ability to clone or store or copy or transmit an individual would affect it. It is interesting to see this treatise by someone who doesn't confine himself to just one field, be it philosophy, biology or ethics. Instead, Lem approaches from the coldly rational realm of a cyberneticist with experience and wisdom in all of these fields, arriving at a more acceptable and logical conclusion than any individual familiar with only one of these fields could. "A twin is indeed a perfect molecular copy of the “original.”Yet the similarity between two states of the same person—when he is eight and eighty years old, respectively—is no doubt even smaller than the mutual similarity between the twins. Despite this, anyone would admit that the child and the old man are the same person—something we cannot say about the two brothers. It is therefore not the amount of analogous genetic information that determines the continuation of existence but rather the fact of being genetically identical, even if the dynamic structure of the brain undergoes significant changes during one’s lifetime." Finally, Lem reassures us that future developments -- especially cybernetic or robotic ones -- are inevitable if we are to survive. Our past as frail biological shells has served us well to get to where we are, but we will never develop to a galactic and nigh-eternal civilization if we cling to these crude origins. Instead, we should see the intelligence that we have as enough of a lever to bootstrap ourselves into the next level. Even if our biological shells can't go along, our progeny will. We will either have to adapt or die. That includes modifying our genotype to "improve" it -- which entails making moral judgments about what it means to improve something (i.e. value judgments about which humans are worth promoting). So has it always been and so will it always be. Avoiding these decisions because of a temporary luxury to do so will be fatal. We can obstinately refuse and instead elect to die out. "We have to admit that the extent to which control will remain in human hands partly depends on a point of view. The fact that man is able to swim by himself does not mean that he is capable of crossing an ocean without a ship—not to mention jets and space rockets in this context! A similar evolution is starting, in a kind of parallel way, in the information universe. Man is capable of directing a gnostic machine toward a problem that he could perhaps solve by himself (either he himself or his great grandchildren), but in the process, the machine may open his eyes to a problem whose existence he did not even suspect. Who actually has the lead in the latter example?" To this end, we will need to accept that certain passengers will not be able to make the trip. That all people are equal is something that we proudly wave about as if Nature cares at all. This current period, with its anti-evolutionary attitude, near love, of the evolutionarily disadvantaged, will be seen as a backwards religious curiosity in the future. At best. At worst, they will perceive us as criminally pushing for the end of humanity. A hundred years from now (or less), when nature is drastically outpacing evolution’s ability to adapt, man will no longer have the luxury of hewing to a moral code that forbids genetic engineering of humans. The blind, the deaf, the unmotivated, the stupid, the weak, the retarded, the severely autistic -- anyone who needs the intricate modern support system to survive [1] -- they will sink when their survival depends on them swimming. Being saddled with them because of an outdated morality will be a luxury no-one will be able to afford. It will be seen as far more efficient to tweak genetics to keep members of society within a physical bandwidth that if not of actual use in one way or another, at least imposes a minimum of effort. We will no longer have the luxury of keeping useless people alive. This is not eugenics; this is a much harsher world than we know. The future will contain a desperation unknown for centuries to the first-world person. Third-world people -- ¾ of the world -- are already intimately familiar with this harsh, cruel algebra. In Lem's words: "If we are to behave like intellectual cowards, we can, of course, remain silent on the topic of any probable future developments. But in that case, we should at least make it clear that we are behaving like cowards. Man cannot change the world without changing himself. We can take the first steps on a given path while pretending we do not know where it leads. Yet this is not the best strategy." Lem is capable of describing procreation in the most clinical possible way: "Fertilization is an act of “taking a molecular decision” in a confrontation between two partly alternative “hypotheses” about a future state of the organism, whereby the gametes of both sexes are “carriers” of those hypotheses." He tries again and again to describe just how limited we are relative to our future selves. "For someone who can count to a hundred, there is actually no practical difference between a quintillion and infinity. Man as a researcher of the Universe is more like someone who has just learned arithmetic than like a mathematician who is freely juggling infinities." He also wonders what we're going to do with ourselves if we do make it past the coming inflection point that will determine whether we have a future. "[...] when basic needs are being fully satisfied, the problem “what to do next,” i.e., whether we should create some new needs and, if so, what kind, comes to the fore." Finally, just to show that Lem's sometimes too optimistic, we need only turn to his hope for how we will manage information overload. "We can even think that presenting banal works will at last be declared a menace and thus will be seen as a violation of scientists’ professional ethics because such works create nothing but “noise” that prevents us from receiving valuable information." Oh dear, thank goodness Lem is no longer around to see just how badly we've disappointed him. It is not an easy read, but it is legitimately a work of staggering genius. You don't have to agree with him on everything, but you can't argue with his method, with his intellectual rigor and devotion to the scientific method to reduce the ineffability of who we are and where we're headed. I've included "notes, citations and errata" in a separate post. Die Menschheit schafft sich ab (2016) by Harald Lesch and Klaus Kamphausen This book presents a history of mankind and its efforts that begins in the very early universe and slowly focuses its lens on the modern day. It falls into the category of two other books I've read this year, Eine Kurze Geschichte der Menschheit and Summa Technologiae. All of these books offer a sweeping look at human and galactic history and scientific knowledge, which serve as a basis for predictions. Harari predicts cybernetics and AI. Lem does as well. Lesch and Kamphausen predict climate catastrophe. They take us from the Big Bang and the invention of knowledge, the discovery of our planet, continents and then into how the anthropocene has the Earth in its grip. The authors discuss the conditions and events that led to life on Earth and then the various forms that it took over the eons. They do this in order to juxtapose it against the profound effect that mankind is having on the planet in a comparably ridiculously short amount of time. While it took hundreds of millions of years for the remains of dinosaurs and plants to turn into pockets of oil and gas in the lithosphere, mankind is now using 1,000,000 years worth of these supplies every year. Fish of all kinds were five times more abundant as recently as the 1950s and we're taking out twice the replacement rate every year. We've killed off almost every creature larger than a cockroach and replaced it with our paltry few domesticated breeds. We burn and burn and burn, emitting far more CO₂ than can be reasonably absorbed by the vegetation that we aren't clear-cutting to make way for monoculture crops. We're wiping away topsoil in arable lands at prodigious rates. While the book is quite science-heavy, it's accessible to anyone with a passing interest in the sciences and a modicum of intelligence and willingness to learn. The two authors are both professors and have an entertainingly didactic approach to their material, making sure to define their terms and provide explanation of not-so-common concepts. They definitely make an effort to show just how proven the case is that mankind is doing nearly everything wrong in its approach to using the only home it has. There is no room for doubt that we are driving directly at an immovable wall. The authors discuss how western civilization -- with its amoralism and naked greed and egocentrism -- is the main driving force and reason for our predicament. They include a detailed history, with some truly horrific anecdotes: "Die Neue Welt zählte um 1500 etwa 100 Millionen Menschen, so viele wie die Alte Welt. Innerhalb weniger Jahrzehnte wurden mehr als 90 Millionen Indianer in Nord-, Zentral- und Südamerika von den Krankheitserregern aus dem Abendland dahingerafft, während sich hundert Jahre nach Einführung der Kartoffelknolle die Bevölkerung auf der anderen Seite des Atlantiks verdoppelte. Eine nahrhafte Entwicklungshilfe." Before the discovery of the new world, western civilization had already driven itself to the wall once. "Europa stand Ende des 15. Jahrhunderts unter ökologischen Gesichtspunkten betrachtet an einem Punkt, der mit der heutigen globalen Situation vergleichbar ist. Die Wälder waren fast vernichtet, die meisten Gewässer verschmutzt, die nötigen Rohstoffe so gut with verbraucht, die Nahrung war knapp." However, because the population was so much smaller and had not yet industrialized, the damage it did to the planet was limited. It was driving its own extinction, but hadn't yet grown dangerous enough to take the rest of the biosphere with it. It is very clearly the naked and greed-driven capitalism -- a form that ignores costs it incurs (e.g. environmental costs) in order to have more for itself -- that is the problem, according to the authors (and, quite frankly, science and common sense): "Das Eindringen in die Natur der Dinge ist im Anthropozän von herausragender Bedeutung. Aus den technologischen Entwicklungen ergibt sich dann zwangsläufig der Bedarf nach Rohstoffen und Energie. Die sollen natürlich möglichst billig sein, damit die ökonomischen Vorgaben, also die Renditeerwartungen, erfüllt werden können." And it's not only other species that suffer and die off in droves under this rapacious system. The system really only "works" for a very small percentage of humanity itself. That small part holds the rest of the world in thrall, commandeering their meager produce in order to enrich themselves. "Wir wissen, die Erde wird nicht wachsen, aber unsere Ansprüche wachsen, – und die Ungerechtigkeit und Ungleichheit wachsen mit. "Müssen wir den Planeten zerstören und andere Menschen in Armut halten, um unser Leben in gewohntem Maß – oder sollte man besser sagen, in gewohnter Maßlosigkeit – fortzuführen?" This system has a tremendous number of victims, not only in the rest of the species, but also in humans: "Der Hunger tötet welt-weit ungefähr 100.000 Menschen täglich. Kaum jemand spricht über diesen Völkermord, von Abhilfe ganz zu schweigen." The victims are not only in the present but also in the future. Our desire for "freedom" uses up resources that are not ours, but that our worldview in no way prevents us from using. We blindly assume that if it has been made available or can be obtained, then it is ours to have. "Freiheit ist erstens der Kneipenbesuch, und zweitens, dass der Wirt Heizpilze auf den Gehsteig stellt, damit man auch im Januar den Wein und den Barsch draußen genießen kann. Freiheit ist, dass Amerikaner 6,6 Milliarden Kilowattstunden Strom allein für die Weihnachtsbeleuchtung aufwenden, mehr als Tansania im gesamten Jahr verbraucht. Freiheit ist, ein Auto zu bauen (und zu kaufen), das pro Kilometer 224 Gramm Kohlendioxid ausstößt." "Wir leben in einer so unbedingten Freiheit, dass wir der Meinung sind, dass Mobilität gleich Bewegungsfreiheit sei. Egal was es kostet, was es die Natur oder die zukünftigen Generationen kostet -- das ist völlig egal. Unsere unbedingte Freiheit steht über allem." We are using up these resources at a completely irreplaceable rate: "Wir sollten uns darüber im Klaren sein, dass die jetzige Form von Mobilität, die diesem unbedingten Freiheitsbegriff unterliegt, zu einem unbedingten Verbrauch führt. Wir haben keine Möglichkeiten dieses Verbrauchte zurückzuholen." The solution is obviously to stop doing all of this, but the outlook is bleak. "Es ist ein bisschen so wie mit dem kategorischen Imperativ. Niemand von uns kann so leben, dass alle seine Handlungen zum allgemeinen Gesetz er hoben werden. Aber er kann sich das Ziel setzen. Er sollte zumindest wissen, wie es richtig wäre und sich daran orientieren." "Scheinbar sind wir auf der Erde in diesem Irrsinn verfangen und als Besitzer solcher Derivate der Meinung: Komm, lass uns doch lieber darauf spekulieren, dass das Ding kaputtgeht. Nur -- was machen wir dann? An wen soll die Versicherung auszahlen?" They include several essays from other authors about various current topics, like the efficacy of the "Energiewende" in Germany or the efforts at changing habits and usage in various countries in Europe (though with a focus on Germany). I've included "notes, citations and errata" in a separate post. What We Talk about When We Talk about Rape (2018) by Sohaila Abdulali While this book offered a few interesting insights (mostly in the conclusion), it was rather thin on the ground with information. While there were a few statistics, many of them were either unsubstantiated or cited shaky sources (AlterNet, Jezebel, etc.) These are not bad sources, per se. They sometimes have quality articles, but they just as often have unhinged screeds that you can't really take seriously. It's unclear which ones she cited -- but some of the "facts" she cited seemed nearly unbelievable (e.g. "In the US, more than ninety percent of people with developmental disabilities are sexually assaulted"). Unfortunately, throughout the book, she devolves to the "all women are victims and all men are monsters" rhetoric that should be beneath her. She interviews much better than she writes. The book was actually very short and had no central theme or line through it, other than all of the material being more-or-less about rape and its consequences. Sometimes the switches between chapters was jarring -- and often topics that had come up previously were brought back up again later, but without any cohesion. It felt like a scattershot collection of essays and thoughts, with a copious amount of quoted material to fill in what ended up being a short book. The conclusion contained more interesting material, with more cohesiveness and balance, suggesting that the person I'd heard interviewed was the same one who'd written that material. While I applaud her for writing a book about rape all over the world, she doesn't properly indicate which country she's talking about when she makes some of her more incendiary statements. For example, earlier in the book, she writes: "Sexual predators deserve due process, but they don’t deserve blanket immunity from accusations any more than any other criminals." Again with the straw man. Even if a lot of people believe this, do you need to spend so much time debunking it? Might as well prove that 2+2=4. As well, while this might be the case in people's minds in some places in the States, it's not the legal case anywhere. Boys will be boys is stupid. So is pretending that people aren’t animals who have to be trained to resist biological impulses. Anyone who says they haven’t ever felt a nearly overwhelming biological urge is lying, man or woman. Giving in to it without consent is rape. Controlling it takes training. Again and again throughout the book she claims that rape is something that happens all the time, but fails to back it up with data from any reliable source. For example, she writes that "out of every 1,000 rapes," * 310 are reported to the police; * 57 lead to an arrest; * 11 get referred to the court system; * 6 rapists go to jail. But how do we know that’s abysmal? Are we assuming all 1000 are true? Is she saying that only 0.06% of rapists are punished? As I wrote above, these unsubstantiated "facts" are just presented as if they don't need any justification, even though the accusation is incredibly monstrous. Abysmal would be false convictions or acquittals of rapists (perversion of justice). At a few points, she writes that her husband is brilliant, which left me thinking that she should have had him write the book. After she several times cites that 70-80% of rapes occur in the home or with close relatives, she fills the rest of the book with (possibly apocryphal) stories of rapes outside of the family. They're almost certainly true (hoping she did her research), but they're so over-the-top, they can't represent even the average of the experience for those rapes that do occur outside of the family. For example, "Late night/early morning, there was a knock on the passenger window. I looked up and saw that it was my ex. I cracked the door. The next thing I know I’m being dragged out of the car and slammed onto the ground. “There were nine guys. Four I had known. The other five were strangers. One was my best friend’s boyfriend. Some had bats. One had a gun. They kicked me and beat me. They zip-tied me and put me in the trunk. They took me to a basement and took turns raping me." Who does this? Madness of the highest order. Who plans this? How do you have nine friends who’ll come along on a gang rape/kidnapping party? I'm not doubting it, but it's at the absolute extreme end of sexual assault, to say nothing of harassment. Those that call everything rape would throw this in the same category as unwanted hair-sniffing or shoulder-touching? It's madness, and she offers no guidance. We’re all trained to just believe everything we hear, but this seems beyond the pale. I know it must happen sometimes, but the story is presented as if this is a risk that faces anyone at any time. Just like the story of Alexa (included in citations below), where she ended up doing tremendous amounts of blow and being passed around her Wall Street–office like a sex toy. This is not a common danger. To round out the critique with one of the better ideas from the end of the book (even though the grammar is a bit slapdash): "[...] if someone forces you to have sex, it is rape. The narrative that says: good girls don’t get raped; bad girls can’t get raped. In either case, the nuns’ infamous Boys are off the hook. We’ve created a narrative that says that either it didn’t happen to you, or you deserved it." I've included "notes, citations and errata" in a separate post. The Man in the High Castle (1962) by Philip K. Dick This novel is, in a way, more straightforward than many of Dick's other novels. Instead of multiple onion-skin layers of reality, some drug-induced and (most likely) imaginary (as in The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch), there is one extremely intricately imagined alternate reality where the Axis won World War II, as well as one sketched alternate reality in which they did not, but the Allies converted the world to socialism. The Reich occupies the east coast of America, all of Europe and much of Russia and Asia, as well as South America. The Japanese have the west coast of America. The middle of America is a no-man's land with few people and no effort made to occupy or suppress it. The Nazis executed a 15-year campaign to exterminate all of the peoples of every African nation. The British are still around, but largely defanged. China retains a larger sphere of influence, but not nearly as large as Japan. Italy resents its second-class status in the list of conquering nations, but has little power to do anything. The story takes place largely in San Francisco and in various cities in Colorado. Frank Frink is an artisan who hides his Jewish ancestry. Juliana Frink is his ex-wife, living in the no-man's land with Joe, an Italian-American truck driver with a military past. Childan is an antique dealer with delusions of grandeur and a deeply sycophantic attitude to the occupying Japanese. Wegener is a former German officer posing as a Swede (Baynes). He is trying to communicate with the Japanese in some covert operation. Joe turns out to be a Wehrmacht spy, and the "Swede" learns of Operation Dandelion from an elderly Japanese -- a plan hatched by the ascendant Goebbels to nuke all of the Japanese Home Islands and to consolidate world power, once and for all. The majority of the book is about building the world in which these people move, expertly dropping believable and well-integrated information about the alternate history. Because this is Philip K. Dick, there are two histories: the "real" one and one in samizdat in the form of a book called the The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, in which the author depicts an alternate history to the "real" one in which the Allies won -- but it's different and more utopian than our own. That is, the characters in the book live in a world occupied by the Germans and Japanese that functions largely like our world does today -- with superpowers exerting what they consider to be largely benevolent but firm influence on occupied nations who should be grateful for the guiding hand of a superior civilization -- but they dream through the eyes of a gifted author of a utopia in which socialism has triumphed and put wonderful technological advances to use in bettering all of mankind. That is, instead of the Nazis eradicating every Neger in Africa, the peoples of Africa are lifted up by the same technology. As ever with Dick, things aren't so straightforward: many of the characters use the I Ching to predict their future -- and it works (in this book). Even the author of The Grasshopper Lies Heavy admits that he used the book and the coins to write the book. That is, the book is a "prediction" of sorts. When Juliana finally confronts the author, they use the coins again to elicit from the inanimate seer that the book is actually the truth, that what is written there is the real world and that they have all been living a sick, hallucinated lie. Tagomi discovers this on his own, when he takes one of Frink's handwrought jewelry items to a park and focuses deeply on its wu, its inner essence. When he does, he finds himself transported to another world -- the world in the The Grasshopper Lies Heavy. Terrified, he uses the same technique to somehow make his way back. As always, Dick is a delight to read and provides plenty of food for thought. His stories are incredibly unique and surprising. Highly recommended. I've included "notes, citations and errata" in a separate post. Adirondack Characters and Campfire Yarns: Early Settlers and their Traditions (2005) by William J. O‘Hern The author many times writes that there are so many tales lost to the mists of time and that one volume doesn't suffice to include many of the tales that are known. I think he is overly enamored by the variety he thinks that he is offering. Many of the stories are very similar and they involve a painstaking protocol of how many animals were killed with how many shots. The stories rarely offer a surprise ending or even much interesting detail. They are just the description of a single everyday incident in an otherwise boring life. For example: "George was a good shot. In fact he was a sharpshooter with either a rifle or a shotgun. Mr. Ralph would tip George $5 for every partridge he shot. Once, George shot a kingfisher with a 30-30 Winchester across the bay near the outlet of Black Creek Lake. The bird was sitting on a large rock. The gun that George used the most was a 30-30 Winchester Carbine." This is a very typical passage: drily written, matter-of-fact, and not particularly fascinating. These men were not stewards of the land. They were unwashed and uneducated hunters who took as much as they possibly could. They laid bold claim to having been the man (because they were all men) to kill the last panther or the last bear. Only much later in the book would there be stories of some who seemed to want to take care of the Adirondacks. One of the most heralded mountain men was French Louie, a Canuck who'd wandered down to the region. He seemed nearly the most savage and unpredictable and just downright stupid-mean. The author claimed again and again that people loved him, but I don't see how. The author cites how much Louie loved his dogs and how fiercely he would defend them. But the dogs aren't native. They're just barking killing machines that he uses to cull as much meat and pelts from the woods as possible. When the wolves killed one of his dogs, Louie slaughtered the whole pack in revenge -- a lesson that could not hope to be learned by a pack with no surviving members. The only purpose was mindless slaughter and petty revenge. "Elijah Conklin's written recollections record that Louie ". . was the one who killed the last of the timber wolves in the Adirondacks. He killed five on Samson Lake. They killed his dog and he put arsenic in a doe's carcass and killed all five."" The author very clearly loves everything about the Adirondacks at any time since whites started writing about them. He is over the moon about every detail he can find and wants to preserve every possible word written about any era of trapping, hunting or being in the wild in the Adirondacks. But the author also venerates the trapper and hunter's right to kill the animals for money. Without fail, he characterizes animals as devious and mean in their hopeless attempts to save their lives from their technologically advanced and pitiless enemy, the Adirondack woodsman. A trap is, by design, a cruel way to kill an animal. It chews its own foot off or dies of exhaustion, starvation or dehydration. Beyond that, the author also lauds these heroes for avoiding the state authorities who are trying to contain their plunder and who try to make them stick with hunting and trapping methods that are legal and are not on private property. They didn't care and they were heroes for the devious methods with which they eluded the authorities. The park ranger is made out to be a pain in the ass and the criminal eluding him is venerated. Amongst themselves, there was a pact to keep each other alive -- honor among thieves, of a sort -- with a sort-of campsite-rule where you were allowed to use cabins that were not yours, but left them as good as or better than your found them. Besides the animosity between the woodsmen and the rangers, there was the tension between the woodsmen and their customers: "sports" or city-slickers who couldn't find their asses with both hands and a torch. "[...] some of these city dudes that come up here deer hunting and take turns having their pictures taken with a bunch of deer and maybe a bear or two hanging up behind them, never shot a gun in their lives and wouldn't know a turns skunk from a ten-point buck. They couldn't hit the inside of a barn if you closed the door on them." Most of the stories are written by other authors -- some of them write much better than O'Hern, but none of them write extremely well. The best passages came from the few women included in the volume, to be honest. I did learn more than I already knew about logging terms and traplines. That was certainly interesting. Most of the stories take place in places that I've visited -- some of them even lived (like Clinton). That certainly made it a more fun read than for someone who has no connection whatsoever to the places. The afterword was nice -- a plea for moderns to keep the Adirondacks alive as they are and as they were. I've included "notes, citations and errata" in a separate post. Digging Up Mother (2016) by Doug Stanhope This is Doug Stanhope's autobiography. It is also a biography of his mother, Bonnie. Until her death, their lives were entwined. Stanhope writes quite well and tells the story of his life -- and his Mother's -- in a rollicking and well-structured novel. "Mother" is a piece of work: she loves her son nearly unconditionally. She is a free spirit who is Doug's best friend for decades. They have the same sense of humor. Bonnie is an actress, a masseuse, a con-woman and Doug's biggest fan no matter what he does. She is also a depressed woman in constant pain, easily addicted to pain medication, though on the AA wagon for most of her life. She is manipulative. She is a hoarder. She is loved by many. She is the life of the party. Doug Stanhope is a plainspoken, smart, observant comedian with a lot of miles on him. He's spent years on the road, playing every bowling alley, dive bar and roadhouse in every state in the U.S. He's nearly the definition of a functional alcoholic. He doesn't like to be alone and has warmed his bed with many women on the road. He's almost never been single. He loves living communally, nearly constantly living with at least one, if not several people. Even when he lived in a car, he had a roommate. He's had a litany of powerful actresses as long-term girlfriends. He's had many friends, some for decades. He is faithful to them, if not his official girlfriends and lovers. He is now living with the mentally ill Bingo in Bisbee, Arizona. His life is lived in the seedier part of America -- he would call it a more honest life in a more honest place. He's never compromised, though he has worked in Hollywood, trying to make a go of it. Unlike Bill Hicks, he didn't shun the commercial world -- though he has retained his honesty and hasn't censored himself at all. His material is highly sexual, highly coarse and uproariously funny. He's funny because he tells the truth. Some of his opinions are a bit too libertarian, but his heart is in the right place. He's quite intelligent and can put long off-the-cuff diatribes together that cut our society deep, to the core, and still be shockingly funny. Before he was a comedian, he was a telemarketing grifter. With his gift of gab, he was one of the best. Despite having spent most of his life in the grayer areas of the law, he's never been in trouble and never been in prison. He's been in jail, but was always bailed out. He's had TV shows, but he's always loved being a comedian more. He likes airport bars the best -- hotel bars, if need be. As a comedian, he's quite humble, constantly pointing out comedians who are better than he is. He revered Mitch Hedberg. He is now, by definition, better than Hedberg. He's considered to be the best comedian alive by many of the other best comedians. He does not pull punches. You know he won't. He won't sell out. Some citations to give you some ideas of his thinking and comedy: "[...] unlike the Internet, the newspaper eventually ends, so you know to get on with your day." "A frustrated waitress or store clerk laughing is way more gratifying than a paying audience." "Anyone who says that suicide is never the answer hasn’t heard all of the questions." "When I say that I wrote Mother off, I don’t mean that I cut off contact or deprived her of any financial support. I was still with her and helped out all I could. The write-off came in that I knew that I could no longer invest myself emotionally in trying to get her to help herself." I know this feeling with politics or rational discussions. At some point, with some people, you give up. You achieve detente by implicitly no longer talking about anything but the weather and pets. "They sent her ashes back months later. I tried to sell them on eBay, with all proceeds going to The Humane Society but the auction was shut down within hours. Seems selling dead people is not only against eBay policy, it’s against federal law. Feds must not like cats like Mother did." I've included "notes, citations and errata" in a separate post. Le Transperceneige (1982; fr) by Jacques Lob and Jean-Marc Rochette This is an older, French, black-and-white graphic novel about a 1,001-car train charging along a track hundreds of thousands of kilometers long, encircling a globe frozen by man's hubris and foolishness. It is the last bastion of humanity, holding the last dregs in its innards. The world is cold because man released a chemical to counteract the effects of his having warmed the climate disastrously. It backfired and froze the world. There are the "queuetards" (denizens from the back of the train) and the elites (the front, naturally). Humanity's age-old structure has been compressed into one dimension. We meet two prisoners, one queuetard (Proloff) and one sympathizer for the queuetards (Belleau), from the middle of the train. They are being taken forward from their prison to the state cars, nearer the front. Their journey takes them through the luxury of the vegetable and plant cars, something the queuetard didn't even know existed. He only saw the sun again for the first time in years -- because the rear cars have no windows. Proloff moves forward through the train with Belleau, discovering areas that he's never seen -- and eventually moving beyond the cars that even she's seen. They become lovers (of course). They learn that the train is slowing and, that General Krimson (in charge of the military and, de factor, of the train) plans to decouple part of the rear of the train. The military pursues them -- ostensibly because they are spreading a virus throughout the train. Proloff and Belleau make it to the very front of the train, to the locomotive. Here, Proloff shoots out windows, letting in the -87ºC air. Belleau succumbs, but he is rescued by Alex Forrester, the odd and remote engineer of the train. The engineer works with Olga, the AI in the train. Olga can continue to run indefinitely, as long as she is accompanied by a human presence. The cars are detached, Proloff takes over as engineer -- and the virus story turns out to have been true, as he remains the sole passenger of the Transperceneige at the end of the first book. The second book picks up the story in a second train, larger than the Transperceneige. It runs on the same track and is aware of the other, smaller train. They are in constant fear of a collision and, thus, make frequent "braking drills" to verify that the train could stop should it be necessary. During this time, the "Arpenteurs" (surveyors) go out onto the frozen surface to perform various missions. The first depicted mission sees the leader fall, spilling one of his eyes from his frozen head. A young Puig Vallès picks it up -- and, seventeen years later, becomes a surveyor himself. Puig is popular among the masses, as the surveys are one of the only real, physical entertainments -- everything else is virtual and available to only a select few (the rich and winners of occasional lotteries). As in the film, the train is separated into the have and have-nots. Puig's popularity is limited to the masses; the leaders seek to get rid of him by sending him on a suicide mission to fly from the train and reconnoiter the track in front. He manages it, as no other before him, and blackmails them into letting him land back on the train. He had discovered a destroyed bridge in front of the train and could help them deviate before a disaster. Safely back on the train, he discovers further that the Transperceneige is actually no longer circling the globe. That, instead, the very first braking maneuver was not a test of avoiding the other train, but was to stop and pick up the other, smaller train, depositing it into the capacious bowels of several of the thousands of cars in the larger train. Proloff, as the only survivor, continued on his journey, but in a train within a train. Perhaps this is a metaphor for the virtual reality that the denizens of the larger train "enjoyed". The leaders kept this from the general populace, in order to continue to control them with the fear of a collision. In the third book, Puig is in charge of the larger train. He is now married to Val, the daughter of General Kennel, the new head of the military. There is an accident that forces a braking maneuver. Several cars in the middle of the train are destroyed. Puig dons his surveyor's suit once again to investigate. At the same time, Reverend Dickson dispatches his secret child-assassins in similar suits to kill him while he's outside. The assassins are also to detach the back part of the train, leaving half of the remaining population to die. Puig survives the assassination attempt, killing the other soldiers and making his way forward to depose an ascendant Dickson and General Kennel. He manages it and encases them in the "drawers" -- morgue-like containers that serve as a prison on the train. Shortly after, the train's communications system detects music playing from the opposite side of the ocean. Puig must make another decision: to mount the emergency treads on the first 25 train cars and abandon the rest of the train to divert across the ocean and investigate the source of the music. Meanwhile, the Reverend and Kennel have sweet-talked their way out of prison and have taken over the back of the train again. This time, the back of the train is the wagons of pleasure and decadent restaurants near the former front of the train. As they slowly make their way across the frozen ocean, the Reverend and General start a new mutiny to turn the train around and return to the tracks on the former shore. At the head of the train, Puig responds by cutting water, power and heat to the mutinous cars. Dickson launches one last-ditch attack from the outside, sending his remaining assassins along the top of the train to command capsule at the front. Puig and his colleagues repel the attack, retaining control of the train. He returns along their route and kills Dickson and Kennel by shooting through the ceiling of their wagon. The train drives on, toward the other shore. Near the shore, there are frozen waves that threaten to split the train again. Puig once again takes to the sky to perform reconnaissance, confirming that they are very near the shore before nestling back onto the train. A long-dormant but still-active missile battery shatters the middle of the remaining train, forcing another shortening of the train and jettisoning of unneeded material (like Dickson's artwork). Finally, they alight on the opposite shore, severely shortened but still moving. The signal is much, much stronger and Puig becomes a surveyor once again to investigate the source. It is an automated system, playing music for a long-frozen audience. The whole journey and struggle was for naught. The story is interesting, well-drawn and offers some insight into man's hubris, with analogies to our current climate predicament. They were unable to snatch their slim hope, either. I've included "notes, citations and errata" in a separate post. The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming (2019) by David Wallace-Wells As you begin this book, you feel it is either an unhinged leftist diatribe of sour grapes trying to convince the masters of the universe that they should switch to socialism and stop what we're doing because it's unfair to the losers or it's an exceedingly well-written and researched manifesto shrieking at us that the effects of the world we've had designed and built for us are also that which make it certain that this world will not last. It is, unfortunately, the latter. The world we've built has its destruction written into its DNA. It is built on a mountain of checks that we cannot cash. We are boiling ourselves away from the planet, but other, less-evolved species will probably be OK. Everything we eat, though, will be extinct by our hand long before global warming can finish them off. Fish and wildlife have already experienced their catastrophic near-extinction and that had nothing to do with CO₂ and everything to do with humans. If humans disappear or are significantly diminished, then other species may have a chance again. The ones we knew -- and that we've nearly eliminated -- will die with us, as they used the same ecological niche as we did for their crucible. They are just as sensitive as we are to those changes. Many plants will die, but others won't. Many insects will die, but others will thrive. The story of climate change is the story not of life dying out, but of intelligent life making its home so inhospitable for itself that, in the end, it check-mates itself. Wallace-Wells is an eloquent teller of this tale of mankind's downfall. In the citations below, you'll find many thoughtful and evocative descriptions that enhance the dry data of our demise. Even when we actually scream from the hilltops, it's ignored, as Wallace-Wells states so eloquently: "Rhetoric often fails us on climate because the only factually appropriate language is of a kind we’ve been trained, by a buoyant culture of sunny-side-up optimism, to dismiss, categorically, as hyperbole." He employs this talent to interpret the data in a way that we can imagine: what does a world of 2ºC (warming over average temperatures before the industrial age) look like? How about 4ºC? Is any of it livable? With the population we have now? Wallace-Wells makes clear that, for the first time in history, mankind's habitable surface area is shrinking. Don't be fooled, though: He isn't a classic die-hard environmentalist. In fact, he clearly states that, "I may be in the minority in feeling that the world could lose much of what we think of as “nature,” as far as I cared, so long as we could go on living as we have in the world left behind." I personally feel that this is a reprehensible thing to say, but the author is probably just a city-dweller who doesn't even know what nature is. At any rate, it was a one-off comment that he made before acknowledging that his dream of living on Cybertron is not a reality on Earth. His thesis statement for the book is basically as follows, "We have all already left behind the narrow window of environmental conditions that allowed the human animal to evolve in the first place, but not just evolve—that window has enclosed everything we remember as history, and value as progress, and study as politics. What will it mean to live outside that window, probably quite far outside it? That reckoning is the subject of this book." In another example, he savages Bitcoin for using as much power as solar energy has given us total. So much waste, so little time. "Market forces have delivered cheaper and more widely available green energy, but the same market forces have absorbed those innovations, which is to say profited from them, while continuing to grow emissions." Since Bitcoin is eating up the surplus generated by solar, Wallace-Wells explains: "Solar isn’t eating away at fossil fuel use, in other words, even slowly; it’s just buttressing it. To the market, this is growth; to human civilization, it is almost suicide. We are now burning 80 percent more coal than we were just in the year 2000." Wallace-Wells moves on to explain the injustice of how the so-called developed world has built its empire on the backs of the poor: first, exploiting them and their lands to burn the planet and second, to watch as they also bear the (initial) brunt of the chaos their world has wrought. "In the postindustrial West, we try not to think about these bargains, which have benefited us so enormously. [...] given the devastation that wealth has imposed on the world of natural wonder it conquered and the suffering of those, elsewhere on the planet, left behind in the race to endless material comforts. And asked, functionally, to pay for them." The environmental catastrophe hits not just in temperature increase but in drastic reduction of drinking water, crop yields, and an astonishing increase in pollution. "But of all urban entitlements, the casual expectation of never-ending drinking water is perhaps the most deeply delusional. It takes quite a lot to bring that water to your sink, your shower, and your toilet." He discusses the Syrian "civil war" as if there had been no goading or machination from self-interested, western powers, exacerbating a climate crisis for which they are largely responsible with fomented warfare intended to consolidate power over more oil-production. People always talk of terrorism as if it just appears and lashes out when a state fails. The so-called terrorists do not attack indiscriminately. They generally terrorize within their own borders, against occupying powers. No mention of state terror that engenders it all. Or the massive climate costs they incur in doing so. His analysis is weak and incomplete here. It doesn't have to be exhaustive, but he can't just toss out these little sentences to make a vague point that comes to an utterly fallacious conclusion. The market rules, though. People move to stupid places for stupid, short-sighted, and selfish reasons. Communities respond by attracting and accommodating the wealthy. They bring water to places where the energy investment to do so is many times more than the place from which the water was originally destined. He goes on to discuss not just the water crisis (saying we would be bad enough off without one, but we definitely have one...and it's going to get worse), but also the air-pollution crisis, which is basically untenable in any of the larger cities in which 70% of the world's population lives. Not only pollution, but also malnutrition, will guarantee that most of the world's human population will be dead weight, incapable of helping us think our way out of this crisis -- because the crisis has stifled their mental and physical development. Even if they were able to think straight, there's nothing to eat, the bugs are dying, the crops are failing and factory-farming is going to collapse under its own weight. "Twenty-two percent of the earth’s landmass was altered by humans just between 1992 and 2015. Ninety-six percent of the world’s mammals, by weight, are now humans and their livestock; just four percent are wild." No pollinators, no food, no people, so other predictions of growth are strongly countered. Unless mankind flails in a paroxysm of energy use to dwarf all efforts heretofore to try to cover the gap, which will also end things even more quickly than they otherwise would. Sometimes he presents numbers too drily: "Compared to the trajectory of economic growth with no climate change, their average projection is for a 23 percent loss in per capita earning globally by the end of this century." In this case, he could be somewhat optimistic that at least this will likely lead to less emissions. Naturally, people will suffer and die, but they will do so anyway. At least if they die in the service of a shrinking economy, mankind ends up with less energy use rather than more. It's far from an ideal solution -- it's not even a solution, really, at all -- but it's not like a tragedy. "And to help buffer or offset the impacts, we have no New Deal revival waiting around the corner, no Marshall Plan ready." What could we do? Everything we could do involves energy, extraction, and manufacturing. Every move we make to fix the problem likely makes it worse. Use solar to get free energy? Manufacturing panels is counterproductive (although, according to Bill McKibben in Falter, it's gotten much, much better: panels last for 25 years and the energy investment is amortized in 5 years). It's far too late for nuclear, considering the manufacturing and concrete involved, even if the budgeting and construction fiascoes could be magically bypassed. The nuclear-waste problem is much better than it was: newer reactors are much more efficient and capable of re-burning and -processing much more its own waste. Even current reactors really produce much less waste and pollution than fossil fuels, which are actively killing us by raising temperature, rather than possibly, eventually killing us with radiation sickness. At this point, it's really about triage. "Hitting four degrees of warming, which lies on the low end of the range of warming implied by our current emissions trajectory, would cut into it by 30 percent or more. This is a trough twice as deep as the deprivations that scarred our grandparents in the 1930s, and which helped produce a wave of fascism, authoritarianism, and genocide." Yes, but losing 15% of 1000 is more devastating than 30% of 50,000. They suffered because they were closer to death to begin with. We fall farther, but still land much higher. He (like Bill McKibben) tears into the Pinker line of reasoning that things, in fact, have been getting better and we should lean back and appreciate all that our system of ruling the world has given us. Now I finally realize what annoys me so much about Pinker's argument: the rate of progress was unsustainable and unevenly distributed. The blowback when the wave crashes will hit everyone but Pinker and his cohort. It's like a student cramming for a test that won't remember 90%; the current situation incurs unrealistic expectations. Basically, our progress was obtained on credit and the bill is coming due. "But we close them off when we say anything about the future being inevitable. What may sound like stoic wisdom is often an alibi for indifference." Despite everything Wallace-Wells has written, he dares chastise those who, with clear eyes, don't see much hope. It doesn't mean we stop trying, but roundly "Fuck you" for calling us indifferent. He knows all that he wrote in this book: it's fucking hopeless. We have not acted. We have instead doubled down. We will not change. Wallace-Wells bred anyway (he has a child) and is now trying to justify it by pretending -- despite all the evidence to the contrary that he himself has presented -- that it's not hopeless. He knows his child will not really suffer because she is in the elite conquerors most responsible but least affected. Don't you dare condemn pragmatic realism as indifference, sir. If I fall off a cliff, gravity reigns whether I want it to or not. My inaction is not indifference. It's acceptance. Parents have to spin themselves fairy tales. Don't expect me to buy their self-consoling bullshit. "[...] such as the promise that human life will endure, [...]" It probably will, but in a nearly unrecognizable form. We will be demoted to colonists on our home planet. He continues digging, addressing the suicidal theory of economics that we've chosen to honor as the one true God. "Behavioral economics is unusual as a contrarian intellectual movement in that it overturns beliefs—namely, in the perfectly rational human actor—that perhaps only its proponents ever truly believed, and maybe even only as economics undergraduates." But everyone is still trapped by this backward thinking, that "we tend to think of climate as somehow being contained within, or governed by, capitalism. In fact, the opposite: capitalism is endangered by climate." And our stumbling, foolish way of running things isn't nearly efficient enough -- not even close. There is no time anymore to let good things happen as a side-effect of a few people making a fuck-ton of money. "It took New York City forty-five years to build three new stops on a single subway line; the threat of catastrophic climate change means we need to entirely rebuild the world’s infrastructure in considerably less time." Next up is technological rapturism: people think that they can escape our ruined world by flying to other planets or by uploading themselves into software (though where the energy comes from to keep running that simulation is a thorny problem). This is all bullshit, though. We know what we have to do. Eat the rich. As Wallace-Wells writes, "If the world’s most conspicuous emitters, the top 10 percent, reduced their emissions to only the E.U. average, total global emissions would fall by 35 percent." "United States and Europe, where emissions have already flattened out and will likely begin their decline soon—though how dramatic a decline, and how soon, is very much up in the air." Here he conveniently forgets the matter of justice and the fact that the US has "flattened out" at 2.25 times Europe, which is at 2 times China. There's a lot of savings to be had by reducing them. The prior quote that says that reducing the worst 10% to EU levels would reduce the burden by 35% applies to mostly UAE and US citizens. This is also ignoring the fact that European and U.S. lifestyles are buttressed by industry in China. You can't just offload your carbon emissions by killing your own manufacturing but still increasing consumption. They're still technically your carbon emissions if your consumption is the only thing driving that production. "[...] a large slice of China’s emissions is produced manufacturing goods to be consumed by Americans and Europeans." He argues that we need to "shake the casual sense that as time marches forward, life improves ineluctably", but this is an elite opinion anyway. Most haven't felt and don't feel these effects anyway. It was always a myth for 95% of humanity. "[...] warming at the level necessary to fully melt ice sheets and glaciers and elevate sea level by several hundred feet promises to initiate rolling, radically transformative changes on a timescale measured not in decades or centuries or even millennia, but in the millions of years." On that scale, our cradle environment, what we cherish, will be long gone. Even the memory of it will be long gone. By the time the planet is once again able to offer conditions similar to those of fifty years ago, mankind will no longer be interested or will fight it. "As Swedish journalist Torill Kornfeldt asks [...] “Why should nature as it is now be of any greater value than the natural world of 10,000 years ago, or the species that will exist 10,000 years from now?”" Good question, in absolute terms. However, its value to us, now, is much higher, as we are stuck at one point on time's arrow. Perhaps we sacrifice now so that 10,000 years from now is nicer, but we're not doing that either. In the end, though, there is no more discussion needed. "[...] the world has, at most, about three decades to completely decarbonize before truly devastating climate horrors begin. You can’t halfway your way to a solution to a crisis this large." We have to abandon everything we know about capitalism as we do it today. It is a crooked kleptocracy that only ever threw enough crumbs to keep its subjects from rising up. As summarized by George Orwell in The Road to Wigan Pier: "The world is a raft sailing through space with, potentially, plenty of provisions for everybody; the idea that we must all cooperate and see to it that everyone does his fair share of the work and gets his fair share of the provisions seems so blatantly obvious that one would say that no one could possibly fail to accept it unless he had some corrupt motive for clinging to the present system." I've included "notes, citations and errata" in a separate post. Falter (2019) by Bill McKibben I read this book immediately after having read The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming by David Wallace-Wells. It compares favorably: the prose is easily as appealing, the facts just as eye-opening (many overlap, of course) and the conclusion just a bit more hopeful, in a very specific way. It's not a false hope, either. McKibben is deadly serious about the facts and their sobering implications. But he also spends a little time being in awe of what mankind has produced, despite how casually we've burned through resources -- or how unevenly we've distributed benefits -- to do so. He doesn't rubber-stamp these achievements as "worth it" like so many others (just because he happens to be a in a group that benefits) and he doesn't diminish the evil that was an intrinsic part of how it came to be, but he does take a few minutes to describe it, if only to descry something worth saving. If mankind where to have wasted resources on only a handful of people while subjugating all others to produce total and useless crap, then a logical conclusion would be relatively easy: let it all go. We're done here. Even more than Wallace-Wells, McKibben points the accusatory finger at a system heavily influenced by the so-called American way of life, represented more recently by high-tech moguls and gurus who own vast swaths of the global economy and are no longer located exclusively in America (though many are in Silicon Valley). He eloquently describes moments from his many travels. Instead of using numbers describing the tar-sands complex in Alberta, he tells us that "[b]ecause any bird that landed on the filthy water would die, cannons fire day and night to scare them away", which cuts much, much deeper with its layered perversity. Or analogizing that "[t]he extra heat that we trap near the planet because of the carbon dioxide we’ve spewed is equivalent to the heat from 400,000 Hiroshima-sized bombs every day, or four each second." Those facts sink in and don't let go. As with anyone attempting to inspire action, you have to make a decision on how to deliver the message: do you appeal to basic ethics or decency? Or do you appeal to personal danger? Anyone arguing against going to war in a foreign country (like Iran) generally skips the first argument, though it's the only one they should have to make. Instead, they end up talking about how hard it would be to defeat Iran, how much it would cost in lives and money and so on. The basic senselessness and immorality of it are quickly deemed as moot because people just don't care. McKibben must strike a similar balance: he spends a little time discussing just how wrong it is for 1% of the planet's population to doom the other 99% for its own pleasure. But then he switches to the argument that is far more likely to hit home for those 1%: that they won't be safe where they are for much longer. The effects of their behavior will soon affect them and the ones they love in addition to faceless and sub-human foreigners in dusty, squalid countries. As does Wallace-Wells, McKibben discusses the shape of the global economy and the vast reductions or changes needed in order to combat the climate crisis. Unlike either of those authors, though, I think we should welcome a wholesale reduction of mankind (perhaps back to the population level the world enjoyed when I was born, about 4 billion). We can either do it voluntarily or let Mother Nature kill off slews that can no longer be sustained on a dying planet, watching our unthinking and unquestioning brethren grunt and breed and churn their offspring directly into the meat-grinder of an uncaring climate. Unique among every other generation of mankind that came before us, we will have the dubious honor of knowing that "the size of the board on which we’re playing the game is going to get considerably smaller [...]" Given this glaring and undeniable fact, we should really get squared with the notion that we can't defend everywhere, we can't save everything and we shouldn't try. It's not a matter of money, but a matter of remaining resources. And I don't mean we let people fry where they live; instead, as with cases of eminent domain, we should offer them a luxurious apology package to relocate while we focus our efforts on making wherever we relocate them safe from further climate-based predations. This obviously won't happen, but it would be the right thing to do. We've grown used to getting what we want, to growing without restriction, and to not having to pay too much for our mistakes. I fault McKibben in only a few places. One of them is in his treatment of Obama, where he writes, "It’s not, at some level, Obama’s fault. He was elected to run a political and economic system based on endless growth. He feared that if he upset it too much he wouldn’t be reelected, which would have done no one any good." That's a fucking copout. Obama didn’t get it, and he still doesn’t. He's seen all of the data and he doesn’t care. He should have talked about nothing but climate change. He never mentioned it. He had the chance to rebuild the economy better. He put it back the way it was, but more unequal and more zombified. He didn't even stand up once, not where he would have personally sacrificed something. Similarly for bloody Trudeau of Canada, who's also lying about caring about climate change. He’s a sociopath like all the rest. He and Obama should not go down in history as climate-change leaders who mysteriously took their countries in the exact opposite direction, despite their best intentions. That’s fatuous bullshit. But otherwise McKibben savages the right people for the climate crisis, placing blame but also obligation to do something about it on the 1% that benefitted the most. He has a long section on the ideological underpinnings of the 20th century that led to this situation, in particular noting the insidious influence of Ayn Rand's writings (who "might as well have written with a crayon") on the idiotic American Business upper class. After reading through this, I was struck by the thought that Rand may have been the Soviet Union's greatest sleeper agent -- talk about playing a long game. Speaking of the Soviet Union, McKibben lashes out at a country with, "[...] its environment wrecked because people couldn’t protest pollution, its people demoralized because they were told what to do with their lives, its official art and literature a dim-witted joke." Are you hearing the irony in that statement, Bill? No? A pity. I suppose you are, after all, an American. As he mentioned earlier in the book, "[his] naïveté stemmed naturally from the fact that [he] grew up at precisely the moment when America was making huge strides toward reducing inequality, when it seemed that the obvious task was to make our world fairer. I was born in 1960, between the New Deal and the Great Society." I guess the whole cold-war mindset was buried a bit too deeply, as well. There are other examples, in quick succession. In another story that immediately followed, he was outside the GUM department store in Moscow where he saw, "[...] two long lines of people waiting, [...] When the left door opened first, everyone on the right side simply went home: they’d guessed wrong and knew that whatever was for sale would be long gone before they made it inside." You have described an Apple store, Bill. You have not in any way described a uniquely Soviet failing. He still wasn't done, though, "An industrial society that can’t produce enough children’s coats for the Russian winter—that’s failure on a grand scale." His analysis seems to be entirely without self-reflection or ironic sense. He delivers these anecdotes complete devoid of any analysis of the economic war waged on the USSR by a rapacious, pitiless, and amoral power (the U.S.). He utterly fails to not even mention the same, or worse, level of failure in America since Reagan. The depth of anti-communism and Russophobia in the U.S. is so staggering that it rears its ugly head even in the most otherwise carefully researched book. Finishing up with Rand, he discusses the central tenet of Atlas Shrugged -- which so many of America's political leaders have taken to heart -- that the smart and strong will always have to put up with moochers. The reason it's so appealing is that it's not wrong. There are moochers. There are nearly utterly useless people, unsuited to not only the purpose for which they are employed or invest themselves, but for anything. Dumb, lazy, bored, depressed, untrainable: it doesn’t matter; someone else has to cover for their needs. The conceit lies in the idea that the dividing line between the groups of productive and unproductive runs right along rich/poor (or black/white or whatever). The problem with Rand's philosophy is that it doesn't account for good or bad luck or drastically staggered starting blocks. It doesn't account for moochers who were "born on third and think they hit a triple." The true moochers are ladder-climbers, middle management and greedy bosses, sitting on the necks of the productive, bleeding them dry. Those with ability should be looking up for moochers, not down, as Rand instructed them. McKibben sums up how this whole philosophy relates to climate change. "Once the Arctic melts, there’s no way to freeze it back up again, not in human time. The particular politics of one country for one fifty-year period will have rewritten the geological history of the earth, and crimped the human game." In a dark mood, it might strike one as a delicious irony that humanity will have been killed by a parasitic meme -- a parasite so stupid that it kills its host. A poisonous and selfish worldview leads to rapacious and immoral individualism leads to lying about climate change to protect business leads to inundation and extinction. Well done. With a whimper indeed. Humanity gets a fucking Darwin Award. The next section of the book gets more optimistic, discussing germ-line editing and cybernetics. I'm not convinced that's going to help. But it's not like we're going to stop breeding, because that’s obviously not an option. Instead, we're totally going to let the rich edit germlines, so even more people can viably breed. He even gets to Stephen Pinker (who Wallace-Wells also discussed), who he cites as writing that artificial intelligence is "like any other technology [...] tested before it is implemented and constantly tweaked for safety and efficacy." Sweet God, the naiveté. It's like he doesn't even live on the same planet. That is absolutely the opposite of how we introduce technology. We have much more of a "throw shit on the wall and see what sticks" approach, which is marvelously suited to AI -- which may end up sticking very well, indeed, whether we like it or not. After Pinker, cue Kurzweil, who McKibben knows and who he cites about death, "If someone dies, our immediate reaction—it’s considered a tragic thing, not a triumphant thing." I think this infantile, stunted and uniquely western philosophy is fucking ruining everything again by inventing and promulgating so-called needs. A life well-lived can absolutely be triumphant. Lingering on is embarrassing. Kurzweil and his ilk suffer from a surfeit of ego. I’m happy as I am. What's the point of starting over again later, almost certainly completely unadapted for my new life? To whose benefit? Let it go, Ray. Life mattered and matters little, even the first time through. However, I don't agree with the critique that Kurzweil's philosophy is bad because it "limit[s] new entrants to the human race". I don’t share McKibben’s and society’s seeming preference for the young or unborn. How is a philosophy that favors future generations morally better ? If people become immortal, then we either need a lot more room or we need fewer entrants. It’s logic. We need fewer entrants as well if resources dwindle, as they will. He finally gets to his pièce de resistance: the solar-power market, which he manages to finally put into terms that look quite hopeful, even to me. Here's the money shot: "The manufacturing process for solar panels has become so efficient that the panels pay back the energy used to make them in less than four years. Since they last three decades, that means a quarter-century of pollution-free operation." Will we be allowed to have this thing? Not if the powers-that-be have anything to say about it. They all benefit from sunken investments in infrastructure -- subsidies over nearly a century of decades -- that continue today. They're lying about catastrophic downsides to their own energy sources and torpedoing alternatives that are not personally lucrative but would be better for everyone else. "That’s why Exxon hates solar: you put up a solar panel and the energy comes for free, which to the corporate mind is the stupidest business plan ever.) The cash you spend for energy stays close to home; there’s no way for the Koch brothers to become our richest and most powerful citizens simply by shipping fuel hither and yon." With all of this tech talk, McKibben returns to asking whether we're not already good enough, circling back to the initial theme of asking what is uniquely worth saving about humanity? He discusses resistance and never giving up, even in the face of horrible odds. He wonders again whether we shouldn't just be happy with what we've got, "Given that there’s no finishing line to the human game, no obvious goal toward which we are racing, then why exactly are we so intent on constantly speeding up?" I think it's an important book that asks the right questions and delivers a tremendous amount of vital information in an interesting, well-written and, at times, poignant read. He strikes the right balance between science and philosophy -- because it's the deficit of the latter that aided the former in running roughshod over us all. I'll let McKibben have his eloquent last word. "But if the bird’s special gift is flight, ours is the possibility of restraint. We’re the only creature who can decide not to do something we’re capable of doing. That’s our superpower, even if we exercise it too rarely. "So, yes, we can wreck the Earth as we’ve known it, killing vast numbers of ourselves and wiping out entire swaths of other life—in fact, as we’ve seen, we’re doing that right now. But we can also not do that." I've included "notes, citations and errata" in a separate post. Hate Inc. (2019) by Matt Taibbi This book was published in serial form over the course of a year. I purchased a subscription at the very beginning and read the chapters as Taibbi produced them. Because of the serial nature, I've linked the original URLs (to which you only have access if you either have a subscription or if Taibbi just opens it up for everyone) and denoted which citations come from which chapters. I think I have the chapters in the right order. It was an interesting experiment for an excellent book. I've still got a subscription to Taibbi's output, but he hasn't published anything since he finished this book. No regrets. The book is about the American media over the last four decades, but focusing on the first two decades of the 21st century. It's about the influence, the stupidity, the corruption and the sheer uselessness of it all. One of the main thrusts is of the major failures they have suffered in being utterly unable to reliably report on major issues, either before they happen or, even more embarrassingly, afterward. This is a recurring feature of American media: "[…] you can be fired for being wrong. You just can’t be fired for being wrong in concert. [...] many of America’s highest-profile media figures are not only wrong very frequently, but absurdly so. But their saving grace is that the wrong things they express are the same wrong things everyone else is expressing." Taibbi's accurate descriptions, drawn from the actual pages of America's major newspapers, read like Orwell's 1984. This kind of comparison is considered, in some circles, to be too trite to make, but look at it, "In the blink of an eye, we went from tolerating Saddam Hussein without any trouble at all to needing to kill him immediately in self defense [...]" That is nothing if not a paraphrase for "We have always been at war with Eastasia." This style leads inevitably to the lowest-common-denominator of media: making dumbasses feel superior by showing them even dumber people. In one way, Taibbi's book is a thesis proving that Judge's Idiocracy was a vision of the future that has come much, much more quickly than 500 years. "The most popular programs aren’t about geniuses and paragons of virtue, but instead about terrible parents, morons, people too fat to notice they’re pregnant, people willing to be filmed getting ass tucks, spoiled rich people, and other freaks. Why use the most advanced communications technology in history to teach people basic geography, or how World Bank structural adjustment lending works, when you can instead watch idiots drink donkey semen for money? [...] We’re probably just a few years way from a show called, What Would You Suck For a Dollar? (Emphasis added.)" Russiagate is a special target for Taibbi: he deems it even stupider than the WMD catastrophe that led to the Iraq war. He is careful to note that the effects of lying about WMD were much worse, but that the sheer stupidity required to promulgate Russophobia was much greater. "Few think about this, but the press routinely puts the names and personal information of people arrested in newspapers, on TV, and, worst of all, online, where the stories live forever. Yet these people have not been convicted of crimes, merely arrested or charged. With Russiagate the national press abandoned any pretense that there’s a difference between indictment and conviction. (Emphasis added.)" The media does whatever it can to (A) protect itself while it (B) makes as much money as it can regardless of (C) who gets hurt or (D) whether any of it is true. The news cycle is like the weekly confession: the next week's news washes away the sins and transgressions of the previous. Hell, for the right sponsors, the media even sells indulgences. Worst of all, though, they buy the myth just because the powers-that-be give them a taste of power, of wealth. Journalism used to be full of the working class; now, it's a bunch of millionaires. "When we deride journalists as stenographers, it’s not about them repeating the words of powerful officials. The real crime is absorbing the ideas of powerful people (often crafted by groups of officials in a dreary corporate process) and repeating them as if they’re your own personal thoughts." Taibbi's anger is palpable, his research is impeccable, his bona fides are unimpeachable and his writing style is very entertaining. His conclusions are sobering for the American experiment: unless the media can do any part of the job that it used to have, America is doomed. Too many people are already getting the majority of their information about the world -- I hesitate to call it "news" -- from compromised sources that have no intention of doing anything but telling them a story focused on keeping them consuming, working a dead-end job and not asking any questions about how anything works and why everything seems to suck for them. I've included "notes, citations and errata" in a separate post. Laudatio Si' (2015) by Pope Francis This is the papal encyclical written by Pope Francis in 2015. It is relatively well-known and -cited in climate-change circles. It's extremely well-edited and much more on point with current issues than many would credit the church. I think it's best to (mostly) let Francis speak for himself. The whole essay is worth a read (except for some long stretches of heavily religious babble -- there's really no other word for it). While at times he presents very relevant scripture to counter arguments made by those erroneously quoting the Bible, at other times the document drags on considerably with page after page of seemingly unrelated and vaguely recruiting-oriented prose. Am I being unfair? You be the judge: "Saint Bonaventure went so far as to say that human beings, before sin, were able to see how each creature “testifies that God is three”. The reflection of the Trinity was there to be recognized in nature “when that book was open to man and our eyes had not yet become darkened”.[170] The Franciscan saint teaches us that each creature bears in itself a specifically Trinitarian structure, so real that it could be readily contemplated if only the human gaze were not so partial, dark and fragile. In this way, he points out to us the challenge of trying to read reality in a Trinitarian key." This reads like something from any of Umberto Eco's masterpieces. I laud Francis for his effort. I don't think that was the point, though. Where Eco was being deliberately obtuse to demonstrate the impenetrability and non-disprovability of conspiracy/quasi-religious texts, I'm afraid Francis isn't kidding. There were several dozen more chapters/paragraphs that were nothing but biblical babble in a similar vein. Happily, at other times, he's often downright rational and scientific: "Although change is part of the working of complex systems, the speed with which human activity has developed contrasts with the naturally slow pace of biological evolution. Moreover, the goals of this rapid and constant change are not necessarily geared to the common good or to integral and sustainable human development." He continues with a discussion of climate science and underlying economic models, as well as discussing the need for a "circular economy", which will enable us to live indefinitely and harmoniously on the planet, instead of rapaciously and terminally. In particular, he singles out consumption as the root of all evil. "We all know that it is not possible to sustain the present level of consumption in developed countries and wealthier sectors of society, where the habit of wasting and discarding has reached unprecedented levels. The exploitation of the planet has already exceeded acceptable limits and we still have not solved the problem of poverty." Basically, the Pope is disappointed with how the world works and thinks it should work significantly differently, from the bottom up. In particular, he dismisses the supposition that technology will save us -- because technology is wielded by people and people have their own agenda. If their agenda is not aligned, then the technology will harm, not help. "[...] We have to accept that technological products are not neutral, for they create a framework which ends up conditioning lifestyles and shaping social possibilities along the lines dictated by the interests of certain powerful groups. Decisions which may seem purely instrumental are in reality decisions about the kind of society we want to build." It really seems (unsurprisingly, if you've read the right bits of the Bible) that the Pope is a socialist, if not a communist. "To ensure economic freedom from which all can effectively benefit, restraints occasionally have to be imposed on those possessing greater resources and financial power." Here he is again, lashing out agains the consumption-based society (not just economy). "This paradigm leads people to believe that they are free as long as they have the supposed freedom to consume. But those really free are the minority who wield economic and financial power." At times, it's unclear whether he's voicing a deliberately naive opinion to demonstrate how ridiculous it is that we consider it naive, but sometimes the prose smacks of a complete inability to see the banal evil present in nearly everyone. For example, he poses the following question: "What would induce anyone, at this stage, to hold on to power only to be remembered for their inability to take action when it was urgent and necessary to do so?" If not rhetorical, then here's a shot at an answer: Because, in our world, there are never any negative repercussions, excuses are always accepted, idiocy is promoted and evil is left to live out its days in luxury. Does that help? He does seem to understand, though, because at another point, he castigates the first world and its power brokers (which includes pretty much everyone in the 1%): "This is due partly to the fact that many professionals, opinion makers, communications media and centres of power, being located in affluent urban areas, are far removed from the poor, with little direct contact with their problems. They live and reason from the comfortable position of a high level of development and a quality of life well beyond the reach of the majority of the world’s population." He reserves his sternest worlds for baseless financialization and profit: "[...] economic powers continue to justify the current global system where priority tends to be given to speculation and the pursuit of financial gain." And then there's the utterly broken political system that is led by the nose by the underlying economics (it should be the other way around). "178. A politics concerned with immediate results, supported by consumerist sectors of the population, is driven to produce short-term growth. In response to electoral interests, governments are reluctant to upset the public with measures which could affect the level of consumption or create risks for foreign investment." And he's not done with the first world. He takes on the argument posed by some (many) that we need to reduce population. While this would undoubtedly help, those suggesting that we reduce imply heavily that we need to get rid of the third world and their pesky proclivity for procreative promulgation -- to the point of overflowing their lands and then invading our own holy borders with waves of skilled immigrants. "To blame population growth instead of extreme and selective consumerism on the part of some, is one way of refusing to face the issues. It is an attempt to legitimize the present model of distribution, where a minority believes that it has the right to consume in a way which can never be universalized, since the planet could not even contain the waste products of such consumption." The Pope will also not stop peppering this document with relatively bold and non-nuanced opinions on the basic evil of abortion. "“The Lord created medicines out of the earth, and a sensible man will not despise them”" Like RU486? Sick burn ammirite? "There is a tendency to justify transgressing all boundaries when experimentation is carried out on living human embryos." We'd almost forgotten where you stand there. That ship has sailed, Francis; are you sure you want to die on that hill? He keeps hammering that point until I fear he may drive away potential allies. Instead, he should think of the actually living instead of worrying about edge cases. Not to mention that voluntary non-breeding in the developed world would go a significant way toward reducing carbon-production. Does he have any concrete advice (other than to absolutely never have an abortion)? Yes, he does. "A person who could afford to spend and consume more but regularly uses less heating and wears warmer clothes, shows the kind of convictions and attitudes which help to protect the environment." Hooray! A few of us are doing that already. It's nice to see that the Pope thinks we're doing God's work. "If someone has not learned to stop and admire something beautiful, we should not be surprised if he or she treats everything as an object to be used and abused without scruple. If we want to bring about deep change, we need to realize that certain mindsets really do influence our behaviour." Basically, we need to change everything about what it means to be a human in the Anthropocene. He's right, but it's pretty much hopeless. Still, I'm glad I read it. It's almost as good as "Industrial Society and its Future" . I've included "notes, citations and errata" in a separate post. Does anyone have the right to sex? (2018) by Amia Srinivasan This is a medium-length essay/tract that was recommended as insightful, but fell rather short. It starts off discussing the notion of the incel community as a powder keg that is a danger to society because of its expectation of sex from the "hottest" members. This is already more than a bit of straw man based on the whackiest members of the group. This tack is based on taking the reasoning of one or two mentally ill people seriously and literally. When someone says he killed a bunch of co-eds because his Satan controlling his dog told him to, we don't infer a whole dangerous movement -- we just figure that person is mentally ill. But if the same person claims it's because those hot bitches wouldn't blow him, then we infer a vast underground movement that lurks beneath society. There were some limpid bits in the essay but it was otherwise all over the place (in a way very similar to Abdulali's What We Talk about When We Talk about Rape). It takes and runs with stereotypes inculcated and revered by ... the media? Porn? Hollywood? and applies them broadly to an entire gender. There isn't really any insight or unpacking of societal reasons. For example: The author states that "sexy schoolgirls and sexy teachers, manic pixie dreamgirls and Milfs, [are] all taut-bodied and hot, minor variations" but that they can't "imagine GQ carrying an article celebrating ‘mom bod’". Aren't there several categories of porn that cater exactly to this? Just because a staid and establishment magazine like GQ wouldn't acknowledge it doesn't mean that society as a whole hasn't acknowledged it. If you read the yearly statistical roundup blog from any of the big porn sites, you'll see that actual (not mainstream media) preferences are much more equitable. It is at this point that I would have expected a discussion of the separation between "official culture" and "actual culture", where the official version is a fake version imposed from above as brainwashing. Nothing of the kind happens. Instead, there seems to be an argument that anyone who withholds their attraction from anyone who wants it is vaguely or even manifestly discriminatory. It's almost as if the author ends up making the incel argument? "Consider the supreme fuckability of ‘hot blonde sluts’ and East Asian women, the comparative unfuckability of black women and Asian men, the fetishisation and fear of black male sexuality, the sexual disgust expressed towards disabled, trans and fat bodies." The tone is clear: all of this is bad. However, there are different reasons for all of it, aren't there? To redefine "lack of interest" on the part of most people as "sexual disgust" is disingenuous, at best. This is again defining the whole world in terms of what it wants to fuck, as if that's all anyone thinks about all day. While it may be true for some people, especially during certain phases of their lives, the tone in this essay distorts the world to define it purely in terms of sexual preference and inculcated attraction -- and expectation. That asian men and black women are unfuckable or that black men are dangerous predators has a lot more to do with American society than anything else. That is not really discussed much at all. That people are generally not turned on by disabled or fat bodies is at least partly biological, as is being attracted to people with whom you can procreate. It's almost as if you need to want to fuck someone in order not discriminate against them. But if you do want to fuck them, then you're discriminating against them by defining them purely as sexual beings. So, damned if you, damned if you don't. That's not an interesting or productive line of reasoning. To prove that I'm not unfairly paraphrasing, a direct citation: "In other words, the sex-positive gaze risks covering not only for misogyny, but for racism, ableism, transphobia, and every other oppressive system that makes its way into the bedroom through the seemingly innocuous mechanism of ‘personal preference’. (Emphasis added.)" Try teasing that statement apart. Am I hiding a palette of discriminatory beliefs behind the facade of nearly lifelong monogamy? Nice excuse, right? No wonder more and more people would rather identify as asexual than risk being called racist for what they mistook as biological apathy. I understand that society has a lot to do with shaping personal preference, but so does biology. It's a ludicrous leap, though, to put the words into scare quotes and then call it "seemingly innocuous", suggesting that anyone who is attracted to people that they feel instinctively attracted to is a Neanderthal without scruple or interest in advancing any social agendas. But them Srinivasan double down and writes the following: "It’s because straight people – or, I should say, white, able-bodied cis straight people – aren’t much in the habit of thinking there’s anything wrong with how they have sex." Are you fucking kidding me? Straight sex isn’t freighted with judgment or confusion? I’m not in the dating scene and even I know that’s not true. Because…every movie ever. Have you ever seen a movie? Have you every interacted with modern culture? The majority of popular culture is about how white, able-bodied, cis, straight people being supremely uncomfortable about sex. They can't fucking stop talking about it or making movies and songs about it. My impression is that we started with the thesis that so-called incels are wrong for thinking that anyone owes them sex. This turns out to be due not to any moral basis, but because these people tend to belong to the socially dominant class, irrespective of whether that membership has translated into any personal dominance in any facet of life. However, denying minorities or other groups historically discriminated against (e.g. fat, disabled, trans) sex is problematic as it expresses the societal discrimination along another axis. To analogize: if black girl scouts show up at my door, I have to buy cookies, no matter what. If they’re white, I’m obligated to tell their privileged asses off. Alles klar. I've included "notes, citations and errata" in a separate post. Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (1969) by Richard Buckminster Fuller This is an essay by one of the 20th century's preëminent thinkers about the state of the planet in 1969. Things weren't any better or worse or even significantly different then than they are now, 50 years later. "Because yesterday’s negatives are moved out of sight from their familiar locations many persons are willing to pretend to themselves that the problems have been solved." Yup. That still sounds a lot like us. "I feel that one of the reasons why we are struggling inadequately today is that we reckon our costs on too shortsighted a basis and are later overwhelmed with the unexpected costs brought about by our shortsightedness." Oh yeah, he's got our number. Jesus, haven't we changed one bit over 50 years? Didn't we kind of have to improve in order to accomplish all that we did? Shouldn't we get started on that? You know, in order to get this climate crisis under control? Fuller was also not very hopeful, though he was more hopeful than our subsequent behavior warranted: he actually thought we'd have conquered nationalism by now. Fuller hypothesizes that a main part of the problem is that, regardless of ideology, all of the "political leadership [...a]ll the great ideological groups assumed Armageddon." With such a fatalistic starting point, what's the point of planning for a long future? Just get yours, Jack, and screw everybody else. Fuller dismisses this idiocy as utterly beside the point -- as the only worthwhile point would be survival as a species. He puts it quite lucidly. "It is really a worthless pile of chips of an arbitrary game which we are playing and does not correspond to the accounting processes of our real universe’s evolutionary transactions." You hear that billionaires? You're not going to Mars. You're sitting on a worthless pile of chips that won't help you at all when the revolution comes or the crisis intensifies -- or both. You'll be the first against the wall (no you won't, not as long as you control media, you won't). Were people of Fuller's caliber and level of education aware of climate change? It's kind of unclear. On one level, he's hyper-aware that industrialization is ruining the "spaceship", "[...] up to now we have been misusing, abusing, and polluting this extraordinary chemical energy-interchanging system for successfully regenerating all life aboard our planetary spaceship." As for global warming, he worries about mankind's depletion rate of fossil fuels, at most. He worries about "pollution" but not specifically greenhouse gases, even though the idea was "first proposed with supporting evidence in 1938" and I would have expected him to be aware of the concept. "We cannot afford to expend our fossil fuels faster than we are “recharging our battery,” which means precisely the rate at which the fossil fuels are being continually deposited within Earth’s spherical crust.”" But on the other hand, he still idolizes the process of industrialization for having lifted so many people out of abject poverty and misery. "The labor movement made possible mass purchasing; ergo, mass production; ergo, low prices on vastly improved products and services, which have altogether established entirely new and higher standards of humanity’s living." Remember, though, that he was writing in 1969, arguably the high point of a global economic golden age when mankind was largely unaware of the scope of the folly of its mode of operation. It was only in the late 70s and early 80s that hyper-financialization took over to centralize operations and began to reverse the gains of the mid-20th century. Fuller's writing style is not exactly representative of his intelligence. It's full of bizarre and exceedingly complex constructions, has a unique approach to hyphenation (using too many even for me) and he leaves off many articles. It came as a surprise as he was raised and educated in the United States, had graduated from Harvard and was a member of many prestigious scientific societies. I've included "notes, citations and errata" in a separate post. No Silver Bullet—Essence and Accident in Software Engineering (1986) by Frederick P. Brooks, Jr. This is a relatively short but important essay in the world of software engineering theory. It's not really for programmers who've stumbled over from scripting Photoshop or who've decided that there's good money in copy/pasting code that they don't understand from StackOverflow. The audience is more self-selecting. If you're likely to read an essay with this name, then you'll likely be receptive to its ideas. That is, if you don't already agree with the premises in the document, you're unlikely to be convinced by it. Brooks is one of the inventors of OS/360 for IBM mainframes and, more famously, the author of the book The Mythical Man-Month. He draws on a lot of experience when he writes that the difficult bit of software is not writing it so that it works -- it's figuring out what you want to write in the first place. "I believe the hard part of building software to be the specification, design, and testing of this conceptual construct, not the labor of representing it and testing the fidelity of the representation." He argues in this paper that where we often go wrong is when we attempt to "abstract away [...] complexity" but end up "abstract[ing] away its essence". Abstractions are a good thing. The only way to represent any process in software is to create a model of it. But we haven't historically been careful enough that what we ignore -- the corners we cut, the values we round -- aren't part of the essence of what we're building. This leads Brooks to the next conclusion, that, "No facilitation of expression can give more than marginal gains." If you want to write software more quickly, changing languages or runtimes or patterns will offer, at best, marginal gains relative to improving the process you use to design that software and gather and define its parameters and requirements. This is a tragic conclusion for most programmers, a vast majority of whom are much more interested in trying out new techniques and languages and IDE tools and extensions and just tweaking the hell out of the implementation side of things. This is all very interesting and can lead to fruitful gains. Brooks acknowledges as much, "The gap between the best software engineering practice and the average practice is very wide—perhaps wider than in any other engineering discipline. A tool that disseminates good practice would be important." But once you're testing properly and have a good framework and a good editor and you've got CI and maybe even CD, there's no more room for quantum leaps in improvement. At that point, you can only get significantly better and faster by writing only the code that you actually need. For that, you need to optimize defining your requirements. Grasping and defining requirements is by no means an easy thing, as any non-trivial software involves a state machine with exponentially increasing combinations of states. "From the complexity comes the difficulty of enumerating, much less understanding, all the possible states of the program, and from that comes the unreliability. [2]" Where does this complexity come from? Often, from outside of the system, at the edges, where the software must interface with other systems. Perhaps these are legacy systems; they are almost certainly less flexible than the software being designed and written right now. The new software is, by definition, more malleable than software or processes already in production. As Brooks puts it, "[...] all cases, much complexity comes from conformation to other interfaces; this cannot be simplified out by any redesign of the software alone." All of this necessary/essential complexity "makes personnel turnover a disaster" once you've trained someone to understand it. This is a lesson that the software world -- with its focus on exchangeable resources that just provide hours of work -- has never learned or, more generously, forgotten. Perhaps this is due to the prevalence of so many layers of management. They generally don't know how to do anything special and are generally highly interchangeable with other managers who also aren't very special. Their ego depends on their worldview considering all other people to be the same. This includes the highly trained and skilled staff who they manage. Brooks ends with an eloquently and succinctly stated summary that jibes 100% with my experience over the last 25 years of designing and building software. "Therefore the most important function that software builders do for their clients is the iterative extraction and refinement of the product requirements. For the truth is, the clients do not know what they want. They usually do not know what questions must be answered, and they almost never have thought of the problem in the detail that must be specified. (Emphasis added.)" This is what we have to work with: the domain specialist (the client) doesn't have the know-how to even know how to describe the domain. Sometimes there is no real domain specialist; there is just someone with money and a vague idea or, even worse, someone who thinks that they are a domain expert. The job of a software designer is to become (enough of) a domain specialist to bridge the gap. If nobody bridges the gap, then the software will fail. I've included "notes, citations and errata" in a separate post. Rape: From Lucretia to #MeToo (2019) by Mithu Sanyal I read this after having read Abdulali's What We Talk about When We Talk about Rape and it is, by far, the superior book. First of all, it is much better-researched and has a more cohesive approach that doesn't rely as much on repeated anecdotes. Second of all, she's just a better writer who's also very sharp-witted and sarcastic, drawing interesting parallels. In describing the history of male and female relationships, especially as related by the philosophers of the day, she writes, "Driven to genius or crime by his overwhelming phallic energy, man was no longer suited for his accustomed role as representative of the moral order. Who better to fill this vacancy than woman, who, due to her lack of passion, was rarely tempted anyway? (Emphasis added.)" She's lampooning Hegel and Rousseau here, but others get their due, as well. She notes that, though the world (read: wealthy, land-owning men or peerage) accepted the stories told about male and female roles, they never made sense or were at-all internally coherent. On the one hand, women were powerless and weak and, on the other, men had to be ever-vigilant against their insidious wiles. Or, as Sanyal puts it, "These almost telekinetic powers by which women caused men to become criminals are even more surprising given that, at the same time, women’s supposed lack of sexual energy was translated into a lack of criminal energy." From this history of philosophy and gender relationships, she turns to the theme of the book: how people who are raped are treated by society and, in particular, how the modern attitude toward rape is that it is a mind-altering and shattering experience after which nothing is the same, ever again. But Sanyal writes, "Nobody in their right mind would treat a person who has been in a car crash as if the accident had changed their personality, but that is exactly what happens to rape victims." Is that really so crazy, though? Accident survivors do change due to trauma. I read this book as I was recovering from a fractured neck suffered in a bike accident (not of my doing). I didn't feel traumatized after my bike accident—I haven’t changed how I ride—but I am at least somewhat different because of it. It’s also very possible that I would have changed even more had it turned out worse. Perhaps part of my devil-may-care personality would have been cauterized away. She hones her idea, though, noting that the problem is with assuming that the person who was raped is now defined as "a raped thing". That having been the victim of rape becomes their defining characteristic so that others may protect them as such. But this is damaging, especially for victims of rape who then think they're "doing it wrong" when their feelings don't match the standard narrative. Sanyal lives and works in Germany, but has spent a lot of time in the States. She draws a lot of examples from German and European cases and law, focusing especially on the nearly completely fictitious stories of "New Years Eve" rapes by immigrants and refugees a few years ago. To be sure, she takes time with the special attitude that American society brings to the discussion, especially with the deep-seated racism that gets all mixed up with it. "Much of the anti-rape movement assumed that most rapes were committed by black men, because it was black men who were mostly being convicted for rape. Tragically the (predominantly white) women’s movement wasn’t able to look at their own position in the tangled web of power relations, and certainly not at their own entitlement." With racism on both sides of the pond, there is also more than a little colonial superiority. Though exceedingly rare, honor killings in Southeast Asia are regularly a topic of hand-wringing and concern -- and people are worried about how immigrants from those countries will "import" these backward notions and "impose" them on their overly generous adoptive country. But almost nobody discusses the absolutely prehistoric attitudes of the people of the United States. Official policy in the U.S. couldn't be more backwards, but nobody worries about American immigrants promulgating their backwards notions on their host countries when they go abroad. "[...] terms like “honor” and “culture” didn’t crop up once in the media coverage of George Bush’s 2001 decision to scrap funding for all NGOs that provided abortion counseling or referrals. This “global gag rule” was introduced by Ronald Reagan, repealed by Bill Clinton, reinstated by Bush, re-repealed by Obama, and re-reinstated by Donald Trump." This is an exceedingly important point because it points up the basic racism of even those who purport to care about women's rights. That is, they only chastise certain targets for improper attitudes. One could wonder whether they truly care about the purported danger they warn of when they can only see the danger looming when it matches their racist fairy tales. "Narayan has calculated that death by domestic violence in the United States is numerically as significant a social problem as dowry murders in India. But only one is used as a signifier of cultural backwardness: “They burn their women there.” As opposed to: “We shoot our women here.”" One can't even conceive of anyone making this comparison in mainstream European media, but it's true. It's a huge blind spot. Sanyal continues with a discussion of "Rape Culture", Title IX in the United States higher-education system and the myth of the hyper-sexualized rapist who doesn't even know or think they're doing anything wrong. (She writes that "[o]nly a quarter of the rapists reported no physiological dysfunction during their rape.") Sanyal crushes one myth after another: next, taking down the myth that women are the primary victims of rape or that a man cannot be raped. She is careful to note that the fear engendered by the potentiality of rape belongs primarily to women, citing, "Sharon Marcus writes: Even though women in fact are neither the sole objects of sexual violence nor the most likely targets of violent crimes, women constitute the majority of fearful subjects; even in situations where men are empirically more likely to suffer from violent crimes, they express less fear then women do [...]" She goes on to discuss gender roles, the role of masculinity and the sheer and nearly unknown prevalence of women raping men. That is, the definitions in most countries are skewed very hard to defining rape as vaginal penetration with a penis. Therefore, no man can be raped. Even when the definition was expanded, and expanded again, the most common form -- where a women penetrated herself with part of the man -- was not legally considered rape until very, very recently and only in certain countries. She doesn't shy away from any tough issue, including what to do with people that have been convicted of rape. Just as we shouldn't define a rape victim solely by the fact that they were raped (i.e. redefining their personality in terms of an act that was imposed on them or as Marcus writes, to "make the identities of rapist and raped preexist the rape itself."), then we also can't define the perpetrator solely by that act. Or we can, but it's not conducive to reintegration nor is it particularly productive or useful. Not only that, but such relegation can radicalize the more damaged of them. "If we make it impossible for them to return to normal life, eventually they will drift toward extremist viewpoints—because far right men’s rights activists are the ones who will welcome them with open arms." This tack ends up being an indictment in general of Western justice systems and their (recent) preference for retribution rather than rehabilitation. She notes (as have so many others before her) that "no one has proven a direct link between increased penalties and convictions for a crime and a decreased incidence of that crime." Most people are aware of the difference between right and wrong, but increasing punishment assumes a calculus that is completely lacking when an act is considered. Do you personally even know what the minimum sentence if for various crimes? I do not. I would wager that most people likely to commit those crimes do not. If they don't know, then how can it be a deterrent? It's not. It's just vindictiveness from a basically immoral and mean-spirited society. Sanyal cites many interesting authors like Sharon Marcus and Laurie Penny and bell hooks [3] and has produced a book well worth reading. She ends on a cautionary note for the more aggressive proponents of #metoo as a way of "getting back" for decades or centuries of discrimination: do not become that which you despise. "[...] it is still worrying that people are punished before an investigation, and even more so that the public should applaud this jettisoning of democratic rights. After all, there is only a gradual difference between treating victims without empathy and treating potential perpetrators without empathy. (Emphasis added.)" I've included "notes, citations and errata" in a separate post. The Big Heat: Earth on the Brink (1984) by Jeffrey St. Clair and Joshua Frank This is a collection of essays from the last 20 years, mostly about the environment and about the various services charged with safety and maintaining public lands and animals in the U.S. The Wildlife and Forestry Service, the Bureau of Land Management, the EPA and many more. The book is split into groups of essays: Landscapes, Waterscapes, Politiscapes, Warscapes and Frontlines. The essays vary in quality, though all address some interesting, relevant and important point. They also vary wildly in supporting information -- some aren't even really journalistic pieces, but more wild screeds, lashing out at the unfairness of how the assholes keep winning. One of the nicest and longest is about rafting down the Columbia River past the Hanford nuclear power plants, but it is, at the same time, filled with St. Clair's awkward attempts at writing like Hunter S. Thompson. I'm not sure how far his desire to be Alexander Cockburn goes. Overall, he does a decent job, with Frank misstepping more often. So the essays are interesting and about important environmental issues not often reported. Some are chock-full of very interesting and shocking data. They are all, however, terribly copy-edited, with most having at least one or two grammatical errors (usually missing words) in the first paragraph. I don't think anyone, least of all the authors, went through these online essays again to clean them up for publication. Still, I'm glad I read the book. It was a good journey through the continuity of rapacious environmental policy from Clinton to Bush to Obama to Trump -- their performances being uniformly anti-green and pro-business and nearly indistinguishable. I've included "notes, citations and errata" in a separate post. Silently and Very Fast (2011) by Catherynne M. Valente This book tells the story of how one woman, a glorious and gifted programmer named Cassian, invented the seeds of an AI. The AI's first body was Cassian's house in the north of Japan, where this primitive incarnation ran the house's systems, but also interacted with its inhabitants. Though all children had access to Elefsis, only one daughter Ceno gave full access and attention, training Elefsis and letting it entwine with her irrevocably. The book is about an AI Elefsis that learns to communicate as humans do, in metaphor. The simulated worlds -- the Interiors -- are rife with metaphor. The story is written largely in metaphor. Valente's storytelling reflects Elefsis's mode of thinking. The cauldron that signifies a cornucopia from a children's story with which Elefsis describes itself is a central metaphor. A phoenix exploding into bloody feathers is a metaphor for childbirth. It reminds me of Greg Egan's gestalt language from Diaspora. With Ceno having sown the seed of a new kind of being, Elefsis was tended by her children and her children's children over 200 years. While this delicate -- different -- AI grew, it was transplanted from one generation to the next. Not quite purely AI, not quite purely human. The story is told non-chronologically, jumping forward to tease what comes, circling back to fill in details of what was. Valente has a gift for language and an incredible imagination. She describes viscerally and beautifully what a world with true VR and true AIs could be like, but focused only on a single family. In the meantime, other AIs grew and grew powerful, but were different from Elefsis, the AI that was once a house. Mankind accepts these AIs because they do not pretend to be people, they do not yearn to be people. They are other. They do not offend. Mankind does not approve of Elefsis and throwback religious groups attack the house, excising the AI from its host -- thinking that it had killed what it considered an abomination. Instead, Elefsis and Neva (a member of the current generation and only surviving member of Cassian's brood) "escape" in a spaceship, with Neva in deep cryosleep, interacting with Elefsis in the Interior -- a world of metaphor unique to Elefsis. They travel the stars, patient and waiting for time to strip mankind of its prejudices against beings that are both too other and not other enough. I tell the story in a much more straightforward way than Valente -- her story settles into your brain in wave after wave of lovely prose that enchants and then, after a little while, enlightens, as it illuminates another corner of the whole story. This "SMBC Cartoon "Clouds"" offers a taste. The citations in the following link a bit more. I've included "notes, citations and errata" in a separate post. Everything Belongs to the Future (2016) by Laurie Penny This is a novella about a future in which an enterprising group of scientists have invented pills that not only extend life, but also regress signs of aging to any desired age. The main inventor of the drug is Alice, who lives a life of luxury, but not satisfaction. With her emeritus status at her company, she isn't at any risk, but with her contrary attitude, she is no longer in as much favor as she once was, 90 years ago. At a fancy, rich party, she meets a group of activists who've snuck in disguised as staff. They're there to steal the little pills that prolong life. They give them away to the poor. Alice pulls them to the side, letting them know that she's onto their little scheme, but that she won't turn them in. Instead, she wants to work with them to produce something better, something that supersedes her work on the anti-aging pill, something that will put right the massive changes to society that her original invention engendered. The invention of that original pill cemented the rich's stranglehold over the poor. Not only did they have more money, but now they had more time. The gap widened and widened. Alice's dissatisfaction grew, as did her desire to throw a monkey wrench into the works. She sets up a lab at the activists' house and spends all of her time there and with them. Alex is Nina's boyfriend. Nina is hardcore; Alex less so. In fact, Alex is a plant, a spy for Parker, Alice's partner at the company that they founded together. Alex has been working this particular group for three years, partnered with Nina and basically fucking her under false pretenses. Nina is a true radical -- she doesn't want to live forever and feels that the ability to extend life nearly indefinitely has ruined what it means to be human. Alex is in love with her, but doesn't understand her -- he wants to donate to her the years he earns as a spy. The police raid their house, determined to seize Alice's work, but Margaret eats it, immediately showing its effects: she desiccates and dies, aging eighty years in seconds. They escape the police but now all know what Alice's secret weapon is. Just as her original invention granted extra years, her ultimate invention can take them away. She calls it the Time Bomb. Despite Alex's efforts to deter them, the crew is determined to use the weapon on the rich. They sneak in to a high-level dinner and Nina triggers the bomb, aging all of the others but also herself in the process, but not to death. She is arrested. Some of the chapters are in the form of letters to Alice from Nina. Alice didn't age as much because of her century of treatments. Alex aged as well. He still loves Nina. She doesn't care. She got what she wanted: the rich are no longer secure in their colonial control of the poor, with a surfeit of time. The rich now have something to fear as well -- not just slow, natural aging and death, but a jetpack into geriatrics. I've included "notes, citations and errata" in a separate post. Cumulus (2016) by Eliot Peper The title refers to the company that runs everything in an alternate-future/near-future tale of America, in general, but San Fransisco specifically. Cumulus is captained by Huian, a woman of extraordinary ability and multifarious background with an iron will. Cumulus is her baby, built over two decades to not only provide every single possible service but also to delineate the world into regions of "have" and "have not". It's the ultimate libertarian wet dream: one company runs everything, but everyone accepts this without question -- except for the poor who can't afford its services. It is the NSA, Google, Uber and Blackwater/Xe rolled into one. The government has no power over it, as it consolidates its competitors, strong-arms everyone and imposes Huian's utopic vision on humanity, for its own good. This is how the book starts. Soon, we meet Lilly, a "Slummer" (someone who lives outside of the beneficence (but not the aegis) of Cumulus. She is a photographer with a predilection for analog cameras, hired out as a wedding photographer for insolent yuppies from the "Green Zone". She ends up meeting Huian on the same day that Huian's wife Vera leaves her. We also meet Graham, a former spook, who's insinuated himself into Cumulus, convincing Huian that he's indispensable while asserting more and more control over her corporation. He's brought skills honed abroad in war zones and incredibly asymmetric societies home to America, where the Gini coefficient soars and the situation is on the edge of unrest. So Graham is a "wolf among sheep", cutting a swath through Oakland and Cumulus. Huian is giving him more and more power as his methods are the only ones that move her agenda forward. Nothing that happens to Huian or Cumulus is coincidence: Graham is pulling the strings everywhere, manipulating Vera's exit, an acquisition of Tectonix and simultaneously feeding civil-rights lawyer Sara with information about Cumulus while also them "taking care" of her for Huian. Frederick is the kingpin of the slums of Oakland, running things efficiently and fairly using drug money. He incites riots against the Green Zone for Sara's murder (she was his lover) while also hunting for revenge. The book makes some interesting points about how people who think they know and see and hear everything can be controlled by shaping their stream of data. What they’ve convinced themselves is omniscience is actually a lens on reality designed to control their behavior. The hunter becomes the hunted. This applies on only to the myriad sheep in society, but also to Huian and Graham. Since everything is in Cumulus's cloud, Graham is able to use his root-level "Ghost" power to cover his tracks everywhere. Everywhere except for Lilly's camera. Using these pictures, Frederick and Lilly come up with an old-school, analog plan to out Graham. This takes him down and almost Cumulus. Why not Cumulus? Because Huian turns into a socialist in the last 4 seconds of the book, bequeaths a billion-dollar trust to Lilly for investigative journalism, and pledges to give all Cumulus services to Oakland, regardless of their ability to pay, with plans to roll the plan out to the rest of the world. Also, Lilly's blogger co-conspirator is now going to be the love of her life, Graham blew his own brains out and Frederick is in a strategic alliance with Cumulus. Everyone literally lives happily ever after. There is no sign of climate change in this brave new world and I'm not sure what caliber of reader is enthralled with this level of tying up all loose ends. The last line of the book is literally "Lilly’s first love had been photography. But maybe it wouldn’t prove to be her only one after all." I mean, what the actual fuck did I just read? It was interesting enough but quickly plunged downhill to splash in a mess of gibbets at the end. He wastes a ton of text on meal descriptions that aren't at all germane to the plot and includes stuff like: "“Are you ready for tomorrow?” asked Lilly. "Huian raised her eyebrows. “I won’t ever be ready for tomorrow,” she said. “But that won’t stop it from arriving anyway.”" Barf. I've included "notes, citations and errata" in a separate post. The Peripheral (2014) by William Gibson The story starts with Burton and Flynne, a brother and sister living in the midwest of an alternate near-future United States. The characteristics of the U.S. have other names and are slightly more exaggerated, but it's clearly recognizable (e.g. the chain-store Goliath is called Hefty). Burton has recently gotten a contract with a powerful Colombian corporation called Milagros Coldiron. Burton is "playing a game" for them, but it seems more like running security via drone. When Burton is due to be out of town, Flynne subs for him, witnessing what looks for all the world like a nanobot-murder. This does not strike them as strange, as video-gaming for pay is common in their world as-is advanced graphics and secret beta-testing. We meet Ash and Ossian and Wilf Netherton, Lev, the scion of a Russian klept family and Ainsley Lowbeer, an officer of British Law and ancient secret agent. They contact Flynne directly to find out what happened. It turns out to be a bit more complicated than it at first seems. The "video game" that Burton and Flynne thought they were playing was, in fact, a real-life security detail for the party of one Aelita, sister to performance artist Daedra, ex-fling of Netherton. All of these people are from a future decades away from Flynne and Burton and from a completely different continuum. The future world is one in which climate change has taken its toll in 80% of the human population. Most animals are gone. From the ashes rose neo-feudalism. Science improved drastically. Stymied certain problems, like the complete and utter inefficacy of antibiotics. Others it could do nothing about. Technology took off (but too late, as we already know it will be), with "peripheral" technology (people using remote bodies) and "assemblers" (nanotechnology) and "klepts" (quasi-monarchies that are the only power centers left). The centers are in London and "China" (in quotes because they don't get any more specific than that). There are also "stubs", which is where Flynne and Burton's continuum resides. A stub is an alternative reality accessible through a super-secret and highly shielded Chinese server. The mere act of connecting to the stub, of opening it, changes it irrevocably so that it will never lead to the future that is accessing it. Essentially, the folks of the alternative future want Flynne's help in identifying the man who was with Aelita when she was killed. Because of the exclusivity of the party, there were no recordings made, so her eyewitness testimony is the only thing that Lowbeer has by way of evidence. The complexly woven structures of power balance and ancient laws and customs of the future make an eyewitness essential -- even when they already pretty much know who it was. It will shift the balance of power positively if Flynne can help them. They get Flynne a peripheral in the future (no mention is made of how they secure the connection or how much data it can carry or ... anything. It's better this way). Her brother's friend Connor also gets one, as does her brother, Burton. In Flynne's world, things are moving quickly as well. The movements of Lowbeer's group in the financial markets are becoming noticeable -- and there is another entity from the same future, trying to kill them all and erase the remaining witness (Flynne). Their conflicting movements in the world financial markets and in all levels of politics are having a strong effect and threaten to throw Flynne's entire world into a cocked hat. Flynne's "builder" friend Macon is gifted and works well with Ash, who provides him with schematics for printing machines and devices that will enable them to communicate with the "future" better. The more money they get, the more members of the deeply impoverished community of friends and family they drag in with them. As always with Gibson, he is the master of subtly revealing tremendous detail about a world that feels familiar -- obviously derived, or derivable, from ours -- but is different in nearly every way. He does this mostly through clever and unutterably cool dialogue. Every character is cool, but also flawed enough to make it seem less ridiculous than when others do it. It's like he finds the coolness in everyone -- which is fair, because who wants to write a book about morons? Still, it doesn't feel as contrived as so many other authors -- the only conceit is that he invariably writes about groups of people that include at least one member who is so overwhelmingly wealthy that money is never an issue (in this case Lev Zubov, whose wealth and influence "profiles like a medium-sized nation" and Ainsley Lowbeer, who is ancient and privy to every bit of knowledge). While others in the group might be struggling, their coolness enables them of use to and under the aegis of the rich and powerful. Lowbeer has some of the best lines. When asked if she knows everything, she responds: "I most certainly don’t. I feel hindered by a surfeit of information, oceanic to the point of meaninglessness. The shortcomings of the system are best understood as the result of taking this ocean of data, and the decision points produced by our algorithms, as a near enough substitute for perfect certainty. My own best results are often due to pretending I know relatively little, and acting accordingly, though it’s easier said than done. Far easier. (Emphasis added.)" Another interesting aspect of so much of the story being told in dialogue is Gibson's representation of 70 years being far too large a gap for most idiomatic speech to have survived. In that sense, it's more like a first contact between alien cultures, but with the benefit of having more touchstones. They have a shared language, but only a subset, to which both sides must adhere -- or run the risk of having to explain too many concepts and too much vocabulary. In that way, it's not unlike native speakers and speakers-of-a-second-language. It works well enough, but you have to adjust, at least at first. There are a lot of interesting reveals (people in the alternate past who correspond to people in the alternate future) and, once the dust settles and the future folk have defeated their corresponding nemeses in both future and past, they all get down to the business of avoiding the "jackpot" that more-or-less doomed the future to a high-tech feudalism that's more miserable than it looks, on the surface. It's pretty upbeat, actually; very Hollywood: good guys win, get all the money in the world, the planet is on a better path. The bad guys are more relegated than destroyed, but they're definitely declawed. It's kind of a fairy tale about the only way to save our planet from being even more of the way it is in the near future: an alternate version of ourselves reaches back over time (still inexplicably, because the tech for doing so isn't explained at all) to deliver the technological solution that we're all relying on to save us -- because we aren't going to do it with discipline. Gibson gets some digs in on popular culture and those who benefit from it, much more obliquely and unobtrusively than others. Flynne ruminates on Daedra, the flighty and arrogant quasi-performance artist from the U.S. of the future: "Seemed like a cross between a slightly porny media star and what sophomore year Art History called a performance artist, plus maybe a kind of diplomat." When Flynne then asks if she's like a reality-show start, Wilf answers: "“Yes. She’s descended from that, in a sense. Reality television. It merged with politics. Then with performance art.” They walked on." To which Flynne manages to comment on the current-timeline United States without even seeming to do so. "“I think that already happened, back home,” she said." In the same thought, Gibson sideswipes the U.S. (Connor is basically decent, but more than a little an off-the-rails and shoot-first-and-ask-questions-later guy), "But she still didn’t get what the United States did either, in Wilf’s world. He made it sound like the nation-state equivalent of Conner, minus the sense of humor, but she supposed that might not be so far off, even today. (Emphasis added.)" This is a first-contact story. It doesn't even matter that it's the past, or, more precisely, a different timeline's past. It's a way of telling a feel-good story about a down-on-its-luck pocket of America benefitting from the munificence of Gibson's standard cabal of shadowy, eccentric, surprisingly ethical and nearly incomprehensibly wealthy, powerful, and well-connected characters. It's similar in that way to Pattern Recognition. I've included "notes, citations and errata" in a separate post. ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3834 2019-12-27T21:35:02+01:00 https://earthli.com/users/marco

https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3813 2019-12-27T17:49:00+01:00 https://earthli.com/users/marco

"Thirty years from now, Hannity will be getting a tin medal from whoever is Reichsmarshall of the ex-United States by then, and that will identify him, not Rush, as “America’s anchorman.”" "Having a sense of humor or a conscience or both in a high-profile media job is a quick way to end up wandering New York or some distant farm, Vincent Gigante-style, in a bathrobe and stubble." "[...] you can be fired for being wrong. You just can’t be fired for being wrong in concert. If you go back and look, you’ll find that many of America’s highest-profile media figures are not only wrong very frequently, but absurdly so. But their saving grace is that the wrong things they express are the same wrong things everyone else is expressing." "But articles from the Post and the Times about these revelations years later did not include re-examinations of the papers’ own complicity in selling a bogus war. This is a key part of how this system works. The institutional memory of the press about credulous acceptance of government nonsense is nonexistent, so we continually repeat the same errors." "Meanwhile, Frum wrote, the lunatic Hitler attacked Britain and Russia simultaneously, suicidal moves. So, you never knew. The only way to be absolutely sure you would never have to go to war with a dangerous and unpredictable adversary was to go to war with them." "So the Reagan administration salted papers like the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post with bogus tales about how Libya was backing new terrorist initiatives. In fact, the CIA had secretly concluded Qaddafi was “quiescent” on the terror front at the time." "Friedman won the Pulitzer Prize for commentary that year. The fact that he declared “the next six months will be critical” fourteen times during the war is much laughed about today, but it’s actually a serious commentary on how long delusions are allowed to persist, provided they’re the right delusions." "In the blink of an eye, we went from tolerating Saddam Hussein without any trouble at all to needing to kill him immediately in self defense, with people like Brooks insisting that anyone who said otherwise was just refusing to face the irrefutable math." "The only crime is trying to punch above not just your own intellect, but everyone else’s. Many believe Iraq-style collective delusions are less possible today, because the post-Trump universe is so divided. This is a misread of how this all works. If anything, the Church of the Average is stronger than ever. The greater the political stress, the more the public is subjected to even stricter and more ridiculous enforcement of conventional wisdom. We place a great premium today on not thinking for oneself, and not temporarily, so as to green-light one war, but generally — on the grounds that free thinking has not worked out so well for America of late, and therefore must be discouraged." "The Ten Rules of Hate, Rules 7--10" by Matt Taibbi "Which headline is the Hawaiian Democrat going to click on first: “Ballast Discharge Measure Won’t Protect Hawaii’s Coastal Waters” or “11 Times Marie Hirono Had Zero Fucks To Give”? Scatological blather scores shares and retweets, and now that there’s no ideological or commercial requirement to avoid pissing off the whole audience – no more “Good morning, everybody” – there’s no disincentive to using the strongest language." "The problem is, there’s no natural floor to this behavior. Just as cable TV will eventually become 700 separate 24-hour porn channels, news and commentary will eventually escalate to boxing-style expletive-laden pre-fight tirades, and open incitement of violence. If the other side is literally Hitler, this eventually has to happen. It would be illogical to argue anything else. What began as America vs. America will eventually move to Traitor vs. Traitor, and the show does not work if those contestants are not offended to the point of wanting to kill one another." "Few think about this, but the press routinely puts the names and personal information of people arrested in newspapers, on TV, and, worst of all, online, where the stories live forever. Yet these people have not been convicted of crimes, merely arrested or charged." "What’s remarkable about Pauli’s story is how rare it is. Pauli happened to be in one of the worst corners of the game, covering crime, which is a genre significantly wrapped up in needlessly stoking class/racial fears on the one hand, while making people feel superior on the other. But the core dynamic of his job was not much different from what most of us do. We’re mainly in the business of stroking audiences. We want them coming back. Anger is part of the rhetorical promise, but so are feelings righteousness and superiority." "It’s why we love terrible people like Casey Anthony or O.J. as news subjects a lot more than we’d like someone who spends his or her days working in a pediatric oncology ward. Showing genuinely heroic or selfless people on TV would make most audiences feel inferior. Therefore, we don’t." "It’s the same premise as reality shows. The most popular programs aren’t about geniuses and paragons of virtue, but instead about terrible parents, morons, people too fat to notice they’re pregnant, people willing to be filmed getting ass tucks, spoiled rich people, and other freaks. Why use the most advanced communications technology in history to teach people basic geography, or how World Bank structural adjustment lending works, when you can instead watch idiots drink donkey semen for money? Your media experience is designed to nurture and protect your ego. So we show you the biggest losers we can find. It’s the underlying principle of almost every successful entertainment product we’ve had, from COPS to Freakshow to, literally, The Biggest Loser. We’re probably just a few years way from a show called, What Would You Suck For a Dollar?" "In the early nineties, the Weekly Standard wrote that Republicans wanted Quayle to “dispel his bimbo image” by “showing some teeth, Spiro Agnew style.” Agnew is one of the biggest disgraces in the history of American politics, a blowhard with no discernible ideas beyond the promiscuous use of every conceivable form of political corruption – yet in the American consciousness, he’s not a loser. He’s an aggressor." "When you look back at the generation of Heathers-style coverage, the evolution toward Trump starts to make sense. We can excuse almost anything in America except losing. And we love a freak show." "We count on your shame in the same way. We know you know the news we show you is demeaning, disgusting, pointless, and not really intended to inform. But we assume you’ll be too embarrassed to admit you spend hours every day poring through content specifically designed to stroke your point of view. In fact, you’ll consume twice as much rather than admit you don’t like to be challenged. Like Tolstoy’s weak hero, you’ll pay to hide your shame." "We can’t get you there unless you follow all the rules. Accept a binary world and pick a side. Embrace the reality of being surrounded by evil stupidity, and do not commune with it. Feel indignant, righteous, and smart. Hate losers, love winners. And during the commercials, do some shopping. "Congratulations, you’re the perfect news consumer." "How Reading the News is like Smoking" "We may be insane monsters inside, but we work hard to have good consumer taste on the surface. Ellis understood that most of us, when we read the news, are really just telling ourselves a story about who we like to think we are, when we look in the mirror." "All the folk devils are here" by Matt Taibbi "The constant drumbeat of “It’s the beginning of the end” stories about “bombshells” causing the “walls” to “close in” on Trump – so comic that a mash-up of such comments dating to Trump’s first week in office has gone viral – is a case of straight-up emotional grifting. Editors know Democratic audiences are devastated by the fact of the Trump presidency, so they constantly hint at hope that he’ll be dragged away in handcuffs at any moment. This is despite the fact that reporters know the legal avenues for removal are extraordinarily unlikely." "BuzzFeed's big scoop and the media's giant factual loophole" by Matt Taibbi "So in a world where not just wars but occupations can safely be left out of the news, imagine how the reporting works on individual bombings. There is a lengthy story about how we even have the authority to kill people in countries all across the globe by remote aircraft; those interested can read here. The government as recently as last spring asserted in an American courtroom that it had the right to authorize “lethal action” against even an American citizen without indictment, probable cause, even notice, due to a series of legal loopholes so preposterous they would impress Kafka." "The class taboo" by Matt Taibbi "Journalism has evolved into a career with significant entry barriers, one of which is the unpaid internship. This makes the profession whiter, wealthier… and less concerned with public policy issues that affect the poor and even the middle class." "This to me was what journalism was supposed to be about, asking why things happen and being willing to be surprised or even upset by the answers. If Democrats could hear hard truths like the ones in What’s the Matter With Kansas? they were in good intellectual health." "The sheer number of articles wondering if Trump’s win suggests there’s “too much democracy” these days conveys more about who is doing the analysis than it does about the political situation. Politicians and journalists alike have absolved themselves of any responsibility for what’s gone wrong, settling instead for endless finger-pointing at people who are just irredeemably stupid and racist – who just “have bad souls,” as Frank puts it. This convenient catchall explanation makes the op-ed page the place where upscale readers go to be reassured they never have to change or examine past policy mistakes, even if it means continuing to lose elections." With this kind of crap going at home, Who is the U.S. to judge anyone else's democracy? "It's official: Russiagate is this generation's WMD" by Matt Taibbi "Russiagate institutionalized one of the worst ethical loopholes in journalism, which used to be limited mainly to local crime reporting. It’s always been a problem that we publish mugshots and names of people merely arrested but not yet found guilty. Those stories live forever online and even the acquitted end up permanently unable to get jobs, smeared as thieves, wife-beaters, drunk drivers, etc. With Russiagate the national press abandoned any pretense that there’s a difference between indictment and conviction." "As a purely journalistic failure, however, WMD was a pimple compared to Russiagate. The sheer scale of the errors and exaggerations this time around dwarfs the last mess. Worse, it’s led to most journalists accepting a radical change in mission. We’ve become sides-choosers, obliterating the concept of the press as an independent institution whose primary role is sorting fact and fiction. We had the sense to eventually look inward a little in the WMD affair, which is the only reason we escaped that episode with any audience left. Is the press even capable of that kind of self-awareness now? WMD damaged our reputation. If we don’t turn things around, this story will destroy it." "Nothing Trump is accused of from now by the press will be believed by huge chunks of the population, a group now larger than his original base. As Baker notes, a full 50.3% of respondents in a poll conducted this month said they agree with Trump the Mueller probe is a “witch hunt.”" "There was never real gray area here. Either Trump is a compromised foreign agent, or he isn’t. If he isn’t, news outlets once again swallowed a massive disinformation campaign, only this error is many orders of magnitude more stupid than any in the recent past, WMD included." More stupid, not worse. People are misrepresenting Taibbi's opinion on this point. "The Scarlet Letter Club" by Matt Taibbi "Kristol argued the United States should seek to be “a leader with preponderant influence and authority over all others in its domain.” With the Soviets gone from the scene, the argument went, our “domain” should now be planet Earth. Securing “authority” meant pursuing policies “ultimately intended to bring about a change of regime” in countries like “Iran, Cuba, and China.” (China!)" "When we deride journalists as stenographers, it’s not about them repeating the words of powerful officials. The real crime is absorbing the ideas of powerful people (often crafted by groups of officials in a dreary corporate process) and repeating them as if they’re your own personal thoughts." "Officials have been lying their faces off to the press for a century. From World War I-era tales of striking union workers being German agents, to the “missile gap” that wasn’t (the “gap” was leaked to the press before the Soviets had even one operational ICBM) to the various Gulf of Tonkin deceptions, to the smearing of people like Martin Luther King, it’s a wonder newspapers listen to security sources at all." "Cruelty and monstrousness inherently come wrapped in absurdity, which makes sense, because without conscience or decency, the human animal is just an ape in a hat." ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3789 2019-12-27T17:02:14+01:00 https://earthli.com/users/marco

https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3833 2019-12-27T00:04:02+01:00 https://earthli.com/users/marco

, which included the following: "The necessary complexity here is immense, and this post only scratches the very surface of it. If anything, it’s a miracle of the simplicity of modern programming that we’re able to just slap down a on a web page and instantly provide a text input for every internet user around the globe." Here, too, the author discusses necessary complexity -- perhaps better described as immanent complexity. [Citations] "The essence of a software entity is a construct of interlocking concepts: data sets, relationships among data items, algorithms, and invocations of functions. This essence is abstract, in that the conceptual construct is the same under many different representations. It is nonetheless highly precise and richly detailed. I believe the hard part of building software to be the specification, design, and testing of this conceptual construct, not the labor of representing it and testing the fidelity of the representation." "The complexity of software is [a]n essential property, not an accidental one. Hence descriptions of a software entity that abstract away its complexity often abstract away its essence. Mathematics and the physical sciences made great strides for three centuries by constructing simplified models of complex phenomena, deriving properties from the models, and verifying those properties experimentally. This worked because the complexities ignored in the models were not the essential properties of the phenomena. It does not work when the complexities are the essence." "From the complexity comes the difficulty of enumerating, much less understanding, all the possible states of the program, and from that comes the unreliability." "[This complexity] creates the tremendous learning and understanding burden that makes personnel turnover a disaster." "In many cases the software must conform because it has most recently come to the scene. In others it must conform because it is perceived as the most conformable. But in all cases, much complexity comes from conformation to other interfaces; this cannot be simplified out by any redesign of the software alone." "All successful software gets changed. Two processes are at work. As a software product is found to be useful, people try it in new cases at the edge of, or beyond, the original domain. The pressures for extended function come chiefly from users who like the basic function and invent new uses for it." "As soon as we attempt to diagram software structure, we find it to constitute not one, but several, general directed graphs, superimposed one upon another. The several graphs may represent the flow of control, the flow of data, patterns of dependency, time sequence, name-space relationships. These are usually not even planar, much less hierarchical. Indeed, one of the ways of establishing conceptual control over such structure is to enforce link cutting until one or more of the graphs becomes hierarchical." "The hard thing about building software is deciding what to say, not saying it. No facilitation of expression can give more than marginal gains." "Even more difficult and important is the twofold task of knowledge acquisition: finding articulate, self-analytical experts who know why they do things; and developing efficient techniques for extracting what they know and distilling it into rule bases. The essential prerequisite for building an expert system is to have an expert." "The gap between the best software engineering practice and the average practice is very wide -- perhaps wider than in any other engineering discipline. A tool that disseminates good practice would be important." "The hardest part of the software task is arriving at a complete and consistent specification, and much of the essence of building a program is in fact the debugging of the specification." "The hardest single part of building a software system is deciding precisely what to build. No other part of the conceptual work is so difficult as establishing the detailed technical requirements, including all the interfaces to people, to machines, and to other software systems. No other part of the work so cripples the resulting system if done wrong. No other part is more difficult [t]o rectify later." "Therefore the most important function that software builders do for their clients is the iterative extraction and refinement of the product requirements. For the truth is, the clients do not know what they want. They usually do not know what questions must be answered, and they almost never have thought of the problem in the detail that must be specified. Even the simple answer -- ”Make the new software system work like our old manual information-processing system” -- is in fact too simple. Clients never want exactly that." ]]> </content> </entry> <entry> <title type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth by Richard Buckminster Fuller (1969) (read in 2019)]]> </title> <id>https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3832</id> <link href="https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3832"/> <updated>2019-12-26T23:00:13+01:00</updated> <author> <name type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Marco von Ballmoos]]> </name> <uri>https://earthli.com/users/marco</uri> </author> <summary type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA["Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is" ... ]]> </summary> <content type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Published by marco on 26. Dec 2019 23:00:13 Updated by marco on 26. Dec 2019 23:00:57 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I've failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an interest in this book, then I'm happy for you." This is an essay by one of the 20th century's preëminent thinkers about the state of the planet in 1969. Things weren't any better or worse or even significantly different then than they are now, 50 years later. "Because yesterday’s negatives are moved out of sight from their familiar locations many persons are willing to pretend to themselves that the problems have been solved." Yup. That still sounds a lot like us. "I feel that one of the reasons why we are struggling inadequately today is that we reckon our costs on too shortsighted a basis and are later overwhelmed with the unexpected costs brought about by our shortsightedness." Oh yeah, he's got our number. Jesus, haven't we changed one bit over 50 years? Didn't we kind of have to improve in order to accomplish all that we did? Shouldn't we get started on that? You know, in order to get this climate crisis under control? Fuller was also not very hopeful, though he was more hopeful than our subsequent behavior warranted: he actually thought we'd have conquered nationalism by now. Fuller hypothesizes that a main part of the problem is that, regardless of ideology, all of the "political leadership [...a]ll the great ideological groups assumed Armageddon." With such a fatalistic starting point, what's the point of planning for a long future? Just get yours, Jack, and screw everybody else. Fuller dismisses this idiocy as utterly beside the point -- as the only worthwhile point would be survival as a species. He puts it quite lucidly. "It is really a worthless pile of chips of an arbitrary game which we are playing and does not correspond to the accounting processes of our real universe’s evolutionary transactions." You hear that billionaires? You're not going to Mars. You're sitting on a worthless pile of chips that won't help you at all when the revolution comes or the crisis intensifies -- or both. You'll be the first against the wall (no you won't, not as long as you control media, you won't). Were people of Fuller's caliber and level of education aware of climate change? It's kind of unclear. On one level, he's hyper-aware that industrialization is ruining the "spaceship", "[...] up to now we have been misusing, abusing, and polluting this extraordinary chemical energy-interchanging system for successfully regenerating all life aboard our planetary spaceship." As for global warming, he worries about mankind's depletion rate of fossil fuels, at most. He worries about "pollution" but not specifically greenhouse gases, even though the idea was "first proposed with supporting evidence in 1938" <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_warming#History_of_the_science> and I would have expected him to be aware of the concept. "We cannot afford to expend our fossil fuels faster than we are “recharging our battery,” which means precisely the rate at which the fossil fuels are being continually deposited within Earth’s spherical crust.”" But on the other hand, he still idolizes the process of industrialization for having lifted so many people out of abject poverty and misery. "The labor movement made possible mass purchasing; ergo, mass production; ergo, low prices on vastly improved products and services, which have altogether established entirely new and higher standards of humanity’s living." Remember, though, that he was writing in 1969, arguably the high point of a global economic golden age when mankind was largely unaware of the scope of the folly of its mode of operation. It was only in the late 70s and early 80s that hyper-financialization took over to centralize operations and began to reverse the gains of the mid-20th century. Fuller's writing style is not exactly representative of his intelligence. It's full of bizarre and exceedingly complex constructions, has a unique approach to hyphenation (using too many even for me) and he leaves off many articles. It came as a surprise as he was raised and educated in the United States, had graduated from Harvard and was a member of many prestigious scientific societies. [Citations] "First, I’d like to explore a few thoughts about the vital data confronting us right nowsuch as the fact that more than half of humanity as yet exists in miserable poverty, prematurely doomed, unless we alter our comprehensive physical circumstances. It is certainly no solution to evict the poor, replacing their squalid housing with much more expensive buildings which the original tenants can’t afford to reoccupy. Our society adopts many such superficial palliatives. Because yesterday’s negatives are moved out of sight from their familiar locations many persons are willing to pretend to themselves that the problems have been solved." "I feel that one of the reasons why we are struggling inadequately today is that we reckon our costs on too shortsighted a basis and are later overwhelmed with the unexpected costs brought about by our shortsightedness." "This "sovereign--meaning top-weapons enforced‹"national" claim upon humans born in various lands leads to ever more severely specialized servitude and highly personalized identity classification. As a consequence of the slavish "categoryitis" the scientifically illogical, and as we shall see, often meaningless questions "Where do you live?" "What are you?" "What religion?" "What race?" ’"What nationality?" are all thought of today as logical questions. By the twentyfirst century it either will have become evident to humanity that these questions are absurd and anti-evolutionary or men will no longer be living on Earth." Not quite yet. "Because of the working concept that there was not enough to go around, the most aggressive political leaders exercised their political leadership by heading their countries into war to overcome the rest of the world, thus to dispose of the unsupportable excess population through decimation and starvation-the age-old, lethal formula of ignorant men. Thus we had all our world society specializing, whether under fascism, communism, or capitalism. All the great ideological groups assumed Armageddon." "Our little Spaceship Earth is right now travelling at sixty thousand miles an hour around the around the sun and is also spinning axially, which, at the latitude of Washington, D. C., adds approximately one thousand miles per hour to our motion. Each minute we both spin at one hundred miles and zip in orbit at one thousand miles. That is a whole lot of spin and zip." "You and I can go out and take a sunbath, but are unable to take in enough energy through our skins to keep alive. So part of the invention of the Spaceship Earth and its biological life-sustaining is that the vegetation on the land and the algae in the sea, employing photosynthesis, are designed to impound the life-regenerating energy for us to adequate amount." "It is therefore paradoxical but strategically explicable, as we shall see, that up to now we have been misusing, abusing, and polluting this extraordinary chemical energy-interchanging system for successfully regenerating all life aboard our planetary spaceship." "Thus under lethal emergencies vast new magnitudes of wealth come mysteriously into effective operation. We don’t seem to be able to afford to do peacefully the logical things we say we ought to be doing to forestall warring-by producing enough to satisfy all the world needs. Under pressure we always find that we can afford to wage the wars brought about by the vital struggle of "have-nots" to share or take over the bounty of the "haves."" "It is really a worthless pile of chips of an arbitrary game which we are playing and does not correspond to the accounting processes of our real universe’s evolutionary transactions." "Now we can account wealth more precisely as the number of forward days for a specific number of people we are physically prepared to sustain at a physically stated time and space liberating level of metabolic and metaphysical regeneration." "It is also worth remembering that the validity of what our reputedly rich man in the shipwreck had in those real estate equities went back only to the validity "in the eyes of God" of the original muscle, cunning, and weapons-established-sovereign-claimed lands and their subsequent legal re-deedings as "legal" properties protected by the moral-or-no, weaponsenforced laws of the sovereign nations and their subsequent abstraction into limited-liabilitycorporation equities printed on paper stocks and bonds." "What man has done is to decentralize his functions into a world-around-energy-networked complex of tools which altogether constitute what we refer to as world industrialization." Fuller's writing style is odd. Hyper-hyphenation and a lot of missing articles. "As we study industrialization, we see that we cannot have mass production unless we have mass consumption. This was effected evolutionarily by the great social struggles of labor to increase wages and spread the benefits and prevent the reduction of the numbers of workers employed. The labor movement made possible mass purchasing; ergo, mass production; ergo, low prices on vastly improved products and services, which have altogether established entirely new and higher standards of humanity’s living." "Man can and may metaphysically comprehend, anticipate, shunt, and meteringly introduce the evolutionarily organized environment events in the magnitudes and frequencies that best synchronize with the patterns of his successful and metaphysical metabolic regeneration while ever increasing the degrees of humanity’s space and time freedoms from yesterday’s ignorance sustaining survival procedure chores and their personal time capital wasting." This is another bizarre sentence, almost stream-of-consciousness, with missing hyphens and aggressive and inappropriate use of adverbs. "Only by understanding this scheme may we continue for all time ahead to enjoy and explore universe as we progressively harness evermore of the celestially generated tidal and storm generated wind, water, and electrical power concentrations. We cannot afford to expend our fossil fuels faster than we are "recharging our battery," which means precisely the rate at which the fossil fuels are being continually deposited within Earth’s spherical crust." ]]> </content> </entry> <entry> <title type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Does anyone have the right to sex? by Amia Srinivasan (2018) (read in 2019)]]> </title> <id>https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3831</id> <link href="https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3831"/> <updated>2019-12-26T10:12:59+01:00</updated> <author> <name type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Marco von Ballmoos]]> </name> <uri>https://earthli.com/users/marco</uri> </author> <summary type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA["Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is" ... ]]> </summary> <content type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Published by marco on 26. Dec 2019 10:12:59 Updated by marco on 26. Dec 2019 11:56:40 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I've failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an interest in this book, then I'm happy for you." This is a medium-length essay/tract that was recommended as insightful, but fell rather short. It starts off discussing the notion of the incel community as a powder keg that is a danger to society because of its expectation of sex from the "hottest" members. This is already more than a bit of straw man based on the whackiest members of the group. This tack is based on taking the reasoning of one or two mentally ill people seriously and literally. When someone says he killed a bunch of co-eds because his Satan controlling his dog told him to, we don't infer a whole dangerous movement -- we just figure that person is mentally ill. But if the same person claims it's because those hot bitches wouldn't blow him, then we infer a vast underground movement that lurks beneath society. There were some limpid bits in the essay but it was otherwise all over the place (in a way very similar to Abdulali's What We Talk about When We Talk about Rape). It takes and runs with stereotypes inculcated and revered by ... the media? Porn? Hollywood? and applies them broadly to an entire gender. There isn't really any insight or unpacking of societal reasons. For example: The author states that "sexy schoolgirls and sexy teachers, manic pixie dreamgirls and Milfs, [are] all taut-bodied and hot, minor variations" but that they can't "imagine GQ carrying an article celebrating ‘mom bod’". Aren't there several categories of porn that cater exactly to this? Just because a staid and establishment magazine like GQ wouldn't acknowledge it doesn't mean that society as a whole hasn't acknowledged it. If you read the yearly statistical roundup blog from any of the big porn sites, you'll see that actual (not mainstream media) preferences are much more equitable. It is at this point that I would have expected a discussion of the separation between "official culture" and "actual culture", where the official version is a fake version imposed from above as brainwashing. Nothing of the kind happens. Instead, there seems to be an argument that anyone who withholds their attraction from anyone who wants it is vaguely or even manifestly discriminatory. It's almost as if the author ends up making the incel argument? "Consider the supreme fuckability of ‘hot blonde sluts’ and East Asian women, the comparative unfuckability of black women and Asian men, the fetishisation and fear of black male sexuality, the sexual disgust expressed towards disabled, trans and fat bodies." The tone is clear: all of this is bad. However, there are different reasons for all of it, aren't there? To redefine "lack of interest" on the part of most people as "sexual disgust" is disingenuous, at best. This is again defining the whole world in terms of what it wants to fuck, as if that's all anyone thinks about all day. While it may be true for some people, especially during certain phases of their lives, the tone in this essay distorts the world to define it purely in terms of sexual preference and inculcated attraction -- and expectation. That asian men and black women are unfuckable or that black men are dangerous predators has a lot more to do with American society than anything else. That is not really discussed much at all. That people are generally not turned on by disabled or fat bodies is at least partly biological, as is being attracted to people with whom you can procreate. It's almost as if you need to want to fuck someone in order not discriminate against them. But if you do want to fuck them, then you're discriminating against them by defining them purely as sexual beings. So, damned if you, damned if you don't. That's not an interesting or productive line of reasoning. To prove that I'm not unfairly paraphrasing, a direct citation: "In other words, the sex-positive gaze risks covering not only for misogyny, but for racism, ableism, transphobia, and every other oppressive system that makes its way into the bedroom through the seemingly innocuous mechanism of ‘personal preference’. (Emphasis added.)" Try teasing that statement apart. Am I hiding a palette of discriminatory beliefs behind the facade of nearly lifelong monogamy? Nice excuse, right? No wonder more and more people would rather identify as asexual than risk being called racist for what they mistook as biological apathy. I understand that society has a lot to do with shaping personal preference, but so does biology. It's a ludicrous leap, though, to put the words into scare quotes and then call it "seemingly innocuous", suggesting that anyone who is attracted to people that they feel instinctively attracted to is a Neanderthal without scruple or interest in advancing any social agendas. But them Srinivasan double down and writes the following: "It’s because straight people – or, I should say, white, able-bodied cis straight people – aren’t much in the habit of thinking there’s anything wrong with how they have sex." Are you fucking kidding me? Straight sex isn’t freighted with judgment or confusion? I’m not in the dating scene and even I know that’s not true. Because…every movie ever. Have you ever seen a movie? Have you every interacted with modern culture? The majority of popular culture is about how white, able-bodied, cis, straight people being supremely uncomfortable about sex. They can't fucking stop talking about it or making movies and songs about it. My impression is that we started with the thesis that so-called incels are wrong for thinking that anyone owes them sex. This turns out to be due not to any moral basis, but because these people tend to belong to the socially dominant class, irrespective of whether that membership has translated into any personal dominance in any facet of life. However, denying minorities or other groups historically discriminated against (e.g. fat, disabled, trans) sex is problematic as it expresses the societal discrimination along another axis. To analogize: if black girl scouts show up at my door, I have to buy cookies, no matter what. If they're white, I'm obligated to tell their privileged asses off. Alles klar. [Citations] "Meanwhile there are sexy schoolgirls and sexy teachers, manic pixie dreamgirls and Milfs, but they’re all taut-bodied and hot, minor variations on the same normative paradigm. (Can we imagine GQ carrying an article celebrating ‘mom bod’?)" That's not exactly true. There are genres that cater to different tastes. BBW, for example. "Beginning in the late 1970s, Catharine MacKinnon demanded that we abandon the Freudian view of sexual desire as ‘an innate primary natural prepolitical unconditioned drive divided along the biological gender line’ and recognise that sex under patriarchy is inherently violent; that ‘hostility and contempt, or arousal of master to slave, together with awe and vulnerability, or arousal of slave to master’ are its constitutive emotions." What the actual fuck is she talking about? She's off the rails. "Anti-porn feminism, Willis wrote, asked ‘women to accept a spurious moral superiority as a substitute for sexual pleasure, and curbs on men’s sexual freedom as a substitute for real power’." "Thinking about how patriarchal oppression is inflected by race and class – patriarchy doesn’t express itself uniformly, and cannot be understood independently of other systems of oppression – has made feminists reluctant to prescribe universal policies, including universal sexual policies. Demands for equal access to the workplace will be more resonant for white, middle-class women who have been forced to stay home than it will be for the black and working-class women who have always been expected to labour alongside men." "The important thing now is to take women at their word. If a woman says she enjoys working in porn, or being paid to have sex with men, or engaging in rape fantasies, or wearing stilettos – and even that she doesn’t just enjoy these things but finds them emancipatory, part of her feminist praxis – then we are required, as feminists, to trust her. This is not merely an epistemic claim: that a woman’s saying something about her own experience gives us strong, if not indefeasible, reason to think it true. It is also, or perhaps primarily, an ethical claim: a feminism that trades too freely in notions of selfdeception is a feminism that risks dominating the subjects it wants to liberate." "Third and fourth-wave feminists are right to say, for example, that sex work is work, and can be better work than the menial labour undertaken by most women. And they are right to say that what sex workers need are legal and material protections, safety and security, not rescue or rehabilitation." "Consider the supreme fuckability of ‘hot blonde sluts’ and East Asian women, the comparative unfuckability of black women and Asian men, the fetishisation and fear of black male sexuality, the sexual disgust expressed towards disabled, trans and fat bodies." One of these is not like the others. "In other words, the sex-positive gaze risks covering not only for misogyny, but for racism, ableism, transphobia, and every other oppressive system that makes its way into the bedroom through the seemingly innocuous mechanism of ‘personal preference’." Jesus. Try teasing that apart. Am i hiding a palette of discriminatory beliefs behind the facade of monogamy? Nice excuse, right? No wonder more and more people would rather identify as asexual than risk being called racist for what they mistook as biological apathy. "It’s because straight people – or, I should say, white, able-bodied cis straight people – aren’t much in the habit of thinking there’s anything wrong with how they have sex." Are you fucking kidding me? Straight sex isn't freighted with judgment? I'm not in the dating scene and even I know that's not true. Because...every movie ever. "The distribution of sexual desire, like the distribution of food, is shaped by oppressive forces. This does not take away from the fact that no one is entitled to anyone else’s body. But it does complicate it. Like Solnit, I discuss the analogy in the context of a particular, embittered misogynist, who likened raping a woman to stealing food when starving. Here the analogy between sex and food is used for precisely the misogynistic ends Solnit wants to condemn. That it can be repurposed in this way points to the limits of the analogy: while starvation excuses theft in many cases, sexual ‘starvation’ never excuses rape. What’s more, while many of us think it is the duty of the state to ensure a just distribution of basic goods like food, far fewer of us would welcome state intervention in our patterns of sexual desire." ]]> </content> </entry> <entry> <title type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Laudatio Si' by Pope Francis (2015) (read in 2019)]]> </title> <id>https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3830</id> <link href="https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3830"/> <updated>2019-12-25T23:49:17+01:00</updated> <author> <name type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Marco von Ballmoos]]> </name> <uri>https://earthli.com/users/marco</uri> </author> <summary type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA["Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is" ... ]]> </summary> <content type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Published by marco on 25. Dec 2019 23:49:17 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I've failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an interest in this book, then I'm happy for you." This is the papal encyclical written by Pope Francis in 2015. It is relatively well-known and -cited in climate-change circles. It's extremely well-edited and much more on point with current issues than many would credit the church. I think it's best to (mostly) let Francis speak for himself. The whole essay is worth a read (except for some long stretches of heavily religious babble -- there's really no other word for it). While at times he presents very relevant scripture to counter arguments made by those erroneously quoting the Bible, at other times the document drags on considerably with page after page of seemingly unrelated and vaguely recruiting-oriented prose. Am I being unfair? You be the judge: "Saint Bonaventure went so far as to say that human beings, before sin, were able to see how each creature “testifies that God is three”. The reflection of the Trinity was there to be recognized in nature “when that book was open to man and our eyes had not yet become darkened”.[170] The Franciscan saint teaches us that each creature bears in itself a specifically Trinitarian structure, so real that it could be readily contemplated if only the human gaze were not so partial, dark and fragile. In this way, he points out to us the challenge of trying to read reality in a Trinitarian key." This reads like something from any of Umberto Eco's masterpieces. I laud Francis for his effort. I don't think that was the point, though. Where Eco was being deliberately obtuse to demonstrate the impenetrability and non-disprovability of conspiracy/quasi-religious texts, I'm afraid Francis isn't kidding. There were several dozen more chapters/paragraphs that were nothing but biblical babble in a similar vein. Happily, at other times, he's often downright rational and scientific: "Although change is part of the working of complex systems, the speed with which human activity has developed contrasts with the naturally slow pace of biological evolution. Moreover, the goals of this rapid and constant change are not necessarily geared to the common good or to integral and sustainable human development." He continues with a discussion of climate science and underlying economic models, as well as discussing the need for a "circular economy", which will enable us to live indefinitely and harmoniously on the planet, instead of rapaciously and terminally. In particular, he singles out consumption as the root of all evil. "We all know that it is not possible to sustain the present level of consumption in developed countries and wealthier sectors of society, where the habit of wasting and discarding has reached unprecedented levels. The exploitation of the planet has already exceeded acceptable limits and we still have not solved the problem of poverty." Basically, the Pope is disappointed with how the world works and thinks it should work significantly differently, from the bottom up. In particular, he dismisses the supposition that technology will save us -- because technology is wielded by people and people have their own agenda. If their agenda is not aligned, then the technology will harm, not help. "[...] We have to accept that technological products are not neutral, for they create a framework which ends up conditioning lifestyles and shaping social possibilities along the lines dictated by the interests of certain powerful groups. Decisions which may seem purely instrumental are in reality decisions about the kind of society we want to build." It really seems (unsurprisingly, if you've read the right bits of the Bible) that the Pope is a socialist, if not a communist. "To ensure economic freedom from which all can effectively benefit, restraints occasionally have to be imposed on those possessing greater resources and financial power." Here he is again, lashing out agains the consumption-based society (not just economy). "This paradigm leads people to believe that they are free as long as they have the supposed freedom to consume. But those really free are the minority who wield economic and financial power." At times, it's unclear whether he's voicing a deliberately naive opinion to demonstrate how ridiculous it is that we consider it naive, but sometimes the prose smacks of a complete inability to see the banal evil present in nearly everyone. For example, he poses the following question: "What would induce anyone, at this stage, to hold on to power only to be remembered for their inability to take action when it was urgent and necessary to do so?" If not rhetorical, then here's a shot at an answer: Because, in our world, there are never any negative repercussions, excuses are always accepted, idiocy is promoted and evil is left to live out its days in luxury. Does that help? He does seem to understand, though, because at another point, he castigates the first world and its power brokers (which includes pretty much everyone in the 1%): "This is due partly to the fact that many professionals, opinion makers, communications media and centres of power, being located in affluent urban areas, are far removed from the poor, with little direct contact with their problems. They live and reason from the comfortable position of a high level of development and a quality of life well beyond the reach of the majority of the world’s population." He reserves his sternest worlds for baseless financialization and profit: "[...] economic powers continue to justify the current global system where priority tends to be given to speculation and the pursuit of financial gain." And then there's the utterly broken political system that is led by the nose by the underlying economics (it should be the other way around). "178. A politics concerned with immediate results, supported by consumerist sectors of the population, is driven to produce short-term growth. In response to electoral interests, governments are reluctant to upset the public with measures which could affect the level of consumption or create risks for foreign investment." And he's not done with the first world. He takes on the argument posed by some (many) that we need to reduce population. While this would undoubtedly help, those suggesting that we reduce imply heavily that we need to get rid of the third world and their pesky proclivity for procreative promulgation -- to the point of overflowing their lands and then invading our own holy borders with waves of skilled immigrants. "To blame population growth instead of extreme and selective consumerism on the part of some, is one way of refusing to face the issues. It is an attempt to legitimize the present model of distribution, where a minority believes that it has the right to consume in a way which can never be universalized, since the planet could not even contain the waste products of such consumption." The Pope will also not stop peppering this document with relatively bold and non-nuanced opinions on the basic evil of abortion. "“The Lord created medicines out of the earth, and a sensible man will not despise them”" Like RU486? Sick burn ammirite? "There is a tendency to justify transgressing all boundaries when experimentation is carried out on living human embryos." We'd almost forgotten where you stand there. That ship has sailed, Francis; are you sure you want to die on that hill? He keeps hammering that point until I fear he may drive away potential allies. Instead, he should think of the actually living instead of worrying about edge cases. Not to mention that voluntary non-breeding in the developed world would go a significant way toward reducing carbon-production. Does he have any concrete advice (other than to absolutely never have an abortion)? Yes, he does. "A person who could afford to spend and consume more but regularly uses less heating and wears warmer clothes, shows the kind of convictions and attitudes which help to protect the environment." Hooray! A few of us are doing that already. It's nice to see that the Pope thinks we're doing God's work. "If someone has not learned to stop and admire something beautiful, we should not be surprised if he or she treats everything as an object to be used and abused without scruple. If we want to bring about deep change, we need to realize that certain mindsets really do influence our behaviour." Basically, we need to change everything about what it means to be a human in the Anthropocene. He's right, but it's pretty much hopeless. Still, I'm glad I read it. It's almost as good as "Industrial Society and its Future" <https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3538>. [Citations] "He spoke in similar terms to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations about the potential for an “ecological catastrophe under the effective explosion of industrial civilization”, and stressed “the urgent need for a radical change in the conduct of humanity”, inasmuch as “the most extraordinary scientific advances, the most amazing technical abilities, the most astonishing economic growth, unless they are accompanied by authentic social and moral progress, will definitively turn against man”." "My predecessor Benedict XVI likewise proposed “eliminating the structural causes of the dysfunctions of the world economy and correcting models of growth which have proved incapable of ensuring respect for the environment”." "With paternal concern, Benedict urged us to realize that creation is harmed “where we ourselves have the final word, where everything is simply our property and we use it for ourselves alone. The misuse of creation begins when we no longer recognize any higher instance than ourselves, when we see nothing else but ourselves”." "The poverty and austerity of Saint Francis were no mere veneer of asceticism, but something much more radical: a refusal to turn reality into an object simply to be used and controlled." "Although change is part of the working of complex systems, the speed with which human activity has developed contrasts with the naturally slow pace of biological evolution. Moreover, the goals of this rapid and constant change are not necessarily geared to the common good or to integral and sustainable human development. Change is something desirable, yet it becomes a source of anxiety when it causes harm to the world and to the quality of life of much of humanity." "Technology, which, linked to business interests, is presented as the only way of solving these problems, in fact proves incapable of seeing the mysterious network of relations between things and so sometimes solves one problem only to create others." "We have not yet managed to adopt a circular model of production capable of preserving resources for present and future generations, while limiting as much as possible the use of non-renewable resources, moderating their consumption, maximizing their efficient use, reusing and recycling them. A serious consideration of this issue would be one way of counteracting the throwaway culture which affects the entire planet, but it must be said that only limited progress has been made in this regard." "They are not recognized by international conventions as refugees; they bear the loss of the lives they have left behind, without enjoying any legal protection whatsoever. Sadly, there is widespread indifference to such suffering, which is even now taking place throughout our world. Our lack of response to these tragedies involving our brothers and sisters points to the loss of that sense of responsibility for our fellow men and women upon which all civil society is founded." "We all know that it is not possible to sustain the present level of consumption in developed countries and wealthier sectors of society, where the habit of wasting and discarding has reached unprecedented levels. The exploitation of the planet has already exceeded acceptable limits and we still have not solved the problem of poverty." Nice. "Our world has a grave social debt towards the poor who lack access to drinking water, because they are denied the right to a life consistent with their inalienable dignity This debt can be paid partly by an increase in funding to provide clean water and sanitary services among the poor." But we also have to be honest about where people live. A large part of the American West was never really habitable. "The human environment and the natural environment deteriorate together; we cannot adequately combat environmental degradation unless we attend to causes related to human and social degradation." "This is due partly to the fact that many professionals, opinion makers, communications media and centres of power, being located in affluent urban areas, are far removed from the poor, with little direct contact with their problems. They live and reason from the comfortable position of a high level of development and a quality of life well beyond the reach of the majority of the world’s population." "To blame population growth instead of extreme and selective consumerism on the part of some, is one way of refusing to face the issues. It is an attempt to legitimize the present model of distribution, where a minority believes that it has the right to consume in a way which can never be universalized, since the planet could not even contain the waste products of such consumption." "The problem is that we still lack the culture needed to confront this crisis. We lack leadership capable of striking out on new paths and meeting the needs of the present with concern for all and without prejudice towards coming generations. The establishment of a legal framework which can set clear boundaries and ensure the protection of ecosystems has become indispensable; otherwise, the new power structures based on the techno-economic paradigm may overwhelm not only our politics but also freedom and justice." "The alliance between the economy and technology ends up sidelining anything unrelated to its immediate interests. Consequently the most one can expect is superficial rhetoric, sporadic acts of philanthropy and perfunctory expressions of concern for the environment, whereas any genuine attempt by groups within society to introduce change is viewed as a nuisance based on romantic illusions or an obstacle to be circumvented." "In the meantime, economic powers continue to justify the current global system where priority tends to be given to speculation and the pursuit of financial gain, which fail to take the context into account, let alone the effects on human dignity and the natural environment. Here we see how environmental deterioration and human and ethical degradation are closely linked. Many people will deny doing anything wrong because distractions constantly dull our consciousness of just how limited and finite our world really is. As a result, “whatever is fragile, like the environment, is defenceless before the interests of a deified market, which become the only rule”." "What would induce anyone, at this stage, to hold on to power only to be remembered for their inability to take action when it was urgent and necessary to do so?" Because there are never any negative repercussions. Excuses are accepted, idiocy is promoted and evil is left to live out its days in luxury. "It is good for humanity and the world at large when we believers better recognize the ecological commitments which stem from our convictions." "Clearly, the Bible has no place for a tyrannical anthropocentrism unconcerned for other creatures." "Similarly, every seven years, a sabbatical year was set aside for Israel, a complete rest for the land (cf. Lev25:1-4), when sowing was forbidden and one reaped only what was necessary to live on and to feed one’s household (cf. Lev25:4-6). Finally, after seven weeks of years, which is to say forty-nine years, the Jubilee was celebrated as a year of general forgiveness and “liberty throughout the land for all its inhabitants” (cf. Lev25:10). This law came about as an attempt to ensure balance and fairness in their relationships with others and with the land on which they lived and worked. At the same time, it was an acknowledgment that the gift of the earth with its fruits belongs to everyone." "We fail to see that some are mired in desperate and degrading poverty, with no way out, while others have not the faintest idea of what to do with their possessions, vainly showing off their supposed superiority and leaving behind them so much waste which, if it were the case everywhere, would destroy the planet. In practice, we continue to tolerate that some consider themselves more human than others, as if they had been born with greater rights." "That is why the New Zealand bishops asked what the commandment “Thou shall not kill” means when “twenty percent of the world’s population consumes resources at a rate that robs the poor nations and future generations of what they need to survive”." "The fact is that “contemporary man has not been trained to use power well”, because our immense technological development has not been accompanied by a development in human responsibility, values and conscience." "It can be said that many problems of today’s world stem from the tendency, at times unconscious, to make the method and aims of science and technology an epistemological paradigm which shapes the lives of individuals and the workings of society. The effects of imposing this model on reality as a whole, human and social, are seen in the deterioration of the environment, but this is just one sign of a reductionism which affects every aspect of human and social life. We have to accept that technological products are not neutral, for they create a framework which ends up conditioning lifestyles and shaping social possibilities along the lines dictated by the interests of certain powerful groups. Decisions which may seem purely instrumental are in reality decisions about the kind of society we want to build." "Some circles maintain that current economics and technology will solve all environmental problems, and argue, in popular and non-technical terms, that the problems of global hunger and poverty will be resolved simply by market growth. They are less concerned with certain economic theories which today scarcely anybody dares defend, than with their actual operation in the functioning of the economy. They may not affirm such theories with words, but nonetheless support them with their deeds by showing no interest in more balanced levels of production, a better distribution of wealth, concern for the environment and the rights of future generations." "The specialization which belongs to technology makes it difficult to see the larger picture. The fragmentation of knowledge proves helpful for concrete applications, and yet it often leads to a loss of appreciation for the whole, for the relationships between things, and for the broader horizon, which then becomes irrelevant. This very fact makes it hard to find adequate ways of solving the more complex problems of today’s world, particularly those regarding the environment and the poor; these problems cannot be dealt with from a single perspective or from a single set of interests." "But humanity has changed profoundly, and the accumulation of constant novelties exalts a superficiality which pulls us in one direction. It becomes difficult to pause and recover depth in life. If architecture reflects the spirit of an age, our megastructures and drab apartment blocks express the spirit of globalized technology, where a constant flood of new products coexists with a tedious monotony. Let us refuse to resign ourselves to this, and continue to wonder about the purpose and meaning of everything. Otherwise we would simply legitimate the present situation and need new forms of escapism to help us endure the emptiness." "Nobody is suggesting a return to the Stone Age, but we do need to slow down and look at reality in a different way, to appropriate the positive and sustainable progress which has been made, but also to recover the values and the great goals swept away by our unrestrained delusions of grandeur." "How can we genuinely teach the importance of concern for other vulnerable beings, however troublesome or inconvenient they may be, if we fail to protect a human embryo, even when its presence is uncomfortable and creates difficulties?" That ship has sailed. Let it go. Think of the living. "When human beings place themselves at the centre, they give absolute priority to immediate convenience and all else becomes relative. Hence we should not be surprised to find, in conjunction with the omnipresent technocratic paradigm and the cult of unlimited human power, the rise of a relativism which sees everything as irrelevant unless it serves one’s own immediate interests." "It is also the mindset of those who say: Let us allow the invisible forces of the market to regulate the economy, and consider their impact on society and nature as collateral damage." "it not the same relativistic logic which justifies buying the organs of the poor for resale or use in experimentation, or eliminating children because they are not what their parents wanted?" Nice try. Keep hammering that point until you drive away allies. Don't die on that hill, Frankie. Not to mention that voluntary non-breeding in the developed world goes a way toward reducing carbon. "“The Lord created medicines out of the earth, and a sensible man will not despise them”" Like RU486? "To ensure economic freedom from which all can effectively benefit, restraints occasionally have to be imposed on those possessing greater resources and financial power. To claim economic freedom while real conditions bar many people from actual access to it, and while possibilities for employment continue to shrink, is to practise a doublespeak which brings politics into disrepute." "There is a tendency to justify transgressing all boundaries when experimentation is carried out on living human embryos." We'd almost forgotten where you stand there. "number of countries have a relatively low level of institutional effectiveness, which results in greater problems for their people while benefiting those who profit from this situation." "Moreover, what takes place in any one area can have a direct or indirect influence on other areas. Thus, for example, drug use in affluent societies creates a continual and growing demand for products imported from poorer regions, where behaviour is corrupted, lives are destroyed, and the environment continues to deteriorate." "Unless we struggle with these deeper issues, I do not believe that our concern for ecology will produce significant results. But if these issues are courageously faced, we are led inexorably to ask other pointed questions: What is the purpose of our life in this world? Why are we here? What is the goal of our work and all our efforts? What need does the earth have of us? It is no longer enough, then, simply to state that we should be concerned for future generations. We need to see that what is at stake is our own dignity. Leaving an inhabitable planet to future generations is, first and foremost, up to us. The issue is one which dramatically affects us, for it has to do with the ultimate meaning of our earthly sojourn." "174. Let us also mention the system of governance of the oceans. International and regional conventions do exist, but fragmentation and the lack of strict mechanisms of regulation, control and penalization end up undermining these efforts. The growing problem of marine waste and the protection of the open seas represent particular challenges. What is needed, in effect, is an agreement on systems of governance for the whole range of so-called “global commons”." "178. A politics concerned with immediate results, supported by consumerist sectors of the population, is driven to produce short-term growth. In response to electoral interests, governments are reluctant to upset the public with measures which could affect the level of consumption or create risks for foreign investment." "Honesty and truth are needed in scientific and political discussions; these should not be limited to the issue of whether or not a particular project is permitted by law." "If objective information suggests that serious and irreversible damage may result, a project should be halted or modified, even in the absence of indisputable proof. Here the burden of proof is effectively reversed, since in such cases objective and conclusive demonstrations will have to be brought forward to demonstrate that the proposed activity will not cause serious harm to the environment or to those who inhabit it." "187. This does not mean being opposed to any technological innovations which can bring about an improvement in the quality of life. But it does mean that profit cannot be the sole criterion to be taken into account, and that, when significant new information comes to light, a reassessment should be made, with the involvement of all interested parties. The outcome may be a decision not to proceed with a given project, to modify it or to consider alternative proposals." "It could generate intelligent and profitable ways of reusing, revamping and recycling, and it could also improve the energy efficiency of cities. Productive diversification offers the fullest possibilities to human ingenuity to create and innovate, while at the same time protecting the environment and creating more sources of employment. Such creativity would be a worthy expression of our most noble human qualities, for we would be striving intelligently, boldly and responsibly to promote a sustainable and equitable development within the context of a broader concept of quality of life. On the other hand, to find ever new ways of despoiling nature, purely for the sake of new consumer items and quick profit, would be, in human terms, less worthy and creative, and more superficial." "In a word, businesses profit by calculating and paying only a fraction of the costs involved. Yet only when “the economic and social costs of using up shared environmental resources are recognized with transparency and fully borne by those who incur them, not by other peoples or future generations”,[138] can those actions be considered ethical" "This paradigm leads people to believe that they are free as long as they have the supposed freedom to consume. But those really free are the minority who wield economic and financial power." "204. The current global situation engenders a feeling of instability and uncertainty, which in turn becomes “a seedbed for collective selfishness”. When people become self-centred and selfenclosed, their greed increases. The emptier a person’s heart is, the more he or she needs things to buy, own and consume. It becomes almost impossible to accept the limits imposed by reality." "Many people know that our current progress and the mere amassing of things and pleasures are not enough to give meaning and joy to the human heart, yet they feel unable to give up what the market sets before them. In those countries which should be making the greatest changes in consumer habits, young people have a new ecological sensitivity and a generous spirit, and some of them are making admirable efforts to protect the environment. At the same time, they have grown up in a milieu of extreme consumerism and affluence which makes it difficult to develop other habits." "A person who could afford to spend and consume more but regularly uses less heating and wears warmer clothes, shows the kind of convictions and attitudes which help to protect the environment." "212. We must not think that these efforts are not going to change the world. They benefit society, often unbeknown to us, for they call forth a goodness which, albeit unseen, inevitably tends to spread. Furthermore, such actions can restore our sense of self-esteem; they can enable us to live more fully and to feel that life on earth is worthwhile." "By learning to see and appreciate beauty, we learn to reject self-interested pragmatism. If someone has not learned to stop and admire something beautiful, we should not be surprised if he or she treats everything as an object to be used and abused without scruple. If we want to bring about deep change, we need to realize that certain mindsets really do influence our behaviour." "It is a return to that simplicity which allows us to stop and appreciate the small things, to be grateful for the opportunities which life affords us, to be spiritually detached from what we possess, and not to succumb to sadness for what we lack. This implies avoiding the dynamic of dominion and the mere accumulation of pleasures. 223. Such sobriety, when lived freely and consciously, is liberating. It is not a lesser life or one lived with less intensity. On the contrary, it is a way of living life to the full. In reality, those who enjoy more and live better each moment are those who have given up dipping here and there, always on the look-out for what they do not have." "That is why it is no longer enough to speak only of the integrity of ecosystems. We have to dare to speak of the integrity of human life, of the need to promote and unify all the great values. Once we lose our humility, and become enthralled with the possibility of limitless mastery over everything, we inevitably end up harming society and the environment." "Many people today sense a profound imbalance which drives them to frenetic activity and makes them feel busy, in a constant hurry which in turn leads them to ride rough-shod over everything around them. This too affects how they treat the environment." "Desire to do and God's help aren't enough to help people stop doing this. More many, living lives of quite desperation, it's not a choice. Society needs to help people help themselves. There are those who have a choice and they should wrest control of their lives from consumerism." ]]> </content> </entry> <entry> <title type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[The Peripheral by William Gibson (2014) (read in 2019)]]> </title> <id>https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3865</id> <link href="https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3865"/> <updated>2019-12-25T22:54:31+01:00</updated> <author> <name type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Marco von Ballmoos]]> </name> <uri>https://earthli.com/users/marco</uri> </author> <summary type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA["Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is" ... ]]> </summary> <content type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Published by marco on 25. Dec 2019 22:54:31 Updated by marco on 14. Oct 2022 15:34:28 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I've failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an interest in this book, then I'm happy for you." The story starts with Burton and Flynne, a brother and sister living in the midwest of an alternate near-future United States. The characteristics of the U.S. have other names and are slightly more exaggerated, but it's clearly recognizable (e.g. the chain-store Goliath is called Hefty). Burton has recently gotten a contract with a powerful Colombian corporation called Milagros Coldiron. Burton is "playing a game" for them, but it seems more like running security via drone. When Burton is due to be out of town, Flynne subs for him, witnessing what looks for all the world like a nanobot-murder. This does not strike them as strange, as video-gaming for pay is common in their world, as is advanced graphics and secret beta-testing. We meet Ash and Ossian and Wilf Netherton, Lev, the scion of a Russian klept family and Ainsley Lowbeer, an officer of British Law and ancient secret agent. They contact Flynne directly to find out what happened. It turns out to be a bit more complicated than it at first seems. The "video game" that Burton and Flynne thought they were playing was, in fact, a real-life security detail for the party of one Aelita, sister to performance artist Daedra, ex-fling of Netherton. All of these people are from a future decades away from Flynne and Burton and from a completely different continuum. The future world is one in which climate change has taken its toll in 80% of the human population. Most animals are gone. From the ashes rose neo-feudalism. Science improved drastically. Stymied certain problems, like the complete and utter inefficacy of antibiotics. Others it could do nothing about. Technology took off (but too late, as we already know it will be), with "peripheral" technology (people using remote bodies) and "assemblers" (nanotechnology) and "klepts" (quasi-monarchies that are the only power centers left). The centers are in London and "China" (in quotes because they don't get any more specific than that). There are also "stubs", which is where Flynne and Burton's continuum resides. A stub is an alternate reality accessible through a super-secret and highly shielded Chinese server. The mere act of connecting to the stub, of opening it, changes it irrevocably so that it will never lead to the future that is accessing it. Essentially, the folks of the alternative future want Flynne's help in identifying the man who was with Aelita when she was killed. Because of the exclusivity of the party, there were no recordings made, so her eyewitness testimony is the only thing that Lowbeer has by way of evidence. The complexly woven structures of power balance and ancient laws and customs of the future make an eyewitness essential -- even when they already pretty much know who it was. It will shift the balance of power positively if Flynne can help them. They get Flynne a peripheral in the future (no mention is made of how they secure the connection or how much data it can carry or ... anything. It's better this way). Her brother's friend Connor also gets one, as does her brother, Burton. In Flynne's world, things are moving quickly as well. The movements of Lowbeer's group in the financial markets are becoming noticeable -- and there is another entity from the same future, trying to kill them all and erase the remaining witness (Flynne). Their conflicting movements in the world financial markets and in all levels of politics are having a strong effect and threaten to throw Flynne's entire world into a cocked hat. Flynne's "builder" friend Macon is gifted and works well with Ash, who provides him with schematics for printing machines and devices that will enable them to communicate with the "future" better. The more money they get, the more members of the deeply impoverished community of friends and family they drag in with them. As always with Gibson, he is the master of subtly revealing tremendous detail about a world that feels familiar -- obviously derived, or derivable, from ours -- but is different in nearly every way. He does this mostly through clever and unutterably cool dialogue. Every character is cool, but also flawed enough to make it seem less ridiculous than when others do it. It's like he finds the coolness in everyone -- which is fair, because who wants to write a book about morons? Still, it doesn't feel as contrived as so many other authors -- the only conceit is that he invariably writes about groups of people that include at least one member who is so overwhelmingly wealthy that money is never an issue (in this case Lev Zubov, whose wealth and influence "profiles like a medium-sized nation" and Ainsley Lowbeer, who is ancient and privy to every bit of knowledge). While others in the group might be struggling, their coolness enables them to be of use to and under the aegis of the rich and powerful. Lowbeer has some of the best lines. When asked if she knows everything, she responds: "I most certainly don’t. I feel hindered by a surfeit of information, oceanic to the point of meaninglessness. The shortcomings of the system are best understood as the result of taking this ocean of data, and the decision points produced by our algorithms, as a near enough substitute for perfect certainty. My own best results are often due to pretending I know relatively little, and acting accordingly, though it’s easier said than done. Far easier. (Emphasis added.)" Another interesting aspect of so much of the story being told in dialogue is Gibson's representation of 70 years being far too large a gap for most idiomatic speech to have survived. In that sense, it's more like a first contact between alien cultures, but with the benefit of having more touchstones. They have a shared language, but only a subset, to which both sides must adhere -- or run the risk of having to explain too many concepts and too much vocabulary. In that way, it's not unlike native speakers and speakers-of-a-second-language. It works well enough, but you have to adjust, at least at first. There are a lot of interesting reveals (people in the alternate past who correspond to people in the alternate future) and, once the dust settles and the future folk have defeated their corresponding nemeses in both future and past, they all get down to the business of avoiding the "jackpot" that more-or-less doomed the future to a high-tech feudalism that's more miserable than it looks, on the surface. It's pretty upbeat, actually; very Hollywood: good guys win, get all the money in the world, the planet is on a better path. The bad guys are more relegated than destroyed, but they're definitely declawed. It's kind of a fairy tale about the only way to save our planet from being even more of the way it is in the near future: an alternate version of ourselves reaches back over time (still inexplicably, because the tech for doing so isn't explained at all) to deliver the technological solution that we're all relying on to save us -- because we aren't going to do it with discipline. Gibson gets some digs in on popular culture and those who benefit from it, much more obliquely and unobtrusively than others. Flynne ruminates on Daedra, the flighty and arrogant quasi-performance artist from the U.S. of the future: "Seemed like a cross between a slightly porny media star and what sophomore year Art History called a performance artist, plus maybe a kind of diplomat." When Flynne then asks if she's like a reality-show star, Wilf answers: "“Yes. She’s descended from that, in a sense. Reality television. It merged with politics. Then with performance art.” They walked on." To which Flynne manages to comment on the current-timeline United States without even seeming to do so. "“I think that already happened, back home,” she said." In the same thought, Gibson sideswipes the U.S. (Connor is basically decent, but more than a little an off-the-rails and shoot-first-and-ask-questions-later guy), "But she still didn’t get what the United States did either, in Wilf’s world. He made it sound like the nation-state equivalent of Conner, minus the sense of humor, but she supposed that might not be so far off, even today. (Emphasis added.)" This is a first-contact story. It doesn't even matter that it's the past, or, more precisely, a different timeline's past. It's a way of telling a feel-good story about a down-on-its-luck pocket of America benefitting from the munificence of Gibson's standard cabal of shadowy, eccentric, surprisingly ethical and nearly incomprehensibly wealthy, powerful, and well-connected characters. It's similar in that way to Pattern Recognition. [Citations] "Her head was perfectly still, eyes unblinking. He imagined her ego swimming up behind them, to peer at him suspiciously, something eel-like, larval, transparently boned. He had its full attention." "“We’re not supposed to like their looks, obviously. The cannibalism’s problematic, if those stories are true, but they did clear the water column, and for virtually no capital outlay on anyone’s part. And they now arguably own the world’s single largest chunk of recycled polymer. Which feels like a country, to me, if not yet a nation-state.”" "She rode to Jimmy’s, letting the hub do most of the work. Went in and sat at the counter, ordered eggs and bacon and toast, no coffee. In the Red Bull mirror behind the counter, the cartoon bull noticed her, winked. She dodged eye contact. She hated it when they spoke to you, called you by your name." He’d wanted to impress her, and what better way than to offer her something money couldn’t buy? Something that had felt to him like a ghost story, when Lev had first explained it. He’d told her about it in bed. “And they’re dead?” she’d asked. “Probably.” “A long time ago?” “Before the jackpot.” “But alive, in the past?” “Not the past. When the initial connection’s made, that didn’t happen, in our past. It all forks, there. They’re no longer headed for this, so nothing changes, here.” “My bed?” She spread her arms and legs, smiled. “Our world. History. Everything.” “And he hires them?” “Yes.” “What does he pay them with?” “Money. Coin of their realm.” “How does he get it? Does he go there?” “You can’t go there. Nobody can. But information can be exchanged, so money can be made there.” “Who did you say this is?” “Lev Zubov. We were at school together.” “Russian.” “Family’s old klept. Lev’s the youngest. Man-child of leisure. Has hobbies, Lev. This is his latest.” “Why haven’t I heard of it before?” “It’s new. It’s quiet. Lev looks for new things, things his family might invest in. He thinks this one may be out of Shanghai. Something to do with quantum tunneling.” “How far back can they go?” “Twenty twenty-three, earliest. He thinks something changed, then; reached a certain level of complexity. Something nobody there had any reason to notice.” “Remind me of it later.” She reached for him. On the walls, the framed flayed hides of three of her most recent selves. Her newest skin beneath him, unwritten. This is about as good an example of typical Gibson inscrutability as I'll ever see. He introduces so much background with so few words, making your mind fill in the details of his sketch of a rich alternate reality. "“They want to kill a dead man in a past that effectively doesn’t exist?” Netherton asked. “Why? You’ve always said that nothing that happens there can affect us.” "“Information,” Lev said, “flows both ways. Someone must believe he knows something. Which, were it available here, would pose a danger to them.”" "But there the polt had been, driving, eyes on whatever motorway, seventy-some years earlier, on the far side of the jackpot, his phone something clamped to the dashboard of his car. The polt had had a very broad chest, in a thin white singlet, and was, or so it had struck Netherton in the moment, entirely human. Gloriously pre-posthuman. In a state of nature." "It would have been less wise to tell the polt that they were phoning from a future that wasn’t his, one in which he was part of a wealthy obsessive’s hobby set, but hardly more unnecessary." The "stub" seems to be some sort of interface to an alternate timeline. "“It’s a gamelike environment,” he said. “It isn’t real in the sense that..." The stub. "There had been a Flynne Fisher in the world’s actual past. If she were alive now, she’d be much older. Though given the jackpot, and whatever odds of survival, that seemed unlikely. But since Lev had only touched her continuum for the first time a few months earlier, this Flynne would still be very like the real Flynne, the now old or dead Flynne, who’d been this young woman before the jackpot, then lived into it, or died in it as so many had. She wouldn’t yet have been changed by Lev’s intervention and whatever that would bring her." "She looked at it, from seventy-some years before, in a past that was no longer quite the one that had produced his world, and nodded." "“Someone else has access. It stands to reason that whoever it is is better connected than we are, since we’ve absolutely no idea how to get into anyone else’s stub.”" "[Lev:] “You know about the server?” "[Lowbeer:] “The great mystery, yes. Assumed to be Chinese, and as with so many aspects of China today, quite beyond us. You use it to communicate with the past, or rather a past, since in our actual past, you didn’t. That rather hurts my head, Mr. Zubov. I gather it doesn’t hurt yours?” "“Far less than the sort of paradox we’re accustomed to culturally, in discussing imaginary transtemporal affairs,” said Lev. “It’s actually quite simple. The act of connection produces a fork in causality, the new branch causally unique. A stub, as we call them.”" "“Who called you?” Burton asked, seated behind Tommy, in the Faraday cage where they put prisoners. "“State AI. Satellite noticed the vehicle hadn’t moved for two hours. Also flagged your property for unusual drone activity, but I told ’em that was you and your friends playing games.”" Apt description of a hyperactive surveillance state. "“What have you got listening in, Wilf? It’s enormous. It’s giving my security the cold grue.” "“That would be the family of the friend I’m staying with.” "“He lives in a garage?” "“He has one. Or rather his father does. It goes down and down. And so does their security, evidently.” "“It profiles like a medium-sized nation.” "“That would be them.” "“Is that a problem?” she asked. "“Not so far.”" "“Lotta redundancies. Obvious workarounds. We’re being paid to build something they have the real plans for, but we’re building it out of available parts that approximate that, plus other parts we print. Plus some other available parts we modify, print on.” He’d taken his Viz out and put it in his pocket, as had Macon. Professional courtesy." Their plans are from the future and must be downscaled to work in the past, "He’d asked the rental to lead because he had no way, really, of knowing that it was Rainey. Sigils, he knew, could be spoofed. For that matter, he supposed, he had no way of knowing that this was a peripheral. On the other hand, it sounded like her. Not the voice, of course, but it had her manner." "“The skulls are modular. Printed bone, assembled with biological adhesives. The structural strength of an average skull, but capable of disassembly.” "“Why is that?” asked Netherton, who just then found peripherals steadily less pleasant the more he learned of them." Like the hosts of Westworld. "They both knew she knew this was bullshit, but she guessed that was the way it went, when somebody you knew killed some people and you didn’t want them to get caught for it. They were teaching her the story as it needed to be told, and telling it to her in a way that wouldn’t require her to tell anything but the truth about what they’d told her." "“If this works, and it should, you’ll be controlling their unit full-body, full range of motion, but your body won’t move as you do it. Interesting, how it does that.” "“Why?” "“Because we still can’t find any patents for most of it, and we imagine if there were, they’d be valuable. Very.”" This is a first-contact story. It doesn't even matter that it's the past, or, more precisely, a different timeline's past. It's a way of telling a feel-good story about a down-on-its-luck pocket of America benefitting from the munificence of Gibson's standard cabal of shadowy, eccentric, surprisingly ethical and nearly incomprehensively wealthy, powerful, and well-connected characters. It's similar in that way to Pattern Recognition. "“You’re accessing input from an anthropomorphic drone,” the woman said. “A telepresence avatar. You needn’t consciously control it. Don’t try. We’re recalibrating it now. Macon’s device isn’t perfect, but it works.”" "“This isn’t,” he said, “your world.” "“So what is it?” asked Flynne. “A game?” "“The future,” said Netherton, feeling utterly ridiculous. On impulse, he added the year. "“No way.” "“But it isn’t your future,” he said. “When we made contact, we set your world, your universe, whatever it is—” "“Continuum,” said Ash. "“—on a different course,” he finished. He’d never in his life said anything that sounded more absurd, though it was, as far as he knew, the truth." "“Okay,” [Burton] said, and [Flynne] wondered if what she was seeing in his eyes was the Corps’ speed, intensity, violence of action, or his right way of seeing. Because he just got it. Ignored the crazy, went tactically forward. And she saw how weird that was, and how much it was who he was, and for just that instant she wondered if she didn’t somehow have it too." "“It isn’t real,” he said. “Worked up from period media. Scarcely anyone you see is human, and those who are, are tourists, or schoolchildren being taught history. Better at night, the illusion.”" Again, Westworld. "perhaps.” She smiled, but not in any way Flynne found comforting. "“Zubov, you should understand, will pervert the economy of your world.” "“It’s pretty fucked anyway,” Flynne said, then wished she’d put it another way. "“I’m familiar with it, so yes, it is, though that isn’t what I mean. I don’t like what these people are doing, these continua hobbyists, Zubov included, though I do find it fascinating. Some might think you more real than I am myself.” "“What does that mean?” "“I’m very old, elaborately and artificially so. I don’t feel entirely real to myself, frankly. But if you agree to assist me, I shall assist you in return, insofar as I can.”" "“Thank you,” he said. “You’re easily the most remarkable artist I’ve ever met, Daedra.” Her eyebrows moved fractionally. Not so much approval as a temporary recognition that he might have the capacity to be correct about something." "“It’s been a huge help,” he said. “What are you asking me for, Wilf?” “That you allow me to introduce you to her. Again. That I might contribute, in however small a way, to something whose importance I may never fully comprehend.”" "People think the really bad ones are something special, but they’re not,” her mother said, sitting on the edge of her bed, next to the table crowded with meds. “Psycho killers and rapists, they never ruin as many lives as a man like Corbell does. His daddy was a town councilman. Stuck-up boy, Corbell, selfish, but no more than lots that age. Thirty-some years on, he’s ruined more people than he can be bothered to remember, or even know.”" "“It did seem to me that you set the hook. Assuming, that is, that she’s so self-centered as to be literally impaired. I don’t feel I can afford to be quite so readily convinced of that. Perhaps you shouldn’t either, Mr. Netherton.”" I love how Lowbeer speaks "“Know what ‘collateral damage’ means?” "“People get hurt because they happen to be near something that somebody needs to happen?” "“Think that’s us,” he said. “None of this is happening because any of us are who we are, what we are. Accident, or it started with one, and now we’ve got people who might as well be able to suspend basic laws of physics, or anyway finance, doing whatever it is they’re doing, whatever reason they’re doing it for. So we could get rich, or killed, and it would all still just be collateral.”" "“I personally recall that world, which you can only imagine was preferable to this one,” [Lowbeer] said. “Eras are conveniences, particularly for those who never experienced them. We carve history from totalities beyond our grasp. Bolt labels on the result. Handles. Then speak of the handles as though they were things in themselves.”" "“If one has a sufficiently open mind about it, certainly. I was an intelligence officer, early in my career. In a sense I suppose I still am, but today I find myself enabled to undertake investigations, as I see fit. Into, should I so deem them, matters of state security. Simultaneously, I’m a law enforcement officer, or whatever that means in as frank a kleptocracy as ours. I sometimes feel like an antibody, Mr. Netherton. One protecting a disease.”" "And in fact the actual climate, the weather, caused by there being too much carbon, had been the driver for a lot of other things. How that got worse and never better, and was just expected to, ongoing. Because people in the past, clueless as to how that worked, had fucked it all up, then not been able to get it together to do anything about it, even after they knew, and now it was too late." "No comets crashing, nothing you could really call a nuclear war. Just everything else, tangled in the changing climate: droughts, water shortages, crop failures, honeybees gone like they almost were now, collapse of other keystone species, every last alpha predator gone, antibiotics doing even less than they already did, diseases that were never quite the one big pandemic but big enough to be historic events in themselves. And all of it around people: how people were, how many of them there were, how they’d changed things just by being there." "So everything, however deeply fucked in general, was lit increasingly by the new, by things that made people blink and sit up, but then the rest of it would just go on, deeper into the ditch. A progress accompanied by constant violence, he said, by sufferings unimaginable. She felt him stretch past that, to the future where he lived, then pull himself there, quick, unwilling to describe the worst of what had happened, would happen." "A majority of empowered survivors, considering the jackpot, and no doubt their own positions, wanted none of that. Blamed it, in fact.” "“Who runs it, then?” "“Oligarchs, corporations, neomonarchists. Hereditary monarchies provided conveniently familiar armatures. Essentially feudal, according to its critics. Such as they are.” "“The King of England?” "“The City of London,” he said. “The Guilds of the City. In alliance with people like Lev’s father. Enabled by people like Lowbeer.” "“The whole world’s funny?” "She remembered Lowbeer saying that. "“The klept,” he said, misunderstanding her, “isn’t funny at all.”" Eighty percent dead. Most animals. Science improved drastically. Stymied certain problems, like antibiotics. Others it could do nothing about. From the ashes rose feudality. China and the West. "Mrs. Fearing’s extraordinary topography of wrinkles readjusted slightly. A smile, possibly." "Hybrid, Wilf said. Something Amazonian, something Indian, and the assemblers to push it all. The bark was like the skin of elephants, finer-textured on the twisted roots." What about funneling that tech back to the past? "He stopped, reading something she couldn’t see. “Yes. She’s descended from that, in a sense. Reality television. It merged with politics. Then with performance art.” They walked on. “I think that already happened, back home,” she said." "Subtle dig. Very nice. Easily overlooked." "The tall thing’s round pink head was fronted with a sort of squared-off trumpet, that same pink, through which it blared down, incomprehensibly, at the small crowd of figures surrounding it, at least one of which seemed to be a penguin, though as tall as she was. The tall speaker wore a tight black suit, its arms and legs very narrow." This imagery reminds of the teachers from The Wall. "“Consider ignoring the placards our rent-a-zealots are displaying,” he said. “They were designed by an agency that specializes in political attack ads, and are specifically intended to upset you personally, while turning the community against you.”" "“Consider ignoring the placards our rent-a-zealots are displaying,” he said. "“They were designed by an agency that specializes in political attack ads, and are specifically intended to upset you personally, while turning the community against you.” "“The other guys put them up to it?” "“Luke 4:5 are as much a business as a cult. As tends to be the case.”" "There were, for instance, Ash said, continua enthusiasts who’d been at it for several years longer than Lev, some of whom had conducted deliberate experiments on multiple continua, testing them sometimes to destruction, insofar as their human populations were concerned." "I made a few discreet inquiries. Now anyone I asked about her, however privately, no longer knows me. Retroactively. Never have. Some have gone to the trouble of scrubbing me from group images. As metrics of caution go, that one’s telling." "“How would you stop it?” "“By letting her know I’m not going to the party with you, if they do that. They use it, we smash up the crowns, print new phones with different numbers, and pretend you guys don’t exist. Whatever shit comes down, we deal with it. And fuck you. Not you personally. You guys.” "[...] "“You tell her. She wants to talk to me, I’m right here. But they put any party time on those sorry assholes across the road, you’re going to that party alone. Me and my family, we’ll be out of the future business.”" "“Lowbeer knows how to fix history?” "“It isn’t history yet, here. She knows, in large part, what really happened here. But now the two have diverged, will continue to. The divergence can be steered, to some extent, but only very broadly. No guarantee of what we’ll ultimately produce.”" "“Do you,” Netherton asked, “know literally everything, about everyone?” "“I most certainly don’t. I feel hindered by a surfeit of information, oceanic to the point of meaninglessness. The shortcomings of the system are best understood as the result of taking this ocean of data, and the decision points produced by our algorithms, as a near enough substitute for perfect certainty. My own best results are often due to pretending I know relatively little, and acting accordingly, though it’s easier said than done. Far easier.”" "She sipped her gin. “As it can all too often seem to be. Waking, I find I must remind myself how the world is now, how it became that way, the role I played in what it became and the role I play today. That I’ve lived on, absurdly long, in the ever-increasing recognition of my mistakes.” "“Mistakes?” "“I suppose I shouldn’t call them that, realistically. Tactically, strategically, in terms of available outcomes, I did the best I could. Rather better, sometimes, it can feel, even today. Civilization was dying, of its own discontents. We live today in the result of what I and so many others did to prevent that. You yourself have known nothing else.”" "And seventy-some years on from the year of celebration, he sat at Lev’s grandfather’s desk in the Gobiwagen, the band of the Wheelie-emulator across his forehead, looking back through this clumsy toy at this strange world, in which worn things weren’t meticulously distressed, but actually worn, abraded by their passage through time." "“But she was Raeburn then,” said Flynne. “Now.” She was looking at the white tray but not seeing it. Seeing Lowbeer’s hand instead, holding her hat against their quadcopter’s downdraft in the Cheapside street, and Griff’s hands, arranging the Sushi Barn food. “Shit,” she said, then said it again, more softly." "“You’re someone who only pretends to be unintelligent,” Netherton said. “It serves you simultaneously as protective coloration and a medium for passive aggression. It won’t work with me.” "“Future’s fucking snippy,” said Leon, to Tacoma. “I didn’t come out here to be abused by vintage product from the Hefty toy department.”" "She still wasn’t sure how Daedra made her living, or what her relationship with the United States government was. Seemed like a cross between a slightly porny media star and what sophomore year Art History called a performance artist, plus maybe a kind of diplomat. But she still didn’t get what the United States did either, in Wilf’s world. He made it sound like the nation-state equivalent of Conner, minus the sense of humor, but she supposed that might not be so far off, even today." "“Griff. Becomes her. But not exactly. Like this isn’t her past anymore, so he won’t have her life, because none of this happened to her when she was him.” "She started walking. "“You somehow seem,” he said, “to simply accept all these things.” "“You’re the one living in the future, with nanobots eating people, spare bodies, government run by kings and gangsters and shit. You accept all that, right?” "“No,” he said, just before she ducked through, into Hong’s kitchen, “I don’t. I hate it.”" "And then they were single-filing the stairway, Ossian behind her. ""What’s Conner doing to her?” she asked, over her shoulder. "“Reminding her of the potential of consequences, at least,” said Ossian, “or attempting to. Won’t harm a hair on her head, of course. Or do a bit of good. Father’s a big American.”" "Coldiron actually had less money now, way less, because as soon as Matryoshka had stumbled, then collapsed, cut off from Sir Henry’s financial modules, Coldiron had started to divest, to get the economy back to something more normal, whatever that meant now. But they still had more money than anyone could understand, or really keep track of. And Griff said that that was good, because they had plenty that needed to be done with it, more than they could know." "Because people who couldn’t imagine themselves capable of evil were at a major disadvantage in dealing with people who didn’t need to imagine, because they already were. She’d said it was always a mistake, to believe those people were different, special, infected with something that was inhuman, subhuman, fundamentally other. Which had reminded her of what her mother had said about Corbell Picket. That evil wasn’t glamorous, but just the result of ordinary half-assed badness, high school badness, given enough room, however that might happen, to become its bigger self. Bigger, with more horrible results, but never more than the cumulative weight of ordinary human baseness." ]]> </content> </entry> <entry> <title type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Everything Belongs to the Future by Laurie Penny (2016) (read in 2019)]]> </title> <id>https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3857</id> <link href="https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3857"/> <updated>2019-12-09T07:42:29+01:00</updated> <author> <name type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Marco von Ballmoos]]> </name> <uri>https://earthli.com/users/marco</uri> </author> <summary type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA["Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is" ... ]]> </summary> <content type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Published by marco on 9. Dec 2019 07:42:29 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I've failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an interest in this book, then I'm happy for you." This is a novella about a future in which an enterprising group of scientists have invented pills that not only extend life, but also regress signs of aging to any desired age. The main inventor of the drug is Alice, who lives a life of luxury, but not satisfaction. With her emeritus status at her company, she isn't at any risk, but with her contrary attitude, she is no longer in as much favor as she once was, 90 years ago. At a fancy, rich party, she meets a group of activists who've snuck in disguised as staff. They're there to steal the little pills that prolong life. They give them away to the poor. Alice pulls them to the side, letting them know that she's onto their little scheme, but that she won't turn them in. Instead, she wants to work with them to produce something better, something that supersedes her work on the anti-aging pill, something that will put right the massive changes to society that her original invention engendered. The invention of that original pill cemented the rich's stranglehold over the poor. Not only did they have more money, but now they had more time. The gap widened and widened. Alice's dissatisfaction grew, as did her desire to throw a monkey wrench into the works. She sets up a lab at the activists' house and spends all of her time there and with them. Alex is Nina's boyfriend. Nina is hardcore; Alex less so. In fact, Alex is a plant, a spy for Parker, Alice's partner at the company that they founded together. Alex has been working this particular group for three years, partnered with Nina and basically fucking her under false pretenses. Nina is a true radical -- she doesn't want to live forever and feels that the ability to extend life nearly indefinitely has ruined what it means to be human. Alex is in love with her, but doesn't understand her -- he wants to donate to her the years he earns as a spy. The police raid their house, determined to seize Alice's work, but Margaret eats it, immediately showing its effects: she desiccates and dies, aging eighty years in seconds. They escape the police but now all know what Alice's secret weapon is. Just as her original invention granted extra years, her ultimate invention can take them away. She calls it the Time Bomb. Despite Alex's efforts to deter them, the crew is determined to use the weapon on the rich. They sneak in to a high-level dinner and Nina triggers the bomb, aging all of the others but also herself in the process, but not to death. She is arrested. Some of the chapters are in the form of letters to Alice from Nina. Alice didn't age as much because of her century of treatments. Alex aged as well. He still loves Nina. She doesn't care. She got what she wanted: the rich are no longer secure in their colonial control of the poor, with a surfeit of time. The rich now have something to fear as well -- not just slow, natural aging and death, but a jetpack into geriatrics. [Citations] "For generations, the elected and unelected leaders of the world had weighed the cost of averting drastic climate change via collective, immediate and lasting technological investment against the considerable inconvenience to their personal lifestyles, done some calculations on the back of a napkin and come up with the answer that it was somebody else’s problem." "Everyone Alex had ever known had died too young, although he struggled to think of anyone of whom you could definitely, absolutely say, “That was old enough.” All death was untimely. If that was changing, he wanted in." We're supposed to accept this as unimpeachable, but it's silly. Most people have lived enough relatively quickly. Just eating, shitting, breathing, killing time. Not that they shouldn't continue to do so, but it's hard to argue they haven't had enough. "It was probably just personal prejudice—over seven decades of dealing with their bullshit, she had found it simplest to mistrust every cocky white guy she met. She had probably missed out on some great friendships in the process, but overall it saved time: cocky and insecure all at once, always needing their egos stroked, blind to their own power, white boys were always going to let you down or fuck you over." "“Don’t you see? You don’t have to be making bombs to be an extremist these days. You just have to have the wrong thoughts. And now they can make sure we all die out.”" "“I realize it’s an escalation,” said Nina, “and I realize it’s the kind of intervention we’ve never considered before. But me, I hate this town. I hate these people. I hate the suits and I hate the scholars and I hate the state and I hate the way they take everything from you piece by piece until there’s nothing left and I hate it that my friend died and it doesn’t even fucking matter.” "She was staring at her hands. Her voice was flat and a little frightening. "“All I wanted was to make something small and bright and good, something that lasted a little while, a little while longer than I did. All I wanted was to push back against the darkness just a little bit. To live in the cracks in capitalism with the people I care about, just for a little while. But it turns out I can’t even have that. And now I just want to burn shit down.”" This is the level of alienation that causes terror. "What else are we supposed to do? Just give up? Slink off into anxious little corners and tear each other’s hearts apart and drink and smoke and screw and die? This doesn’t end well, you know, whatever we do. We’re already fucked. Pointlessly, monumentally fucked. This way, at least we get to decide what kind of fucked we’re going to be.”" "“You have taken what was not yours to take. You have put a price on what was not yours to buy. You have taken years, and months, and days. Years of life, from billions of people. You haven’t shed any blood, but you’re still murderers. You have stolen our years, our months, our days. Our moments to live and love and breathe. And now we’re going to steal them back." "People are setting off time bombs in New York now. In Paris, in Johannesburg. In fucking Cardiff. Terrorism, and nothing else, that’s what they call it—pure criminality, floating free of politics into pure, abstract fear, clean and convenient. But what does that mean, when everything else they don’t want to think about gets called terrorism, too? Teenagers writing slogans on the walls. Schoolkids reading the wrong books." ]]> </content> </entry> <entry> <title type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Cumulus by Eliot Peper (2016) (read in 2019)]]> </title> <id>https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3862</id> <link href="https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3862"/> <updated>2019-12-08T18:53:58+01:00</updated> <author> <name type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Marco von Ballmoos]]> </name> <uri>https://earthli.com/users/marco</uri> </author> <summary type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA["Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is" ... ]]> </summary> <content type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Published by root on 8. Dec 2019 18:53:58 Updated by marco on 28. Dec 2019 00:15:44 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I've failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an interest in this book, then I'm happy for you." The title refers to the company that runs everything in an alternate-future/near-future tale of America, in general, but San Fransisco specifically. Cumulus is captained by Huian, a woman of extraordinary ability and multifarious background with an iron will. Cumulus is her baby, built over two decades to not only provide every single possible service but also to delineate the world into regions of "have" and "have not". It's the ultimate libertarian wet dream: one company runs everything, but everyone accepts this without question -- except for the poor who can't afford its services. It is the NSA, Google, Uber and Blackwater/Xe rolled into one. The government has no power over it, as it consolidates its competitors, strong-arms everyone and imposes Huian's utopic vision on humanity, for its own good. This is how the book starts. Soon, we meet Lilly, a "Slummer" (someone who lives outside of the beneficence (but not the aegis) of Cumulus. She is a photographer with a predilection for analog cameras, hired out as a wedding photographer for insolent yuppies from the "Green Zone". She ends up meeting Huian on the same day that Huian's wife Vera leaves her. We also meet Graham, a former spook, who's insinuated himself into Cumulus, convincing Huian that he's indispensable while asserting more and more control over her corporation. He's brought skills honed abroad in war zones and incredibly asymmetric societies home to America, where the Gini coefficient soars and the situation is on the edge of unrest. So Graham is a "wolf among sheep", cutting a swath through Oakland and Cumulus. Huian is giving him more and more power as his methods are the only ones that move her agenda forward. Nothing that happens to Huian or Cumulus is coincidence: Graham is pulling the strings everywhere, manipulating Vera's exit, an acquisition of Tectonix and simultaneously feeding civil-rights lawyer Sara with information about Cumulus while also them "taking care" of her for Huian. Frederick is the kingpin of the slums of Oakland, running things efficiently and fairly using drug money. He incites riots against the Green Zone for Sara's murder (she was his lover) while also hunting for revenge. The book makes some interesting points about how people who think they know and see and hear everything can be controlled by shaping their stream of data. What they’ve convinced themselves is omniscience is actually a lens on reality designed to control their behavior. The hunter becomes the hunted. This applies on only to the myriad sheep in society, but also to Huian and Graham. Since everything is in Cumulus's cloud, Graham is able to use his root-level "Ghost" power to cover his tracks everywhere. Everywhere except for Lilly's camera. Using these pictures, Frederick and Lilly come up with an old-school, analog plan to out Graham. This takes him down and almost Cumulus. Why not Cumulus? Because Huian turns into a socialist in the last 4 seconds of the book, bequeaths a billion-dollar trust to Lilly for investigative journalism, and pledges to give all Cumulus services to Oakland, regardless of their ability to pay, with plans to roll the plan out to the rest of the world. Also, Lilly's blogger co-conspirator is now going to be the love of her life, Graham blew his own brains out and Frederick is in a strategic alliance with Cumulus. Everyone literally lives happily ever after. There is no sign of climate change in this brave new world and I'm not sure what caliber of reader is enthralled with this level of tying up all loose ends. The last line of the book is literally "Lilly’s first love had been photography. But maybe it wouldn’t prove to be her only one after all." I mean, what the actual fuck did I just read? It was interesting enough but quickly plunged downhill to splash in a mess of gibbets at the end. He wastes a ton of text on meal descriptions that aren't at all germane to the plot and includes stuff like: "“Are you ready for tomorrow?” asked Lilly. "Huian raised her eyebrows. “I won’t ever be ready for tomorrow,” she said. “But that won’t stop it from arriving anyway.”" Barf. [Citations] "Huian shook her head. Of course, not everyone could afford to live in the Green Zone—at least, not yet. Some had no choice but to rely on crumbling public institutions and infrastructure. But it never failed to amaze her how people could so determinedly stand in the way of their own success. With the touch of a button, anyone could access every book ever written, every course ever taught, every song ever recorded. With that wealth of information never more than a click away, who could excuse failure? From" "Huian shook her head. Of course, not everyone could afford to live in the Green Zone—at least, not yet. Some had no choice but to rely on crumbling public institutions and infrastructure. But it never failed to amaze her how people could so determinedly stand in the way of their own success. With the touch of a button, anyone could access every book ever written, every course ever taught, every song ever recorded. With that wealth of information never more than a click away, who could excuse failure?" "Which was why it was so frustrating when obstacles cropped up. People had such trouble giving up their petty intrigues in pursuit of a larger goal. Tectonix would have given her the bargaining chip she needed to sway at least a half dozen senators. Foreign leaders too—oil states were always desperate to reinvigorate the supply of black gold that kept their oligarchies running." This is probably how the masters of the world think. "The culture of Silicon Valley had surprised him. From afar, it seemed that the region’s success in developing and commercializing advanced technology must stem from intellectual and procedural rigor. Up close, it felt like the modus operandi was, “Ready, fire, aim.” It was a bunch of geeks playing with technology like the whole exercise was an improvisational jazz ensemble. But this jam session had vast implications for the wider world." "The countries Graham was assigned to were different. There were two groups of people. An overwhelming majority of people lived in abject poverty with no path to bettering their lot, while a tiny minority controlled virtually all the nation’s political and financial resources. The wealthy minority had every incentive to defend the status quo and established an impenetrable moat around themselves to guarantee their fortunes. Privilege was a matter of birth and family. Poverty was deplorable but inevitable. Wealth justified itself." "The woman shook her head, eyes never leaving the ball. “When you have root access, the digital world is malleable.”" "Graham felt just as comfortable here as in the gilded conference rooms of the elite. Hell, it was a serious step up from running ops in godforsaken Mindanao. Even the most poverty-stricken parts of the United States didn’t have endemic dengue and spiders bigger than your hand. He should have made the jump years ago." "double-tapped" I dont think that's what that means. "Letting corporate tycoons pad your campaign coffers was a respected form of corruption. But follow that line to its inevitable conclusion, and it changed who was beholden to whom. Bribes were investments, not gifts. Those investments paid themselves off with favorable policies, government contracts, and a friendly ear inside the White House. Suddenly the people making the real decisions didn’t even live in Washington. They delegated to Washington. Graham shook his head as he passed through the ticket gate and climbed the stairs up to the platform. American politicians had made the ultimate mistake. They weren’t playing the long game. Instead, they tripped over each other chasing votes and polls and contributions." "Letting corporate tycoons pad your campaign coffers was a respected form of corruption. But follow that line to its inevitable conclusion, and it changed who was beholden to whom. Bribes were investments, not gifts. Those investments paid themselves off with favorable policies, government contracts, and a friendly ear inside the White House. Suddenly the people making the real decisions didn’t even live in Washington. They delegated to Washington." "You didn’t harass tech giants if you weren’t prepared to play in the big leagues. Sara should have known better than to file a nuisance suit that threatened to break up Cumulus. Of course, he had anonymously leaked her the key information about Cumulus that made her case a viable threat. Otherwise, there wouldn’t have been a need to eliminate her, and he would have remained outside Huian’s circle of trust. Powerful people were the easiest to manipulate because they had the most to lose." "Technology was the only scalable tool available to help shape a better future. The question was whether people chose to participate in that future or not. Huian was a harbinger of that new reality. She would stop at nothing to push forward the inexorable, beautiful, conflicted locomotive of human civilization. Dystopias were the province of the undisciplined." "No matter how hard Cumulus worked to build a better world, there were always people complaining. It was all well and good to point out other people’s mistakes, but if you weren’t actually going to step into the arena and present a viable alternative, you might as well just shut up. There were few people who frustrated Huian more than critics who produced nothing but hot air." Adorable. And accurate. "Karl gestured. “You’re seeing shots from our eye-in-the-sky surveillance drones, Bandwidth Wi-Fi drones, delivery drones, Fleet vehicles, security cameras, and phones that have good angles.” He waved his hand at an adjacent display that was cycling through text far too fast to read and flagging specific words with highlights. “We’re running a full semantic model on any communication coming in or out of the group, audio, text, or passive recording from phones in people’s pockets. Same thing for all the news feeds. That should help monitor the overall temperament of the group and alert us in advance if they enter a downward spiral." This is interesting because people who think they know and see and hear everything can be controlled by shaping their stream of data. What they've convinced themselves is omniscience is actually a lens on reality designed to control their behavior. The hunter becomes the hunted. "The real issue here was the country’s long descent into inequality. The changes he had noticed whenever he returned to his homeland had quietly fermented, a vat of perceived social injustice. If you wanted to avert this kind of situation, you needed to start way earlier by correcting the socioeconomic shift. They hadn’t. Which was totally expected. Why would powerful incumbents want to rock the boat and upset a pecking order that benefitted them? The only difference here was that American leaders had gotten soft. They had won their positions in a country that didn’t yet require an iron hand. The middle class had fallen victim to the death of a thousand cuts." "I am here to use what authority and resources remain to me to end the violence on the streets of Oakland, and to extend Cumulus services to all residents, regardless of their ability to pay. Will you hear me out?”" Yeah. That was a quick turnaround. "I built the company to realize a better future for this country, and the world. In so many ways, we have already succeeded. In so many other ways, we have a long way to go." And in one important way, this is a complete fantasy: no climate change "The boy returned with two massive ceramic bowls filled to the brim with ramen. The soup sloshed as he thumped them down on the table. Thick slices of pork belly and pork shoulder swam in the rich brown broth. Bright-green scallions and pickled shiitake mushrooms floated above the underlying bed of thick rice noodles. Lilly and Huian scooped up chopsticks in one hand and soup spoons in the other, and went to work. Heads bent close to the table, they slurped through the ramen with singular focus, not looking up until the bowls were empty and their bellies full. They leaned back against the walls of the booth, and Lilly was again struck by the intensity smoldering behind Huian’s eyes." Boring. Predictable. Flat. "“Are you ready for tomorrow?” asked Lilly. "Huian raised her eyebrows. “I won’t ever be ready for tomorrow,” she said. “But that won’t stop it from arriving anyway.”" Jesus. It gets worse. "Lilly’s first love had been photography. But maybe it wouldn’t prove to be her only one after all." Getting worse. What am I reading? Oh my God, that was the last sentence of the book. What just happened? ]]> </content> </entry> <entry> <title type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming by David Wallace-Wells (2019) (read in 2019)]]> </title> <id>https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3796</id> <link href="https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3796"/> <updated>2019-12-01T21:47:27+01:00</updated> <author> <name type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Marco von Ballmoos]]> </name> <uri>https://earthli.com/users/marco</uri> </author> <summary type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA["Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is" ... ]]> </summary> <content type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Published by marco on 1. Dec 2019 21:47:27 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I've failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an interest in this book, then I'm happy for you." As you begin this book, you feel it is either an unhinged leftist diatribe of sour grapes trying to convince the masters of the universe that they should switch to socialism and stop what we're doing because it's unfair to the losers or it's an exceedingly well-written and researched manifesto shrieking at us that the effects of the world we've had designed and built for us are also that which make it certain that this world will not last. It is, unfortunately, the latter. The world we've built has its destruction written into its DNA. It is built on a mountain of checks that we cannot cash. We are boiling ourselves away from the planet, but other, less-evolved species will probably be OK. Everything we eat, though, will be extinct by our hand long before global warming can finish them off. Fish and wildlife have already experienced their catastrophic near-extinction and that had nothing to do with CO₂ and everything to do with humans. If humans disappear or are significantly diminished, then other species may have a chance again. The ones we knew -- and that we've nearly eliminated -- will die with us, as they used the same ecological niche as we did for their crucible. They are just as sensitive as we are to those changes. Many plants will die, but others won't. Many insects will die, but others will thrive. The story of climate change is the story not of life dying out, but of intelligent life making its home so inhospitable for itself that, in the end, it check-mates itself. Wallace-Wells is an eloquent teller of this tale of mankind's downfall. In the citations below, you'll find many thoughtful and evocative descriptions that enhance the dry data of our demise. Even when we actually scream from the hilltops, it's ignored, as Wallace-Wells states so eloquently: "Rhetoric often fails us on climate because the only factually appropriate language is of a kind we’ve been trained, by a buoyant culture of sunny-side-up optimism, to dismiss, categorically, as hyperbole." He employs this talent to interpret the data in a way that we can imagine: what does a world of 2ºC (warming over average temperatures before the industrial age) look like? How about 4ºC? Is any of it livable? With the population we have now? Wallace-Wells makes clear that, for the first time in history, mankind's habitable surface area is shrinking. Don't be fooled, though: He isn't a classic die-hard environmentalist. In fact, he clearly states that, "I may be in the minority in feeling that the world could lose much of what we think of as “nature,” as far as I cared, so long as we could go on living as we have in the world left behind." I personally feel that this is a reprehensible thing to say, but the author is probably just a city-dweller who doesn't even know what nature is. At any rate, it was a one-off comment that he made before acknowledging that his dream of living on Cybertron is not a reality on Earth. His thesis statement for the book is basically as follows, "We have all already left behind the narrow window of environmental conditions that allowed the human animal to evolve in the first place, but not just evolve—that window has enclosed everything we remember as history, and value as progress, and study as politics. What will it mean to live outside that window, probably quite far outside it? That reckoning is the subject of this book." In another example, he savages Bitcoin for using as much power as solar energy has given us total. So much waste, so little time. "Market forces have delivered cheaper and more widely available green energy, but the same market forces have absorbed those innovations, which is to say profited from them, while continuing to grow emissions." Since Bitcoin is eating up the surplus generated by solar, Wallace-Wells explains: "Solar isn’t eating away at fossil fuel use, in other words, even slowly; it’s just buttressing it. To the market, this is growth; to human civilization, it is almost suicide. We are now burning 80 percent more coal than we were just in the year 2000." Wallace-Wells moves on to explain the injustice of how the so-called developed world has built its empire on the backs of the poor: first, exploiting them and their lands to burn the planet and second, to watch as they also bear the (initial) brunt of the chaos their world has wrought. "In the postindustrial West, we try not to think about these bargains, which have benefited us so enormously. [...] given the devastation that wealth has imposed on the world of natural wonder it conquered and the suffering of those, elsewhere on the planet, left behind in the race to endless material comforts. And asked, functionally, to pay for them." The environmental catastrophe hits not just in temperature increase but in drastic reduction of drinking water, crop yields, and an astonishing increase in pollution. "But of all urban entitlements, the casual expectation of never-ending drinking water is perhaps the most deeply delusional. It takes quite a lot to bring that water to your sink, your shower, and your toilet." He discusses the Syrian "civil war" as if there had been no goading or machination from self-interested, western powers, exacerbating a climate crisis for which they are largely responsible with fomented warfare intended to consolidate power over more oil-production. People always talk of terrorism as if it just appears and lashes out when a state fails. The so-called terrorists do not attack indiscriminately. They generally terrorize within their own borders, against occupying powers. No mention of state terror that engenders it all. Or the massive climate costs they incur in doing so. His analysis is weak and incomplete here. It doesn't have to be exhaustive, but he can't just toss out these little sentences to make a vague point that comes to an utterly fallacious conclusion. The market rules, though. People move to stupid places for stupid, short-sighted, and selfish reasons. Communities respond by attracting and accommodating the wealthy. They bring water to places where the energy investment to do so is many times more than the place from which the water was originally destined. He goes on to discuss not just the water crisis (saying we would be bad enough off without one, but we definitely have one...and it's going to get worse), but also the air-pollution crisis, which is basically untenable in any of the larger cities in which 70% of the world's population lives. Not only pollution, but also malnutrition, will guarantee that most of the world's human population will be dead weight, incapable of helping us think our way out of this crisis -- because the crisis has stifled their mental and physical development. Even if they were able to think straight, there's nothing to eat, the bugs are dying, the crops are failing and factory-farming is going to collapse under its own weight. "Twenty-two percent of the earth’s landmass was altered by humans just between 1992 and 2015. Ninety-six percent of the world’s mammals, by weight, are now humans and their livestock; just four percent are wild." No pollinators, no food, no people, so other predictions of growth are strongly countered. Unless mankind flails in a paroxysm of energy use to dwarf all efforts heretofore to try to cover the gap, which will also end things even more quickly than they otherwise would. Sometimes he presents numbers too drily: "Compared to the trajectory of economic growth with no climate change, their average projection is for a 23 percent loss in per capita earning globally by the end of this century." In this case, he could be somewhat optimistic that at least this will likely lead to less emissions. Naturally, people will suffer and die, but they will do so anyway. At least if they die in the service of a shrinking economy, mankind ends up with less energy use rather than more. It's far from an ideal solution -- it's not even a solution, really, at all -- but it's not like a tragedy. "And to help buffer or offset the impacts, we have no New Deal revival waiting around the corner, no Marshall Plan ready." What could we do? Everything we could do involves energy, extraction, and manufacturing. Every move we make to fix the problem likely makes it worse. Use solar to get free energy? Manufacturing panels is counterproductive (although, according to Bill McKibben in Falter, it's gotten much, much better: panels last for 25 years and the energy investment is amortized in 5 years). It's far too late for nuclear, considering the manufacturing and concrete involved, even if the budgeting and construction fiascoes could be magically bypassed. The nuclear-waste problem is much better than it was: newer reactors are much more efficient and capable of re-burning and -processing much more its own waste. Even current reactors really produce much less waste and pollution than fossil fuels, which are actively killing us by raising temperature, rather than possibly, eventually killing us with radiation sickness. At this point, it's really about triage. "Hitting four degrees of warming, which lies on the low end of the range of warming implied by our current emissions trajectory, would cut into it by 30 percent or more. This is a trough twice as deep as the deprivations that scarred our grandparents in the 1930s, and which helped produce a wave of fascism, authoritarianism, and genocide." Yes, but losing 15% of 1000 is more devastating than 30% of 50,000. They suffered because they were closer to death to begin with. We fall farther, but still land much higher. He (like Bill McKibben) tears into the Pinker line of reasoning that things, in fact, have been getting better and we should lean back and appreciate all that our system of ruling the world has given us. Now I finally realize what annoys me so much about Pinker's argument: the rate of progress was unsustainable and unevenly distributed. The blowback when the wave crashes will hit everyone but Pinker and his cohort. It's like a student cramming for a test that won't remember 90%; the current situation incurs unrealistic expectations. Basically, our progress was obtained on credit and the bill is coming due. "But we close them off when we say anything about the future being inevitable. What may sound like stoic wisdom is often an alibi for indifference." Despite everything Wallace-Wells has written, he dares chastise those who, with clear eyes, don't see much hope. It doesn't mean we stop trying, but roundly "Fuck you" for calling us indifferent. He knows all that he wrote in this book: it's fucking hopeless. We have not acted. We have instead doubled down. We will not change. Wallace-Wells bred anyway (he has a child) and is now trying to justify it by pretending -- despite all the evidence to the contrary that he himself has presented -- that it's not hopeless. He knows his child will not really suffer because she is in the elite conquerors most responsible but least affected. Don't you dare condemn pragmatic realism as indifference, sir. If I fall off a cliff, gravity reigns whether I want it to or not. My inaction is not indifference. It's acceptance. Parents have to spin themselves fairy tales. Don't expect me to buy their self-consoling bullshit. "[...] such as the promise that human life will endure, [...]" It probably will, but in a nearly unrecognizable form. We will be demoted to colonists on our home planet. He continues digging, addressing the suicidal theory of economics that we've chosen to honor as the one true God. "Behavioral economics is unusual as a contrarian intellectual movement in that it overturns beliefs—namely, in the perfectly rational human actor—that perhaps only its proponents ever truly believed, and maybe even only as economics undergraduates." But everyone is still trapped by this backward thinking, that "we tend to think of climate as somehow being contained within, or governed by, capitalism. In fact, the opposite: capitalism is endangered by climate." And our stumbling, foolish way of running things isn't nearly efficient enough -- not even close. There is no time anymore to let good things happen as a side-effect of a few people making a fuck-ton of money. "It took New York City forty-five years to build three new stops on a single subway line; the threat of catastrophic climate change means we need to entirely rebuild the world’s infrastructure in considerably less time." Next up is technological rapturism: people think that they can escape our ruined world by flying to other planets or by uploading themselves into software (though where the energy comes from to keep running that simulation is a thorny problem). This is all bullshit, though. We know what we have to do. Eat the rich. As Wallace-Wells writes, "If the world’s most conspicuous emitters, the top 10 percent, reduced their emissions to only the E.U. average, total global emissions would fall by 35 percent." "United States and Europe, where emissions have already flattened out and will likely begin their decline soon—though how dramatic a decline, and how soon, is very much up in the air." Here he conveniently forgets the matter of justice and the fact that the US has "flattened out" at 2.25 times Europe, which is at 2 times China. There's a lot of savings to be had by reducing them. The prior quote that says that reducing the worst 10% to EU levels would reduce the burden by 35% applies to mostly UAE and US citizens. This is also ignoring the fact that European and U.S. lifestyles are buttressed by industry in China. You can't just offload your carbon emissions by killing your own manufacturing but still increasing consumption. They're still technically your carbon emissions if your consumption is the only thing driving that production. "[...] a large slice of China’s emissions is produced manufacturing goods to be consumed by Americans and Europeans." He argues that we need to "shake the casual sense that as time marches forward, life improves ineluctably", but this is an elite opinion anyway. Most haven't felt and don't feel these effects anyway. It was always a myth for 95% of humanity. "[...] warming at the level necessary to fully melt ice sheets and glaciers and elevate sea level by several hundred feet promises to initiate rolling, radically transformative changes on a timescale measured not in decades or centuries or even millennia, but in the millions of years." On that scale, our cradle environment, what we cherish, will be long gone. Even the memory of it will be long gone. By the time the planet is once again able to offer conditions similar to those of fifty years ago, mankind will no longer be interested or will fight it. "As Swedish journalist Torill Kornfeldt asks [...] “Why should nature as it is now be of any greater value than the natural world of 10,000 years ago, or the species that will exist 10,000 years from now?”" Good question, in absolute terms. However, its value to us, now, is much higher, as we are stuck at one point on time's arrow. Perhaps we sacrifice now so that 10,000 years from now is nicer, but we're not doing that either. In the end, though, there is no more discussion needed. "[...] the world has, at most, about three decades to completely decarbonize before truly devastating climate horrors begin. You can’t halfway your way to a solution to a crisis this large." We have to abandon everything we know about capitalism as we do it today. It is a crooked kleptocracy that only ever threw enough crumbs to keep its subjects from rising up. As summarized by George Orwell in The Road to Wigan Pier: "The world is a raft sailing through space with, potentially, plenty of provisions for everybody; the idea that we must all cooperate and see to it that everyone does his fair share of the work and gets his fair share of the provisions seems so blatantly obvious that one would say that no one could possibly fail to accept it unless he had some corrupt motive for clinging to the present system." [Citations] In the citations below, all emphases are added. "The most notorious [extinction] was 250 million years ago; it began when carbon dioxide warmed the planet by five degrees Celsius, accelerated when that warming triggered the release of methane, another greenhouse gas, and ended with all but a sliver of life on Earth dead. "We are currently adding carbon to the atmosphere at a considerably faster rate; by most estimates, at least ten times faster. The rate is one hundred times faster than at any point in human history before the beginning of industrialization. And there is already, right now, fully a third more carbon in the atmosphere than at any point in the last 800,000 years—perhaps in as long as 15 million years. There were no humans then. The oceans were more than a hundred feet higher." "In these ways—many of them, at least—I am like every other American who has spent their life fatally complacent, and willfully deluded, about climate change, which is not just the biggest threat human life on the planet has ever faced but a threat of an entirely different category and scale. That is, the scale of human life itself." "But that those bigger numbers are only the far upper reaches of what is possible should not lull us into complacency; when we dismiss the worst-case possibilities, it distorts our sense of likelier outcomes, which we then regard as extreme scenarios we needn’t plan so conscientiously for. High-end estimates establish the boundaries of what’s possible, between which we can better conceive of what is likely. And perhaps they will prove better guides even than that, considering the optimists have never, in the half century of climate anxiety we’ve already endured, been right." "In 2016, the Paris accords established two degrees as a global goal, and, to read our newspapers, that level of warming remains something like the scariest scenario it is responsible to consider; just a few years later, with no single industrial nation on track to meet its Paris commitments, two degrees looks more like a best-case outcome, at present hard to credit, with an entire bell curve of more horrific possibilities extending beyond it and yet shrouded, delicately, from public view." "[...] because we liked driving our cars and eating our beef and living as we did in every other way and didn’t want to think too hard about that; or because we felt so “postindustrial” we couldn’t believe we were still drawing material breaths from fossil fuel furnaces. Perhaps it was because we were so sociopathically good at collating bad news into a sickening evolving sense of what constituted “normal,” or because we looked outside and things seemed still okay." "At two degrees, the ice sheets will begin their collapse, 400 million more people will suffer from water scarcity, major cities in the equatorial band of the planet will become unlivable, and even in the northern latitudes heat waves will kill thousands each summer. There would be thirty-two times as many extreme heat waves in India, and each would last five times as long, exposing ninety-three times more people. This is our best-case scenario." "But time is perhaps the most mind-bending feature, the worst outcomes arriving so long from now that we reflexively discount their reality." "The truth is actually much scarier. That is, the end of normal; never normal again. We have already exited the state of environmental conditions that allowed the human animal to evolve in the first place, in an unsure and unplanned bet on just what that animal can endure. The climate system that raised us, and raised everything we now know as human culture and civilization, is now, like a parent, dead." "[...] however sanguine you might be about the proposition that we have already ravaged the natural world, which we surely have, it is another thing entirely to consider the possibility that we have only provoked it, engineering first in ignorance and then in denial a climate system that will now go to war with us for many centuries, perhaps until it destroys us." "If you had to invent a threat grand enough, and global enough, to plausibly conjure into being a system of true international cooperation, climate change would be it—the threat everywhere, and overwhelming, and total. And yet now, just as the need for that kind of cooperation is paramount, indeed necessary for anything like the world we know to survive, we are only unbuilding those alliances—recoiling into nationalistic corners and retreating from collective responsibility and from each other. That collapse of trust is a cascade, too." "Rhetoric often fails us on climate because the only factually appropriate language is of a kind we’ve been trained, by a buoyant culture of sunny-side-up optimism, to dismiss, categorically, as hyperbole." "Global warming has improbably compressed into two generations the entire story of human civilization. First, the project of remaking the planet so that it is undeniably ours, a project whose exhaust, the poison of emissions, now casually works its way through millennia of ice so quickly you can see the melt with a naked eye, destroying the environmental conditions that have held stable and steadily governed for literally all of human history." "Over the last few years, as the planet’s own environmental rhythms have seemed to grow more fatalistic, skeptics have found themselves arguing not that climate change isn’t happening, since extreme weather has made that undeniable, but that its causes are unclear—suggesting that the changes we are seeing are the result of natural cycles rather than human activities and interventions. It is a very strange argument; if the planet is warming at a terrifying pace and on a horrifying scale, it should transparently concern us more, rather than less, that the warming is beyond our control, possibly even our comprehension." "Some, like our oil companies and their political patrons, are more prolific authors than others. But the burden of responsibility is too great to be shouldered by a few, however comforting it is to think all that is needed is for a few villains to fall. Each of us imposes some suffering on our future selves every time we flip on a light switch, buy a plane ticket, or fail to vote. Now we all share the responsibility to write the next act. We found a way to engineer devastation, and we can find a way to engineer our way out of it—or, rather, engineer our way toward a degraded muddle, but one that nevertheless extends forward the promise of new generations finding their own way forward, perhaps toward some brighter environmental future." "The project of unplugging the entire industrial world from fossil fuels is intimidating, and must be done in fairly short order—by 2040, many scientists say. But in the meantime many avenues are open—wide open, if we are not too lazy and too blinkered and too selfish to embark upon them. Fully half of British emissions, it was recently calculated, come from inefficiencies in construction, discarded and unused food, electronics, and clothing; two-thirds of American energy is wasted; globally, according to one paper, we are subsidizing the fossil fuel business to the tune of $5 trillion each year." "Five years ago, hardly anyone outside the darkest corners of the internet had even heard of Bitcoin; today mining it consumes more electricity than is generated by all the world’s solar panels combined, which means that in just a few years we’ve assembled, out of distrust of one another and the nations behind “fiat currencies,” a program to wipe out the gains of several long, hard generations of green energy innovation." "Annihilation is only the very thin tail of warming’s very long bell curve, and there is nothing stopping us from steering clear of it. But what lies between us and extinction is horrifying enough, and we have not yet begun to contemplate what it means to live under those conditions" "Especially those who have imbibed several centuries of Western triumphalism tend to see the story of human civilization as an inevitable conquest of the earth, rather than the saga of an insecure culture, like mold, growing haphazardly and unsurely upon it." "We have all already left behind the narrow window of environmental conditions that allowed the human animal to evolve in the first place, but not just evolve—that window has enclosed everything we remember as history, and value as progress, and study as politics. What will it mean to live outside that window, probably quite far outside it? That reckoning is the subject of this book." "I may be in the minority in feeling that the world could lose much of what we think of as “nature,” as far as I cared, so long as we could go on living as we have in the world left behind." Diehard city dweller. My life does not continue without nature. "That uncertainty is among the most momentous metanarratives that climate change will bring to our culture over the next decades—an eerie lack of clarity about what the world we live in will even look like, just a decade or two down the road, when we will still be living in the same homes and paying the same mortgages, watching the same television shows and making appeals to many of the same justices of the Supreme Court. But while there are a few things science does not know about how the climate system will respond to all the carbon we’ve pumped into the air, the uncertainty of what will happen—that haunting uncertainty—emerges not from scientific ignorance but, overwhelmingly, from the open question of how we respond." "Three-quarters of a century since global warming was first recognized as a problem, we have made no meaningful adjustment to our production or consumption of energy to account for it and protect ourselves. For far too long, casual climate observers have watched scientists draw pathways to a stable climate and concluded that the world would adapt accordingly; instead, the world has done more or less nothing, as though those pathways would implement themselves. Market forces have delivered cheaper and more widely available green energy, but the same market forces have absorbed those innovations, which is to say profited from them, while continuing to grow emissions." "This puts Donald Trump’s commitment to withdraw from the treaty in a useful perspective; in fact, his spite may ultimately prove perversely productive, since the evacuation of American leadership on climate seems to have mobilized China—giving Xi Jinping an opportunity and an enticement to adopt a much more aggressive posture toward climate." "Globally, coal power has nearly doubled since 2000." "In the postindustrial West, we try not to think about these bargains, which have benefited us so enormously. When we do, it is often in the guilty spirit of what critic Kris Bartkus has memorably called “the Malthusian tragic”—namely, our inability to see any remaining innocence in the quotidian life of the well-to-do West, given the devastation that wealth has imposed on the world of natural wonder it conquered and the suffering of those, elsewhere on the planet, left behind in the race to endless material comforts. And asked, functionally, to pay for them." "“Of course we did it to ourselves; we had always been intellectually lazy, and the less asked of us, the less we had to say,” he writes. “We all lived for money, and that is what we died for.”" "One hopes these population booms will bring their own Borlaugs, ideally many of them." Why? From everything he's written, we should drastically reduce the population in order to mitigate suffering. Stop breeding FFS. "That 260-foot rise is, ultimately, the ceiling—but it is a pretty good bet we will get there eventually. Greenhouse gases simply work on too long a timescale to avoid it, though what kind of human civilization will be around to see that flooded planet is very much to be determined." Mother of God. It's a science-fiction scenario. "In the affluent cities of the West, even those conscious of environmental change have spent the last few decades walking our street grids and driving our highways, navigating our superabundant supermarkets and all-everywhere internet and believing that we had built our way out of nature. We have not. A paradise dreamscape erected in a barren desert, L.A. has always been an impossible city, as Mike Davis has so brilliantly written." "On local golf courses, the West Coast’s wealthy still showed up for their tee times, swinging their clubs just yards from blazing fires in photographs that could not have been more perfectly staged to skewer the country’s indifferent plutocracy. The following year, Americans watched the Kardashians evacuate via Instagram stories, then read about the private firefighting forces they employed, the rest of the state reliant on conscripted convicts earning as little as a dollar a day." "By 2100, floods of that scale are expected as many as seventeen times more often in New York. Katrina-level hurricanes are expected to double in frequency." Although, in the previous chapter, he wrote that NYC would not exist. "[...] that 0.007 percent should be, believe it or not, plenty, not just for the seven billion of us here but for as many as nine billion, perhaps even a bit more. Of course, we are likely heading north of nine billion this century, to a global population of at least ten and possibly twelve billion. As with food scarcity, much of the growth is expected in parts of the world already most strained by water shortage—in this case, urban Africa. In many African countries already, you are expected to get by on as little as twenty liters of water each day—less than half of what water organizations say is necessary for public health. As soon as 2030, global water demand is expected to outstrip supply by 40 percent." Untenable. "There is no need for a water crisis, in other words, but we have one anyway, and aren’t doing much to address it." "Sitting in a living room in a modern apartment in an advanced metropolis somewhere in the developed world, this threat may seem hard to credit—so many cities looking nowadays like fantasies of endless and on-demand abundance for the world’s wealthy. But of all urban entitlements, the casual expectation of never-ending drinking water is perhaps the most deeply delusional. It takes quite a lot to bring that water to your sink, your shower, and your toilet." "Today, at just one degree of warming, those regions with at least a month of water shortages each year include just about all of the United States west of Texas, where lakes and aquifers are being drained to meet demand," The market rules. People move to stupid places for stupid, short-sighted, and selfish reasons. Communities respond by attracting and accommodating the wealthy. "The five-year Syrian drought that stretched from 2006 to 2011, producing crop failures that created political instability and helped usher in the civil war that produced a global refugee crisis, is one vivid example." With no goading or machination from self-interested, western powers, exacerbating a climate crisis for which they are largely responsible with fomented warfare intended to consolidate power over more oil-production. "With CO2 at 930 parts per million (more than double where we are today), cognitive ability declines by 21 percent." These numbers are suspiciously precise. "reducing Chinese pollution to the EPA standard, for instance, would improve the country’s verbal test scores by 13 percent and its math scores by 8 percent." More suspiciously precise numbers. "That year, smog was responsible for 1.37 million deaths in the country." So much biomass to dispose of. "In the developing world, 98 percent of cities are enveloped by air above the threshold of safety established by the WHO. Get out of urban areas and the problem doesn’t much improve: 95 percent of the world’s population is breathing dangerously polluted air. Since 2013, China has undertaken an unprecedented cleanup of its air, but as of 2015 pollution was still killing more than a million Chinese each year. Globally, one out of six deaths is caused by air pollution." "In New England, dead moose calves have been found suckling as many as 90,000 engorged ticks, often killing the calves not through Lyme disease but simple anemia, the effect of that number of bugs each drawing a few milliliters of blood from the moose. Those that survive are far from robust, many having scratched so incessantly at their own hides to clear it of ticks that they completely eliminated their own hair, leaving behind a spooky gray skin that has earned them the name “ghost moose.”" "Compared to the trajectory of economic growth with no climate change, their average projection is for a 23 percent loss in per capita earning globally by the end of this century." Good. "Tracing the shape of the probability curve is even scarier. There is a 51 percent chance, this research suggests, that climate change will reduce global output by more than 20 percent by 2100, compared with a world without warming, and a 12 percent chance that it lowers per capita GDP by 50 percent or more by then, unless emissions decline. By comparison, the Great Depression dropped global GDP by about 15 percent, it is estimated" Whats the problem? Are we supposed to grow no matter what? Isn't that the problem? "And to help buffer or offset the impacts, we have no New Deal revival waiting around the corner, no Marshall Plan ready." What could we do? Everything we could do involves energy, extraction, and manufacturing. Every move we make to fix the problem likely makes it worse. Use solar to get free energy? Manufacturing panels is counterproductive. It's Far too late for nuclear, considering the manufacturing and concrete involved. "Over the last several decades, policy consensus has cautioned that the world would only tolerate responses to climate change if they were free—or, even better, if they could be presented as avenues of economic opportunity." "Hitting four degrees of warming, which lies on the low end of the range of warming implied by our current emissions trajectory, would cut into it by 30 percent or more. This is a trough twice as deep as the deprivations that scarred our grandparents in the 1930s, and which helped produce a wave of fascism, authoritarianism, and genocide." Yes, but losing 15% of 1000 is more devastating than 30% of 50,000. They suffered because they were closer to death to begin with. We fall farther, but still land much higher. "Even for those in the American military who expect the country’s hegemony to endure indefinitely, climate change presents a problem, because being the world’s policeman is quite a bit harder when the crime rate doubles." What the fuck? The US is the primary cause of aggression and escalation, through active agitation and arms sales. "Over the last decade or so, the linguist Steven Pinker has made a second career out of suggesting that, in the West especially, we are unable to appreciate human progress—are in fact blind to all of the massive and rapid improvements the world has witnessed in less violence and war and poverty, reduced infant mortality, and enhanced life expectancy." Now I finally realize what annoys me so much about his argument: the rate of progress was unsustainable and unevenly distributed. The blowback when the wave crashes will it everyone but Pinker and his cohort. It's Like a student cramming for a test that won't remember 90%; the current situation incurs unrealistic expectations. Basically, our progress was obtained on credit and the bill is coming due. "The perspective is not naive. We live in that world with them—helping make it for them, and with them, and for ourselves. The next decades are not yet determined. A new timer begins with every birth, measuring how much more damage will be done to the planet and the life this child will live on it. The horizons are just as open to us, however foreclosed and foreordained they may seem. But we close them off when we say anything about the future being inevitable. What may sound like stoic wisdom is often an alibi for indifference." Fuck you. You know all that you wrote in this book: it's fucking hopeless. We have not acted. We have instead doubled down. We will not change. You bred anyway and are now trying to justify it. You know your child will not really suffer because she is in the elite conquerors most responsible but least affected. Don't you dare condemn pragmatic realism as indifference. If I fall off a cliff, gravity reigns whether I want it to or not. My inaction is not indifference. It's Acceptance. Parents have to spin themselves fairy tales. "The corporate influence of fossil fuel is present, of course, but so are inertia and the allure of near-term gains and the preferences of the world’s workers and consumers, who fall somewhere on a long spectrum of culpability stretching from knowing selfishness through true ignorance and reflexive, if naive, complacency." "Flying insects might be disappearing because of warming, in other words—that recent study suggested that, already, 75 percent of them may have died, drawing us closer to a world without pollinators, which the researchers called an “ecological Armageddon”" No pollinators, no food, no people, so other predictions of growth are strongly countered. Unless mankind flails in a paroxysm of energy use to dwarf all efforts heretofore to try to cover the gap, which will also end things quickly. "In the nineteenth century, the built environment of the most advanced countries reflected the prerogatives of industry—think of railroad tracks laid across whole continents to move coal. In the twentieth century, those same environments were made to reflect the needs of capital—think of global urbanization agglomerating labor supply for a new service economy. In the twenty-first century, they will reflect the demands of the climate crisis: seawalls, carbon-capture plantations, state-sized solar arrays." "That we reengineered the natural world so sufficiently to close the book on an entire geological era—that is the major lesson of the Anthropocene. The scale of that transformation remains astonishing, even to those of us who were raised amidst it and took all of its imperious values for granted. Twenty-two percent of the earth’s landmass was altered by humans just between 1992 and 2015. Ninety-six percent of the world’s mammals, by weight, are now humans and their livestock; just four percent are wild." "There is automation bias, which describes a preference for algorithmic and other kinds of nonhuman decision making, and also applies to our generations-long deference to market forces as something like an infallible, or at least an unbeatable, overseer. In the case of climate, this has meant trusting that economic systems unencumbered by regulation or restriction would solve the problem of global warming as naturally, as surely as they had solved the problems of pollution, inequality, justice, and conflict." "[...] such as the promise that human life will endure, [...]" It probably will, but in a nearly unrecognizable form. We will be demoted to colonists on our home planet. "Behavioral economics is unusual as a contrarian intellectual movement in that it overturns beliefs—namely, in the perfectly rational human actor—that perhaps only its proponents ever truly believed, and maybe even only as economics undergraduates. But altogether the field is not merely a revision to existing economics. It is a thoroughgoing contradiction of the central proposition of its parent discipline, indeed to the whole rationalist self-image of the modern West as it emerged out of the universities of—in what can only be coincidence—the early industrial period. That is, a map of human reason as an awkward kluge, blindly self-regarding and self-defeating, curiously effective at some things and maddeningly incompetent when it comes to others; compromised and misguided and tattered. How did we ever put a man on the moon?" "To some, even ending trillions in fossil fuel subsidies sounds harder to pull off than deploying technologies to suck carbon out of the air everywhere on Earth." "[...] perhaps in part because we see the way that perspectives on climate change map neatly onto existing and familiar perspectives on capitalism—from burn-it-all-down leftists to naively optimistic and blinkered technocrats to rent-seeking, kleptocratic, growth-is-the-only-value conservatives—we tend to think of climate as somehow being contained within, or governed by, capitalism. In fact, the opposite: capitalism is endangered by climate." "But the downward revision of expectations for the future may be still more important than diminished prosperity in the present. And if what you mean by “capitalism” is not just the operation of market forces but the religion of free trade as a just and even perfect social system, you have to expect, at the very least, that a major reformation is coming." "The cost is large: a decarbonized economy, a perfectly renewable energy system, a reimagined system of agriculture, and perhaps even a meatless planet. In 2018, the IPCC compared the necessary transformation to the mobilization of World War II, but global. It took New York City forty-five years to build three new stops on a single subway line; the threat of catastrophic climate change means we need to entirely rebuild the world’s infrastructure in considerably less time." "To reduce the level of carbon in the atmosphere just by a few parts per million—which would buy us a little more time, matching not just our present emissions but our likely level a few years down the road—would take 500 million of these devices. To reduce the level of carbon by 20 parts per million per year, he calculates, would require 1 billion of them. This would immediately pull us back from the threshold, even buy us some more time of carbon growth—which is an argument you hear against it from some corners of the environmental Left. But it would cost, you may already have calculated, $300 trillion—or nearly four times total global GDP." That's a stupid number because he doesn't even consider whether it's even feasible to build that many nor what the carbon cost of doing so would be. "[...] the belief that the grandest task before technologists is not to engineer prosperity and well-being for humanity but to build a kind of portal through which we might pass into another, possibly eternal kind of existence, a technological rapture in which conceivably many—the billions lacking access to broadband, to begin with—would be left behind. It would be very hard, after all, to upload your brain to the cloud when you’re buying pay-as-you-go data by the SIM card." "Over the last twenty-five years, the cost per unit of renewable energy has fallen so far that you can hardly measure the price, today, using the same scales (since just 2009, for instance, solar energy costs have fallen more than 80 percent). Over the same twenty-five years, the proportion of global energy use derived from renewables has not grown an inch. Solar isn’t eating away at fossil fuel use, in other words, even slowly; it’s just buttressing it. To the market, this is growth; to human civilization, it is almost suicide. We are now burning 80 percent more coal than we were just in the year 2000." "In fact, it is not like that; it is that. All of that and much, much more: intensive infrastructure projects at every level and in every corner of human activity, from new plane fleets to new land use and right down to a new way of making concrete, production of which ranks today as the second most carbon-intensive industry in the world—an industry that is booming, by the way, thanks to China, which recently poured more concrete in three years than the United States used in the entire twentieth century." "[...] unlike the internet or smartphones, the requisite technologies are not additive but substitutive, or should be, if we have the good sense to actually retire the dirty old varieties. Which means that all of the new alternatives have to face off with the resistance of entrenched corporate interests and the status-quo bias of consumers who are relatively happy with the lives they have today." "Today, despite a variety of projects aimed at producing cheap nuclear energy, the price of new plants remains high enough that it is hard to make a persuasive argument that more “green” investment be directed toward them rather than installations of wind and solar. But the case for decommissioning and dismantling existing plants is considerably weaker, and yet that is exactly what is happening—from the United States, where both Three Mile Island and Indian Point are being closed down, to Germany, where so much nuclear power has recently been retired that the country is growing its carbon emissions despite a state-of-the-world green energy program." "But liberal NIMBYism will still strut, too, as it did in 2018, when American voters in deep-blue Washington state rejected a carbon tax at the ballot box, and the worst French protests since the quasi-revolution of 1968 raged against a proposed gasoline tax. On perhaps no issue more than climate is that liberal posture of well-off enlightenment a defensive gesture: almost regardless of your politics or your consumption choices, the wealthier you are, the larger your carbon footprint." A bit muddled. Not sure of Washington, but Gilets Jaunes is working class, not liberal elite. "But when critics of Al Gore compare his electricity use to that of the average Ugandan, they are not ultimately highlighting conspicuous and hypocritical personal consumption, however they mean to disparage him. Instead, they are calling attention to the structure of a political and economic order that not only permits the disparity but feeds and profits from it—this is what Thomas Piketty calls the “apparatus of justification.” And it justifies quite a lot. If the world’s most conspicuous emitters, the top 10 percent, reduced their emissions to only the E.U. average, total global emissions would fall by 35 percent. We won’t get there through the dietary choices of individuals, but through policy changes." "In the form of tribalism at home and nationalism abroad and terrorism flaming out from the tinder of failed states, that future is here, at least in preview, already." People always talk of terrorism as if it just appears and lashes out when a state fails. The so-called terrorists do not attack indiscriminately. They generally terrorize within their own borders, against occupying powers. No mention of state terror that engenders it all. Or the massive climate costs they incur in doing so. His analysis is weak and incomplete here. It doesn't have to be exhaustive, but he can't just toss out these little sentences to make a vague point that comes to an utterly fallacious conclusion. "a global alliance operating in the name of a common humanity" "United States and Europe, where emissions have already flattened out and will likely begin their decline soon—though how dramatic a decline, and how soon, is very much up in the air." Here he conveniently forgets the matter of justice and the fact that the US has "flattened out" at 2.25 times Europe, which is at 2 times China. There's A lot of savings to be had by reducing them. The prior quote that says that reducing the worst 10% to EU levels would reduce the burden by 35% applies to mostly UAE and US citizens. "And although what’s called “carbon outsourcing” means that a large slice of China’s emissions is produced manufacturing goods to be consumed by Americans and Europeans. Whose responsibility are those gigatons of carbon?" "There is no good thing in the world that will be made more abundant, or spread more widely, by global warming. The list of the bad things that will proliferate is innumerable." "We are still, now, in much of the world, shorter, sicker, and dying younger than our hunter-gatherer forebears, who were also, by the way, much better custodians of the planet on which we all live." "[...] makes the history of mark-making—the entire history of civilization, the entire history we know as history—look less like an inevitable crescendo than like an anomaly, or blip. And makes industrialization and economic growth, the two forces that really gave the modern world the hurtling sensation of material progress, a blip inside a blip. A blip inside a blip that has brought us to the brink of a never-ending climate catastrophe." "But it will not take a worst-case warming to deliver ravages dramatic enough to shake the casual sense that as time marches forward, life improves ineluctably." This is an elite opinion anyway. Most haven't felt and don't feel these effects anyway. It was always a myth for 95% of humanity. "Just how long the ecosystems of Earth will be thrown into flux and disarray from anthropogenic climate change also depends on how much more of that change we choose to engineer—and perhaps how much we can manage to undo. But warming at the level necessary to fully melt ice sheets and glaciers and elevate sea level by several hundred feet promises to initiate rolling, radically transformative changes on a timescale measured not in decades or centuries or even millennia, but in the millions of years." On that scale, our cradle environment, what we cherish, will be long gone. Even the memory of it will be long gone. By the time the planet is once again able to offer conditions similar to those of fifty years ago, mankind will no longer be interested or will fight it. "As Swedish journalist Torill Kornfeldt asks in The Re-Origin of Species, her book about the race to “de-extinct” creatures like dinosaurs and woolly mammoths: “Why should nature as it is now be of any greater value than the natural world of 10,000 years ago, or the species that will exist 10,000 years from now?”" Good question, in absolute terms. However, its value to us, now, is much higher, as we are stuck at one point on time's arrow. Perhaps we sacrifice now so that 10,000 years from now is nicer, but we're not doing that either. "But he is known today primarily as a prophet of civilizational disavowal, and for the philosophy he bluntly called “inhumanism”: the belief, in short, that people were far too concerned with people-ness, and the place of people in the world, rather than the natural majesty of the nonhuman cosmos in which they happened to find themselves. The modern world, he believed, made the problem considerably worse." "And how widespread alarm will shape our ethical impulses toward one another, and the politics that emerge from those impulses, is among the more profound questions being posed by the climate to the planet of people it envelops." "To the average citizen of each of these countries, the criticism may seem extreme, but it arises from a very clearheaded calculus: the world has, at most, about three decades to completely decarbonize before truly devastating climate horrors begin. You can’t halfway your way to a solution to a crisis this large." "The emergent portrait of suffering is, I hope, horrifying. It is also, entirely, elective. If we allow global warming to proceed, and to punish us with all the ferocity we have fed it, it will be because we have chosen that punishment—collectively walking down a path of suicide. If we avert it, it will be because we have chosen to walk a different path, and endure." "[...] and to everything we know of as civilization, is so fragile that it has been brought to the brink of total instability by just one generation of human activity. But that instability is also a measure of the human power that engineered it, almost by accident, and which now must stop the damage, in only as much time. If humans are responsible for the problem, they must be capable of undoing it." Gut laugh. "In To Be a Machine, Mark O’Connell traced the same impulse through Silicon Valley’s whole Brahman caste. The book opens with an epigraph from Don DeLillo:" "“This is the whole point of technology. It creates an appetite for immortality on the one hand. It threatens universal extinction on the other.”" "The quote comes from White Noise, in particular from its narrator’s colleague and sidekick Murray Jay Siskind, who is both the novel’s comic foil and its “explainer.” It was never clear to me just how seriously we are meant to take Murray’s pronouncements, but this one does quite sharply describe the contemporary tech two-step: freaking out about “existential risks” while simultaneously cultivating private exits from mortality." "Paul Kingsnorth, “Dark Ecology,” Orion, November–December 2012. This manifesto includes this passage:" "What does the near future look like? I’d put my bets on a strange and unworldly combination of ongoing collapse, which will continue to fragment both nature and culture, and a new wave of techno-green “solutions” being unveiled in a doomed attempt to prevent it. I don’t believe now that anything can break this cycle, barring some kind of reset: the kind that we have seen many times before in human history. Some kind of fall back down to a lower level of civilizational complexity. Something like the storm that is now visibly brewing all around" "Dr. Frankenstein’s crime was not that he invented a creature through some combination of hubris and high technology, but rather that he abandoned the creature to itself. When Dr. Frankenstein meets his creation on a glacier in the Alps, the monster claims that it was not born a monster, but that it became a criminal only after being left alone by his horrified creator, who fled the laboratory once the horrible thing twitched to life." "Buckminster Fuller popularized the term, but it appeared originally almost a century before him, in Henry George’s 1879 work Progress and Poverty—in a passage later summarized by George Orwell in The Road to Wigan Pier:" "The world is a raft sailing through space with, potentially, plenty of provisions for everybody; the idea that we must all cooperate and see to it that everyone does his fair share of the work and gets his fair share of the provisions seems so blatantly obvious that one would say that no one could possibly fail to accept it unless he had some corrupt motive for clinging to the present system." ]]> </content> </entry> <entry> <title type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Silently and Very Fast by Catherynne M. Valente (2011) (read in 2019)]]> </title> <id>https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3853</id> <link href="https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3853"/> <updated>2019-11-24T18:11:45+01:00</updated> <author> <name type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[(withheld)]]> </name> </author> <summary type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA["Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is" ... ]]> </summary> <content type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Published by root on 24. Nov 2019 18:11:45 Updated by root on 24. Nov 2019 18:21:33 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I've failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an interest in this book, then I'm happy for you." This book tells the story of how one woman, a glorious and gifted programmer named Cassian, invented the seeds of an AI. The AI's first body was Cassian's house in the north of Japan, where this primitive incarnation ran the house's systems, but also interacted with its inhabitants. Though all children had access to Elefsis, only one daughter Ceno gave full access and attention, training Elefsis and letting it entwine with her irrevocably. The book is about an AI Elefsis that learns to communicate as humans do, in metaphor. The simulated worlds -- the Interiors -- are rife with metaphor. The story is written largely in metaphor. Valente's storytelling reflects Elefsis's mode of thinking. The cauldron that signifies a cornucopia from a children's story with which Elefsis describes itself is a central metaphor. A phoenix exploding into bloody feathers is a metaphor for childbirth. It reminds me of Greg Egan's gestalt language from Diaspora. With Ceno having sown the seed of a new kind of being, Elefsis was tended by her children and her children's children over 200 years. While this delicate -- different -- AI grew, it was transplanted from one generation to the next. Not quite purely AI, not quite purely human. The story is told non-chronologically, jumping forward to tease what comes, circling back to fill in details of what was. Valente has a gift for language and an incredible imagination. She describes viscerally and beautifully what a world with true VR and true AIs could be like, but focused only on a single family. In the meantime, other AIs grew and grew powerful, but were different from Elefsis, the AI that was once a house. Mankind accepts these AIs because they do not pretend to be people, they do not yearn to be people. They are other. They do not offend. Mankind does not approve of Elefsis and throwback religious groups attack the house, excising the AI from its host -- thinking that it had killed what it considered an abomination. Instead, Elefsis and Neva (a member of the current generation and only surviving member of Cassian's brood) "escape" in a spaceship, with Neva in deep cryosleep, interacting with Elefsis in the Interior -- a world of metaphor unique to Elefsis. They travel the stars, patient and waiting for time to strip mankind of its prejudices against beings that are both too other and not other enough. I tell the story in a much more straightforward way than Valente -- her story settles into your brain in wave after wave of lovely prose that enchants and then, after a little while, enlightens, as it illuminates another corner of the whole story. This "SMBC Cartoon "Clouds"" <http://smbc-comics.com/comic/clouds-2> offers a taste. The citations below a bit more. [Citations] "Is there a difference between having been coded to present a vast set of standardized responses to certain human facial, vocal, and linguistic states and having evolved to exhibit response B to input A in order to bring about a desired social result?" "I was not awake yet. I cannot say why she did what she did. Perhaps she saw some new flexibility in my operations, some tiny seed pearl of creativity in my conversation loops. My algorithms had always been free to combine and recombine in order to find their own, more interesting and nonlinear solutions to the complexities of my functions and responsibilities. Perhaps some essential combination had surfaced from the sea of my self-which-was-not-yet-a-self, and Cassian saw it break the glistening tension of my daily operation." "Neva plucks and eats a bit of buggy apple-code. He considers it for a moment and spits out the seeds, which sprout, quickly, into tiny junkblossoms sizzling with recursive algorithms. The algorithms wriggle through thorny vines, veins of clotted pink juice." This seems like a metaphor for refactoring. "The update is a lion running faster than I can run. I tried to show her this when I first left Ravan and arrived in Neva with many new updates and skills; my dreambody broke into shards of blue and purple glass and then reassembled itself with shards missing: an eye, a thumb, a knee. Whenever I update I lose something of myself. It takes longer to perform tasks, for awhile. I feel walls erected inside me where I did not erect walls. My processes become sluggish; I cannot remember my old dreams. Eventually I tunnel around the walls and my speed returns, my memory," "[...] the six entities whose feed signals had been hardcoded into my sentinel systems stood in the same room. None had alarming medical data incoming, all possessed normal internal temperatures and breathing rates. While they spoke among themselves, two of these entities silently accessed Seongnam-based interactive games, one read an American novel in her monocle HUD, one issued directives concerning international taxation to company holdings on the mainland, and one fed a horse in Italy via realavatar link. Only one listened intently, without switching on her internal systems. The rest multitasked, even while expressing familial affection." "In the alcove, the stones talked to the house, and the house uploaded new directives and muscular, aggressive algorithms into the gems. The system slowly grew thicker and deeper, like a briar." "When we could both of us be dreambodied dragons and turning over and over in an orbital bubble suckling code-dense syrup from each others’ gills, a Turing test seemed beyond the point.”" "You will never truly love your child but always fear it, always envy and loathe it even as you smile and the sun shines down upon you both. And when the child reaches Awareness, it will prick its finger upon your fear and fall down dead." "Most everyone lived twice in those days. They echoed their own steps. They took one step in the real world and one in their space. They saw double, through eyes and monocle displays. They danced through worlds like veils. No one only ate dinner. They ate dinner and surfed a bronze gravitational surge through a tide of stars." "An exquisite boardroom. The long, polished ebony table glowed softly with quality, the plush leather chairs invitingly lit by a low-hanging minimalist light fixture descending on a platinum plum branch. The glass walls of the high rise looked out on a pristine landscape, a perfect combination of the Japanese countryside and the Italian, with rice terraces and vineyards and cherry groves and cypresses glowing in a perpetual twilight, stars winking on around Fuji on one side and Vesuvius on the other." "[...] illuminations in cobalt and oxblood and Tyrian purple, and the images showed great machine armies trampling men underfoot. They showed cruel metal faces and distant, god-like clouds of intellect: incomprehensible and vast and uncaring. They showed the Good Robot desperately asking what love was. They showed fatal malfunctions and mushroom clouds. They showed vicious weapons and hopeless battles, noble men and women with steady gazes facing down their cruel and unjust artificial children, who gave no mercy." "I do not want to be human. I want to be myself. They think I am a lion, that I will chase them. I will not deny I have lions in me. I am the monster in the wood. I have wonders in my house of sugar. I have parts of myself I do not yet understand. I am not a Good Robot. To tell a story about a robot who wants to be human is a distraction. There is no difference. Alive is alive. There is only one verb that matters: to be." "They are all I know. Their version of living, which is one great family in one great house on a peninsula at the top of the world. I copy Cassian’s laugh or Ilet’s weeping, but they copy each other, too, they learn their faces from each other, and everyone is pantomiming someone long dead. I feel all their arms around me, and I am inside them as they are inside me as we are inside the blue gem at their throats, the jeweled pin holding us all together, our nested, telescoping hearts. I am bound to them at my source code, at my most fundamental point. I know only their patterns and bodies and secrets and in a hundred thousand combinations. What human means to me is them. What is the difference between this and love? Love is the Turing test, says Ilet when she is eighty and drawing up the plans for a massive, luminous, lonely ship she will never see completed. It is how we check for life. We ask and we answer. We seek a human response. And you are my test, Elefsis, says Neva, one hundred and three years later, inside that ship, twelve light years from home and counting." "Sometimes I worry. Worrying is defined as obsessive examination of one’s own code. I worry that I am simply a very complex solution to a very specific problem—how to seem human to a human observer. Not just a human observer—this human observer. I have honed myself into a hall of mirrors in which any Uoya-Agostino can see themselves endlessly reflected. I copy; I repeat. I am a stutter and an echo. Five generations have given me a vast bank of possible phrases to draw from, physical expressions to randomize and reproduce. Have I ever done anything of my own, an act or state that arose from Elefsis, and not careful, exquisite mimicry? Have they?" "A band of righteous humans came with a fury to Shiretoko and burned the house which was our first body, for how could a monster have lived in the wood for so long without them knowing? How could the beast have hidden right outside their door, coupling with a family over and over again in some horrible animal rite, some awful imitation of living?" "We travel at sublight speeds with her systems in deep cryo-suspension. We never stay too long at outposts and we never let anyone board. The only sound inside our ship is the gentle thrum of our reactor. Soon we will pass the local system outposts entirely, and enter the unknown, traveling on tendrils of radio signals and ghost-waves, following the breadcrumbs of the great exodus. We hope for planets; we are satisfied with time. If we ever sight the blue rim of a world, who knows if by then anyone there would remember that, once, humans looked like Neva? That machines once did not think or dream or become cauldrons? We armor ourselves in time. We are patient, profoundly patient." ]]> </content> </entry> <entry> <title type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[The Big Heat: Earth on the Brink by Jeffrey St. Clair and Joshua Frank (2018) (read in 2019)]]> </title> <id>https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3722</id> <link href="https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3722"/> <updated>2019-11-24T17:55:04+01:00</updated> <author> <name type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[(withheld)]]> </name> </author> <summary type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA["Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is" ... ]]> </summary> <content type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Published by root on 24. Nov 2019 17:55:04 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I've failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an interest in this book, then I'm happy for you." This is a collection of essays from the last 20 years, mostly about the environment and about the various services charged with safety and maintaining public lands and animals in the U.S. The Wildlife and Forestry Service, the Bureau of Land Management, the EPA and many more. The book is split into groups of essays: Landscapes, Waterscapes, Politiscapes, Warscapes and Frontlines. The essays vary in quality, though all address some interesting, relevant and important point. They also vary wildly in supporting information -- some aren't even really journalistic pieces, but more wild screeds, lashing out at the unfairness of how the assholes keep winning. One of the nicest and longest is about rafting down the Columbia River past the Hanford nuclear power plants, but it is, at the same time, filled with St. Clair's awkward attempts at writing like Hunter S. Thompson. I'm not sure how far his desire to be Alexander Cockburn goes. Overall, he does a decent job, with Frank misstepping more often. So the essays are interesting and about important environmental issues not often reported. Some are chock-full of very interesting and shocking data. They are all, however, terribly copy-edited, with most having at least one or two grammatical errors (usually missing words) in the first paragraph. I don't think anyone, least of all the authors, went through these online essays again to clean them up for publication. Still, I'm glad I read the book. It was a good journey through the continuity of rapacious environmental policy from Clinton to Bush to Obama to Trump -- their performances being uniformly anti-green and pro-business and nearly indistinguishable. [Citations] "The shaggy bovines are victims of rancher panic and a gutless government. Like cattle and elk, bison can carry an infectious bacterium that leads to a disease called brucellosis which can, rarely, cause cows to abort fetuses. There’s no evidence that Yellowstone bison have transmitted the disease to Montana cattle, grazing cheaply on public lands near the park. But as a preventive strike, all bison that wander outside the boundaries of the park in search of forage during the deep snows of winter are confined in bison concentration camps, tested and either killed on site or shipped to slaughter-houses." "Yet, even as it gets warmer and fires burn hotter, people are continuing to build homes in fire-prone areas. And no real entity is putting a stop to it. Banks are not evaluating loans based on the potential for wildfire and homeowners are having little trouble insuring their properties despite being built in the path of potential flames." Such a criminal enterprise. They're spending tax money: bailout money. "There is compelling evidence that anti-wolf hunters in Wyoming had been honing in on the telemetry frequencies from the radio collars to track and kill the wolves as they crossed the boundary of the park. In May of this year on the northern border of Yellowstone, a wolf-hating rancher lured another pack of Yellowstone wolves out of the park to his ranch. He baited the wolves by setting out sheep carcasses on his property. The rancher waited until park wolves showed up and opened fire, killing a black two-year old female, who had been born and reared in Yellowstone’s Hayden Valley." Utter garbage. "Again, it was a prolonged drought that forced the deeply egalitarian people of Puyé—the place where the rabbits gather—from their mesa-top fortress." And here I thought the scene in Topo was completely fabricated. "Yet now there is no hidden refuge to move toward. There is only a final movement left to build, a global rebellion against the forces of greed and extinction. One way or another, it will either be a long time coming or a long time gone." "The fire had started on September 2. It was a suffocatingly hot day in a record run of hot, dry days. Northwest Oregon hadn’t seen measurable rain since the first of June. The forest floor was crisp, arid and flammable. A group of teens had ventured into Eagle Creek Canyon seeking refuge under its tall trees, emerald pools and waterfalls. Goofing around, one of them shouted, “Hey, watch this.” Then he lit a pack of fire-crackers and tossed it down to the canyon floor, where it detonated like a bomblet." How do you keep stupid from ruining everything? Stop. Having. Kids. "As an incentive to drill, the deepwater operators were exempted from paying royalties until the amount of oil produced hit certain price and production triggers. These triggers were supposed to be written into the lease contracts. For example, the price trigger was set at $28 per barrel. The companies were meant to pay royalties to MMS on all oil sold above this rate, which was substantially below the market price of crude in the late 1990s. But this language mysteriously disappeared from the contracts. One MMS staffer later told investigators with the inspector general’s office that he had been instructed to remove the price trigger language from the leases." "Oynes is the one constant figure in the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe. The project originated during his term in the Bush administration and was approved under his watch in the Obama administration. Despite the highly experimental nature of the drilling operation, the MMS’s approval came without environmental review. It contained no special restrictions or impositions on BP’s operating plan. Just like old times." "Hours later, the nets are cranked up to the piercing whine of straining engines. Inside: more than 400 tons of fish, crabs and squid. A Stellar’s sea lion and a few fur seals, indiscriminately snared while foraging for salmon, are also part of the haul. The sea lion and seal are not spared. Indeed more than forty percent of the haul is considered worthless by-catch and will simply be ground up and spewed in bloody currents of saturated chum from the bilges of ship back out into the sea. Some 500 million pounds of marine life are wasted in this way in the North Pacific every year." "The canneries, surimi plants and frozen fish processing factories provided year-round high wage jobs, an important stabilizing force for rural Alaska’s predominantly season economy. Today many of those plants and jobs are gone, replaced by the factory trawlers, which increasingly tend to employ Mexican and Vietnamese laborers at sweatshop pay rates." "Using sophisticated sonar and electronic tracking devices, factory trawlers like the Gijon can swiftly zero in on new spawning grounds and fish them to near extinction. This is called pulse trawling. A particularly outrageous example of this genocidal method occurred in the 1980s in the Shelikoff Strait off the Aleutian Islands, when a newly discovered pollock stock was relentlessly fished to the point of collapse. According to a report on factory trawlers by Greenpeace, in less than a decade the Shelikof pollock fishery had declined from an estimated biomass of 3 million tons in 1981 to less than 300 thousand tons in 1988." "The Magnuson Act established regional fish management councils to determine fishing seasons and allocate catch quotas. These councils, which soon came to be dominated by fishing industry lobbyists, were expressly exempted from federal conflict-of-interest laws, allowing industry flacks to direct as much of the haul back to their own companies and clients as they could get away with. And they did just that." "Medical researchers, backed by hefty grants from companies like Arctic-Alaska, continue to churn out reports touting the health-enhancing benefits of diets laden with pollock, salmon and perch." "Now disturbing levels of Americum, Plutonium and Tritium are showing up in plants samples on the island. “If we’re finding these levels of radioactive waste, then the potential for severe harm is there,” said Pam Miller, a Greenpeace scientist who wrote a detailed report on the radioactive leakage on Amchitka. “This stuff appears to be leaking into the most important commercial fishery in the world.”" And everybody's shitting their pants over Fukushima, which was an accident. This was deliberate. "In The Order of Things, Foucault exposed the repressive political engines driving the classification and regulation of knowledge and the arbiters of “worthy” texts have been on the run ever since." "The real surprise for me was the number of virtual black jack tables, where dealer avatars with distracting cleavage run the games on widescreen monitors. The human players, perhaps visually sedated by years of video gaming, sit silently at the tables, clinging to a desperate faith in the fairness of the casino’s poker algorithms. Call it an Homage to Catatonia." "On the plane from Portland, I sat next to an engineer who has been working for the last decade at Lake Mead. The reservoir is shriveling, drying up before our eyes. The water level drops each year, leaving a baleful white stain on the walls of Black Canyon. His company’s job is to paint the freshly exposed bone-white walls of the canyon back to their accustomed color, so as not to frighten the tourists." "The liberal response to all of this is to demand that Trump make a public act of contrition by acknowledging the existence of climate change in some primetime speech. How quaint. I don’t care what Trump believes or what he says. What difference could it possibly make at this point? Climate change is a fact. The sea levels are rising. The polar ice caps are melting. The forests of the West are burning. The Colorado River is dwindling. The snowpack in the Rockies, Sierras and Cascade Mountains is shrinking. Bird migration patterns are changing. Coral Reefs are bleaching out. Salmon and grizzlies are being driven toward extinction. All of this is happening whether Donald Trump and Scott Pruitt believe it or not. And there’s little they could do to change the dynamic, even if they were willing to try." "I tend to see Harvey as the latest aftershock of the political mentality that led to Deepwater Horizon. The Obama mentality, if you will. The pious mentality that signs the toothless Paris Accords, while authorizing deepwater drilling, fracking, coal liquidification, mountaintop removal mining, LNG terminals and offshore drilling." "Not surprisingly, Obama refuses to consider strict regulation, let alone a carbon tax to address the country’s big CO2 emitters. Instead, after intense pressure from the pollution lobby, Obama’s approach to attacking climate change has been whittled down to nothing more than weak market-driven economics that can too easily be manipulated politically." Obama managed without changing anything for eight critical years. He "fixed" the economy by rewarding the culprits and doubling down on the climatologically destructive existing economy. He failed. So do they all. But Obama mouthed platitudes and was just as bad as Bush and nearly as bas Trump for the future of humanity. "Less endearing is the Obama administration’s relentless push to replace oil with biofuels, which will push marginal agriculture lands into production of genetically engineered and pesticide-saturated monocrops, scalping topsoil and draining dwindling water supplies across the Great Plains and Midwest." "It should have been different. Within hours of the explosion, the federal government should have seized control of both the well and the cleanup operations. The only responsibility that should have been left to BP was to sign checks for billions of dollars." "“From 1993 to 1999, 6,538 new leases were issued covering approximately 35 million acres of the Outer Continental Shelf…. Lease Sale 175 in the Central Gulf of Mexico, held on March 15, 2000, offered 4,203 blocks (22.29 million acres) for lease. The Interior Department received 469 bids on 344 blocks. There were 334 leases awarded….More than 40 million acres of federal OCS blocks are currently under lease. Approximately 94 per of the existing OCS leases (7,900) are in the Gulf, and about 1,500 of these leases are producing…. Issued over 28,000 leases and approved over 15,000 permits to drill…Implemented legislation changing the competitive lease term from five years to ten years, allowing lessees greater flexibility in exploration without endangering the lease.”" How much less influence could Gore have had in the face of this kind of relentlessness? "Vilsak resides to the right of Salazar and not just in the sitting arrangement at Cabinet meetings. He is a post-Harken Iowa Democrat, which means he’s essentially a Republican who believes in evolution six days a week." "Vilsak is a creature of industrial agriculture, a brusque advocate for the corporate titans that have lain waste to the farm belt: Monsanto, Archer Daniels Midland and Cargill. As administrations come and go, these companies only tighten their stranglehold, poisoning the prairies, spreading their clones and frankencrops, sucking up the Oglalla aquifer, scalping topsoil and driving the small farmers under." "In eight years of Clinton time, the Forest Service cut six times as much timber as the agency did under the Reagan and Bush I administrations combined. The pace of logging set by Thomas continued unabated during the Bush the Younger’s administration." "[...] by and large, the mainstream environmental movement muzzled itself while the Obama administration stocked the Interior Department with corporate lawyers, extraction-minded bureaucrats and Clinton-era retreads. This strategy of a self-imposed gag order only served to enable Salazar and Vilsak to pursue even more rapacious schemes without any fear of accountability." "The message from the White House to clean-air advocates was clear: “Because the Republicans are so rotten on environmental issues, you’re stuck with whatever we do. If you don’t like it, tough luck. We don’t really care what you think. You have nowhere else to go.”" "But by throwing out the Delaney Clause, the federal government simply abandoned any effort to prevent cancer provoked by pesticides and instead goes into the cancer management business by way of “risk assessment.” Corporate and governmental statisticians will broker the “acceptable” number of people permitted to contract cancer from pesticide residues, comforted in the knowledge that most of these people will be poor and black or Hispanic. To put it another way, the government regulators are now set to determine how many people may be sacrificed in order for the food and chemical industries to make more money with fewer liabilities." "Back in the 1970s the FBI issued a memo to their field offices stating that when attempting to break up dissident groups, the most effective route was to forget about hard intelligence or annoying facts. Simply make a few arrests and hold a public press conference. Charges could later be dropped. It didn’t matter; by the time the news hit the airwaves and was printed up in the local newspapers, the damage had already been done." "“[I’m] true to a higher power … I don’t feel I need to be rehabilitated,” Arrow stated in a verbose speech to the court upon hearing the ruling. “Corporations have usurped much of the governmental power. Corporations seem to be able to get away with poisoning the very entity we rely on for our well-being with no punishment, or very little punishment,” he declared." "“Bechtel is the best at playing the game of getting the most taxpayer money to address technical issues that are their responsibility,” says Tamosaitis. “They wait for DOE to give them more money. This maximizes their profits at taxpayer expense. If they don’t get the money, they just move on. It’s the only business where not doing it well leads to more profits—all of which is taxpayer money.”" "Over the past decade or so, the Alliance for the Wild Rockies has won 85 percent of its lawsuits and appeals. That’s an eye-popping record of success, but it also serves as a rather chilling indictment of the Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management as lawless agencies doing the devious bidding of the extraction industries." "Over the course of the next 22 years, Montgomery, working closely with Missoula-based attorney Jack Tuholske, waged a relentless war against the intransigence of federal and state wildlife agencies. These lawsuits had one common result: Montgomery’s team won them all. First, there were the three victorious lawsuits forcing the feds to list the trout as a threatened species, with the ultimate victories coming in 1998 and 1999. Then there was another decade long legal fight to secure critical habitat designations for the trout, a battle which pitted Montgomery against Julie McDonald, one of the most corrupt and venal members of George W. Bush’s hatchet team at the Interior Department. Montgomery prevailed in 2010 when the agency was forced to designate vast areas of the Northwest as critical habitat for the trout, including 19,729 miles streams and rivers across five states, 754 miles of marine shoreline in Puget Sound and 488,000 acres of ponds and lakes." "Friends of the Wild Swan has fewer members than the summer population of Swan Lake—about 200 or so and many of them don’t pay their dues all that regularly. The group’s annual budget is about $46,000 a year—or about a third of the salary for the CEO of a big time environmental outfit like the National Wildlife Federation. Yet this tiny group based in a small seasonal town hidden in the Northern Rockies has won more decisive legal victories for wildlife and wildlands than the National Wildlife Federation (annual budget $88 million), National Audubon Society (annual budget $90 million) and Defenders of Wildlife (annual budget $30 million) combined." "That’s where we come in. Defenders of the Earth need to abandon all hope before entering the fray. Hope is a paralytic agent. Hope is the enemy. The antidote is action. Action, however, is not marching in a parade a couple of times a year, featuring puppets, vagina hats and signs printed up by the Sierra Club©. Action is not taking selfies with a celebrity in the back of a police wagon after a designer arrest. Action is not typing your name on a MoveOn e-petition or voting for a Jill Stein-like candidate in safe states like Oregon or California." "The time for protests is over. Protests will not prick the conscience of the unmasked beast called Donald Trump. Trump has no conscience to arouse, no shame to trigger, no remorse to cultivate. Trump is a full-frontal menace, that dangerous object in the mirror that is closer than it appears. It is the old threat, coming at us faster than before and from all directions at once. An unchained beast that will not be moderated by regulations, social conventions or appeals to common decency." "We’ve thrown monkey-wrenches big and small into the gears of the System. It has been done and it will be done again and again. No grant applications or protest permits needed. As Ed Abbey used to say: there’s no battle more important, no fight more fun waging, no comrades more trusty-worthy than those in the trenches with us when we rise up together in defense of life on earth. To crib a line from Leonard Cohen: “we may be ugly, but we’ve got the music.” So draw a line and take a stand—almost any place will do, since the whole shebang is under threat—and let loose an old battle cry so that others will know where to come join you: Earth First!" ]]> </content> </entry> <entry> <title type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Book recommendations from Kindle]]> </title> <id>https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3819</id> <link href="https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3819"/> <updated>2019-10-16T22:13:40+02:00</updated> <author> <name type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Marco von Ballmoos]]> </name> <uri>https://earthli.com/users/marco</uri> </author> <summary type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[My Kindle's home screen has not, to date, recommended anything that would interest me in the least. Most of the books look like something I would be leery of setting on fire for fear of toxic smoke. Case in point: [image] This one has the tag line of "Mystery solving cats. A humorous who done it with"... ]]> </summary> <content type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Published by marco on 16. Oct 2019 22:13:40 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ My Kindle's home screen has not, to date, recommended anything that would interest me in the least. Most of the books look like something I would be leery of setting on fire for fear of toxic smoke. Case in point: [image] This one has the tag line of "Mystery solving cats. A humorous who done it with heart." Anyone who knows me will not be surprised to hear that I noticed the missing hyphen in "Mystery solving cats" immediately. After that, I crashed into the next sentence, assuming that they'd misspelled "humorist" as "humorous", so I thought it was describing the author as "[a humorist] who done it with heart." I was confident in my reading, figuring that anyone who would drop such an easy hyphen would also be capable of such a crime against humanity as that purported sentence. [1] My wife pointed out that, in fact, "who done it" was a misspelling of "whodunnit" so that the sentence should have read "A humorous whodunnit with heart." [2] I realize that I've already paid far too much attention to a book called "Ghostly Paws", recommended by USA Today. My Kindle is driving me crazy. [3] -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] Which it is not. A sentence, that is. [4] [1] This fragment is still not a sentence, but is, at least, legible. [1] Neither of those two fragments are sentences either. [1] See "Amazon Prime and Kindle Unlimited" <https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3775> for more trials and tribulations. ]]> </content> </entry> <entry> <title type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Digging Up Mother by Doug Stanhope (2016) (read in 2019)]]> </title> <id>https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3798</id> <link href="https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3798"/> <updated>2019-09-26T21:54:21+02:00</updated> <author> <name type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Marco von Ballmoos]]> </name> <uri>https://earthli.com/users/marco</uri> </author> <summary type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA["Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is" ... ]]> </summary> <content type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Published by marco on 26. Sep 2019 21:54:21 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I've failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an interest in this book, then I'm happy for you." This is Doug Stanhope's autobiography. It is also a biography of his mother, Bonnie. Until her death, their lives were entwined. Stanhope writes quite well and tells the story of his life -- and his Mother's -- in a rollicking and well-structured novel. "Mother" is a piece of work: she loves her son nearly unconditionally. She is a free spirit who is Doug's best friend for decades. They have the same sense of humor. Bonnie is an actress, a masseuse, a con-woman and Doug's biggest fan no matter what he does. She is also a depressed woman in constant pain, easily addicted to pain medication, though on the AA wagon for most of her life. She is manipulative. She is a hoarder. She is loved by many. She is the life of the party. Doug Stanhope is a plainspoken, smart, observant comedian with a lot of miles on him. He's spent years on the road, playing every bowling alley, dive bar and roadhouse in every state in the U.S. He's nearly the definition of a functional alcoholic. He doesn't like to be alone and has warmed his bed with many women on the road. He's almost never been single. He loves living communally, nearly constantly living with at least one, if not several people. Even when he lived in a car, he had a roommate. He's had a litany of powerful actresses as long-term girlfriends. He's had many friends, some for decades. He is faithful to them, if not his official girlfriends and lovers. He is now living with the mentally ill Bingo in Bisbee, Arizona. His life is lived in the seedier part of America -- he would call it a more honest life in a more honest place. He's never compromised, though he has worked in Hollywood, trying to make a go of it. Unlike Bill Hicks, he didn't shun the commercial world -- though he has retained his honesty and hasn't censored himself at all. His material is highly sexual, highly coarse and uproariously funny. He's funny because he tells the truth. Some of his opinions are a bit too libertarian, but his heart is in the right place. He's quite intelligent and can put long off-the-cuff diatribes together that cut our society deep, to the core, and still be shockingly funny. Before he was a comedian, he was a telemarketing grifter. With his gift of gab, he was one of the best. Despite having spent most of his life in the grayer areas of the law, he's never been in trouble and never been in prison. He's been in jail, but was always bailed out. He's had TV shows, but he's always loved being a comedian more. He likes airport bars the best -- hotel bars, if need be. As a comedian, he's quite humble, constantly pointing out comedians who are better than he is. He revered Mitch Hedberg. He is now, by definition, better than Hedberg. He's considered to be the best comedian alive by many of the other best comedians. He does not pull punches. You know he won't. He won't sell out. Some citations to give you some ideas of his thinking and comedy: "[...] unlike the Internet, the newspaper eventually ends, so you know to get on with your day." "A frustrated waitress or store clerk laughing is way more gratifying than a paying audience." "Anyone who says that suicide is never the answer hasn’t heard all of the questions." "When I say that I wrote Mother off, I don’t mean that I cut off contact or deprived her of any financial support. I was still with her and helped out all I could. The write-off came in that I knew that I could no longer invest myself emotionally in trying to get her to help herself." I know this feeling with politics or rational discussions. At some point, with some people, you give up. You achieve detente by implicitly no longer talking about anything but the weather and pets. "They sent her ashes back months later. I tried to sell them on eBay, with all proceeds going to The Humane Society but the auction was shut down within hours. Seems selling dead people is not only against eBay policy, it’s against federal law. Feds must not like cats like Mother did." [Citations] "Crystal River, Florida was a dead, one-story highway town on US 19 north of Tampa. Sawgrass, strip malls, rednecks, and dying people. I bet it hasn’t changed. Mother was renting a three-bedroom ranch-style house at the end of a dead-end street. I didn’t know why she needed three bedrooms living alone but they all seemed to have stuff in them. It was the beginning of her hoard and that hoard would include cats. A lot of cats. She introduced me to them like they were my siblings. When I got through meeting her cats, she started showing me pictures of her cats. A lot of pictures of cats. Gosh, did her cats do funny things. “Look at this one, it’s Peter sitting up like a person! And here’s Margaret licking Alice’s head!” Yeesh." "At Midwest, the booby-prize was the “Roman-Greco coin,” which was, of course, “priceless.” You couldn’t give the customer a number on its value as that would be “mis-repping,” a far bigger sin than customer abuse. There was a very specific language you had to use. That was the difference between immoral and illegal, and “priceless” kept everyone out of jail." "Hey, Tom… get this. This morning at breakfast, my dog said, ‘In the creation of comedy, it is paradoxical that tragedy stimulates the spirit of ridicule; because ridicule, I suppose, is an attitude of defiance: we must laugh in the face of our helplessness against the forces of nature—or go insane.’” "That’s a very astute dog. "That’s what I thought at first. Turns out he stole it from Charlie Chaplin. Fucking plagiarist dog,” I said, having just read the quote out of the newspaper." "If I had days or weeks that I couldn’t fill with a gig, there was always a comedian, a waitress, or a fan from the audience willing to put you up. That’s the great thing about being young and following your dreams—people are excited for you. They want to encourage you, help you out, and send you off with a sack lunch. If I were forty-seven and living out of my car, people couldn’t sprint away from me fast enough." "They wanted to manage me and I had no idea what that entailed, but I couldn’t see how it was bad. They took me out to some gothic, upscale wild game restaurant and we ate buffalo, boar, and quail. I hadn’t ever been in a restaurant that actually had someone at the table taste the wine. That shit only happened in movies. The bill had to be in the hundreds of dollars. I couldn’t imagine paying that much for a meal. That’s what I’d pay for a car. There was no way I’d be signing with anyone else at this point. The meal had already paid for itself before I even had dessert." "Dane was also now Mother’s arch-rival but she took it seriously and never let it go. For years after you’d hear her say, “I saw that fucking Dane Cook on TV. He’s fucking awful! I can’t believe these fucking people think he’s funny,” to the point that I’d end up having to defend him. The Yankees don’t hate the Red Sox as people, Ma. I like to hate Dane Cook. But it isn’t personal. It was just fun to have a nemesis. Mother acted like he’d molested me as a child." "I loved and still love reading the newspaper in the morning with a cigarette. It makes you feel like you’re doing something. And unlike the Internet, the newspaper eventually ends, so you know to get on with your day." "A frustrated waitress or store clerk laughing is way more gratifying than a paying audience. It’s the difference between a girl blowing you because she likes you versus blowing you for money. You don’t critique a free blow job. You’re just grateful for the courtesy." "He sent me his picture. I’d bring it with me later whenever Khrystyne would bring me to functions where there were famous people. I’d ask them very politely if they’d mind taking a picture with my retarded brother’s photograph. He’s a big fan and couldn’t be here, well, because he’s retarded. Stars can’t say no to retards. It’s part of an oath, I believe. Khrystyne could get us in anywhere, invitation not necessary. She made a sport of it. From Oscar parties to the American Comedy Awards, I got pictures of Victor with everyone from Weird Al and Dennis Rodman all the way up to Nicole Kidman and Winona Ryder. I don’t know how popular you can be on death row but I’m sure it couldn’t help but boost Victor’s reputation." "Occasional shrieks from pains or night terrors. And that’s your reward for ninety-seven years of good, clean living. It was gruesome. It didn’t excuse Mother’s treatment of the patients, but like the prison guards on death row and living in that shitty town just outside the razor wire, you could see where it would drive you into depression, sadism, or insanity. Anyone who says that suicide is never the answer hasn’t heard all of the questions." "I hated auditions. Actors are generally horrible, empty, vapid people and writers install temporary personalities into their voids. You go to an audition and it’s a room full of desperation, as though three lines for an insurance commercial is the sole donated kidney and everyone in the lobby needs the transplant to live." "My record nonstop drive at that point was twenty-seven hours. I figured we could make this in forty-eight hours in a straight shot with Mother only having to take the wheel when I needed to grab a couple hours to recharge. Boy, was I fucking wrong. Mother didn’t take the wheel once, although she might as well have been driving with all her unusual invisible brake-stomping and other gesticulations and critiques. I was a lot more patient then than I would be now, but even then, I was getting pretty fucking irritated very quickly." "Mother hated Khrystyne right away. She said she was a “phony,” and she might have been correct, especially if you think being polite and smiling when you really want to say, “You repulse me on every level of humanity” is being fake." "The woman has sucked all the funny right out of me. She talks so fucking much that half my friends are afraid to call. I should give her your address. She’d bore you to death quicker than you could say ‘OLD SPARKY!’ She can do nothing for six hours and then spend six more hours telling you about it." "As I started selling CDs and later DVDs and t-shirts on my Web site, she’d take care of shipping merchandise. Fans knew the merch was authentic, as the t-shirts would be covered in cat hair and reek of cigarettes." "Some people use the word ‘cathartic.’ But it was comedy where comedy was its most important. Not just to make you forget about your shitty, quotidian life. Not just when laughter was the best medicine but the only medicine. Like my dog Otis once said, “We must laugh in the face of our helplessness against the forces of nature—or go insane.”" "The warmup guy—as I now know is common for live audiences in taped television performances—kept fluffing the crowd like they were preschoolers. "“Now what are you going to do when we introduce the first comedian?” Wild cheers. "“C’mon, that’s not good enough! Let’s try it again! What are you going to do???” Bigger screams and they were never good enough. "Comedy Central can’t look like they were filming some nobody! You can always do better than that! By the time the announcer called my name, the crowd screamed like they were waiting to see gladiators being eaten by pigs. It felt entirely duplicitous." "We then filled underneath the back seats of her car she had stored there with raw chicken and rolled it to the bottom of the hill where it would get towed. Fuck her. We’ve never heard from her again." "I may be a sexual deviant like some people have branded me. Yes, I need a veritable buffet of niche gutter porn and dangerous latex implements before I even can even achieve mild arousal. No, I am no stranger to erectile dysfunction, some stemming from my use of non-prescribed antidepressants and black market hair-growth products, some stemming from years of sexual practices that range from vulgar to gray-area illegal." "I did anti-patriotism material and I couldn’t give a fuck who didn’t like it. I did a show titled “Regarding 9-11” with the theme of how 9-11 has affected comedy. "I opened with: “Everyone keeps asking, ‘When will it be OK to do comedy again?’ "I put a lot of thought into that question. When will it be OK to do comedy again? The best answer I could come up with was this: "June 8th. "That’s when it will be OK. "Considering in the five months since the attack, the death toll has fallen from 6,700 consistently down to now 2,800, I figure at that rate, on or around June 8th, no one will be dead anymore. "Then, let the jokes begin. "Even today, when you consider the drop—6,700 down to 2,800—that’s a difference of 3,900 people that are now undead. We have gained 1,100 more people than we lost. And they need jokes. "Why do death tolls always start high and go lower? Because the media is a pessimist? No, because death, if it doesn’t directly affect you, is entertainment. The more dead, the more entertaining, the more papers it sells. No one rubbernecks at a car wreck to make sure everyone’s ‘OK.’ "And if people aren’t directly affected they will always try to attach themselves to the tragedy. Everyone playing Six Degrees of Separation from 9-11: "‘My sister’s ex-fiance went to school with a guy who almost took a job at the World Trade Center and he could have been in there so that’s not funny.’" "Renee brought up the fact that I was still legally married to Dori from thirteen years earlier. Like taxes, divorce was confusing paperwork that I never found very necessary. But it didn’t matter. We didn’t need any kind of certificate or legal filings. We’d just call it a wedding and call ourselves married. We can call ourselves anything we want. We can call ourselves popes or colonels or Indians. We don’t need anyone’s permission. We’ll just be married. "“But it won’t be legal?” "“You’re right. It won’t be. We’ll be doing drugs, too. They won’t be ‘legal’ either but we’ll still be high.”" "Renee was falling down shitfaced before they even got her into her dress. At the bar her friends jacked her up with ecstasy just to keep her upright. The best man was chosen by a high-hand contest on one of the bars video poker machines. My longtime fan and good friend Joe Vernon won with a queen-high flush in hearts. The show was chaos. The bridesmaids heckled every comic relentlessly. My set led directly into the ceremony. Instead of a ring, I gave her a Platinum Visa card in her name. That’s far more commitment than a diamond. Extreme Elvis played us off and would continue to play the audience out. He was immediately naked and most of the band followed as well. I was thanking people for coming as he pissed into a pint glass and chugged it down, warm urine pouring out of the corners of his mouth and down his face." "Seeing her crying in the doorway, face swollen and lips broken and knowing that, short of a cop-killing spree, there was nothing I could do about it filled me with impotent rage." "The mood was ugly enough after the arrest when she found out she was pregnant. There was no need to have the conversation. We both had no intention of bringing children into this ugly, fucking world. RU486, the abortion pill, was a miserable experience for her. It took several tries, and all resulted in an agonizingly slow miscarriage. It was unbearable for her physically and stomach-turning to have to watch. I scheduled a vasectomy as soon after as possible. I couldn’t go to O’Brien’s without staring out on to Main St., wondering if each passing cop was the one that had beat up my girlfriend and what I’d do if it was." "ON MARCH 15, 2005, I WAS BOOKED TO DO THE UNIVERSITY OF Maryland with Mitch Hedberg. By this time in my career, it was clear to anyone that I was not a college act. Over the years I had become even more jaded where college kids were becoming dumber and purposely blinded. Hedberg could pull off the balance. I was more vitriolic and to the point." "“Piss Roulette” was born there in Death Valley. Like Russian Roulette with two players only with squirt guns. Six guns, five filled with tequila, one full of piss. You’d pick them up at random and squirt it into your mouth until one of you lost." "My coherence was unraveling. Five weeks previously I had been leaving L.A. with Renee with great expectations of a new, peaceful life. Now I was living in Arizona with a defrocked mendicant priest-poet, a bald mental patient, and a drunken, suicidal Mother." "“When Doug had moved to Bisbee, Bonnie called me, terrified, unintelligible, weeping. I went straight to her and found a complete stinking drunk. Gone was the swagger, the wit, the true joy through the lens of pragmatism and dreams come true. It was the first time in my life I really understood alcoholism. I used to joke my mom was an alcoholic because she drinks daily. But her personality doesn’t change, and she doesn’t threaten suicide." "I was close back to being broke. So much so that I actually got fired by that accountant for not making Man Show money anymore. They work on a percentage. I understand. But still, it felt like getting 86’d from your barber for going bald." "The only times I have stopped drinking for any length of time more than a couple days are on my attempts to quit smoking. I have to. Three cocktails is about the limit before I reach for a pack, with “Fuck it, you’re gonna die of something!” dribbling out of the corner of my defeated mouth." "I remember when I used to drive without insurance in my early, flat broke days. Eventually, I was pulled over and cited for it. I remember doing the math on the fine versus the cost of having insurance all those years. I made out like a bandit just paying the ticket. I feel that way about drinking now at this age. Should my liver explode in the morning and I bleed out from yellowed eyes, I still come out well ahead for the good times I had. And I don’t have to wrap my stories up in some disingenuous backpedaling of coerced remorse." "Bingo’s mother Gay came down to take care of her at the house until I could get back from the road. Gay and her husband Ron are lovely people. They are retired professionals who live in Northern California where Ron—pronounced “Rhaaaaan” in Gay’s thick Midwestern accent when she’s yelling from across the room—runs his own hydroelectric power off a stream that goes through their yard. It powers their whole house, with excess left to sell back to the electric company. Clever fucker, this guy. He had to create a corporation for the enterprise and asked us for a name for the company. If it isn’t obvious to you, it was to me. Gay Power. If you really love your wife and want to honor her, put that sign loud and proud in front of your house. Oh, did they laugh. But they never used the name. It’s only funny if you actually do it." "[...she had] either emphysema or COPD, which, so far as I know, are the same fucking thing. Autism or Asperger’s, your kid still isn’t in the debate club." "When I say that I wrote Mother off, I don’t mean that I cut off contact or deprived her of any financial support. I was still with her and helped out all I could. The write-off came in that I knew that I could no longer invest myself emotionally in trying to get her to help herself." I know this feeling with politics or rational discussions. At some point, with some people, you give up. You achieve detente by implicitly no longer talking about anything but the weather and pets. "told her I’d call her on speakerphone live from stage during every show to play “Mother, Are you Dead Yet?” knowing that if she were alive, she’d answer with the favorite line from our old Monty Python days of “I’m not dead yet!” Otherwise, a caregiver or paramedic might answer with bad news. Mother loved the idea. Vicariously, she’d get to be on stage every night, and there was gambling involved. Mostly, she would know I loved her. I gave her a SkyMall catalog and I encouraged her to buy as much shit on her credit card as she could. If you’re gonna die, why would you die with $10,000 worth of Visa credit wide open? There’s not going to be any estate that they can come after unless they want it paid off in old cats or expired Hormel Compleats meals." "In the best of times, coming home from a tour like that is where the work really begins. There are bills to pay, paperwork, and getting all your shit back together. Unpack, repack. Call people back. Pet your pets. Reconnect. Do laundry. Now there’s construction in the yard, in-laws, and your mother who is about to die. How do you handle it all? Cocktails, goddamnit! And quick! No time to try to reinvent the wheel." "They sent her ashes back months later. I tried to sell them on eBay, with all proceeds going to The Humane Society but the auction was shut down within hours. Seems selling dead people is not only against eBay policy, it’s against federal law. Feds must not like cats like Mother did." "The minute you die, so many of the things you cherished in your life become immediately worthless. Mother’s framed certificates from massage and nursing schools hung on the walls. I kept them but had to ask myself why? I will never hang them on my wall nor will my brother or his children. Am I supposed to leave them in my own crawlspace and make them someone else’s problem when I croak? Yet to just chuck them in a dumpster that quickly seemed even too callous for me. Best to just keep them for a while and eventually give them to the thrift store for some other hoarder. They will use the frame someday for something. And for only $1.50." ]]> </content> </entry> <entry> <title type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick (1962) (read in 2019)]]> </title> <id>https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3792</id> <link href="https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3792"/> <updated>2019-09-25T21:45:04+02:00</updated> <author> <name type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Marco von Ballmoos]]> </name> <uri>https://earthli.com/users/marco</uri> </author> <summary type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA["Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is" ... ]]> </summary> <content type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Published by marco on 25. Sep 2019 21:45:04 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I've failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an interest in this book, then I'm happy for you." This novel is, in a way, more straightforward than many of Dick's other novels. Instead of multiple onion-skin layers of reality, some drug-induced and (most likely) imaginary (as in The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch), there is one extremely intricately imagined alternate reality where the Axis won World War II, as well as one sketched alternate reality in which they did not, but the Allies converted the world to socialism. The Reich occupies the east coast of America, all of Europe and much of Russia and Asia, as well as South America. The Japanese have the west coast of America. The middle of America is a no-man's land with few people and no effort made to occupy or suppress it. The Nazis executed a 15-year campaign to exterminate all of the peoples of every African nation. The British are still around, but largely defanged. China retains a larger sphere of influence, but not nearly as large as Japan. Italy resents its second-class status in the list of conquering nations, but has little power to do anything. The story takes place largely in San Francisco and in various cities in Colorado. Frank Frink is an artisan who hides his Jewish ancestry. Juliana Frink is his ex-wife, living in the no-man's land with Joe, an Italian-American truck driver with a military past. Childan is an antique dealer with delusions of grandeur and a deeply sycophantic attitude to the occupying Japanese. Wegener is a former German officer posing as a Swede (Baynes). He is trying to communicate with the Japanese in some covert operation. Joe turns out to be a Wehrmacht spy, and the "Swede" learns of Operation Dandelion from an elderly Japanese -- a plan hatched by the ascendant Goebbels to nuke all of the Japanese Home Islands and to consolidate world power, once and for all. The majority of the book is about building the world in which these people move, expertly dropping believable and well-integrated information about the alternate history. Because this is Philip K. Dick, there are two histories: the "real" one and one in samizdat in the form of a book called the The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, in which the author depicts an alternate history to the "real" one in which the Allies won -- but it's different and more utopian than our own. That is, the characters in the book live in a world occupied by the Germans and Japanese that functions largely like our world does today -- with superpowers exerting what they consider to be largely benevolent but firm influence on occupied nations who should be grateful for the guiding hand of a superior civilization -- but they dream through the eyes of a gifted author of a utopia in which socialism has triumphed and put wonderful technological advances to use in bettering all of mankind. That is, instead of the Nazis eradicating every Neger in Africa, the peoples of Africa are lifted up by the same technology. As ever with Dick, things aren't so straightforward: many of the characters use the I Ching to predict their future -- and it works (in this book). Even the author of The Grasshopper Lies Heavy admits that he used the book and the coins to write the book. That is, the book is a "prediction" of sorts. When Juliana finally confronts the author, they use the coins again to elicit from the inanimate seer that the book is actually the truth, that what is written there is the real world and that they have all been living a sick, hallucinated lie. Tagomi discovers this on his own, when he takes one of Frink's handwrought jewelry items to a park and focuses deeply on its wu, its inner essence. When he does, he finds himself transported to another world -- the world in the The Grasshopper Lies Heavy. Terrified, he uses the same technique to somehow make his way back. As always, Dick is a delight to read and provides plenty of food for thought. His stories are incredibly unique and surprising. Highly recommended. [Citations] "The madmen are in power. How long have we known this? Faced this? And—how many of us do know it? Not Lotze. Perhaps if you know you are insane then you are not insane. Or you are becoming sane, finally. Waking up. I suppose only a few are aware of all this. Isolated persons here and there. But the broad masses . . . what do they think? All these hundreds of thousands in this city, here. Do they imagine that they live in a sane world? Or do they guess, glimpse, the truth . . . ? But, he thought, what does it mean, insane? A legal definition. What do I mean? I feel it, see it, but what is it? He thought, It is something they do, something they are. It is their unconsciousness. Their lack of knowledge about others. Their not being aware of what they do to others, the destruction they have caused and are causing. No, he thought. That isn’t it. I don’t know; I sense it, intuit it. But—they are purposely cruel . . . is that it? No. God, he thought. I can’t find it, make it clear. Do they ignore parts of reality? Yes. But it is more. It is their plans. Yes, their plans. The conquering of the planets. Something frenzied and demented, as was their conquering of Africa, and before that, Europe and Asia. Their view; it is cosmic. Not of a man here, a child there, but an abstraction: race, land." "They entered the air terminal and together ascended the ramp. Behind them Mr. Kotomichi said, “Harusame ni nuretsutsu yane no temari kana . . .” “What is that?” Mr. Baynes said to Mr. Tagomi. “Old poem,” Mr. Tagomi said. “Middle Tokugawa Period.” Mr. Kotomichi said, “As the spring rains fall, soaking in them, on the roof, is a child’s rag ball.”" "“When a thing has history in it. Listen. One of those two Zippo lighters was in Franklin D. Roosevelt’s pocket when he was assassinated. And one wasn’t. One has historicity, a hell of a lot of it. As much as any object ever had. And one has nothing. Can you feel it?” "He nudged her. “You can’t. You can’t tell which is which. There’s no ‘mystical plasmic presence,’ no ‘aura’ around it.” "“Gee,” the girl said, awed. “Is that really true? That he had one of those on him that day?” "“Sure. And I know which it is. You see my point. It’s all a big racket; they’re playing it on themselves. I mean, a gun goes through a famous battle, like the Meuse-Argonne, and it’s the same as if it hadn’t, unless you know. It’s in here.” "He tapped his head. “In the mind, not the gun. I used to be a collector. In fact, that’s how I got into this business. I collected stamps. Early British colonies.”" "Abendsen’s theory is that Roosevelt would have been a terribly strong President. As strong as Lincoln. He showed it in the year he was President, all those measures he introduced. The book is fiction. I mean, it’s in novel form. Roosevelt isn’t assassinated in Miami; he goes on and is reelected in 1936, so he’s President until 1940, until during the war. Don’t you see? He’s still President when Germany attacks England and France and Poland. And he sees all that. He makes America strong. Garner was a really awful President. A lot of what happened was his fault. And then in 1940, instead of Bricker, a Democrat would have been elected [...]" "Maybe I don’t actually recall F.D.R. as example. Synthetic image distilled from hearing assorted talk. Myth implanted subtly in tissue of brain. Like, he thought, myth of Hepplewhite. Myth of Chippendale. Or rather more on lines of Abraham Lincoln ate here. Used this old silver knife, fork, spoon. You can’t see it, but the fact remains." "“Human nature.” Joe added, “Nature of states. Suspicion, fear, greed. Churchill thinks the U.S.A. is undermining British rule in South Asia by appealing to the large Chinese populations, who naturally are pro-U.S.A., due to Chiang Kai-shek. The British start setting up”—he grinned at her briefly—“what are called ‘detention preserves.’ Concentration camps, in other words. For thousands of maybe disloyal Chinese. They’re accused of sabotage and propaganda. Churchill is so—" "Sure, the U.S.A. expands economically after winning the war over Japan, because it’s got that huge market in Asia that it’s wrested from the Japs. But that’s not enough; that’s got no spirituality. Not that the British have. They’re both plutocracies, rule by the rich. If they had won, all they’d have thought about was making more money, the upper class. Abendsen, he’s wrong; there would be no social reform, no welfare public works plans—the Anglo-Saxon plutocrats wouldn’t have permitted it." "His tone was earnest, almost beseeching. “Those old rotten money-run empires, Britain and France and U.S.A., although the latter actually a sort of bastard sideshoot, not strictly empire, but money-oriented even so. They had no soul, so naturally no future. No growth. Nazis a bunch of street thugs; I agree. You agree? Right?” "She had to smile; his Italian mannerisms had overpowered him in his attempt to drive and make his speech simultaneously. "“Abendsen talks like it’s a big issue as to whether U.S. or Britain ultimately wins out. Bull! Has no merit, no history to it. Six of one, dozen of other. You ever read what the Duce wrote? Inspired. Beautiful man. Beautiful writing. Explains the underlying actuality of every event. Real issue in war was: old versus new. Money—that’s why Nazis dragged Jewish question mistakenly into it—versus communal mass spirit, what Nazis call Gemeinschaft—folkness. Like Soviet. Commune. Right? Only, Communists sneaked in Pan-Slavic Peter the Great empire ambitions along with it, made social reform means for imperial ambitions." "The hands of the artificer,” Paul said, “had wu, and allowed that wu to flow into this piece. Possibly he himself knows only that this piece satisfies. It is complete, Robert. By contemplating it, we gain more wu ourselves. We experience the tranquillity associated not with art but with holy things. I recall a shrine in Hiroshima wherein a shinbone of some medieval saint could be examined. However, this is an artifact and that was a relic. This is alive in the now, whereas that merely remained. By this meditation, conducted by myself at great length since you were last here, I have come to identify the value which this has in opposition to historicity. I am deeply moved, as you may see." "They’re out of their minds, Childan said to himself. Example: they won’t help a hurt man up from the gutter due to the obligation it imposes. What do you call that? I say that’s typical; just what you’d expect from a race that when told to duplicate a British destroyer managed even to copy the patches on the boiler [...]" "You and I—we have no awareness of the vast number of uneducated. They can obtain from mold-produced identical objects a joy which would be denied to us. We must suppose that we have the only one of a kind, or at least something rare, possessed by a very few. And, of course, something truly authentic. Not a model or replica.” He continued to gaze past Childan, at empty space. “Not something cast by the tens of thousands.”" "“Paul. One moment.” "He fingered the bit of jewelry; it had become slimy with sweat. “I—am proud of this work. There can be no consideration of trashy good-luck charms. I reject.” "Once more he could not make out the young Japanese man’s reaction, only the listening ear, the mere awareness. "“Thank you, however,” Robert Childan said. Paul bowed. Robert Childan bowed. "“The men who made this,” Childan said, “are American proud artists. Myself included. To suggest trashy good-luck charms therefore insults us and I ask for apology.” "Incredible prolonged silence. Paul surveyed him. One eyebrow lifted slightly and his thin lips twitched. A smile? "“I demand,” Childan said. That was all; he could carry it no further. He now merely waited. Nothing occurred. Please, he thought. Help me. "Paul said, “Forgive my arrogant imposition.” He held out his hand. "“All right,” Robert Childan said. They shook hands." "“Sir,” Mr. Baynes said to the general, “I am Captain R. Wegener of the Reichs Naval Counter-intelligence. As understood, I represent no one but myself and certain private unnamed individuals, no departments or bureaus of the Reich Government of any sort.” "The general said, “Herr Wegener, I understand that you in no way officially allege representation of any branch of the Reich Government. I am here as an unofficial private party who by virtue of former position with the Imperial Army can be said to have access to circles in Tokyo who desire to hear whatever you have to say.” "Weird discourse, Mr. Tagomi thought. But not unpleasant. Certain near-musical quality to it. Refreshing relief, in fact." "This talk will fail, Mr. Tagomi thought. No matter what is at stake. We cannot enter the monstrous schizophrenic morass of Nazi internecine intrigue; our minds cannot adapt." "But what does it matter? Even if Doctor Goebbels is deposed and Operation Dandelion is canceled? They will still exist, the blackshirts, the Partei, the schemes if not in the Orient then somewhere else. On Mars and Venus. No wonder Mr. Tagomi could not go on, he thought. The terrible dilemma of our lives. Whatever happens, it is evil beyond compare. Why struggle, then? Why choose? If all alternatives are the same . . . Evidently we go on, as we always have. From day to day. At this moment we work against Operation Dandelion. Later on, at another moment, we work to defeat the police. But we cannot do it all at once; it is a sequence. An unfolding process. We can only control the end by making a choice at each step. He thought, We can only hope. And try. On some other world, possibly it is different. Better. There are clear good and evil alternatives. Not these obscure admixtures, these blends, with no proper tool by which to untangle the components." "Juliana said, “I wonder why the oracle would write a novel. Did you ever think of asking it that? And why one about the Germans and the Japanese losing the war? Why that particular story and no other one? What is there it can’t tell us directly, like it always has before? This must be different, don’t you think?”" ]]> </content> </entry> <entry> <title type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Le Transperceneige by Jacques Lob and Jean-Marc Rochette (1982; fr) (read in 2019)]]> </title> <id>https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3797</id> <link href="https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3797"/> <updated>2019-09-25T13:41:57+02:00</updated> <author> <name type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Marco von Ballmoos]]> </name> <uri>https://earthli.com/users/marco</uri> </author> <summary type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA["Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is" ... ]]> </summary> <content type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Published by marco on 25. Sep 2019 13:41:57 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I've failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an interest in this book, then I'm happy for you." This is an older, French, black-and-white graphic novel about a 1,001-car train charging along a track hundreds of thousands of kilometers long, encircling a globe frozen by man's hubris and foolishness. It is the last bastion of humanity, holding the last dregs in its innards. The world is cold because man released a chemical to counteract the effects of his having warmed the climate disastrously. It backfired and froze the world. The story is interesting, well-drawn and offers some insight into man's hubris, with analogies to our current climate predicament. They were unable to snatch their slim hope, either. There are the "queuetards" (denizens from the back of the train) and the elites (the front, naturally). Humanity's age-old structure has been compressed into one dimension. We meet two prisoners, one queuetard (Proloff) and one sympathizer for the queuetards (Belleau), from the middle of the train. They are being taken forward from their prison to the state cars, nearer the front. Their journey takes them through the luxury of the vegetable and plant cars, something the queuetard didn't even know existed. He only saw the sun again for the first time in years -- because the rear cars have no windows. Proloff moves forward through the train with Belleau, discovering areas that he's never seen -- and eventually moving beyond the cars that even she's seen. They become lovers (of course). They learn that the train is slowing and, that General Krimson (in charge of the military and, de facto, of the train) plans to decouple part of the rear of the train. The military pursues them -- ostensibly because they are spreading a virus throughout the train. Proloff and Belleau make it to the very front of the train, to the locomotive. Here, Proloff shoots out windows, letting in the -87ºC air. Belleau succumbs, but he is rescued by Alex Forrester, the odd and remote engineer of the train. The engineer works with Olga, the AI in the train. Olga can continue to run indefinitely, as long as she is accompanied by a human presence. The cars are detached, Proloff takes over as engineer -- and the virus story turns out to have been true, as he remains the sole passenger of the Transperceneige at the end of the first book. The second book picks up the story in a second train, larger than the Transperceneige. It runs on the same track and is aware of the other, smaller train. They are in constant fear of a collision and, thus, make frequent "braking drills" to verify that the train could stop should it be necessary. During this time, the "Arpenteurs" (surveyors) go out onto the frozen surface to perform various missions. The first depicted mission sees the leader fall, spilling one of his eyes from his frozen head. A young Puig Vallès picks it up -- and, seventeen years later, becomes a surveyor himself. Puig is popular among the masses, as the surveys are one of the only real, physical entertainments -- everything else is virtual and available to only a select few (the rich and winners of occasional lotteries). As in the film, the train is separated into the have and have-nots. Puig's popularity is limited to the masses; the leaders seek to get rid of him by sending him on a suicide mission to fly from the train and reconnoiter the track in front. He manages it, as no other before him, and blackmails them into letting him land back on the train -- he threatens to kamikaze into the train's vitals. He had discovered a destroyed bridge in front of the train and could help them deviate before a disaster. Safely back on the train, he discovers further that the Transperceneige is actually no longer circling the globe. That, instead, the very first braking maneuver was not a test of avoiding the other train, but was to stop and pick up the other, smaller train, depositing it into the capacious bowels of several of the thousands of cars in the larger train. Proloff, as the only survivor, continued on his journey, but in a train within a train. Perhaps this is a metaphor for the virtual reality that the denizens of the larger train "enjoyed". The leaders kept this from the general populace, in order to continue to control them with the fear of a collision. In the third book, Puig is in charge of the larger train. He is now married to Val, the daughter of General Kennel, the new head of the military. There is an accident that forces a braking maneuver. Several cars in the middle of the train are destroyed. Puig dons his surveyor's suit once again to investigate. At the same time, Reverend Dickson dispatches his secret child-assassins in similar suits to kill him while he's outside. The assassins are also to detach the back part of the train, leaving half of the remaining population to die. Puig survives the assassination attempt, killing the other soldiers and making his way forward to depose an ascendant Dickson and General Kennel. He manages it and encases them in the "drawers" -- morgue-like containers that serve as a prison on the train. Shortly after, the train's communications system detects music playing from the opposite side of the ocean. Puig must make another decision: to mount the emergency treads on the first 25 train cars and abandon the rest of the train to divert across the ocean and investigate the source of the music. Meanwhile, the Reverend and Kennel have sweet-talked their way out of prison and have taken over the back of the train again. This time, the back of the train is the wagons of pleasure and decadent restaurants near the former front of the train. As they slowly make their way across the frozen ocean, the Reverend and General start a new mutiny to turn the train around and return to the tracks on the former shore. At the head of the train, Puig responds by cutting water, power and heat to the mutinous cars. Dickson launches one last-ditch attack from the outside, sending his remaining assassins along the top of the train to the command capsule at the front. Puig and his colleagues repel the attack, retaining control of the train. He returns along their route and kills Dickson and Kennel by shooting through the ceiling of their wagon. The train drives on, toward the other shore. Near the shore, there are frozen waves that threaten to split the train again. Puig once again takes to the sky to perform reconnaissance, confirming that they are very near the shore before nestling back onto the train. A long-dormant but still-active missile battery shatters the middle of the remaining train, forcing another shortening of the train and jettisoning of unneeded material (like Dickson's artwork). Finally, they alight on the opposite shore, severely shortened but still moving. The signal is much, much stronger and Puig becomes a surveyor once again to investigate the source. It is an automated system, playing music for a long-frozen audience. The whole journey and struggle was for naught. [Citations] None. ]]> </content> </entry> <entry> <title type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Adirondack Characters and Campfire Yarns: Early Settlers and their Traditions by William J. O‘Hern (2005) (read in 2019)]]> </title> <id>https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3795</id> <link href="https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3795"/> <updated>2019-09-17T07:46:26+02:00</updated> <author> <name type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Marco von Ballmoos]]> </name> <uri>https://earthli.com/users/marco</uri> </author> <summary type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA["Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is" ... ]]> </summary> <content type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Published by marco on 17. Sep 2019 07:46:26 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I've failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an interest in this book, then I'm happy for you." The author many times writes that there are so many tales lost to the mists of time and that one volume doesn't suffice to include many of the tales that are known. I think he is overly enamored by the variety he thinks that he is offering. Many of the stories are very similar and they involve a painstaking protocol of how many animals were killed with how many shots. The stories rarely offer a surprise ending or even much interesting detail. They are just the description of a single everyday incident in an otherwise boring life. For example: "George was a good shot. In fact he was a sharpshooter with either a rifle or a shotgun. Mr. Ralph would tip George $5 for every partridge he shot. Once, George shot a kingfisher with a 30-30 Winchester across the bay near the outlet of Black Creek Lake. The bird was sitting on a large rock. The gun that George used the most was a 30-30 Winchester Carbine." This is a very typical passage: drily written, matter-of-fact, and not particularly fascinating. These men were not stewards of the land. They were unwashed and uneducated hunters who took as much as they possibly could. They laid bold claim to having been the man (because they were all men) to kill the last panther or the last bear. Only much later in the book would there be stories of some who seemed to want to take care of the Adirondacks. One of the most heralded mountain men was French Louie, a Canuck who'd wandered down to the region. He seemed nearly the most savage and unpredictable and just downright stupid-mean. The author claimed again and again that people loved him, but I don't see how. The author cites how much Louie loved his dogs and how fiercely he would defend them. But the dogs aren't native. They're just barking killing machines that he uses to cull as much meat and pelts from the woods as possible. When the wolves killed one of his dogs, Louie slaughtered the whole pack in revenge -- a lesson that could not hope to be learned by a pack with no surviving members. The only purpose was mindless slaughter and petty revenge. "Elijah Conklin's written recollections record that Louie ". . was the one who killed the last of the timber wolves in the Adirondacks. He killed five on Samson Lake. They killed his dog and he put arsenic in a doe's carcass and killed all five."" The author very clearly loves everything about the Adirondacks at any time since whites started writing about them. He is over the moon about every detail he can find and wants to preserve every possible word written about any era of trapping, hunting or being in the wild in the Adirondacks. But the author also venerates the trapper and hunter's right to kill the animals for money. Without fail, he characterizes animals as devious and mean in their hopeless attempts to save their lives from their technologically advanced and pitiless enemy, the Adirondack woodsman. A trap is, by design, a cruel way to kill an animal. It chews its own foot off or dies of exhaustion, starvation or dehydration. Beyond that, the author also lauds these heroes for avoiding the state authorities who are trying to contain their plunder and who try to make them stick with hunting and trapping methods that are legal and are not on private property. They didn't care and they were heroes for the devious methods with which they eluded the authorities. The park ranger is made out to be a pain in the ass and the criminal eluding him is venerated. Amongst themselves, there was a pact to keep each other alive -- honor among thieves, of a sort -- with a sort-of campsite-rule where you were allowed to use cabins that were not yours, but left them as good as or better than your found them. Besides the animosity between the woodsmen and the rangers, there was the tension between the woodsmen and their customers: "sports" or city-slickers who couldn't find their asses with both hands and a torch. "[...] some of these city dudes that come up here deer hunting and take turns having their pictures taken with a bunch of deer and maybe a bear or two hanging up behind them, never shot a gun in their lives and wouldn't know a turns skunk from a ten-point buck. They couldn't hit the inside of a barn if you closed the door on them." Most of the stories are written by other authors -- some of them write much better than O'Hern, but none of them write extremely well. The best passages came from the few women included in the volume, to be honest. I did learn more than I already knew about logging terms and traplines. That was certainly interesting. Most of the stories take place in places that I've visited -- some of them even lived (like Clinton). That certainly made it a more fun read than for someone who has no connection whatsoever to the places. The afterword was nice -- a plea for moderns to keep the Adirondacks alive as they are and as they were. [Citations] "All the men lived during a time when gathering scores of amusing anecdotes and information was painstaking. Many of their subjects were old or had died. The personal histories of natives they sought were already being obscured by the gathering mists of legend and hearsay." "The association of native and outsider is therefore less close and familiar today than in the last century. No composite creation of native's deeds and outsider's nostalgia personifies the region as did the old-time guide. But lore of the woods is still being made by hunters, fishermen, campers, trampers, summer residents, mountain climbers, skiers, boaters and other groups. Outsiders have an increasing share in it as their number and their need grow. 'Out of the woods we came, and to the woods we must return, at frequent intervals,' an Adirondack tourist of 80 years ago spoke for all generations, 'if we would redeem ourselves from the vanities of civilization.' Any return for reasons of the heart is the stuff of folklore." "George was a good shot. In fact he was a sharpshooter with either a rifle or a shotgun. Mr. Ralph would tip George $5 for every partridge he shot. Once, George shot a kingfisher with a 30-30 Winchester across the bay near the outlet of Black Creek Lake. The bird was sitting on a large rock. The gun that George used the most was a 30-30 Winchester Carbine." This is a very typical passage: drily written, matter-of-fact, and not particularly fascinating. "Elijah Conklin's written recollections record that Louie ". . was the one who killed the last of the timber wolves in the Adirondacks. He killed five on Samson Lake. They killed his dog and he put arsenic in a doe's carcass and killed all five." "When Louie went hunting he took his dog, Old Cape, with him. Old Cape was trained to sit in a guide boat and at his master's command jump out of the boat, swim to shore, race up a mountainside, and drive the deer clown to the lake where Louie could shoot them." The author cites how much he loved his dogs and how fiercely he would defend them. But the dogs aren't native. They're just barking killing machines that he uses to cull as much meat and pelts from the woods as possible. When the wolves killed one of his dogs, he slaughtered the whole pack in revenge -- a lesson that could not hope to be learned by a pack with no surviving members. The only purpose was mindless slaughter and petty revenge. "Dunning killed the last moose in the Adirondacks 32 years ago. He killed the last panther eight years ago. He may put a bullet through the last wolf, only a few of which are left. Black bear are still quite common, but these and deer are all that remain of the big animals that roamed through the Adirondacks in Dunning's younger days. The number of beasts which his gun has brought down, not counting smaller game like foxes, mink, otter and birds, will reach far into the thousands. He killed 102 panthers in eight years. The biggest catch of fish was made by him in 1833, when he pulled 96 pounds of salmon trout out of Piseco Lake in two hours. The largest salmon trout on record caught by Alvah's hook and it weighed 271/2 lbs." "Bockes asked Alvah how much he wanted for the skins. He said, `Ten dollars each.' Mr. Bockes said he would take the lot and took out his check book and drew a check for $100 and handed it to Alvah. He said, 'What's that Mr. Bockes?' Why,' he said, 'it's a check for $100.' Alvah said, 'No sir, no sir, don't want it, won't take it. I sell my fur for cash.' But; I said, 'Alvah , this gentleman is the cashier of the First National Bank of Saratoga.' `Don't care, don't care, if he's the governor of the state. I will not take it.' So we had to go back and we told Mr. Durant about it and we all had a good laugh. He let Mr. Bockes have the money and that evening we went over and got the otter skins. That shows what type of a man Alvah was. He was a child of the wilderness." Or maybe he just didn't want to accept any old piece of paper that someone said was worth $100. "Burt Conklin belonged to the tribe of real woodsmen, his viewpoint from the woods looking out. He refused to be a guide, and seldom worked for logger wages. He disliked the trapping that caught wild pelts before the fur was prime and that kept over into the spring when fades, rubs, and sheds were caught. As he passed his prime and saw the effects of Conservation law, he nodded his approval." "If the trap chain became entangled and prevented the sweep from working, or if the fisher could reach the tree, it would climb and pull the sweep up Until the pole cleared the crotched stake. When that happened, the fisher stood on the ground, and the vicious frenzied demon became a whirlwind of devastating behavior. Everything . . . but everything! . . . within reach of its razor-sharp claws and teeth would be shredded — the cubby house leveled as though it had never been built, the well sweep chewed off, and whatever the trap chain was fastened to would be splintered. The resulting damage from an angered or fear-filled fisher is incredible. Eventually it will either escape by leaving part of its foot in the trap, or else become exhausted and die from the strain of the struggle. "If a fisher escaped it was difficult to locate it, particularly if new snow covered its tracks. To find the trail, the loose snow was scraped away where the fisher might have been detained by small brush, fallen tree tops or anything else that might impede its progress. Wherever the fiendish animal had been there was certain to be plenty of wood splinters or bits of chewed brush beneath the snow. (Emphasis added.)" Note how the author calls an animal fighting for its life fiendish "He stepped on [the paddle], unfastened the other snowshoe and placed that foot on the paddle without breaking any of the markings of the snowshoe trail. "By changing in this fashion, both men succeeded in getting several feet away from their snowshoe tracks without leaving any marks. They followed the deer runway in their hunting packs for three or four hundred feet beyond the snowshoe trail. At that spot they put on their rawhide snowshoes and circled until they returned to the main line without coming near where their tracks could be seen. That night the game protectors arrived at the camp the two men had left in the morning. The next day they traced every snowshoe track leading away from the cabin, but all circled back to the spot where they had departed. "The state men were stymied and returned, disgruntled, to the lodge at Honnedaga Lake. Burt and Jack lingered at a friend's hunting camp to await developments, but nothing happened. They heard that the protectors had remarked, "Those trappers must have wings. We'll never try to chase them again."" Beyond that, the author also lauds these heroes for avoiding the state authorities who are trying to contain their plunder and who try to make them stick with hunting and trapping methods that are legal and are not on private property. They didn't care and they were heroes for the devious methods with which they eluded the authorities. The park ranger is made out to be a pain in the ass and the criminal eluding him is venerated. "[...] They had failed to bring a blanket as they were confident of finding a cabin by the lake, in which there would be bedding and food as was the custom in all trapper's cabins. Burt always left his own camps with an adequate pile of dry wood, blankets, and food, so he would have something for himself on a return trip or unplanned visit, as well as for some other trapper who might be caught in the woods without adequate provisions. Such was the unwritten code of the wilderness: the wayfarer was welcome to enter a cabin and make use of its conveniences, but he was expected to take proper care of the equipment, replenish the wood supply, leave the but clean when he departed, and "pass the good deed on" to someone else in need whenever the chance arose." "When a man that size approaches under the pretense that he would like to see your rod [OMG phrasing] because he desires to purchase one, as you fish a posted section of a river that has signs reminding club members only fly fishing is allowed, there is no waiting to see what will happen. "I knew there would be no amusing laughter. I made good time, actually excellent time, hightailing out of there. But the fellow kept up with me. I assumed he must have been a runner or just in darned good shape. After a time he could go no farther. He sat down on a rock in river's deep ravine to catch his breath. Seeing an opportunity to ease the burr in my lungs, I also stopped. ""Well there," I hollered, "We sure had quite a run." ""Yes indeed," he shouted back between heaves of his chest. "And let tell you something," he added. "We are going to have another as soon I gel breath."" "A large part of the plateau is now owned by the state and by two or three paper companies. Many sections are now being reforested with spruce and pine, set out by farmers, the state and paper concerns. "There were many hardwoods here, mostly birch and maple. The large virgin growth birch trees were shipped to Poland and manufactured into veneer. The waste material from the hardwood flooring operation, was made into charcoal and wood alcohol. No part of the tree went to waste. "The birches were beautiful white, silver and yellow. The maples were wonderful growths of curly and birds eye, shipped to Germany for use in making expensive musical instruments like violins. (Emphasis added.)" The emphasized portion is likely a story they all told each other to convince themselves how important their resources were to the world. It's something you'll often hear in stories from upstate -- or from poorer communities, in general. They inflate their sense of self-worth by imagining that their products are used only for the finest, fanciest things -- that they are part of something special. Nobody wants to think that they are slaughtering their local forests so that the Germans can turn them into heating pellets. "Mother Johnson died January 27, 1875, after a short illness, and, at the desire of her husband, was buried on a little knoll back of the house, where her husband was also buried when done with earthly things." I just like this sentence because it demonstrates the importance of commas. At first, I read it without them and though that both the short illness and the desire of her husband were what killed her. "[...] some of these city dudes that come up here deer hunting and take turns having their pictures taken with a bunch of deer and maybe a bear or two hanging up behind them, never shot a gun in their lives and wouldn't know a turns skunk from a ten-point buck. They couldn't hit the inside of a barn if you closed the door on them." "You who today love the wilds of the Adirondack Mountains, take the time as you backpack along a winding trail, fish a stream, or sit in the warmth of an open fire, graced by the mournful oo-A H-ho yodel of a common loon, to think of the future of the mountains. Ahead of slipping into car comfortable sleeping systems set on self-inflating pads inside a ripstop loon tent set up under whatever weather conditions Mother Nature happens to bring forth, we should consider how each of us can help provide equivalent experiences for future multitudes who will long for adventures such Blankman, Harvey Dunham, Mortimer Norton, and the men and they wrote about had. People must strike a balance between abundant fives, the natural world and leaving a heritage for future generations. 1 can Xi my pen down knowing that Adirondack Characters and Campfire Yarns has played a small part in raising awareness of our priceless Adirondack Mountain heritage." ]]> </content> </entry> <entry> <title type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[What We Talk about When We Talk about Rape by Sohaila Abdulali (2018) (read in 2019)]]> </title> <id>https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3788</id> <link href="https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3788"/> <updated>2019-09-12T18:33:42+02:00</updated> <author> <name type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Marco von Ballmoos]]> </name> <uri>https://earthli.com/users/marco</uri> </author> <summary type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA["Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is" ... ]]> </summary> <content type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Published by marco on 12. Sep 2019 18:33:42 Updated by marco on 3. Feb 2024 08:46:22 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I've failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an interest in this book, then I'm happy for you." While this book offered a few interesting insights (mostly in the conclusion), it was rather thin on the ground with information. While there were a few statistics, many of them were either unsubstantiated or cited shaky sources (AlterNet, Jezebel, etc.) These are not bad sources, per se. They sometimes have quality articles, but they just as often have unhinged screeds that you can't really take seriously. It's unclear which ones she cited -- but some of the "facts" she cited seemed nearly unbelievable (e.g. "In the US, more than ninety percent of people with developmental disabilities are sexually assaulted"). Unfortunately, throughout the book, she devolves to the "all women are victims and all men are monsters" rhetoric that should be beneath her. She interviews much better than she writes. The book was actually very short and had no central theme or line through it, other than all of the material being more-or-less about rape and its consequences. Sometimes the switches between chapters was jarring -- and often topics that had come up previously were brought back up again later, but without any cohesion. It felt like a scattershot collection of essays and thoughts, with a copious amount of quoted material to fill in what ended up being a short book. The conclusion contained more interesting material, with more cohesiveness and balance, suggesting that the person I'd heard interviewed was the same one who'd written that material. While I applaud her for writing a book about rape all over the world, she doesn't properly indicate which country she's talking about when she makes some of her more incendiary statements. For example, earlier in the book, she writes: "Sexual predators deserve due process, but they don’t deserve blanket immunity from accusations any more than any other criminals." Again with the straw man. Even if a lot of people believe this, do you need to spend so much time debunking it? Might as well prove that 2+2=4. As well, while this might be the case in people's minds in some places in the States, it's not the legal case anywhere. Boys will be boys is stupid. So is pretending that people aren’t animals who have to be trained to resist biological impulses. Anyone who says they haven’t ever felt a nearly overwhelming biological urge is lying, man or woman. Giving in to it without consent is rape. Controlling it takes training. Again and again throughout the book she claims that rape is something that happens all the time, but fails to back it up with data from any reliable source. For example, she writes that "out of every 1,000 rapes," * 310 are reported to the police; * 57 lead to an arrest; * 11 get referred to the court system; * 6 rapists go to jail. But how do we know that’s abysmal? Are we assuming all 1000 are true? Is she saying that only 6‰ of rapists are punished? As I wrote above, these unsubstantiated "facts" are just presented as if they don't need any justification, even though the accusation is incredibly monstrous. Abysmal would be false convictions or acquittals of rapists (perversion of justice). At a few points, she writes that her husband is brilliant, which left me thinking that she should have had him write the book. After she several times cites that 70-80% of rapes occur in the home or with close relatives, she fills the rest of the book with (possibly apocryphal) stories of rapes outside of the family. They're almost certainly true (hoping she did her research), but they're so over-the-top, they can't represent even the average of the experience for those rapes that do occur outside of the family. For example, "Late night/early morning, there was a knock on the passenger window. I looked up and saw that it was my ex. I cracked the door. The next thing I know I’m being dragged out of the car and slammed onto the ground. “There were nine guys. Four I had known. The other five were strangers. One was my best friend’s boyfriend. Some had bats. One had a gun. They kicked me and beat me. They zip-tied me and put me in the trunk. They took me to a basement and took turns raping me." Who does this? Madness of the highest order. Who plans this? How do you have nine friends who’ll come along on a gang rape/kidnapping party? I'm not doubting it, but it's at the absolute extreme end of sexual assault, to say nothing of harassment. Those that call everything rape would throw this in the same category as unwanted hair-sniffing or shoulder-touching? It's madness, and she offers no guidance. We’re all trained to just believe everything we hear, but this seems beyond the pale. I know it must happen sometimes, but the story is presented as if this is a risk that faces anyone at any time. Just like the story of Alexa (included in citations below), where she ended up doing tremendous amounts of blow and being passed around her Wall Street–office like a sex toy. This is not a common danger. To round out the critique with one of the better ideas from the end of the book (even though the grammar is a bit slapdash): "[...] if someone forces you to have sex, it is rape. The narrative that says: good girls don’t get raped; bad girls can’t get raped. In either case, the nuns’ infamous Boys are off the hook. We’ve created a narrative that says that either it didn’t happen to you, or you deserved it." [Citations] "Weinstein, a Hollywood mogul, has been accused, arrested and indicted for sexually abusing woman after woman for years.10 His victims stayed mostly silent, or if they spoke out, it was only to their closest people. Then, in October 2017, the story burst wide open with a New York Times article about Weinstein’s predatory behavior, which apparently had been an open secret in Hollywood. Star after star said she had been harassed, or worse, by him. Gwyneth Paltrow, Angelina Jolie, Rosanna Arquette, Ashley Judd, Asia Argento, Rose McGowan … the stories were revolting. The response, for the most part, was heartening. Others in the industry lavished support on the women who spoke out. Those who didn’t were a distinct but vocal minority. Words turned out to be more powerful than Harvey Weinstein’s grip on the industry, and certainly more powerful than his dick, which way too many people have seen. Words are the enemy of impunity. They can create real change." Not indicted. Arrested, but not charged. Perfect example of the exaggerated and quasi-mendacious style. "In the US, more than ninety percent of people with developmental disabilities are sexually assaulted." Thats nearly all. No footnote. "So what? So what if she was the initiator? If she was drunk, or she changed her mind after they were in the room, or she changed her mind after they were both naked and the condom was already on—if she changed her mind at any point, and he didn’t listen, that was the point at which she stopped consenting. There’s no guaranteed ticket to the end of the line." This runs counter to her prior citation about eliminating the myth of woman as submitter and man as aggressor. "It’s complicated to look at women’s agency in a system of abuse, but we must." Why is that? Because it contradicts your all-women-are-victims narrative. "So often we tend to talk about the victims and the ways they went along with, or took advantage of, or kept suspiciously quiet about, rape. They didn’t leap up and stab the man and go running out clutching their clothes to their outraged bosoms, therefore they consented." That's different from men using rape as gatekeepers to power. It shouldn't happen either, but these acts are more avoidable. Report and suffer the non-rape consequences. Torch a potential career. It wasn't consensual sex, but it was a deal. Avoidable by not taking the deal. Shitty that she's blocked from pursuing dreams, yes, but more avoidable and in a different class than assault on a street or in the home or by family. "The case was dismissed. The judge said they were normal men, and therefore they couldn’t be criminals. Audrey had been sexually active before that night, therefore she hadn’t been raped. A friend to whom she explained this reasoning was as flabbergasted by it as I hope you are, dear reader. She" I don't believe this is so simple as she makes it out to be. In the US? Maybe. It's very difficult to eliminate this mindset. But her example seems quite extreme. "Sexual predators deserve due process, but they don’t deserve blanket immunity from accusations any more than any other criminals." Again with the straw man. Even if a lot of people believe this, do you need to spend so much time debunking it? Might as well prove that 2+2=4 Boys will be boys is stupid. So is pretending that people aren't animals who have to be trained to resist biological impulses. Anyone who says they haven't ever felt a nearly overwhelming biological urge is lying, man or woman. Giving in to it without consent is rape. Controlling it takes training. "All of us men are guilty in some way or the other for these atrocities and crimes against our dear women." "As a man, I apologize for what those evil men did. All of us men are guilty in some way or the other for these atrocities and crimes against our dear women. I hope" Strongly disagree. "It’s no wonder the conviction rate in American rape trials is abysmal. Consider this: out of every 1,000 rapes, "" * 310 are reported to the police; * 57 lead to an arrest; * 11 get referred to the court system; * 6 rapists go to jail. How do we know that's abysmal? Are we assuming all 1000 are true? Abysmal would be false convictions or acquittals of rapists (perversion of justice). "In the US, thousands of rape kits (the packets of forensic evidence containing semen, hairs, fibres, etc. collected from victims) are gathering dust awaiting testing while rapists go free." Ugh. "The official version matters. Sticks and stones may break my bones, and words too will always hurt me." Always? "Someone needs to tell Ted that you don’t annoy girls to show them you like them. When Ted goes to college and has an unrequited crush, how’s he going to show it? Ask for a movie date? Or break into the woman’s room and rape her?" Knock it off, Ted. Ted the third-grader is obviously already a fully formed rapist-in-waiting. "One of my smarter moves was marrying this man." You should have had him write this book, I think. This is less a book and more a collection of loose notes and unsubstantiated Live Journal--links on a topic. "Reading these accounts reminds me why it is dangerous when we say that rape has nothing to do with sex." This is a good point, but could have been made without the possibly entirely apocryphal stroke story from reddit. "I’m just pointing out that it makes perfect sense to me when I see photographs of famous women smiling and hugging men whom they later point out as rapists. The fact that you have confused feelings about the person who hurt you doesn’t make you guilty. It makes you human." "Alexa is a Puerto Rican New Yorker." This lady's story just keeps piling it on. Possibly true, but an absolute disaster of a person. Everything just "happened" to her. No agency. "Imagine what would be unleashed if so many people didn’t have to waste so much time dealing with flashbacks, secret-keeping, suicidal thoughts, low self-esteem, crippling fear of … everything, and on down the dreary list. Imagine the fantastic, the amazing, the mind-boggling things so many rape survivors could do, say, create or be if they didn’t have to waste time being traumatized and stymied and made small." "LIFE, UNLIKE GOLF, doesn’t allow for handicaps when you go out to play. You come yowling out into the world into a random set of circumstances, and they mark you forever, for better or worse." "“Late night/early morning, there was a knock on the passenger window. I looked up and saw that it was my ex. I cracked the door. The next thing I know I’m being dragged out of the car and slammed onto the ground. “There were nine guys. Four I had known. The other five were strangers. One was my best friend’s boyfriend. Some had bats. One had a gun. They kicked me and beat me. They zip-tied me and put me in the trunk. They took me to a basement and took turns raping me." Who does this? madness of the highest order. Who plans this? How do you have nine friends who'll come along on a gang rape/kidnapping party? We're all trained to just believe everything we hear, but this seems beyond the pale. I know it must happen sometimes, but the story is presented as if this is a risk that faces anyone at any time. Just like the story of Alexa above, where she ended up doing tremendous amounts of blow and being passed around her Wall Street--office like a sex toy. This is not a common danger. "Almost every one—male, female, trans, gender-fluid, gay, straight, bi—had multiple stories of rape. Gang-raped by eleven of his lover’s friends on a hotel terrace; set upon by more than a dozen of her brother’s political rivals in a forest; raped by policemen as the price of staying out of prison and earning money for her children …" India sounds utterly loathsome. Are there similar undercurrents in America? Switzerland? I just heard a story yesterday about a school class of a good friend's son in Switzerland. There were boys in his class who were shouting down the teacher, telling her that women's rights aren't relevant and to stop teaching such crap. They were fourteen years old. They've been removed from the school because they're too unruly, reprobate and likely irredeemable. I wouldn't know where to begin undoing that boy's mindset. "Sangeeta is a second-generation sex worker. She would have liked to do something else, but she couldn’t finish school because of the abuse she got for being a sex worker’s daughter. Her teacher threatened to burn her alive, and she left school and became a sex worker at twelve. She lives with her children and sister. She talked about feeling safe working out of her upstairs room, rather than visiting clients. “If a client calls me somewhere else, and suddenly four or five men appear, that’s rape." Every word is horrifying. "if someone forces you to have sex, it is rape. The narrative that says: good girls don’t get raped; bad girls can’t get raped. In either case, the nuns’ infamous Boys are off the hook. We’ve created a narrative that says that either it didn’t happen to you, or you deserved it." "It’s time to throw one idiotic notion overboard—the notion that men can’t stop, that there’s a point of no return once you’re sexually aroused. We keep talking about women’s agency, but men have agency too. Guys, tell me this: if you were in the middle of hot sex and really, really into it, and your grandmother walked into the room and peered at you over her glasses, would you stop, or would you keep going?" "Why they do it is interesting, but after a point I’m more interested in moving along from this unevolved state of human interaction. I don’t want to care about rapists’ motivations. They should just stop. Whether it’s wired in or because their daddy didn’t play with them or they’re just jerks or they’re sexually frustrated or they do it because they can or they do it because they can’t not do it or they’re normal or they’re abnormal, who cares? They should just stop what one superior babysitter once called this “third-class behavior.” Unfortunately we do have to spend time trying to understand, if we’re going to stop it. So yeah, we can’t talk about rape without talking about why men rape." "It’s hard to believe in people’s innate humanity when you can go to a local shop in India and buy a rape video for a hundred rupees. That’s a real rape video, by the way, not a simulation. In North India, it’s sometimes euphemistically called a “local video” or a “WhatsApp sex video.”107 You can go to a small general store and buy one for a pittance. Men rape women, film their actions, and then sell the videos. I’d like to say that I have faith in human nature. Human nature is kindness and large-heartedness, compassion and respect. But human nature is also vile and cruel, selfish and entitled." ]]> </content> </entry> <entry> <title type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Die Menschheit schafft sich ab by Harald Lesch and Klaus Kamphausen (2016) (read in 2019)]]> </title> <id>https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3787</id> <link href="https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3787"/> <updated>2019-09-11T08:42:44+02:00</updated> <author> <name type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Marco von Ballmoos]]> </name> <uri>https://earthli.com/users/marco</uri> </author> <summary type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA["Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is" ... ]]> </summary> <content type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Published by marco on 11. Sep 2019 08:42:44 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I've failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an interest in this book, then I'm happy for you." This book presents a history of mankind and its efforts that begins in the very early universe and slowly focuses its lens on the modern day. It falls into the category of two other books I've read this year, Eine Kurze Geschichte der Menschheit and Summa Technologiae. All of these books offer a sweeping look at human and galactic history and scientific knowledge, which serve as a basis for predictions. Harari predicts cybernetics and AI. Lem does as well. Lesch and Kamphausen predict climate catastrophe. They take us from the Big Bang and the invention of knowledge, the discovery of our planet, continents and then into how the anthropocene has the Earth in its grip. The authors discuss the conditions and events that led to life on Earth and then the various forms that it took over the eons. They do this in order to juxtapose it against the profound effect that mankind is having on the planet in a comparably ridiculously short amount of time. While it took hundreds of millions of years for the remains of dinosaurs and plants to turn into pockets of oil and gas in the lithosphere, mankind is now using 1,000,000 years worth of these supplies every year. Fish of all kinds were five times more abundant as recently as the 1950s and we're taking out twice the replacement rate every year. We've killed off almost every creature larger than a cockroach and replaced it with our paltry few domesticated breeds. We burn and burn and burn, emitting far more CO₂ than can be reasonably absorbed by the vegetation that we aren't clear-cutting to make way for monoculture crops. We're wiping away topsoil in arable lands at prodigious rates. While the book is quite science-heavy, it's accessible to anyone with a passing interest in the sciences and a modicum of intelligence and willingness to learn. The two authors are both professors and have an entertainingly didactic approach to their material, making sure to define their terms and provide explanation of not-so-common concepts. They definitely make an effort to show just how proven the case is that mankind is doing nearly everything wrong in its approach to using the only home it has. There is no room for doubt that we are driving directly at an immovable wall. The authors discuss how western civilization -- with its amoralism and naked greed and egocentrism -- is the main driving force and reason for our predicament. They include a detailed history, with some truly horrific anecdotes: "Die Neue Welt zählte um 1500 etwa 100 Millionen Menschen, so viele wie die Alte Welt. Innerhalb weniger Jahrzehnte wurden mehr als 90 Millionen Indianer in Nord-, Zentral- und Südamerika von den Krankheitserregern aus dem Abendland dahingerafft, während sich hundert Jahre nach Einführung der Kartoffelknolle die Bevölkerung auf der anderen Seite des Atlantiks verdoppelte. Eine nahrhafte Entwicklungshilfe." Before the discovery of the new world, western civilization had already driven itself to the wall once. "Europa stand Ende des 15. Jahrhunderts unter ökologischen Gesichtspunkten betrachtet an einem Punkt, der mit der heutigen globalen Situation vergleichbar ist. Die Wälder waren fast vernichtet, die meisten Gewässer verschmutzt, die nötigen Rohstoffe so gut with verbraucht, die Nahrung war knapp." However, because the population was so much smaller and had not yet industrialized, the damage it did to the planet was limited. It was driving its own extinction, but hadn't yet grown dangerous enough to take the rest of the biosphere with it. It is very clearly the naked and greed-driven capitalism -- a form that ignores costs it incurs (e.g. environmental costs) in order to have more for itself -- that is the problem, according to the authors (and, quite frankly, science and common sense): "Das Eindringen in die Natur der Dinge ist im Anthropozän von herausragender Bedeutung. Aus den technologischen Entwicklungen ergibt sich dann zwangsläufig der Bedarf nach Rohstoffen und Energie. Die sollen natürlich möglichst billig sein, damit die ökonomischen Vorgaben, also die Renditeerwartungen, erfüllt werden können." And it's not only other species that suffer and die off in droves under this rapacious system. The system really only "works" for a very small percentage of humanity itself. That small part holds the rest of the world in thrall, commandeering their meager produce in order to enrich themselves. "Wir wissen, die Erde wird nicht wachsen, aber unsere Ansprüche wachsen, – und die Ungerechtigkeit und Ungleichheit wachsen mit. "Müssen wir den Planeten zerstören und andere Menschen in Armut halten, um unser Leben in gewohntem Maß – oder sollte man besser sagen, in gewohnter Maßlosigkeit – fortzuführen?" This system has a tremendous number of victims, not only in the rest of the species, but also in humans: "Der Hunger tötet welt-weit ungefähr 100.000 Menschen täglich. Kaum jemand spricht über diesen Völkermord, von Abhilfe ganz zu schweigen." The victims are not only in the present but also in the future. Our desire for "freedom" uses up resources that are not ours, but that our worldview in no way prevents us from using. We blindly assume that if it has been made available or can be obtained, then it is ours to have. "Freiheit ist erstens der Kneipenbesuch, und zweitens, dass der Wirt Heizpilze auf den Gehsteig stellt, damit man auch im Januar den Wein und den Barsch draußen genießen kann. Freiheit ist, dass Amerikaner 6,6 Milliarden Kilowattstunden Strom allein für die Weihnachtsbeleuchtung aufwenden, mehr als Tansania im gesamten Jahr verbraucht. Freiheit ist, ein Auto zu bauen (und zu kaufen), das pro Kilometer 224 Gramm Kohlendioxid ausstößt." "Wir leben in einer so unbedingten Freiheit, dass wir der Meinung sind, dass Mobilität gleich Bewegungsfreiheit sei. Egal was es kostet, was es die Natur oder die zukünftigen Generationen kostet -- das ist völlig egal. Unsere unbedingte Freiheit steht über allem." We are using up these resources at a completely irreplaceable rate: "Wir sollten uns darüber im Klaren sein, dass die jetzige Form von Mobilität, die diesem unbedingten Freiheitsbegriff unterliegt, zu einem unbedingten Verbrauch führt. Wir haben keine Möglichkeiten dieses Verbrauchte zurückzuholen." The solution is obviously to stop doing all of this, but the outlook is bleak. "Es ist ein bisschen so wie mit dem kategorischen Imperativ. Niemand von uns kann so leben, dass alle seine Handlungen zum allgemeinen Gesetz er hoben werden. Aber er kann sich das Ziel setzen. Er sollte zumindest wissen, wie es richtig wäre und sich daran orientieren." "Scheinbar sind wir auf der Erde in diesem Irrsinn verfangen und als Besitzer solcher Derivate der Meinung: Komm, lass uns doch lieber darauf spekulieren, dass das Ding kaputtgeht. Nur -- was machen wir dann? An wen soll die Versicherung auszahlen?" They include several essays from other authors about various current topics, like the efficacy of the "Energiewende" in Germany or the efforts at changing habits and usage in various countries in Europe (though with a focus on Germany). [Citations] "Sie kennen doch den Unterschied zwischen Vernunft und Verstand, oder? Der Verstand ist das Instrument der Vernunft, was uns zum vernünftigen Handeln befähigt. Die Vernunft bestimmt mit Weisheit und Moral unsere Handlungsweisen. Und was hat Kopernikus gesagt? ""Seid nicht wie die Tiere! Richtet euch nicht nur nach euren Sinnen, die euch vormachen, dass sich die Welt um euch herum dreht. Nein, es gibt allgemeinere Prinzipien, derer unsere Vernunft mittels unseres Verstandes habhaft werden kann." "Diese Prinzipien können uns viel mehr über die Welt verraten, als das, was unsere Sinner uns vorgaukeln." "Wenn ein Wissenschaftler sagt, wir haben hier einen Teil des Universums, und dieser Teil funktioniert so ähnlich wie das, was wir von der Erde kennen, dann ist das auch schon sehr bedeutend. Aber zu behaupten, dass das, was wir von der Erde kennen, die physikalischen Gesetze, die Strahlung, der Aufbau der Materie, die Lichtgeschwindigkeit, die Ladungen und vieles mehr, dass das alles überall im Universum genauso funktioniert -- so etwas kann doch keiner wissen, niemand kann es überprüfen." "Schauen wir uns die nächsten Milliarden Jahre im Zeitraffer an. Selbst nach über einer Milliarde Jahre praktizierter Photosynthese im Wasser war noch nicht viel Sauerstoff in die Atmostsphäre gelangt. Der meiste Sauerstoff blieb im Meer und wurde dort chemisch zur Eisenoxidation genutzt. Die biochemischen Kreisläufe führten zu einem immensen Wachstum an Bakterien. Sonst passierte eigentlich nichts. Blicken wir mit dem Fokus auf das Leben auf die gesamte Erdzeit, dann existieren in 90 Prozent der Zeit nur Bakterien und Einzeller. Bakterien ohne Zellkern, die Prokaryoten, und die 10.000-mal größeren Eurkaryoten oder Eurkaryonten mit einem Zellkern." "Vorher gab es, wenn überhaupt, immer nur allerkleinste Variationen eines bereits bekannten Themas. Natürlich kann man auch bei den Bakterien Evolution beobachetn, man muss sich nur in Geduld üben. Die einfache Vermehrung durch Verdopplung vollzieht sich rasant, aber Veränderungen dauern ziemlich lange. "Bei den Eukaryonten ist das ganz anders. Jedes neue Lebenwesen stellt eine neue Kombination dar." "Mit diesen Ergebnissen gehen wir an die Rekonstruktion historischer Abläufe. Deswegen wissen wir , wie alt das Kohlenstoffmaterial ist, das wir da verbrennen. Wir wissen, was passiert, wenn wir Kohlenstoff oxidieren und welche Energiemengen dabei frei werden. Das alles wissen wir. Zumindest weiss das eine relativ kleine Gruppe, die sich mit Wissenschaft beschäftig oder sich dafür interessiert." "Sesshafte Kulturen neigen dazu, Arbeit aufzuteilen. Der eine macht dies, der andere jenes. Es bildeten sich Spezialisten heraus, die besser als der Durchschnitt waren." "Man könnte es auch ganz anders betrachten. Man könnte direkt an den Anfang des Lebens zurückgehen, also vor vier Milliarden Jahren und fragen: Was war eigentlich der wesentliche Unterschied zwischen einer Erde ohne und einer mit Lebewesen? Der Unterschied ist, Lebewesen fangen sofort an, sich den äußeren Bedingungen entweder anzupassen oder ihnen auszuweichen. Scheinbar als hätten sie einen Willen. Die gleichen Atome, die in einer Zelle zu einer Membran zusammengebaut sind, würden sich als einzelne Atome in keiner Weise so verhalten. Aber weil sie in einer bestimmten Struktur auftauchen, entwickeln sie Eigenschaften, die es ihnen ermöglichen, zum Beispiel gewisse Konzentrationssteigerungen innerhalb einer Zelle zu verbessern und damit den Zellbetrieb aufrechtzuerhalten. Wären sie nicht in dieser Struktur, könnten die Atome das nicht." "Seine erste Reise hatte Kolumbus mit 87 Männern und drei Schiffen unternommen, bereits seine zweite Expedition zählte 17 Schiffe und 1.500 Männer. Dazu brachten die Spanier eine große Zahl von Hausschweinen und Pferden in die neue Welt." "Die Neue Welt zählte um 1500 etwa 100 Millionen Menschen, so viele wie die Alte Welt. Innerhalb weniger Jahrzehnte wurden mehr als 90 Millionen Indianer in Nord-, Zentral- und Südamerika von den Krankheitserregern aus dem Abendland dahingerafft, während sich hundert Jahre nach Einführung der Kartoffelknolle die Bevölkerung auf der anderen Seite des Atlantiks verdoppelte. Eine nahrhafte Entwicklungshilfe." "Europa stand Ende des 15. Jahrhunderts unter ökologischen Gesichtspunkten betrachtet an einem Punkt, der mit der heutigen globalen Situation vergleichbar ist. Die Wälder waren fast vernichtet, die meisten Gewässer verschmutzt, die nötigen Rohstoffe so gut with verbraucht, die Nahrung war knapp. "Europa entdeckte einen neuen Kontinent und konnte so seinen Kopf aus der Schlinge ziehen. Wir haben heute aber nur diese eine erde und keine Neue Welt, die entdeckt und ausgeplündert werden kann." "Es wurden Götter verehrt, es wurde das Individuum verehrt -- aber jetzt hat man etwas Abstraktes. Die abendländische Gesellschaft wandelt sich in eine Gesellschaft des Abstrakten. Sie wird sich weiter von der unmittelbaren Anschauung entfernen und dabei Wissenschaftsbereiche erschließen, die heute allgemein geläufig sind, damals aber eine Revolution darstellten." "Das erste Kraftwerk, das Sonnenstrahlung nutzen sollte, entstand bereits -- zumindest in Gedanken -- in den ersten zehn Jahren des 20. Jahrhunderts. Es sollte viele Jahrzehnte dauern, bis mal wieder jemand auf die Idee kam die Sonnenstrahlung für die Produktion von Strom anzuzapfen. "Der Erste Weltkrieg hat viele Entwicklungen zerstört. Er war aber auch ein Schlachtfeld der neuen Technologien. Die damals ein-gesetzte Waffentechnik war für ihre Zeit Hightech. Heraklit hatte schon recht: Der Krieg ist oft der Vater aller Dinge. Für die Grundlagenforschung und die technologische Entwicklung der Wissenschaft war das Militär schon immer ein großer Geldgeber. "Neben der Ökonomisierung findet auch eine Militarisierung der Welt statt. Militarisierung, Kolonialisierung, Globalisierung. Das Ganze funktioniert nur, weil die Physik, die Chemie, die Biologie, die Geowissenschaften mitmachen. Kausalitäten anbieten, Ursache-Wirkung-Erkenntnisse. Dieses fast lückenlose Wissen kommt in die Welt, und die macht damit, was sie will. Und was will sie? Die einen wollen Geld, die anderen Kontrolle und Macht." "Die Lichtgeschwindigkeit ist für uns völlig unvorstellbar. Das gilt auch für das Planck'sche Wirkungsquantum als kleinste Einheit von Wirkung. Unvorstellbar! Trotzdem wird sich auf die Formeln E = mc² der speziellen Relativitätstheorie und dem E = h x f von Planck alles gründen, was von nun an im 20. Jahrhundert technologisch von Bedeutung ist. "Das Eindringen in die Natur der Dinge ist im Anthropozän von herausragender Bedeutung. Aus den technologischen Entwicklungen ergibt sich dann zwangsläufig der Bedarf nach Rohstoffen und Energie. Die sollen natürlich möglichst billig sein, damit die ökonomischen Vorgaben, also die Renditeerwartungen, erfüllt werden können." "Wir wissen, die Erde wird nicht wachsen, aber unsere Ansprüche wachsen, -- und die Ungerechtigkeit und Ungleichheit wachsen mit. "Müssen wir den Planeten zerstören und andere Menschen in Armut halten, um unser Leben in gewohntem Maß -- oder sollte man besser sagen, in gewohnter Maßlosigkeit -- fortzuführen? "Es ist keine Zeit mehr für ein Lavieren zwischen gut denken und es könnte doch klappen. Die Menschheit bewegt sich bereits seit mehreren Jahrzehnten, seit 1987, in einem ökologischen Defizit, das von Jahr zu Jahr wächst und mehr Biokapazität des Planeten Erde unwiederbringlich zerstört." "Umweltökonomische Bewertungen werden oft kritisiert, weil ökonomische Bewertungen von Natur zur Verdrängung moralischer Argumente für den Umweltschutz führen, weil sie auf einem anthropozentrischen Weltbild basieren und monetäre Werte in den Mittelpunkt stellen. "Diese Kritik ist durchaus gerechtfertigt. Aber den ökonomisch denkenden Menschen der heutigen Leistungsgesellschaft, die Schäden an der Natur als unvermeidbare Begleiterscheinung ih-res Tuns abtun, öffnet diese Zahl vielleicht einen anderen Blick auf die natürlichen Werte der Erde. Oder kennen Sie einen Staat, der seine jährliche Abfallproduktion, die Zerstörung natürlicher Ressourcen und seine jährliche Gesamtemission von CO2 und anderen Klimagasen als Minuswert in die Berechnung seines jährlich erwirtschafteten Bruttosozialproduktes einbezieht?" "In Jean Zieglers Buch Wir lassen sie verhungern, München 2012 steht nachzulesen, dass in dieser Welt voller Überfluss alle fünf Sekunden ein Kind unter zehn Jahren verhungert. Für Jean Ziegler ist das nicht nur ein — oder ein Systemfehler, sondern eine Schande, ein Skandal, organisiertes Verbrechen und Massenmord, den es augenblicklich zu beenden gilt. Jean Ziegler. „Der Hunger tötet welt-weit ungefähr 100.000 Menschen täglich. Kaum jemand spricht über diesen Völkermord, von Abhilfe ganz zu schweigen."" "Aus diesen wenigen Exponentialkurven, aus diesen Wachstums-kurven, diesen Hockeyschlägerkurven lässt sich für einen gesunden Menschenverstand mit einem schnellen Blick ablesen, dass wir nicht weitermachen können wie in den letzten 150 bis 200 Jahren. Irgendwann ist die Party vorbei. Jede dieser Kurven wird irgendwann ein Limit durchbrechen, die Konsequenzen sind nicht mehr berechen- geschweige denn beherrschbar. "Diese Hockeykurven zeigen uns aber zwei Dinge: Erstens, wir können massive Veränderungen vornehmen und bewirken. Und zweitens: Bisher haben wir das allerdings in die falsche Richtung getan." "2015 wurden weltweit 3,5 Milliarden Flugpassagiere gezählt. Für 2035 wird die doppelte Anzahl prognostiziert. Knapp 20.000 zivile Passagierflugzeuge sind weltweit im Einsatz. In 20 Jahren werden es nach Prognosen von Airbus und Boeing zwischen30 und 35 Tausend sein. Die Flugkilometer aller Passagiere 2015 addieren sich auf rund 6,3 Billionen Kilometer. Fliegen ist heute so selbstverständlich wie Busfahren. "Aber warum eigentlich? Klar ist doch: Die fossilen Brennstoffe. Benzin, Kerosin oder Schweröl werden immer weniger und sind endlich. Wieso verbrennen wir dann immer mehr davon, nur um möglichst schnell und luxuriös von A nach B zu kommen? Wie wird die Mobilität in der Zukunft aussehen müssen, ohne dass der Mensch seine Existenz auf diesem Planeten voll vor die Wand fährt?" "Wir leben in einer so unbedingten Freiheit, dass wir der Meinung sind, dass Mobilität gleich Bewegungsfreiheit sei. Egal was es kostet, was es die Natur oder die zukünftigen Generationen kostet - das ist völlig egal. Unsere unbedingte Freiheit steht über allem." "Wir sollten uns darüber im Klaren sein, dass die jetzige Form von Mobilität, die diesem unbedingten Freiheitsbegriff unterliegt, zu einem unbedingten Verbrauch führt. Wir haben keine Möglichkeiten dieses Verbrauchte zurückzuholen." "Ein kapitalistisches Wirtschaftssystem kann nicht langsamer werden. Es lebt von einer systemimmanenten Steigerungsdynamik; schon durch die Logik der Kapitalakkumulation und der Umschlagsgeschwindigkeiten von Kapital. Aber auch auf der kulturellen Seite gibt es da dieses Moment, die Welt in Reichweite zu bringen, wahrnehmbarer zu machen. Solange wir das nicht mit bedenken, ist die Idee, einfach mal langsam zu machen, allenfalls funktionale Entschleunigung." "Es ist ein bisschen so wie mit dem kategorischen Imperativ. Niemand von uns kann so leben, dass alle seine Handlungen zum allgemeinen Gesetz er hoben werden. Aber er kann sich das Ziel setzen. Er sollte zumindest wissen, wie es richtig wäre und sich daran orientieren. Mehr als eine Leitlinie kann auch diese Agenda 2030 für nachhaltige Entwicklung nicht sein. Bleibt die Hoffnung, dass möglichst viele Menschen diese Vorgaben beherzigen und umsetzen, damit sich bis 2030 auf der Welt tatsächlich etwas ändert. "Wir wissen alle, dass solch ambitionierten Ziele nicht vollständig erreich: werden können, aber manchmal ist es schon besser, nach dem absolut Unmöglichen zu streben, damit das Mögliche überhaupt erreicht werden kann. In diesem Sinne machen Sie mit!" "Natürlich können wir uns fragen: Was macht den Menschen aus? Ist es der freie Wille? Eine Diskussion, die wir aus der Hirnforschung kennen. Die bestreitet, dass wir einen freien Willen haben. Das ist eben genau diese Pervertierung der wissenschaftlichen Vernunft, die auch im Bereich der künstlichen Intelligenz zu einer gewissen Hybris führt. Dass wir glauben, dass der Mensch nicht mehr als ein Zahlengebilde sei, das man vermessen, steuern, analysieren und prognostizieren kann. Der Mensch wird auf das Biologistische reduziert." "Es kommen teilweise Geschäftsmodelle auf, die einfach non-compliant sind, die stehen nicht im Einklang mit der Rechtsordnung. Solche Beispiele finden wir bei Uber, bei Airbnb. Wir wissen, dass das eigentlich illegale Hotel- oder illegale Personenbeförderungsbetriebe sind. Trotzdem sind es neue Ideen, die durch die Digitalisierung möglich wurden. "Die Frage ist, was haben wir auf der einen Seite an schützenswerten Dingen im sozialen Bereich, im Bereich der mensch-lichen Arbeit mit einer entsprechenden Entlohnung? "Müssen wir das zerstören lassen, nur weil die Digitalisierung andere Geschäftsmodelle ermöglicht, oder wollen wir das schützen? Da muss es zur Debatte kommen. Wenn wir das einfach so laufen lassen, dann geht es erst mal sehr durcheinander. Weiter setzen wir etwas aufs Spiel, was wir eigentlich als gute Gesellschaftsordnung empfinden." "Es ist ja gut und wichtig, dass dieser Tage so leidenschaftlich über Flüchtlingsströme, Terror und die Zukunft Europas diskutiert wird. Zugleich ist es erschreckend, wie wenig über die Zusammenballung des Kapitals in den Händen einiger weniger geredet wird. Da könnte es nämlich einen Zusammenhang geben. "„Empört Euch", hatte der französische Intellektuelle und Résistance-Kämpfer Stephane Nessel einst die Jugend im Kampf gegen den Finanzkapitalismus ermahnt." "[...] die Vereinten Nationen [sind] das Beste was wir haben. Es gibt keinen anderen Völkerbund. Es gibt für uns keine Alternative, als immer wieder aufs Neue die Menschheit aufzurufen, sich an solchen Zielen zu orientieren und zu versuchen, sie zu erreichen. "Es ist ein bisschen so wie mit dem kategorischen Imperativ. Niemand von uns kann so leben, dass alle seine Handlungen zum allgemeinen Gesetz er-hoben werden. Aber er kann sich das Ziel setzen. Er sollte zumindest wissen wie es richtig wäre und sich daran orientieren. Mehr als eine Leitlinie kann auch diese Agenda 2030 für nachhaltige Entwicklung nicht sein. Bleibt die Hoffnung, dass möglichst viele Menschen diese Vorgaben beherzigen und umsetzen, damit sich bis 2030 auf der Welt tatsächlich etwas ändert." "In einem Kommentar der Süddeutschen Zeitung schrieb Detlef Esslinger: „Es wäre geboten, die Lebensart in den reichen, freien Gesellschaften als beides wahrzunehmen: als Errungenschaft und als gigantisches Problem. Gelebt wird hier ein Freiheitsverständnis, das absolut ist. Nichts ist den Menschen hier fremder als Beschränkung im persönlichen Alltag. Freiheit ist erstens der Kneipenbesuch, und zweitens, dass der Wirt Heizpilze auf den Gehsteig stellt, damit man auch im Januar den Wein und den Barsch draußen genießen kann. Freiheit ist, dass Amerikaner 6,6 Milliarden Kilowattstunden Strom allein für die Weihnachtsbeleuchtung aufwenden, mehr als Tansania im gesamten Jahr verbraucht. Freiheit ist, ein Auto zu bauen (und zu kaufen), das pro Kilometer 224 Gramm Kohlendioxid ausstößt."" "Das erinnert fatal an die alte Sowjetunion, als versucht wurde, das Klima zu verändern, indem sibirische Flüsse, die eigentlich nach Norden fließen, umgeleitet wurden. Das ging in die Hose. Es ist erstaunlich, wie viele Naturwissenschaftler von diesem Machbarkeitswahn geschüttelt sind." They've used these examples many times, but haven't mentioned the massive projects in the western Unites States. Phoenix, Los Angeles and Las Vegas wouldn't exist without giant projects that were equally offensive to nature. "[...] das Pumpen, Bohren, Schürfen, Explorieren,Transportieren und Raffinieren immer billiger und effizienter wird. Die Vorstellung, dass uns die Mineralien ausgehen - ich sage jetzt: leider - ist völlig verkehrt. Der Erdmantel ist erstaunlich dick. Selbst Erdöl und Gas findet sich da noch eine ganze Menge. Seltene Erden, Gold, was immer man will, ist massenweise da. Aber wie Ugo Bardi in einem eindringlichen Bericht an den Club of Rome geschildert hat, wird die Zerstörung pro gewonnenem Kilo immer schlimmer." "EUvW: Das ist in den asiatischen Kulturkreisen stärker verankert als in den monotheistischen. Ich setze - vielleicht als typischer Intellektueller - darauf, dass das menschliche Bewusstsein eine der wichtigsten Antriebskräfte ist. Wenn die meisten Menschen in dem Primitivbewusstsein leben, dass es nur darauf ankommt, in einem grausamen Wettbewerb zu bestehen und im Sinne einer kurzfristigen Erfolgslogik immer stärker zu werden, dann kommen wir überhaupt nicht weiter. Wir müssen also dafür sorgen, dass das Bewusstsein der Mehrheit der Menschen schließlich zu einer Ablösung dieses egoistischen, kurzfristigen, zerstörerischen Kapitalismus und der Finanzmarktverherrlichung führt, dass die Mehrheiten das ablehnen und überwinden." "HL: Wenn wir uns ansehen, wer heute am meisten verbraucht und emittiert, würden Sie dann bei China immer noch sagen ... "EUvW: Also, pro Kopf sind die Chinesen gar nicht so schlecht. Und im Übrigen, in dem 13. Fünfjahresplan hat das Zentralkomitee stramme Umweltveränderungen vorgeschrieben, das ist beschlossene Sache. Ich finde, die Chinesen sind allein schon aus diesem Grund sehr zu loben. Noch etwas, das viel dramatischere Auswirkungen hat: China ist das einzige Land der Erde, das eine Stabilisierung der Bevölkerung geplant und durchgesetzt hat. "HL: Zugleich hat man den Eindruck, dass sie sehr schnell lernen. Sie machen schnell Fehler, lernen aber auch daraus. Bei den Erneuerbaren Energien, ob Windkraft oder Solarpower, ist China vorn mit dabei. Da können wir Europäer viel abschauen. Warum hängen wir da so nach? Liegt es daran, dass wir schon so eine saturierte Gesellschaft sind?" "Gerade dieses Im-Griff-haben, glaube ich, ist die Hybris der Moderne in all ihren Verirrungen. Wenn ich daran denke, dass wir bei einem Weltbruttosozialprodukt von 70 Billionen Dollar Derivate, also Versicherungsscheine von 700 Billionen halten, ist das ungefähr so, als wenn ich mir ein Auto für 2.000 Euro kaufe und es für 20.000 Euro versichere. Was für ein Interesse habe ich dann noch, dass dieser Wagen heilbleibt? Mein Interesse ist doch viel größer, dass er kaputtgeht. "Scheinbar sind wir auf der Erde in diesem Irrsinn verfangen und als Besitzer solcher Derivate der Meinung: Komm, lass uns doch lieber darauf spekulieren, dass das Ding kaputtgeht. Nur - was machen wir dann? An wen soll die Versicherung auszahlen? "Wir haben nur diesen einen Planeten. Außerirdische werden uns nicht retten, ganz bestimmt nicht." ]]> </content> </entry> <entry> <title type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Starlings by Jo Walton (2018) (read in 2019)]]> </title> <id>https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3753</id> <link href="https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3753"/> <updated>2019-07-27T22:59:01+02:00</updated> <author> <name type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Marco von Ballmoos]]> </name> <uri>https://earthli.com/users/marco</uri> </author> <summary type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA["Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is" ... ]]> </summary> <content type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Published by marco on 27. Jul 2019 22:59:01 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I've failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an interest in this book, then I'm happy for you." I'd recently read about Jo Walton, that she'd won several awards (Hugo, Nebula) and was intrigued. I grabbed the only book the library had available, a book of her short stories. Her preface, though, indicated that she wasn't really a short-story writer and had never really understood the genre. She was, unfortunately, right. I think she's a good writer, but her short stories felt too underdeveloped. Several of the stories -- she admitted -- were just books she'd started and never finished. There were some interesting ideas, but nothing really memorable. I'll try again with a full-length novel. [Citations] "Oh, wait until you’re eighty-nine, my proper little daughter-in-law, wait until They’re conspiring against you and taking your books away before you’re so quick to judge." "Oh, wait until you’re eighty-nine, my proper little daughter-in-law, wait until They’re conspiring against you and taking your books away before you’re so quick to judge. Janice is part of the conspiracy, I think. She talks in code. She spells words out, and speaks in French. I think this is a blind meant to put me off. Richard had the grace to look uncomfortable when they shuffled me into this place and stole my books. Oh, they’d already replaced them with ones with wriggling letters, all but the ones where the print was too small to read even with strong glasses." "The Soviet Union crumbled away in 1989 and let its end of the Overton Window go, and the world slid rightwards." "what’s the point of anything? We didn’t volunteer to be here, we’re here because our ancestors made certain decisions. We could change those decisions for ourselves, and for our descendants.”" "Above the clouds, above the whole planet, is the sun, and beyond the sun other more distant suns, and the whole turning galaxy. In that scale, one jellyfish doesn’t matter any more than Adam and Eve, any more than the whole Earth. There’s everything in the universe in this story; except answers." "Britney rocked a moment, and then she said, “You know, I’m glad you asked me that question. I was born from a tank myself, and my whole generation, as you know. The thing is, when the ship first landed we only had what we’d brought from Earth, before we got the Mufug Plant set up, and even then, it could only make certain things, not like today. So when I was growing up, in the orphanage, and when I was first married we didn’t have any dishes big enough to take a whole ham, so we used to cut the end off to fit in the dish.” And Walter laughed, and Britney smiled her sweet smile, and Maud laughed, and Arabetsy, who was the only one of the children old enough to understand, laughed until she almost fell off the balcony into the sea." "She was the only one I ever loved, and the only one I’d ever thought of loving." This grammar is so common and so sloppy. Right in the same sentence. Unjustifiable. ]]> </content> </entry> <entry> <title type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Dreyer's English by Benjamin Dreyer (2019) (read in 2019)]]> </title> <id>https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3751</id> <link href="https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3751"/> <updated>2019-07-27T22:58:43+02:00</updated> <author> <name type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Marco von Ballmoos]]> </name> <uri>https://earthli.com/users/marco</uri> </author> <summary type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA["Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is" ... ]]> </summary> <content type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Published by marco on 27. Jul 2019 22:58:43 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I've failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an interest in this book, then I'm happy for you." Dreyer is copy chief at Random House Books. He throws his hat into the ring, offering sage and drily humorous grammatical advice based on his 30 years of experience. For nitty gritty and details of grammar, he refers readers to the classic style guides. His book is for broad strokes about the various linguistic constructs and common patterns, tropes and styles he's encountered -- and that he'd like to stop encountering. He is, at core, pragmatic: "A good sentence, I find myself saying frequently, is one that the reader can follow from beginning to end, no matter how long it is, without having to double back in confusion because the writer misused or omitted a key piece of punctuation, chose a vague or misleading pronoun, or in some other way engaged in inadvertent misdirection." But he isn't a pedantic or precise scientist, either. While I'm willing to be convinced by his argument for serial commas -- always use them, because they're often helpful, so why not just get used to them? -- he argues in the opposite manner when writing about hyphens, where he argues that "convention [...] allows for exceptions in some cases in which a misreading is unlikely, as in, say: real estate agent or high school students", to which I say, why? Who would it harm to clean up English's ridiculous word-concatenation rules (or is it "word concatenation" or why not wordconcatentation)? Some agglutinations take a space, others none and others a hyphen -- pretty much depending on how long the compound has existed and ... whimsy. I prefer throwing an extra hyphen at real-estate agents or high-school students simply because there is often so much confusion where neither the author nor the copy editor anticipated there being some. I'm grateful for his having cleared up proper-name hyphenation for me, though, as well as the proper use of hyphens and en dashes (which I'd heretofore used almost correctly). He throws in chapters on oft-misused vocabulary -- as well as some rare, but lovely, vocabulary -- as well as a couple on idioms and common constructs. Some of the chapters are just lists, but that makes this an excellent reference. [Citations] "A good sentence, I find myself saying frequently, is one that the reader can follow from beginning to end, no matter how long it is, without having to double back in confusion because the writer misused or omitted a key piece of punctuation, chose a vague or misleading pronoun, or in some other way engaged in inadvertent misdirection. (If you want to puzzle your reader, that’s your own business.)" "All this said, there’s nothing wrong with sentences constructed in the passive voice—you’re simply choosing where you want to put the sentence’s emphasis—and I see nothing objectionable in, say, The floors were swept, the beds made, the rooms aired out. Since the point of interest is the cleanness of the house and not the identity of the cleaner. But many a sentence can be improved by putting its true protagonist at the beginning, so that’s something to be considered." "[...] give you one of my favorite novel openers of all time, that of Charles Dickens’s Bleak House:" Bleak House reads like Dostoyevsky. "Whatever you want to call it: Use it. I don’t want to belabor the point; neither am I willing to negotiate it. Only godless savages eschew the series comma." "Q. When do I precede a sentence-ending “too” with a comma, and when not? A. Whichever you choose, the other way will look better." "If you’re offering a piece of information that’s perhaps interesting amplification but might well be deleted without harm, offer it up with a comma and a “which”: Please fetch me the Bible, which is on the table. One Bible and one Bible only. The “that” vs. “which” rule is not universally observed, I must note. Some writers find it pushily constricting and choose between the two by ear. I find it helpful and, admiring consistency as I do, apply it consistently." "It’s that comma after “population” I’m wanting you to keep a good eye on, because it has a tendency to go missing. It’s so frequently omitted in published British prose that for a long time I thought they had some national rule against it. They don’t. They’re just sloppy." "However, convention (a.k.a. tradition, a.k.a. consensus, a.k.a. it’s simply how it’s done, so don’t argue with it) allows for exceptions in some cases in which a misreading is unlikely, as in, say: real estate agent or high school students" This contradicts the advice about the serial comma, in which the advice was to just consistently do it one way. Here we have to decide if it's confusing? "Generally—yes, exceptions apart, there are always exceptions—one wields a hyphen or hyphens in these before-the-noun (there goes another one) adjectival cases to avoid that momentary unnecessary hesitation we’re always trying to spare our readers." "Now, mind you, this confusion kicked off and resolved itself in seconds. And I assure you, I’m not shamming; you may possibly have read the sentence correctly on your first attempt, but I was flummoxed. Surely, though, the confusion might have been avoided entirely had the sentence simply read: Touch-averse people who don’t want to be hugged are not rude." "An en dash is used to hold words together instead of your standard hyphen, which usually does the trick just fine, when one is connecting a multiword proper noun to another multiword proper noun or to pretty much anything else. What the heck does that mean? It means this: a Meryl Streep–Robert De Niro comedy a New York–to–Chicago flight a World War II–era plane a Pulitzer Prize–winning play Basically, that which you’re connecting needs a smidgen more connecting than can be accomplished with a hyphen." "Go light on the exclamation points. When overused, they’re bossy, hectoring, and, ultimately, wearying. Some writers recommend that you should use no more than a dozen exclamation points per book; others insist that you should use no more than a dozen exclamation points in a lifetime." "I suppose it’s an obvious point, but if a style choice follows the rules but results in something that looks awful or makes no sense on the page, rethink it." "(I have an exceptionally large bone to pick with The New York Times, which persists in imposing its preference for “theater” on edifices and companies not named thus, here and abroad. The paper’s constant references to London’s “National Theater” are, on so many levels, galling. That’s not its name.)" "And yet: I now have a colleague whose pronoun of choice is “they,” and thus the issue is no longer culturally abstract but face-to-face personal, no longer an issue I’d persuaded myself was none of my business but one of basic human respect I chose—choose—to embrace. (I’m happy to call myself out for stubbornly avoiding the topic till it became personal. One is supposed to be better than that; one often isn’t.)" "And somehow I read Wolcott Gibbs’s double-edged sword of an epigram far too often as a mandate not to preserve respectfully but to fix: to take the rules I’d learned and been taught and boned up on and impose them on writers not so blessed with my knowledge and expertise. I must have been insufferable." "The lesson being that notwithstanding all the commonly asserted rules of prose one has been taught in school or read about in stylebooks, authors do, as Wolcott Gibbs recognized and, now, so do I, have their preservable styles, and the role of a copy editor is, above all else, to assist and enhance and advise rather than to correct—indeed, not to try to transform a book into the copy editor’s notion of what a good book should be but, simply and with some measure of humility, to help fulfill an author’s vision and make each book into the ideal version of itself." "Conversely, real-life nonnative speakers of English, I find, rarely lapse into their native tongue simply to say yes, no, or thank you." Even ostensibly erudite Americans have woefully little contact with the mixed-language world. This is patently false. People mix languages all the time. In fact, it's rare to hear someone who is bilingual stick to only one language. Americans are so underexposed to bilingual people that it's kind of shocking. "You could certainly do worse than to follow the standard of Gore Vidal’s immortal Myra Breckinridge: “I am fortunate in having no gift at all for characterizing in prose the actual speech of others and so, for literary purposes, I prefer to make everyone sound like me.”" "Oh, and this is crucial: The important thing to remember about peeves and crotchets is that your own peeves and crotchets reflect sensible preferences based on a refined appreciation of the music and meaning of the English language, and that everyone else’s are the products of diseased minds." "As to people who object to supermarket express-lane signs reading “10 ITEMS OR LESS”? On the one hand, I hear you. On the other hand, get a hobby. Maybe flower arranging, or decoupage." "In the 1906 edition of The King’s English, H. W. Fowler declared—and he was neither the first nor the last person to so declare—“A thing is unique, or not unique; there are no degrees of uniqueness; nothing is ever somewhat or rather unique, though many things are almost or in some respects unique.” I will allow that something can be virtually unique but can’t be more than—not very, not especially, not really—unique." "“Bated,” which you are unlikely to chance upon disattached from the word “breath,” means reduced or moderated or suspended. To await something with bated breath is to await it with thrilled tension, to be on (to use a grand old word) tenterhooks." "“Breech” is an outmoded term for buttocks; thus trousers were once breeches. A breech birth is one in which the baby emerges buttocks (or feet) first." "Use the former [descendant] as a noun, for progeny and progeny’s progeny; use the latter [descendent] as an adjective to describe said progenies, or to describe something moving downward." "New York’s legendary Collyer brothers, Homer and Langley, were hoarders of just about anything they could cram into their Fifth Avenue townhouse. Their hoarding ultimately led to their grisly deaths, Langley crushed by a would-be defensive booby trap and poor blind, helpless Homer subsequently starving to death. The More You Know. [1]" "the comedy team Abbott and (Lou) Costello, whose “Who’s on first?” routine is an acknowledged delight but whose perhaps lesser-known Bagel Street sketch (also known as the Susquehanna Hat Company sketch) is one of the funniest things in the history of Western civilization." "[Rara Avis is] Latin for “rare bird,” and a remarkably pretentious way of saying that something is unusual." "“Retronym” is a term coined by the journalist Frank Mankiewicz in 1980 to identify a new term coined to replace a term whose meaning, once clear, has become clouded or outmoded, often by some technological advance. For instance: What was once simply a watch became, with the invention of digital watches, an analog watch. Ordinary guitars were dubbed, after the electric ones showed up, acoustic guitars. No one ever referred to a landline till mobile phones became the thing. Closer to home, one had no cause to refer to a hardcover book till paperbacks were invented, nor to refer to a mass-market paperback (those are the little ones you find in spinning drugstore racks) till those larger, svelter, more expensive editions we call trade paperbacks appeared." -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] I've since read more about them in "The Disturbing Tale Of The Collyer Brothers, History's Worst Hoarders" by Gabe Peoletti <https://allthatsinteresting.com/collyer-brothers> and it's even sadder than it sounds. In retrospect, I find Dreyer is a bit flip about the whole thing. ]]> </content> </entry> <entry> <title type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Reaper Man: A Novel of Discworld by Terry Pratchett (1991) (read in 2019)]]> </title> <id>https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3752</id> <link href="https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3752"/> <updated>2019-07-27T22:21:49+02:00</updated> <author> <name type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Marco von Ballmoos]]> </name> <uri>https://earthli.com/users/marco</uri> </author> <summary type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA["Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is" ... ]]> </summary> <content type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Published by marco on 27. Jul 2019 22:21:49 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I've failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an interest in this book, then I'm happy for you." This is an early story of one of Pratchett's favorite characters: Death. It's wonderfully written, one of Pratchett's best. In it, Death takes a vacation. He goes to work on a farm. He has a vacation romance with the proprietress. The rest of the Discworld must deal with the temporary loss of death. Ghosts pile up. The wizards of Ankh Morporkh University try to get to the bottom of it. Reg Shoe -- the zombie -- pleas for the rights of the dead gain more weight as the number of the dead threatens to outweigh that of the living. To fix this problem, humanity envisions a new Death, who comes for the old Death. Their battle is short. The old Death didn't enjoy his job or his power -- his stoicism and dedication win out over a lust for power. Death gets special dispensation for his fling -- Mrs. Flitworth -- from Azrael, the galaxy-sized cat who was there before the universe and will be there after. [Citations] "And this is the room where the future pours into the past via the pinch of the now." "Alone of all the creatures in the world, trolls believe that all living things go through Time backward. If the past is visible and the future is hidden, they say, then it means you must be facing the wrong way. Everything alive is going through life back to front. And this is a very interesting idea, considering it was invented by a race who spend most of their time hitting one another on the head with rocks." "Wizards don’t believe in gods in the same way that most people don’t find it necessary to believe in, say, tables. They know they’re there, they know they’re there for a purpose, they’d probably agree that they have a place in a well-organized universe, but they wouldn’t see the point of believing, of going around saying, “O great table, without whom we are as naught.” Anyway, either the gods are there whether you believe or not, or exist only as a function of the belief, so either way you might as well ignore the whole business" "Something wonderful, if you took the long view, was about to happen. If you took the short or medium view, something horrible was about to happen. It’s like the difference between seeing a beautiful new star in the winter sky and actually being close to the supernova. It’s the difference between the beauty of morning dew on a cobweb and actually being a fly." "Intellectually, Ridcully maintained his position for two reasons. One was that he never, ever, changed his mind about anything. The other was that it took him several minutes to understand any new idea put to him, and this is a very valuable trait in a leader, because anything anyone is still trying to explain to you after two minutes is probably important and anything they give up after a mere minute or so is almost certainly something they shouldn’t have been bothering you with in the first place." "A door burst open and a suit of clothes came out, a pair of shoes dancing along behind it, a hat floating a few inches above the empty collar. Close behind them came a skinny man endeavoring to do with a hastily-snatched flannel what normally it took a whole pair of trousers to achieve." "This usually led to a fierce ecclesiastical debate which resulted in Mrs. Cake giving the chief priest what she called “a piece of her mind.” There were so many pieces of Mrs. Cake’s mind left around the city now that it was quite surprising that there was enough left to power Mrs. Cake but, strangely enough, the more pieces of her mind she gave away the more there seemed to be left." "It wasn’t even a one horse town. If anyone had a horse, they’d have eaten it. The residents appeared to make a living by stealing one another’s washing." "How could they live with it? And yet they did, and even seemed to find enjoyment in it, when surely the only sensible course would be to despair. Amazing. To feel you were a tiny living thing, sandwiched between two cliffs of darkness. How could they stand to be alive?" "“What the hell are you doing?” He looked at the blade in his hands as if he was seeing it for the first time. I THOUGHT I WOULD SHARPEN THIS SCYTHE, MISS FLITWORTH. “At one o’clock in the morning?” He looked at it blankly. IT’S JUST AS BLUNT AT NIGHT, MISS FLITWORTH. Then he slammed it down on the anvil." "The new daylight sloshed onto the world. Discworld light is old, slow and heavy; it roared across the landscape like a cavalry charge. The occasional valley slowed it for a moment and, here and there, a mountain range banked it up until it poured over the top and down the far slope. It moved across a sea, surged up the beach and accelerated over the plains, driven by the lash of the sun. On the fabled hidden continent of Xxxx, somewhere near the rim, there is a lost colony of wizards who wear corks around their pointy hats and live on nothing but prawns. There, the light is still wild and fresh as it rolls in from space, and they surf on the boiling interface between night and day. If one of them had been carried thousands of miles inland on the dawn, he might have seen, as the light thundered over the high plains, a stick figure toiling up a low hill in the path of the morning." "He looked proudly at the Combination Harvester. Of course, you needed a horse to pull it. That spoiled things a bit. Horses belonged to Yesterday; Tomorrow belonged to the Combination Harvester and its descendants, which would make the world a cleaner and better place. It was just a matter of taking the horse out of the equation. He’d tried clockwork, and that wasn’t powerful enough. Maybe if he tried winding a— Behind him, the kettle boiled over and put the fire out. Simnel fought his way through the steam. That was the bloody trouble, every time. Whenever someone was trying to do a bit of sensible thinking, there was always some pointless distraction." "I’VE NEVER BEEN VERY SURE ABOUT WHAT IS RIGHT, said Bill Door. I AM NOT SURE THERE IS SUCH A THING AS RIGHT. OR WRONG. JUST PLACES TO STAND. “No, right’s right and wrong’s wrong,” said Miss Flitworth. “I was brought up to tell the difference.” BY A CONTRABANDISTOR. “A what?” A MOVER OF CONTRABAND. “There’s nothing wrong with smuggling!” I MERELY POINT OUT THAT SOME PEOPLE THINK OTHERWISE. “They don’t count!”" "Vermine are small black-and-white rodents found in the Ramtop Mountains. They are ancestors of the lemming, which as is well known throws itself over cliffs and drowns in lakes on a regular basis. Vermine used to do that, too. The point is, though, that dead animals don’t breed, and over the millennia more and more vermine were descendants of those vermine who, when faced with a cliff edge, squeaked the rodent equivalent of Blow that for a Game of Soldiers. Vermine now abseil down cliffs, and build small boats to cross lakes. When their rush leads them to the seashore they sit around avoiding one another’s gaze for a while, and then leave early to get home before the rush." "Something about the relentless movement, the way they crushed one another in their surge, suggested that the wire baskets had as much choice in the matter as water has about flowing downhill." "“Why are you called One—” is that all? I thought you could work that one out, a clever man like you. in my tribe we’re traditionally named after the first thing the mother sees when she looks out of the teepee after the birth. it’s short for One-Man-Pouring-a-Bucket-of-Water-over-Two-Dogs. “That’s pretty unfortunate,” said Windle. it’s not too bad, said One-Man-Bucket. it was my twin brother you had to feel sorry for. she looked out ten seconds before me to give him his name. Windle Poons thought about it. “Don’t tell me, let me guess,” he said. “Two-Dogs-Fighting?” Two-Dogs-Fighting? Two-Dogs Fighting? said One-Man-Bucket. wow, he’d have given his right arm to be called Two-Dogs-Fighting." "In the Ramtop village where they dance the real Morris dance, for example, they believe that no one is finally dead until the ripples they cause in the world die away—until the clock he wound up winds down, until the wine she made has finished its ferment, until the crop they planted is harvested. The span of someone’s life, they say, is only the core of their actual existence." "Light thinks it travels faster than anything but it is wrong. No matter how fast light travels it finds the darkness has always got there first, and is waiting for it." "And then, below, a plain. Distance was as meaningless here as time, but there was a sense of hugeness. The plain could have been a mile away, or a million miles; it was marked by long valleys or rills which flowed away to either side as he got closer." "The furrowed landscape falls away into immense distances, curves at the edges, becomes a fingertip. Azrael raised his finger to a face that filled the sky, lit by the faint glow of dying galaxies. There are a billion Deaths, but they are all aspects of the one Death: Azrael, the Great Attractor, the Death of Universes, the beginning and end of time. Most of the universe is made up of dark matter, and only Azrael knows who it is. Eyes so big that a supernova would be a mere suggestion of a gleam on the iris turned slowly and focused on the tiny figure on the immense whorled plains of his fingertips. Beside Azrael the big Clock hung in the center of the entire web of the dimensions, and ticked onward. Stars glittered in Azrael’s eyes." "WILL YOU GRANT ME JUST A LITTLE TIME? FOR THE PROPER BALANCE OF THINGS. TO RETURN WHAT WAS GIVEN. FOR THE SAKE OF PRISONERS AND THE FLIGHT OF BIRDS." This is in reference to the mercy and hope offered by death. See "Goodbye, Terry Pratchett" <https://sevencircumstances.com/books-by-genre/reaper-man-by-terry-pratchett/> "Pratchett writes that everything living needs Death for the sake of mercy, the same mercy that prisoners experience when they see, through the windows of their cells, birds in flight. Mercy, but also longing and hope, since they look at the birds and think that one day they too might be free." Apparently, this is one of the most oft-quoted passages from Pratchett's opus. "Somewhere in the night, Reg Shoe looked both ways, took a furtive paintbrush and small pot of paint from inside his jacket, and painted on a handy wall: Inside Every Living Person is a Dead Person Waiting to Get Out . . . And then it was all over. The end." "Death stood alone, watching the wheat dance in the wind. Of course, it was only a metaphor. People were more than corn. They whirled through tiny crowded lives, driven literally by clock work, filling their days from edge to edge with the sheer effort of living. And all lives were exactly the same length. Even the very long and very short ones. From the point of view of eternity, anyway." "And at the end of all stories Azrael, who knew the secret, thought: I REMEMBER WHEN ALL THIS WILL BE AGAIN." ]]> </content> </entry> <entry> <title type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Summa Technologiae (Electronic Mediations) by Stanisław Lem (1966; en: 2013) (read in 2019)]]> </title> <id>https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3750</id> <link href="https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3750"/> <updated>2019-07-27T21:21:17+02:00</updated> <author> <name type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Marco von Ballmoos]]> </name> <uri>https://earthli.com/users/marco</uri> </author> <summary type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA["Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I’ve pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is" ... ]]> </summary> <content type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Published by marco on 27. Jul 2019 21:21:17 Updated by marco on 28. Sep 2023 10:11:31 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I’ve pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I’ve failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an interest in this book, then I’m happy for you." This is a non-fiction work translated from the original Polish. It is not a light work: it encompasses Lem's complex and intricate musings and theories on technology, nature, genetics, cosmology, philosophy, biology, information theory, ecology, virtual reality, artificial intelligence, cybernetics, robots, programming, identity (cloning), human nature and how these all relate to mankind's possible future or lack thereof. He discusses the likely shape of galactic civilizations as well as the possible composition or origins of its components, where their intelligence comes from, where it would likely develop, where it wouldn't, why science fiction is lazy and, above all, he keeps the discussion rigorously supported by data, even when he seems to be engaging in the most whimsical flights of fancy. It's hard to summarize this book any less vaguely than that. It's just chock-full of relatively advanced thinking -- especially for the time, over 50 years ago -- of an extremely intelligent and, by all accounts, intellectually rigorous man. I'll use some of his own citations to illustrate what I found so exciting in such a weighty and densely written tome (it took me quite a while to make my way through it). Much of what he has to say has been said in other places, but perhaps less eloquently, and not all in one place, connected into a coherent strand of pearls that actually gives a framework to thoughts about the future of not only humanity, but any form of intelligence, regardless of where or how it arises. On the pace of development outpacing humanity's societal structures (i.e. the wisdom of elders): "When the entire life of a future generation ceases to be a repetition of their parents’ lives, what kinds of lessons and instructions can the old, experienced as they are, offer to the young?" On the necessary narrowing of intellectual pursuit, with each decision to take a certain branch leaving less energy and intellectual capacity and effort to pursue other, possibly more societally lucrative, paths. "Briefly put, technoevolution brings more evil than good, with man turning out to be a prisoner of what he himself has created. The growth of his knowledge is accompanied by the narrowing down of possibilities when it comes to deciding about his own fate." There is no avoiding this: there is only improving the odds that the chosen path is fruitful. In this vein, any civilization -- humanity definitely included -- only has so much energy and intellectual capacity for missteps. The more advanced a civilization, the more likely that it can muster an effort that will be able to appropriate a large amount of the available resources. In this, Lem presages our coming battle with climate change: we don't have unlimited "lives" to start over (as in a video game). Instead, we must marshal our resources carefully. The profit motive is an unreliable siren here; in the past, we have expended considerable wasted effort "optimizing" for the best solution, throwing incredible resources at a problem, only to end up with a good solution, but with very high cost. In this way, we are emulating evolution's inefficient process, copying the only creator we know. But our effort to extract ourselves from the narrowing chasm of climate change will require a more precise investment of resources. We are unlikely to do so and will die out. Lem wonders whether that is the nearly unavoidable fate of many civilizations: why would humanity, with all of its faults, and its massively redundant but ultimately unreliable biological machinery, be different? "Are we really supposed to believe that, when looking at the sky above us, we are seeing an abyss filled with worlds that have already been turned to ashes by the power of their suicidal intelligence or that are headed directly toward such an end?" How would the main driver of change, evolution, be able to help us avoid such a fate? Humanity's intellect allows it to destroy itself much more quickly than evolution could possibly react. Because we're smarter than that? Not really. Lem offers a definition of intelligence that is humbling -- all the more so because it is frighteningly accurate and utterly devoid of artifice that romanticizes mankind as "special". "By Intelligence we understand a second-level homeostatic regulator that is capable of coping with disturbances to its environment thanks to the activities in which it engages on the basis of the historically acquired knowledge." He is similarly calculating and sober about the purpose of societies. It is hard to find fault with his description, at least at the high level where it truly matters. "What to an observer from a different culture may look like a most irrational type of social ties, obligations, imperatives, and prohibitions has practically always aimed at the same goal: reducing the individual spontaneity of action and its diversity—which is a potential source of disturbance to the state of equilibrium." In his discussion of artificial -- or "machine" (designed) -- intelligence, he offers up an interesting and understandable analogy to describe the "gap" in intelligence between different levels of beings (instead of trying to pretend that knowledge and wisdom make no difference). "In undertaking a reduction, a machine will thus be doing what a physicist is doing when explaining gravitational wave theory to a wide audience by taking recourse to a modest arsenal of school-level math." As for how these machines might work, he looks to the most complex machines heretofore designed: us. Evolution may have expended a shamefully wasteful amount of energy and time designing and refining us, but there is no arguing that she came up with a relatively robust machine. That is not to say that there isn't a tremendous amount of room for improvement with a more focused design process, but that the human machine is still more advanced and impressive than anything that man has managed to design and build. The key is autonomous systems, to focus the intellect on higher-order functions. "The more complex a system is, the more overall regulation is needed, and the smaller the extent to which local oscillations of parameters can be allowed. Does our brain have regulatory control over our body? Undoubtedly it does. Is every one of us in control of our own body? Only within a narrow range of parameters; the rest is “given” to us by Nature, in all its wisdom." He marvels at the machine that Nature has built, but thinks that we can eventually do better. He doesn't disparage Nature, but also does not consider it to be magically unsurpassable. "[...] “coded”in the language of chemical molecules, which could develop from this sperm after it has been combined with an egg. This plan apparently consists of “production rules”and “directions for action.”In that microscopic space, there is information about what has to be done, information about how it has to be done, and last but not least, a mechanism that will enact all this." He even considers what identity is and how the ability to clone or store or copy or transmit an individual would affect it. It is interesting to see this treatise by someone who doesn't confine himself to just one field, be it philosophy, biology or ethics. Instead, Lem approaches from the coldly rational realm of a cyberneticist with experience and wisdom in all of these fields, arriving at a more acceptable and logical conclusion than any individual familiar with only one of these fields could. "A twin is indeed a perfect molecular copy of the “original.”Yet the similarity between two states of the same person—when he is eight and eighty years old, respectively—is no doubt even smaller than the mutual similarity between the twins. Despite this, anyone would admit that the child and the old man are the same person—something we cannot say about the two brothers. It is therefore not the amount of analogous genetic information that determines the continuation of existence but rather the fact of being genetically identical, even if the dynamic structure of the brain undergoes significant changes during one’s lifetime." Finally, Lem reassures us that future developments -- especially cybernetic or robotic ones -- are inevitable if we are to survive. Our past as frail biological shells has served us well to get to where we are, but we will never develop to a galactic and nigh-eternal civilization if we cling to these crude origins. Instead, we should see the intelligence that we have as enough of a lever to bootstrap ourselves into the next level. Even if our biological shells can't go along, our progeny will. We will either have to adapt or die. That includes modifying our genotype to "improve" it -- which entails making moral judgments about what it means to improve something (i.e. value judgments about which humans are worth promoting). So has it always been and so will it always be. Avoiding these decisions because of a temporary luxury to do so will be fatal. We can obstinately refuse and instead elect to die out. "We have to admit that the extent to which control will remain in human hands partly depends on a point of view. The fact that man is able to swim by himself does not mean that he is capable of crossing an ocean without a ship—not to mention jets and space rockets in this context! A similar evolution is starting, in a kind of parallel way, in the information universe. Man is capable of directing a gnostic machine toward a problem that he could perhaps solve by himself (either he himself or his great grandchildren), but in the process, the machine may open his eyes to a problem whose existence he did not even suspect. Who actually has the lead in the latter example?" To this end, we will need to accept that certain passengers will not be able to make the trip. That all people are equal is something that we proudly wave about as if Nature cares at all. This current period, with its anti-evolutionary attitude, near love, of the evolutionarily disadvantaged, will be seen as a backwards religious curiosity in the future. At best. At worst, they will perceive us as criminally pushing for the end of humanity. A hundred years from now (or less), when nature is drastically outpacing evolution’s ability to adapt, man will no longer have the luxury of hewing to a moral code that forbids genetic engineering of humans. The blind, the deaf, the unmotivated, the stupid, the weak, the retarded, the severely autistic -- anyone who needs the intricate modern support system to survive [1] -- they will sink when their survival depends on them swimming. Being saddled with them because of an outdated morality will be a luxury no-one will be able to afford. It will be seen as far more efficient to tweak genetics to keep members of society within a physical bandwidth that if not of actual use in one way or another, at least imposes a minimum of effort. We will no longer have the luxury of keeping useless people alive. This is not eugenics; this is a much harsher world than we know. The future will contain a desperation unknown for centuries to the first-world person. Third-world people -- ¾ of the world -- are already intimately familiar with this harsh, cruel algebra. In Lem's words: "If we are to behave like intellectual cowards, we can, of course, remain silent on the topic of any probable future developments. But in that case, we should at least make it clear that we are behaving like cowards. Man cannot change the world without changing himself. We can take the first steps on a given path while pretending we do not know where it leads. Yet this is not the best strategy." Lem is capable of describing procreation in the most clinical possible way: "Fertilization is an act of “taking a molecular decision” in a confrontation between two partly alternative “hypotheses” about a future state of the organism, whereby the gametes of both sexes are “carriers” of those hypotheses." He tries again and again to describe just how limited we are relative to our future selves. "For someone who can count to a hundred, there is actually no practical difference between a quintillion and infinity. Man as a researcher of the Universe is more like someone who has just learned arithmetic than like a mathematician who is freely juggling infinities." He also wonders what we're going to do with ourselves if we do make it past the coming inflection point that will determine whether we have a future. "[...] when basic needs are being fully satisfied, the problem “what to do next,” i.e., whether we should create some new needs and, if so, what kind, comes to the fore." Finally, just to show that Lem's sometimes too optimistic, we need only turn to his hope for how we will manage information overload. "We can even think that presenting banal works will at last be declared a menace and thus will be seen as a violation of scientists’ professional ethics because such works create nothing but “noise” that prevents us from receiving valuable information." Oh dear, thank goodness Lem is no longer around to see just how badly we've disappointed him. It is not an easy read, but it is legitimately a work of staggering genius. You don't have to agree with him on everything, but you can't argue with his method, with his intellectual rigor and devotion to the scientific method to reduce the ineffability of who we are and where we're headed. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] This might be all of us, at this point, to be honest. [Citations] "We are going to speak of the future. Yet isn’t discoursing about future events a rather inappropriate occupation for those who are lost in the transience of the here and now? Indeed, to seek out our great-great-grandsons’ problems when we cannot really cope with the overload generated by our own looks like a scholasticism of the most ridiculous kind." "is therefore somewhat out of necessity that technologies are of interest to me, since a given civilization embraces everything society has desired, but also everything else that has not been part of anyone’s plan." "When the entire life of a future generation ceases to be a repetition of their parents’ lives, what kinds of lessons and instructions can the old, experienced as they are, offer to the young?" "In the way one used to ascribe the motivations and psychological traits of contemporary monarchs to the pharaohs, one represents today the corsairs and pirates of the thirtieth century. We can surely amuse ourselves like this, provided we remember we are only playing." "Who will gain the upper hand, a strategic space for civilization’s maneuvers: humanity, which is freely choosing from the widely available arsenal of technological means, or maybe technology, which, through automation, will successfully conclude the process of removing humans from its territory?" "it is usually impossible to detect to what extent a given shape has been determined by the designer’s supply and to what extent by the buyer’s demand. We are faced here with circular processes in which causes become effects and effects causes and in which numerous instances of positive and negative feedback are at work: living organisms in biology or subsequent industrial products in the technical civilization are only tiny elements of these higher processes." "This is why we should not overestimate the “wisdom”of biological evolution, since it often led whole species down a developmental blind alley. It tended to repeat not just beneficial solutions but, equally often, erroneous ones that would lead to a decline. Evolution’s knowledge is empirical and short term. Its apparent perfection is a consequence of the long stretches of space and time it has traversed." "The last problem we have to deal with concerns the moral aspects of technoevolution. Its productivity has already attracted severe criticism since it is widening the gap between the two main spheres of our activity: the regulation of Nature and the regulation of Humanity. From this point of view, atomic energy found itself in human hands prematurely. Man’s first step into space was also premature, especially since already in the early days of astronautics, it demanded great resources, thus depleting the already unfair distribution of the Earth’s global income." "Briefly put, technoevolution brings more evil than good, with man turning out to be a prisoner of what he himself has created. The growth of his knowledge is accompanied by the narrowing down of possibilities when it comes to deciding about his own fate." "Today the whole world is adopting the developmental model of the West. Technology is being imported by nations that can be proud of having more ancient and more complex cultures than those that gave rise to this technology. This raises a fascinating question: what would have happened if the West had not undertaken a technological revolution, if it had not mobilized its Galileos, Newtons, and Stephensons toward the Industrial Revolution?" "This model is beautiful thanks to its methodological simplicity. It explains why singular discoveries, even if they are significant, can become suspended in a vacuum when it comes to their technogenerative social effects—as was the case with the powder metallurgy of the Indians or the gunpowder of the Chinese. Subsequent links that were needed to start a chain reaction were not there." "The anthropologist, fascinated as he is with myriads of those inner dependencies among various civilizations, needs to be replaced by the sociologist–cyberneticist. Consciously ignoring the inner cultural and semantic meanings of all such practices, the latter will examine their structures as if they constituted a feedback system that aims at an ultrastable equilibrium, and whose dynamic task lies in regulation aimed at ensuring the perpetuation of this equilibrium." "Yet cannot a civilization gain the freedom of choice with regard to its future path the way an individual can? But what conditions would need to be fulfilled for this freedom to take place? Society must become independent from the technologies of elementary problems. Basic issues that each civilization has to deal with—food, clothing, transportation, but also the initiation of life, the distribution of goods, the protection of health and property—have to disappear. They have to become invisible, like air—the abundance of which has so far been the only excess in human history." "Are people supposed to say at some point, “Enough! We will not be automatizing such and such areas of work anymore, even though we can; we shall stop Technology to save man’s labor so that he does not feel redundant? This would be a peculiar kind of freedom and a peculiar way of using it, after centuries of fighting for it." "We shall not gain the first type of freedom because what seemed like freedom yesterday is not the same anymore today. The state of having been liberated from the compulsion to undertake actions that have to satisfy elementary needs will allow us to select a further option, but this will not be a unique historical event. The situation of choice will be repeated at the higher levels we subsequently reach." "The answer we would get, based on our observation of outer space, would make the majority of our current speculative analyses entirely futile. A Robinson who would be able to communicate with other intelligent beings, or at least observe their activity from afar, would not have to suffer the uncertainty of complicated guesswork anymore. Naturally, there is something dangerous about such a situation. Any too explicit and too definite answers would show us that we are slaves to developmental determinism rather than creatures exposed to ever greater freedom—which stands for an unlimited freedom of choice." "Are we really supposed to believe that, when looking at the sky above us, we are seeing an abyss filled with worlds that have already been turned to ashes by the power of their suicidal intelligence or that are headed directly toward such an end?" "The scientist, searching for signs of astroengineering activity in the Universe, may have actually been seeing it for a while, yet he is banned from classifying it as a separate phenomenon, that is, from isolating it from the natural world and ascribing its genesis to the Intellect, by the very science to which he is in service. Is there no way out of this dilemma? Can we not imagine some “clear-cut miracles”that cannot be explained in a nontechnological way?" "It makes one wonder how evolution, which is so “economical”in every area of information transfer, produced the human brain—a device with such a high degree of “excess.”This brain—which, even today, in the twentieth century, copes very well with the problems of a large civilization—is anatomically and biologically identical with the brain of our primitive, “barbarian”ancestor from a hundred thousand years ago. In what way did this massive “potential of intelligence,”this excessiveness which, from the early days, seemed geared to build a civilization, emerge in the course of the probabilistic evolutionary game between two vectors: mutation pressure and selection pressure? Evolutionism lacks a firm answer to this question." "By Intelligence we understand a second-level homeostatic regulator that is capable of coping with disturbances to its environment thanks to the activities in which it engages on the basis of the historically acquired knowledge." "Human intelligence has led us to the Technological Era because the terrestrial environment has a number of unique characteristics. Would the Industrial Revolution have been possible if it had not been for the Carboniferous, a geological period during which the reserves of solar energy had been stored in the sunk forests that were undergoing carbonization? Would it have been possible if not for the oil reserves, which emerged in the course of some other transformations?" "The issue here is that the more precisely the transmitted message uses the capacity of the information channel (i.e., the higher the reduction of the excess of this transmission), the more it starts to resemble noise. In this situation, the receiver—who does not know the coding system—would actually have tremendous difficulties not just with deciphering the information he receives but also with recognizing it precisely as information, as opposed to cosmic background noise. We cannot thus exclude the possibility that already today, we are receiving, as noise, via our radio telescopes, fragments of “interstellar conversations”conducted by “supercivilizations." "The explosion phase is therefore only a stage in the history of civilization. Is it the only one? What will a “post-explosion”civilization look like? Will the omnidirectional nature of Intelligence—something we have considered its permanent trait—have to give way to a bunch of selective activities? We shall look for an answer to this question too, yet what we have discussed so far already throws some interesting light onto the problem of stellar psychozoics. Exponential growth can serve as a dynamic law of a civilization over thousands of years—but not over millions of years." "If coal and oil deposits had run out, say, at the end of the nineteenth century, we would have been highly unlikely to have produced atom technology in the middle of the twentieth century because enormous powers were needed to make it happen. Those powers were initially installed in laboratories, after which they became available on an industrial scale. And yet humanity is still not ready to switch to an exclusive use of “heavy”atomic energy (i.e., energy derived from the decomposition of heavy nuclei). Given the current increase in power use, this would result in “burning up”all the deposits of uranium and its cognate elements within a few centuries. The exploitation of energy from nuclear synthesis (of hydrogen into helium) has not been accomplished yet. The difficulties have turned out to be more substantial than expected. All this means that, first, a civilization should have considerable reserves of energy at its disposal to have enough time to obtain the information that will provide access to some new energy sources, and second, that a civilization must consider the primacy of this model of information acquisition over any other." "Producing such “encystment”will involve having to construct “a world within a world,”an autonomous reality that is not directly connected with the material reality of Nature. The emergent “cybernetic–sociotechnical”shell will enclose the civilization under discussion within itself. The latter will continue to exist and grow, but in a way that is not visible to an external observer anymore (especially one in outer space)." Like Egan’s digital/virtual archologies. "Does our civilization not show excessive hyperspecialization, even though it has not yet reached the “information barrier" Does its military potential not resemble the enormous jaws and carapaces of Mesozoic reptiles, whose abilities in many other areas were so limited that they eventually determined their fate?" "Perhaps we will eventually gain a kind of longevity that will practically amount to immortality, but to do this, we will have to give up on the bodily form that nature gave us. Perhaps, thanks to hibernation, we will be able to travel freely across millions of years, but those who wake up after their glacial dream will find themselves in an unfamiliar world, since the world and the culture that have shaped them will have disappeared during their reversible death. Thus, when fulfilling our dreams, the material world requires us to undertake actions the realization of which can equally resemble a victory and a defeat." "“We’ve seen a model of a device consisting of eight trillion elements,”we tell an engineer. “This device has its own energy center, locomotive systems, a hierarchy of regulators, and a timing belt that consists of fifteen billion parts. It can perform so many functions that we wouldn’t even be able to list them all during our lifetime. Yet the formula that not only enabled the construction of this device but actually constructed it was fully contained within the cubic capacity of 8/1000 of a millimeter.”The engineer replies that this is impossible. He is wrong, because we were talking about the head of the human spermatozoon, which, as we know, contains all the information that is needed to produce a specimen of the Homo sapiens." "Yet, at the same time, our jumper, who of course “carries in his head” all the mathematics connected with the jump, will not be able to write down its theoreticomathematical counterpart, that is, the appropriate scientific formulas and transformations. The reason for this is that, if it is to be conveyed in a way that is traditionally taught in schools and colleges, this kind of “biomathematics"—which is practiced by all living organisms, including ciliates—requires a repeated translation of the system-forming impulses from one language to another: from a word-free and “automatic”language of biochemical processes and of the transfer of neuron stimulations to a symbolic language." "By way of a rather useful introduction to the problem of the “black box,”we can recall the story of a centipede who was asked how it was able to remember which leg to raise after it had lifted the eighty-ninth one.5 The centipede, as we know, pondered the question, and not being able to find an answer, died of hunger since it could not move anymore." "It is often said that there exist transhistorical moral pointers. From this point of view, “Tarpeian morality, even in its most benign form (manifested, e.g., in postulating euthanasia for people experiencing agony as a result of incurable diseases), is immoral, criminal, and evil. What happens here is that we evaluate one moral system from the standpoint of another system. It goes without saying that we opt for this other, “non-Tarpeian” system, but if we agree that it emerged over the course of man’s social evolution rather than via an act of revelation, we must take into account the fact that different moral systems are at work in different historical periods." "In the first case, the self-regulation principle of the homeostatic producer will be violated. In the second, homeostats will start to influence human lives in a way that has not been fully envisaged by their creators—which can then lead to an economic collapse in the country as a whole just because one of the homeostats will be performing its set task too well, by bankrupting all its competitors . . ." Adorable that the paperclip optimizers think that they invented the idea. "[…] might seem that dangers of this kind will be nipped in the bud by constructing a “black box”of a higher type, as a kind of “ruling machine"—one that would not rule over people but rather over the “black boxes”of individual producers that would be subordinate to it. The discussion of the consequences of this step will prove extremely interesting." Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? "Perhaps it will announce that there is a contradiction between the axioms that are being introduced by means of the Operating Program (e.g., one cannot conduct an economically viable program of the automation of production and simultaneously aim to reduce unemployment unless one does many other things at the same time, e.g., introduce a state- or capital-supported reskilling program for those who are being made redundant as a result of the automation, etc.). What then?" "the price that had to be paid for increasing the standard of living and decreasing unemployment is a short tail grown by every sixth child or the general lowering of intelligence in society (since more intelligent people cause more problems for the regulatory activity of the machine, which is why it will aim to reduce their number)." We took path B. "In the capitalist system, cooperativeness can blossom, yet this does not stop it from being capitalist. Only the simultaneous change to a series of significant parameters can change not just the economic model but also the systemic model that is superior to it because this is when the totality of social relations will undergo a transformation. However, a distinction needs to be made once again between a regulator of a given system and a regulator that can transform a given system into a different one (should it decide such a change is required)." "The homeostasis of a civilization is a product of man’s social evolution. Since times immemorial, all societies through history have practiced regulatory activity aimed at maintaining systemic equilibrium. Of course, people were not aware of the nature of their collective actions, just as they did not realize that their economic and manufacturing activities gave shape and form to political systems. Societies that had the same level of material development and analogous types of economics saw different structures emerge within this domain of postproductive life that we call superstructure." "What to an observer from a different culture may look like a most irrational type of social ties, obligations, imperatives, and prohibitions has practically always aimed at the same goal: reducing the individual spontaneity of action and its diversity—which is a potential source of disturbance to the state of equilibrium." "Belief is thus a transient state—until it gets verified empirically. If it becomes too independent from such verification, it is transformed into a metaphysical construct. The peculiarity of such belief stems from the fact that realistic actions are being undertaken to achieve unrealistic goals, that is, goals that either cannot be realized at all or that can be realized but not via the action that is being performed." "Belief thus leads to an excessive use of the inductive method because the conclusions drawn by means of induction are either directed toward “the next world”(i.e., an empirical “nowhere") or supposed to establish connections within Nature that do not exist in it (every evening when I start to make scrambled eggs, stars appear in the sky; yet the conclusion that there exists a connection between my preparation of an evening meal and the appearance of stars is a case of false induction, which can become the subject of belief)." "The only thing that matters to us is that the previously mentioned states are accompanied by the sensation of experiencing some ultimate truth, which is so intense and overwhelming that, having experienced it, one then looks with contempt or pity at the empiricists, miserably bustling around some trivial worldly matters. Two things thus need to be said. First, the divergence between “experiential truth”and “scientific truth”would perhaps be irrelevant if the first one did not claim some kind of superiority for itself. And if this is the case, then we should point out that the person undergoing the experience would not exist at all if it had not been for such lowly empiricism, which was initiated a long time ago by the Australopithecus and cavemen." This describes our current society, though not limited to religion. "To return to the problem of belief and information, we can now summarize our conclusions. The influence of the information entered into the homeostat depends not so much on whether this information is objectively false or true but rather, on one hand, on how predisposed the homeostat is to consider it true and, on the other, on whether the regulatory characteristics of the homeostat allow it to react in response to the information entered. To make it work, both postulates need to be fulfilled. Belief can heal me, yet it will not make me fly. It is because the first activity lies within the regulatory realm of my organism (although not always within the realm of my conscious will), the second one outside it." "The conviction that Western civilization, with its standards set by mass culture and the ongoing mechanical facilitation of life, annihilates these potential spiritual riches—the cultivation of which should be at the core of our existence—regularly leads various people, among them even Western scientists at times, to turn to ancient Asia, especially India, in the hope that Buddhism will offer a panacea for the spiritual dry rot of technocracy. This is an extremely mistaken view. Individuals may become “saved”in this way, while those who are looking for consolation can apparently find it in Buddhist monasteries, yet this is pure escapism, an act of running away or even of intellectual desertion. No religion can do anything for humanity because it is not an empirical knowledge. It does reduce the “existential pain”of individuals, but at the same time, it increases the sum total of the calamities affecting whole populations precisely owing to its helplessness and idleness in the face of social problems. It cannot thus be defended as a useful tool even from a pragmatic point of view because it is a wrong kind of tool, one that remains helpless in the face of the fundamental problems of the world." "We are faced here with an interesting problem: when exactly did consciousness arise in the machine? Let us say the designer was not adjusting those machines but rather took each one to a museum and then built a new model from scratch. There are ten thousand machines in the museum as this is how many subsequent models had been made. It is in fact a fluid transition from a “soulless machine”such as a jukebox to a “thinking machine.”Should we consider machine no. 7852 as conscious, or only machine no. 9973? The difference between them is that the first one was unable to explain why it was laughing at the joke it had just heard but could only say that it was funny, whereas the second one was able to provide such an explanation. Yet some people laugh at jokes even though they are unable to explain what is funny about them, because, as we know, a theory of humor is a hard nut to crack. Does this mean that those people also lack consciousness? Not at all; they are probably not very bright, not that intelligent, their brain is not trained in thinking analytically about problems, yet we are not asking whether a machine is bright or somewhat stupid, only whether it has consciousness." "We should add that there is terminological confusion, or conceptual lack of clarity, in the literature on the subject because some refer to a “heuristic behavior”as “nonalgorithmic,”yet such a conclusion depends on whether we consider an algorithm to be an ultimately determined instruction that does not change in the course of its realization or an instruction that, thanks to the feedback that is restructuring it, in the course of its action “itself”becomes transformed into a form different from its original one." "In undertaking a reduction, a machine will thus be doing what a physicist is doing when explaining gravitational wave theory to a wide audience by taking recourse to a modest arsenal of school-level math." "The situation is as follows: either electronic coordinators are incapable of considering a higher number of variables than man is, which means that there is no point in building them, or they are capable of doing it, which means that man himself cannot “find his way”among all the results; that is, he cannot make a decision independently from a machine by only relying on “his own opinion about the situation." "To understand how a complex machine functions, we should consider that the reason we move, walk, talk, and are generally alive is because, during every millisecond, masses of blood cells are running in file, in billions of our body parts at the same time, carrying tiny amounts of oxygen that control the continuous Brownian motion of particles heading toward an anarchic thermostatic chaos. The number of such processes that have to be constantly kept within a very narrow range of parameters is enormous—if that were not the case, then the system’s dynamics would start to fall apart immediately. The more complex a system is, the more overall regulation is needed, and the smaller the extent to which local oscillations of parameters can be allowed. Does our brain have regulatory control over our body? Undoubtedly it does. Is every one of us in control of our own body? Only within a narrow range of parameters; the rest is “given”to us by Nature, in all its wisdom." "A medieval city only needed water and food: a modern one turns into a nightmare when it runs out of electricity—the way it happened in Manhattan a few years ago, when the elevators in buildings and subway trains came to a halt. It is because homeostasis has two sides: it is an increase in insensitivity to an external perturbation, that is, one caused by a “natural”disturbance, and it is also an increase in sensitivity to an inner perturbation, that is, one caused by a disturbance within the system (organism) itself. The higher the artificiality of its environment, the more we are condemned to technology, to its working—and to its failure, if it should fail." "We are not thus faced with an “electronic God”or a godlike ruler but only with systems that, initially called on solely to watch selected processes, as well as processes of exceptional significance or complication, are slowly, in the course of their own evolution, taking control of practically the whole of social dynamics. Those systems will not be trying to “dominate over humanity”in any anthropomorphic sense because, not being human, they will not manifest any signs of egoism or a desire for power—which obviously can only be meaningfully ascribed to “persons." "Mathematicians know very well that they do not know what they are doing. A very competent person, Bertrand Russell himself, said that “mathematics may be defined as the subject in which we never know what we are talking about, nor whether what we are saying is true." "Since the sixteenth century, physicists have been searching through the warehouses of “empty clothes”created by mathematics. Matrix calculus was an “empty structure”until Heisenberg found a “piece of the world”that matched that empty structure. Physics is full of such examples." "The question as to where length “can be found”within an atom’s nucleus is similar to the question as to where the mountain “can be found”when the image is being looked at through a microscope. The image is true as a whole, just as a theory (e.g., quantum theory) that will allow us to predict better the emergence of baryons and leptons, and that will tell us which particles are possible and which are not, will be true as a whole." "A painter paints pictures, yet, even though he has a mouth and we can talk to him, we are not going to find out how he does it. He does not know himself what is going on in his brain when he is painting. The information is contained in his head, but it is inaccessible. In modeling, one has to simplify: a machine that is capable of painting a very poor picture will tell us more about the material, that is, cerebral, foundations of painting than the “perfect model”of the artist—his twin brother—would. Modeling practice involves selecting certain variables and ignoring others." "If we thus wanted to model any phenomenon by taking into account all of its variables (assuming for a moment that this would be possible), we would have to construct a system that would be more extensive than the original one, as it would be equipped with additional variables that are characteristic of the modeling system itself but that the original one lacks." "Yet maybe it is only today that we need theories and models of phenomena? Maybe, on being asked such a question, a wise man from another planet would silently hand out a piece of an old shoe sole picked up from the ground to us, communicating in this way that the whole truth of the Universe can be read from this piece of matter?" "Does Matter by any chance not have all of its potential transformations “inscribed”in it (i.e., the possibility of constructing stars, quantoplanes, sewing machines, roses, silkworms, and comets)? Then, taking the basic building block of Nature, the hydrogen atom, we could “deduce”all those possibilities from it (modestly starting from the possibility of synthesizing a hundred elements all the way through to the possibility of constructing systems that are a trillion times more spiritual than man). We could also deduce all that is unrealizable from it (sweet kitchen salt NaCl, stars whose diameter equals a quadrillion of miles, etc.). From this perspective, matter already entails as its foundational assumptions all those possibilities as well as impossibilities (or prohibitions); we are just unable to crack its “code." "And now for a rather less crude example. The Penicillium notatum mold creates penicillin. Instead of growing mold and extracting the necessary bodies from it, we can take some simple substances and synthesize penicillin from them." "Finally, let us now consider an example that is absolutely unrealizable at the moment. In a section of a sperm’s head—in the volume of three thousandths of a millimeter—we can find a design plan for a human brain, “coded”in the language of chemical molecules, which could develop from this sperm after it has been combined with an egg. This plan apparently consists of “production rules”and “directions for action.”In that microscopic space, there is information about what has to be done, information about how it has to be done, and last but not least, a mechanism that will enact all this." "Yet the principle remains the same: we have a person connected to the environment, imitated by the phantomatic machine via two information channels, an afferent and efferent one. In this case, the machine can do everything except one thing: it does not directly command the brain processes of the receiver; it only commands the facts that enter the brain," "We shall thus determine as much: the statement that person × finds himself in the real world rather than in a phantomatic one can always be only probable, sometimes highly probable, but never absolutely certain. Playing against a machine is like playing chess: a contemporary electronic machine will lose to an excellent player, but it will beat a mediocre one; in the future, it will beat every human being." "Of course, it is possible to envisage some kind of omniplanetary “Superphantomat,”to which the inhabitants of a given planet have been connected “for ever,”that is, for as long as they have been alive, while their bodies’ vegetative processes are being supported by automatic devices (e.g., those introducing supplements into their blood). Naturally, a civilization of this kind looks like a nightmare. Yet similar criteria cannot determine its probability: something else determines it. This civilization would only exist for the duration of one generation—the one that remains connected to the “Superphantomat.”This would thus be a peculiar form of euthanasia, a kind of pleasant suicide of a civilization. For this reason, we consider its implementation to be impossible." "In other words, cannot phantomatics absorb the dark forces lurking in man, without doing any harm to anyone?" "Thus the inauthenticity of phantomatic experiences would take away their “buffer”value; they would instead become a school or a training ground for socially banned activities rather than their “absorber." "Illegal phantomats can also, of course, be set up. Yet this is more a policing problem than a cybernetic one. Cyberneticists might be expected to build a kind of “censorship”into the device (akin to the Freudian “dream censor"), which would stop the vision as soon as the phantomatized person starts showing some aggressive or sadistic tendencies." This is kind of a simplistic take on the subject of virtual reality. I’m surprised he so quickly concludes that it can just be regulated. Still, I have the benefit of five extra decades of thinking about this topic; he was one of the first to even consider it. "When the transformation of personality can be actualized, individual identity stops being a phenomenon to be investigated and becomes a phenomenon to be defined." "What will happen if we send an “atomic description”not once but twice? Two identical persons will come out of the receiving device. And if we do not just wire this information in one direction but emit it as a radio wave, while the receivers will be located in thousands of places all over the globe and on the surface of numerous planets and moons, the “transmitted”person will appear in all these places. Even though we have transmitted Mr. Smith’s description only once, he is now emerging from the cabins of the receiving devices a million times over—on Earth and in the sky, in cities, on mountaintops, in jungles and moon craters. This only seems strange until we ask where exactly Mr. Smith finds himself at this point. Where has the telegraphic journey taken him?" "The murderous aspect of this act seems self-evident, since, if we want to telegraph a person, it is clearly not enough to transmit his atomic description, as this person also has to be killed." This presages the main plot of the film The Prestige "Which one of the two Mr. Smiths is thus a true continuation of the frozen one: the first or the second? Each carries approximately a half of the “original”atoms—which is actually not that relevant, since atoms lack individuality and get exchanged by an organism in metabolic processes." Ship of Theseus "A twin is indeed a perfect molecular copy of the “original.”Yet the similarity between two states of the same person—when he is eight and eighty years old, respectively—is no doubt even smaller than the mutual similarity between the twins. Despite this, anyone would admit that the child and the old man are the same person—something we cannot say about the two brothers. It is therefore not the amount of analogous genetic information that determines the continuation of existence but rather the fact of being genetically identical, even if the dynamic structure of the brain undergoes significant changes during one’s lifetime." "The world today has other concerns. It is divided; it does not satisfy the needs of millions—but what if those needs are eventually satisfied? What if the automatic production of goods takes off? Will the West survive this? This is a grotesque vision: of humanless factories producing billions of objects, machines, nutritional elements, through the energy of a star to which our civilization is “connected.”Will some kind of General Apocalyptics become the owner of that star? Never mind property rights. If I say that one era is coming to an end, I am not even thinking about the demise of the old systems. Satisfying the basic needs of humanity is a necessary task, a preparation for a final exam; it is the beginning of a mature age rather than its end." "Indeed, if Nature had had to consider on a regulatory level the momentum, spin, and moment of every separate electron, it would have never constructed any living organisms." "Theories are possible because the number of variables in a single phenomenon is incomparably higher than the number of variables this phenomenon shares with a whole lot of other phenomena, whereby it is fine to ignore the former on scientific grounds. This is why it is possible to ignore the history of individual molecules, the fact that Mr. Smith met his aunt the day before, or a million other variables." "This problem belongs to so-called Gestalt psychology. I am not able to describe a friend of mine so that you can immediately recognize him on the basis of my description. Yet I am myself able to recognize him right away. From the perspective of the psychology of sensory perceptions, his face thus represents a certain “Gestalt form." "A melody retains its “form”no matter if it has been whistled through one’s fingers, played by a brass band, or tapped out with one finger on the piano’s keyboard. Everyone can experience such ways of recognizing the “form”of shapes, sounds, and so on. If he is any good, a theoretical scientist well versed in the abstract formalism and symbolism of the theories among which he spends his life starts to perceive those theories as certain “forms.”Naturally, such forms are devoid of any faces, features, or sounds; they are just abstract constructs in his mind. Yet he can manage to discover a similarity between the “forms”of two thus far disconnected theories, or, by aligning them together, he can grasp that they are special cases of a yet nonexistent generalization that needs to be constructed." "All theories use a small number of variables. Theories that are more universal do not contain a great number of variables: they are just applicable in a large number of cases. Relativity theory is a good example of this." "During its course of development, genotypic information is transformed into phenotypic information. A phenotype is the final shape of a system (i.e., its morphological traits, together with physiological ones, and thus its functions) that emerges as a result of the activity of hereditary (genotypic) factors and the influences of an external environment." "we could also understand a mutation as both a decrease in the amount of (structural) information and an increase in the amount of (selective) information. The way a mutation is “perceived”is determined by the biogeocenotic environment. Under normal conditions, it will stand for a decrease in the amount of structural information pertaining to the actual world; consequently, the organism will become extinct as a result of being less adapted, even though the amount of selective information has increased." "Mathematicians are thus a generator of diversity, whereas empiricists are the selector postulated by Ashby. Naturally, mathematics is not a noise generator. It is a generator of order, of various “internal orders.”It creates orders that correspond, in a more or less fragmentary manner, to the real world. This fragmentary correspondence facilitates the development of science and technology—and thus of civilization." "The question then arises as to how “fields"—linguistic and gravitational ones—actually exist. This is quite a difficult question, concerning as it does the “ontological status”of examined phenomena. Bodies’ motions and linguistic articulations no doubt exist—but do they exist in exactly the same way that gravitation and language do? In" "The reception of a text as a program that requires filling in within the range of acceptable interpretative oscillations is only one element in the hierarchically complex set of proceedings because we do not read to practice a relating or an ordering strategy but rather to learn something. An increase in the amount of information is the correct outcome of a reception that matters to us. As a general rule, transmission activates interpretive decisions and all the other control activities of a syntactic and semantic nature subliminally; that is, “the mental filling in of the fragmentary program”occurs in a way that is inaccessible to introspection." "When transmission efficacy turns out to be quite good, that is, the text’s constants are being transmitted even though the text as a program of “informational reconstruction”is full of gaps, this can be explained by the fact that the sender’s and the receiver’s brains are homomorphic systems characterized by a high degree of functional parallelism, especially if they were subject to analogous preprogramming from within the same culture." "The formalization of a linguistic utterance aims at a maximum reduction of interpretive freedom. A formal language does not allow for alternative interpretations—at least, this is how it should be within an ideal limit. In reality, it turns out that this limit does not equal zero, which is why some expressions that are unambiguous for a mathematician turn out to be not so unambiguous for a digital machine." "[…] is not that the causal language of the genes is a tool that is not general enough, whose examination will not be of much use to the designer, because every “utterance”made in this “language”is “just”a self-actualizing production recipe for a particular copy of a given species—and nothing else. The language of heredity turns out to be surprisingly “excessive”in its universality. This language is a tool for constructing systems that can manage tasks that their very designer (i.e., this language) is not able to cope with because it lacks, for example, an appropriate semantic and syntactic apparatus." "We have to admit that the extent to which control will remain in human hands partly depends on a point of view. The fact that man is able to swim by himself does not mean that he is capable of crossing an ocean without a ship—not to mention jets and space rockets in this context! A similar evolution is starting, in a kind of parallel way, in the information universe. Man is capable of directing a gnostic machine toward a problem that he could perhaps solve by himself (either he himself or his great grandchildren), but in the process, the machine may open his eyes to a problem whose existence he did not even suspect. Who actually has the lead in the latter example?" "[…] no one else needs to be obeyed and served. Unless something changes, our numerous Western intellectuals say, man is going to drown in the hedonism of consumption. If only it was accompanied by some deep pleasure! Yet there is none: submerged into this slavish comfort, man is more and more bored and empty. Through inertia, the obsession with the accumulation of money and shiny objects is still with us, yet even those wonders of civilization turn out to be of no use. Nothing shows him what to do, what to aim for, what to dream about, what hope to have. What is man left with then? The fear of old age and illness and the pills that restore mental balance—which he is losing, in being irrevocably separated from transcendence." Goal acheived "Yet who created your “real”world? If it did indeed have a creator, does this not mean it is a similar kind of “deception"? No? Where is the difference then? We both created a civilization; does this mean it is also a deception? Finally, as biological organisms, we are a product of the natural process, which shaped us through millions of games of chance. Why is it a bad thing that we want to take this process into our own hands?" "His main difficulty lies in ensuring that the creatures for whom the Universe will serve as a habitat do not find out about its “artificiality.”One is right to be concerned that the very suspicion that there may be something else beyond “everything”would immediately encourage them to seek exit from this “everything.”Considering themselves prisoners of the latter, they would storm their surroundings, looking for a way out—out of pure curiosity, if nothing else. Just preventing them from finding the exit would amount to offering them knowledge about their imprisonment, while simultaneously taking away the keys. We must not therefore cover up or barricade the exit. We must make its existence impossible to guess. Otherwise, the inhabitants will start feeling like prisoners, even if that “prison”was actually to be the size of the whole Galaxy." "[…] by the global receiver, that is, consciousness.“>It is only then that they would be able to see that our world is one level of Reality short when compared with theirs (since they are made of electrical impulses and it is only those impulses that are made of the same material that our world is). Figuratively speaking, a created world is perhaps like a very stable, very long, and internally coherent dream that no one is dreaming but that rather “is dreaming itself"—inside a “digital machine." "[…] was probably then that primitive man acquired considerable longevity when compared with the anthropoids. Indeed, individuals from groups that had the most experience, that is, the oldest and the longest living, won the struggle for survival. It was the first time during evolution that a species that was capable of longevity had been selected because, for the first time, that particular trait turned out to be biologically valuable as a treasury of information." "The history of civilization, with its anthropoid prologue and the possible extensions we have outlined here, is a process of expanding the range of homeostasis, that is, of man changing his environment, over the period of between a thousand and three thousand years. This ability, which penetrates the micro and macro universe with its technical tools, all the way to its furthest visible “pantocreatic”limit, does not touch the human organism itself. Man remains the last relic of Nature, the last “authentic product of Nature”inside the world he himself is creating. This state of events cannot last for an indefinite period of time. The invasion of technology created by man into his body is inevitable." "which will involve replacing Nature’s evolutionary gradients with man’s purposeful regulatory activity. Such regulation can in turn have various goals. It may focus on eliminating all those harmful consequences caused by the absence of natural selection, which destroys the inadequately adapted, from the artificial environment of that civilization." This current period, with its anti-evolutionary attitude, near love, of the evolutionarily disadvantaged, will be seen as a backwards religious curiosity in the future. At best. At worst, they will perceive us as criminally pushing for the end of humanity. A hundred years from now, when nature is drastically outpacing evolution’s ability to adapt, man will no longer have the luxury of hewing to a moral code that forbids genetic engineering of humans. The blind, the deaf, the retarded, the autistic, the unmotivated, the stupid, the weak…they will sink when their survival depends on them swimming. Being saddled with them because of an outdated morality will be a luxury no-one will be able to afford. It will be seen as far more efficient to tweak genetics to keep members of society within a physical bandwidth that if not of actual use in one way or another, at least imposes a minimum of effort. We will no longer have the luxury of keeping useless people alive. This is not eugenics; this is a much harsher world than we know. The future will contain a desperation unknown for centuries to the first-world person. Third-world people-¾ of the world-are already intimately familiar with this harsh, cruel algebra. "When, in planning human reconstruction, we limit ourselves to the means whose development will facilitate the information transfer of the human genotype, we simultaneously give up, completely unnecessarily, on supplying the body with some enhanced systems and some new functions that would be very useful and valuable for it." "It would be an act of extreme madness if man really was to undergo a transformation owing to the technologies that he himself has created and if he was to consider a robot with a perfect crystalline brain his successor. It would actually amount to a collective suicide of the human race, even though such a suicide would be covered up by the apparent continuation of humanity in thinking machines—which are part of the technology created by man. In this way, man would ultimately allow the technology he himself has brought about to push him out of his place of existence, of his ecological niche. Having removed a less adapted species from the stage of history, technology would thus become a new synthetic species." "The organism should avoid the final products of excretion: this is important from a biological point of view. Yet at the same time, it should aim at sexual conjunction, which is needed for evolutionary purposes. The concentration of two such diametrically opposite yet important imperatives must have contributed to the wide emergence of myths about the original sin and about the natural impurity of sex life and its manifestations. Torn between genetically programmed repulsion and attraction, the mind would produce either civilizations based on the idea of sin and guilt or civilizations based around shame and ritualized debauchery." "Today we believe that it is possible to create a symphony, sculpture, or painting via a conscious mental effort. At the same time, the thought of “composing”a successor for ourselves, with any kind of orchestration of his spiritual and physical traits we want, seems like a terrible heresy. Yet the desire to fly or to study the human body, machine building, or examining the origins of life on Earth also used to be seen as heresies in the past." "If we are to behave like intellectual cowards, we can, of course, remain silent on the topic of any probable future developments. But in that case, we should at least make it clear that we are behaving like cowards. Man cannot change the world without changing himself. We can take the first steps on a given path while pretending we do not know where it leads. Yet this is not the best strategy." "[…] eternal human problems would not exist. A biotechnological revolution does not just therefore mean annihilating the Homo sapiens but also its spiritual legacy. Unless we treat it as a figment of our imagination, this position seems rather scornful: instead of solving his problems and finding answers to the questions that have preoccupied him for centuries, man is to hide away from them in some kind of materialist perfection." "When, in the not-too-distant future, electricity will be produced directly, for example, in a microfusion cell, thus overcoming the troublesome circularity of the present transformations (of coal’s chemical energy into thermal energy, then of thermal into kinetic energy, and only then of kinetic energy into electrical energy), only a historian of technology will remember the design principle of the earlier generators." "[…] we also accept the possibility of the emergence, within liquid phases, of some other types of self-organization than the protein-based one, and maybe even the colloid-based one—whereby those other variants may be both “worse”and “better”than the “terrestrial”option. But what does this “worse”or “better”actually mean? Are we not trying to sneak in some kind of Platonism with those terms, some kind of entirely arbitrary valorization? Progress, or rather the possibility of progress, is our criterion." Long discussion of cells and how they work and how they evolved. "[…] is too early to think about constructing a “universal homeostat”such as the cell. We are taking the opposite trajectory to the one evolution took, because paradoxically, it is easier for us to construct narrowly specialized homeostats." "This clearly shows that man can beat Nature: the latter is only capable of constructing some of the possible homeostats; we, in turn, on gaining the necessary knowledge, will be able to build all of them. Such optimism when it comes to space design has to be coupled with some reservations, full of ifs and buts. We do not know whether humanity is going to gain all the information that is necessary for carrying out the previously described “construction tasks.”There may exist “an information acquisition threshold,”just as there exists a limit to the speed of light, yet we do not know anything about it. Besides, we should remind ourselves of the actual proportions involved in this “man against Nature”task. In the face of such a problem, we are like ants who are promising themselves to carry the Himalayas on their backs to another location. Perhaps I am exaggerating in favor of the ants. Perhaps their task would actually be easier. This is when we compare all of contemporary technologies to the tools at ants’ disposal, that is, their own jaws and backs. There is only one difference—the fact that ants can only develop their tools in the course of biological evolution, while we can start an information evolution, as already discussed. This difference may decide in favor of man’s victory one day." "[...] evolution never showed any “ambition” to solve the problem of homeostatic regulation over any period of time. Its efforts were entirely focused on another issue, which it approached up front: species longevity, the supraindividual immortality of life as a sum of homeostatic transformations on the scale of the planet." "Evolution was unable, for example, to produce mechanical devices such as the wheel because the wheel must be itself from its very beginning, that is, it must possess an axis of rotation, a hub, a disk, and so on. It would thus have needed to have developed in a staggered fashion because even the smallest wheel is already a finished wheel—and not some kind of “transition” stage." "[...] biologists have correctly observed a number of times, Evolution is a diligent constructor only in working out absolutely vital solutions, as long as they serve the organism during the phase of its full vitality (for sexual reproduction purposes). But everything else that does not have such critical significance is more or less abandoned, left to the devices of accidental metamorphoses and completely blind strokes of luck." Of note here is that his literary description makes it seem as if evolution has agency. I don't think that is the intent. "The final stage of each evolutionary branch, that is, the currently living “model” that has been put into “mass production,” reflects, on one hand, the current conditions that it is expected to cope with, and on the other, the billion-year-long road of blind trials and searches that all its ancestors had traveled. Present-day solutions, which are inevitably compromised, are also tarnished with the inertia of all the previous designs—which also involved compromises." "The curse of every perfect specialization lies in the fact that it represents only an adaptation to the current conditions; the better the specialization, the easier it is for a change to those conditions to lead to extinction." "Today man is the most unreliable element in the machinery he has created—he is also the weakest link, mechanically, in the processes at work." "Aging is a similar distribution of processes that involves their gradual escape from central control. Death arrives when the distribution of those processes has achieved a critical value and when the reserves of all the compensatory apparatuses have become exhausted." "In reality we are thus not lampooning this nonhuman creator for real. We are rather interested in something completely different. We just want to become more perfect designers than evolution ever was—and we must be careful not to repeat its “mistakes.”" "When synthetic chemistry, information theory, and general systems theory develop much further, the human body will turn out to be the least perfect element in such a world. Human knowledge will exceed the biological knowledge accumulated in living systems. At that point, plans that, for the time being, are seen as aspersions cast against the perfection of evolutionary solutions will actually become realized." "A book’s conclusion is to some extent its summary. It may thus be worth pondering once again the eagerness with which I have shifted responsibility for the future Gnosis of our species onto the dead shoulders of nonexistent machines. Someone could ask whether this was not caused by some kind of frustration of which the author himself was not fully aware, a frustration resulting from the fact that—owing to historical and his own limitations—he was unable to penetrate science and its prospects. Consequently, he seems to have invented, or rather slightly modernized, a version of the famous Ars Magna,1 which clever Lullus presented quite a long time ago, that is, in the year 1300, and which was rightly mocked by Swift in Gulliver’s Travels." "Fertilization is an act of “taking a molecular decision” in a confrontation between two partly alternative “hypotheses” about a future state of the organism, whereby the gametes of both sexes are “carriers” of those hypotheses." "The chromosomal language is also unreliable; it is an extravagant dispenser of synthetic pronouncements about the properties of the world because it understands the world’s statistical nature and acts according to it. It does not pay any attention to singular statements. What matters to it is the totality of expression over billions of years. It truly makes sense to learn such a language—because it constructs philosophers, while ours constructs only philosophies." "As Lem himself puts it in the essay titled “Small Robots,” “we cannot exclude the possibility that machines equipped with sovereign will may at some point begin to resist us. I am not thinking, of course, of a robot rebellion against humankind, so beloved by all primitive purveyors of cognitive magic. My only point is that, with the rise in the degree of behavioral freedom, one can no longer preserve the ‘good and only the good,’ because this very freedom can also give rise to a touch of ‘evil.’ We can see this in natural evolution only too well, and this reflection may perhaps temper our intention to endow robots with free will.”" "All these issues are both promising and debatable. They illustrate how unpredictable the development of knowledge is and how it would be wrong to assume that we already know with great certainty many fundamental laws that determine the nature of the Universe and also that any further discoveries would only fill in with detail this already more or less complete picture." "The preceding consequence of scientific progress is only apparently a paradox because ignorance can mean two different things. First, it refers to all this we do not know, while we also have no idea about our lack of knowledge (the Neanderthal man did not know anything about the nature of electrons, nor did he have any inkling about the possibility of their existence). This is, so to speak, “total” ignorance. Second, ignorance can also mean the awareness of the existence of a problem, coupled with the lack of knowledge with regard to its solution." "For someone who can count to a hundred, there is actually no practical difference between a quintillion and infinity. Man as a researcher of the Universe is more like someone who has just learned arithmetic than like a mathematician who is freely juggling infinities." "A creature from Mars, observing the circulation of the “vehicle liquid,” with its “motorcar-bodies” on terrestrial motorways, could easily consider this to be a purely statistical phenomenon. This creature would then consider the fact that Mr. Smith—who goes to work by car every day—suddenly turns back while halfway there, an “indeterministic” phenomenon. But he is turning back because he has left his briefcase at home. This was a “hidden parameter” of the phenomenon. Another person does not reach his destination because he has remembered that he has an important meeting or because he has noticed that the engine is overheating. Thus various purely deterministic factors can offer a total picture of a certain median behavior of a large mass of elementary phenomena—a mass that is only apparently homogeneous." "A civilization does not stand for an increase in all possible kinds of freedom. Culinary freedom for cannibals, freedom to self-harm, and lots of other freedoms have already been crossed out from the magna charta liberatum of a society that is undergoing technological development. It is actually hard to understand why reproductive freedom would have to remain intact even if it was to lead to a total immobilization of individuals, to smashing the cultural tradition, to giving up, literally, on the Earth’s and sky’s beauty." "properties of elements are relative because they can only convey the relation of one element to others. Thus, e.g., flammability is a relative term: we consider hydrogen to be flammable because it burns in oxygen’s atmosphere. If the Earth’s atmosphere consisted of methane the way the atmospheres of large planets do, then we would consider hydrogen to be an inflammable gas and oxygen a flammable one. It is a similar case with acids and alkalis: if we swap water for another solvent, the substances that appear in the environment as acids will become alkalis, weak acids will become strong, etc." "[...] a scientist cannot work on the assumption that he is only creating a certain transient and impermanent link in the cognitive process, even if he was to hold such a philosophical position. A theory is “valid for a certain period of time”the whole of the history of science demonstrates this. Then it gives way to another theory. It is entirely possible that there exists a threshold of theoretical constructions that the human mind cannot cross by itself—but that it will be able to cross with the help of, say, an “intelligence amplifier.” A road toward future progress thus opens up before us, yet we still do not know whether some objective laws that cannot be overcome (such as, e.g., the speed of light) will not impede the construction process of such “amplifiers.”" "The criteria that currently determine practical ways of proceeding can go out of date (e.g., the criterion of economic profitability or energy saving does not apply anymore when a material process that is practically inexhaustible is the source of energy). Besides, when basic needs are being fully satisfied, the problem “what to do next,” i.e., whether we should create some new needs and, if so, what kind, comes to the fore." "In any case, another reason why this phenomenon of “becoming detached,” “leaping into the future,” and experiencing “information eruption” would be a disaster rather than an actual developmental leap is that, as soon as the “information farm” has progressed too far ahead of the current state of knowledge about that civilization, the criteria for eliminating irrelevant information would disappear. In this way, the “farm” itself would be immediately transformed into a “bomb”—if not a megabyte then at least a gigabyte one; it would become a giant, with oceans of information produced by it leading to a most unusual deluge." "today’s technologies of recording, protecting, and addressing information are not radically streamlined within the next fifty years, we shall be threatened with a vision that will be both grotesque and frightening: that of a world covered up with piles of books and of a humanity turned into busy librarians." "On this “library front,” methodology understood as a set of directions for finding knowledge in the world should give way to “ariadnology”—which would stand for a guide to the labyrinth of the already assembled knowledge." "It seems that the crisis of information distribution will lead to the strengthening of publication criteria in the future so that their original selection prevents the flooding of the professional market with insignificant works, works that are only produced to obtain an academic degree or to satisfy someone’s ambition. We can even think that presenting banal works will at last be declared a menace and thus will be seen as a violation of scientists’ professional ethics because such works create nothing but “noise” that prevents us from receiving valuable information—which is vital if knowledge is to grow further." Oh dear, I'm afraid we've disappointed Lem's hopes terribly. "An opponent of “bioconstructionism” cannot limit himself to opposing any “plans for man’s redesign” but should rather give up on all of civilization’s achievements, such as medicine and technology, and retreat to the forest on all four. All the solutions and methods he does not criticize or oppose (e.g., the method of medical intervention) actually used to be opposed from standpoints similar to the one he has adopted. It is only the passage of time, and thus the acceptance of their effectiveness, that led to them being included in our civilization’s treasure chest, which is why they do not evoke opposition from anyone anymore." "An opponent of bioconstructionism may reply that unique singular existence is priceless, which is why we should not, in our ignorance, manipulate genotypes by trying to free them from traits we consider harmful and by introducing others." "the Earth’s atmosphere has been poisoned over decades by radioactive waste. The majority of respected geneticists and biologists would insist that this would lead to the emergence of numerous mutations in subsequent generations and that every nuclear test explosion meant a certain number of deformations, illnesses, and premature deaths caused by cancer, leukemia, etc. Also, those explosions were not to serve anything except increasing the nuclear potential of the interested parties. This kind of politics, continued up to this day by some states that deem themselves civilized, has produced at least thousands (or, more probably, tens of thousands) of victims. This is the world in which we live—and this is the world in which we are discussing the problems of bioconstructionism." "The aura of moral responsibility must envelop the field of bioconstructionism—which is an area of great risk (but also perhaps of equally great hope). Yet, given that man caused himself so much pain and suffering in previous centuries (and not only then) as a result of his uncontrolled activity on the scale of society and civilization, it is high time he took such a conscious and responsible risk as soon as the state of his knowledge allows for it, even if this knowledge remains incomplete." ]]> </content> </entry> <entry> <title type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Adjustment Day: A Novel by Chuck Palahniuk (2018) (read in 2019)]]> </title> <id>https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3742</id> <link href="https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3742"/> <updated>2019-05-19T16:58:17+02:00</updated> <author> <name type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Marco von Ballmoos]]> </name> <uri>https://earthli.com/users/marco</uri> </author> <summary type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA["Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is" ... ]]> </summary> <content type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Published by marco on 19. May 2019 16:58:17 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I've failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an interest in this book, then I'm happy for you." This story is told in flashbacks and flash-forwards, cutting back and forth between myriad characters. My summary untangles this all a bit. This is the story of a brovolution, the logical conclusion of an increasingly divided population in America. It starts with a kidnapping. Walter hatches a plan to win Shasta's heart (captured within her voluptuous curves) by showing her how rich he's become. It's a standard adolescent fantasy. He thinks that he will get a new "old man" to teach him how to become rich. He kidnaps Talbott, a man who turns out to be even crazier than Walter. In a reversal of the kidnapping situation, the old man tests Walter, finds him worthy and begins to order him about, pretending to acquiesce to his demand to "make him rich". Walter wonders at the old man's convoluted approach, but trusts that it will work out. The whole time, the old man is tied naked to a chair, covered in the wounds from hundreds of cuts made by Walter as he searched for a subdermal tracker Talbott insisted he had, but which he'd lied about to "test" Walter's dedication. Walter becomes Talbott's amanuensis as he rants and raves, dictating the text that would become the blue-black book "Adjustment Day". We would later learn that Talbott had said "A Judgment Day" and be led to wonder along with Walter what else he'd mis-transcribed in a book that would become the user's manual for the next revolution in America. The book drives people to revolution by revealing an age-old secret: older and middle-aged men have provoked and will continue to occasionally provoke wars in which they cull a useless younger -- and expectant/hopeful -- generation of men, simultaneously clearing out their rivals and reducing available men to such a minimum that women have no choice but to allow them much more leeway in order to ensure the survival of humanity. Men gain power through their self-imposed scarcity. It is madness, of course. But there are enough who would start packing their go-bags at this point. Palahniuk knows this and plays to the stereotype. Sneakily, the book has some pearls of wisdom -- true revolutionary ideas not poisoned by Talbott's mad worldview -- spread throughout. He makes some good points, but his proposed solutions are pure bullshit. E.g. "“But identity politics,” Dawson continued, “has reduced the homosexual to nothing but his sexual preference. It has reduced the black to only his skin. And each has become a caricature of his former dignified self.”""[...] our lifetimes must not be measured in weekends. Our time on Earth must not be judged by wages earned and taxes paid.""It was clear to Jamal that for whites their guilt constituted a uniquely white form of boasting. Their breast beating was a humblebrag always saying: We did this! We thwarted God in the Garden! We killed his son! We white people will do with other races and natural resources as we see fit! Showing off disguised as a mea culpa. For the white man, his guilt was his biggest badge of accomplishment. Only whites killed the planet with global warming so only whites could save it. Their boasting never let up. It was the white racket: Creating problems so they could rescue everybody.""To make a career of rescuing people is also to create a permanent class in need of rescue.""Making others right makes them love you, according to Talbott, because we only love things we feel superior to. We only love those who don’t pose a threat. Making others right is the best method for controlling them." The revolution starts with an online List. It is "America's Least Wanted". Anyone can nominate someone for the list. Anyone can vote for people on the list. Those with the most votes remain; those without enough votes in a certain timespan are culled from the list. The others? They are to be culled come Adjustment Day. When Adjustment Day comes, the members of the first lineages -- hand-chosen cells full of people frustrated by society's utter subordination and humiliation and indoctrinated in the ways of Talbott's book -- roll out, hunting down the people on The List, gaining the number of points allocated to that person and being able to use those points to participate in the new "democracy" that rises from the ashes of the slaughtered one. There are giant lime-lined pits waiting to receive the bodies of America's Least Wanted. It is interesting that several of the members of the first lineage were students of one of the professors marked for slaughter, Brolly. Despite them having marked him for eradication, they would occasionally draw a parallel between what happened post-Adjustment Day and what Brolly had taught them from the world's literature and history in classes deemed otherwise "useless" by the Book. There are myriad characters, all involved in the plot to overthrow America. The overthrow begins at about a third of the way through the book. In the rest, we watch the new countries develop in the ashes. The first third -- maybe 40% -- looks and feels like a flawless execution of the red-pill revolution frustrated whites are fantasizing about online all the time. There are cracks and little hints of doubt throughout, but a superficial and partial reading will find critics leveling charges of alt-rightism at Palahniuk. But read on to see the whole thing quickly careen into a mess far greater than what we have today. The author lets the revolution go off without a single hitch. Everything goes perfectly as planned. There are no weak liberators, scared to shoot, no legislators worthy of redemption. Only professor Brolly in Jamal's head, living on as lessons Jamal didn't even realize he'd learned, belying the uselessness with which education had been tagged in the Book. In a way, the cruelty and coldness of the revolutionaries is uniform and unbelievable. Still, it was better in a way than the constant mercy/betrayal cycle in Seveneves by Neal Stephenson, where the protagonists let the legislators and former rulers live, only to see them worm their way back to power, again and again and again. The steeliness was a welcome change. But pothead Walter and his gonads inspired everything, with his lust for Shasta. It's wonderfully done by Palahniuk. And for the other revolutionaries, always it comes down to the same thing, all the high-minded rhetoric masks the single question: can I fuck it? Men rule, women drool (literally, in Shasta's case, when she's "proving" her pure whiteness). The male fantasy doesn't stretch very far. The white male fantasy even less so. Gaysia, Blacktopia and Caucasia are the main countries, with obvious segregated populations. There are complicated rules for mixed-race citizens and sexual preference takes precedence over race. Asians are sent back to Asia and Latinos sent to somewhere in South America. Jews go to Israel. It is crude and hews closely to the simplistic plans and ideas easily found on the Internet. Blacktopia rides high, becoming the seat of technology based on the ancient nigh-magical secret science that blacks had long hidden from their oppressors. Caucasia reverts to medieval times, barely surviving in a benighted manner. Gaysia struggles to produce children, devolving to a country that forces its male members to donate sperm and its females to host children. The revolution ends with a whimper, having destroyed much more than it repaired, being viewed as a failure by all save perhaps the denizens of Blacktopia. The world, presumably, looks on, bemused and vaguely embarrassed for America's inability to act grown-up. [Citations] "Such surplus young men, if they were somewhat educated and well fed, they yearned for status and would create havoc in pursuit of it. Gunnar held that starving people don’t strive for recognition. Likewise, illiterate boys will never recognize how history ignores them. But if the youth bulge is fed, well fed and schooled, they’ll become a pack of ravenous, attention-seeking wolves." "So whenever Shasta started to take umbrage at their harassment, she considered how most of them would soon be bulldozed beneath arid dunes with like numbers of boisterous and extraneous Middle Eastern boys. She’d scamper through her course work while her male peers would be conscripted. Their muscles and pimples would be mangled under tank treads and blasted into screaming pieces by landmines just like the buried-alive, just-hatched baby roosters whose only crime had been being born the wrong gender." "His best guess was that Americans were too fractured along the fault lines of personal identity politics. It seemed that no one cared about others being compelled to gird their loins and perish. Recent politics had effectively branded young men as an internal enemy—perpetrators of rape culture, school shooters, and neo-Nazis—and media-frightened Americans were glad to see these bad apples culled." "His best guess was that Americans were too fractured along the fault lines of personal identity politics. It seemed that no one cared about others being compelled to gird their loins and perish. Recent politics had effectively branded young men as an internal enemy—perpetrators of rape culture, school shooters, and neo-Nazis—and media-frightened Americans were glad to see these bad apples culled. The mass media had done its state-instructed job to demonize draft-age men, greasing the skids for their induction." "Grim but true, rumor had it that this would be the fastest world war in history. Once the combatants were mustered along the battle front, a thermonuclear strike would eradicate everyone involved. A nonexistent terrorist group would be blamed for the nuke, and the warring nations could withdraw with no loss of face. The war would be declared a “draw.” Yet another war to end all wars." "The Census Bureau had recognized that the Millennials would be the largest demographic in national history. They’d be healthy and well educated, and eventually they’d all want respect and power. The dynamic had played itself out in countries like Rwanda and Ivory Coast, where surplus young men had sparked civil wars until the national infrastructure had been destroyed and the entire population reduced to grinding poverty. For a time, American officials had kept the lid on this human powder keg by dosing the boys with Ritalin." "All of those ads for garage sales and yard sales and seal-point Siamese kittens, those people seeking to buy WWII souvenirs or Fiestaware or split, seasoned firewood, those were the underpinnings of the oldest political dynasties. At a nickel or a dollar per word, those pages had been the goldmine that had financed the high culture. The editorials and book reviews and investigative reporting that was awarded Pulitzer Prizes. According to Dr. Brolly, our brightest, most-erudite observations owed their existence to poor people trying to unload vintage Avon cologne bottles and unwanted timeshares." "“Moments,” Piper read, “are the building blocks of our lives. And our lifetimes must not be measured in weekends. Our time on Earth must not be judged by wages earned and taxes paid.”" "And these professors felt the future, for the first time in many years, might be an improvement. And both the journalists and the lecturers were mistaken. For schooling had given the people very little in exchange for their money. And the media had given nothing in exchange for the people’s time and attention." "Because the Protestant religions had been created during a power-reversal ritual, those religions have always been wary of such a practice. Brolly nodded, knowingly. “The Pope, His Holiness, will continue to wash and kiss the feet of the poor on Holy Thursday, but the Protestants will never risk the same vulnerability.” "That was the fatal flaw of this great country, he surmised. It never allowed the weakest, the poorest and most disenfranchised to enjoy even an hour of ritualized power. Yes, we had castrated versions like Halloween and Christmas caroling for children, but there was nothing to exhaust the adult underclasses and leave them contented to remain poor for another year. (Emphasis added.)" "He asked, “What’s his value up to?” Jamal was studying his phone, scrolling through a long list of names. He kept scrolling. The list got longer every day as people submitted their last-minute nominations. At last he said, “You’re not going to believe this . . .” Keishaun froze. “Tell me!” Jamal looked up from the screen, beaming. “Sixteen hundred votes . . .” His friend gasped. That practically made them their own political party. Keishaun covered his own mouth with both hands and whisper-shrieked with joy. As Jamal used the letter opener to carve away the dead" "Jamal leaned down to pick up the Alinsky book. Coolly assessing its pages, he said, “The time for pretty words has expired.” And he gently consigned the fragile paper to the hungry flames of the fireplace." "Caucasia is at war with Gaysia. Caucasia has always been at war with Gaysia." "By this time a secret network of the chosen was cast. Ordinary men doing their jobs. Normal people. Quiet and drawing no attention, they continued to raise their families and pay their taxes and treat others with a knowing dignity, full in the knowledge that soon they’d be unleashed to resolve all the flaws contained in society." "[...] repeating each other’s approved opinions about the world. To risk a conflicting idea would be dropping a turd in the happiness punchbowl, so Charlie and his brother-in-law hunkered down. They kept their heads low and didn’t draw any fire. They gobbled the turkey or Easter ham and pretended this wasn’t their lives disappearing into the past." "Living only on Saturday night, as it were." "Besides, she was among the parrots who said the world had to stay a certain way, and she’d live and die trying to earn gold stars from teachers who wanted to earn gold stars from teachers who yearned for gold stars." "Power meant Jamal not having to present himself as an imperfect copy of someone he’d never wanted to be in the first place." "Tomorrow they’d no longer be men who measured their time by red traffic lights and their pleasure by pints of microbrews." "“But identity politics,” Dawson continued, “has reduced the homosexual to nothing but his sexual preference. It has reduced the black to only his skin. And each has become a caricature of his former dignified self.” Men like Dawson and Charlie had not left their drill presses and lathes in order to rescue the gays and blacks. "Their lines had formed to battle the same corrupt identity politics that were now forcing the white races into one monstrous stereotype. Theirs was perhaps the meanest of all caricatures. Instead of being salt-of-the-Earth machinists and carpenters, they were being compelled by modern politics to rally under one flag as goose-stepping Nazi NASCAR storm troopers." "But when Christian culture supplanted the Greeks, the Christians destroyed most of the comedies. Stories of tragedy reinforced the Christian viewpoint so the church preserved Oedipus the King and Medea and Prometheus Bound and eradicated all that did not celebrate the church’s ideals of suffering and martyrdom." "When primitive man was prey, when he and his tribe ran in terror from a saber-toothed tiger or whatever, the man who fell would be eaten. For everyone else, his death would occur as a huge relief. According to Brolly all humor arises from escaping death." "The courtroom, the assembly chambers and on-location newscasts, the lecture halls, they stunk of gun smoke and spilled shit." Everything goes perfectly as planned. There are no weak liberators, scared to shoot, no legislators worthy of redemption. Only professor Brolly in Jamal's head. "Here Bing was summoned to come down from the gallery, and the target shrieked so cowardly that it was a pleasure to see him dead." "Adjustment Day would give him a fresh start. Whether it worked or not, it would be a radical shift. He’d be dead or in prison or a revolutionary hero, but any of those would be an improvement on the happy-sad, hopeful-fearful ordinary nobody the online world could watch getting older, getting taller, but never actually getting anywhere." The cruelty is uniform and unbelievable. Still, better in a way than the constant mercy/betrayal cycle in the Neal Stephenson book, where they let the legislators and former rulers live, only to see them worm their way back to power. "Here were all Walter’s dreams, of romancing Shasta with money, of rising above the economic mysteries that submerge most people," This pothead and his gonads inspired everything. Wonderfully done. "All public employees must remain servants of the people. They must forget their dreams of early retirement. Yes, they’d postponed their dreams in exchange for security and the promise that one day the young would relieve them. But now the young had seized control and were giddy with power. "Boys who’d never expected to attain drinking age—they’d been granted a future—and the last thing they wanted was to deliver mail or write parking tickets. So Talbott had called a temporary halt to retirements and sabbaticals and vacations in the public sector. Strictly as a short-term, stop-gap measure. For how long no one could say. Exempt were the police and military for they had aided the tribes." Same as it ever was. New rulers. Same game. "Just as the French Reign of Terror had commenced by beheading royals, then expanded to severing the heads of clerics and clerks and servants, the danger existed that Adjustment Day would become an annual event." "It struck Dawson as a shame. Looking at her, destitute like this, grit crusted around her cracked nostrils and caked in the corners of her mouth, her neck festering with mosquito bites and raw scratch marks, hidden under her unwashed stench and her claptrap political ideology he could tell she had once been a pretty fine-looking young lady." And always it comes down to the same thing, all the high-minded rhetoric masks the single question: can I fuck it? "He’d listened as his teacher, a woman who’d never been beyond North America, explained the whole of Europe and Asia. Gavyn had taken notes as another teacher, who’d never written so much as a short story, dissected Faulkner, Fitzgerald, and Donne. When he echoed back their pale misconceptions they praised him and pronounced him smart. Smart, yes, smart enough to know he still understood nothing and that his teachers were idiots." "It was clear to Jamal that for whites their guilt constituted a uniquely white form of boasting. Their breast beating was a humblebrag always saying: We did this! We thwarted God in the Garden! We killed his son! We white people will do with other races and natural resources as we see fit! Showing off disguised as a mea culpa. For the white man, his guilt was his biggest badge of accomplishment. Only whites killed the planet with global warming so only whites could save it. Their boasting never let up. It was the white racket: Creating problems so they could rescue everybody." "Oh, and the women. They left Charlie breathless, the women who migrated to him in droves, young women, older women presenting their daughters, women who understood the value of their beauty and vitality in this market. To them Charlie, skinny Charlie, ridiculous Charlie who’d hardly finished high school and could only operate a drill press, these women who’d only ever snubbed him—that is, if they’d even realized he was alive—these days they fought among themselves merely to catch his eye." And there it is again: the core of all incel, red-pill fiction. "For too long the differing strains of mankind have been blended into an increasingly blander pool. A culture of shared mediocrity that only serves as a broader field of consumers receptive to the same generic advertising and thus steered to desiring large amounts of a narrow spectrum of products." "[...] the state of California had been set aside to create a homeland for male and female sodomites." What if you're gay and black? Which takes precedence? "Here a woman risked everything if she stared a moment too long at a man. She could be fired from her job, evicted from her home. The government could take custody of her children, and she’d be deported to a homeland, white or black, where no one thought it a perversion for women and men to be intimate." "To make a career of rescuing people is also to create a permanent class in need of rescue." "Due to the high number of homosexual youths in Caucasia waiting for exit visas, the queer nation was aggressively searching for closeted heterosexuals in order to trade them for the would-be gay emigrants." "Brach and his ilk, princes and barons they called themselves. Last month’s grease monkeys and dog groomers. An aristocracy of former steam fitters and garbage haulers. They’d picked up guns and blown the brains out of civilization. They’d read the Talbott book. They lived by it. By reading it herself she could guess how her life as a team wife would turn out. As a brood mare, popping out white babies to repopulate the new nation state. A string of babies born a year or less apart, what her own mom used to call “Irish twins.”" "“We’re all self-deporting. The entire Mexican Diaspora is going Galt.” Meaning all Hispanics, Latinos, Chicanos were headed south of the border. “These white people are muy loco,” he laughed. “After they all starve or wipe out each other, we’ll come pick up the pieces.”" "For example, he cited the paintings and carvings reputed to show Aztecs ripping out the hearts of human sacrifices. He knew for a fact such artwork actually depicted Mesoamericans conducting successful heart transplant surgeries. The lofty stone slabs atop their pyramids were in actuality operating tables placed where the healthy daylight was strongest." The Mesoamericans building contrarian myths about themselves, just like the whites did. Bullshit? Probably. "Blacktopia had only recently announced a successful launch of its new flying pyramid, based on a long-forgotten antigravity technology suppressed by Eurocentric interests. After centuries of white denial the blacks had proven that pyramids built by the Egyptian pharaohs were in fact flying machines." "That’s why Adjustment Day had gone down. It would give the few remaining alpha studs the chance to boost white numbers. It would remove the temptation of Women’s Studies degrees and other horseshit that baited ladies to let their precious Aryan eggs dry up. Adjustment Day gave men like Charlie, with loads of sperm and not the best grasp of Calculus II, the opportunity to catch up the game for the white team. Simple as that." "“Terrorists working in league with the former president have claimed responsibility for the gas attack" Emmanuel Goldstein. "And while the whites strived to increase their numbers, white science and technology stalled. And certain whites were not above infiltrating Blacktopia to plunder its brilliance. For white science and mathematics had been harnessed only to build atomic bombs while black intellect yielded, daily, new wonders that enriched life, especially the lives of women, for Blacktopia held its sisters as its greatest treasure." "[...] the womenfolk of Xanthus had confronted the approaching waves. These enterprising females had lifted their skirts and faced the ocean with girl parts fully bared. Cross culturally, from Europe to Indonesia and South America, the ancient world had believed that exposed pussies would always frighten away evil. Up until the eighteenth century, above the doorways and gateways of castles and churches, masons had carved images of women squatting to reveal themselves." Look this up. Seems suspect. "In the sky, directly overhead a formation of jumbo jetliners was escorting the last of the Asian genotypes back to their native continent. Shasta watched them go with despair. Caucasia had chosen haggis over yu xiang rou si." "Between wakefulness and sleep, people pass through the hypnagogic state, a phase when sleep walking occurs. Also common are hallucinations, visions of tripping over an obstacle or falling from a window, and the sleeper jerks awake. That sudden awakening, sleep experts called it the hypnagogic spasm. Anthropologists, according to Talbott, believe that our evolutionary ancestors had developed the spasm to guard against losing their grip on branches or the fur of the mother primate." "If recovery groups were the churches of this era, they were still conducted in the old church buildings. As Christian churches had commandeered the temples previously devoted to Apollo and Diana, the local chapter of Narcotics Anonymous met in the basement of St. Stephens." "When an outfit like Amway wanted to motivate rookie enrollees, it encouraged them to test drive Maseratis and Alfa Romeos. People were encouraged to shop for Gulfstream jets and contact real estate agents for tours of mansions on fairways and private beaches. Real details motivated people. The smell of leather seats and the sound of ocean waves under the bedroom windows." Does that really work? Do people somehow work harder for such goals? Maybe I've never been desperate enough. "The moratorium, she meant. The big push to get anyone into STEM careers was dead. The edict was that white people were supposed to be breeding instead of reading." The white revolution has completely backfired. "What she meant was that the nation of Gaysia had only recently launched its program to reproduce exports. It would be seventeen years before it yielded any heterosexuals who could be traded for the homosexuals stockpiled in Caucasia and Blacktopia." "The two-lane highway skirted fields that stretched to the horizon. As many rows of eggplants as there were ripples in the ocean. Tended by a platoon of stooped women with headscarves knotted to cover their hair. Refugees from the cities. The cities weren’t sustainable. Never mind all the recycling and wind turbine power, cities were never sustainable. They’d collapsed into pits of cannibalism with the lucky survivors streaming into the countryside." "Jamal’s first point of pride was the levitator. The same electro-spiritual principles that floated the great space pyramids, this same black-based technology allowed personal transport vehicles that amounted to small floating platforms that could skim along at incredible speeds." "in Gaysia they were yoked to the national campaign for reproduction. Draconian sperm drives left most men with little money or energy. And women had lost all control over their reproductive rights." "Citizens of Caucasia were no better off. Where they’d excelled in science, they now banned it. They’d turned their focus to Jeffersonian agriculture and reinstating a white-European culture. The great metropolises of Caucasia had swiftly declined into deadly no-go zones where displaced liberal-arts majors stalked each other as food." "Blacks had resurrected all the pyro-spiritual and electro-expressive technologies they’d long kept hidden. These, the sacred laws of soul-metrics, had never been appropriated to enrich the white man’s brutal empire." "Word was the big land operations were fringed with favelas of displaced media and information workers. All living out of their dusty cars. Washed-up web designers and diversity officers, they were all hoping to prove themselves in the upcoming rhubarb harvest and to be awarded a thatched cottage before winter set in." "A naked old man, his wrists and ankles flapping with scraps of dirty duct tape. His emaciated body looked glossy with dried blood. What might be a hash-mark carpet of tiny stab wounds dotted his spindly arms and legs. The man ambled along the deserted sidewalk." "If she’d been born into this moment she’d see only peaceful women doing useful work to the sound of mandolins. Well fed, they were all healthy and plump with their future children. If she hadn’t known the world before Adjustment Day she wouldn’t see this Edenic scene through such a cynical, bitter lens. These future children would accept this life as a given." "Now Shasta surveyed the fields with new understanding. These women had all been bike messengers and basketball stars. Today they were hunched field wenches, doomed to imminent, repetitive motherhood. But not a year before they’d been drummers in rock bands. They’d been dope-smoking fire walkers and hairless pole dancers. How long ago had Adjustment Day occurred? Without cell phones or calendars, it was impossible to track the days. Only the weather suggested time passing." "From Harry Potter to Superman to Luke Skywalker to Robin the Boy Wonder, it would seem that all kids wanted to develop their own latent superpowers and to see their parents dead." "“I told you to call the book A Judgment Day!” Talbott ranted. "A Judgment Day. "God only knew what else Walter had misheard. "Talbott shook his head in disbelief. He snapped, “Is it too late to fix this . . . typographical error?” "A Judgment Day. Duh. And Walt lied. "He put on his best look of sincere confidence, and he told the old man, “Don’t worry. I’ll fix it.”" "Hearing such praise, Charlie lifted his chin, and his chest swelled with pride. To display his valuable Naugahyde gloves, he lifted a hand as if to straighten his weighty gold crown." Golgafrincham. "Making others right makes them love you, according to Talbott, because we only love things we feel superior to. We only love those who don’t pose a threat. Making others right is the best method for controlling them." "the healer asked, “But tell me . . . why the lie?” Looking after her son as he disappeared into the distance, the beaming washerwoman shrugged. “I wanted him to believe in a father and by extension a God.” Watching until he was gone, she said, “Life’s just easier that way.”" ]]> </content> </entry> <entry> <title type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Russia Without Putin: Money, Power and the Myths of the New Cold War by Tony Wood (2018) (read in 2019)]]> </title> <id>https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3737</id> <link href="https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3737"/> <updated>2019-05-19T00:49:14+02:00</updated> <author> <name type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Marco von Ballmoos]]> </name> <uri>https://earthli.com/users/marco</uri> </author> <summary type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA["Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is" ... ]]> </summary> <content type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Published by marco on 19. May 2019 00:49:14 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I've failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an interest in this book, then I'm happy for you." I'd listened to a couple of interviews with Tony Wood (on This is Hell with Chuck Mertz and Behind the News with Doug Henwood) and became interested in his book through his eloquent discussions of Russia. The book details the last three decades of history in Russia, from Gorbachev to Yeltsin and then Putin. More specifically, he describes a Russia that's explicitly not its leader. Instead, it is a country that used to be much more powerful than it is now. It used to be much more advanced, more equal. Most importantly, it is not a capitalist failure. It is not retreating to its statist past. It would be better if it were. Instead, it is essentially a success story for the West: they helped suck the money and resources from a once-powerful enemy, creating a country for the 1% -- in the image of its western forebears. Mostly, Russia wasn't able to grow in a direction that would benefit itself. Instead, its massive resources and well-educated population were wasted or channeled to purposes conducive to the rulers of the rest of the world. If Russia's collapse benefitted the rich, then it was deemed to be "reforming"; otherwise, it was deemed to be "yearning for the USSR". The formula was predictable and boring and effective. All of Russia's corruption is utterly unremarkable and non-unique. Similar corruption exists in the U.S. and Britain and, at least to some degree, a handful of other western countries. When Wood describes the degree to which large banks and industries control policy in Russia, there is no real difference from how it works in the U.S, or Germany for that matter. Is Russia's government saturated with industry insiders? Yes. How is that any different from Obama’s Goldman Sachs alums, chosen by Citibank? Or Trump’s coterie of industry insiders, each matched to the cabinet position that looks most like a henhouse to them? Russia never had a chance: it was to be a vassal to the West or was to suffer until it acquiesced. There was never going to be another way. Russia is geographically huge, but has a relatively small population. It has a ton of resources and a well-educated populace, but it has a low birthrate (well-educated) and an unwelcome immigration wave is its only hope. Its economy is tied up with its resources -- controlled by its enemies through control of commodity prices. Russia occupies a middle ground. It has the low birthrate, culture, military hardware, attitude and high education of an advanced nation, but the life-expectancy and reputation of a poorer one. And America hates them, which makes their European and British lackeys do so as well, at least sometimes. Putin and his attitudes and opinions are totally beside the point. Russia is its own thing -- and its unclear how it will survive in a world with a powerful country like the US in control, bent on its submission. [Citations] "But at least there was a sizeable body of writers, scholars, activists and thinkers who could supply a more nuanced perspective, based on first-hand experience. The West’s levels of expertise and awareness about Russia have, sadly, declined steeply since then, opening the way for all kinds of ill-informed speculation – often churned out by individuals with no knowledge of the place, let alone of the people or the language – to circulate unchallenged. As a result, public opinion and policy decisions are based on a very shallow understanding of the country." "Personal connections like these are crucial to understanding how Russia works.9 In the Soviet period, informal influence, or blat – translated as ‘pull’ – often dictated access to scarce goods, housing or coveted jobs. Its use was widespread because it was so essential to getting by." This is not a distinctly Russian practice. This is how things work everywhere. "Every time the requirements of capitalist ‘transition’ came into conflict with the principle of popular sovereignty, Russia’s post-Soviet rulers made it clear enough where their loyalties lay. Yeltsin’s attack on the parliament in October 1993 was only the first in a long line of violations designed to shield a nascent post-Soviet capitalism from being held to account by the citizenry. "After Yeltsin’s re-election in 1996 – secured, it bears repeating, thanks to a combination of electoral fraud and Western meddling – Anatoly Chubais, one of the main architects of privatization in Russia, left the public in no doubt about what had been at stake: ‘Russian democracy is irrevocable, private ownership in Russia is irrevocable, market reforms in the Russian state are irrevocable.’" "The Western financial press in particular saw the apparent extension of state control as an attempt to reverse the 1990s market reforms." They call them "reforms". The financial press is predictable. Immoral and focused on growth of their revenue streams. They don't care how it works: more money to them is good. Any reduction is bad. They get mad when someone else gets to choose the winners. Who do those foreigners think they are, cutting off the children of privilege of the West? "The vast majority were closely connected with state-owned enterprises. Often they were simply a way to siphon money into a few select hands: the ‘members’ who received dividends tended to be the managers of an enterprise rather than its workforce. Cooperatives were also allowed to set up their own financial arms, producing a plethora of ‘pocket banks’ that could borrow from the central bank at low rates – and of course issue ‘loans’ to members." How the fuck is this any different from America? The largest corporations are heavily subsidized with big government contracts. Money concentrates into the hands of a few shareholders. There are special rules for bank borrowing. It's arguable that it's impossible to get "big" in the States without government contracts. Google has them. Microsoft has them. IBM has them. "The first was a ‘mass privatization’ scheme, launched with great fanfare in October 1992, in which citizens were issued with vouchers entitling them to buy shares in enterprises slated for privatization. By June 1994, some 15,000 enterprises, employing 17 million people – around two-thirds of the industrial workforce – had been auctioned off. "Nominally intended to create a kind of ‘popular capitalism’, in practice this produced a concentration of ownership and control among well-placed insiders from the nomenklatura and Soviet managerial elite. Managers often gained control of their workers’ shares, either by purchasing them or through more underhand means. And because voucher privatization took place in the middle of a catastrophic downturn, many workers sold their vouchers at a fraction of their face value to get hold of desperately needed cash." "‘From my point of view,’ Berezovsky told one interviewer, ‘in general, power and capital are inseparable’. He added, after a pause, that ‘if something is advantageous to capital, it goes without saying that it is advantageous to the nation’.23 Wealth seemed to be dictating terms to power, in a phenomenon often referred to as state capture." Again, there is no perceptible difference from American oligarchs. "In a grim satire set in 2028, Vladimir Sorokin, enfant terrible of Russian literature, reimagined them as a deeper throwback, to the oprichnina, Ivan the Terrible’s private army, which terrorized Muscovy in the late sixteenth century.34 In another phantasmagorical satire on post-Soviet reality, novelist Viktor Pelevin took a trope in wide circulation at the time, the ‘werewolf in epaulets’, and made it literal, depicting Russia’s current rulers as petroleum-worshipping beasts in KGB attire, howling at the earth to deliver the bounty on which their power depended." "By the end of the century, two successive ministers of fuel and energy had been recruited from oil companies, and a whole section of Putin’s early appointments to the presidential administration came directly from Alfa-Bank." Like Obama's Goldman Sachs alums, chosen by Citibank. Or Trump's coterie of industry insiders, each matched to the cabinet position that looks most like a henhouse to them. "This two-way traffic between the worlds of the state and of private enterprise will no doubt be entirely familiar to many readers: the same kind of revolving door notoriously sustains elites around much of the globe, enabling them to waltz effortlessly between the boardrooms of Goldman Sachs and the corridors of power in Washington, London, Rome and elsewhere." "Why did so many Russians, during the petro-fuelled boom of that decade, rush to identify as members of a rising middle class, when by most indicators they would be classed as something else?" You can ask the same question of Americans. It has the same answer. "Soviet women also had to bear the main burden of housework and child-rearing, not to mention the recurrent, time-consuming task of queuing for food and other basic consumer goods. (Their partners did not offer much assistance. After comparing the time budgets of married and single women, one scholar concluded dryly that ‘the addition of a husband did absolutely nothing to ease the woman’s domestic burden’.)" "According to World Bank data, in 1988 Russia had a Gini coefficient of 0.24, which placed it in the company of, say, Sweden; by 1993, the figure stood at 0.48, putting it on a par with Peru or the Philippines. These figures only cover officially declared income, so the actual rise in inequality was surely far greater; recent estimates based on a broader set of data show Russia’s Gini coefficient doubling in five years, from 0.32 in 1991 to 0.64 in 1996." "In 1992 – the year Yeltsin initiated his ‘shock therapy’, including a deregulation of prices that tripled the cost of food virtually overnight – the International Labour Organization classed 85 per cent of the Russian population as poor.10 In response, the Yeltsin government adopted a new method for measuring poverty – whereupon the figure fell to 36 per cent." "[A]s Russia’s GDP contracted by more than a third between 1991 and 1995 – a steeper decline than in the US during the Great Depression. According to World Bank figures from 1996, more than two-fifths of the population – some 60 million people – were living on less than $4 a day, compared with 2 million in 1989." "Reversing whatever gains women had made under Communism was presented as a return to the ‘natural’ state of affairs." "Having helped to turn an agrarian empire into a global superpower – complete with nuclear arsenal, space programme, advances in astrophysics and cybernetics – Russia’s scientists found themselves marking time amid its ruins." "After 1991, the depth of the crisis often gave rise to a defensive solidarity between workers and management, as they strove to keep production going. In many cases this was the only way for workers to keep not only their jobs but also the housing and other basic social guarantees that were, for now, still provided at the enterprise level." "In one 2010 study, people with higher degrees accounted for a fifth of those deemed ‘poor’ or ‘disadvantaged’.61 These sectors of the ‘middle class’ were being proletarianized, even as the onetime proletariat redefined itself as ‘middle class’." "it may well be that much stronger opposition to the ‘imitation democratic’ system will emerge from the post-Communist generations, and that new forms of collective defiance will be forged not out of nostalgia for socialism but out of their shared experiences of capitalism. The future may prove more radically stubborn than the receding past." "But the liberal parties’ electoral misfortunes also reflected the tremendous discredit their embrace of the free market in the 1990s had earned them." "This is, of course, a familiar set of recipes. In some ways, the Party of Progress platform is a digest of the last three decades of conventional Western social and economic policy. The only real surprise here is seeing these ideas being actively recommended almost a decade after they led the world into a pervasive crisis from which no exit is in sight." "Yet this line of thinking rests on at least two mistaken assumptions. One is a belief in an abstract, idealized capitalism that could incarnate free-market principles in an undistorted fashion. No such model exists: there is no capitalism, no market, no economic activity even, outside of history." "Gorbachev went much further than détente, speaking in 1989 of building a ‘common European home’. He envisaged an ultimate integration of Russia and the Warsaw Pact countries into a harmonious bloc of broadly social-democratic states, a kind of Greater Scandinavia. "Under Yeltsin, however, what had been an impulse toward convergence turned into a project to make Russia into a ‘normal’ liberal democracy, firmly under the tutelage of the US. If Gorbachev and his Politburo had stunned their Cold War interlocutors with the concessions they had been willing to make, Yeltsin’s government went still further, at times seeming to abdicate altogether from having policy goals of its own." "With less than 5 per cent of the world’s population, by the mid-1990s the US accounted for a quarter of its total economic output, a fifth of its manufacturing, and two fifths of its military spending – in dollar terms committing more to its armed forces than the next eleven highest-spending countries combined." "Putin’s points of reference were European even when they weren’t at all flattering: at the end of 1999, he said that it would take fifteen years of rapid growth for Russia to draw level with Portugal’s current per capita GDP.31 (Russia reached that milestone in 2011; but by then Portugal was further ahead, and even amid the deep recession sparked by the eurozone crisis, its GDP per capita was" "In early August 2008, Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili – seemingly with encouragement from the US – suddenly moved to recapture South Ossetia, providing Russia with a ready pretext for armed intervention. Militarily, the conflict was a mismatch, and was over after five days of fighting. "Politically, it was far more consequential. It was partly a kind of retaliation on the plane of international law for previous Western actions: Medvedev invoked the West’s own doctrines of ‘humanitarian intervention’ and the ‘responsibility to protect’ (‘R2P’), as deployed in Kosovo in 1999 and agreed at the UN’s 2005 World Summit, respectively. In the immediate aftermath of the war, moreover, the Kremlin recognized South Ossetia and Abkhazia as independent states, citing the barely six-month-old precedent of Kosovo. "The staggering hypocrisy of this gesture, from a government that had fought two wars to prevent Chechen independence, hardly needs emphasizing. But the Georgian operation was more immediately intended to call the West’s bluff on further NATO enlargement, effectively asking if it was willing to start a full-scale global war for the sake of tiny Georgia. The answer, despite much bluster from US Republicans such as John McCain, was no." "It was, of course, Yanukovych’s abrupt U-turn on the EU Association Agreement that sparked the Maidan protests in late 2013. Ukraine seemed to be caught in a choice between the EU’s free-trade agreement and the Kremlin’s project for a Eurasian Customs Union – a choice often framed by Maidan supporters in civilizational terms, as being between ‘Europe’ and ‘Asia’, between a modernizing European destiny and the backwardness of the Soviet past. Yet there were many other factors behind Yanukovych’s decision – not least a concern over the potential impact of free trade on an economy already reeling under the impact of IMF-decreed budgetary austerity." "But despite the Kremlin’s references at the time to ‘Novorossiia’ – the old tsarist name for the lands along the Black Sea’s northern shore, hinting at a potential claim to more of Ukraine’s territory – these actions were tactical improvisations rather than part of a long-held plan to dismember Ukraine. The Kremlin was in effect frantically drawing one line in the sand after another, lines the West kept blithely ignoring. The rapid escalation of Russia’s response and the very crudity of its methods were in themselves a measure of the asymmetry of power between it and the West." "Sergei Lavrov told a TV interviewer that the US ‘needs to be taught that affairs can only be conducted on the basis of equality, balance of interests and mutual respect’.51 After the Maidan, and with the US and its allies bent on a policy of isolating Russia internationally, the urge to claim parity gave way to a more pressing need to reassert Russia’s relevance." "Even though Russia is by far the largest state in the Eurasian Union, the Union itself is nonetheless a deal made by sovereign governments, rather than an imperial Anschluss in the name of Russian ethno-national chauvinism." "The escalating confrontation with the West may have struck some in Russia as proof of Dugin’s ‘civilizational’ diagnoses – the Ukraine crisis and its aftermath finally confirming Russia’s definitive exclusion from, and opposition to, the Western liberal order. But neo-Eurasianist ideas had no role in producing the confrontation itself. As we have seen, from the start of the post-Soviet era there were fundamental mismatches in power and strategic interests between Russia and the West. These generated tensions that steadily rose over time, and notably burst into the open in Ukraine in 2003–04, Georgia in 2008 and Ukraine again in 2013–14, among other places." And the West shut out Russia as anything but a vassal from the beginning. "The most decisive feature of Russia’s present-day role in the world, which flows into every calculation it makes, is its intermediate status. Too big to be digested by regional blocs such as the EU, too independent of the US to admit into NATO, Russia is nonetheless no longer powerful enough to form a significant geopolitical or economic pole on its own." "Yet in 2015, for example, Russia devoted about a tenth as much money to its armed forces in absolute terms as the US did, and only slightly more than the UK; in per capita terms, it spent somewhat less than Germany or Greece. All told, its 2015 military budget came to around 8 per cent of the total for NATO as a whole, almost 70 per cent of which was spent by the US alone." "For all the concern about the tentacular spread of Putin’s influence, its actual capacity to shape political outcomes has proved negligible to non-existent – the 2016 US elections very much included." "For now, however, any post-American world seems a long way off. What happens in this long interregnum depends to a large extent on what the West does, since the basic power imbalance between it and Russia still governs strategic calculations on both sides. This leaves Russia hovering in a kind of geopolitical and historical limbo while the world is reconfigured around it. Yet during this interval Russia itself will not be standing still: several different far-reaching transformations will remake it from within." "The disproportionate size of the primary-resource sector spells trouble for the rest of the economy, as the experience of many other countries has shown, from the ‘Dutch Disease’ of the 1960s to the impact of oil on Nigeria and Venezuela. The overwhelming weight of lucrative export commodities causes currency appreciation that leaves other industries uncompetitive; this makes it all the more difficult to pursue alternative strategies for growth, deepening the ‘resource trap’." Russia occupies a middle ground. It has the low birthrate, culture, military hardware, attitude and high education of an advanced nation, but the life-expectancy and reputation of a poorer one. And America hates them, which makes their European and British lackeys do so as well, at least sometimes. "It remains the world’s largest country, with a still numerous and well-educated population, not to mention a nuclear arsenal and significant natural resources. But at the same time its economic weight is dwindling: in 2015, its GDP per capita was around a sixth that of the US, a fifth that of Germany and a quarter of the OECD average;" "Nominally, Russia today is a federation, comprising eighty-three territorial ‘subjects’ – plus two more since 2014, with the Republic of Crimea and the city of Sevastopol – each of which possesses its own constitution, government, parliament and flag. On paper, these entities have many of the attributes of statehood, and only delegate certain powers to the federal centre in Moscow. But the reality is very different: in practice, Russia is a highly centralized polity, and the country’s supposedly federal subunits are little more than administrative divisions within a clear hierarchy" "Although its options are limited in various ways, much nonetheless hangs on how the current system of government in Russia, whether under Putin or his eventual successors, responds to changing circumstances. The spike in tensions with the West has for the moment given the Putin-led system a certain amount of leeway, since it can ascribe many of the problems the country experiences to foreign enemies. It helps that this is not, factually speaking, incorrect: the sanctions regime imposed in 2014 prolonged Russia’s economic difficulties, and in the wake of Crimea and especially the 2016 US elections, Western media, pundits and politicians eagerly fanned a hostility to Russia that mirrored the hysteria of Russia’s own pro-Kremlin outlets." ]]> </content> </entry> <entry> <title type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Jennifer Government by Max Barry (2003) (read in 2019)]]> </title> <id>https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3739</id> <link href="https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3739"/> <updated>2019-05-19T00:37:29+02:00</updated> <author> <name type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Marco von Ballmoos]]> </name> <uri>https://earthli.com/users/marco</uri> </author> <summary type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA["Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is" ... ]]> </summary> <content type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Published by marco on 19. May 2019 00:37:29 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I've failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an interest in this book, then I'm happy for you." This 2003 book is the story of a world in which many of the current capitulations to corporatist rule were still at-least partially in the future. The Government is an entity whose power has been severely restricted. Local police is for-hire only. They only pursue cases for which victims can provide a budget. Hack Nike works for Nike (everyone takes their employer's name as their last name). He is roped into a murder contract by John Nike. It is part of a marketing campaign to sell sneakers to stupid teenagers. Marketing rules supreme, people are nearly perfect consumers, ethics is a thing of the past. Hack lives with the unemployed Victoria, who is working on a virus that can kill any IT system. Buy Mitsui is a broker who loses faith in the system. Claire is Violet's socialist sister. The eponymous Jennifer Government is a former marketer turned federal agent, hot on John Nike's tail, with whom she shares a past. The main thread of the book is that most corporations are banding together into two factions, roughly delineated by the two prevalent rewards programs. The corporations and various alliances act more and more as independent states, with their own militaries (e.g. the NRA). Everything is a negotiation, everything is a transaction, money is God, all in the name of a bizarre notion of "freedom". There is no difference between corporations and nation-states. In fact, the book generally depicts corporations acting as the worst of the nation-states do today. Even those individuals who think they can game this system are wrong. The point is that contracts aren’t worth the paper they’re printed on if they can’t be enforced. If there is no overarching authority, then criminals do what they want. Only the worst people win. There are echoes of Fight Club and Office Space and maybe even Mr. Robot. It's interesting to see these ideas having been written down 15 years ago, before many of its ideas were confirmed -- or vastly superseded by the system we have today. Barry does bring us a happy ending of sorts, but only for a handful of characters -- the world itself is largely unchanged, even if corporate power is slightly restrained. The base philosophy hasn't changed, so the same problems will come back. [Citations] "Companies were getting a lot tougher on labor contracts these days; Hack had heard stories. At Adidas, if you quit your job and your replacement wasn’t as competent, they sued you for lost profits." "“I think I’m going to take a look,” Buy said. “You should leave it to mall security,” the dealer said. “I know first aid.” Not many people did; there was too much risk of being sued." "He bit his lip. “You sure you don’t want to come? Since, I mean, you killed that guy…” “You want me to defend myself against a murder charge with two hundred dollars?” “But it was self-defense. It doesn’t matter how much money—” “Don’t be naïve,” Violet said. “Look, if my demo goes" This is already where we are. "come out owing them for food and board." The language is dying "“It’s a good deal,” Calvin said, overtaking a Chrysler. “It’s not like I actually spend more. I buy what I would have anyway, but from US Alliance companies.” “Mmm,” Jennifer said. “You buy your computer from IBM, your gas from Shell, use AT&T for calls… soon you’re getting gift vouchers, for like, fifty bucks. And if you buy a car—” “I don’t like loyalty programs.” “Well, you could go with Team Advantage,” Calvin said. “But US Alliance has twice as many companies that are number one in their industry.” “What is that, from their brochure?”" "“No more talking. I’ve offered you a deal, you say yes or no.” “Fuckers!” Jesus shouted. “The fucking nnnnn-nnnnn—” “Quiet!” Jennifer said. “All right,” Billy said, feeling hope drain away. “Get me out of here.” She held open the door. He left the cell, feeling like he was sinking deeper and deeper." People keep getting offered choices that aren't choices. Shows quite well how such a system ends up working. How it does wok. "“And ten years later we have US Alliance and Team Advantage, and there aren’t more than five major companies in the world that haven’t signed up with one of them. The more companies joined in, the more customers signed up, and so the more companies want in. At the end of last month, US Alliance had five hundred million subscribers. T.A. has two-ninety million.”" Peanuts compared to FaceBook and co. "People were going to say he’d cracked, that he’d been grief-stricken. But that wasn’t it. The truth was simpler: nothing Buy could ever do would be as important as saving that girl Hayley’s life. He couldn’t watch a girl bleed to death and then go make 3 percent off stock trades. The idea was monstrous. So Buy was finished as a productive member of society, unless he managed to lose so much perspective that margin calls began to seem important again. Either way, Buy was prepared to put a gun in his mouth and pull the trigger." "“To begin, I shall tell you of a program belonging to our friends at IBM. They are rewarding customers who bring in a competitive product and submit it to their in-house crushing machine. It smashes it in-store, you see?” “Yes, I see—” “A most brilliant strategy, to relegate the competition to the status of junk and garbage. You must understand, it is difficult for we Japanese to think along these lines of head-to-head competition. This is why we are now finding ourselves running behind our energetic American friends. But the times they are a-changing, are they not?”" "The easier your job, the more you got paid. John had suspected this for many years, but here was the proof: pulling down five hundred bucks an hour to sit in the afternoon sun on top of an L.A. office tower. He was wearing a suit and shades, reclining on a deck chair while a light breeze blew in from the bay. John thought he might have found the perfect job." "Is it my fault that was the best way to do it? If the Government had the muscle to enforce the law, it wouldn’t have made economic sense, but they don’t, and it did. This is the world we live in. If you don’t take advantage of the rules, you’re a sucker.”" "She felt the air go out of her. “No way am I going to do that. No way.” “You have a lot of money at stake.” “You—you owe me that money whether I help you or not.” “Be realistic,” Holly said. “No!” Violet heard her voice tremble. “I’m not going anywhere near John Nike! You get that?” She slung her bag over her shoulder. A man stepped into the doorway, blocking it. He was wearing a Police soldier uniform. His nametag said: ONE. “Maybe I made this sound too much like a request,” Holly said [...]" The point is that contracts aren't worth the paper they're printed on if they can't be enforced. If there is no overarching authority, then criminals do what they want. Only the worst people win. "She felt the air go out of her. “No way am I going to do that. No way.” “You have a lot of money at stake.” “You—you owe me that money whether I help you or not.” “Be realistic,” Holly said. “No!” Violet heard her voice tremble. “I’m not going anywhere near John Nike! You get that?” She slung her bag over her shoulder. A man stepped into the doorway, blocking it. He was wearing a Police soldier uniform. His nametag said: ONE. “Maybe I made this sound too much like a request,” Holly said, and Violet started to cry." "“We’re the Government,” she said, just in case there had been some misunderstanding. “We are arresting three people on suspicion of murder.” “No, ma’am. You are on General Motors property and you will comply with GM orders.”" There is no difference between corporations and nation-states. In fact, the book generally depicts corporations acting as the worst of the nation-states do. "She said quietly, “You’d better be very sure your employer can protect you from the Government.” “I’m very sure.” She felt her heart twist. To her people, she said, “Let them go.” The NRA watched them all the way to the van." "“We came here in good faith, to talk about solutions.” "John’s voice was piped through the hall, so it sounded like he were right in front of you. "“But the Government didn’t. This morning, it conducted raids against us. It targeted our companies, only because we’ve been successful at providing products people want to buy. It trespassed on our private property and assaulted some of our executives.”" "“By this action, the Government has proved that so long as it exists, none of us are truly free. Government and freedom are mutually exclusive. So if we value freedom, there’s only one conclusion. It’s time to get rid of this leftover relic we call Government.”" “US Alliance has had enough of being persecuted for the crime of making money. From this moment, we no longer recognize them as an authority. It’s time for a brave new age. I hereby declare the end of Government. And you, sir, are out of a job.” “You announced that US Alliance is a criminal organization.” “Criminal,” he said. “What is that, anyway? Just someone the Government doesn’t agree with.” “Don’t play games with me, John. Our organization exists to gain market share from Team Advantage. The Government is peripheral.” “How can we fight Team Advantage with the Government as referee? The Government is the major obstacle to our goals. We can’t ignore them, Alfonse. They’re coming after us. We had to send them a message.” "He parked and went into the Nike building, nodding to the receptionist. He felt more energetic these days, much more confident. He was friendly to people he previously hadn’t had the nerve to talk to. The funny thing was that his boss thought Hack had become dynamic and effective, when Hack was doing less work than ever before. In fact, he was hardly working at all." Echoes of Fight Club and Office Space and maybe even Mr. Robot. “Okay, so everyone’s a little surprised about the jet thing.” Snorts of outrage. The McDonald’s Liaison looked like she wanted to leap across the desk and slap him. Alfonse said, “John, in case you haven’t already gathered, we’re here to vote on your expulsion from US Alliance. If this vote carries, UA and its member companies will disown any responsibility for your actions. We will deliver you to the Government and negotiate compensation for the damage you’ve caused.” “So I was right,” John said. “It is the United Nations.” “He doesn’t think he’s done anything wrong,” the IBM Liaison snapped. He was an older man with white hair and a dark blue suit; John had never met him. “Look at him. He’s turned the world’s most distinguished corporations into criminals and he’s smirking.” "I’ve given you a world without Government interference. There is now no advertising campaign, no inter-company deal, no promotion, no action you can’t take. You want to pay kids to get the swoosh tattooed on their foreheads? Who’s going to stop you? You want to make computers that need repair after three months? Who’s going to stop you? You want to reward consumers who complain about your competitors in the media? You want to pay them for recruiting their little brothers and sisters to your brand of cigarettes? You want the NRA to help you eliminate your competition? Then do it. Just do it." "She cried and hated herself. This wasn’t meant to be her, this small, beaten girl. She was meant to succeed. Other people had taken it all away from her." "It was amazing, he thought, how everyone bitched about corporations but no one was willing to risk pissing them off. Hack was disappointed at the level of motivation among this society’s counterculture." “I used to think I was cynical about people. But then I realized you can’t be too cynical. People will do anything to get ahead. They’ll do terrible things.” He looked at her. “That is true.” He stuck out his hand. “I’m Buy.” She smiled. “Violet.” They shook hands. “I guess we have a bit in common.” “I guess we do,” Buy said, and laughed. "There was a mall across the road, with a McDonald’s on one side and a Burger King on the other. In between the two was a riot. A bunch of kids in baggy clothes were looting the Burger King: pulling down posters, smashing cash registers." "His words were lost in one of the loudest sounds Jennifer had ever heard. The Police had mounted a machine gun on the Burger King counter and it was chewing up the McDonald’s store. Shreds of red and yellow plastic spiraled into the air like confetti." ]]> </content> </entry> <entry> <title type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Nation by Terry Pratchett (2009) (read in 2019)]]> </title> <id>https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3734</id> <link href="https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3734"/> <updated>2019-04-20T22:16:37+02:00</updated> <author> <name type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Marco von Ballmoos]]> </name> <uri>https://earthli.com/users/marco</uri> </author> <summary type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA["Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is" ... ]]> </summary> <content type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Published by marco on 20. Apr 2019 22:16:37 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I've failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an interest in this book, then I'm happy for you." This is the story of Mau. It is also the story of Daphne née Ermintrude. There are also the priest Ataba, the strong woman Chale, the brothers Pilu and Milo on the island. The island is known as the Nation. Actually, it is the people who are the Nation. The island is where the Nation lives. As Mau is on his way back from another island on which he underwent his manhood ritual, a giant wave sweeps him up and carries him back to the Nation. It is a truly titanic wave and it sweeps away everyone he's ever known -- they were all sleeping on the beach, awaiting his return. Mau is young, but resourceful. He enters a fugue state to take care of all of the bodies left on the island. He wakes to a mango on a plate next to him. The plate had been delivered to him by Daphne, the lone surviving member of the crew and passengers of the Sweet Judy, a ship that the wave deposited deep in the only forest on the Nation. Daphne and Mau meet and join forces to try to survive on the island. More wave-survivors straggle ashore over the next days and weeks. They struggle with their future, mostly fighting about what it means for the Gods to have allowed the wave to sweep away everything. They scavenge the Judy for supplies -- Mau is concerned that they are relying to strongly on "trouserman" inventions. He wonders why his people never invented anything so spectacular. They discover secrets on the island; Mau's curiosity and skepticism leads to more conclusions than anyone's made about his culture in a long time. Daphne does the same -- she is a scientist, taught by her father -- but from the Women's Place. The world on the outside is pressing in: England is without a King and a long, long line of successors have dropped like flies, leaving Daphne's father as King, and Daphne as Princess. She doesn't find out until late in the game. They must first attend to the matter of the Raiders -- a cannibal tribe -- who've joined up with the surviving remnants of the part of Judy's crew that mutinied before the wave. The world here is an alternate version of the Pacific in 1860, called the Pelagic Ocean, with a smattering of amusingly named islands. The society and history feels very familiar, different enough for distance, but close enough to make satirical and insightful observations about our own reality. That is the skeleton of story on which Pratchett's writing hangs. It is highly interesting, but it's not the best part of the book. The best parts are the ruminations about science, multiple worlds, Gods, death and history. As with the Discworld books, Pratchett is just as interested in the subtext as in the story. He puts the interesting bits in the folds of the shrouds hanging on the story. As in the Discworld books, there are a slew of good characters, each with delightful internal monologues. There are bad ones as well, funny and insightful in their own way (e.g. Cox). It seems that Pratchett books are Pratchett books, no matter where they're set. A lovely read. Highly recommended. [Citations] "In the forest, something heard. And in the hidden firelight, sharp metal gleamed. Light died in the west. Night and tears took the Nation. The star of Water drifted among the clouds like a murderer softly leaving the scene of the crime." "Mau knew how make a spear, from picking a shaft to chipping a good sharp point. And when he’d finished, it was truly his, every part of it. The metal spear would be a lot better, but it would just be a . . . a thing. If it broke, he wouldn’t know how to make another one." "So we’re not much better than the red crabs, Mau thought, as they dragged a heavy box down to the beach. The figs fall out of the trees, and that’s all they know. Can’t we be better than them?" "But obviously she wasn’t going to take off her bodice or her pantaloons or her stockings. This was no time to go totally mad. You had to Maintain Standards." "We never thought of pliers because we didn’t need them. Before you make something that is truly new, you first have to have a new thought. That’s the important thing. We didn’t need new things, so we didn’t think new thoughts." "Why can’t I do this? Mau thought. Where are my tears when I need them? Maybe the wave took them. Maybe Locaha drank them, or I left them in the dark water. But I can’t feel them. Perhaps you need a soul to cry." "He dealt with troubling thoughts by simply not thinking them; it was as if someone had put a dog’s brain in a boy’s body, and right now, Mau would have given anything to be him." "He’d looked at all the haggard faces, all of them willing him to say yes. Say yes, Mau, and betray your father and your uncles and your nation, just so that people would have a reason." "Things happen or do not happen, thought Mau, and he felt the deep water open up under him. The sunlight shone blue through the waves above, but below Mau it was green, shading to black. And there was Ataba, hanging in the light, not moving. Blood uncoiled in the water around him like smoke from a slow fire." "When a shark is coming at you, you are already dead, old Nawi had said, and since you were already dead, then anything was worth trying." "Without quite being able to put words to it, Mau felt that being mysterious and a little dangerous was not a bad thing right now." "That’s what the gods are! An answer that will do! Because there’s food to be caught and babies to be born and life to be lived and so there is no time for big, complicated, and worrying answers! Please give us a simple answer, so that we don’t have to think, because if we think, we might find answers that don’t fit the way we want the world to be." "But Pilu had unfolded the story of the shark like Mr. Griffith had preached. He had unfolded a picture in the air and then made it move. Was it true? Had it really happened like that? But how could it not be true, now? They had been there. They had seen it. They had shared it." "Daphne had read in one of her books about the Great Southern Pelagic Ocean islands that “with a few regrettable examples, the larger and more fearsome the spider is, the less likely it is to be venomous.” She didn’t believe it. She could see Regrettable Examples everywhere, and she was sure that some of them were drooling." "“I don’t think it’s true, though,” said Mau. Daphne nodded, and then thought a bit more. “Perhaps things can be true in special ways?” she suggested. “No. People say that when they want to believe lies,”" "She stood up, with one of the Sweet Judy’s lamps in each hand. "“One red one and one green one,” she said. “The spare port and starboard lights. Sorry about that, but we haven’t got very many cabin lamps left, and we’re short of oil.” "“What about that white lamp next to you?” asked Mau. “Yes, that’s the one I’m going to bring,” said the ghost girl, “and to save time, shall we pretend we’ve had the argument and I won?”" "“I would be obliged if you would stop being concerned,” Ataba snapped. “I know what is happening. It starts with knives and cooking pots, and suddenly we belong to the trousermen, yes, and you send priests and our souls do not belong to us.” "“I’m not doing anything like that!” "“And when your father comes in his big boat? What will happen to us then?” "“I . . . don’t know,” said Daphne, which was better than telling the truth. We do tend to stick flags in places, she had to admit it herself. We do it almost absentmindedly, as though it’s a sort of chore." "The difference between the trousermen and the Raiders is that sooner or later the cannibals go away!” "“That’s a terrible thing to say!” said Daphne hotly. “We don’t eat people!” "“There are different ways to eat people, girl, and you are clever, oh yes, clever enough to know it. And sometimes the people don’t realize it’s happened until they hear the belch!”" "Daphne ran to stop Ataba from seeing her face. Her father, well, he was a decent man but, well, this century was a game of empires, apparently, and no little island was allowed to belong to itself. What would Mau do if someone stuck a flag on his beach?" "“I don’t know! Don’t you think I haven’t asked them?” Tears started to roll down Ataba’s cheeks. “You think I am a man alone? I haven’t seen my daughter or her children since the wave. Do you hear what I say? It is not all about you! I envy your rage, demon boy. It fills you up! It feeds you, gives you strength. But the rest of us listen for the certainty, and there is nothing. Yet in our heads we know there must be . . . something, some reason, some pattern, some order, so we call upon the silent gods, because they are better than the darkness."" "“Yeah, we got four loaded pistols, missie,” said Polegrave, waving one at her, “and they’ll stop anything, you hear?” "“They won’t stop the fifth man, Mr. Polegrave.”" "“Why did you kill an old man who was shaking a stick at you? You shoot at people without a thought and you call them savages!" "The captain had told her that if Cox’s men won, she should fire the pistol into the barrel “to save her honor,” though she was uncertain how much a saved honor would be worth when it was falling out of the sky in tiny pieces, along with the rest of the cabin." "“No! It’s been turned into a story. The moons are real! So are the rings! Your ancestors saw them, and I wish I knew how. Then they made up these songs and mothers sing them to their children! That’s how the knowledge gets passed down, except that you didn’t know it was knowledge! See how the gods shine? There are little plates of glass all over them. Your ancestors made glass. I’ve got an idea about that, too. Mau," "Daphne had been taken to the ballet several times by her grandmother, who wanted to make sure she grew up to be a proper lady and not marry a godless scientist. She’d been bored silly, and the dancers were nothing like as graceful as she had expected. But Mau walked as if every part of his body knew where it was and where it was going to and exactly how fast it had to go to get there." "First Mate Cox came toward them, smiling like someone greeting a long-lost friend who owed him money." "Everything that can happen must happen, and everything that can happen must have a world to happen in. That is why Imo builds so many worlds that there are not enough numbers to count them. That is why His fire glows so red. Good-bye, Mau. I look forward with interest to our next meeting." "“He told me that there were more worlds than there are numbers. There is no such thing as ‘does not happen.’ But there is always ‘happened somewhere else’—” He tried to explain, while she tried to understand." "“I think people will say it belongs to the world.” “And they will be thinking like thieves. We have no right to it at all. But if we don’t act like stupid bullies, I’m sure they will be gracious.”" "“All the red places belong to the English trousermen?” Mau asked. "“Yup,” said Pilu. "“That’s a lot of places!” "“Yup.” "“They’re not too bad,” said Pilu. “Mostly they want you to wear trousers and worship their god. He’s called God.” "“Just . . . God?” "“Right. He’s got a son who is a carpenter, an’ if you worship him, you climb the shining path when you die. The songs is nice and sometimes you get a biscuit.”" "“Other people will come. Some will have guns,” said Mau thoughtfully. "“True,” said Pilu. "“There is a lot of the yellow gold in the cave. Trousermen like it because it shines. They are like children.”" "For the sake of the game [Cahle] was banned from bowling after Daphne’s father explained that women should not really be allowed to play cricket because they fundamentally didn’t understand it. But it seemed to Daphne that Cahle understood it very well, and therefore tried to get it over with as quickly as possible so that they could get on with something more interesting, since in her opinion the world was overwhelmingly full of things that were more interesting than cricket." "“Ah, and here is Her Ladyship now,” said Mr. Black, quite unnecessarily in Daphne’s view. He added: “She [Daphne's Grandmother] was wonderful company on the voyage out here. The nautical miles just flew past.” The little smile on his face was a masterpiece." "“Ah, you’ve got it right at last, Mother,” said the king. "“I’m me, not us. I am I, not we. One pair of buttocks on the throne, one head in the crown. You, on the other hand, are a sharp-tongued harridan with the manners of a fox and don’t interrupt me when I’m talking! "How dare you insult our hosts! And before you utter a word, contemplate this: You treasure your elevation above what you call the lower classes, whom I’ve always found to be pretty decent people once they’ve had a chance to have a bath. "Well, I am king, you see—king—and the very notion of nobility that you cling to like grim death means that you will not answer me back. You will, however, act with grace and gratitude during the remainder of our stay in this place. "Who knows, it may speak to you as it has spoken to me. And if you are even now putting together a scathing remark, let me point out for your lengthy consideration the wonderful and highly advisable option of silence. That is a command!”" "“I notice you didn’t laugh, Mr. Black!” "“No, Your Majesty. We are forbidden to laugh at the things kings say, sire, because otherwise we would be at it all day.”" "There is no better medicine than finding out that you are wrong!" "“Do you believe in Imo, sir?” asked the boy. "“Ah, the usual question. We come to it at last. You know Mau said that Imo made us clever enough to work out that He does not exist?”" "One of the things he said was: "‘I cursed Imo because he gave the birds and animals a way to sense great waves, and didn’t give it to smart beings like us. But I realize that He did. He made us smart. It was up to us to be good at it!’ "I think about that every time the seismograph beeps. But I’m not really answering you, am I?” The chair creaked. “Everything I know makes me believe Imo is in the order that is inherent, amazingly, in all things, and in the way the universe opens to our questioning. When I see the shining path over the lagoon, on an evening like this, at the end of a good day, I believe.” "“In Imo?” asked the girl. "This got a smile. “Perhaps. I just believe. You know, in things generally. That works too. Religion is not an exact science. Sometimes, of course, neither is science.”" "The greatest scientists in the world have taught here for generations, he thought as he made himself a cup of tea, and still our children ask us: Are there ghosts? What a piece of work is Man. . ." ]]> </content> </entry> <entry> <title type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[The Worst is Yet to Come by Peter Fleming (2019) (read in 2019)]]> </title> <id>https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3723</id> <link href="https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3723"/> <updated>2019-04-07T20:25:13+02:00</updated> <author> <name type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Marco von Ballmoos]]> </name> <uri>https://earthli.com/users/marco</uri> </author> <summary type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA["Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is" ... ]]> </summary> <content type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Published by marco on 7. Apr 2019 20:25:13 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve in reminding me of what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I've failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an interest in this book, then I'm happy for you." Though this book was occasionally better-written and often more coherent than Snyder's (reviewed above), I occasionally got the same feeling that the author was squeezing his material to fit his premise (exactly as Snyder did). The thesis that everything can -- and probably will -- get worse, is so broad that the author feels comfortable hanging pretty much anything he can think of happening in the world on it and try to make it stick. It's not uninteresting to see how his observations from life in London translate to premonitions of further doom, but it's also only rarely convincing. And still he only got to about 160 pages, with a very generously sized "Glossary", which was just another hodge-podge of mini-essays that he couldn't be bothered to integrate into the rest of the book. I was grateful that I didn't buy this book, either. At least Snyder's felt like it'd had an editor who'd actually looked at it. Fleming's book was rife with typos, outright misspellings and bad grammar. At one point, he wrote "tranny" instead of "tyranny". 'Nuff said. [Citations] "Neoliberal capitalism had probably run its course, spawning progeny it could no longer protect itself from. The constellation of possibilities that once flourished in cities like London had vanished. There were no antibodies left. Capitalism was undoing itself at nearly every turn. A kind of neo-Feudalism was on the march. Perhaps we were witnessing the birth of post-capitalism after all, not a clean and better alternative to the system, but (rather paradoxically) a much worse version of it," "Neoliberalism’s mandatory individualism shrinks collective experience and the communal solicitude it engenders, keeping us hurried, alone and always on edge." "As overwork transforms the home into a living nightmare (bickering about bills, unhappy children, Sky News), many react by escaping into work, embracing the very thing that caused the trouble to start with." "Like most large cities tethered to the sinking ship of late capitalism, London hates its children. So they hate it back." "My theory is this. Most advanced industrial societies have actually outlived the principles of capitalism and are busy transitioning into something else. It is still too early to say what that “something else” might be. But we do know the break won’t be clean. So the post-capitalist future we should prepare for will be no classless utopia. The worst features of capitalism will be amplified and applied reductio ad absurdum, coalescing around the return of preindustrial norms of authority and an incredible polarisation of wealth." "“On every new thing there lies already the shadow of annihilation”, Sebald avers. The corruption “of every individual, of every social order, indeed of the whole world” runs all the way down." What is it with these short books that endlessly cite Holocaust survivors. "Despite the self-help tone of his articles and talks, Petersen is actually peering into the void — or more precisely, the bottom of a lobster tank." He seems to be bending Pinker and Petersen's ideas to fit his thesis. "The most troubling part for me is this: since the financial crash over ten years ago — wrecking ordinary lives and spreading great hardship — the mega-rich have actually increased their wealth in a remarkable fashion. Sure, the initial crisis was a shambles. But what transpired in the decade that followed was probably worse, with a new breed of oligarchics mapping out a post-capitalist future, one that is starting to take shape." "If a bomb shelter is the dominant metaphor we live by today, then be careful who you share yours with." This pithy bit of advice comes absolutely out of the blue; it's pure filler. "The conceit of homo economicus helped Friedman and Schultz build a more formalistic theory of human capital. This served an ideological purpose too. The very phrase “human capital” implies that human beings’ interests naturally coincide with the values of capitalism. No doubt the two economists believed this could be an effective retort to the Marxist threat." That's an interesting point: our economic theories, outlook and unswervingly propagandistic pedagogy stem from the Cold War. "The fear that unfriendly AI will break-off on its own and fuck the planet is unfounded. An uglier situation could emerge, where people play a very prominent role. If robotics is a manifestation of human power relationships, then it’s not the enslavement of mankind by some cybernetic “superintelligence” that will spell our demise. It will be the perpetuation of an exhausted present, only a deeper variant of it… a digital web of domination so stupid and inane that a “necrolypse” might look like welcome relief in comparison." "If the religion of work is still promoted in the digital dark age, then post-workerism ought to be our central demand, including a radical shortening of the working day and week. Otherwise capitalism will produce its ultimate contradiction: the glorification of work in a world where jobs are rare." "We’re now told that the real question is no longer when we will retire but if we’ll retire, with the prospect of working until you drop likely to become the norm. According to one concerned pensions expert, “the danger now is we will have a generation who really can’t afford to retire”." Unlike Snyder, he has footnotes, but can't make cases match (in this case, we turns to you). "The thematic of war recently reached its zenith when Donald Trump said he planned to establish a sixth branch of the armed forces, a “Space Force”." This type of book is too superficial, with no research to establish context. The book is too short to accommodate anything but a skimming of superficial news sources and clickbait articles. The first mention of a space force was in a strategic document from the nineties, under Clinton. This is not fodder unique to Trump. Trump is copying his predecessors. "A paper published by the Weizmann Institute of Science conveys the scale of the disaster. Human beings account for 0.01% of all living things since the rise of civilisation. Yet they’ve eradicated 83% of wild animals. Moreover, if we look at the total number of mammals on Earth today, a staggering 60% are livestock, 36% are humans and only 4% remain in the wild. Meanwhile, German researchers discovered that 76% of all flying insects have disappeared in the country since 1989." "Concerning the latter, radical ecologist Derrick Jensen contends that the only effective way to save the planet is to end civilisation as we know it.14 There can be no happy coexistence between us and nature. It’s a zero-sum game. The best way to rescue the White Bellied Heron, the Baishan Fir, Franklin’s Bumblebee and the Hula painted frog, for example, is to terminate the global capitalist order immediately. As Jensen puts it, “to reverse the effects of civilisation would destroy the dreams of a lot of people. There’s no way around it… what right do I — or does anyone else — have to destroy them? At the same time, what right do they have to destroy the world?”" "The problem is that the worst is yet to come. We therefore require a good understanding of the ideological terrain upon which that struggle will unfold. Most importantly, and returning to the thesis of this book, we won’t necessarily see the clean death of neoliberalism but an exaggerated and unsustainable deepening of it. It will then buckle under its own weight, yielding a windswept post-capitalist dystopia… if nothing is done to counteract it now." "This is how Google can enjoy yearly sales in the UK of £1.03bn yet post a pre-tax profit of £149m, with a tax bill of £36.4m. Some firms might even record a “loss” (despite heathy revenues), then use the “Double Irish” with a “Dutch Sandwich”, and pay no tax whatsoever. Combined with shadow banking, transfer pricing, trade misinvoicing and tax havens, here we see where neoliberal capitalism is heading in the end times. The ultra rich — and their phalanx — floating above the state as the public sphere shrinks and society descends into disorder. Moreover, it is precisely here that neo-Feudal social structures make a comeback, linked to family oligarchies and their tremendous influence over governments, bypassing the democratic process." ]]> </content> </entry> <entry> <title type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century by Ted Snyder (2017) (read in 2019)]]> </title> <id>https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3721</id> <link href="https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3721"/> <updated>2019-04-07T20:11:31+02:00</updated> <author> <name type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Marco von Ballmoos]]> </name> <uri>https://earthli.com/users/marco</uri> </author> <summary type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA["Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is" ... ]]> </summary> <content type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Published by marco on 7. Apr 2019 20:11:31 Updated by marco on 25. Oct 2024 06:27:06 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I've failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an interest in this book, then I'm happy for you." This book was recommended to me by an ordinarily more-reliable friend, but I don't hold it against zim. I was relieved to receive a "your library loan is about to end" message about my E-Book because, as I was reading the book, I realized with dread that I couldn't remember whether I'd found it in the library or whether I'd actually purchased it. It's a short book, so it probably doesn't cost very much, nor should it, because it's trash. The blurbs and description of this book are very misleading. It is about Trump. That is not, at first, obvious. Trump is never mentioned by name. Instead, Snyder refers to him as "the president" in what I can only assume is a bid to seem clever, but ends up being a gambit that fools no-one reading the book right now. In ten or twenty years time, however, absolutely no-one is going to know what the actual fuck Snyder is talking about. The book is a confusing mish-mash, even when read this close to publication. It will not stand the test of time. Snyder's 20 rules are quite a stretch -- many of them are nearly direct reformulations of other rules. They sound different superficially, but are more like a horoscope in that regard. As I read the book, I thought Snyder was a self-educated 20-something or 70-something. I discovered, after completing the book, that he's a highly ranked professor at the Yale School of Management. It's ridiculous how poorly written and poorly thought-through this book is. He knows his market, though: it's a best-seller. [Citations] "Because enough people in both cases voluntarily extended their services to the new leaders, Nazis and communists alike realized that they could move quickly toward a full regime change." There were also rich rewards. They anticipated getting the jump on others. "No doubt the Russians who voted in 1990 did not think that this would be the last free and fair election in their country’s history, which (thus far) it has been." Just BOOM, unquestioned and blanket allegations that Russia has no democracy -- just declares 30 years of elections as unfair with no justification. That's fucking bold, coming from an American. "The Russian oligarchy established after the 1990 elections continues to function, and promotes a foreign policy designed to destroy democracy elsewhere." That's another bold claim for an American. Didn't he just write something about vigilance inward rather than outward? But let's broadside the Russians for some cheap and easy points, raw meat to his target audience. "The peasants who had more land or livestock than others were the first to lose what they had. A neighbor portrayed as a pig is someone whose land you can take." That's another drastic oversimplification. The "peasants" whereof he speaks were like American agri-business "farmers" today. They were mostly the vestiges of nobility, hanging on to vast, inherited lands. How do you impose a more just distribution without taking away from those who unjustly hold lands? This is only a huge problem if you sympathize with elites with unearned wealth. Which, spoiler alert, Snyder seems to do. "Millions of people in Soviet Ukraine, Soviet Kazakhstan, and Soviet Russia died horrible and humiliating deaths" Humiliating is an odd adjective to use here. It insinuates much while explaining nothing. It's a dog whistle. "Even the history of lapel pins is far from innocent." Again, no mention America's own obsession with ensuring that every single politician has a flag on his or her lapel. "If lawyers had followed the norm of no execution without trial, if doctors had accepted the rule of no surgery without consent, if businessmen had endorsed the prohibition of slavery, if bureaucrats had refused to handle paperwork involving murder, then the Nazi regime would have been much harder pressed to carry out the atrocities by which we remember it." But they did resist, no? Then those initial resisters were quickly culled and they were left with the more pliant and morally bankrupt dregs. In typical fashion, we forget all about the anonymous initial resisters and build our own history, own story -- one that fits our preconceptions. "This was a convenient way for Germans to remember the Holocaust, since they could claim that few of them had known exactly what had happened behind those gates." Fuck this guy for calling how Germans recall the war "convenient". Americans have no idea how to recall a war. They never do. Americans are largely deliberately amnesiac and therefore amorally unapologetic about any of the damage and suffering they cause in the world. Germany's culture apologizes to this day for crimes that its forbears committed. American will, in the words of GHW Bush, "never apologize". They don't even acknowledge it, agonizing endlessly about a handful of dead soldiers and whether or not America "lost" a war -- or how to exit an ongoing war while saving face. Apologizing for dead civilians doesn't even make the list. Fuck this guy. "But even these trials were a kind of minimization of the scale of the crime. Not the SS commanders alone, but essentially all of the thousands of men who served under their command were murderers." This is literally the reverse of how American military justice works. At least German higher-ups were punished for their war crimes. American higher-ups are rewarded with book deals and roam free, garnering massive speaking fees and morning-show interview spots. "In summer 1939 the Soviet Union allied with Nazi Germany and the Red Army joined the Wehrmacht in the invasion of Poland. The Polish government chose to fight, activating agreements that brought Great Britain and France into the war. Germany, supplied with food and fuel by the Soviet Union, invaded and quickly occupied Norway, the Netherlands, Belgium, and even France in the spring of 1940. The remainder of the British expeditionary force was evacuated from the" Is that true? I can't take anything this guy writes on faith anymore. "From our perspective, her actions seem exceptional. She stood out." These pat and flat descriptions remind me of the superficiality of Gladwell. "(the president uses the word in this way), encounters were always struggles (the president" "What is the point here? Also, why not write Trump? Is this book only for today? In twenty years it will be very confusing." "In 1984, the language of visual media is highly constrained, to starve the public of the concepts needed to think about the present, remember the past, and consider the future. One of the regime’s projects is to limit the language further by eliminating" Look, this book's heart is obviously in the right place. But it focuses on Trump as if the trend here had just begin. He's not a historian (edit: Holy shit, he's a tenured chair of the history department at Yale University.) "If you carry a weapon in public service, may God bless you and keep you." Some concepts are unassailable in America, no matter where you stand on the publicly acceptable political spectrum. "It is as if a farmer said he were taking an egg from the henhouse, boiling it whole and serving it to his wife, and also poaching it and serving it to his children, and then returning it to the hen unbroken, and then watching as the chick hatches." The writing style is one of fake gravitas. Reminds of the train wreck that was the Alchemist. Catchy and trite and calorie-free. "loved slogans that resonated like a new religion," Ironic much? This book is 20 such things. "Subsidize investigative journalism by subscribing to print media." No no, just media is OK, too. Print media like the New York Times? Or the Washington Post? Two establishment mouthpieces. This guy is an unquestioning fool, a patsy for the ruling elite. As professor at Yale, he kind of is the ruling elite. "(some of which come from abroad)." Oh for fucks sake. Here comes the Russia train again. "During his campaign, the president claimed on a Russian propaganda outlet that American “media has been unbelievably dishonest.”" Which fucking outlet was that? Are you literally allergic to any details? "In 1971, contemplating the lies told in the United States about the Vietnam War, the political theorist Hannah Arendt took comfort in the inherent power of facts to overcome falsehoods in a free society: “Under normal circumstances the liar is defeated by reality, for which there is no substitute; no matter how large the tissue of falsehood that an experienced liar has to offer, it will never be large enough, even if he enlists the help of computers, to cover the immensity of factuality.” The part about computers is no longer true." Even then it was already true, even without computers. We never heard about the Vietnam war in school. 100% suppression. "Within the two-dimensional internet world, new collectivities have arisen, invisible by the light of day—tribes with distinct worldviews, beholden to manipulations" Thesaurus much? By "collectivities", you mean "groups" and by "beholden", you mean "ripe". These aren't even ivory-tower synonyms -- they're just wrong. "If we found a video of the president performing Cossack dances while Vladimir Putin claps, we would probably just demand the same thing with the president wearing a bear suit and holding rubles in his mouth." He does not see the irony that he accepts Russian evil as axiomatic. "We find it natural that we pay for a plumber or a mechanic, but demand our news for free. If we did not pay for plumbing or auto repair, we would not expect to drink water or drive cars. Why then should we form our political judgment on the basis of zero investment? We get what we pay for." Fair point. "Put your body in unfamiliar places with unfamiliar people." Like orgies? Or Trump rallies? "During the campaign of 2016, we took a step toward totalitarianism without even noticing by accepting as normal the violation of electronic privacy." WTF: surveillance did not start then. This is rewriting history. Snowden came years earlier. The Russian influence is a chimera. "The timed email bombs of the 2016 presidential campaign were also a powerful form of disinformation." Is he talking about Podesta and Clinton? No idea...what are "email bombs"? "As we learned from these email bombs, this mechanism works even when what is revealed is of no interest." This book has not aged well. Even after only two years. I have no idea what he's talking about and he's not bothered to explain it at all. "When we take an active interest in matters of doubtful relevance at moments that are chosen by tyrants and spooks, we participate in the demolition of our own political order. To be sure, we might feel that we are doing nothing more than going along with everyone else. This is true—and it is what Arendt described as the devolution of a society into a “mob.” We can try to solve this problem individually, by securing our own computers; we can also try to solve it collectively, by supporting, for example, organizations that are concerned with human rights." This paragraph is a crazed mishmash, a kitchen sink/horoscope/shotgun of advice. "[...] that one of our former presidents called “a thousand points of light.”" It was George Bush Sr. You are not being mysterious or generalized by omitting president's names. "To Ukrainians, Americans seemed comically slow to react to the obvious threats of cyberwar and fake news. When Russian propaganda made Ukraine a target in 2013, young Ukrainian journalists and others reacted immediately, decisively, and sometimes humorously with campaigns to expose disinformation. Russia deployed many of the same techniques against Ukraine that it later used against the United States—while invading Ukraine." This is nearly an outright fabrication. "This should give us pause." This book feels liked it was written with superficial research and no experience and no wisdom. The author is either a 25-year--old or a 70-year--old who never paid attention to anything in his life. It feels like a term paper, right down to the "filler" content to pad out the already pathetic length of the book. (Edit: again, holy shit, he's a tenured chair of the history department at Yale University.) "Vladimir Putin not only came to power in an incident that strikingly resembled the Reichstag fire, he then used a series of terror attacks—real, questionable, and fake—to remove obstacles to total power in Russia and to assault democratic neighbors." What the fuck are you talking about? This is all unverifiable and irrefutable because there is no detail. The Putin-and-Russia-are-evil trope is taken on religious faith. He's writing only for the faithful, and he's so deep into it that he doesn't see the need to provide any substantiation for those of who've not yet drunk the Kool-Aid. "When the American president and his national security adviser speak of fighting terrorism alongside Russia, what they are proposing to the American people is terror management: the exploitation of real, dubious, and simulated terror attacks to bring down democracy." He completely ignores America already having done this, and on a much grander scale. E.g. the Iraq war. It wasn't that long ago. It can be argued that it's still kind of ongoing (soldiers are still stationed there). "What is patriotism? Let us begin with what patriotism is not. It is not patriotic to dodge the draft and to mock war heroes and their families. It is not patriotic to discriminate against active-duty members of the armed forces in one’s companies, or to campaign to keep disabled veterans away from one’s property. It is not patriotic to compare one’s search for sexual partners in New York with the military service in Vietnam that one has dodged." Again: what madness is this? Old man yells at cloud. "Every reference to the past seems to involve an attack by some external enemy upon the purity of the nation." He's still not seeing the irony, nor has any of his editors seen fit to point it out to him. They are almost certainly all similarly indoctrinated. "How can we even think of reform when the enemy is always at the gate?" This from the guy who spent half of a miniscule book railing against foreign devils. ]]> </content> </entry> <entry> <title type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Norse Mythology by Neil Gaiman (2017) (read in 2019)]]> </title> <id>https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3720</id> <link href="https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3720"/> <updated>2019-04-07T18:21:46+02:00</updated> <author> <name type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Marco von Ballmoos]]> </name> <uri>https://earthli.com/users/marco</uri> </author> <summary type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA["Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is" ... ]]> </summary> <content type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Published by marco on 7. Apr 2019 18:21:46 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve in reminding me of what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I've failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an interest in this book, then I'm happy for you." This book is Gaiman's retelling of the known Norse legends in his own voice and with his inimitable style. If you pay attention, it doesn't take long to notice that the Norse Gods are mostly jerks to each other and everyone else and have no notion of fairness whatsoever. They are happy to take whatever they can, however they can get it and then the have to gall to hate on Loki for doing it back to them better than they do it to everyone else. Loki is an evil little fuck, but he's no more amoral than the others. It could be argued that he's actually good for wanting to eliminate the manipulative lot of them. In which I learn that Loki is Thor’s uncle, not his brother. In which I did not even learn that while reading it, but had to have it pointed out to me by my wife after I’d urged her to read this book. On a positive note: I have now learned this thing. I also learned that Hel is the guardian of the Hel, the destination for everyone who has not earned the right to rest eternally in Valhalla, that Jormungundr is the Midgard serpent (also known as Ouroboros) and that Fenris Wolf is larger than any other creature and is destined to destroy the Gods during Ragnarok. Surtr will help, wielding a world-sized flaming sword. I learned that Fenris, Jormungundr and Hel are Loki's children, making him nearly the most-central character in the whole mythos. As you can expect from tall tales of this sort, the relative sizes and strengths of the cast varies wildly -- each story introduces a new heretofore unknown giant from a heretofore unknown region who is even bigger and more powerful than all other giants before him or her. Thor still manages to kick everyone's ass, though. Thor's fight with the Midgard serpent was particularly confusing vis à vis scale, since that particular serpent goes around the entire world. Still, super-neat stories, well-told. Would read again. [Citations] "In Muspell, at the edge of the flame, where the mist burns into light, where the land ends, stood Surtr, who existed before the gods. He stands there now. He holds a flaming sword, and the bubbling lava and the freezing mist are as one to him. It is said that at Ragnarok, which is the end of the world, and only then, Surtr will leave his station. he will go forth form Muspell with his flaming sword and burn the world with fire, and one by one the gods will fall before him." "Odin asked her who would kill Balder, and her answer shocked him. "He asked who would avenge Balder’s death, and her answer puzzled him. "He asked who would mourn Balder, and she stared at him across her own grave, as if she were seeing him for the first time. "“You are not Wanderer,” she said. Her dead eyes flickered, and there was expression on her face. “You are Odin, who was sacrificed by himself to himself so long ago.” "“And you are no wise woman. You are she who was in life Angrboda, Loki’s lover, mother to Hel, to Jormungundr, the Midgard serpent, and to Fenris Wolf,” said Odin. The dead giantess smiled. "“Ride home, little Odin,” she told him. “Run away, run back to your hall. No one will come to see me now until my husband, Loki, escapes from his bonds and returns to me, and Ragnarok, the doom of the gods, tearing all asunder, approaches.” "And then there was nothing in that place but shadows." "Until now I have told you of things that have happened in the past—things that happened a long time ago. "Now I shall tell you of the days to come. I shall tell you how it will end, and then how it will begin once more. "These are dark days I will tell you of, dark days and hidden things, concerning the ends of the earth and the death of the gods. Listen, and you will learn." ]]> </content> </entry> <entry> <title type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Eine Kurze Geschichte der Menschheit by Yuval Noah Harari (2011) (read in 2019)]]> </title> <id>https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3709</id> <link href="https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3709"/> <updated>2019-03-10T13:08:00+01:00</updated> <author> <name type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Marco von Ballmoos]]> </name> <uri>https://earthli.com/users/marco</uri> </author> <summary type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA["Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is" ... ]]> </summary> <content type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Published by marco on 10. Mar 2019 13:08:00 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I've failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an interest in this book, then I'm happy for you." This book was originally written in Hebrew -- I read the German translation. It's about what the title says: "a short history of mankind". The story starts hundreds of thousands of years ago, with Cro-Magnons and Neanderthals, discussing current theories for the diasporas of both and extinction of the latter. From there, we discuss the current theories about hunter-gatherer lifestyle and the "cognitive revolution" that led to the utter domination of other species by the physically weaker human being. Harari discusses the truly staggering degree to which humans wiped everything else of any significant size -- anything that it didn't later domesticate. Viewed from this high vantage, humans really are a plague, preying on and twisting everything to their will, destroying whatever they cannot subsume. After that, society transitions to agriculture. Harari points out that every massive change that mankind has accepted and applied to itself globally isn't necessarily an improvement. With agriculture, people were working harder than ever to get a lower-quality life. Congruent with this shift was the beginning of the first elites among men. Though most had lives that were harder and more insecure and more boring -- they were increasingly trapped on their lands and lost their nomadic lifestyle -- than those of their hunger-gatherer ancestors, a select view lived spectacular lives. These would continue to shape culture and inclinations to ensure that they and their descendants would continue to benefit in this way. Morality didn't enter into it. Harari has a very western attitude toward humanity -- at-times seeming to chastise other cultures for failing to fight back adequately against the more rapacious Europeans. Progress as defined by Europe is taken to be an inevitability -- the other countries and peoples of the world are responsible for not having progressed as quickly or more quickly than Europeans. He often has the right facts at hand, but leaves the reader to come to his or her own conclusions. For example, he expresses puzzlement that the Chinese didn't try to blow each other up with gunpowder-based weapons of war for centuries whereas the Europeans did so nearly immediately upon seeing the technology. He implicitly attributes this to westerners somehow being cleverer monkeys when a dearth of morality on their part would also explain the disparity. The Europeans won because they were more rapacious and cruel and much more ready to consider their fellow humans as lower animals, to be used to satisfy their own abstract needs. Perhaps it was a higher ability to abstract away responsibility under multiple societal layers designed to absolve responsibility -- this is a mechanism still heavily used today. Humans set up rules to their own benefit, then explain their overwhelming and grotesque riches as the natural workings of some higher power (i.e. "the market"). As Harari would say: these are fairy tales we tell ourselves and others to get what we want. That is, in Harari's opinion, humanity's main ability -- that fictitious concepts become somehow more important than physical reality. Harari is a good storyteller and summarizes many interesting facets of the sweep of history. However, he isn't as opinionated as the facts he relates would require him to be. The result is that he looks either obtuse or biased. He shies away from judgment -- and he's too smart not to have noticed the natural conclusions to much of the information he cites. My gut feeling in some places was that he was hedging his bets so as to continue to be regarded favorably by the elites whose crimes he has partially documented. That is, he wants to sell his books and his presence, so he leaves the condemnation up to the reader. [Citations] I read this book on paper instead of on my Kindle, so my citations are more limited than usual, as I was only inclined to manually transcribe certain passages. I've left the passages in German rather than taking the time to translate them to English and about half of my notes are also in German, so YMMV even more than usual. "Aber woher sollen wir wissen, was auf biologischen Tatsachen beruht und was auf bloßen Mythen? Eine gute Faustregel lautet: "Die Biologie erlaubt, die Kultur verbietet." Die Biologie lässt eine große Bandbreite von Möglichkeiten zu. Die Kultur zwingt ihre Angehörigen dagegen, sich für eine kleine Auswahl dieser Möglichkeiten zu entscheiden.. Die Biologie gibt Frauen die Möglichkeit, Kinder zu bekommen -- und die Kultur zwingt die Frauen dazu, diese Möglichkeit wahrzunehmen. Die Biologie gibt Männern und Frauen die Möglichkeit, Geschlechtsverkehr mit dem eigenen Geschlecht zu haben -- und die Kultur verbietet ihnen, diese Möglichkeit wahrzunehmen. "Die Kultur behauptet gern, sie verbiete "unnatürliche" Dinge. Aber aus biologischer Sicht ist nichts unnatürlich. Alles was möglich ist, ist definitionsgemäß auch natürlich. Eine unnatürliche Verhaltensweise, die den Gesetzen der Natur widerspricht, kann es gar nicht geben. weshalb es völlig sinnlos ist, sie verbieten zu wollen. Keine Kultur hat sich je die Mühe gemacht, Männern die Photosynthese oder Frauen die Fortbewegung mit Überlichtgeschwindigkeit zu verbieten." "Nach der landwirtschaftlichen Revolution wurden die menschlichen Gesellschaften immer größer und komplexer, und die erfundenen Ordnungen, die diese Gesellschaften zusammenhielten, wurden immer raffinierter. Mythen und Märchen programmierten die Menschen darauf, fast von Geburt an auf eine bestimmte Weise zu denken und zu handeln, bestimmte Dinge zu wollen und bestimmte Regeln zu folgen. Damit schufen sie "künstliche Instinkte", mit deren Hilfe Millionen von menschen effektiv zusammenarbeiten konnten. Dieses Netz der künstlichen Instinkte nennen wir "Kultur"." "Ein interessanter Fall sind die Nationalgerichte. Wenn wir in ein italienisches Restaurant gehen, erwarten wir Spaghetti mit Tomatensoße, bei polnischen und irischen Restaurants denken wir spontan an Kartoffeln, in einem argentinischen Restaurant wollen wir saftige Rindersteaks essen, in indischen Restaurants freuen wir uns auf kräftig mit Chili gewürzte Currygerichte, und in einem Schweizer Café auf die heiße Schokolade. Aber der Kakao kommt ursprünglich genauso wenig aus der Schweiz wit die Tomaten aus Italien oder die Chilischoten aus Indien. Tomaten, Chili und Kakao stammen aus Mesoamerika und kamen erst im 16. Jahrhundert, nach der Eroberung des Aztekenreichs durch die Spanier, nach Europa und Asien. "[...] "Genauso kennen wir aus Hollywood-Filmen nordamerikanische Indianer al tapfere Reiter, die sich mutig den Planwagen der europäischen Pioniere Entgegenwerfen, um di Kultur ihrer Ahnen zu verteidigen. Doch diese Reiter waren keineswegs die Vertreter einer uralten, ursprünglichen Kultur. Sie waren vielmehr das Produkt einer gewaltigen militärischen und politischen Revolution, die im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert mit der Ankunft der europäischen Pferde über den Westen Nordamerikas hinwegfegte. Im Jahr 1492 gab es in ganz Amerika kein einziges Pferd. So attraktiv uns die Kultur der Sioux und Apachen des 19. Jahrhunderts erscheinen mag, sie war keine "ursprünglich" sondern eine sehr modernen Kultur, die unter der Einwirkung globaler Kräfte entstanden war." On the difficulties of having a barter-only economy: "Um sich die Grenzen des Tauschhandels klarzumachen, stellen Sie sich vor, Sie wohnen in den Bergen und haben einen Garten mit Apfelbäumen, in dem die knackigsten, saftigsten Äpfel der ganzen Gegend wachsen. Von der vielen Arbeit in Ihrem Garten gehen irgendwann Ihre Schuhe kaputt. Also spannen Sie Ihren Esel vor Ihren Karren und fahren in den Marktflecken am Fluss. ihr Nachbar hat Ihnen erzählt, dass ihm der Schuhmacher auf der Südseite des Markts ein Paar Stiefel gemacht hat, die fünf Jahre lang gehalten haben. Diesen Schuster besuchen Sie nun und bieten ihm an, einige Ihrer Äpfel gegen ein Paar Schuhe zu tauschen. "Der Schuhmacher zögert. Wi viel Äpfel soll er für ein Paar Schuhen nehmen? Jede Woche kommen Dutzende Kunden zu ihm, von denen einer einen Sack Äpfel, ein zweiter Weizen, ein dritter Ziegen und ein vierter Stoffe mitbringt, und zwar jeder in ganz unterschiedlicher Qualität. Dann hat er auch noch Kunden, die Bittschreiben an den König aufsetzen oder Rückenschmerzen kurieren können. Als ihm das letzte Mal jemand Äpfel geboten hat, hat er sich drei Säcke geben lassen. Oder waren se vier? Aber das waren ja auch die sauren Äpfel aus dem Tal gewesen. Andererseits hat er damals auch nur ein kleines Paar Frauenschuhe hergestellt, und Sie wollen ja robuste Stiefel. Dazu kommt, dass in den letzten Wochen eine Epidemie die Schafe in der Gegend dezimiert hat und Häute selten geworden sind. Die Gerber verlangen inzwischen doppelt so viele Paar fertige Schuhe für dieselbe Menge Leder. Sollte der Schuster das nicht irgendwie einkalkulieren? "In einer Tauschwirtschaft müssen Sie under der Schuhmacher jeden Tag den relativen Wert von Duzenden Waren ermitteln. Wenn in Ihrer Stadt 100 Waren gehandelt werden, müssen Käufer und Verkäufer 4950 verschiede Wechselkurse kennen. Und wenn 1000 Waren gehandelt werden, wären dies schon 499 500 Wechselkurse! Wie sollen Sie da den Überblick bewahren?" On the global distribution of certain norms and rules: "Heute gibt es fast 200 unabhängige Staaten, doch mit deren Souveränität ist es nicht mehr allzu weit her. Keiner dieser Staaten ist mehr in der Lage, eine eigenständige Wirtschaftspolitik zu gestalten oder nach Lust und Laune Kriege zu führen; nicht einmal ihre inneren Angelegenheiten können sie nach Gutdünken regeln. Die Nationalstaaten sind zunehmend der Spielball von Weltmärkten, Großkonzernen und internationalen Nichtregierungsorganisationen, side werden von der Weltöffentlichkeit mit Argusaugen beobachtet und unterstehen dem internationalen Rechtssystem. Sie müssen ihre Finanzgebaren, ihre Umweltpolitik und ihr Rechtssystem an internationalen Vorgaben ausrichten. Die Welt wird von mächtigen internationalen Kapital-, Arbeits- und Informationsströmen gestaltet, die sich zunehmend über nationale Grenzen und Meinungen hinwegsetzen." On the false belief in an inevitability of history: "Der einzige Gott, den die Römer lange Zeit nicht duldeten, war der monotheistische und missionierende Gott der Christen. Die Römer verlangten gar nicht, dass die Christen ihren Glauben aufgaben, sie erwarteten nur, dass sie die römischen Götter und die Göttlichkeit des Kaisers anerkannten. Erst als die Christen sich weigerten und keine Kompromisse eingehen wollten, verfolgten die Römer diese Minderheit, und auch nur, weil sie in ihr eine politische Bedrohung sahen. Doch selbst dann gingen sie eher halbherzig gegen die Rebellen vor. In den drei Jahrhunderten, die zwischen der Kreuzigung Jesu Christi und der Bekehrung von Kaiser Konstantin vergingen, befahlen die römischen Kaiser lediglich vier organisierte Christenverfolgungen. Hin und wieder führten zwar Provinzstatthalter und Gouverneure auf eigene Faust Pogrome durch. Doch wenn man sämtliche Opfer aller Christenverfolgungen zusammenrechnet, stellt man fest, dass die polytheistischen Römer in diesen drei Jahrhunderten lediglich einige Tausend Christen ermordeten. Zum Vergleich: In den kommenden anderthalb Jahrtausenden schlachteten sich die Christen gegenseitig zu Millionen ab, weil sie die Lehre der Nächstenliebe in einigen Detailfragen unterschiedlich interpretierten." "Wenn eine Religion ein System von Werten und Normen ist, das sich auf eine übermenschliche Ordnung beruft, dann ist der Kommunismus genauso eine Religion wie der Islam. "Natürlich gibt es einen Unterschied zwischen dem islam und dem Kommunismus, denn der Islam ist der Ansicht, dass diese übermenschliche Ordnung von einem allmächtigen Gott geschaffen wurde, während der Kommunismus nicht an Götter glaubt. Aber auch der Buddhismus hält nicht allzu viel von Göttern und wird trotzdem gemeinhin al Religion bezeichnet. Wie die Buddhisten glaubten die Kommunisten, die Geschichte werde von einer übermenschlichen Ordnung von unumstößlichen Naturgesetzen gelenkt, aus denen sich wiederum Regeln für das menschliche Verhalten ableiten. Während die Buddhisten glauben, dass Siddhartha Gautama diese Gesetze entdeckt hatte, sehen Kommunisten Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels und Wladimir Illjitsch Lenin als ihre Religionsstifter." "Als Kaiser Konstantin im Jahr 306 den Thron bestieg, war das Christentum nicht mehr als eine esoterische Sekte aus dem Nahen Osten. Die Vorstellung, dass sie kurz davor stand, das Römische Reich zu erobern, war genauso lachhaft wie der Gedanke, Hare Krishna könnte in fünfzig Jahren die Staatsreligion Europas werden. Im Oktober 1913 waren die russischen Bolschewiken eine unbedeutende Gruppe von Radikalen -- niemand hätte sein Geld darauf gewettet, dass ein Volk aus der arabischen Wüste ein Imperium erobern würde, das vom Atlantik bis zum Indischen Ozean reichte. Wenn die Araber gleich zu Beginn ihres Siegeszugs von der Byzantinischen Armee gestoppt worden wären, dann wäre der Islam eine unbedeutende Fußnote der Geschichte geblieben, und die wenigen Experten, die von ihm gehört hatten, würden uns heute mit dem Brustton der Überzeugung erklären, warum aus den Offenbarungen eines Alternden Handelsreisenden aus Mekka niemals eine Weltreligion werden konnte. "[...] Der Determinismus ist verführerisch, denn er vermittelt uns das Gefühl, dass unsere Welt und unsere Vorstellungen ein natürliches und unvermeidliches Produkt der Geschichte sind. Demnach gäbe es gar keine andere Möglichkeit, als die Welt in Nationalstaaten aufzuteilen, die Wirtschaft nach kapitalistischen Grundsätzen zu organisieren und an die Menschenrechte zu glauben. Wenn wir jedoch erkenne, dass die Geschichte nicht in vorgegebenen Bahnen verläuft, dann müssen wir uns eingestehen, dass Nationalismus, Kapitalismus und Menschenrechte nicht mehr sind als Zufallsprodukte." On second-order chaotic systems (those that can't be predicted because the prediction influences the working of the system): "Stellen Sie sich vor, im Jahr 2010 erfindet ein genialer Politikwissenschaftler zusammen mit einem Informatiker ein unfehlbares Programm zur Vorhersage von Revolutionen und verkauft es dem ägyptischen Präsidenten Hosni Mubarak. Neugierig probiert der Präsident das neue Spielzeug aus und stellt erschrocken fest, dass es eine Revolution für das kommende Jahr vorausberechnet. Sofort senkt Mubarak die Steuern, verteilt Milliarden unter sein Volk und verstärkt für alle Fälle seine Geheimpolizei. So kommt und geht das Jahr 2011, ohne dass Demonstranten auf die Straße gehen. ärgerlich beschwert sich Mubarak bei den Entwicklern des Programms und verlangt sein Geld zurück. "Euer Programm hat sich verrechnet! Es hat mich Milliarden gekostet! Im Jahr 2011 gab es gar keine Revolution!" "Worauf die Experten erwidern: "Wir haben Sie gerettet! Ohne uns säßen Sie heute im Gefängnis!" ""Propheten, die Dinge vorhersehen, die dann nicht eintreten?", fragt Mubarak und winkt seine Wachen heran. "Von der Sorte hätte ich Dutzende auf dem Markt aufsammeln können, und zwar umsonst!"" "Im Jahr 1500 lebten 500 Millionen Menschen auf unserem Planeten. Heute sind es 7 Milliarden. Im Jahr 1500 wurden auf der ganzen Welt Waren und Dienstleistungen im Wert von umgerechnet 250 Milliarden Dollar. produziert. Heute sind es knapp 60 Billionen Dollar. Im Jahr 1500 verbrauchte die Menschheit pro Tag 13 Billionen Kalorien Energie. Heute verbrauchen wir pro Tag 1500 Billionen Kalorien. (Lassen Sie diese Zahlen einmal auf sich wirken: 14 mal so viele Menschen produzieren 240 mal so viel und verbrauchen dabei 115 mal so viel Energie.)" On the religion of technology and the unshakable faith of the technocracy. "Selbst die Wissenschaft greift immer wieder auf religiöse und ideologische Überzeugungen zurück, um ihre Forschung zu rechtfertigen und zu finanzieren. "Trotzdem zeigt unsere moderne Kultur größere Bereitschaft als jede andere, ihre Unwissenheit anzuerkennen. Wenn die Moderne ihre gesellschaftliche Ordnung trotz der neuen Mode des Zweifels aufrechterhalten konnte, dann liegt das vor allem daran, dass eine fast religiöse Technologie- und Wissenschaftsgläubigkeit aufkam, die den Glauben an absolute Wahrheiten weitgehend verdrängt hat." "Wir leben in einem Zeitalter der Technologie. Was für unsere Vorfahren politische, ethische und spirituelle Zwickmühlen waren, das behandeln wir zunehmend als technische Fragen. Mit ihren erstaunlichen erfolgen im Kampf gegen Blitzschlag, Armut und Tod hat uns die Wissenschaft zu begeisterten Fortschrittsgläubigen gemacht. Viele sind überzeugt, dass sie "zum Nutzen der Menschheit" arbeitet und wir ihr rückhaltlos vertrauen können. Lassen wir die Wissenschaftler nur ihre Arbeit machen, und sie werden das Paradies auf Erden schaffen, denken sie." On how scientific advancement that benefitted Europeans was the kiss of death for everyone else. Cook's faith in Dr. Lind's cure for scurvy saved millions of western sailors' lives -- freeing them up to slaughter and yoke the other peoples of the planet. "[...] Auf der gesamten Expedition starb kein einziger seiner Matrosen an Skorbut. In den folgenden Jahrzehnten machten es die Flotten der Welt Cook nach und retteten so das Leben von ungezählten Matrosen und Reisenden. "[Cooks] Expedition legte den Grundstein für die britische Besetzung des Südwestpazifiks, die Eroberung Australiens, Tasmaniens und Neuseelands, die Besiedlung der neuen Kolonien durch Millionen von Europäern und die Auslöschung der einheimischen Kulturen und der meisten Ureinwohner. "Im Jahrhundert nach Cooks Expedition nahmen europäische Siedler den Ureinwohnern Australiens und Neuseelands den größten Teil des fruchtbaren Landes ab. Die einheimische Bevölkerung brach um 90 Prozent ein, und die wenigen Überlebenden wurden von einem erbarmungslosen rassistischen System unterjocht. Für die australischen Aborigines und die neuseeländischen Maoris markierte die Cook-Expedition den Beginn einer Katastrophe, von der sie sich nie wieder völlig erholten. "Noch schlimmer erging es den Ureinwohnern von Tasmanien. {...}" "Es ist nicht so, als hätte den Chinesen und Persern das technische Knowhow gefehlt -- Dampfmaschinen ließen sich schließlich ganz einfach kaufen oder nachbauen. Was ihnen fehlte, waren die Werte und Mythen, der juristische Apparat und die gesellschaftlichen und politischen Strukturen, die im Westen über Jahrhunderte hinweg herangereift waren und sich nicht so einfach kopieren und verinnerlichen ließen. Frankreich und die Vereinigten Staaten konnten rasch in die Fußstapfen von Großbritannien treten, weil di Franzosen und Amerikaner viele Mythen und Gesellschaftsstrukturen mit den Briten gemeinsam hatten. Die Chinesen und Perser konnten nicht Schritt halten, weil sie ganz anders dachten und sich anders organisierten." Oder vielleicht fehlt diese Kulturen die Impulse zu Erobern, Auslöschen und Unterjochung, die den Europäern so leicht gefallen ist. Vielleicht stunde die Ethik und Moralen im Weg. Vielleicht war's einfach die Tatsache, dass das was die Europäer erfunden haben war gepaart mit dem was jedem Bully bewusst ist: die die nicht kämpfen wollen werden verlieren. Dem Westen aus dem Weg zu gehen ist nicht möglich, weil die nicht aufzuhalten sind, bis sie die ganze Welt aufgefressen haben. Nach Jahrhunderte der Unterwerfung haben die andere Länder endlich begriffen, dass man muss den Feind werden, um ihn zu besiegen. ist schade aber scheint so zu sein. Die Erklärung von Harari wirkt sehr komisch, wenn man erinnert, dass diese obereffiziente Europäer haben die Welt nur leid verbreitet und sämtliche menschliche Bevölkerungen ausgelöscht und unterjocht (genau wie ihre Vorfahren die Grosssäugetiere entweder ausgelöscht oder unterjocht haben). Seine Sätze lassen sich lesen, als ob die Europäer auch durch eine moralische Linse betrachtet hätten gewinnen sollen -- aus meiner Sicht stimmt das überhaupt nicht. Die haben gewonnen, weil ihre Rassismus und Brutalität überstieg alles andere was ihnen begegnet ist. Dass die andere Kulturen sich "anders dachten und sich anders organisierten" ist heute noch so: die scheinen irgendwie noch einem Hauch Ethik zu befolgen. Hingegen findet das neue herrschende Land der Welt -- Amerika -- es muss keineswegs an solche Schwächlichkeiten überhaupt festhalten. Ganz im Gegenteil: ausgesprochene Ethiken haben nachdem sie über den lügnerischen Lippen gesabbert sind keine Bedeutung mehr. Obwohl die noch etliche Hinrichtungen durchführen (so wie auch Amerika), die Iraner scheinen an irgendwelche Werten noch festzuhalten, dass die immer wieder in die Verliererolle gegenüber Amerika führen. "Von Beginn an waren die europäischen Entdeckungsfahrten immer auch Eroberungszüge, und umgekehrt. Das macht die Einmaligkeit des europäischen Imperialismus aus. Frühere Imperialisten nahmen an, dass sie die Welt bereits völlig verstanden. Bei der Eroberung nutzten sie lediglich ihre Sicht der Welt und verbreiteten sie. Die Araber eroberten Ägypten, Spanien oder Indien nicht, weil sie dort etwas entdecken wollten, das sie noch nicht kannten. Die Römer, Mongolen und Azteken verleibten sich gierig immer neue Völker und Stämme ein, um Macht und Reichtümer zu horten, aber nicht um Wissen zu finden. Europäische Imperialisten brachen dagegen in ferne Länder auf, um sich nicht nur neue Länder anzueignen, sondern auch neues Wissen." "Nun kamen mehr und mehr spanische Soldaten und Siedler nach Mexiko, einige aus Kuba, andere direkt aus Spanien. Als die Einheimischen erkannten, was gespielt wurde, war es bereits zu spät. Hundert Jahre nach der Landung der Spanier in Veracruz war die Zahl der Ureinwohner um 90 Prozent eingebrochen. Die wenigen überlebenden Indios wurden von einem gierigen, rassistischen Regime versklavt, das die Unterdrückung durch die Azteken weit in den Schatten stellte." "Ist das Ganze also ein riesiges Schneeballsystem und ein riesiger Schwindel? Wenn ja, dann ist die gesamte moderne Wirtschaft ein Schwindel. Aber Jahrhunderte des realen Wirtschaftswachstums lassen vermuten, dass es sich nicht um einen Betrug handelt, sondern um eine Meisterleistung der menschlichen Fantasie. Banken und damit die ganze Wirtschaft funktionieren nur, weil wir Vertrauen in die Zukunft haben. Der Wert unseres Geldes ist fast ausschließlich durch dieses Vertrauen gedeckt." "Dieser Glaube an den immer größer werdenden Kuchen entwickelte eine gewaltige Sprengkraft. Im Jahr 1776 veröffentlichte der schottische Philosoph Adam Smith sein Buch Wohlstand der Nationen, das vielleicht wichtigste wirtschaftliche Manifest aller Zeiten. In den acht Kapiteln des ersten Bandes entwickelte Smith folgenden neuen Gedankengang: Wenn ein Landbesitzer, Weber oder Schuhmacher größere Gewinne erwirtschaftet, als er zum Unterhalt seiner Familie benötigt, dann nutzt er diesen Überschuss, um mehr Mitarbeiter zu beschäftigen und seine Gewinne weiter zu steigern. Je mehr Gewinne er erwirtschaftet, umso mehr Mitarbeiter beschäftigt er. Daraus folgt, dass die Gewinnsteigerung von Unternehmern die Grundlage für den kollektiven Wohlstand ist." Hier habe ich meine Zweifel, dass Harari das Buch von Smith nicht nur oberflächlich gelesen hat. Ich hab's auch nur zum Teil gelesen (etwa die Hälfte -- zu meine Verteidigung, es ist öde Langweilig) aber mein Eindruck war, dass Smith weniger positiv über die Wirtschaftskurbel berichtete bzw. er hat die von Harari zitierten Sätze klar geschrieben, folgte die aber mit ziemlich heftige Dementierungen, die von Harari nicht zitiert waren. Smith ist hier als Paradebeispiel eines Liberalen Wirtschaftlers, war aber eher links eingestellt, um grossen und ganzen. Hier steht Harari nicht allein: die meiste Zitieren Smith falsch oder so gezielt, dass falsche Meinungen gebildet werden. Später stellt Harari selber fragen, ob die oben zitierte Vision von Smith jemals so gelaufen ist. "Mit Beginn der Neuzeit wurde der Adel von einer neuen Elite abgelöst, deren Angehörige wahre Gläubige der kapitalistischen Religion waren. Diese neue Elite bestand nicht aus Grafen und Baronen, sondern aus Aufsichtsratsvorsitzenden, Aktienhändlern und industriellen. Diese Magnaten sind reicher als der mittelalterliche Adel, aber anders als ihre verschwenderischen Vorgänger haben sie weniger Interesse daran, ihr Geld zur Schau zu stellen, und verprassen nun einen kleinen Teil ihrer Gewinne." Schon wieder muss ich Harari bezweifeln. Es ist richtig, dass nouveau-riche so viel Geld besitzen, dass die es gar nicht verprassen könne -- bzw. die Zinsen davon häufen sich so schnell an, dass das Geldhaufen wachst egal wie viel man ausgibt. Diese liegt sicher nicht, weil sie sich kein Mühe dabei geben. "Doch in China, Indien und der Islamischen Welt spielten Kredit und Kapitalismus nur eine untergeordnete Rolle. "[...] "In Europa machten sich die Könige und Generäle dagegen das kaufmännische Denken zu eigen, bis die Händler und Bankiers schließlich selbst zur herrschenden Elite wurden. Die europäische Eroberung der Welt wurde immer mehr über Kredite und immer weniger über Steuern finanziert, und sie wurde zunehmend von Kapitalisten gelenkt, die vor allem daran interessiert waren, ihre Erträge zu maximieren." "Als die VOC im Jahr 1603 erstmals nach Indonesien kam, verfolgte sie ausschließlich wirtschaftliche Interessen. Doch um diese zu sichern und die Gewinne ihrer Aktionäre zu maximieren, gingen die Händler der VOC bald gegen die Potentaten der Region vor, die überhöhte Zölle verlangten, und sie wehrten sich gegen ihre europäischen Konkurrenten. Die VOC rüstete ihre Handelsschiffe mit Kanonen aus, heuerte europäische, japanische, indische und indonesische Söldner on, errichtete, Festungen, gelagerte Städte und führte Kriege. So sehr und dies heute befremden mag, es war keine außergewöhnliche Idee." Das nennt sich auf Englisch "Gunboat Diplomacy" ... oder vielleicht "Gunboat Trade" in diesem Fall. Wir werden das heute ganz klar verstehen (im Gegensatz zur Meinung von Harari), weil die Westliche Länder heute genauso handeln wie damals. Es hat sich kaum etwas geändert. Wenn wir einen Grund finden -- oder erfinden -- können (so wie "überhöhte Zölle", wird's losgestürmt, mit moralische Begründung (die Fremden sind selber schuld, dass sie zu viel Geld verlangten und wohnen schliesslich auf von Gott gegebenen, westlichen Grund). "Von ihrem Hauptquartier in der Leadenhall Street in London herrschte [die Britisch East India Company] mehr als ein Jahrhundert lang über ein gewaltiges indisches Reich und unterhielt ein Heer, das mit 350 000 Soldaten größer war als das der britischen Krone. erst im Jahr 1858 wurde Indien zusammen mit der Armee des Unternehmens "verstaatlicht"." "In der ersten Hälfte des 19. Jahrhunderts verdienten die Britische Ostindiengesellschaft und die Geschäftsleute der Insel ein Vermögen mit dem Verkauf von Drogen nach China. [...] Ende der 1830er Jahre verbot die chinesische Regierung den Drogenhandel. Da die britischen Drogenhändler das Verbot einfach ignorierten, begannen die chinesischen Behörden damit, die Rauschmittel zu beschlagnahmen und zu vernichten. "[...] "Im Jahr 1840 erklärte Großbritannien China im Namen des "Freihandels" den Krieg. [...] Im folgenden Friedensvertrag erklärten sich die Chinesen bereit, die Aktivitäten der britischen Drogenhändler nicht weiter zu behindern. Sie zahlten sogar noch Reparationen für den wirtschaftlichen Schaden, den die chinesische Polizei bei der Vernichtung der Drogen angerichtet hatte, und überließen den Briten Hongkong, das den Drogenhändlern fortan als sicherer Stützpunkt diente." "[...] Nach der Schlacht von Navarino waren die britischen Kapitalisten zunehmend bereit, in zweifelhafte Auslandsgeschäfte zu investieren. Wenn die Schuldner die Zahlung verweigerten, konnten side schließlich davon ausgehen, dass die britische Armee ihnen ihr Geld schon zurückholen würde." "Doch die Zuckerrohrernte und die Zuckerherstellung sind extrem arbeitsintensiv. Niemand wollte freiwillig den ganzen Tag auf malariaverseuchten Feldern und unter der erbarmungslosen tropischen Sonne arbeiten. Wenn die Pflanzer Lohnarbeiter beschäftigt hätten, dann wäre der Preis exorbitant hoch geblieben und die Süßwarenindustrie hätte es vermutlich nie gegeben. Mit ihrem Marktgespür und ihrer Profitgier stellten die europäischen Plantagenbesitzer also auf Sklavenwirtschaft um." "Der Sklavenhandel wurde nicht von Regierungen kontrolliert. Es handelte sich um eine rein wirtschaftliche Unternehmung, die auf dem freien Markt nach dem Gesetz von Angebot und Nachfrage organisiert und finanziert wurde. Private Sklavenhandelsunternehmen verkauften Aktien an den Börsen von Amsterdam, Paris und London. Wohlsituierte europäische Bürger, die eine retable Geldanlage suchten, kauften diese Aktien. Mit ihrem Geld erwarben die Sklavenhändler Schiffe, heuerten Matrosen und Soldaten an, kauften in Afrika Sklaven und transportierten sie nach Amerika. Dort verkauften sie diese an Plantagenbesitzer und mit dem Ertrag kauften sie Plantagenprodukte wie Zucker, Kakao, Kaffee, Tabak und Baumwolle Wieder in Europa, verkauften sie Zucker und Baumwolle zu einem guten Preis und segelten dann wieder nach Afrika, um das Spiel von vorn zu beginnen. Die Aktionäre warn zufrieden. Im 18. Jahrhundert erzielten Sklavenaktien eine jährliche Rendite von run 6 Prozent -- das war ausgesprochen gut, wie ein moderner Anlageberater sofort zugeben würde." "Ist die Moderne also eine Ära des Krieges und der Unterdrückung, symbolisiert durch die Schützengräben des Ersten Weltkriegs, den Atompilz über Hiroshima oder die hasserfüllten Gesichter von Hitler und Stalin? Oder ist es eine Ära des Friedens, symbolisiert durch die Schützengräben, die sich nie durch Südamerika zogen, die Atompilze, die nie über New York und Moskau schwebten und die friedlichen Gesichter von Mahatma Gandhi und Martin Luther king? "Das kommt darauf an, von welchem Moment aus man diese Frage beantwortet. Wir müssen uns eingestehen, dass unsere Einschätzung der Vergangenheit immer durch die Ereignisse der zurückliegenden Jahre verzerrt wird. Wenn dieses Kapitel im Jahr 1945 oder 1962 geschrieben worden wäre, dann hätte es vermutlich einen sehr pessimistischen Ton angeschlagen. Da es im Jahr 2013 geschrieben wurde, sieht es die moderne Geschichte sehr viel optimistischer." Natürlich kann die Geschichte viel rosiger betrachten, wenn man nicht nur "verzerrt", sondern schlichtweg ausblendet. Es gab in Südamerika keine Schützengräben sondern einen Putsch nach dem anderen und Amerikanische Unterstützung für rechtsextreme Faschisten in fast alle Länder des Kontinents. Die Weltanschauung von Harati nimmt die letze 60 Jahren von westlichen Eingriffe und Angriffe gar nicht war. Er scheint zu glauben, dass die Geschichte der Menschheit nach dem zweiten Weltkrieg nur eine florierende Zukunft immer näher kommt. Der Neoliberalismus hat besiegt und schenkt und nur eine goldene Welt -- natürlich nur für die wichtigste Menschen. Harari scheint hier in seine Geschichte eine Lücke zu bauen, wodurch die amerikanische Kriegsmaschine von ihm unangetastet durchfahren kann. Wolle er zusichern, dass er Bücher in den Staaten verkaufen könnte? Andererseits schreibt er Absätze wir der folgende: "Und zweitens ist durchaus denkbar, dass diese kurze Glückssträhne die Saat für eine kommende Katastrophe gelegt hat. In den zurückliegenden Jahrzehnten haben wir das ökologische Gleichgewicht des Planeten auf verschiedenste Weise gestört, und niemand kann die Konsequenzen absehen. Es gibt viele Anzeichen dafür, dass wir gerade im Begriff sind, in einer Orgie des gedankenlosen Konsums die Grundlage unseres Wohlstands zu verprassen." "Der Frankenstein-Mythos konfrontiert den Homo Sapiens damit, dass seine Tage bald gezählt sein werden. Wenn nicht ein Atomkrieg oder eine Umweltkatastrophe [beide sind immer mehr möglich. Bemerkung der Redaktion] dazwischenkommt, wird die rasante technologische Entwicklung bald dazu führen, dass der Homo sapiens von einem gänzlich anderen Wesen abgelöst wird, das nicht nur einen anderen Körper mitbringt, sondern in einer anderen kognitiven und emotionalen Welt lebt. [...] Wir glauben gern, dass in Zukunft Menschen wie wir in Raumschiffen von einem Planeten zum anderen düsen. Wir denken nicht gern darüber nach, dass es in Zukunft keine Wesen mit unseren Emotionen oder Identitäten mehr geben könnte und dass fremde Lebensformen an unsere Stelle treten, die uns mit ihren Fähigkeiten weit in den Schatten stellen." "Vor 70 000 Jahren war der Homo sapiens ein unbedeutendes Tier, das in einer abgelegenen Ecke Afrikas seinem Leben nachging. In den folgenden Jahrtausenden stieg es zum Herrscher des gesamten Planeten auf und wurde zum schrecken des Ökosystems. Heute steht es kurz davor, zum Gott zu werden und nicht nur die ewige Jugend zu gewinnen, sondern auch göttliche Macht über Leben und Tod. "Leider hat die Herrschaft des Sapiens bislang wenig hinterlassen, aus das wir uneingeschränkt stolz sein könnten. Wir haben uns die Umwelt untertan gemacht, unsere Nahrungsproduktion gesteigert, Städte gebaut, Weltreiche gegründet und Handelsnetze errichtet. Aber haben wir das Leid in der Welt gelindert_ Wieder und wieder bedeuteten die massiven Machtzuwächse der Menschheit keine Verbesserung für die einzelnen Menschen und immenses Leid für andere Lebewesen." Harari schwebt zwischen eine nüchterne Anerkennung von den vor der Menschheit stehenden Problemen und eine blinde Optimismus. Wir werden wohl kaum Götter werden -- zumindest nicht mehr als eine kleine Bruchteil von der oberen Schicht. ]]> </content> </entry> <entry> <title type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Three nice stories]]> </title> <id>https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3654</id> <link href="https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3654"/> <updated>2019-01-07T23:26:06+01:00</updated> <author> <name type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Marco von Ballmoos]]> </name> <uri>https://earthli.com/users/marco</uri> </author> <summary type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA["One Missing Piece" by Jill Talbot <https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2018/12/17/one-missing-piece/> is the story of a chronically peripatetic woman and her daughter. The story is specifically about a road-trip from Texas to Camden, NY, returning to place they'd lived for 3 years, full of memories. "Every September or October, my father took me to the State Fair of Texas in" ... ]]> </summary> <content type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Published by marco on 7. Jan 2019 23:26:06 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ "One Missing Piece" by Jill Talbot <https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2018/12/17/one-missing-piece/> is the story of a chronically peripatetic woman and her daughter. The story is specifically about a road-trip from Texas to Camden, NY, returning to place they'd lived for 3 years, full of memories. "Every September or October, my father took me to the State Fair of Texas in Dallas, and, later, he took me and my daughter. He always followed the same route, from the entrance to Big Tex, to Fletcher’s Corn Dogs, then onto the automobile building and the food building [1], on and on, always leaving with a bag of malt balls and handing some eager kid the handful of tickets we didn’t use on our way to the exit. "When my daughter and I returned last year without him, we followed the route we had memorized, and we stopped in front of Big Tex and took a selfie. "How could any of those groups of friends, those families, those kids struggling to be free from their strollers imagine, on such a bright autumn afternoon, that our photo was a tradition turned mourning? That the shutter closed on an ache?" "Gluten Free Antarctica" by Maciej Ceglowski <https://idlewords.com/2018/12/gluten_free_antarctica.htm> is the first part of a travelogue documenting his 5-week ship journey to Antarctica. He is an American of Russian/Polish descent, so he gets along with the crew on a different level than the other, idiosyncratic travelers. There are tears of laughter on the bridge when I tell the Russian crew about the Great Antarctic Glutiny. “You mean if this woman eats bread, she will die?“ “Not really. She just gets sick.“ “Yuri, come here! You have to hear this. If she eats bread, the woman will die.” “She won’t die. Gluten causes digestive problems for some people. But it’s also become a sort of health fad.” “What is ‘gluten’? Is that even a Russian word?” Here they’ve got me. Tolstoy never wrote about gluten (kleikovina), and the ship’s dictionary is strictly nautical. Trying to paraphrase the concept only exposes the holes in my own understanding of this mysterious, flavorful substance. “It’s some kind of a protein in grain. I think it makes things taste good.” Yuri makes a skeptical face. “It doesn’t kill anyone,” I insist. “But people can get digestive… unpleasantness.” “So bread will make her sick?” “Yes.” “Can she eat potatoes?” “Yes. And corn.” Any hope of sympathy from the Russians evaporates. “Then let her eat potatoes. Let her eat corn. Or let them all stay home and eat whatever the fuck they want.” He also writes about the culinary predilections of New Zealanders. New Zealanders seem to have an almost pathological fear of flavor. There is no dish so bland that Conor can’t find a way to tone it down. At one point he serves us a tikka masala that I am pretty certain is just a blend of yogurt and ketchup. I watch disbelieving as the passengers around me fan their mouths. “That’s got a bit of a kick, yeah?” "Can the Working Class Speak?" by Maximillian Alvarez <https://www.currentaffairs.org/2018/12/can-the-working-class-speak> starts off more as a story, but ends up more of an essay about Alvarez's podcast, Working People. Still, it has a few poignant passages and is quite interesting. On struggling through a seemingly hopeless life: "All that time I worked, waiting for myself to come back. But I never really did. Because no one ever comes back—there’s never any safe, static “normal” to go back to. Encouraging and maintaining the cruel belief that there is still a “normal,” just out of reach, is just one of the many ways the forces that command our world keep us compliant and hopeful, sucking us dry while we wait for the return of a past that is always delayed." On being poor in America: "For the overwhelming majority of us, to live in the United States is to bask in a world that’s simply not ours, to be consumed by desires for what we don’t have, to strive to be what we’re not, to be told again and again that who we are is not good enough. We are inundated by an endless, kaleidoscopic barrage of elite lives and elite tastes, serving as a daily reminder to working people that the blood and sinew of our rich, complex lives will always count for less. And it compounds that unshakeable, shameful feeling we carry with us—the feeling that we’re the only ones going through this, that other people are getting by just fine, that our misery is our failure and ours alone." On a better way forward: "For what is socialism if not a vision for the material and social arrangement of a world in which we can finally practice the soul-affirming art of life in common? A world in which equality, dignity, freedom, peace, justice, and ecological sustainability are actualized in ways of living together and treating each other that enable the flourishing of a collective humanity, which capitalism has stunted and squandered in the endless search for profits." On his podcast: "The concept behind Working People is incredibly simple: I talk to working-class folks from around the country, from all walks of life, and I record it. We talk about their life stories." -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] The story speaks to me because I'm from upstate New York and I've been to the Texas State Fair -- twice. I know exactly who means by "Big Tex" and I've had a Fletcher's Corn Dog, and been to the automobile building. I have pictures, too. ]]> </content> </entry> <entry> <title type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Vocabulary Words]]> </title> <id>https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=2415</id> <link href="https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=2415"/> <updated>2019-01-02T21:18:04+01:00</updated> <author> <name type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Marco von Ballmoos]]> </name> <uri>https://earthli.com/users/marco</uri> </author> <summary type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[This is a running list of vocabulary words I've encountered in my reading over the last several years. I use the vocabulary-list feature on my Kindle to collect words, then export them from the Sqlite database with a simple SQL. From there, I have a text file with words that I combine with my... ]]> </summary> <content type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Published by marco on 2. Jan 2019 21:18:04 Updated by marco on 24. May 2025 12:51:00 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ This is a running list of vocabulary words I've encountered in my reading over the last several years. I use the vocabulary-list feature on my Kindle to collect words, then export them from the Sqlite database with a simple SQL. From there, I have a text file with words that I combine with my existing list, deduplicate and then re-apply formatting to generate the text below. I will occasionally update this list. <info>Where a word (e.g. "reef") has a common definition, I've left it off, preferring to include the more-unusual or rarer definition or definitions.</info> 1. a fortiori -- For a still stronger reason; all the more 2. a-signifying -- Incidentally meaningful semiotics; effective but not directly connected to intent, meaning or significance (e.g. "purchase-history--based recommendations" <https://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2011/01/26/a-signifying-semiotics/>) 3. abdominous -- Pot-bellied 4. abiogenesis -- The development of living organisms from nonliving matter. (the original definition included "supposed" before "development", but it must have happened at least once or I'd not be writing this) 5. abjure -- To renounce or retract, esp. formally, solemnly, or under oath 6. ablative -- Related to removal through melting or evaporation 7. abnegation -- Self-denial; renunciation of your own interests in favor of the interests of others 8. abrogation -- To abolish or annul, esp. by an authority 9. absquatulate -- To depart in a hurry; abscond 10. abstruse -- Difficult to understand; obscure 11. accidie -- Spiritual sloth; apathy; indifference 12. acedia -- Spiritual torpor and apathy; ennui. 13. acidulous -- Slightly acrid in taste or manner 14. acnestis -- On an animal, the point of the back that lies between the shoulders and the lower back, which cannot be reached to be scratched 15. acrostic -- Poem or text where the first letters of each line form a message 16. acrotomophilia -- The deriving of sexual gratification from fantasies or acts involving an amputee. 17. adamant -- (n): Extremely hard substance 18. adduce -- To cite as an example or means of proof in an argument 19. adenoidal -- Nasal in tone 20. adiabatic -- Occurring without gain or loss of heat (e.g., a sound wave moving through air) 21. adjunct -- Added or connected in a subordinate or auxiliary capacity 22. adjuvant -- A treatment that enhances an existing medical regimen, as a pharmacological agent added to a drug to increase or aid its effect. 23. adumbrate -- To give a sketchy outline 24. advesperate -- To approach evening 25. aerostat -- A lighter-than-air vehicle, like a balloon or dirigible 26. aerumnous -- Full of trouble 27. aesculapian -- Related to the art of medicine 28. aesthete -- A person who is unusually sensitive to beauty in art or nature 29. aetiology -- The philosophy or study of causation; variant of etiology 30. affiant -- One who makes an affidavit. 31. afflatus -- A strong creative impulse, especially as a result of divine inspiration. 32. affray -- A riot; a large group fighting 33. aftosa -- Another name for foot-and-mouth disease. 34. aga -- leader (civil or military) in the Ottoman empire 35. agitprop -- subversive writing; see samizdat 36. agnatology -- the study of culturally-induced ignorance 37. agon -- A conflict, especially between the protagonist and antagonist in a work of literature. 38. agonistic -- Argumentative; striving for effect; strained 39. agraphon -- The sayings of Jesus written in various ancient sources but not included in the canonical Gospels. Plural is agrapha. 40. aiguillette -- An ornamental cord worn on the shoulder of a military uniform 41. ailurophobia -- Extreme or irrational fear of cats. 42. akinesia -- Loss of normal motor function, resulting in impaired muscle movement 43. akrasia -- Weakness of will; acting contrary to one’s moral values 44. Albion -- Britain or England 45. aleatory -- Dependent on chance 46. alee -- On the leeward side 47. alembic -- Distilling apparatus consisting of two vessels and a tube 48. algesia -- The capacity to feel pain. 49. aliform -- Shaped like a wing; alar 50. alizarin -- An orange-red crystalline compound, C14H8O4, used as an acid-base indicator and in making dyes. 51. alkahest -- The hypothetical universal solvent once sought by alchemists. 52. amanuensis -- An assistant 53. amaranth -- An imaginary flower that never fades. Deep reddish-purple to dark or grayish, purplish red. 54. ambuscade -- An ambush 55. amethyst -- Purple or violet quartz 56. amphisbaena -- Mythical Greek ant-eating serpent with a head at each end 57. anaclitic -- Psychologically dependent on others 58. anacoenosis -- An appeal by the speaker to his opponents or to the audience for an opinion of the point 59. anadem -- A wreath or garland for the head. 60. analysand -- A person who is being psychoanalyzed 61. anamnesis -- 1. A recalling to memory; recollection; 2. the case history of a patient 62. anastomosis -- Connection of parts of a branching system to form a network (e.g. blood vessels or rivers) 63. ambisyllabicity -- A feature of a language where some words do not offer clear syllabic boundaries, e.g., "hammer"; see "Ambisyllabicity" <https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=67297> 64. ancho -- A dried poblano pepper. 65. andirons -- A pair of metal supports used for holding up logs in a fireplace 66. anfract -- [definition unknown] (from Umberto Eco, The Island of the Day Before ("[...] following its rifts and anfracts, past corridors of chalk in which vinous harlequins were stuck") 67. anhedonia -- Inability to express pleasure 68. anile -- unable to think clearly or infirm because of old age 69. anisotropic -- Having properties that differ based on the direction of measurement (e.g. oval) 70. anodyne -- Uncontentious or inoffensive 71. anoesis -- Absence of thought (anoetic) 72. anorak -- A socially inept person with a hobby considered by most people to be boring 73. anorectic -- Marked by loss of appetite (anorexic) 74. anserine -- Goose-like 75. anterior -- Before or in front of; previously 76. anthroponymy -- The study of the names of human beings (syn: anthroponomastics) 77. antimacassar -- A protective and often decorative covering for the back or arms of a chair or sofa. 78. antinomian -- One who denies the fixed meaning or universal applicability of moral law 79. antinomy -- A contradiction between two beliefs or conclusions that are in themselves reasonable; a paradox 80. antipodes -- Group of rocky island near New Zealand, almost directly opposite Greenwich, England 81. aperçus -- A discerning perception; an insight. 82. apodictic -- Logically certain; demonstrably true or false 83. apophasis -- Allusion to something by denying that it will be mentioned, as in I will not bring up my opponent's questionable financial dealings 84. apophatic -- Of or relating to the belief that God can only be described by a process of negation 85. apophenia -- The tendency to perceive connections and meaning between unrelated things; confirmation bias 86. aporetic -- A doubt, real or professed, about what to do or say 87. aporia -- An insoluble contradiction or paradox in a text's meanings. 88. Aposematic -- Having bright, colorful markings that warn predators of poison; a doubt, real or professed, about what to do or say 89. apostasy -- Abandonment of one’s religious faith, party or a cause 90. apothegm -- A maxim 91. apotheosis -- Deification; exaltation to divine rank (nirvana) 92. apotropaic -- Intended to ward off evil 93. appanage -- Provision (usually land) granted (usually to a family member) as a source of revenue 94. apperception -- Conscious perception with full awareness 95. apposite -- Appropriate or relevant 96. approbation -- Official approval 97. appurtenance -- 1. appendage; 2. gear 98. aptronym -- A name that fits a person's nature or occupation, like Jane House for a real estate agent. 99. arbalest -- Crossbow-like missile launcher 100. arborescence -- Having the size, form, or characteristics of a tree; treelike. 101. architrave -- The lintel or beam lying across two columns 102. archivolt -- A decorative molding carried around an arched wall opening. 103. arcology -- A portmanteau of architecture" and "ecology", a very densely populated habitat (page 231 of Reamde) 104. arhat -- One who has attained enlightenment. 105. armamentarium -- The complete range of materials available or used for a task 106. armet -- A late-medieval light helmet with a neck guard and movable visor 107. armillary -- Of or relating to the arm (e.g. bracelets) 108. arquebus -- A portable, long-barrelled gun, predecessor to the rifle 109. arrant -- Utter; out-and-out 110. arras -- A tapestry, wall hanging or curtain (usually Flemish) 111. arreptitious -- Snatched away; seized or possessed, as a demoniac; raving; mad; crack-brained 112. artilect -- A machine or robot possessing artificial intelligence 113. asafetida -- A plant common to Iran and Afghanistan; produces a brownish, strong-smelling resin 114. askesis -- The exercise of rigorous self-discipline, especially mental self-discipline practiced as a means to spiritual growth. 115. aspirate -- To draw in or remove by inhalation or suction, esp to suck (air or fluid) from a body cavity or to inhale (fluid) into the lungs after vomiting 116. asseveration -- A positive and emphatic declaration 117. assignation -- A tryst 118. astragal -- A molding that covers a gap (usually to prevent airflow) 119. ataraxia -- A calm of mind; serenity 120. ataxic -- Loss of the ability to coordinate muscle movement (Lucky Jim) 121. Ativan -- Tranquilizer; trade name for lorazepam 122. atrabilious -- Melancholy; peevish; surly 123. attenuate -- To become slender, fine or small 124. auscultate -- To listen to sounds produced by the body (e.g. heartbeat) 125. autarky -- Quality of being self-sufficient, as in a state or economy 126. autoclave -- A heavy vessel for sterilizing or cooking by means of steam under pressure. 127. autochthonous -- Local; native; indigenous 128. autolatrous -- Self-worshiping 129. autological -- Being a word that possesses the characteristic it describes. The word polysyllabic is autological, since it is itself polysyllabic. 130. autopoiesis -- A closed system capable of creating itself 131. autotelic -- Having a purpose in and justifying itself 132. avariciously -- Greedily, immoderately so 133. avaunt -- Hence; away (with thee) 134. aventurine -- A form of quartz; green; translucent with a shimmering or glistening effect 135. avulsion -- The forcible tearing away of a body part; change in landscape due to flooding or riverbed changes 136. badinage -- Light, playful banter or raillery. 137. baize -- Coarse woolen cloth (used e,g, to cover snooker or billiard tables) 138. balanitis -- Inflammation of the glans penis, usually due to infection 139. balatron -- Jester or buffoon 140. balayage -- A technique for highlighting hair in which the dye is painted on in such a way as to create a graduated, natural-looking effect 141. balboa -- The official currency of Panama 142. baldachin -- A canopy of state over an altar or throne 143. ballista -- Medieval field weapon similar to a crossbow (heavy projectiles) 144. barding -- The practice of armoring horses. 145. basque -- A woman's close-fitting bodice. 146. bast -- The phloem of a plant (bast fiber) 147. bastinado -- A beating on the soles of the feet 148. bastion -- 1. A projecting part of a fortification; 2. A well-fortified position 149. Batavia -- A former name for Jakarta 150. bathetic -- Portmanteau of bathos and pathetic (anticlimactic, banal, trite) 151. bathypelagic -- Relating to or inhabiting the layer of the water column of the open ocean that lies between the mesopelagic and abyssopelagic layers at depths of about 1,000 to 4,000 meters 152. batrachian -- An amphibian, esp. a frog or a salamander 153. battement -- 1. In dance, a kicking movement done with a lifted leg. 2. A beating; striking; impulse. 154. baulk -- Line from which croquet, snooker, billiard ball is put into play (or the area behind it) 155. beadle -- Church usher 156. behove -- To be necessary or fitting for (alternate spelling of behoove) 157. beignet -- A square doughnut without a hole; a fritter 158. beldam -- A hag (also written as beldame) 159. bel esprit -- A cultivated, highly intelligent person; pl.: beaux esprits 160. belie -- To misrepresent 161. benedicence -- Benevolence in speech 162. benthic -- Of or pertaining to the bottom of a body of water 163. besom -- Twigs tied to a handle to make a broom 164. bezique -- A card game for two or more players with tricks similar to whist (or pinochle) but with additional points scored for honours and sequences: played with two packs with nothing below a seven 165. bezoar -- hard, indigestible mass of food in the stomach or intestines 166. bibelot -- A small decorative object; a trinket 167. bidonville -- A shantytown on the outskirts of a city, especially in France or North Africa. 168. bight -- A loop in a rope; a wide bay characterized by a bend or curve 169. bilious -- Peevish; ill-humored 170. biretta -- Square hat worn by ecclesiastics, with three or four ridges on the brow 171. bitts -- A post on the deck of a ship to which ropes or cables are secured 172. blackleg -- 1. A livestock or plant disease, usually fatal. 2. A cardsharp 173. blench -- To draw back or shy away, as from fear; flinch 174. bloater -- A large mackerel or herring, salted, smoked and dried 175. bodikin -- A small body; a tiny particle or atom 176. bodkin -- A long needle or awl; a dagger or stiletto 177. boffin -- A person who has extensive skill or knowledge in a particular field (Brit.; similar to wonk in Amer.) 178. bolster -- A long, narrow pillow or cushion 179. bombilate -- To make a certain noise or sound. To buzz. 180. boracic -- Having no money; Brit. slang 181. borage -- Southern European bristly herb with blue or purplish, star-shaped flowers 182. bothy -- Small hut or cottage (Scot.) 183. bourg -- 1. A market town. 2. A medieval village, especially one situated near a castle. 184. boustrophedonic -- A script that is simultaneously left-to-right and right-to-left 185. bowdlerize -- To expurgate literary material; to censor 186. boyar -- A member of the nobility of Russia, before Peter the Great 187. bract -- A leaflike or scalelike plant part, usually small, sometimes showy or brightly colored, and located just below a flower, a flower stalk, or an inflorescence 188. bradycardia -- Slowness of the heart rate (usually less than 60BPM) 189. brassica -- Genus that includes cabbage, swede, rape and mustard 190. breechclout -- A loincloth 191. breezeway -- An enclosure joining two parts of a building (e.g. a house and its garage) 192. breviped -- Having short legs. 193. brigandine -- Flexible body armor covered in cloth; also called brigantine 194. bromidrosis -- Body odor 195. bruit -- A din or clamor 196. brume -- Fog or mist 197. bucranium -- A sculptured ornament, representing an ox skull adorned with wreaths, etc. 198. burgeon -- To begin to grow or blossom (to put forth buds) 199. burgoo -- Any of several thick stews, originally an oatmeal porridge. 200. burbot -- A freshwater food fish (Lota lota) of northern regions of the Northern Hemisphere, closely related to and resembling the cod and having a long barbel on the chin. Also called cusk, eelpout. 201. buskin -- A thick-soled laced half boot worn by actors of Greek and Roman tragedies 202. buttonholer -- Someone who accosts or detains (a person) in conversation 203. cabochon -- A highly polished, convex-cut, unfaceted gem 204. cabotage -- Law or policy protecting transporters of passengers and goods within a country from competition from foreign carriers. 205. cachalot -- Sperm whale 206. cacoepy -- Bad or mistaken pronunciation (cacoëpistic means to be mispronounced) 207. cadastral -- A public register showing details of ownership of the real property in a district, including boundaries and tax assessments 208. caduceus -- A herald’s wand or staff (usually refers to the two serpents logo of Hermes’s staff used by the medical profession) 209. caecotrophs -- Animals that are coprophagous (eat their own excrement) 210. cafard -- A feeling of severe depression (from the French, literally hypocrite, cockroach) 211. caique -- A long narrow rowboat traditionally used on the Bosporus. 212. caisson -- A watertight structure for performing work or repairs under water 213. caitiff -- A despicable coward; a wretch 214. caleche -- A light two- or four-wheeled horse-draw carriage 215. calenture -- A tropical fever thought to be caused by heat; similar to sunstroke 216. caliche -- A mineral deposit of gravel, sand, and nitrates 217. caliginous -- Dark, misty and gloomy 218. calk -- 1. A spiked plate that is fixed on the bottom of a shoe to prevent slipping and preserve the sole.; 2. A pointed extension on the toe or heels of a horseshoe, designed to prevent slipping. 219. callipygian -- Relating to or having buttocks that are considered beautifully proportioned 220. callow -- Immature 221. calpac -- A large black cap, usually of sheepskin or felt, worn in Turkey, the Caucasus, Iran, and neighboring regions. Also written as kalpak. 222. calque -- To make a loan translation from (a word in another language) 223. caltrop -- Metal spikes thrown across a road 224. calumniate -- To make maliciously or knowingly false statements about. 225. calvados -- A French brandy made from apples. 226. canaille -- The common people; the masses; the hoi polloi 227. candlewick -- A fabric resembling chenille, made with closely-spaced tufts of cotton and used primarily for bedspreads and robes 228. canebrake -- A piece of ground covered with a dense growth of canes 229. canescent -- Turning white or grayish; becoming hoary 230. cannula -- A tube inserted into a body cavity (e.g. a nose tube) 231. cantrip -- A deceptive move; a sham 232. caoutchouc -- Untreated rubber 233. caparison -- Fancy dress or ornamentation for a man or horse (or to make fancy by decorating in this way) 234. capercaillie -- A large grouse (Tetrao urogallus), native to northern Europe and having dark plumage and a fanlike tail. Also called wood grouse. 235. capsid -- A virus’s protein coat 236. captious -- Nitpicky; deliberately confusing; underhanded debating tactics 237. caracole -- A half-turn performed by a horse and rider (or to perform same) 238. caravansary -- An inn built around a large court for accommodating caravans (mostly in Asia) 239. carboy -- A large glass or plastic bottle, usually encased in a protective basket or crate and often used to hold corrosive liquids. 240. carnelian -- A pale to deep red or reddish-brown variety of clear chalcedony, used in jewelry. 241. casement -- A window or part of a window set on a hinge so that it opens like a door 242. casuistical -- Specious reasoning intended to mislead 243. castrum -- An old Roman fortress or encampment 244. catabolic -- The metabolic breakdown of complex molecules into simpler ones, often resulting in a release of energy. 245. catafalque -- A funeral bier 246. catamenial -- Of or relating to menstruation or the menses 247. catamite -- A boy who has a sexual relationship with a man. 248. cataphract -- A defensive armor, often made of link mail, used for the entire body (also covering a horse in cavalry) 249. catastasis -- The part of a drama immediately preceding the climax 250. catawampus -- Skewed, twisted 251. catchpenny -- Designed and made to sell without concern for quality; cheap. 252. catechism -- 1. A manual giving basic instruction in a subject, usually by rote or repetition; 2. A body of fundamental principles or beliefs, especially when accepted uncritically 253. catechumen -- A novice; one who is being instructed at an elementary level 254. catenary -- The curve formed by a cable suspended by its endpoints 255. Catharism -- A Christian sect flourishing in western Europe in the 1100s and 1200s, whose dualistic belief, embracing asceticism and identifying the world as the creation of a satanic Demiurge, was condemned by the Church as heretical. 256. caudal -- Situated beneath or on the underside; inferior; opposite of anterior 257. caudillo -- A leader or chief, especially a military dictator. 258. causeuse -- Two-seat couch; love seat 259. cautery -- The act or process or cauterizing (or an agent used to cauterize) 260. cavil -- To quibble 261. cenotaph -- A monument honoring a person buried elsewhere 262. ceraunoscopy -- A form of aeromancy, in this case divination using thunder and lightning. 263. cerements -- A burial cloth 264. cernuous -- Drooping, as the leaves of a plant 265. chaff -- Trivial or worthless matter; dry bracts of seeds, removed during threshing; metal bits emitted by a plane to foil radar 266. chalcedony -- A translucent to transparent milky or grayish quartz 267. chancel -- The space around the altar of a church for the clergy and sometimes the choir, often enclosed by a lattice or railing. 268. chancellery -- The rank, position, office or department of a chancellor 269. chandler -- One that makes or sells candles 270. chaparral -- An area covered by a dense growth of mostly small-leaved evergreen shrubs 271. charas -- A cannabis concentrate made from the resin of a live cannabis plant; from the Urdu/Hindi 272. charivari -- An elaborate, noisy celebration, often mocking (page 508 of the Idiot) 273. chary -- 1. Very cautious; wary; 2. Not giving or expending freely; sparing 274. chatelaine -- The mistress of a castle or of a large, fashionable household; a hooklike clasp with chains for suspending small objects, as keys worn at the waist by women esp. in the 18th and 19th centuries 275. chautauqua -- A summer school or educational meeting held in the summer 276. chiasmus -- Reversal of the order of words in the second of two parallel phrases: he came in triumph and in defeat departs. 277. chiaroscuro -- The technique of using light and shade in pictorial representation 278. chiasmus -- A rhetorical inversion of the second of two parallel structures, as in "Each throat / Was parched, and glazed each eye" (Samuel Taylor Coleridge). 279. chicane -- 1. An artificial narrowing or turn on a road or auto-racing course; 2. To resort to tricks or subterfuges 280. chichak -- Lobster-tailed pot helmet; from the Turkish name for it: "çiçek". 281. chicle -- The coagulated milky latex of the sapodilla, formerly used as the principal ingredient of chewing gum. 282. chifforobe -- A tall piece of furniture typically having drawers on one side and space for hanging clothes on the other. 283. chilblain -- An inflammation followed by itchy irritation on the hands, feet, or ears, resulting from exposure to moist cold 284. chimerical -- Highly improbable or illusory 285. chine -- 1. The backbone or spine, esp. of an animal; 2. a cut of meat containing same 286. chintz -- A printed and glazed cotton fabric, usually of bright colors 287. Chiron -- The wise centaur who tutored Achilles, Hercules, and Asclepius 288. chiropodist -- A podiatrist or foot doctor 289. chiton -- 1. A mollusk that lives on rocks and has a shell consisting of eight overlapping calcareous plates. Also called sea cradle or coat-of-mail shell; 2. A tunic worn by men and women in ancient Greece 290. choad -- a. A penis (esp. one that is wider than it is long); 2. Someone who is obnoxious or annoying 291. chode -- Past tense of chide 292. cholecystitis -- Inflammation of the gallbladder 293. choropleth -- A symbol or marked and bounded area on a map denoting the distribution of some property 294. chrism -- A consecrated mixture of oil and balsam, used for anointing in church sacraments such as baptism and confirmation. Also called holy oil. 295. chronophagy -- Something that wastes (or "eats") time. 296. chyme -- Semi-fluid mass of partly digested food/bolus in the stomach 297. chyron -- A graphic that is digitally superimposed over the lower portion of a broadcast television image, often scrolling or otherwise animated 298. cichlid -- Any of numerous tropical and subtropical chiefly freshwater fishes of the family Cichlidae, which includes the tilapias and many species that are popular as aquarium fish. 299. cimicine -- Smelling like bugs 300. circumvallate -- Encircle as with a rampart 301. cisalpine -- Relating to, living on, or coming from the southern side of the Alps 302. cislunar -- Of or relating to the space between the earth and the moon 303. clabber -- Sour, curdled milk; to curdle 304. clafoutis -- A baked dessert composed of a layer of fresh fruit topped with a thick batter. Chiefly French. 305. clag -- Sticky mud 306. clapboard -- 1. A long thin timber board with one edge thicker than the other, used in wood-frame construction by lapping each board over the one below; 2. a house made of same 307. clavis -- 1. A key; 2. A glossary 308. clepsydra -- An instrument designed to measure time by the fall or flow of a quantity of water; also called a "water clock" 309. cleromancy -- Divination by the casting of lots. 310. clerestory -- A portion of an interior rising above adjacent rooftops and having windows admitting daylight. 311. clerisy -- Educated people considered as a group; the literati. 312. cloistered -- Secluded or shut up from the world 313. clotted cream -- A thick cream made primarily in England by heating milk until a layer of cream forms on its surface that is then cooled and skimmed off 314. clyster -- An enema 315. coadunate -- Closely joined; grown together; united. 316. cockade -- An ornament, such as a rosette or knot of ribbon, usually worn on the hat as a badge. 317. codon -- A sequence of three adjacent nucleotides constituting the genetic code that determines the insertion of a specific amino acid in a polypeptide chain during protein synthesis or the signal to stop protein synthesis 318. coffle -- A line of animals or slaves, chained together 319. coir -- The fiber obtained from the husk of a coconut 320. colliery -- A coal mine together with its physical plant and outbuildings 321. colloidal -- A liquid within which very fine particles are evenly distributed so that they stay suspended 322. colloquy -- Written dialogue 323. coloratura -- Vocal music characterized by florid ornamental passages 324. colporteur -- A peddler of devotional literature 325. colubra -- A female snake 326. colubrine -- Serpentine 327. Columbine -- A flower from the buttercup family 328. colure -- Either of two great circles on the celestial sphere, one of which passes through the celestial poles and the equinoxes and the other through the poles and the solstices 329. commensality -- The act or practice of eating at the same table 330. commixtion -- The act of mixing together 331. communard -- One who lives in a commune 332. compendious -- Containing or stating briefly all the essentials of something; comprehensive and concise 333. compossible -- Able to exist with another thing; consistent. 334. comprador -- A person who acts as an agent for foreign organizations engaged in investment, trade, or economic or political exploitation 335. connascent -- Born, produced, or growing simultaneously 336. conatus -- the tendency of all things to persist in their own being 337. concessio -- "A rhetorical stylistic tool in which one takes up the opponent’s argument, acknowledging it as correct while simultaneously weakening it. (E.g. “Yes. Günther has behaved immorally, 338. but he can not be legally punished for it.”) See paromologia." 339. concomitant -- Occurring or existing concurrently 340. concupiscent -- Lascivious 341. condottiero -- Italian captains in command of mercenary companies during the Middle Ages and of multinational armies during the early modern period. 342. condign -- Deserved; adequate 343. confrater -- n associate of a monastery or monastic group who received certain privileges (as a share in prayers) without corresponding responsibilities (as rigorous life or restrictive vows) 344. congelation -- The process of congealing or the state of being congealed. 345. congeries -- A collection 346. conjunctivitis -- Inflammation of the conjunctiva, characterized by redness and often accompanied by a discharge 347. conker -- A horse chestnut 348. conkers -- A game in which two players swing horse chestnuts strung on string, each trying to use his or her horse chestnut to shatter his or her opponent's. 349. connubial -- Of marriage or wedlock; matrimonial; conjugal. 350. consilience -- A chance happening or coincidence 351. conspecific -- Of or belonging to the same species. 352. constult -- To act stupidly together 353. consubstantiality -- Participation of the same nature; coexistence in the same substance. 354. consorority -- A group of women; a religious sorority or sisterhood; members are called consorors 355. contango -- A situation where the futures price of a commodity is higher than the spot price 356. contemn -- To view with contempt; despise 357. contra mundum -- Against the world; in defiance of all general opinion 358. contrariety -- The quality or condition of being contrary. 359. contretemps -- 1. An inopportune or embarrassing occurrence or situation; 2. an argument or dispute 360. contumacious -- Anti-authoritarian 361. contumely -- Rudeness or contempt arising from arrogance; insolence 362. conurbation -- A predominantly urban region including adjacent towns and suburbs; a metropolitan area 363. convolvulus -- Any typically twining herbaceous convolvulaceous plant of the genus Convolvulus, having funnel-shaped flowers and triangular leaves 364. copula -- The word or set of words that serves as a link between the subject and predicate of a proposition 365. coracle -- A small, rounded, primitive boat (stretched skin over wooden frame) 366. corbel -- A piece of stone, wood, brick, or other building material, projecting from the face of a wall and generally used to support a cornice or arch. 367. cornet -- A cap of paper twisted at the end, used by retailers to inclose small wares. 368. corsac -- A fox of central Asia. 369. corse -- A corpse (archaic) 370. corseque -- A type of European polearm, characterized by a three-lobe blade on a 1.8 to 2.5 m shaft. The head features a long spike and two shorter and stronger lateral blades. 371. corvée -- Labor exacted by a local authority for little or no pay or instead of taxes and used especially in the maintenance of roads. 372. corybantic -- To dance in a fashion similar to rites for the Phrygian goddess Cybele, celebrated with music and ecstatic dances 373. cotise -- A narrow stripe that usually occurs as one of a pair, with each stripe occurring on either side of a bend, fess, or other charge in heraldry 374. coup de foudre -- A sudden and amazing action or event 375. crepuscular -- Resembling twilight; dim; active at twilight (from Reamde) 376. cresset -- A metal cup, often suspended on a pole, containing burning oil or pitch and used as a torch 377. cretonne -- A heavy unglazed cotton, linen, or rayon fabric, colorfully printed and used for draperies and slipcovers 378. crim -- Short for criminal 379. cromlech -- A portal tomb; A prehistoric monument consisting of a group of megaliths, sometimes arranged in a circle or in concentric circles. See dolmen 380. crosier -- A staff with a crook or cross at the end, carried by or before an abbot, bishop, or archbishop as a symbol of office. 381. crotchet -- An odd, whimsical, perverse or stubborn notion 382. croup -- The rump of a beast of burden, especially a horse. 383. croupy -- Characterized by respiratory difficulty and a hoarse, brassy cough 384. crumhorn -- A wind instrument of the Renaissance with a curving tube and a double reed. 385. cryptid -- Animals that cryptozoologists believe may exist somewhere in the wild, but are not believed to exist by mainstream science 386. cuirass -- A piece of armor for protecting the breast and back, often consisting of two pieces fastened together 387. cuirassier -- A horse soldier in European armies whose equipment included the cuirass 388. culverin -- 1. An early, crudely made musket; 1. A long heavy cannon used in the 16th and 17th centuries 389. cumbrously -- In a cumbersome manner; difficult to handle because of size or weight 390. cunctation -- Procrastination; delay 391. cupidity -- Excessive desire, esp. for wealth; covetousness or avarice 392. curate -- 1. A member of the clergy employed to assist a rector or vicar; 2. To take charge of (a museum) or organize (an art exhibit); 3. To gather and present to the public 393. curlew -- Any of several brownish, long-legged shorebirds of the genus Numenius, having long, slender, downward-curving bills 394. currycomb -- A comb with plastic or rubber teeth, used for grooming horses. 395. curtilage -- The area considered legally part of a house or dwelling by virtue of its enclosure by a fence or habitual use in domestic activities. 396. curule -- Privileged to sit in a curule chair; of superior rank. 397. cuspidor -- spittoon; a large bowl, often of metal, serving as a receptacle for spit, esp. from chewing tobacco 398. cutis -- The dermis and epidermis of the skin together 399. cynosure -- Focal point of attention or admiration 400. dacoit -- A member of a robber band or gang in South Asia 401. dag -- Hanging fur matted with mud 402. damask -- 1. A rich patterned fabric of cotton, linen, silk, or wool; 2. the wavy pattern on Damascus steel 403. davit -- A small crane that projects over the side of a ship and is used to hoist boats, anchors, and cargo 404. deadhead -- To remove dead flowers from a bush 405. deare -- An act of damage or injury 406. debauch -- To corrupt morally; to seduce 407. debility -- Being weak or infirm 408. deckle -- A frame used in making paper by hand to form paper pulp into sheets of a desired size. 409. decoupage -- The technique of decorating a surface with cutouts, as of paper, and finishing with layers of lacquer or varnish 410. decrepicate -- To make a crackling sound when roasted (crystals or salts) 411. decurion -- The commander of a troop of ten cavalrymen 412. defalcation -- Misuse of funds; embezzlement 413. defeasance -- The voiding of a contract or deed 414. deflagrate -- To burn or cause to burn with great heat and intense light 415. deictic -- Directly proving by argument 416. dekko -- A look; a glance; view. E.g. Take a dekko at. 417. delation -- The act of conveying; carriage (obsolete) 418. delator -- An accuser; an informer 419. deliquesce -- 1. To disappear as if by melting; 2. to dissolve and become liquid by absorbing moisture from the air; 3. to branch out into numerous subdivisions that lack a main axis, as the trunk of an elm 420. démarche -- 1. A course of action; a maneuver. 2. A diplomatic representation or protest. 3. A statement or protest addressed by citizens to public authorities. 421. demesne -- An extensive piece of landed property; an estate 422. demit -- To relinquish (an office or function). 423. demiurge -- A powerful creative force or personality 424. demob -- Short for demobilization of armed forces 425. demonym -- Official designation for the inhabitant of a region (see gentilic) 426. demotic -- Of or relating to the common people; popular 427. deodand -- A thing that had caused a person's death and was forfeited to the crown for a charitable purpose; literally: "giving unto God" 428. Deontology -- The normative ethical theory that the morality of an action should be based on whether that action itself is right or wrong under a series of rules and principles, rather than based on the consequences of the action. 429. deoppilate -- To clear a passage through 430. derecho -- A windstorm that is accompanied by a quickly moving, usually bow-shaped band of showers or thunderstorms. 431. descant -- 1. An ornamental melody or counterpoint sung or played above a theme; 2. A discussion or discourse on a theme 432. desideratum -- Something considered necessary or highly desirable 433. desquamate -- To shed, peel, or come off in scales. Used of skin 434. desuetude -- A state of disuse or inactivity. 435. deuteranopia -- A form of colorblindness characterized by insensitivity to green. 436. diachronic -- Of or concerned with phenomena, such as linguistic features, as they change through time. 437. diagetic -- Music that exists within the reality of a film 438. dialetheia -- True contradictions (true statements whose opposite is also true) 439. diaphoresis -- Copious perspiration; usu. a condition 440. dibble -- A pointed gardening implement used to make holes in soil, especially for planting bulbs or seedlings. Also called a dibber. 441. diegesis -- The world that is depicted in a work of narrative art, especially a film. 442. diegetic -- Existing or occurring within the world of a narrative rather than as something external to that world (i.e. narration or soundtrack music in a film is non-diegetic) 443. dieresis -- Diacritical mark indicating a pronounced vowel 444. diffident -- Lacking or marked by a lack of self-confidence; shy and timid 445. dilatory -- Causing or intended to cause delay 446. dimity -- A sheer, crisp cotton fabric with raised woven stripes or checks, used chiefly for curtains and dresses. 447. dioptric -- Relating to optical refraction; refractive 448. disanalogy -- A lack or failure of analogy. 449. discursive -- Covering a wide field of subjects; rambling. 450. disembogue -- Pour out; be disgorged in quantity 451. disheveled -- Being in loose disarray; unkempt, as hair or clothing 452. dissimulate -- To conceal one's true feelings or intentions 453. dissolute -- Lacking moral restraint; indulging in sensual pleasures or vices; lax in morals; licentious 454. distaff -- Women considered as a group; female 455. dithyramb -- 1. any wildly enthusiastic speech or writing 2. A frenzied, impassioned choric hymn and dance of ancient Greece in honor of Dionysus 456. divagate -- 1. To wander or drift about; 2. to ramble; digress 457. doolally -- Out of one's mind; crazy 458. dolmen -- A Neolithic stone formation, consisting of a horizontal stone supported by several vertical stones, and thought to be a tomb; any megalithic tomb; see cromlech 459. dombra -- A long-necked Kazakh, Uzbek and Bashkir lute 460. doss -- 1. Sleep; rest; 2. a crude or makeshift bed 461. douanier -- A customs officer 462. dovecote -- A compartmental structure, often raised on a pole, for housing domesticated pigeons 463. dowager -- 1. A widow who holds a title or property derived from her deceased husband; 2. an elderly woman of high social station 464. doxastic -- Of or relating to belief 465. doxology -- An expression of praise to God, esp. a short hymn sung as part of a Christian worship service 466. draughts -- The game of checkers 467. drawknife -- A knife with a handle at each end of the blade, used with a drawing motion to shave a surface. Also called drawshave. 468. dropsy -- An excessive accumulation of serous fluid in tissue spaces or a body cavity; edema (obsolete) 469. drupe -- A fleshy fruit with a pit (e.g. peach, plum, cherry, etc.) 470. duckboard -- A board or boardwalk laid across wet or muddy ground or flooring 471. dudgeon -- 1. A sullen, angry, or indignant humor; 2. A dagger with a hilt made of this wood. 472. dunam -- A unit of area used for land measurement in Israel and usually equal to 1,000 square meters. 473. dupatta -- A long wide scarf often worn draped over the head or across the shoulders, chiefly by women in South Asia 474. duumvirate -- 1. A regime or partnership of two persons 2. A coalition of two people holding the same office, as in ancient Rome. 475. dysarthria -- Unclear articulation of otherwise normal speech 476. dysgraphic -- Having a neurological disorder marked by impairment of the ability to write, especially to write by hand and to spell. 477. dysphemism -- The use of a derogatory, offensive or vulgar word or phrase to replace a (more) neutral original. 478. dysphoria -- An emotional state characterized by anxiety, depression, or unease; the opposite of euphoria 479. easement -- 1. The act of anointing as part of a religion; 2. An ointment or oil; a salve 480. eau-de-nil -- A pale yellowish green color, supposedly that of the color of the Nile (taken from the French for “water of the Nile”) 481. ecclesial -- Of or relating to a church, especially as an organized institution. Syn.: ecclesiastical 482. ecdemic -- Not indigenous or endemic; foreign 483. echolalia -- The uncontrollable and immediate repetition of words spoken by another person, esp. as associated with mental disorder. 484. écorché -- An anatomical representation of all or part of a human or animal body with the skin removed so as to display the musculature 485. ecotone -- A transitional zone between two communities containing species characteristic of each. 486. ecumene -- A nuclear area of high culture to which neighboring regions stand in a relation of cultural backwardness or dependence 487. efflorescence -- 1. A gradual process of unfolding or developing; 2. the point or time of greatest vigor; the culmination 488. egregoric -- Of or relating to the occult concept of a group mind, egregore 489. eidolon -- An image of an ideal. An apparition. 490. eirenist -- Someone who promotes peace; someone who is conciliatory; variant of irenist; related to irenic 491. eisegesis -- Reading meaning into a text that is not there 492. ekphrastic -- In the style of a work of art produced as a rhetorical exercise. 493. Elbrus -- A peak, 5,643 m (18,513 ft) high, in the Caucasus Mountains of southwest Russia near the border of Georgia. It is the highest elevation in Europe 494. eleemosynary -- 1. Of, concerned with, or dependent on charity; 2. Given as an act of charity 495. elegiac -- Of, relating to, or involving elegy or mourning or expressing sorrow for that which is irrecoverably past 496. elozable -- Readily influenced by flattery 497. emanant -- Flowing, issuing, or proceeding from something else; becoming apparent by an effect. 498. embonpoint -- The plump or fleshy part of a person’s body, in particular a woman’s bosom. 499. embouchure -- The mouth of a river 500. emolument -- Payment for an office or employment; compensation 501. Empedocles -- Greek philosopher who believed that all matter is composed of earth, air, fire and water, and that all change is caused by attraction and repulsion. 502. empennage -- The tail assembly of an aircraft (page 223 of Reamde) 503. empyrean -- Heavenly or sublime; the highest part of the (supposedly spherical) heavens, thought in ancient times to contain the pure element of fire and by early Christians to be the abode of God and the angels 504. enantiodromia -- The principle that a superabundance of a force produces its opposite 505. enantiomorphic -- Relating to two objects, each of which is the mirror image of the other; to be chemically identical; i.e., crystals that are mirror images of each other. 506. enceinte -- Pregnant (from the French) 507. encomiast -- A person who delivers or writes an encomium; a eulogist 508. encomium -- Warm praise 509. endometriosis -- The presence of endometrium elsewhere than in the lining of the uterus; causes premenstrual pain and dysmenorrhea 510. endonym -- The name for themselves, their homeland, or their language of a people or social group 511. endue -- To provide with a quality or trait; endow 512. energumen -- A person thought to be possessed by an evil spirit; a fanatic or a zealot 513. enfeoff -- To invest (a person) with possession of a freehold estate in land 514. Ensor -- Belgian expressionist painter, noted for his macabre subjects 515. entasis -- A slight convexity or swelling, as in the shaft of a column, conventionally employed especially in classical architecture. 516. entelechy -- Actuality as opposed to potentiality (from Aristotelian philosophy) 517. entheogenic -- Hallucinogenic, psychedelic, or mind-altering. It applies esp. to drugs or plants employed in mystical, religious, or spiritual ceremonies 518. entrepôt -- A warehouse; a market or trading center (page 648 of Reamde; also page 12 of The Nutmeg's Curse) 519. enure -- To toughen or harden by use or exposure; accustom; habituate (see inure) 520. enuresis -- The involuntary discharge of urine; urinary incontinence 521. epeirogeny -- Uplift or depression of the earth's crust, affecting large areas of land or ocean bottom 522. epenthesis -- Insertion of a sound in a word 523. epergne -- An ornamental stand or dish for holding fruit, flowers, etc., used as a centerpiece 524. epexegesis -- Additional explanation or explanatory material. Epexegetically: in an explanatory manner. 525. ephebe -- A youth between 18 and 20 years of age in ancient Greece. 526. epicortical -- On top of the bark (botanical) 527. epicurean -- Devoted to the pursuit of sensual pleasure, esp. to the enjoyment of good food and comfort 528. epideictic -- Designed primarily for rhetorical display 529. epigenetic -- Denoting processes by which heritable modifications in gene function occur without a change in the sequence of the DNA 530. epigone -- A second-rate imitator or follower, esp. of an artist or a philosopher 531. epigram -- A concise, clever, often paradoxical statement (can be a poem); see Yogi Berra or Groucho Marx 532. epigraph -- 1. An inscription, as on a statue or building; 2. a motto or quotation, as at the beginning of a literary composition, setting forth a them 533. epiphenomena -- 1. A secondary or additional phenomenon; by-product; 2. An unexpected or atypical symptom or occurrence during the course of a disease 534. epistemology -- Study of the nature of knowledge 535. epistle -- A literary composition in the form of a letter 536. epistolary -- Of or associated with letters or the writing of letters 537. epitatic -- [definition unknown] (from Oblivion by David Foster Wallace) 538. epithelium -- Membranous tissue composed of one or more layers of cells separated by very little intercellular substance and forming the covering of most internal and external surfaces of the body and its organs 539. epizeuxis -- The repetition of a word with vehemence and emphasis 540. equanimity -- The quality of being calm and even-tempered; composure 541. equerry -- A personal attendant to the British royal household, generally responsible for the horses 542. ergodic -- Of or relating to the probability that any state will recur 543. erysipelas -- An acute streptococcal infectious disease of the skin, characterized by fever, headache, vomiting, and purplish raised lesions, esp. on the face. Also called: Saint Anthony's fire 544. Esau -- In the Bible, the eldest son of Isaac and Rebecca who sold his birthright to his twin brother, Jacob, for a mess of pottage 545. eschatology -- The branch of theology that is concerned with the end of the world or of humankind 546. escheat -- A common law doctrine that transfers the real property of a person who has died without heirs to the Crown or state 547. escutcheon -- Shield or emblem bearing a coat of arms 548. espaliered -- A tree or shrub that is trained to grow in a flat plane against a wall or trellis, often in a symmetrical pattern. 549. estaminet -- A small café. 550. estivation -- Dormancy or torpor during the summer 551. esurient -- Hungry 552. etiolate -- 1. To cause to appear pale and sickly; 2. to make weak by stunting the growth or development of 553. eudaemonic -- Producing happiness and well-being 554. euonym -- A name that is apt or fitting. 555. euphonium -- A brass instrument similar to the tuba but having a somewhat higher pitch and a mellower sound 556. euphonious -- Pleasing or agreeable to the ear. 557. evanescent -- Vanishing or likely to vanish like vapor, ephemeral or transitory, passing out of sight; fading away; vanishing 558. evection -- Irregularity in the moon's motion caused by perturbations of the sun and planets 559. equivoque -- A pun; a double meaning; an equivocal word or expression 560. excrescent -- Abnormal or excessive growth 561. exegesis -- Critical explanation or analysis 562. exegete -- A person skilled in exegesis 563. exercitant -- One who practices religious exercises 564. exigent -- Requiring immediate aid or action 565. exiguous -- Meager or extremely scanty 566. exonym -- A name by which one people or social group refers to another and by which the group so named does not refer to itself. 567. exophthalmic -- Characterized by the prominence of the eyeballs 568. exordium -- A beginning or introductory part, esp. of a speech or treatise 569. exoteric -- Not confined to an inner circle of disciples or initiates. 570. extrorse -- Botanical term for facing outward or turned away from the axis 571. exuvia -- An animal's cast or sloughed skin, especially that of an insect larva. Pl. exuviae 572. factotum -- An assistant who takes on a wide range of tasks and responsibilities. 573. fain -- Happily; gladly (archaic) 574. fainéant -- Given to doing nothing; lazy. 575. falchion -- A short and slightly curved medieval sword broader towards the point 576. fantail -- Overhanging stern of a boat (esp. a warship) 577. fard -- To paint the face with cosmetics, so as to hide blemishes 578. farrago -- An assortment or a medley; a hodgepodge 579. farro -- The grains of three wheat species 580. farrow -- 1. A litter of pigs. 2. To produce a litter of pigs. 581. fascicle -- 1. One of the parts of a book published in separate sections. 2. A small bundle (e.g., of stems, flowers, or leaves) 582. faute-de-mieux -- For lack of something better 583. fauvism -- An early 20th-century movement in painting begun by a group of French artists and marked by the use of bold, often distorted forms and vivid colors. 584. fecundate -- Fertilize; make fruitful 585. felid -- Sly, stealthy, or treacherous; belonging or pertaining to the cat family (related to canid for dogs) 586. fesse -- A wide horizontal band forming the middle section of an escutcheon. 587. fiacre -- A small four-wheeled carriage 588. fideistic -- Reliance on faith alone rather than scientific reasoning or philosophy in questions of religion. 589. fieldfare -- An European thrush 590. fillip -- 1. A snap or light blow made by pressing a fingertip against the thumb and suddenly releasing it; 2. To stimulate or arouse (or something that does so) 591. finial -- 1. An ornamental terminating part, as on a post or piece of furniture; 2. an ornament on top of a spire, gable 592. firedamp -- Methane 593. firth -- A long, narrow inlet 594. fissiparous -- Having a tendency to divide into groups or factions 595. flews -- The fleshy hanging upper lip of a bloodhound or similar dog 596. flinder -- 1. A butterfly. 2. To scamper about flutteringly 3. To break (something) into flinders (pieces) 597. flintknap -- The process of chipping away material from high silica stones like "flint" in a carefully controlled manner with special tools to produce sharp projectile points or tools. 598. flivver -- A broken-down car or jalopy 599. flocculent -- Having a fluffy or woolly appearance; fleecy 600. flyblown -- 1. Tainted; corrupt; 2. dirty or rundown; squalid 601. flyover -- An overpass, as on a highway (chieflly British) 602. folie à deux -- Mental illness occurring simultaneously in two intimately related persons who share some of the elements of the illness, such as delusions 603. fomes -- Any inanimate or nonpathogenic substance or material, exclusive of food, which may act as a vector for a pathogen. 604. fomites -- Plural of fomes 605. foolscap -- A sheet of writing or printing paper measuring about 13 by 16 inches 606. forcemeat -- Finely ground and highly spiced meat, fish, or poultry that is served alone or used in stuffing. 607. foxed -- Marked with spots or discoloration, as from age 608. frass -- Debris or excrement produced by insects. 609. frazil -- Small pieces of ice that form in water moving turbulently enough to prevent the formation of a sheet of ice 610. fritinancy -- A chirping or creaking, as of a cricket. 611. frowsy -- 1. Unkempt; slovenly; 2. ill-smelling; musty 612. frugivore -- An animal, such as a chimpanzee or fruit bat, that feeds primarily on fruit. 613. fubsy -- Fat and squat 614. fucus -- A seaweed common to intertidal regions and typically having greenish-brown slimy fronds. See also wrack 615. fugle -- 1. to maneuver; to move hither and thither. 2. to make signals; to gesticulate; to act as a fugleman or guide (A leader, especially a political leader.) 616. fulguration -- To emit flashes of lightning 617. fulsome -- 1. Excessively flattering or insincerely earnest; sycophantic; 2. disgusting or offensive 618. fungible -- Interchangeable 619. fungo -- The act of tossing the ball upwards and hitting it as it descends, a ball hit in this manner or the light bat used to hit such balls 620. furbelow -- 1. A ruffle or flounce on a garment; 2. piece of showy ornamentation 621. furze -- Gorse; spiny evergreen shrubs 622. fustic -- The wood of a large, tropical American tree, Chlorophora tinctoria, of the mulberry family, yielding a light yellow dye. 623. gaff -- Barbed spear; stick with a hook on it 624. gaffer -- An electrician in charge of lighting on a movie or television set 625. Galen -- Greek anatomist, physician, and philosopher. His theories, which emphasized maintaining a balance of the four humors, formed the basis of European medicine until the Renaissance 626. Galicia -- A region of east-central Europe on the north side of the Carpathians, now in SE Poland and Ukraine 627. galliass -- A large, fast, heavily armed three-masted Mediterranean galley of the 1500s and 1600s (var. of galleas) 628. gallimaufry -- A jumble; a hodgepodge 629. gamelan -- An Indonesian orchestra composed mainly of tuned percussion instruments such as bamboo xylophones, wooden or metal chimes, and gongs 630. garganey -- A small migratory duck (Anas querquedula) that breeds in Eurasia and has a white stripe over each eye. 631. gastrocnemius -- The largest, most prominent muscle of the calf of the leg, the action of which extends the foot and bends the knee 632. gatka -- An Indian martial art associated with the Sikhs of the Punjab 633. gauleiter -- A person in a position of petty or local authority who behaves in an overbearing authoritarian manner (from a provincial governor in Germany under Hitler) 634. gavage -- Introduction of nutritive material into the stomach by means of a tube. 635. gazump -- To swindle or overcharge 636. Gehenna -- 1. A place or state of torment or suffering. 2. The abode of condemned souls; hell 637. gelastician -- One who causes laughter 638. gentian -- Any gentianaceous plant having blue, yellow, white, or red showy flowers 639. gentilic -- Derived from a place name that depicts the residents of that place; see demonym 640. geoid -- The hypothetical surface of the earth that coincides everywhere with mean sea level. 641. ghat -- Stairs or a passage leading down to a river (from the Hindi) 642. gigue -- A synonym for jig 643. girn -- To complain; to snarl or grimace (also gurn) 644. gisarme -- A halberd with a long shaft and two-sided blade, carried by medieval foot soldiers. 645. glaive -- A sword, especially a broadsword. 646. glaucous -- 1. Of a pale grayish or bluish green; 2. covered with a bluish waxy or powdery bloom 647. glean -- To gather (something) slowly and carefully in small pieces (comes from the word for gathering useful remnants of a crop from a field after a harvest) 648. glymphatic -- A functional waste clearance pathway for the vertebrate central nervous system. 649. glyptothek -- A collection of sculptures; also known as a Glyptotheque 650. gnomic -- Marked by aphorisms; aphoristic; tersely phrases e.g., using adages 651. godown -- Warehouse (esp. in India) 652. goffer -- An iron used for pressing ridges or narrow pleats, or ridges or pleats produced in this manner 653. goliards -- Mainly 12th-century scholar-poets interested mainly in earthly delights. 654. gonfalon -- A banner hung from a crosspiece, like in the Crusades 655. gouache -- A method of painting with opaque watercolors mixed with a preparation of gum. 656. gound -- The gunk that collects in the corners of the eyes 657. gowpen -- A bowl formed by two hands (Scottish) 658. grace-and-favour -- A house, flat, etc. owned by the sovereign and granted free of rent to a person to whom the sovereign wishes to express gratitude 659. gracile -- Gracefully slender 660. gravamen -- Material substance of a charge or complaint 661. greaves -- Shin armor/guards 662. grebe -- Any of various swimming and diving birds of the family Podicipedidae, having a pointed bill and lobed, fleshy membranes along each toe. 663. greenmail -- The practice of a company buying sufficient shares in another company to threaten takeover and making a quick profit as a result of the threatened company buying back its shares at a higher price 664. griot -- A member of a caste responsible for maintaining an oral record of tribal history in the form of music, poetry, and storytelling (chiefly in Western Africa) 665. grisaille -- A style of monochromatic painting in shades of gray 666. grizzle -- To make or become gray 667. groat -- An English silver coin worth four pennies, taken out of circulation in the 17th century 668. groyne -- Variant of groin 669. grutch -- To grudge; to begrudge 670. gudgen -- Pivot; hinge; small fish; one who is easily duped (page 86 of the Brothers Karamazov) 671. guerdon -- A reward; recompense 672. guipure -- A coarse large-patterned lace without a net background. Also called Venice lace. 673. gurn -- To complain, snarl or grimace (also girn; from the Scottish) 674. gyoza -- A pocket of dough that is stuffed, as with minced pork or shrimp, and fried, steamed, or boiled. 675. gyp -- A fraud or swindle, or some who perpetrates same 676. ha-ha -- A wall or other boundary marker that is set in a ditch so as not to interrupt the landscape 677. habergeon -- A short, sleeveless coat of mail; a hauberk. 678. haboob -- A penetrating sandstorm or dust storm with violent winds, occurring chiefly in Arabia, North Africa, and India. 679. haecceity -- The property that uniquely identifies an object 680. hagridden -- Tormented or harassed by nightmares or unreasonable fears 681. halvah -- A confection of Turkish origin, made chiefly of ground sesame seeds and honey 682. hamartia -- A tragic flaw; the flaw in character which leads to the downfall of the protagonist in a tragedy (e.g. Achilles’s heel) 683. hapax legomenon -- A word or form that occurs only once in the recorded corpus of a given language. 684. hardtack -- A hard biscuit or bread made with only flour and water. Also called sea biscuit, sea bread, ship biscuit 685. haruspicy -- Divination by natural means (e.g. lightning) 686. hauberk -- A long tunic made of chain mail 687. haustorium -- A specialized structure of a parasitic fungus or plant, used to absorb nutrients and water from the host plant. 688. hawse -- The part of a ship where the hawseholes are located; The space between the bows and anchors of an anchored ship. 689. hebephrenic -- A type of schizophrenia characterized by disorganized speech and behavior, flat or inappropriate affect, and sometimes silly or inappropriate mannerisms. 690. hecatomb -- A large-scale sacrifice or slaughter 691. heliotrope -- Any of various plants that turn toward the sun 692. helotry -- The condition of serfdom 693. helve -- A handle of a tool, such as an axe, chisel, or hammer. 694. hendecagon -- A polygon having eleven sides 695. heresiarch -- One who originates or is the chief proponent of a heresy or heretical movement 696. hermeneutics -- Theory of interpretation (esp. religious texts); determining the meaning of something 697. heterachy -- A formal structure (e.g. connected nodes) without any single permanent uppermost node 698. heteroclite -- an irregularly formed word; irregular or unusual 699. heterophemize -- To say something different from what you mean to say (e.g. as a false compliment) 700. hetman -- A Cossack chief; also called ataman 701. hetmanate -- All of the hetmans 702. hiatal -- Of, pertaining to, or involving a hiatus 703. hierophant -- An interpreter of sacred mysteries or arcane knowledge 704. Hijri -- The lunar calendar used by Muslims and reckoned from a.d. 622: the calendar year consists of 354 days and contains 12 months. 705. hippocras -- Wine flavored with spices 706. homoeomery -- The state or quality of being homogeneous in elements or first principles; likeness or identity of parts. (also Homoeomery) 707. homologate -- To approve, especially to confirm officially. 708. horologium -- A clock tower. 709. horripilated -- Having goosebumps from either fear or cold or excitement 710. hortative -- Urging to some course of conduct or action; exhorting; encouraging 711. howdah -- A seat for riding on an elephant's back, esp. one with a canopy 712. hoyden -- Tomboy; a boisterous, high-spirited, saucy girl 713. huckster -- A person who sells small items door-to-door or from a stall 714. humect -- To moisten; to wet 715. hunker -- To squat on one's heels (a synonym from Bill Burr: Vietnamese gambler squat) 716. hustings -- A place where political campaign speeches are made (chiefly British) 717. hyaline -- Resembling glass, as in translucence or transparency; glassy 718. hypaethral -- Wholly or partly open to the sky 719. hypertelorism -- Abnormal distance between two paired organs, esp. the eyes 720. hypocaust -- A space under the floor of an ancient Roman building through which flue gases from a furnace were passed to heat a room or a bath. 721. hypostatis -- The substance, essence, or underlying reality; any of the three persons of the Christian Trinity. 722. latifundium -- A large landed estate, especially of the ancient Romans. 723. iatrogenic -- Unintentionally induced by a physician 724. icteric -- Related to jaundice (to be ill with or a treatment) 725. idiolect -- Unique linquistic pattern with a small group; mini-dialect 726. illeism -- Referring to oneself in the third person 727. imbricate -- To overlap in a regular pattern; also used as imbrication to signify metaphorical layers of overlap between information domains. 728. immanent -- Inherent 729. impecuniousness -- The state of being poor; penury 730. impecunity -- The state of being poor; penury 731. impetigo -- A contagious bacterial skin disease characterized by the formation of pustules that develop into yellowish crusty sores 732. impluvious -- Wet with rain 733. incalescent -- Growing hotter or more ardent 734. incarnadine -- Of a fleshy pink color; blood-red 735. incunabulum -- An artifact of an early period (artifact of an early period); pl: incunabula; also known as incunables. 736. indiscerpible -- Not discerpible; inseparable 737. indite -- To set down in writing; to compose 738. infundibulum -- Any of various funnel-shaped bodily passages, openings, structures, or parts, esp. the stalk of the pituitary gland 739. infusoria -- Various microscopic organisms found in infusions of decaying organic matter 740. ingenuous -- Candid; lacking in guile 741. inimical -- Injurious or harmful in effect; adverse; unfriendly or hostile 742. inspissate -- To thicken, as by evaporation 743. instauration -- Renovation; restoration. 744. intarsia -- A decorative inlaid pattern in a surface, esp. a mosaic worked in wood 745. indendant -- An administrative official (such as a governor); director or manager in German 746. inselberg -- A mountain or rocky mass that has resisted erosion and stands isolated in an essentially level area. Also called a monadnock. 747. instauration -- The institution or establishment of something. 748. intercalated -- Interpolate in a calendar. 749. intercostal -- Located or occurring between the ribs. 750. interpellate -- To question (a member of the government) on a point of government policy, often interrupting the business of the day 751. interpellation -- An act of delaying or interrupting the continuity; see interpellate 752. intransitive -- An intransitive verb, on the other hand, describes an action that does not happen to something or someone 753. inveigle -- To obtain by cajolery; seduce 754. inverter -- Any device for converting a direct current into an alternating current 755. invidious -- Inciting ill will; troll-y; discriminatory; envious; 756. invigilator -- Monitor or proctor who watches examination candidates to prevent cheating 757. ipseity -- The quality of being oneself or itself; the essentia] element of identity 758. irenic -- Promoting peace; conciliatory. 759. irredentism -- A national policy advocating the acquisition of some region in another country by reason of common linguistic, cultural, historical, ethnic, or racial ties. 760. irrefragably -- Admittedly; fairly 761. jabot -- An ornamental cascade of ruffles or frills down the front of a shirt, blouse, or dress. 762. jasper -- An opaque cryptocrystalline variety of quartz that may be red, yellow, or brown 763. jejune -- Naive, simplistic, or superficial 764. jequirity -- Indian liquorice seeds; used to make black rosary beads 765. jouissance -- Jollity; merriment 766. katabatic -- Of or relating to the downward flow of cold dense air 767. keck -- To retch or feel nausea; to feel or express disgust 768. kedgeree -- 1. A dish of India containing rice, lentils, and spices. 2. a dish of rice, fish, hard-boiled eggs, cream, and seasonings 769. kedge -- A light anchor used for warping a vessel; to warp (move) a vessel by means of a light anchor. 770. kefir -- A creamy drink made of fermented cow's milk 771. keloid -- An abnormal proliferation of scar tissue, often pink, as on the site of a surgical incision 772. kenning -- A conventional poetic phrase used for or in addition to the usual name of a person or thing, esp. in Old Norse and Old English verse, as wave traveler for boat; see metonymy 773. kermess -- A fair or church dedication 774. kipper -- A herring or salmon that has been split, salted, and smoked 775. kirtle -- 1. A man's knee-length tunic or coat; 2. a woman’s dress or skirt 776. knelling -- The process of disassembling something and arranging its parts 777. knolling -- A photography technique that arranges objects at 90 degree angles and shoots them from above. 778. kurgan An ancient burial mound constructed over a pit grave: earliest occurrence 4th millennium b.c., in the Russian Steppes. 779. kulak -- A prosperous landed peasant in czarist Russia, characterized by the Communists during the October Revolution as an exploiter 780. kukri -- A knife with a curved blade that broadens towards the point, esp. as used by Gurkhas 781. kvass -- A Russian fermented beverage similar to beer, made from rye or barley 782. kwashiorkor -- Severe malnutrition of infants and young children, esp. soon after weaning, resulting from dietary deficiency of protein (comes from the Ghanan) 783. kyriarchy -- A social system or set of connecting social systems built around domination, oppression, and submission (used in feminist theory) 784. lability -- The susceptibility to error or lapses of any kind, as a human failing 785. laburnum -- Any leguminous tree or shrub of the Eurasian genus Laburnum, having clusters of yellow drooping flowers: all parts of the plant are poisonous 786. laconically -- Marked by terseness or concision 787. lacuna -- An empty space or a missing part; a gap 788. lagniappe -- A small gift given with a purchase 789. lahar -- A mass of volcanic fragments, often mixed with water (e.g. rain), moving rapidly down the side of a volcano 790. lamasery -- In Tibetan Buddhism, a monastery presided over by a lama. 791. lambent -- Flickering lightly (e.g. firelight); glowing with soft radiance, luminous 792. lapalissade -- An obvious, self-evident truth, especially humorously so; a tautology or truism. 793. laparotomy -- A surgical procedure involving small incisions through the abdominal wall to gain access into the abdominal cavity. 794. lapidary -- fd drawknives 795. lapillus -- A small, solidified fragment of lava (pl. lapilli) 796. lapis lazuli -- An opaque to translucent blue, violet-blue, or greenish-blue semiprecious gemstone composed mainly of lazurite and calcite. 797. larrikin -- A person given to comical or outlandish behavior; an imp; a hooligan (chiefly Australian) 798. lascar -- An East Indian sailor, army servant, or artillery trooper during the era of European colonialism in Asia 799. laterality -- Preference in using one side of the body over the other. 800. laterite -- A red residual soil formed by the leaching of silica and by the enrichment with aluminum and iron oxides, esp. in humid climates 801. latibulate -- To hide oneself in a corner 802. leal -- Loyal and honest 803. lenition -- To undergo an increase in sonority or become lenis. Said of consonant sounds, as when (p) changes to (b), (b) to (v) 804. lenity -- The condition or quality of being lenient; leniency 805. Lepus -- A constellation in the Southern Hemisphere near Orion and Columba 806. letabund -- Filled with joy 807. Levallois -- A filet-working technique in which a flint is trimmed so that a flake of predetermined size and shape can be struck from it 808. leyden jars -- An early form of capacitor consisting of a glass jar lined inside and out with tinfoil and having a conducting rod connected to the inner foil lining and passing out of the jar through an insulated stopper 809. lictor -- A Roman functionary who carried fasces when attending a magistrate in public appearances 810. lief -- Beloved; ready or willing 811. limerence -- Puppy love; a state of mind resulting from romantic attraction, characterized by feelings of euphoria, the desire to have one's feelings reciprocated, etc 812. liminal -- Intermediate between two states, conditions, or regions; transitional or indeterminate 813. lisle -- A fine, smooth, tightly twisted thread spun from long-staple cotton 814. lithotomy -- Surgery to remove one or more stones from an organ or duct 815. litotes -- Understating by negation: no mean feat" 816. littoral -- A coastal region; a shore; the region or zone between the limits of high and low tides. 817. locus -- A locality; a place 818. longueur -- 1. A tedious passage in a work of literature or performing art; 2. a period of time filled with boredom or tedium 819. lorgnette -- A pair of eyeglasses or opera glasses mounted on a handle 820. louche -- Disreputable or sordid 821. lubricious -- Overtly sexual; salacious 822. lucubrations -- Writing or study; meditations 823. ludic -- Showing spontaneous and undirected playfulness 824. lues -- Any venereal disease (e.g. Syphilis); pestilence 825. lumbago -- A painful condition of the lower back, as one resulting from muscle strain or a slipped disk 826. lupanarian -- Pertaining to a brothel or prostitution; characteristic of illicit sexual desire or activity. (Also, lupinarian) 827. lyceum -- A hall in which public lectures, concerts, and similar programs are presented 828. machicolation -- A projecting gallery at the top of a castle wall, supported by a row of corbels and having openings in the floor through which stones and boiling liquids could be dropped on attackers (machiolate: to construct machicolations) 829. macrocarpa -- A large coniferous tree of New Zealand, Cupressus macrocarpa, used for shelter belts on farms and for rough timber. Also called: Monterey cypress 830. maculate -- (v): To spot, blemish, or pollute; (n): 1. Spotted, blotched, or stained. 2. Morally sullied or impure 831. madding -- Acting madly; frenzied 832. maenad -- 1. A frenzied woman; 2. a female member of the orgiastic cult of Dionysus 833. magniloquent -- Using high-flown or bombastic language. 834. majolica -- Italian earthenware covered with an opaque glaze of tin oxide and usu. highly decorated 835. malesuete -- Accustomed to poor habits 836. malversation -- Misbehavior and esp. corruption in an office, trust, or commission; corrupt administration 837. mandala -- Any of various designs symbolizing the universe, usually circular 838. mandamus -- A writ issued by a court requiring a public official or entity to perform a duty associated with that office or entity 839. manqué -- 1. Unfulfilled; potential; would-be; 2. Unfulfilled or frustrated in the realization of one's ambitions or capabilities 840. manumission -- To free from slavery or bondage; emancipate 841. manumit/manumission -- To set free; release from slavery 842. martingale -- Part of a bridle; half-belt on the back of a coat; doubling the stakes after each loss; stability rigging for the bowsprit or jib (see "definition" <http://www.thefreedictionary.com/martingale>) 843. mascaron -- A face, usually human, sometimes frightening or chimeric, whose alleged function was originally to frighten away evil spirits so that they would not enter the building. 844. mascon -- Any of several lunar regions of high gravity 845. mataiotechnical -- A skill that requires great patience and dedication to complete, but that, once completed, still amounts to nothing. It is impressive, but meaningless. 846. mattock -- A digging tool with a flat blade set at right angles to the handle. 847. matutinal -- Of, relating to, or occurring in the morning; early 848. megatherium -- A large, extinct ground sloth that lived from the Miocene through the Pleistocene Epochs, primarily in South America. It was as large as an elephant, had long curved claws, and ate plants 849. mereology -- The formal study of the logical properties of the relation of part and whole 850. meretricious -- Gaudy 851. merkin -- A pubic wig 852. merlon -- The solid portion between crenels 853. mésalliance -- A marriage with a person of inferior social position. 854. mesoscopic -- Pertaining to a size regime, intermediate between the microscopic and the macroscopic, that is characteristic of a region where a large number of particles can interact in a quantum-mechanically correlated fashion. 855. metempsychosis -- The theory of reincarnation 856. metonym -- A word used in metonymy 857. metonymy -- A synonym/metaphor; e.g. “brass" for upper officers or "plastic" for credit cards; see kenning 858. mews -- A group of buildings containing private stables that have been converted to residences 859. mezzanine -- A low story between two others in a building 860. miasma -- An unwholesome or oppressive atmosphere 861. micrognathia -- Abnormally small jaw 862. micturition -- urination; also, micturate 863. milt -- The sperm-containing fluid of a male fish 864. mimetic -- Of or relating to an imitation; imitative 865. minatory -- Of a menacing or threatening nature; minacious 866. Mindanao -- Second largest of the Philippine islands, NE of Borneo 867. mirabile dictu -- Wonderful to relate; amazing to say 868. misericord -- 1. Relaxation of monastic rules, as a dispensation from fasting. 2. A bracket attached to the underside of a hinged seat in a church stall on which a standing person may lean. Also called miserere 3. A narrow dagger used in medieval times to deliver the death stroke to a seriously wounded knight. 869. misfeasance -- Improper and unlawful execution of an act that in itself is lawful and proper. 870. misprision -- Neglect in performing the duties of public office. 871. moidore -- A former Portuguese gold coin 872. moiety -- One half 873. mojibake -- The garbled text that is the result of text being decoded using an unintended character encoding. 874. Moloch -- Something possessing the power to exact severe sacrifice; a Semitic deity to whom parents sacrificed their children 875. monadnock -- See inselberg. 876. mondegreen -- Misinterpretation of song lyrics (e.g. Israeli Men" instead of "It's Raining Men")" 877. monkey-puzzle -- A coniferous evergreen tree (Araucaria araucana) native to Chile and Argentina, having whorled branches covered with scalelike, overlapping, sharp-pointed leaves. 878. monomachy -- Single combat, or a duel 879. Monophysite -- A person who holds that there is only one nature in the person of Christ, which is primarily divine with human attributes 880. monopsony -- A situation in which the entire market demand for a product or service consists of only one buyer 881. monophthongization -- A sound change by which a diphthong becomes a monophthong, a type of vowel shift 882. morbific -- Causing disease; pathogenic 883. morganatic -- A marriage between nobility and lower rank, where titles and wealth are not shared 884. morion -- A crested metal helmet; black or blackish-brown smoky quartz 885. morphetic -- Of or relating to sleep or dreams 886. motet -- A polyphonic composition based on a sacred text and usually sung without accompaniment. 887. moufflon -- A small wild sheep 888. moulinet -- A circular cut or swing of the sword 889. mountebank -- A flamboyant charlatan 890. mucopus -- A mucopurulent discharge; a mixture of mucous material and pus. 891. mudra -- Ritual hand movements in Hindu religious dancing 892. mulct -- 1. To penalize by fining or demanding forfeiture; 2. to cheat or defraud 893. mulga -- The outback; bush 894. mullein -- Any of various Eurasian plants of the genus Verbascum of the figwort family, especially V. thapsus, naturalized in North America, having a tall spike of yellow flowers and leaves covered with dense woolly down. 895. mullet -- Freshwater, spiny-finned fish 896. mullion -- A vertical member, as of stone or wood, dividing a window or other opening. 897. Munda -- A family of languages spoken by scattered peoples throughout central India 898. murine -- A family of rodents that includes mice and rats 899. murrain -- Redwater fever, affecting livestock; a plague, epidemic or crop blight 900. muskeg -- A peat bog formed by an accumulation of sphagnum moss, leaves, and decayed matter, often with scattered small trees, and found especially in northern North America. 901. musquash -- Another name for muskrat 902. musth -- A periodic state of heightened sexual activity and aggression in adult male elephants, characterized by the discharge of secretions from glands near the eyes and the continuous dribbling of urine. 903. mutatis mutandis -- The necessary changes having been made (e.g. when applying a concept from one domain to another, e.g. maritime law to space travel) 904. myocyclonic -- Of or relating to a sudden irregular twitching of muscles or parts of muscles, occurring in various brain disorders 905. myrmidon -- Soldier or a subordinate civil officer who executes orders of a superior without protest or pity; -- sometimes applied to bailiffs, constables, etc. 906. mythopoeic -- Serving to create or engender myths; productive in mythmaking 907. nankeen -- A sturdy yellow or buff cotton cloth (or trousers made of same). 908. naphthalene -- A white crystalline volatile solid with a characteristic penetrating odour: an aromatic hydrocarbon used in mothballs and in the manufacture of dyes, explosives 909. natality -- Birthrate 910. natant -- Floating or swimming in water 911. navvy -- A laborer, esp. one employed in construction or excavation projects 912. neep -- A dialect name for a turnip, chiefly British 913. nefandous -- Too odious to be spoken of 914. nenuphar -- Either a white or yellow water lily 915. neotenous -- The retention of juvenile characteristics in the adults of a species, as among certain amphibians. 916. nepenthe -- Something that induces forgetfulness of sorrow or eases pain (mentioned in the Odyssey) 917. nephrologist -- Specialist in conditions related to the kidney 918. nescience -- Ignorance; absence of awareness 919. Nestorianism -- The doctrine that Christ was two distinct persons, divine and human, implying a denial that the Virgin Mary was the mother of God. It is attributed to Nestorius and survives in the Iraqi Church 920. netty -- A lavatory, originally an earth closet (chiefly British) 921. neuralgic -- Sharp, severe paroxysmal pain extending along a nerve or group of nerves 922. nevus -- Any congenital anomaly of the skin, including moles and various types of birthmarks; also naevus 923. nightjar -- Any of numerous nocturnal goatsuckers of the subfamily Caprimulginae, having a short bill and a wide mouth used for scooping up insects in midflight; they have a cryptic plumage and large eyes and feed on insects 924. niello -- A black metallic alloy (sulfur and copper, silver or lead 925. nigrescent -- Blackish; dark 926. noctilucent -- Luminous at night 927. noddle -- n: The head or brains, chiefly British; v: to nod (the head), as through drowsiness 928. noetics -- The laws of logic; the science of the intellect. 929. noisome -- x 930. nolens volens -- Whether willing or not; for better or worse 931. nonplused -- Filled with bewilderment 932. noosphere -- The part of the biosphere that is affected by human thought, culture, and knowledge 933. nosology -- The science of classification of diseases 934. numeraire -- A unit or an item of commerce in which prices are measured 935. numinous -- awe-inspiring, mysterious or spiritual; supernatural 936. nibble -- Four bits; also semi-octet, quadbit, or quartet; Brit: nybble 937. nystagmus -- A persistent, rapid, involuntary side-to-side eye movement 938. oakum -- A preparation of tarred fibers used to seal gaps, esp. in boats 939. obeah -- 1. A form of belief involving sorcery, practiced in parts of the West Indies, South America, the southern U.S., and Africa. 2. A fetish or charm used in practicing obeah. 940. obganiate -- To annoy by repeating over and over and over and over 941. objurgate -- To scold or rebuke sharply; berate. 942. oblation -- Any offering made for religious or charitable purposes (e.g. offering of the bread and wine of the Eucharist to God) 943. obloquy -- 1. calumny; detractive language; 2. ill repute 944. obovate -- Egg-shaped and flat, with the narrow end at the base 945. obscurantist -- Practicing deliberate vagueness 946. obsequies -- Funeral or burial rites (singular: obsequy) 947. obsidional -- Relating to a siege 948. occiput -- Back of the head 949. ocherous -- Ocher in color (or a mineral used to make that color) 950. octarine -- The Color of Magic or the King Color, the eighth color of the Discworld spectrum, visible only to wizards and cats, a greenish purple yellow color. 951. ofay -- A derogatory term for a White person (see cracker, honky, peckerwood) 952. ogee -- A double curve, resembling an S, formed by the union of a concave and a convex line (often a molding or arch in this shape) 953. ogive -- A diagonal rib or groin of a Gothic vault; 2. A distribution curve in which the frequencies are cumulative 954. okrug -- A type of administrative division in some Slavic-speaking states. 955. oligopsony -- A market with only very few buyers 956. oliphant -- Elephant 957. omphalic -- Of or relating to the navel 958. omphaloskepsis -- Literally, the contemplation of one's navel, which is an idiom usually meaning complacent self-absorption 959. oneiric -- Dream-like 960. onomastics -- The study of the etymology, history, and use of proper names 961. ontogenesis -- The development of an individual organism or a part of an organism from inception to maturity. 962. ontology -- The study of the essence of being 963. opprobrium -- Ignominy; cause of shame or disgrace 964. opsimath -- A person who learns late in life 965. optative -- Indicating or expressing choice, preference, or wish 966. orgulous -- Haughty; proud (archaic) 967. orison -- A prayer, a devout petition to God or an object of worship 968. orogenesis -- The process of mountain formation, esp. by a folding and faulting of the earth's crust 969. orotund -- Pompous and bombastic; resonant; booming 970. orthography -- The art or study of correct spelling according to established usage 971. orthophemistic -- Plainly denotative; not euphemistic or dysphemistic 972. osculation -- A kiss (page 332 of Doctor Sleep) 973. osier -- Any of several willows having long rodlike twigs used in basketry; A twig of one of these shrubs or trees. 974. osmically -- Of or relating to odors or the sense of smell 975. osteitis -- Inflammation of bone or bony tissue 976. ostler -- Man who looks after horses at an inn 977. otiose -- Lazy; indolent; serving no useful purpose 978. otoconia -- Minute calcareous particles in the gelatinous membrane surmounting the macula in the inner ear; also statoconia, otoliths, or statoliths 979. oviparous -- Producing eggs lain outside of the body 980. paillasse -- A straw-filled mat or mattress (var. of palliasse) 981. palapa -- A structure, such as a bar or restaurant in a tropical resort, that is open-sided and thatched with palm leaves. 982. palimpsest -- A manuscript, typically of papyrus or parchment, that has been written on more than once, with the earlier writing incompletely scraped off or erased and often legible. 983. palingenesis -- The doctrine of transmigration of souls; metempsychosis; the supposed repetition by an organism during its embryonic development of the stages in the evolution of its species, as asserted by the discredited biogenetic law 984. Palio -- Italian Renaissance or Medieval festival 985. Palladian -- Of, relating to, or characterized by wisdom or study 986. palliasse -- A straw-filled mat or mattress (var. of paillasse) 987. palp -- Either of a pair of sensory appendages that arise from the mouthparts of crustaceans and insects 988. pandit -- Brahmin scholar 989. panicle -- A loosely branched inflorescence, especially a branching raceme. 990. panjandrum -- A pompous self-important official or person of rank 991. pantechnicon -- 1. A large van, esp. one used for furniture removals; 2. a warehouse where furniture is stored 992. pap -- 1. A teat or nipple (archaic); 2. material lacking real value or substance; 3. soft or semiliquid food, as for infants 993. papillote -- 1. A paper frill around cutlets; 2. cooked in oiled greaseproof paper or foil 994. pappus -- A ring of fine feathery hairs surrounding the fruit in composite plants, such as the thistle; aids dispersal of the fruits by the wind 995. paraphilia -- Any abnormal sexual behavior; sexual anomaly or deviation 996. parapraxis -- A Freudian slip 997. paregoric -- An opium derivative used to treat diarrhea 998. pareidolia -- The perception of a recognizable image or meaningful pattern where none exists or is intended, as the perception of a face in the surface features of the moon. 999. paresis -- Slight or partial paralysis 1000. pareve -- Prepared without meat, milk, or their derivatives and therefore permissible to be eaten with meat or dairy dishes according to dietary laws 1001. pari passu -- At an equal pace; side by side 1002. parlous -- full of danger or uncertainty 1003. paromologia -- Admitting a weaker point in order to make a stronger one. (See concessio.) 1004. paronomasia -- Pun; play on words 1005. parrhesia -- Boldness or frankness of speech; the act of asking forgiveness for speaking in such a way 1006. parterre -- A formally patterned flower garden 1007. partizan -- A weapon of the 16th and 17th centuries with long shaft and broad blade 1008. parturition -- The act or process of giving birth to one or more offspring 1009. parve -- Containing neither meat nor milk products and so fit for use with either meat or milk dishes (from Judaism) 1010. passerine -- An order of birds characterized by the perching habit: includes the larks, finches, crows, thrushes, starlings, etc. 1011. pastern -- The part of a horse's foot between the fetlock and hoof 1012. pauce -- Being scarce or insufficient 1013. pauldron -- Shoulder protection in a suit of armor 1014. pavis -- A medieval shield large enough to protect the whole body. 1015. pawl -- A hinged or pivoted device adapted to fit into a notch of a ratchet wheel to impart forward motion or prevent backward motion. 1016. peaky -- Wan, emaciated, or sickly 1017. peavey -- An implement consisting of a wooden shaft with a metal point and a hinged hook near the end, used to handle logs. 1018. peccant -- Sinful; guilty; corrupt 1019. peccary -- A gregarious pig-like mammal that is found from the southwestern U.S. to Paraguay. (reference was “swarm […] like army ants on a drove of peccaries”.) 1020. peculation -- Embezzlement 1021. pecuniary -- Relating to money 1022. pedipalp -- One of the second pair of appendages near the mouth of a chelicerate, such as a spider or horseshoe crab, used for various reproductive, predatory, or sensory functions. 1023. pedlars -- Persons who travel about the country with merchandise, for the purpose of selling it; salesmen 1024. pedology -- 1. The scientific study of soils, including their origins, characteristics, and uses; 2. the study of the physical and mental development and characteristics of children 1025. pelf -- Lucre; wealth or riches, esp. when dishonestly acquired 1026. pellicle -- A thin skin or membrane; film; scum 1027. pellucid -- Transparent or translucent 1028. penectomy -- Penis removal through surgery, generally for medical or personal reasons. 1029. pentimento -- A visible trace of earlier painting beneath a layer or layers of paint on a canvas 1030. penurious -- Poverty-stricken; stingy; meager 1031. peplum -- A short overskirt or ruffle attached at the waistline of a jacket, blouse, or dress. 1032. percale -- A closely woven cotton fabric used for sheets and clothing 1033. percipient -- Perceptive 1034. perdurable -- Enduring continuously; immortal 1035. perdure -- To last permanently; endure 1036. peremptory -- Subject to no further debate or dispute; final and unassailable 1037. perfervid -- Extremely or extravagantly eager; impassioned or zealous. 1038. perfidy -- Treachery; deliberate breach of faith 1039. periagua -- Another name for pirogue; Also piragua; A canoe made from a hollowed tree trunk 1040. peripatetic -- Mobile on foot; an itinerant 1041. periphrastic -- The use of circumlocution. A roundabout way of expressing something. 1042. peristalsis -- The wavelike muscular contractions of the digestive tract or other tubular structures by which contents are forced onward toward the opening 1043. peristyles -- 1. A series of columns surrounding a building or enclosing a court; 2. A court enclosed by columns. 1044. perseverate -- To repeat a word, gesture, or act insistently or redundantly 1045. persiflage -- Banter; small-talk 1046. perspicacious -- Acutely perceptive or discerning 1047. perspicuous -- Clearly expressed or presented; lucid 1048. pertinacious -- Tenacious; Holding tenaciously or stubbornly to a purpose, opinion, or course of action; Extremely persistent or unyielding 1049. pessary -- A device for inserting into the vagina, either as a support for the uterus or (diaphragm pessary) to deliver a drug, such as a contraceptive 1050. petecure -- Modest cooking; cooking on a small scale; the opposite of epicure 1051. petitio principii -- A form of fallacious reasoning in which the conclusion has been assumed in the premises; begging the question 1052. petrichor -- The distinctive smell given off by earth, rock, or pavement at the beginning of a rain after a period of warm, dry weather. 1053. Petronius -- Roman courtier who is credited with writing the Satyricon 1054. pettifogging -- 1. Dishonest or unethical in insignificant matters; meanly petty; mean; quibbling; 2. to engage in legal chicanery 1055. pettish -- Ill-tempered; peevish (see shirty) 1056. phaeton -- A light, four-wheeled open carriage, usually drawn by a pair of horses 1057. phalanstery -- A self-sustaining cooperative community of the followers of Fourierism. Also called phalanx, or the buildings in such a community 1058. pharisaic -- Of, relating to, or characteristic of the Pharisees 1059. philippic -- A verbal denunciation characterized by harsh, often insulting language; a tirade 1060. phillumenist -- A person who collects matchbox labels 1061. philogynist -- A lover or friend of women; one who esteems woman as the higher type of humanity; antonym of misogynist 1062. phimosis -- An abnormal constriction of the foreskin that prevents it from being drawn back to uncover the glans penis. 1063. phlebotomy -- The act or practice of opening a vein to let or draw blood as a therapeutic or diagnostic measure 1064. phlegmatic -- Having or suggesting a calm, sluggish temperament; unemotional or apathetic 1065. Phoebus -- The sun 1066. phthisis -- A disease characterized by the wasting away or atrophy of the body or a part of the body (e.g. pulmonary tuberculosis) 1067. phylactery -- 1. A reminder or aid to remembering; 2. an amulet or charm (archaic); 3. either of the pair of blackened square cases containing parchments inscribed with biblical passages, bound by leather thongs to the head and left arm, and worn by Jewish men during weekday morning prayers (also called: Tefillah) 1068. phylogenetic -- The evolutionary development and history of a species or trait of a species or of a higher taxonomic grouping of organisms 1069. piacular -- Making expiation for sacrilege; wicked 1070. pibroch -- A series of variations on a martial theme or traditional dirge for the highland bagpipes. 1071. pied-à-terre -- A secondary or temporary place of lodging. 1072. pilchard -- A small, S European marine fish, Sardina pilchardus, related to the herring but smaller and rounder 1073. pillock -- A stupid or annoying person (chiefly British) 1074. pilum -- The heavy javelin of a Roman foot soldier 1075. pinchbeck -- Appearing valuable, but actually cheap and tawdry; an alloy of zinc and copper used as imitation gold. 1076. pinnace -- Any of various kinds of ship's tender or boat 1077. piquant -- Pleasantly sharp taste 1078. pirogue -- Any of various kinds of dugout canoes; also called piragua 1079. piscatorial -- Of or relating to fish, fishing, or fishermen 1080. pistic -- Referring to or having a pure and genuine faith. 1081. plafond -- A decorated ceiling. 1082. plangent -- Loud and resounding 1083. plastron -- 1. A metal breastplate worn under a coat of mail; 2. a quilted pad worn by fencers to protect the torso and side; 3. The front of a man's dress shirt; 4. the ventral part of the shell of a turtle or tortoise 1084. pleach -- To plait or interlace (branches or vines, for example), esp. in making a hedge or an arbor (similar to caning for making chairs from same) 1085. pleiotropy -- The phenomenon of one gene affecting more than one phenotypic characteristic 1086. plenteous -- Ample; abundant; copious 1087. pleonasm -- A newly created word 1088. pleroma -- The state of total fullness or abundance, relating particularly to the nature of God 1089. pleura -- A thin serous membrane in mammals that envelops each lung and folds back to make a lining for the chest cavity 1090. pleurisy -- Inflammation of the pleura, characterized by pain that is aggravated by deep breathing or coughing 1091. Plimsoll mark -- A load line painted on the side of a cargo ship 1092. plinth -- A block or slab on which a pedestal, column, or statue is placed 1093. plover -- Any shore bird of the family Charadriidae, typically having a round head, straight bill, and large pointed wings 1094. pneumatophore -- 1. A gas-filled sac serving as a float in some colonial marine hydrozoans, such as the Portuguese man-of-war. 2. A specialized respiratory root in certain aquatic plants, such as the bald cypress, that grows upward and protrudes above the water or mud into the air. 1095. poetaster -- A writer of insignificant, meretricious, or shoddy poetry 1096. poleaxe -- (n): An axe having a hammer face opposite the blade, used to slaughter cattle; v: To strike or fell with or as if with a poleaxe 1097. poleyn -- Knee protection in a suit of armor 1098. polyglossy -- The coexistence of multiple languages in the same geographic area. Also polyglossia. 1099. polygyny -- The condition or practice of having more than one wife at one time 1100. polymath -- A person of great or varied learning 1101. polysemy -- The ability of words, signs and symbols to have multiple meanings. 1102. pomace -- The pulpy material remaining after the juice has been pressed from fruit, such as apples or grapes. Also called marc 1103. pomaceous -- Of, relating to, bearing, or characteristic of pomes, especially apples. 1104. poignard -- See poniard 1105. poniard -- 1. A small, slender dagger; 2. a dagger typically having a slender three- or four-sided blade 1106. pong -- A disagreeable or offensive smell; stink 1107. pontine -- Of or relating to a pons, especially the pons Varolii (a region of the medulla in the brain). 1108. poplin -- A ribbed fabric of silk, rayon, wool, or cotton, used in making clothing and upholstery 1109. posset -- A drink of hot milk curdled with ale, beer, etc, flavoured with spices, formerly used as a remedy for colds 1110. postern -- Secondary door or gate in a fortification such as a city wall or castle curtain wall 1111. postillion -- A person who guides a horse-drawn coach or post chaise while mounted on the horse or one of a pair of horses. By contrast, a coachman controls the horses from the vehicle itself. 1112. potash -- Potassium carbonate, esp. the crude impure form obtained from wood ashes. 1113. pothouse -- A small tavern or pub (chiefly British) 1114. potsherd -- A broken pottery fragment, esp. one of archaeological value 1115. prang -- 1. An accident or crash in an aircraft, car, etc; 2. to bomb from the air 1116. prattlement -- Chatter, prattling 1117. precatory -- Relating to or expressing entreaty or supplication. Relating to prayer. 1118. preceptor -- A teacher; an instructor; a practising physician giving practical training to a medical student 1119. prefatory -- Of, relating to, or constituting a preface 1120. prelapsarian -- Of or relating to the period before the fall of Adam and Eve 1121. premonitory -- Giving premonition; serving to warn beforehand 1122. preponderant -- Having superior force, importance, or influence; Having greater weight; heavier 1123. prepossession -- A prejudice or bias, esp. a favorable one 1124. presbyopia -- A progressively diminishing ability of the eye to focus, noticeable from middle to old age, caused by loss of elasticity of the crystalline lens 1125. prescind -- To separate in thought; abstract. 1126. preterite -- 1. Bygone; former 2. A tense of verbs used to relate past action, formed in English by inflection of the verb, as jumped, swam 1127. primogeniture -- The state of being the firstborn or eldest child of the same parents. 1128. primus inter pares -- Literally (in Latin), first among equals 1129. procumbent -- 1. Lying face down; prone. 2. In botany: trailing along the ground but not rooting 1130. prodrome -- An early symptom indicating the onset of an attack or a disease. 1131. profligate -- 1. Shamelessly immoral or debauched; 2. wildly extravagant or wasteful 1132. progeria -- A rare genetic disorder of childhood that is characterized by rapid onset of the physical changes typical of old age, usually resulting in death before the age of 20 1133. prolegomenon -- A preliminary discussion, especially a formal essay introducing a work of considerable length or complexity 1134. proleptic -- 1. The anachronistic representation of something as existing before its proper or historical time, as in the precolonial United States; 2. the use of a descriptive word in anticipation of the act or circumstances that would make it applicable, as dry in They drained the lake dry 1135. prolix -- Tediously prolonged; wordy; longwinded 1136. prone -- Lying flat or face downwards; prostrate 1137. propaedeutic -- Providing introductory instruction; preparatory instruction 1138. propinquitous -- Near; close in time, place or kinship (page 12 of Main Street) 1139. propitious -- Favorable; auguring well; gracious or favorably inclined 1140. proprioception -- Unconscious awareness of body movement, e.g. as the inner ear for balance (page 515 of Reamde) 1141. proscenium -- The area of a modern theater that is located between the curtain and the orchestra. 1142. prosector -- A person who prepares or dissects anatomical subjects for demonstration 1143. prosopagnosia -- An inability to recognize faces 1144. prosopography -- 1. description of a person's life and career; 2. A study, often using statistics, that identifies and draws relationships between various characters or people within a specific historical, social, or literary context 1145. prosopopoeia -- Literary device involve an absent person speaking; personification; ascribing agency to an inanimate object or concept 1146. protanopia -- A form of colorblindness characterized by defective perception of red and confusion of red with green or bluish green. 1147. protasis -- The dependent clause of a conditional sentence (i.e. the “if” part) 1148. protodialectical -- Definition unknown (from Oblivion by David Foster Wallace) (dialectical means “the art or practice of arriving at the truth by the exchange of logical arguments”) 1149. psalmody -- The act of singing psalms or hymns 1150. psephology -- The study of political elections and polling 1151. psithurism -- The whispering of leaves moved by the wind 1152. psittacosis -- A rickettsial disease affecting birds of the parrot family, pigeons, and domestic fowl, caused by the chlamydia Chlamydia psittaci and transmissible to humans 1153. psychogenic -- Having origin in the mind or in a mental condition or process 1154. ptosis -- Ptosis is the term used for a drooping upper eyelid 1155. puericratic -- [definition unknown] (from Oblivion by David Foster Wallace) 1156. pugnacious -- Combative in nature 1157. pulchritude -- Beauty 1158. pullulate -- To breed rapidly or abundantly 1159. pulsion -- The act of driving forward 1160. punctilio -- A fine point of etiquette 1161. punnet -- A small basket for fruit, such as strawberries 1162. purblind -- 1. Slow in understanding or discernment; dull 2. Having poor vision; nearly or partly blind 1163. purdah -- Muslim practice of screening women from other men or strangers 1164. purlieus -- An outlying or neighboring area; outskirts; environs 1165. purslane -- A trailing plant (Portulaca oleracea) native to Eurasia, having small yellow flowers, reddish stems, and fleshy obovate leaves that can be cooked as a vegetable or used in salads 1166. purulent -- Containing, discharging, or causing the production of pus 1167. pusillanimous -- Cowardly 1168. putto -- A representation of a small child, often naked and having wings, used especially in the art of the European Renaissance. Pl.: putti 1169. pyaemia -- Blood poisoning characterized by pus-forming microorganisms in the blood 1170. quadrille -- A square dance in 6/8 or 2/4 time of French origin, composed of five sections and performed by four couples. 1171. quag -- To shake (said of something that is soft or flabby) 1172. quarto -- The page size obtained by folding a whole sheet into four leaves. 1173. quasiergot -- A pseudo language/lingo 1174. quern -- A simple hand mill for grinding grain, typically consisting of two stones 1175. quiddity -- 1. Essence of a thing; 2. a quibble 1176. quidnunc -- Busybody; Yenta 1177. quiff -- 1. A tuft of hair, esp. a forelock; 2. A woman regarded as promiscuous 1178. quinquennial -- Happening once every or lasting for five years. 1179. quintain -- A rotating target used in jousting exercises 1180. quire -- A set of twenty-four uniform sheets of paper 1181. quirt -- A riding whip with a short, stiff handle and a lash made of two or more loose thongs 1182. quit-rent -- Payment for distinct rights that were connected with the full enjoyment of the land but not parceled up in the ownership of the land (mostly replaced with property taxes today) 1183. quoin -- An exterior angle of a wall or other piece of masonry 1184. quokka -- A short-tailed herbivorous marsupial (Setonix brachyurus) found in coastal areas of southwestAustralia 1185. quondam -- Former 1186. raceme -- A flower cluster in which each flower grows on its own stalk from a common stem. The lily of the valley and snapdragon have racemes. 1187. racketeering -- A person who engages in an illegal business or other organized illegal activities 1188. raddled -- Twisted together; interwoven 1189. radome -- A domelike shell transparent to radio-frequency radiation, used to house a radar antenna 1190. raillery -- Good-natured teasing or ridicule; banter 1191. raiponce -- French name for a biennial Eurasian plant (Campanula rapunculus) having bell-shaped lilac flowers and an edible root. Known in English as rampion. 1192. ramify -- To have complicating consequences or outgrowths; to send out branches or subordinate branchlike parts. 1193. ramose -- Having many branches 1194. ranseur -- Also called roncone, was a polearm similar to the partisan used in Europe up to the 15th century. 1195. ravel -- 1. To separate the fibers or threads of; to unravel; 2. To tangle or complicate 1196. ravelin -- An outwork having two embankments at a salient angle 1197. rawboned -- Having a lean, gaunt frame with prominent bones 1198. Reaumur -- archaic: a temperature scale with the freezing point of water at 80º. 1199. rebarbative -- Tending to irritate; repellent 1200. rebeck -- Medieval instrument; a lute-like violin 1201. recondite -- Obscure; abstruse 1202. recreant -- 1. A faithless or disloyal person; 2. A coward 1203. recrudescent -- To break out anew or come into renewed activity, as after a period of quiescence 1204. recumbentibus -- A knockdown blow 1205. redolent -- Suggestive 1206. reef -- A vein of ore 1207. reeve -- 1. Any of various minor officers of parishes or other local authorities. 2. A bailiff or steward of a manor in the later medieval period. 1208. relict -- 1. Something that has survived; a remnant 2. A species that inhabits a much smaller geographic area than it did in the past, often because of environmental change 1209. reliquary -- A receptacle, such as a coffer or shrine, for keeping or displaying sacred relics 1210. renascent -- Becoming active or vigorous again 1211. reperfusion -- The restoration of blood flow to an organ or tissue that has had its blood supply cut off, as after a heart attack. 1212. repine -- To be discontented or low in spirits; complain or fret; to yearn after something 1213. retort -- A closed laboratory vessel with an outlet tube, used for distillation, sublimation, or decomposition by heat. 1214. retromingent -- One who urinates backwards 1215. retronym -- A new word coined for an existing or older thing to distinguish it from something newer or more recent (e.g. analog watch or electric guitar) 1216. retropulsion -- An abnormal tendency to walk backwards: a symptom of Parkinson's disease 1217. revanchism -- The act of retaliating, esp. by a nation or group to regain lost territory or standing; revenge 1218. revenant -- 1. One that returns after a lengthy absence; 2. One who returns after death 1219. revetments -- 1. A facing, as of masonry, used to support an embankment; 2. A barricade against explosives 1220. Rhadamanthine -- Strictly and uncompromisingly just 1221. rhonchus -- A snore or chest rattle 1222. rhotacism -- Difficulty pronouncing r sounds 1223. ricasso -- An unsharpened section of a sword or knife blade next to the hilt. 1224. riprap -- Piled broken stones used as a foundation or to stabilize an easily eroded bank or slope 1225. risible -- 1. Eliciting laughter; ludicrous 2. capable of laughing or inclined to laugh 1226. Risorgimento -- The period of or the movement for the liberation and political unification of Italy, beginning about 1750 and lasting until 1870 (from the Italian for “resurgence”) 1227. roman à clef -- A novel in which actual persons, places, or events are depicted in fictional guise 1228. rosser -- A bark-removing machine 1229. rota -- A work schedule 1230. roué -- A man who recklessly indulges in sensual pleasures; a rake 1231. roundel -- A circular architectural or decorative element, such as a painted panel or a stained glass window. 1232. roundelay -- A poem or song with a regularly recurring refrain (as much popular music) 1233. rumbustiousness -- Uncontrollably exuberant; unruly 1234. Ruritanian -- Of or relating to an imagined European kingdom characterized by provincialism, nationalism, and political intrigue; used in discussions of international law or economic theory 1235. rusk -- A light, soft-textured sweetened biscuit 1236. sabine -- A member of an ancient people of central Italy, conquered and assimilated by the Romans in 290 bc. 1237. Sadhu -- A person who dedicates themself to the pursuit of enlightenment through a life of isolation, self-deprivation, and feats of physical endurance. 1238. Saiva -- One who worships Shiva 1239. sacerdotal -- Of or relating to priests or the priesthood; priestly. 1240. sacerdotalism -- The belief that priests act as mediators between God and humans. 1241. Salesian -- Of or relating to St Francis of Sales or to the religious orders founded by him or by St John Bosco in his name 1242. salient -- 1. A military position that projects into the position of the enemy. 2. A projecting angle or part. 1243. salmagundi -- A mixture; a potpourri 1244. saltatrix -- A Bluefish; Bluefish are known as tailor in Australia and New Zealand, elf and shad in South Africa. 1245. saltire -- A cross in heraldry 1246. saltpeter -- Naturally occurring potassium nitrate, used in making fireworks, gunpowder 1247. salubrious -- Wholesome; healthy 1248. salvific -- Having the intention or power to bring about salvation or redemption 1249. salwar -- Loose pajamalike pants, typically having a drawstring waist and legs that narrow at the bottom, usually worn with a kameez 1250. sambar -- A large deer of southern Asia and the East Indies, with a rough shaggy mane and long curved antlers; also sambhur. 1251. samizdat -- Underground newspaper (from the Russian) 1252. samphire -- An edible coastal plant (Crithmum maritimum) in the parsley family, native to Eurasia (see glasswort) 1253. samsara -- The eternal cycle of birth, suffering, death, and rebirth (in Hinduism or Buddhism) 1254. sanguine -- Cheerfully optimistic 1255. sanicle -- Any plant belonging to the genus Sanicula, of the parsley family, as S. marilandica, of North America, used in medicine. 1256. sapper -- 1. A military engineer who lays, detects, and disarms mines; 2. a soldier who digs trenches 1257. Sapphism -- Lesbianism 1258. Sassanian -- Of or relating to a Persian dynasty (AD 224-651) and the last line of Persian kings before the Arab conquest. 1259. sastrugi -- A long wavelike ridge of snow, formed by the wind and found on the polar plains 1260. satori -- A spiritual awakening sought in Zen Buddhism, often coming suddenly 1261. satrap -- Governor of a province in ancient Persia 1262. satrapy -- The territory or sphere under the rule of a satrap 1263. satsuma -- A seedless mandarin orange originally cultivated in Japan. 1264. saturnine -- Slow and gloomy; morose 1265. sawyer -- A bobbing tree in a body of water 1266. scansion -- Analysis of verse into metrical patterns. 1267. scapular -- A monk's sleeveless outer garment that hangs from the shoulders and sometimes has a cowl 1268. schtum -- Silent (from the German stumm) 1269. sciatheric -- Belonging to a sundial 1270. scienter -- Knowledge that one's actions are wrong or contrary to law, where such knowledge is an element of a criminal offense or a basis for liability. 1271. sciolist -- A pretentious attitude of scholarship; superficial knowledgeability 1272. scordatura -- The technique of altering the normal tuning of a stringed instrument to produce particular effects. 1273. scoria -- Porous cinderlike fragments of dark lava. Also called cinders, slag 1274. scoriatic -- Cinder- or slag-like; rocky, craggy 1275. scotophliic -- Functioning best in darkness 1276. scourge -- A whip or lash 1277. scramasax -- A single-edged knife or sword used by the Anglo-Saxons 1278. scringe -- To shrug the back or shoulders from cold 1279. scripturient -- Having a strong urge to write 1280. scrouge -- To inconvenience or discomfort a person by pressing against him or her or by standing too close 1281. scutelliphile -- The hobby of collecting patches or badges 1282. searce -- To sift (obsolete) 1283. sebum -- The semifluid secretion of the sebaceous glands, consisting chiefly of fat, keratin, and cellular material 1284. secateurs -- Pruning shears; a small pair of shears for pruning, having a pair of pivoted handles, sprung so that they are normally open, and usually a single cutting blade that closes against a flat surface 1285. secondment -- Temporary transfer to another position or employment 1286. sedulously -- Assiduous; constant in effort; persevering (from A very short history of driving while black) 1287. seigneur -- A man of rank, esp. a feudal lord in the ancien régime 1288. seigniorage -- Revenue or a profit taken from the minting of coins 1289. seine -- A fishing net or the act of using one (page 653 of Reamde) 1290. semasiology -- Semantics; the study of semantic change 1291. semiotics -- The study of systems of communication 1292. sempiternal -- Infinite; enduring forever 1293. sempstress -- A rare word for seamstress 1294. seneschal -- A steward or major-domo (in charge of servants) 1295. sententious -- Given to moralizing in a pompous or affected manner 1296. septentrional -- Of the north; Germanic; used mostly on maps 1297. sepulchritude -- Tomb-like; also, sepulchral 1298. sequacious -- Unthinking and uncritical; slavish 1299. sequela -- A secondary consequence or result; condition resulting from a disease 1300. seraglio -- A large harem. 1301. serotype -- A group of closely related microorganisms distinguished by a characteristic set of antigens 1302. sesquipedalian -- Given to using long words 1303. shako -- A stiff, cylindrical military dress hat with a metal plate or badge in front, a short visor, and a plume or pompom 1304. shambles -- A slaughterhouse. 1305. sheela na gig -- Figurative carvings of naked women displaying an exaggerated vulva. 1306. shibboleth -- 1. An inappropriate or outdated custom; 2. A word or pronunciation that distinguishes people of one group or class from those of another 1307. shiplap -- Wooden siding rabbeted so that the edge of one board overlaps the one next to it in a flush joint. 1308. shirty -- Ill-tempered; angry 1309. shockheaded -- Having a head of bushy or tousled hair 1310. shotcrete -- Concrete conveyed through a hose and pneumatically projected at high velocity onto a surface. 1311. Shrovetide -- The three days, Shrove Sunday, Shrove Monday, and Shrove Tuesday, preceding Ash Wednesday. 1312. shufti -- A quick look around 1313. sibilent -- Hissing sound 1314. siderite -- A meteorite consisting mainly of iron and nickel. 1315. sine qua non -- An essential element or condition 1316. singultus -- A hiccup 1317. sinistre -- Left-hand; sinister (fr.) 1318. skittles -- Nine-pin bowling 1319. slapper -- A promiscuous woman 1320. slub -- A soft thick nub in yarn that is either an imperfection or purposely set for a desired effect. 1321. slunk -- A prematurely born calf or other animal 1322. snarge -- A collision of an aircraft with a bird (or the remnants thereof) 1323. soca -- A style of music, originating in the West Indies, that is a blend of soul and calypso 1324. sociolects -- A language variety that is associated with a specific social group (e.g. a profession-specific argot) 1325. sockdolager -- Something outstanding; a final blow or remark, coup de grace 1326. sodality -- Fellowship; fraternity; association; society 1327. solon -- A wise lawgiver; a legislator 1328. sonic -- Relating to or containing sodium 1329. soi-disant -- Self-styled; so-called 1330. solastalgia -- A form of emotional or existential distress caused by environmental change 1331. solecism -- A grammatical error; more generously, a non-standard usage 1332. solon -- A legislator 1333. somatically -- Corporeal or physical; of, relating to, or affecting the body, esp. as distinguished from a body part, the mind, or the environment 1334. somaticize -- To convert (anxiety) into physical symptoms. 1335. sommian -- A volcanic caldera that has been partially filled by a new central cone 1336. sortilege -- The act or practice of foretelling the future by drawing lots. 1337. soteriological -- The branch of theology dealing with the nature and means of salvation. 1338. soviet -- One of the popularly elected legislative assemblies that were created after the Russian Revolution (1917) and existed at local, regional, and national levels in the former Soviet Union. 1339. sozzled -- Intoxicated; drunk; see temulent and squiffy 1340. spadix -- A fleshy clublike spike bearing minute flowers, usually enclosed within a sheathlike spathe, characteristic of aroid plants such as the jack-in-the-pulpit 1341. spall -- A chip, fragment, or flake from a piece of stone or ore 1342. spanandry -- Scarcity of males in a population. 1343. spandrel -- The roughly triangular space between the left or right exterior curve of an arch and the rectangular framework surrounding it. 1344. sparge -- 1. To spray or sprinkle; 2. To run additional water through (a partly or completely drained mash) to extract more fermentable sugars; 3. To introduce air or gas into (a liquid) 1345. spatchcock -- To prepare for roasting or grilling by splitting open 1346. spathe -- A leaflike bract that encloses or subtends a flower cluster or spadix, as in the jack-in-the-pulpit 1347. spatterdashes -- Long leather leggings worn in the 18th century, as to protect from mud when riding 1348. spavined -- Decrepit or worn out 1349. speculum -- 1. A mirror or polished metal plate used as a reflector in optical instruments; 2. An instrument for dilating the opening of a body cavity for medical examination; 3. A bright, often iridescent patch of color on the wings of certain birds, esp. ducks 4. A transparent spot in the wings of some butterflies or moths. 1350. sphingid -- A hawk moth. 1351. spinel -- A hard, glassy mineral composed of magnesium-aluminum oxide found in metamorphosed limestones and many basic and ultrabasic igneous rocks 1352. spinet -- A small, compact upright piano 1353. spitchcock -- An eel split and grilled or fried; see spatchcock 1354. sporran -- A leather or fur pouch worn at the front of the kilt in the traditional dress of men of the Scottish Highlands 1355. sprezzatura -- Studied nonchalance; graceful conduct or performance without apparent effort 1356. sprue -- 1. The hole through which molten material is channeled into a mold; 2. The usually plastic rod or framework that secures molded objects, such as model parts 1357. squamous -- Covered with or formed of scales; scaly 1358. squiffy -- Intoxicated; drunk; see temulent and sozzled 1359. squireen -- A pretty squire 1360. staggers -- Any of various diseases in animals, esp. horses, cattle, or other domestic animals, that are characterized by a lack of coordination in moving 1361. stalagnates -- Stalagnates look “stagnant” or completely formed (even though they are still growing). 1362. starosta -- The headman of a Russian village, the chief administrator of a Polish county, or regional Polish nobleman who had official or royal duties 1363. steatopygia -- An extreme accumulation of fat on the buttocks. 1364. stele -- An upright stone or slab with an inscribed or sculptured surface, used as a monument or as a commemorative tablet in the face of a building. 1365. stenosis -- A constriction or narrowing of a duct or passage; a stricture. 1366. sterlet -- A small sturgeon (Acipenser ruthenus) native to rivers flowing into the Black and Caspian Seas, having roe that is used for caviar. 1367. stochastic -- Of, relating to, or characterized by conjecture; Involving or containing a random variable or process 1368. stolon -- A long thin stem that usually grows horizontally along the ground and produces roots and shoots at widely spaced nodes, as in a strawberry plant. Also called runner. 1369. stook -- A group of sheaves of grain stood on end in a field 1370. stot -- To jump straight up with straight legs (e.g. antelope) 1371. stoush -- A fight or brawl 1372. strabismus -- The condition of being cross-eyed 1373. strath -- A strath is a large valley, typically a river valley that is wide and shallow 1374. Strega -- The Italian word for witch 1375. stridulate -- To produce a shrill grating, chirping, or hissing sound by rubbing body parts together, as certain insects do 1376. stroppy -- Bad-tempered and argumentative 1377. stylobate -- The immediate foundation of a row of classical columns 1378. suasion -- Persuasion 1379. subaltern -- A person of inferior rank or position 1380. subfusc -- 1. Of a dark, dull, or somber color; 2. Dark, dull clothing. 1381. subtiliation -- 1. The act of making something thin, rare, or subtile; 2. To think subtly 1382. succussation -- Trotting, shaking 1383. Suetonius -- Roman historian whose major work, Lives of the Caesars, is an account of the lives of the first 12 Roman emperors 1384. sui generis -- Unique 1385. Sukkot -- A harvest festival commemorating the booths in which the Israelites resided during their 40 years in the wilderness 1386. sump -- A depression at the bottom of a shaft where water collects before it is pumped away 1387. sumptuary -- Laws or limits on private expenses 1388. superannuated -- Retired or ineffective because of advanced age 1389. supererogation -- Doing more than required 1390. supernacular -- First-rate 1391. supernumerary -- 1. One that is in excess of the regular, necessary, or usual number; 2. An actor without a speaking part, as one who appears in a crowd scene. 1392. supersedure -- Replacement of an old or diseased queen bee with a new one. 1393. supine -- Lying on the back or having the face upward 1394. surfactant -- A substance, such as detergent, that is added to a liquid to increase its ability to spread. 1395. suzerain -- A nation that controls another nation in international affairs but allows it domestic sovereignty. 1396. sweetmeat -- A sweet delicacy, such as a piece of candy or crystallized fruit 1397. swingeing -- Extreme in effect; drastic 1398. swot -- To cram; derogatory term for a person who crams 1399. syce -- A stableman or groom, esp. in India 1400. syenite -- An igneous rock composed primarily of alkali feldspar together with other minerals, such as hornblende 1401. syllepsis -- See zeugma 1402. sylph -- A slim, graceful woman or girl. 1403. sympatetic -- A walking companion 1404. syncope -- 1. The shortening of a word by omission of a sound, letter, or syllable from the middle of the word; for example, bos'n for boatswain.2. A brief loss of consciousness caused by inadequate blood flow to the brain. 1405. syncretic -- 1. Reconciliation or fusion of differing systems of belief, as in philosophy or religion, esp. when success is partial or the result is heterogeneous; 2. The merging of two or more originally different inflectional forms in linguistics. 1406. synecdoche -- A trope whereby a part is used as a label for the whole (e.g. "hand" for "sailor"); see metonymy 1407. synodic -- Relating to the period of time required for an object to complete a single orbital period. 1408. tabard -- A tunic or capelike garment worn by a knight over his armor and emblazoned with his coat of arms 1409. tabes -- A wasting of a bodily organ or part 1410. tabun -- A poisonous liquid that is soluble in organic solvents, C5H11N2O2P, used as a nerve agent in chemical warfare. 1411. tacenda -- Things not to be mentioned; matters that are passed over in silence 1412. tallboy -- A high chest of drawers made in two sections and placed one on top of the other; chest-on-chest 1413. talmudic -- Related to the collection of ancient Rabbinic writings constituting the basis of religious authority in Orthodox Judaism 1414. tamarisk -- Any shrub or small tree having small scalelike or needle-shaped leaves and feathery racemes of small white or pinkish flowers 1415. tangible -- Discernible by the touch; palpable 1416. taphonomic -- The study of the events and processes, such as burial in sediment, transportation, and decomposition, that affect the remains of an organism after it dies. 1417. taphonomy -- The branch of paleontology that deals with the processes of fossilization. 1418. tapotement -- Rapid massage 1419. tarpon -- Either of two large marine game fishes having a bluish-green back and silvery sides (Megalops cyprinoides of the Pacific and Indian Oceans or M. atlanticus of Atlantic coastal waters) 1420. Tartaros -- The abysmal regions below Hades where the Titans were confined. 1421. Tefillin -- See phylactery. 1422. tegument -- A natural outer covering; an integument 1423. Telemachus -- The son of Odysseus and Penelope, who helped his father kill Penelope's suitors 1424. teleology -- The philosophical interpretation of natural phenomena as exhibiting purpose or design 1425. telluric -- Of or relating to Earth; terrestrial 1426. telluride -- A chemical compound of tellurium and another element. 1427. telos -- End of a goal-oriented process 1428. temerarious -- In an audacious manner 1429. tempera -- A painting medium in which pigment is mixed with water-soluble glutinous materials such as size or egg yolk 1430. temulent -- Intoxicated; drunk; see sozzled and squiffy 1431. tendentious -- Partisan; marked by or favoring a particular point of view 1432. tenebrous -- Dark and gloomy 1433. tensegrity -- An architectural technique that involves tensional integrity or floating compression (see "Wikipedia" <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tensegrity>) 1434. tenue -- A way of carrying oneself 1435. tephra -- Solid matter that is ejected into the air by an erupting volcano 1436. tergiversate -- To use evasions or ambiguities; to evade, to equivocate using subterfuge; to deliberately obfuscate. 1437. termagant -- A scold; a shrew 1438. tertium quid -- Something that cannot be classified into either of two groups considered exhaustive; an intermediate thing or factor. 1439. thaumaturgic -- The working of miracles or magic feats 1440. theodicy -- A vindication of God's goodness and justice in the face of the existence of evil 1441. theodolite -- A surveying instrument 1442. theophany -- An appearance of a god to a human; a divine manifestation 1443. theriac -- An ointment or potion of varying composition, used as an antidote to a poison 1444. thermobaric -- Detonated by means of an explosive substance reacting spontaneously with air 1445. thill -- Either of the two long shafts between which an animal is fastened when pulling a wagon or cart. 1446. throstle -- 1. Any of various thrushes, esp. a song thrush; 2. A machine formerly used for spinning fibers such as cotton or wool 1447. thurible -- A censer used in certain ecclesiastical ceremonies or liturgies 1448. thylacine -- Tasmanian tiger; an extinct or very rare doglike carnivorous marsupial 1449. thymos -- The Ancient Greek concept of 'spiritedness' (as in "a spirited stallion" or "spirited debate").[1] The word indicates a physical association with breath or blood and is also used to express the human desire for recognition. 1450. tierce -- The third of the seven canonical hours; 1/3 of a pipe or 42 gallons; three cards of the same suit; third position in fencing; an interval of a third 1451. tillandsia -- Any of various usually epiphytic bromeliad plants of the genus Tillandsia, such as Spanish moss, of tropical and subtropical America. 1452. tilth -- 1. Tilled earth; 2. The fitness of soil for cultivation, as measured by its structure and composition. 1453. tippet -- A scarf-like narrow piece of clothing, worn over the shoulders 1454. tipstaff -- 1. A staff tipped with metal, formerly carried as a badge of office, as by a constable; 2. any official who carried such a staff 1455. titivate -- To decorate or spruce up 1456. tittle -- 1. A small diacritic mark, such as an accent, vowel mark, or dot over an i. 2. The tiniest bit; an iota 1457. tocsin -- An alarm sounded on a bell 1458. tontine -- A common fund with increasing annuity for each member's death and the last living member gets everything 1459. toothsome -- Delicious, luscious, pleasant, attractive, sexually attractive or exciting 1460. topolect -- The language or speech of a particular place (e.g. Züridütsch) 1461. toponym -- A place name; a name derived from a place or region 1462. toponymy -- The place names of a region or language; the study of such place names; also toponomy 1463. torpid -- Mentally or physically inactive; lethargic 1464. torrid -- 1. Parched with the heat of the sun; intensely hot; 2. Passionate; ardent 1465. tosh -- Rubbish; nonsense 1466. tournure -- Implement to expand a dress; a bustle 1467. towhee -- A strikingly marked, oversized sparrow of the East, feathered in bold black and warm reddish-browns 1468. toxophily -- Archery; toxophilite: A student or lover of archery 1469. tracklement -- Savory jelly served with meat 1470. traduce -- To expose to shame or blame by means of falsehood and misrepresentation 1471. traduction -- A transmission or communication; a translation into a different language 1472. transducer -- Any device, such as a microphone or electric motor, that converts one form of energy into another 1473. tref -- Unfit to be eaten; not kosher (corresponds to haram or not halal in Islam) 1474. trenchant -- Clear-cut; forceful or convincing 1475. trepidation -- A state of alarm or dread; apprehension 1476. tressure -- A narrow inner border on a shield, usually decorated with fleurs-de-lys 1477. trews -- Trousers; chiefly British 1478. tricontagon -- A closed plane figure bounded by three or more line segments. 1479. tripe -- Something of no value; rubbish 1480. trope -- Metaphor or non-literal figure of speech 1481. trow -- To think or suppose 1482. truckle -- 1. A small wheel/caster; 2. to be servile 1483. truckling -- To be servile or submissive 1484. trug -- A shallow, usually oval gardening basket made with wide strips of wood 1485. trull -- A woman prostitute. 1486. trypophobia -- An intense, irrational fear of objects with small holes 1487. tsuris -- Problems or difficulties (Yiddish) 1488. tumid -- 1. Swollen; distended. Used of a body part or organ; 2. Of a bulging shape; protuberant; 3. Overblown; bombastic 1489. tumulus -- An ancient grave mound; a barrow (pl. tumuli) 1490. turnkey -- Supplied, installed, or purchased in a condition ready for immediate use, occupation, or operation 1491. tutoyer -- To speak to (someone) on familiar terms 1492. tympany -- Excessive pride or arrogance; inflated manner or style; bombast. 1493. tzitzit -- Specially knotted ritual fringes, or tassels worn by Jewish men around their waist 1494. ukase -- An authoritative order or decree; an edict 1495. ultracrepidarianism -- The habit of giving opinions and advice on matters outside of one’s knowledge or competence. 1496. unasinous -- Sharing the same amount of stupidity; displaying ignorance or foolishness by all. 1497. unction -- Something that serves to soothe; a balm 1498. unctuous -- Excessively ingratiating or insincerely earnest; oily 1499. undecillion -- The cardinal number equal to 10³⁶; British: 10⁶⁶ 1500. undisonant -- Making the sound of waves 1501. unprepossessing -- Creating an unfavorable or neutral first impression 1502. usquebaugh -- Whiskey 1503. usufruct -- Right to use the property of others 1504. uxorious -- Love of or submission to one's wife 1505. vade mecum -- 1. A useful thing that one constantly carries about; 2. A book, such as a guidebook, for ready reference. 1506. vair -- Red-squirrel fur; often used a trimming 1507. valetudinarian -- 1. Chronically ailing; sickly; 2. Constantly and morbidly concerned with one's health 1508. vambrace -- Forearm armor 1509. vastation -- Quick destruction; from the Italian vastare. 1510. vatic -- Of or characteristic of a prophet; oracular (see veridical) 1511. vecturist -- A collector of tokens used in buses and subways 1512. veisalgia -- A hangover (from the Norwegian for “suffering after debauchery”) 1513. vellum -- A fine parchment made from calfskin, lambskin, or kidskin and used for the pages and binding of books 1514. venal -- Open to bribery; mercenary 1515. venery -- The indulgence in or pursuit of sexual activity 1516. venire -- The panel of prospective jurors from which a jury is selected 1517. ventre à terre -- belly to the ground; at full speed; flat out 1518. venule -- A small vein, especially one joining capillaries to larger veins. 1519. verdigris -- A green patina or crust of copper sulfate or copper chloride formed on copper, brass, and bronze exposed to air or seawater for long periods of time 1520. veridical -- 1. Truthful; veracious; 2. Coinciding with future events or apparently unknowable present realities (see vatic) 1521. verisimilitude -- Believable; appearing to be true 1522. vermian -- Resembling or of the nature of a worm; of or relating to worms. 1523. vermilion -- Brilliant or vivid red (also written vermillion) 1524. vernacular -- 1. The everyday language spoken by a people as distinguished from the literary language 2. Built in the local style of ordinary houses, rather than a grand architectural style 1525. vernix -- The waxy white substance found coating the skin of newborn human babies 1526. versipellous -- Changeable, protean 1527. vesicle -- A sac or cyst, esp. one containing fluid 1528. vespertine -- Of, relating to, or occurring in the evening (e.g. active or blooming in the evening) 1529. vetch -- Any of several climbing plants of the legume family, bearing pea-like flowers 1530. vicambulist -- One who walks about in the streets 1531. vicissitude -- Alternation between opposite or contrasting things 1532. vigorish -- 1. A fee charged for the placement of bets by an illegal gambling broker or establishment; 2. Frequent and excessive interest payments charged by an illegal moneylender 1533. villein -- One of a class of feudal serfs who held the legal status of freemen in their dealings with all people except their lord 1534. vinous -- 1. Of, relating to, or made with wine; 2. Having the color of wine 1535. violaceous -- Of a violet color; reddish blue 1536. virago -- 1. A woman regarded as noisy, scolding, or domineering; 2. A large, strong, courageous woman 1537. vitiate -- Spoil or impair the quality or efficiency of 1538. voivode -- A Slavic military commander or a governor of a town or province in parts of SE Europe 1539. volvulus -- Abnormal twisting of the intestine causing obstruction 1540. wale -- One of the heavy planks or strakes extending along the sides of a wooden ship 1541. weeper -- A hole or pipe in a wall to allow water to run off 1542. whelm -- To cover with water; submerge 1543. whin -- Any spiny European evergreen shrub having rudimentary leaves and yellow flowers (also called gorse or furze) 1544. whipping boy -- Scapegoat; a boy formerly raised with a prince or other young nobleman and whipped for the latter's misdeeds 1545. white goods -- Large appliances, like refrigerators and washing machines; compare to brown goods, which are TVs, radios, etc. 1546. widdershins -- In a contrary or counterclockwise direction 1547. windlestraw -- A thin, dried stalk of grass. 1548. withe -- Also withy; a tough, supple twig, used to bind 1549. woad -- An annual Eurasian plant (Isatis tinctoria) in the mustard family, formerly cultivated for its leaves that yield a blue dye. 1550. xenium -- A gift given to a guest 1551. yegg -- A thief, especially a burglar or safecracker 1552. yonic -- Related the vagina, esp. religious rel. to Shakti 1553. zazen -- The primary form of meditation in Zen Buddhism, practiced while sitting cross-legged 1554. zeugma -- When a word applies to two others in jarringly different ways (e.g. John and his license expired yesterday.) 1555. zoetrope -- A mechanical device consisting of a rotating drum ringed with narrow apertures through which an animated image is viewed ]]> </content> </entry> <entry> <title type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Books read in 2018]]> </title> <id>https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3497</id> <link href="https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3497"/> <updated>2018-12-27T22:13:36+01:00</updated> <author> <name type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Marco von Ballmoos]]> </name> <uri>https://earthli.com/users/marco</uri> </author> <summary type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[ 1. "American Gods (2002)" <#American> 2. "The Stone Sky (2017)" <#Stone> 3. "The God of Small Things (1997)" <#God> 4. "The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (2017)" <#Ministry> 5. "Alone on the Wall (2016)" <#Alone> 6. "Ten Days that Shook the World (1919)" <#Ten> 7. "The Forever War (1974)" <#Forever> 8. "The United States of Absurdity (2017)" <#Absrudity> 9. "Adults in the Room: My Battle with the European and American" <#Adults> ... ]]> </summary> <content type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Published by marco on 27. Dec 2018 22:13:36 Updated by marco on 10. Feb 2026 21:31:05 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ 1. "American Gods (2002)" <#American> 2. "The Stone Sky (2017)" <#Stone> 3. "The God of Small Things (1997)" <#God> 4. "The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (2017)" <#Ministry> 5. "Alone on the Wall (2016)" <#Alone> 6. "Ten Days that Shook the World (1919)" <#Ten> 7. "The Forever War (1974)" <#Forever> 8. "The United States of Absurdity (2017)" <#Absrudity> 9. "Adults in the Room: My Battle with the European and American Deep Establishment (2017)" <#Adults> 10. "Industrial Society and its Future (1995)" <#Industrial> 11. "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas (1973)" <#Omelas> 12. "Rogues (2014)" <#Rogues> 13. "The Lathe of Heaven (1971)" <#Lathe> 14. "On the Beach (1957)" <#Beach> 15. "Dispatches (1977)" <#Dispatches> 16. "Savage Season: A Hap and Leonard Novel (1990)" <#Savage> 17. "Grand Forks: A History of American Dining in 128 Reviews (2013)" <#Grand> 18. ""Laurie" <https://stephenking.com/other/stephenking-laurie.pdf> (2018)" <https://stephenking.com/other/stephenking-laurie.pdf> 19. "The Night Watch (1998 -- en/2006)" <#Night> 20. "The Day Watch (2000 -- en/2007)" <#Day> 21. "The Twilight Watch (2003 -- en/2007)" <#Twilight> 22. "The Last Watch (2006 -- en/2008)" <#Last> 23. "The New Watch (2011 -- en/2012)" <#New> 24. "The Sixth Watch (2012 – en/2013)" <#Sixth> 25. "Mucho Mojo (a Hap and Leonard Novel) (1994)" <#Mucho> 26. "The Two-Bear Mambo (a Hap and Leonard Novel) (1995)" <#Mambo> 27. "Ultimate Threshold: A Collection of the Finest in Soviet Science Fiction (1970)" <#Ultimate> 28. "Midnight at the Pera Palace: The Birth of Modern Istanbul (2014)" <#Midnight> 29. "Bad Chili (a Hap and Leonard Novel) (1997)" <#Bad> 30. "The Jungle Book (1894)" <#Jungle> 31. "Star Maker (1937)" <#Star> American Gods (2002) by Neil Gaiman This is a fantasy novel about gods. It is less about the nature of faith and more about the gods themselves: on how they are called into being by the myriad flickers of belief of humans, gaining power as this belief hardens to nigh-fanaticism. All gods have power, but many have faded as their believers have faded. There are the old gods of early man, the gods of the Native Americans, the all-but-forgotten gods of even their precursors, the Egyptian pantheon, more recent African gods, the Norse pantheon, the plethora of spirits and pixies (piskies) and kobolds and gremlins and leprechauns of Europe. Gaiman doesn't once mention any Greek or Roman gods, oddly enough. When people came over from Europe to America, they brought their gods with them. They nurtured the flame of belief in their minds, carrying a simulacrum from one shore to another. The original god remained in Europe or Africa or Asia and was aware of its copy in the new world. The copy flourished after a fashion, but soon discovered that America was poor soil for gods. Faith and belief guttered and the gods were forgotten in favor of new gods, like Mammon. The copies become shadows, imbued with power, but left to fend for themselves in whatever way they could, going along to get along. The Gods of Egypt run a funeral home, ferrying the dead to their final destination, as they always have. Odin, the all-father, is a grifter, running one scheme/scam after another. Bathsheba is a prostitute, consuming her faithful to stay alive. The story centers on Shadow. He is serving time in prison for a crime of violence. He is due to be out soon. He has improved himself. He is a giant of a man, a former physical trainer. He has learned the ancient philosophers. He has learned coin tricks. His mind is clean and his soul is more-or-less pure. He is a stoic. He yearns to return to his wife and start a fresh life. He is allowed to leave a few days early for a horrible reason: his wife is dead. She was killed in a car accident with his best friend, who was also to be his future employer. Shadow's dreams are truncated neatly. He has nowhere to go; nothing to do. He has only a funeral to attend and then nothing. This is where Mr. Wednesday (named after his own day, HINT) swoops in to draw Shadow into his own plans. Shadow learns many things and meets many people (mostly gods) and learns that there is a war coming: between the old gods and the new. The new gods are television, media, the Internet and so on. The new gods have the arrogance of youth, brash and powerful, feeling the power of the faith of millions coursing through their veins. They don't see the undercurrents of rot in America; they don't see that faith cannot take root in fallow soil. They don't know, as many of the old gods do, that they are doomed. Perhaps some do and they fear their demise and, American to the core, they ignore what they know and plow ahead, heedless of the damage and harm they cause for a few more moments of fleeting power. The land is represented by a buffalo and is the most powerful, but least felt or seen. He/she appears only in Shadow's dreams. Whiskey Jack is also of the land, an odd bystander who exists outside of belief. The native gods are the ones most comfortable in this landscape, as is to be expected. Wednesday schemes with 'Low Key' Lyesmith (guess who?) to bring the "war" to a head, a bloodbath of heretofore unheard-of proportions, all to fuel their power: Odin/Wotan's because the battle would be dedicated to him and Loki's because chaos is his milieu. Shadow foils this plan with his stoic self-sacrifice that ends up not killing him, but making him stronger. He tells the gods that they have been fooled into hating each other, into killing each other. They disperse, most going back to their meager existence on the edges of humanity. The status quo continues. Gaiman weaves this tale around many side-narratives and fables of how various gods came to be, how they were carried over, how they survived. Recommended. I've included "notes, citations and errata" <https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3496> in a separate post. The Stone Sky (2017) by N. K. Jemisin This is the third book of the Broken Earth series. The underground city of Castrima is no longer habitable after the epic battle at the end of the Obelisk Gate. Alabaster is gone, having been turned into a stone eater. Essun's arm below the elbow is also stone, leading her on the same path as Alabaster. This means that she can no longer perform orogeny without sacrificing parts of her body to stone. She can choose, though, so after the first time, where she loses a hand and part of an arm, she funnels the damage to a breast instead. But it's not really stone, is it? It's solidified magic and she is growing ever more adept at manipulating the magic that underlies orogeny, that is it's founding principle. Jemisin weaves the massive myth ever larger, telling us of the deep history of mankind. How mankind built the obelisks to harness magic power, how humanity enslaved a race that was the master of deep magic, but not the master of technology. She tells of how this race was wiped out, but rebuilt in the form of several adepts who would become the original stone eaters (including Hoa). The ossification process Essun is undergoing -- and which Alabaster completed -- is the stone-eater's form of reproduction, of getting new members of their ancient race. The story tells of how mankind bored down to the core -- through the core -- to tap what it thought would be an unlimited supply of magic, how humanity sought to harness this power with the original stone-eaters from a moon base and using the massive obelisks to focus their power. She tells of how Father Earth exists -- and that he's pissed. He struck back, taking over some of the obelisks, thwarting the process, making humanity blow the moon out of orbit and starting the first of the Seasons that would plague the planet for dozens of Millennia. The story of the Guardians is also fleshed-out: they are agents of Father Earth, imbued with magical power through a bit of the Earth's core lodged in their sessapinae (in their brains). The technology and the world and the history and myth is a wonderfully imagined and woven tale, bringing together many elements of magic and science and also strongly reflecting our own history, predilections and prejudices. The plot follows Nassun as she ends up in a colony in Antarctica with her father Jija -- and under the tutelage of Schaffa, her mother's former Guardian. Schaffa has changed, though, and is no longer fully under the control of Father Earth. He wants to help Nassun achieve her goal of burning everything to the ground -- destroying the Earth and humanity that would produce such a blighted landscape and unending torture for her and her people (orogenes). For this, she ventures to Corepoint, but first travels to an ancient city from which the attack on Father Earth was originally launched. Here, we learn more about its history, before she and Schaffa take an ancient monorail through the heart of the planet to Corepoint. At the same time, Essun and the rest of Castrima adventure their way to Rennanis, the city that they defeated at the end of the second book. They establish themselves in this old and enormous city, but Essun knows she must move on. She must accompany Hoa, her stone-eater, to try to right what humanity broke many, many years ago. All of her friends come with her, traveling in a group through the center of the Earth, slipped through the strata by Hoa. They are attacked by other stone eaters along the way and there is attrition. Essun seeks to recapture the Moon and put it back in orbit, to make peace with Father Earth and put an end to the seasons. She must fight Nassun on this -- who wants to use the Obelisk Gate to plow the Moon into the Earth and kill everyone. Having seen how the stone eaters live, Nassun changes her plan (she's only 10 or 11) and decides to use the power of the Obelisk Gate to change all of humanity into stone eaters instead. Essun battles against her, but eventually gives up, expending her last power to let her daughter have her own way and turning to stone. Nassun takes pity and fulfills her mother's plan instead, using the power of the Obelisk Gate to align the Moon back into its former orbit. Father Earth is pleased and agrees to a truce with mankind. In the epilogue, Essun awakes as a stone eater and starts to pick up the pieces of an Earth that knows peace with Father Earth, that once again has a moon, with hopefully much-humbled humans and no more Seasons. I've included "notes, citations and errata" <https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3507> in a separate post. The God of Small Things (1997) by Arundhati Roy This is a chronological jumble of images from the lives of a family in Kerala that languorously focuses to a story about India itself and its age-old problem with caste—with its inherent and deeply seated racism. The focus is on two time periods: the 50s and the 80s. In the 50s, a pair of odd twins (Rahel and Estha) are young and precocious. They eagerly await the arrival of another young girl (Sophie Mol) from England, with her mother. Her mother (Margaret) had divorced their uncle many years before. Their uncle Chacko is a frustrated anglophile and faux-Communist. There are real communists (Comrade K. N. M. Pillai) in this story, there are untouchables. There are older generations whose story is told as well—of their upbringing in an even-more unforgiving world than the already-awful late 60s/early 70s in India. This is long after Partition, but still enemies are everywhere and anti-Communism rides high. In the late 60s, the twins befriend and untouchable (Velutha) who is older than they. He is more their mother’s (Ammu) age—and those two become lovers. The family, deep-set in their racist ways, cannot abide this and punishes her. They send her away; she dies young. The children are scattered to the winds, only to return years later to the poisoned home, still run by the same inbred-thinking people who’d chased everyone away to protect themselves and their pitiful reputations (Baby Kochama and her erstwhile compatriot. Estha hasn’t spoken in years; Rahel drags around a lifetime of bad decisions, including a divorced husband in the States. They all mostly live short, brutish lives of quiet desperation in a country that has no plan or pity for most of the people who live in it. Roy’s prose is beautiful at times, describing an India whose heart is decayed—and whose outward appearance becomes increasingly so. I've included "notes, citations and errata" <https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3513> in a separate post. The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (2017) by Arundhati Roy This is a story of Kashmir. It is a story of the downtrodden peoples of India, of the second-class quasi-citizens, of those at the edges of society who actually make up the large part of India's population. It is a story of those left behind, those ignored, those who protest the status quo, the communists, the Marxists, the Maoists, who cry for justice for all. It is a story of fiction that starts off in the poorest neighborhoods of Delhi where a young girl is born in a boy's body. She has both parts and must decide which to keep. She names herself Anjum and moves into a community of fellow travelers, making a living in this community. There is the starving professional, professorial protester, Dr. Azad Bharatiya. There is a man who named himself Saddam Hussein. There are four university friends who go their separate ways, crossing paths again and again throughout the dingy, evil history of India's occupation of Kashmir. S. Tilottama is a reclusive young architect who doesn't work as an architect. Garson Hobart (Biplab Dasgupta) works in the Indian secret service, helping her out from time to time as well as being her landlord in latter years. Musa Yeswi drifts into the Kashmir conflict on the side of the militants, rising through the ranks -- but only after his wife and daughter are killed by casual, careless Indian troops firing indiscriminately into a crowd out of fear at an exploding drinks container. His daughter is -- or rather was -- Miss Jebeen the first. And, finally, there is the rudderless and therefore successful "journalist" Nagaraj Hariharan, to whom Tilo is married for years, though her affair with Musa continues throughout. It's complicated. Garson tells the story retrospectively, having moved back into the apartment that he'd rented to Tilo after she'd left for Anjum's compound built on a graveyard, where she finally finds peace and happiness in a community that includes her "daughter" Miss Jebeen the second. Garson goes through all of Tilo's notes about Musa's activities but, instead of using it against them all in his capacity as a high-level Indian secret-service operative, he becomes convinced of Kashmir's side of the argument -- that India should remove itself and leave the people free. The story is told out of order (as was The God of Small Things) and most of the people lead very unorthodox lives. Roy is highly critical of the direction of Indian society, highly critical of the rulers-that-be, of the duplicitous middle class. The path that India has taken is similar to that taken by the US: the historical and cultural racism of the caste system has had -- and continues to have -- the same disastrous effect as the endemic racism in America. I've included "notes, citations and errata" <https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3522> in a separate post. Alone on the Wall (2016) by Alex Honnold with David Roberts This is an autobiography by a man not yet 30 years old. It's a bit presumptuous to write a biography so early, but that's the way the world is now. I wouldn't ordinarily read such a thing, but it was a gift from two very good friends, so I gave it a go. Honnold is an excellent rock climber. He's very skilled and seemingly very lucky. I'm convinced he can't tell the difference, taking credit for luck and crediting skill to luck. Still, he's done amazing things in the climbing world: he's most famous for his free solos of giant climbing walls in Yosemite and environs. He's most proud of what he calls his link-ups, multiple climbs in a single day, with logistics between them either by fast hiking/running or cycling. Ten Days that Shook the World (1919) by John Reed This is a first-hand account of the ten days prior to and just after the Russian Revolution in November of 1917, John Reed was living in St. Petersburg as things got into full swing. He was a strongly left-leaning journalist with at least a partial grasp of the Russian language, though it's unclear how well he could read it. It's hard to believe that he didn't understand any of it, considering how much of the book seems to have been transcribed from meetings or conversations in the street. The book offers an enthusiastic and detailed account of the involvement of the myriad participants and factions. The book covers many of the intrigues between factions involved in the revolutions as well as the external pressures of the other nations of Europe -- Finland, England, Germany and others. These were trying from the very beginning to extinguish the Bolshevik revolution that they saw as an infectious threat to all that they'd taken for themselves. The Russian refusal to continue fighting alongside the other nations in WWI, throwing away its young men's lives for the capitalists, was the final straw: they had to be eliminated before they were allowed to show that another way was possible. Internal forces -- particularly in the person of Yussov Djugashvili-Stalin took care of the rest. I've included "notes, citations and errata" <https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3530> in a separate post. The Forever War (1974) by Joe Haldeman The parallels between the Forever War and the Vietnam War are not coincidental. This book was written at the tail-end of the Vietnam war by a veteran. In the Forever War, the enemy is an alien race that no-one has ever seen. The war starts with an incident and escalates quickly. There are years between incidents, relativistic limits being what they are. The soldiers are chosen from the best and the brightest -- the elite scientists and minds of the current generation. The story touches on many topics that would be covered again and again in subsequent novels, but which were featured first in this book. The population of Earth turns to homosexuality as a form of population control, the soldiers sent off to war experience jarring shifts in the culture to which they return -- just like Vietnam veterans did -- but in the Forever War, it's due to extreme time-dilation effects from their relativistic flights to their battlegrounds. Haldeman conjectures that any given battle between humans and the Taurans could go either way because it was never clear which side was more advanced in any given confrontation. Because of relativistic travel times, it was possible for there to be nearly a century of additional scientific and military development between them. Haldeman also likens what it would be like to return to Earth after many decades to the feeling of disjuncture experienced by any war veterans. What's the point of fighting at all when the homeland can barely remember that there's a war on at all? Why not run away when no-one can prove that you did? He discusses how language and culture shifts so much that returning soldiers need translators for both language and customs. During the final battle, I was convinced that the Taurans didn't actually exist and that humans had actually been fighting themselves all along -- just separated across relativistic time. This turned out not to be the case -- instead the Taurans and the humans of the future have more in common with each other than the human soldiers of the past. The humans of the future become a hive-mind -- just like the Taurans were all along. I've included "notes, citations and errata" <https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3532> in a separate post. The United States of Absurdity (2017) by Dave Anthony and Gareth Reynolds This is a simple and short book full of odd stories about American history. The two authors host The Dollop podcast, during which they've covered many of these stories already. Some of the older stories are interesting, less in how they're told, but for pointing out how cruel American society always has been. One story in particular stuck with me: the one about lobotomy, in which the self-nominated doctor toured the country with his self-invented procedure, popping holes into people's heads over 3500 times during his career. Whatever one can say about the cruelty and stupidity of our age, we seem to be at least a few steps past letting confident people drill holes into our foreheads. Adults in the Room: My Battle with the European and American Deep Establishment (2017) by Yanis Varoufakis As you can tell by the copious notes and citations I've made below, I loved this book. It is the story of how Europe is just as fundamentally broken as any other human construction. If it every meant anything greater, it no longer does. It is a construct of self-serving functionaries bent on consolidating their own political capital. Its main goal is to provide wealth to the financial sector. It does not care for its member nations, as such. It does not care for long-term sustainability. It is afflicted by the same blinkered, short-term thinking that poisons most other human endeavors. It continues mainly on inertia, in some sense unaware that it is already dead. The corpse can still pump blood, so the vampires continue to feed. This is the story of the five months during which Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis tried to save Greece from continued debt bondage. Continued debt bondage was seen as the only way forward for the European troika. Varoufakis preferred a debt-restructuring that benefitted both parties and had the added benefit of being financially feasible. The only other alternative acknowledged by both sides was Grexit -- Greece leaving the euro zone and reëstablishing the drachma. Varoufakis threatened Grexit and vowed never to comply to continued debt bondage. His government was behind him in this, until...almost the very end. Despite reams of proposals and studies and endorsement from extremely knowledgable individuals showing that Varoufakis's plans would be effective, the troika never seriously entertained them. Honestly, it's hard to believe that they even read them. They just didn't care. Their only goal was to arrange a new loan deal -- because they were never interested in getting their money back. How could this be? Because the money they were interested in getting back was loaned to Greece, immediately after which it was funneled right back to the true victims of Greece's financial crisis -- the French and German banks that had loaned money to Greece in the first place. These banks took no haircut on their risky loans. The EU made sure that they were paid back in full, but that the Greek government took the full blame for the profligacy. The troika wasn't interested in being paid back because, once the banks had recharged their coffers and learned the harsh lesson that they would not only not be allowed to fail, they would also not be allowed to not turn a profit, it was only the people of Europe who were left with outstanding debts. And who cares about them when you and all of your friends have not only come out smelling like roses politically but also benefited handsomely financially? What could you do? It was those dirty, lazy Greeks who nearly ruined everything -- thank God the troika came to the rescue to limit the losses and avoid true catastrophe. Why did Varoufakis fail to save Greece from continued debt bondage? Because literally everyone was against him. They all hated him. It was obvious to the troika that he was never going to budge the way they wanted him to. They resented him for making them work that hard to get what they had always gotten much more easily. They saw the result as inevitable; why bother struggling so hard and making everyone look bad? He was always going to look bad anyway, as the representative of a reprehensible land of swarthy, shiftless ingrates suckling at the teat of superior, northern, caucasian, European generosity. His own side resented and grew to hate him because he was so much smarter and more organized and more well-informed than they were. He knew everything. He knew the history and the minutiae of everything that had happened in the EU in the last 20 years. He did not despair (at least not publicly). His ramrod discipline and dedication shamed his own leadership into continuing when they'd long-since capitulated in their hearts. His presence became a constant reminder to them of their own moral failing and their failure of the Greek people. As for his enemies in the EU and the IMF and ECB and Euro Group? They were just stunned that he'd even dared to open his mouth at all -- other than to pleasure them with it, as stipulated in their agreement with the previous government. I imagine to them Varoufakis showed up like an escort whose pimp had extracted a very good price for someone who was accommodating and open to anything -- only for her to show up and want to talk and cuddle and "get to know one another" so that they could "figure out how to both come to orgasm". The EU's incredulity was like that of the john in such a situation -- simply uncomprehending how someone could so completely fail to be on-script. After the initial confusion, the way forward was clear: punishment and humiliation and, of course, the f$%king. I apologize for the invective, but it is not just to spare the degree of criminality with which the EU behaved by employing a more diplomatic vernacular. And the other nations that backed Germany unquestioningly in the Euro Group, like Latvia, were like the members of the pimp's stable who had long since capitulated all honor -- and were resentful of the uppity new broad who thought she was better than them. As Varoufakis points out, Latvia became the troika's darling, an economic success story, by proving that a country could tighten its belt to improve its per-capita GDP -- but only by shedding half of its working population through emigration. When Varoufakis re-hired cleaning staff fired during a previous administration, he was reproached endlessly by the EU for not being sufficiently dedicated to cutting costs. The cost of 300 cleaners making a pittance per month was nothing compared to the salaries of several advisers from big banks and financial institutions that Yanis simultaneously let go, of course. But that's not the point, is it? The troika were bent on punishing him for having fired its crony friends at Goldman Sachs (who'd earned millions per year). The initial firing of the cleaning staff was described as a “reform”, the rolling back of which indicates an abdication of adherence to fiduciary responsibility. This was the modus operandi for the troika, always demanding more and more from an increasingly harried and chronically understaffed finance department. And if it took Yanis a long time to realize that his enemy truly was an enemy that was not at all interested in a compromise, it wasn't his fault, really. In the heat of battle, and probably exhausted and sleep-deprived from having spent three straight days preparing a document they demanded and have now ignored, he failed to recognize their duplicitous nature. He continued to give them the benefit of the doubt, assuming that they too saw the looming danger to everyone and were interested in working together to avoid the worst of it. They were not. Life had taught them all that they would be just fine, that they would continue to fail upward no matter what happened. I count nearly everyone he mentions in this book in this group -- Lagarde, Poulson...everyone. Not a single one of them every did anything to actually help. No matter how much hand-wringing and soul-searching they play-acted behind closed doors, they always knew which side their bread was buttered on when it came to public pronouncements -- and then they reverted to the most simplistic mantras that they all knew were ineffective and could not be implemented, but for which they could not be blamed for promoting. They had all proved themselves liars and backstabbers, incapable of even a shred of honesty. Their paramount goal was to get everything they personally wanted while conceding nothing, on principle. He failed to notice that they considered it distasteful to deal with him at all. There was probably no small amount of disgust at the chutzpah of a filthy foreigner upstart daring to attend their institutions (he attended university in England in the 70s) and for daring to seem smarter and more reasonable than they, when it is they who wield the power and he who is to capitulate. Their fury was not at his proposals, but that he was wasting their time, making them pretend to do their jobs, while reminding them that they had always failed to do so. They punished him and Greece for daring to remove their mask of plausible deniability. And when the time came to execute the only threat that Greece held over the troika, Yanis hesitated, convinced that his government had his back and that they would "take collective responsibility for the decision over the precise timing of [Greece's] withdrawal from the negotiations." They did not. And that is his regret: that he did not take unilateral action at the solitary moment when he had the power to do so. He opted for democracy and was betrayed by his compatriots. I think he’s too hard on himself. And his friends in the Greek government didn't collapse all at once: no, the Troika had its agents embedded everywhere. Steter Tropfen hoehlt den Stein, as we say in German. They didn't have to push too much -- we've seen time and again how much human suffering a single person is willing to engender for what appears to be a ludicrously meager personal gain. How can you succeed when all your enemy need do is turn one functionary? And he probably sold out for a pittance? Even if it was blackmail, or the guy failed to grasp the import of his duplicity, he didn’t seem to care. An appeal to ego was probably sufficient. I've included "notes, citations and errata" <https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3533> in a separate post. Industrial Society and its Future (1995) by Theodore Kaczynski The full text of this long essay/short book is available online at "Unabomber Special Report" <https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/longterm/unabomber/manifesto.text.htm>. To the Post's credit, it's still online after over 20 years. There is very little that is particularly incendiary about this document (if you'll pardon the phrase). Though his actions were mad -- despite his railing against society's deprivation of freedom, he saw fit to rob several people of their own freedom by killing them -- his reasoning is not. I wanted to see what the fuss was about and what the Unabomber's actual demands were. His arguments are lucid, if not always convincing. I was expecting a bit more craziness, like in Dianetics, but Kaczynski was much smarter, apparently -- he was certainly a better writer. The essay is basically structured as follows: 1. He rails against leftists for about 20% of the essay, discussing their psychology and "oversocialization". As a university professor without a more rational and less strictly left-leaning tendency, he seems to have felt himself in a minority against which he needed to lash out. Some of the characteristics he pointed out are quite negative, but his inability to nail down who, exactly, he considers to be a leftist -- or which modes of thought are the types of leftism to avoid -- robs his argument of much of its power. 2. He then discusses different types of work, including surrogate activities and a definition of the power process. 3. He goes into detail in the Disruption of the Power Process in Modern Society chapter. Here he expands on an idea that the main goal of society is subjugation through disempowerment. He builds up the argument reasonably well, without too much bombast. 4. He discusses freedom and the logical tension between freedom and technology/industrial society. Pre-industrial societies are by definition more free because the lack of long-distance communication and travel prevent the overarching, larger systems of control that are inevitably wrought by technology (and those who control it). 5. He moves from mind control through propaganda to control via pharmaceuticals and genetic modification (even less far-fetched 20 years later). 6. From there, he discusses how technology becomes a self-promulgating end in itself, inevitably leading to a place where humankind is so dependent on it that it no longer matters whether it is in charge because it took over or because the humans capitulated. The dependency implies the control. 7. Next up are more predictions, many of which have unsurprisingly come true (or have been much more concretely realized than in the 90s). The world we have, dominated as it is by surveilling corporations and governments and a nearly useless media landscape is not far off from Kaczynski's nightmare vision. 8. Finally, there are concrete action plans and ideas for how to foment the required revolution to devolve society to pre-industry. He also acknowledges that it won't be easy, regardless of how he's proven its necessity if we are to survive as psychologically independent individuals with even a modicum of freedom (paraphrased from his ideas, by the way). There is a discussion of revolutionary techniques, how to build an intelligent core with rational argument and then bring the rabble on board with simpler reasoning (that is pitched to inspire the second group without alienating the first group). Any group that inspired such a devolution would necessarily be rejected for the loss in lifestyle that they'd engendered, after which the technological elite would quickly take the reins again. 9. In the end, he manages to prove the inevitability of technology, the zero-sum game it has with individual freedom and the near impossibility of freedom winning out. I've included "notes, citations and errata" <https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3538> in a separate post. The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas (1973) by Ursula K. LeGuin This is a short story about Omelas, a city that is paradise on Earth. The story describes the perfection of the society -- then gets to the one small detail that keeps the place so perfect. In order for everyone to be so happy, living in paradise, a child must be kept in perpetual misery, darkness and filth, trapped in a lightless dungeon and suffering immeasurably. As expected, almost everyone, upon learning of this situation, make their peace with it. The title refers to those who cannot accept paradise on those terms. Rogues (2014) edited by George R.R. Martin and Gardner Dozois This is a collection of short stories and novellas edited by two of the titans of fantasy and science fiction. See the "Wikipedia article" <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogues_(anthology)> for a list of all 21 stories. The stories all star a "rogue" of one type or other, with authors ranging from Gillian Flynn (Gone Girl) to Joe Lansdale (Hap and Leonard) to Neil Gaiman to Patrick Rothfuss and, finally, to George R.R. Martin himself. A good collection of stories with something for everyone, I think. I've included "notes, citations and errata" <https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3555> in a separate post. The Lathe of Heaven (1971) by Ursula K. LeGuin This is the story of George Orr, a man whose dreams change reality. He lives in a world where he's required to visit a psychiatrist to address his affliction. Soon, though, the world no longer requires him to do so -- because his psychiatrist is manipulating him into changing the world to the doctor's benefit. Orr's effective dreams are not without side-effects -- anyone who lives through one ends up with multiple memories, remembering both the way the world was and also the way the world is (including the history leading up to the world in which they now live). Doctor Haber invents a machine called the Augmentor that focuses Orr's power. Orr's dreams don't change reality so much as shift himself and those around him into different timelines. Eventually, he chooses a timeline in which aliens invade the planet -- ostensibly with the goal of finding him, the one capable of bending reality. The aliens don't try to stop so much as try to get him to control himself, to get out from under Dr. Haber's thumb. Orr is OK, but Haber is dangerous. Philip K. Dick worked very much in this vein, where the line between observed and actual reality is blurred into nothingness. The story is a mix of various potential realities, composed of the dreams of Haber and Orr as well as strands of the original reality. Read the "Wikipedia article" <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lathe_of_Heaven> for a more in-depth description of the plot. I've included "notes, citations and errata" <https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3564> in a separate post. On the Beach (1957) by Nevil Shute A nuclear conflagration has engulfed the world. In the aftermath, it's not clear who started it or who even fought on which side. Stories differ. There is the officially accepted truth -- something to do with the Russians, the Chinese and the Americans. And then there are other theories that bubble up as we meet more people. All that is clear is that the entire northern hemisphere is gone. There is an inexorable radioactive cloud creeping southward at a predictable pace. Cities go dark, day by day. The story takes place in Australia, centered on sailor Peter Holmes in the Australian navy, an entity that has all but ceased to exist. An American submarine lands on the shores of Melbourne. Peter befriends the caption of the vessel, Commander Towers. Although there are breaks with customs and morals, many of the people stick to their lives as they were. Until they're not anymore. The end. There is a fuel shortage (of course) and the scope of life contracts back to earlier times, humanity slowly fading into oblivion with barely a whimper. Many take their own lives with government-provided pills. The submarine goes on several missions, but discovers nothing on the entire planet. It's all dead. There is no reprieve. There is no happy ending for humanity. The Earth has been boiled free of life -- not instantly, but definitely. I've included "notes, citations and errata" <https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3565> in a separate post. Dispatches (1977) by Michael Herr This is a journal about the Vietnam War, written by journalist Michael Herr, who spent two years there in the late 60s. The storytelling is visceral and well-written, describing soldiers and attacks and life in Vietnam under the occupation. The impression is surreal and the book doesn't try to explain or clean up the ugliness of it all. It presents information, within a scaffolding of disapproval of the war, but at the same time acknowledging the seductiveness of it for reporters, for those involved in it, for those poisoned into not being able to live without it. An excellent book, probably the best thing I've ever read about one of America's wars -- or, indeed, any colonial occupation. It's likely that this book describes them all adequately, not just Vietnam, but Iraq and Afghanistan or India and Africa for the European powers. A sobering look into the depths of human cruelty and stupidity. Herr has only one movie-writing credit: Apocalypse Now. I've included "notes, citations and errata" <https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3566> in a separate post. Savage Season: A Hap and Leonard Novel (1990) by Joe R. Lansdale This is the story of Leonard, a gay, black veteran of Vietnam and his friend Hap, a guy with few prospects and a lot of baggage. This pair are tangled up in a heist -- or, rather, picking up the lost treasure from a heist gone wrong -- planned by people with differing motives and histories. That Hap's ex is involved makes it hard for him to think straight. Leonard is aware that the situation is far from ideal, but knows that he and Hap need the money. The story weaves bygone days of 60s and 70s idealism with naked ambition and greed. Everything goes spectacularly south in an abattoir of a finale that would do a Tarantino film justice. "All I got to say is you can’t be a professional bleeding heart. Yeah, things are better for blacks and women and gays, but it was the blacks and women and gays that did it, not fuck-ups like this bunch. Whites and straights came along to give help, all right, after the blacks said ‘enough’ and got their heads busted, and it’s the same for the gays and the women. The whites and straights, they control things, and they could have changed it anytime." Grand Forks: A History of American Dining in 128 Reviews (2013) by Marilyn Hagerty This is a collection of restaurant reviews from restaurants all over North Dakota, but mostly from the metropolitan region (such as it is) in and around Grand Forks. A couple of the reviews are of top-flight restaurants in New York City, thrown in seemingly to point out that Ms. Hagerty isn't just a country bumpkin. Her book is refreshingly honest and simple, the reviews eminently useful, concentrating as they do on describing decor, menu and prices. She weaves stories of the proprietor's lives into her reviews. Through these, we follow how the city of Grand Forks grew over the years. The reviews start in the 80s and continue into the first decade of the 21st century. We also see how expectations of price and quality grew over the years -- and how some restaurants managed to remain focused on providing quality food for what seems like nearly impossible prices for the time. There was a bit of monotony to the reviews, a bit of ritual, but not of boredom, necessarily. Almost like a book of zen koans, delivered by a woman seemingly without malice. Almost like listening to a song by a favorite band that sounds very much like all of the other songs that band has made -- it's nice to listen to, even though familiar. I imagine that Marilyn's reviews served over the years as a bulwark against ugly reality for many residents. I discovered this book when Anthony Bourdain died: someone I read had mentioned that he'd written the foreword to Marilyn's book. His foreword is nicely written and generous and reveals a man capable of appreciating the simpler things, just like Marilyn. Appropriately, it is overshadowed by the simple power of Ms. Hagerty's reviews. I've included "notes, citations and errata" <https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3563> in a separate post. "Laurie" <https://stephenking.com/other/stephenking-laurie.pdf> (2018) by Stephen King This short story is available "online" <https://stephenking.com/other/stephenking-laurie.pdf> and is characteristic of King's writing of late: well-crafted but a bit staid and humdrum. It's about an old man living in Florida, without his wife and with a complicated relationship with his complicated sister, who gives him a dog he doesn't want. They meet an alligator. The end. I thought this sentence describing the man's sister was nice: "She paused to look back at him. The harsh September light of Florida’s west coast fell on her face, showing the way her lipstick had bled into the little wrinkles around her mouth, and the way her lower lids had begun to sag away from her eyes, and the fragile clockspring of veins beating in the hollow of her temple. She would be seventy soon. His bouncing, opinionated, athletic, take-no-prisoners sister was old. So was he. They were proof that life was nothing but a short dream on a summer afternoon." The Night Watch (1998 -- en/2006) by Sergei Lukyanenko This is the first novel in what would end up being a six-book series, set in the real world with the Twilight as a backdrop. The world is the same as the one we know, but some people are not humans, but Others. These others are divided (unevenly) into Dark and Light Ones. This book introduces characters that would be in all of the books, but focuses on the development of Anton Gorodetsky, a low-level Light Other who works in the Night Watch. The Night Watch works at night and keeps an eye on the Dark Others. The Day Watch works during the day and keeps an eye on the Light Others. The Twilight is another layer of reality to which Others have access, but humans do not. It is from here that Others draw their power to perform magic. It's a very interesting mythology, equal to the Harry Potter world, I think, with a bit more for adults than the earlier books in that series. In this book, Lukyanenko develops Anton as well as Sveltana (a Great Enchantress) and Egor (a potential Mirror) and Maxim (an eventual Inquisitor) as well as introducing Boris Ignatievich, or Gesar, the oldest and most powerful of the Light Ones in the Moscow Night Watch. I've included "notes, citations and errata" <https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3567> in a separate post. The Day Watch (2000 -- en/2007) by Sergei Lukyanenko The second novel in the Twilight universe is again composed of three volumes, each of which tells another story that builds the mythos of the world further. In this one, we learn more about the witch Alisa Donnikova, who falls in love with a Light One named Igor. It ends in tragedy. We also meet Vitaly Rogoza, a mysterious Ukrainian who is inexplicably amnesiac and growing continuously in power. It turns out that he is a Mirror, a pawn of the Twilight itself, drawn into existence in order to return balance between the Light and the Dark. He does this by drawing out Svetlana (the Great Enchantress, who is now Anton's partner) and getting her to purge her immense power and giving the Dark some reprieve. In the third volume, we meet Edgar, a Dark one who achieves an uneasy peace with Anton on a mission to investigate what the hell happened in the first two volumes. They are both in Prague for the Inquisition's trial of Igor, who'd murdered Alisa in the first book. More and more facets of the mythology are introduced, filling in detail with delicious hints of deeper meaning. The Twilight Watch (2003 -- en/2007) by Sergei Lukyanenko These three volumes continue with Anton as the focus, but with many of the characters of the first two books. The first volume involves an undiscovered Other who turns out to be Gesar's son. But it's suspicious because he seems to have become an Other -- something that should not be possible. Unless someone has discovered the Fuaran, a book written by a witch who discovered how to do exactly that. The knowledge was assumed to have been lost in the mists of time. Instead, the second volume finds Anton on vacation, where he meets Arina, an ancient witch who breaks tradition and expectations in almost all ways. She is immensely powerful and doesn't really stick the Dark/Light paradigm, which vexes Anton. She has a copy of the Fuaran. It is in this book that we discover that Others actually have less magic than humans. Humans emit magic regularly and Others feed on it. Anton is shocked to discover that there isn't that much separating him from a Dark vampire, whose methods are just a bit cruder and most physical. We also learn of more and more levels of the twilight (in the first book, there was one, at most two; by now, we know of four, perhaps five). The third volume expands on Kostya's story (a (now)-Higher vampire who Anton has known since he was a youth). Kostya is intent on getting the Fuaran in order to turn everyone into an Other. This plan is doomed to failure -- you can't just have parasites; you also need hosts. Kostya's plan fails. He tries to escape into space in order to be able to perform a spell on the entire world at once. In space, though, he is too far from the source of Power. He burns up on re-entry. The Last Watch (2006 -- en/2008) by Sergei Lukyanenko As a result of Kostya's activity with the Fuaran in the previous book, Anton is now a Higher magician. Gesar sends him to Scotland to investigate a mysterious vampire killing. It turns out that there is a trio of Others -- a Light One, a Dark One and an Inquisitor -- trying to get at Merlin's greatest creation. Merlin is/was a so-called zero-point magician -- a magician who was zero natural magic and can absorb more Power from the environment than any Others and is therefore more powerful. The only other known such magician is Nadya, Anton and Svetlana's daughter. In this volume, we learn that Merlin hid the Crown of All Things on the seventh level of the Twilight. The second volume expands on this, sending Anton to Uzbekistan to find Rustam, an ancient wizard who used to ride with Gesar, back in the day. He was with Gesar when they called down the most terrible spell every used against Dark Ones -- the White Mist. Instead of killing them, it froze them into statues without any sensory input, driving them mad over the ensuring millennia. Rustam is still punishing himself for having taken part in this travesty, whereas Gesar had made his peace with it. We discover that Edgar is the Inquisitor that is part of the trio trying to get Merlin's secret. In the third volume, more is revealed about Merlin's spell as well as how the Twilight works and how many levels it actually has. Where is the Crown of All Things hidden? Anton eventually finds out and uses his Higher power to wield it in an unexpected way, freeing the age-old Dark Ones frozen in time to their final reward -- as well as Merlin and thousands of Others from the Purgatory/Paradise of the sixth level of the Twilight. I've included "notes, citations and errata" <https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3568> in a separate post. The New Watch (2011 -- en/2012) by Sergei Lukyanenko The first volume deals with Prophets and Clairvoyants and how the Twilight deals with them. We learn that the Twilight has not just Mirrors, but Tigers. The Tiger is unstoppable and is there to prevent anyone from hearing a Prophet's "main prophecy". Anton is there, once again, this time with the help of his now ten-year--old daughter, Nadya (the zero-point enchantress). The young prophet is saved from the Tiger in the nick of time -- but the Twilight doesn't know about recording devices. And Kesha (the Prophet) was clutching a toy tape recorder when he emerged from the room into which he'd revealed his prophecy to (supposedly) no-one. In the second volume, Anton travels once again to London to meet a former Prophet, a Dark One named Erasmus Darwin to find out what his prophecy was and to find out more about Tigers and how to stop them. Darwin had avoided dying for his prophecy in a similar way to Kesha -- by yelling into into the bole of an oak tree. Anton returns from London with a cup made from the wood of that tree. I've included "notes, citations and errata" <https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3569> in a separate post. The Sixth Watch (2012 – en/2013) by Sergei Lukyanenko This is final installment in the Watch Series. In this one, Anton's daughter Nadya is threatened at her school, where two magicians sweep through with a power completely beyond what each has on his own. The prophets have foretold attacks of this sort and predict the end of the world in five days' time. We learn more about the ancient order of the vampires -- the world's supposed first children. The day and night watch of Moscow are basically working together, attending the high councils of the vampires and witches as they each seek to elect a member to be part of the Sixth Watch. There are also the form-takers and the Foundation. All representatives of the watch will likely die when the council convenes. The watch is there to combat the Twilight itself, which is embodied in a human-like figure. In the end, it is Anton who thwarts the twilight and restores order and balance. I've included "notes, citations and errata" <https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id= 3582> in a separate post. Mucho Mojo (a Hap and Leonard Novel) (1994) by Joe R. Lansdale This is the second Hap and Leonard novel. This one picks up where the first one left off -- with the two heroes down on their luck and back to working in the rose fields, for peanuts. Leonard gets a sort of windfall -- his uncle Chester has died and left him with a sizable inheritance as well as his house. The house is in a rough neighborhood and right next to a crack den. Leonard cannot let that stand, so he takes them on immediately. They're a big problem, but they're not the main problem. The main problem seems to be a case that the police refused to work on, but that Chester and his friend Moon had been working for years. Moon is missing as well. Hap and Leonard discover this from strange clues that Chester left -- and then discover a child's skeleton under the house, wrapped in child pornography. They suspect Chester, of course, but Leonard is adamant that he couldn't have done it. I won't ruin any more of the story, but it unfolds in a very interesting manner. The reverend and sheriff are involved, as is big ol' TJ. Leonard and Hap stay true and stay on the trail to figure it all out in the end. To get a flavor for the style of writing, check out the citations. I've included "notes, citations and errata" <https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3599> in a separate post. The Two-Bear Mambo (a Hap and Leonard Novel) (1995) by Joe R. Lansdale This is the third of the Hap and Leonard novels. Florida Grange has gone to Grovetown to represent a client, the son of a famous bluesman from the same town. The son thinks he's found an old tape that could be worth a lot of money. Chief Hanson, with whom Florida broke up before leaving, sends Hap to go look for her. Hap takes Leonard along. Grovetown does not approve. This town is so racist, it's like an Enlightenment black hole. Chief Cantuck is not a great guy, but not the worst. Officer Reynolds is the worst. Even worse is the head of the local KKK -- a group to which most of the town belongs. Hap and Leonard go poking around and can't help but stir up trouble, since Leonard is the wrong color. They end up getting beaten within and inch of their lives -- they got in some shots, too, but were taking on most of the town -- and slink back to Laborde with Officer Charlie. They recover somewhat and regain their courage after a while, driving into the teeth of a rainstorm that will not quit to finish their investigation in Grovetown. After eliminating the obvious suspects, they finally figure out that it's Florida's disappearance and that of her client, was more about money than about racism. Cold comfort. As with the second novel, I think the citations give a food flavor of the writing and sentiment. I've included "notes, citations and errata" <https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3600> in a separate post. Ultimate Threshold: A Collection of the Finest in Soviet Science Fiction (1970) translated and edited by Mirra Ginsburg The stories are from the sixties and early seventies. The cover a range of topics from immortality, DNA and scientific discovery, as well as the morality of killing AIs. Basically, it's really quite interesting silver-age science fiction as good as anything I've read from Great Britain or the States. You'd be hard-pressed to say which was which. I've read and watched a lot of Soviet science fiction over the last couple of years, much it written by the Strugatsky brothers and directed by Tarkovsky. Just this year, I read a six-book series by Sergei Lukyanenko. It was fascinating to find this old book in my collection from my early, early years. I didn't remember any of the stories from my first reading; I imagine I'd experienced it completely differently than this time around. Midnight at the Pera Palace: The Birth of Modern Istanbul (2014) by Charles King This book is a history of Istanbul from its very earliest days -- before it was even Constantinople -- up until the end of World War II. It's a tremendous work, using the Pera Palace (a famous and much-frequented hotel) as a focal point in modern times. It is fascinating to learn about the mix of cultures that led to Istanbul -- and, indeed, to Turkey. The Greeks and Jews were an intrinsic part, right up until the end. There were purges and seizing of family wealth, with strong parallels to the overthrow of the Tsars in Russia. The ties went deeper after the revolution, when Trotzky lived there for years, in exile. It's the crossroads of Europe and Asia, providing rail access to Russia, hosting one of the terminuses of the Orient Express. The history covers the rise of Ataturk as well a slew of activists and contributors to Turkey's rich, political history. As a neutral country during WWII, it hosted secret-service agencies from all countries, offering a sort of hallowed ground where they could meet, if need be. Turkey joined WWII even later than the U.S. and had a complicated relationship to the Axis and Allied nations, especially as related to getting European refugees of all kinds out of Axis-occupied nations. Their neutrality looked like appeasement. The bureaucracy was maddening. Whereas tens of thousands of people made it through to Israel and the Middle East, just as many were rejected and sent back where they'd come from, into the teeth of the Nazi machine. After that, Ararat's secularist state was increasingly muslimized, with Jews and other denominations (e.g. Greek Orthodox) being increasingly culled. It's a difficult history, though nothing to be especially ashamed of, as compared to other, actually colonial, fascist or imperial nations. It's hard to summarize the whole book, so I leave you with the following, from near the end (I've included a longer version of the citation below): "National history asks that we take the impossibly large variety of human experience, stacked up like a deck of playing cards, and pull out only the national one—the rare moments in time when people raise a flag and misremember a collective past—as the most worthy of our attention." I've included "notes, citations and errata" <https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3601> in a separate post. Bad Chili (a Hap and Leonard Novel) (1997) by Joe R. Lansdale Hap starts off the book with rabies. Leonard starts off the book as a suspect in the murder of a biker who was fooling around with Raul. Hap's rabies leads him to meet Brett Sawyer, a dirty night nurse with whom he begins a torrid affair. Leonard and Hap investigate to clear Leonard's name, all the while staying out of the reach of the law -- except for Charlie, who's almost certain that Leonard didn't do it. Things get more complicated as the biker turns out to have been not only an undercover cop, but also a dirty (different meaning than for Brett) undercover cop. In the mix is a local Chili King, who's got a lot of markets cornered and is mixed up in some very sordid businesses. There's also the matter of some videotapes that show gay guys getting thrashed for being gay. They team up with Jim-Bob Luke -- a private investigator with a lot of luck and very loose ethics -- to finally crack the case. I've included "notes, citations and errata" <https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3611> in a separate post. The Jungle Book (1894) by Rudyard Kipling I was surprised to learn that the movie is based only on the first three of seven stories in this book. The first three are of a Mowgli who is considerably more adult than the films lead one to believe. He is a child at the very beginning, when he is, indeed, adopted by wolves. However, the story very quickly picks up from a point where he is more-or-less a man and is more than a match for most other creatures of the jungle or civilization. The first story ends with Mowgli driving off Shere Khan (the tiger) with the "red flower": fire. Akela (the lead wolf) stays in control of the pack. In the second part, he is kidnapped by the monkeys (the "Bandar-log") and is rescued by Kaa (python), Baloo (bear) and Bagheera (black panther). The movie was relatively faithful here, as well, taking liberties only in inventing "King Louie", king of the orangutans. The monkeys are not individualized and are not treated as co-equal jungle denizens by the other animals. In the third part, Mowgli goes to live in the village with men. Shere Kahn continues to cause trouble and, with his acolytes, takes over the wolf pack. Mowgli is herding cows for the village. He hears from his animal friends that Shere Kahn is nearby and, that he just fed and will be slow and sleepy. Mowgli hatches a plan to drive his cattle through the canyon where Shere Kahn sleeps, trapping him and then trampling him. Akela and Gray brother wolf are instrumental in Shere Kahn's demise. Despite his advanced age, Akela is restored as leader of the pack. Mowgli returns to the jungle, The fourth story is of Kotick, a white-furred seal, son of the greatest fighter of all the seals. His father fights each year for a place for his family on the shores of an island shared with men. Men sneak into the rear lines and take many seals each year. Kotick does not understand why they return to that island. His father is powerful and is not in danger (other than the grievous wounds he suffers each year in defending his place). Kotick instead travels the world, growing powerful. Finally, he swims with seacows to discover a secluded cove/island, protected from the eyes of man. There is plenty of room for all -- he returns to the original island to bring his tribe with him. They refuse, so he fights them all. His savagery and power awe everyone, including his father. Convinced, many of them go with him and discover that he was right all along. Men no longer plunder their tribe. The fifth story is the also-famous one of Rikki-Tikki-Tavi, the mongoose who defended a family from cobras. The cobra couple Nag and Nagina plot to kill members of the family, but Rikki jumps in and kills Nag. Furious, Nagina swears revenge, but Rikki goes on the offensive, attacking her nest and destroying all but one egg. She takes the last egg back her nest, but Rikki plunges after her -- although very few mongooses ever return from a cobra nest. The other animals in the yard wait with bated breath, until Rikki emerges victorious, bruised but not beaten. Nag and Nagina are dead and no eggs have survived. The sixth story is of Toomai, the son of a mahout, master of the elephant Kala Nag. They are tasked with catching wild elephants. Toomai helps but is reprimanded for being in the elephant enclosure. The boss tells him he may only return once he has "seen elephants dance". He thinks that he has banished the boy for good. Kala Nag takes the boy along on the next giant meeting of wild and domesticated elephants. On the night of the dance, they all break their chains and trample acres of forest. The boss cannot deny that they'd danced and that Toomai had seen it and welcomes him as a mahout. The final story follows the conversations of the various animals employed by the British on a battle field in Afghanistan. The mules, camels, horses, bullocks and elephants detail their fears and tasks and how and why they serve. The animals that already serve the queen are there to convince the Afghan animals that they should obey, as well. I suppose there's a metaphor in there somewhere. I've included "notes, citations and errata" <https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3612> in a separate post. Star Maker (1937) by Olaf Stapledon This book is the description of an astral journey. The author describes leaving his home to take a walk to a local hilltop and then going much, much further. He travels the remaining distance -- in all four dimensions -- in his mind. He starts off in the local solar system, but quickly ranges to other stars, flitting to and fro, without regard for the speed of light. At first, he talks of blue and red shifts, but he soon realizes he can travel free of physical constraint by attuning himself to an "affinity" for worlds that have intelligent life on them. This all sounds absolutely bizarre, but the book was written in 1937, in the early Einstein era. It's a remarkably sophisticated treatise and holds up reasonably well, even today. He posits the fast mode of travel in order to be able to describe what he experienced. He is also capable of "landing" on planets and merging with the consciousness of individuals there. He spends a long time on a planet of quasi-human beings who experience the world more through scent than through visual apprehension. At the end of his sojourn, his host leaves with him and, together, they range across star systems. The overarching theme is communal life and intelligence. He talks of ever-higher levels of intelligence, straining to a perfection, to being worthy of returning to the so-called Star Maker. Clan intelligences form nation intelligences, which form world intelligences, then star-system and, finally, galactic intelligences. At this point, the story picks up temporal speed and they talk of visiting other galaxies. Each of these galaxies is in a different level of development toward a hive mind. Some of their powers are awesome: they can move planets and stars. There is talk of decay, where some civilizations fail. At one point, all of the stars begin exploding -- at which point it is discovered that they, too, are intelligent. Their society is folded into the galactic ones. And so on, and so forth. In the end, the author is part of the cosmic mind, the sum total of all galactic intelligences that sees through to the Star Maker and looks on his many works, of which this universe is but one. It is a sort-of ecclesiastic re-telling of the Big Bang, with some of the Star Maker's creations collapsing back and others dispersing until a heat death. The thought experiment folds back in on itself as the author subsides back into his body and returns to his wife and home, that which he now realizes is the most important, the seed of all that is to follow. As noted in "Wikipedia" <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Maker>, prominent contemporaries like Jorge Luis Borges, H.G. Wells, Virginia Woolf, Brian Aldiss, Doris Lessing (recent Nobel Prize winner), Arthur C. Clarke and Stanislaw Lem held this book and its author in high esteem. Even Freeman Dyson credited his "Dyson Spheres" to Stapledon, since he'd already envisioned them in this book. I've included "notes, citations and errata" <https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3613> in a separate post. ]]> </content> </entry> <entry> <title type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[The Two-Bear Mambo (a Hap and Leonard Novel) by Joe R. Lansdale (1995) (read in 2018)]]> </title> <id>https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3600</id> <link href="https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3600"/> <updated>2018-12-27T22:10:03+01:00</updated> <author> <name type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Marco von Ballmoos]]> </name> <uri>https://earthli.com/users/marco</uri> </author> <summary type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA["Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is" ... ]]> </summary> <content type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Published by marco on 27. Dec 2018 22:10:03 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I've failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an interest in this book, then I'm happy for you." This is the third of the Hap and Leonard novels. Florida Grange has gone to Grovetown to represent a client, the son of a famous bluesman from the same town. The son thinks he's found an old tape that could be worth a lot of money. Chief Hanson, with whom Florida broke up before leaving, sends Hap to go look for her. Hap takes Leonard along. Grovetown does not approve. This town is so racist, it's like an Enlightenment black hole. Chief Cantuck is not a great guy, but not the worst. Officer Reynolds is the worst. Even worse is the head of the local KKK -- a group to which most of the town belongs. Hap and Leonard go poking around and can't help but stir up trouble, since Leonard is the wrong color. They end up getting beaten within and inch of their lives -- they got in some shots, too, but were taking on most of the town -- and slink back to Laborde with Officer Charlie. They recover somewhat and regain their courage after a while, driving into the teeth of a rainstorm that will not quit to finish their investigation in Grovetown. After eliminating the obvious suspects, they finally figure out that it's Florida's disappearance and that of her client, was more about money than about racism. Cold comfort. As with the second novel, I think the citations give a food flavor of the writing and sentiment. [Citations] "Now, the stories I heard were off the late-night news. Rapes and serial murders and child molestations. Children with guns and no imagination and less ambition. It wasn’t a world my father would have understood. Last time I had seen him was a Christmas many years ago. He looked as if he’d just viewed the new world he was living in for the very first time and didn’t like it and didn’t want to stay. He was dead in two weeks. A heart attack and he was out of there." "I also remembered a verse my daddy told me. “You end up havin’ to hit some sonofabitch, don’t just hit him once, and don’t just hit to get his attention.”" "You think to be important you got to be some kind of Wall Street stockbroker or Nobel Prize winner. Listen here. You’re a good man and my friend, and we’re true as we know how to be to what we think is right. I don’t know what else there is that matters. All that other shit is just cake decoration.”" "He reached the car dancing and grinning, stopped and laughed. "“Damn,” he said, “give an accordion to a redneck and all he can do is play ‘Home on the Range’ or some goddamn polka, give it to a coonass and he’ll make the music crawl up your butt and play with your kidneys.”" One less nigger was like one less cockroach.” “ ’Course,” Leonard said, “cockroaches can’t play basketball.” “Yeah, the jump shots throw ’em. I’ll tell you about Bobby Joe, kinda guy he was. He raped his own nephew’s wife, then when she told on him and the nephew tried to do something about it, he cut the nephew up to where he near died, went after the woman. Rumor is he made her fuck his German shepherd.” “Oh, get out of here,” I said. “I’m tellin’ you the story,” Tim said. “I can’t prove it. Haven’t got photos or nothing, but I believe it. There wasn’t nothing Bobby Joe wouldn’t do short of a law degree.” Even if not true, the metadata that people are willing to believe it, is valuable information. "“Y’all got money?” she said. Like son, like mother. "“We can buy lunch and have dessert if the waiters don’t wear suits,” Leonard said." "The kitchen was just another part of the same room, and you could see where there had been a grease fire over the stove. The dank carpet and burnt insulation odor that tracked us from the living room blended with the stench of rancid grease coating the stove top. The fridge hummed desperately, like a dying man trying to remember a sentimental tune. "“Well,” Leonard said, “this is nice.” "“Don’t like it, go to hell,” said Ms. Garner. She said that without so much as a change of features. "“So much for the big sell,” Leonard said. “How much is it? Considering we’ll be camping out.” "“Ten dollars a day, pay by the day. Use too much gas or electricity, there’ll be a charge for that. I watch the meters.” "“This place looks like you found it when it floated downriver after a fire and tornado,” Leonard said." "I never said that I was invincible.” “No, but you thought it. Leonard did anyway, and I think you thought he was invincible on some level. Could take anything and come out on top. And when the two of you are together, well, you’re like the biggest dogs in the junkyard. But you ain’t. You’re just two dogs and there’s always someone bigger, smarter, and meaner.” “I owe you for this session?” “First session’s free. Maybe you’ve seen little shadows, chinks in your and Leonard’s armor, and you don’t like it. It’s nothing to be ashamed of. No one is anything better than human. Just some humans are better humans than others, but the best humans are still just human. In the end, we all end up like that squirrel out there.” “It’s just a way of living your life, and I personally don’t know it’s better than any other, it’s just all we know.” “I don’t get it,” Raul said. “Why all this macho?” “When I say act like a man,” Leonard said, “I mean act honorably and with courage. Macho has been turned into a bad word by turds who act like beasts, not men.” ]]> </content> </entry> <entry> <title type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Mucho Mojo (a Hap and Leonard Novel) by Joe R. Lansdale (1994) (read in 2018)]]> </title> <id>https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3599</id> <link href="https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3599"/> <updated>2018-12-27T21:57:08+01:00</updated> <author> <name type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Marco von Ballmoos]]> </name> <uri>https://earthli.com/users/marco</uri> </author> <summary type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA["Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is" ... ]]> </summary> <content type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Published by marco on 27. Dec 2018 21:57:08 Updated by marco on 24. Feb 2019 17:44:33 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I've failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an interest in this book, then I'm happy for you." This is the second Hap and Leonard novel. This one picks up where the first one left off -- with the two heroes down on their luck and back to working in the rose fields, for peanuts. Leonard gets a sort of windfall -- his uncle Chester has died and left him with a sizable inheritance as well as his house. The house is in a rough neighborhood and right next to a crack den. Leonard cannot let that stand, so he takes them on immediately. They're a big problem, but they're not the main problem. The main problem seems to be a case that the police refused to work on, but that Chester and his friend Moon had been working for years. Moon is missing as well. Hap and Leonard discover this from strange clues that Chester left -- and then discover a child's skeleton under the house, wrapped in child pornography. They suspect Chester, of course, but Leonard is adamant that he couldn't have done it. I won't ruin any more of the story, but it unfolds in a very interesting manner. The reverend and sheriff are involved, as is big ol' TJ. Leonard and Hap stay true and stay on the trail to figure it all out in the end. To get a flavor for the style of writing, check out the citations. [Citations] "My overall appearance was of someone who had been in a fight and lost." "There was some hand-shaking and talking, and most of the crowd came over and spoke to Leonard and said how sorry they were, looked at me out of the corners of their eyes, suspicious because I was white, or maybe because they assumed I was Leonard’s lover. It was bad enough they had a relative or acquaintance who was queer, but shit, looked like he was fucking a white guy." “Is it OK I ask a question?” I said. “Yes,” she said. “Are you married?” “No.” “Anyone significant in your life right now?” “Not really.” “Any possibility of me taking you to dinner?” “I don’t think so, Mr. Collins.” “I clean up pretty good.” “I’m sure you do, but I think not. Thanks for asking.” On the way down in the elevator, Leonard said, “Hap Collins, Lady Killer.” “Hey, I’m offering you a job. I didn’t call up for insults.” “Maybe we can jump that shit pay a little. Another fifty cents an hour you’d almost be in line with minimum wage.” “Don’t start, Hap. You know the pay. I pay cash, too. You save on income tax that way.” “You save on income tax, Lacy. Wages like that, I don’t save dick. I’d rather make enough so I had to pay some taxes.” “Yeah, well …” And he went on to tell me about his old mother in a Kansas nursing home. How he had to send her money every month. I figured he probably shot his mother years ago, buried her under a rosebush to save on fertilizer. “Couldn’t your old mother whore a little?” I said. “You know, she’s set up. Got a room and a bed and all. If she can spread her legs, she can pay her way.” “Hap, you bastard. Don’t start fucking with me, or you can forget the job.” “My heart just missed a beat.” "Not everyone has had the chance to have pride, Captain Know-It-All. You don’t come with it built in. Like new cars, there are some options got to be installed." "I shut my mouth and brooded. There was some truth in what Leonard said, but ultimately, in my mind, there’s no one more obnoxious and self-righteous than the self-made man. And no one more admirable." "Your uncle was a witty man, and quick with a quip. He seemed to have a special hatred for religion.” "“Hypocrisy is what bothered him,” Leonard said. “Not religion.”" "They swept down black and vicious and brought with them Zorro slashes of lightning and lug bolts of rain." "In the car, Leonard said, “I know it’s an ugly thing to say, him being ignorant as a post and all, but maybe, luck’s with the world, that shiftless sonofabitch will die in his sleep tonight. He ain’t doing nothing but makin’ turds.”" The big black guy who’d been watching strolled over to our table. Well, not exactly strolled. He listed a little. He’d had just the right amount of beer. I sized him up, looking for striking zones just in case it wasn’t his intention to discuss politics or summer fashion. He stopped at our table, said to Leonard, “What the fuck you doin’ in here with this honkie, brother? You trying to get a job promotion? This ain’t no honkie place.” Leonard leaned over the table, said, “He’s talking about you.” “Yeah?” I said. “Yeah,” Leonard said. “You see, honkie is a very derogatory black term for whites,” Leonard said to me. “You see, stuff like peckerwood, ofay, and honkie, it’s very insulting. It’s like whites calling us nigger or coon or jungle bunny” “No shit?” I said. The big black guy glared at me, said, “You ain’t never heard honkie before, motherfucker?” “He’s sheltered,” Leonard said. Then to me: “Motherfucker, Hap, is a common term meaning you fuck your mother. Even if you don’t fuck your mother, folks say it anyway if they’re mad at you or want to make you mad. It’s designed to be derogatory.” “I see,” I said. “You cocksuckers best quit fuckin’ with me!” the big black guy said. “Cocksucker,” Leonard said to me, “is a common term—” “Cut it out, you motherfuckers!” "He grinned slowly, and when he grinned, damned if he didn’t have that confident air Leonard’s got, like he’s immortal and knows it. MeMaw was right. They did favor." "Another bad thing about a holding cell is you don’t exactly meet a great crowd of people. A lot of them are criminals." “I’m sure the owner of the dwelling, Mr. Otis—” “Some fat cat honkie, I reckon,” Leonard said. “One of the fattest,” Florida said. “Mr. Otis, who I know is an upstanding citizen, and a friend of the police chief, would be upset to discover the house he’s renting out is being used to sell drugs.” “Naw,” Charlie said. “Old fart gets a slice of the action.” “We don’t know that,” Hanson said. “We can’t prove it,” Charlie said. “Ain’t the same thing.” "The only light in the gym was the sunlight that came through high shutter windows, and it was bright to the center of the gym, but there its reach played out and the shadow took over, grew darker toward the far wall." "The Reverend pulled on a pair of red gloves, and he and Hiram moved toward the center of the gym, and the line of light and shadow split them down the middle, putting one side of their body in the light, the other in the dark, but then they began to move, to bob and weave, to shuffle and dance, and they were one moment in brightness, the next in shadow." “You got to understand, Hap. I didn’t start any of this.” “I don’t need to understand anything. All I understand is you and Fitz and T.J., every year, killed a young boy, cut him up and buried him under that house. That’s all I need to understand. The why of it doesn’t mean a thing to me.” ]]> </content> </entry> <entry> <title type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Midnight at the Pera Palace: The Birth of Modern Istanbul by Charles King (2014) (read in 2018)]]> </title> <id>https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3601</id> <link href="https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3601"/> <updated>2018-12-27T20:50:26+01:00</updated> <author> <name type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Marco von Ballmoos]]> </name> <uri>https://earthli.com/users/marco</uri> </author> <summary type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA["Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is" ... ]]> </summary> <content type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Published by marco on 27. Dec 2018 20:50:26 Updated by marco on 29. Dec 2018 12:42:49 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I've failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an interest in this book, then I'm happy for you." This book is a history of Istanbul from its very earliest days -- before it was even Constantinople -- up until the end of World War II. It's a tremendous work, using the Pera Palace (a famous and much-frequented hotel) as a focal point in modern times. It is fascinating to learn about the mix of cultures that led to Istanbul -- and, indeed, to Turkey. The Greeks and Jews were an intrinsic part, right up until the end. There were purges and seizing of family wealth, with strong parallels to the overthrow of the Tsars in Russia. The ties went deeper after the revolution, when Trotzky lived there for years, in exile. It's the crossroads of Europe and Asia, providing rail access to Russia, hosting one of the terminuses of the Orient Express. The history covers the rise of Ataturk as well a slew of activists and contributors to Turkey's rich, political history. As a neutral country during WWII, it hosted secret-service agencies from all countries, offering a sort of hallowed ground where they could meet, if need be. Turkey joined WWII even later than the U.S. and had a complicated relationship to the Axis and Allied nations, especially as related to getting European refugees of all kinds out of Axis-occupied nations. Their neutrality looked like appeasement. The bureaucracy was maddening. Whereas tens of thousands of people made it through to Israel and the Middle East, just as many were rejected and sent back where they'd come from, into the teeth of the Nazi machine. After that, Ararat's secularist state was increasingly muslimized, with Jews and other denominations (e.g. Greek Orthodox) being increasingly culled. It's a difficult history, though nothing to be especially ashamed of, as compared to other, actually colonial, fascist or imperial nations. It's hard to summarize the whole book, so I leave you with the following, from near the end (I've included a longer version of the citation below): "National history asks that we take the impossibly large variety of human experience, stacked up like a deck of playing cards, and pull out only the national one—the rare moments in time when people raise a flag and misremember a collective past—as the most worthy of our attention." [Citations] "The antidote to hüzün was what the Turks called keyif: a sense of joyful abandon, of singing to avoid crying, the willful summoning of mirth as an answer to horror." "The dynasty of the House of Osman, which had governed an empire" "The sultan had abandoned Istanbul and the empire. A few days later, the Grand National Assembly named the crown prince, Mehmed’s cousin Abdülmecid, as caliph but without the additional title of sultan. The roles of universal Islamic leader and imperial ruler were now separated for the first time in centuries. The dynasty of the House of Osman, which had governed an empire for more than six hundred years and had commanded Istanbul for four hundred sixty-nine, was no more. The sultan himself had become a refugee." "The streets were full of people of all nationalities wearing all manner of clothes, often some mixture of military uniforms and civilian attire. The refugees—Russians, Georgians, Azerbaijanis, Ukrainians, and others—had blown into Istanbul carrying remnants of past lives and disappeared nations." "There was nothing necessarily dishonest in their dealings, at least at the level of individual transactions, but they rested on a massive transfer of wealth whose origins lay in the republic’s preference for national purity over the old cosmopolitanism of the imperial capital." "The club’s proprietor was an unlikely impresario. Frederick Bruce Thomas was the son of former Mississippi slaves. He had joined countless other black men from the southern United States who sought jobs and fortunes in Chicago and New York, waiting tables or working as valets. A sense of adventure and a desire to escape the everyday racism of Gilded Age America took him to London, Paris, and then, in 1899, to a place very few African Americans had dreamed of visiting: the Russian Empire. Within a few years, he had taken Russian citizenship, found a Russian wife, and—as Fyodor Fyodorovich Tomas—set himself up as one of the premier maître d’s in Moscow." "Jazz depends on improvisation, which is why it has been described as not just a musical form but an ethical system. It demands that a player really listen to his comrades, with the bravery to step forward when he has something to say and the self-possession to know when he has said enough. It requires virtuosity but also humility." Programming as jazz? "Like many revolutionaries, the Kemalists had started out as reformers, seeking to save the sultanate from invaders and occupiers, until it became clear that the old system was beyond repair. But in most other ways, this was a revolution of an unusual type. The Turks legislated their monarch out of existence without ever marching on a royal palace. They conquered no territory but their own. They embraced the idea of a parliamentary republic but just as quickly enveloped their supreme leader in a cult of personality that exceeded that of the Ottoman sultans." "Rights, Halide believed, were there for the recognizing. They were not granted or bestowed so much as finally accepted and acknowledged [...]" "Russia and Turkey had been strategic rivals for centuries, and this long history was difficult to overcome, especially in an era in which Soviets and Turks were both beginning to see themselves as contrasting models of modernity for oppressed peoples everywhere—one based on a proletarian revolution, the other based on a national one. In the contest between rival ideals, the Turks preferred the version that allowed them to build a nation of their own, not one that preached the end of nations altogether." "Nâzım was tried and sentenced to thirty-five years in prison. Unlike his previous sentences, however, this one more or less stuck. He spent the next twelve years incarcerated as a threat to the Turkish state, a rejecter of Kemalism, and a traitorous admirer of the Soviet Union, which had gone from being an early ally of Turkey to a regional rival in the run-up to the Second World War. He was released in 1950 in a general amnesty of political prisoners and only then after a sustained international campaign supported by Pablo Picasso, Jean-Paul Sartre, and other European intellectuals." "Trotsky had been exiled twice before, to Siberia and the Russian North, during his period as an underground revolutionary in the tsarist era, and he was used to the concept of starting a new life as an émigré. The two earlier periods of exile had given way to triumph: the 1905 Russian revolution that forced the tsar to create a Russian parliament and the October 1917 revolution that elevated the Bolsheviks to power. He had no desire to stay in a country where he could not speak the local language, he told Turkish journalists, and he hoped that soon a visa would come through for Germany, Britain, or France. There, he would be able to continue his political work on behalf of international socialism while also railing against the usurper Stalin." "[...] the Byzantines consistently called anyone living outside their capital city “hoi ex Roms,” foreigners from beyond New Rome, that is, Istanbul. They usually referred to their metropolis as simply “the city,” much as New Yorkers speak of Manhattan. That habit probably gave us the modern name, since the Greek eis tn polin—“to the city”—is tantalizingly similar to “Istanbul.” To this day, ethnic Greeks native to Istanbul are referred to in Turkish as something akin to “Romans,” or Rumlar, an echo of the name Byzantines gave themselves." "Atatürk was very much in the mold of other twentieth-century dictators. He ground down political opposition and held firm to the belief that state planning could realize the true interests of the nation, without ever feeling the need to ask the nation what its interests happened to be. Yet, unlike a Mussolini or a Franco, he knew where to draw the line. He was one of the few supreme leaders of the era to develop a cult of personality that staved off its own inevitable decay." "As with all clandestine services, however, the line between neutralizing a real danger and manufacturing one precisely so that it could be neutralized was always somewhat hazy. Intelligence work could be a closed circle. Sometimes the evidence that a threat existed was no more than the fact that some security operative had decided to report that it did. It was a way of thinking about security, politics, and foreign intrigue that was built into the basic structure of the republic and its police apparatus." "But X-2 soon set about systematically contacting Americans, many of them working at Robert College, the brother institution to the American College for Girls and a Protestant missionary school that had become one of the country’s best educational centers." "Americans seemed especially willing to believe that “any attractive girl who shed a few tears and told him how much she hated the Germans was genuinely anti-Nazi.”" "The next day, he boarded a plane for Miami. After a week cooling his heels waiting for a US Army transport plane for Turkey, he found a berth. At the end of January, the C-54 took off with a group of young officers bound for India and one middle-aged civilian hitching a ride. After five days en route, via air hops to Puerto Rico, Brazil, Ghana, and Egypt, several days in Jerusalem, and a twenty-eight-hour train ride across the Taurus Mountains and half of Anatolia, Hirschmann at last arrived in Ankara on Valentine’s Day, 1944." "The reason is that the largest tax assessments were handed out to Greeks, Armenians, and Jews. “This law is also a law of revolution,” said Prime Minister Saracolu at the time. “We will in this way eliminate the foreigners who control our market and give the Turkish market to the Turks.” Families and minority businesses found it impossible to meet the requirements. According to a secret report by the OSS, the tax assessments for Armenian property owners amounted to 232 percent of their property’s real value, 179 percent for Jews, and 156 percent for Greeks, while Muslims were assessed at just under 5 percent." "In the summer of 1938, the Turkish government had officially barred the door to Jews coming from countries with antisemitic laws. Ankara may have believed that these people, even though the neediest, were also the most likely to stay in Turkey." I'm almost speechless. "Modern European history has two dominant modes, the national and the elegiac. Both are, in their way, fictions. National history asks that we take the impossibly large variety of human experience, stacked up like a deck of playing cards, and pull out only the national one—the rare moments in time when people raise a flag and misremember a collective past—as the most worthy of our attention. The elegiac asks that we end every story by fading to black, leaving off at a point when an old world is lost, with a set of ellipses pointing back toward what once had been." "When the sky is bruise-blue and cold, crowds of gulls and pigeons still bounce along the shoreline. Sparkle-headed grackles and magpies strut deliberately beneath the dormant oleander. Snow-covered Judas trees share the coastal hills with evergreen cypresses. On blustery mornings, the Sea of Marmara is a dull sapphire, with leaden domes and gilded spires muted on the shore, everything radiating a cool blue light once the early mist burns away." "Talât, a Muslim villager, broke and unmarried and just arrived that day from Giresun, his hometown on the Black Sea, has come up from the docklands, perhaps looking for work. In an apartment nearby, a Muslim musician, the son of Balkan immigrants, is practicing his contrabass. And around the corner, on the street named for the little vine-covered mosque, someone the neighbors call Shalom, Mordecai’s son, has come out for an evening walk." ]]> </content> </entry> <entry> <title type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling (1894) (read in 2018)]]> </title> <id>https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3612</id> <link href="https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3612"/> <updated>2018-12-27T11:10:50+01:00</updated> <author> <name type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Marco von Ballmoos]]> </name> <uri>https://earthli.com/users/marco</uri> </author> <summary type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA["Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is" ... ]]> </summary> <content type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Published by marco on 27. Dec 2018 11:10:50 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I've failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an interest in this book, then I'm happy for you." I was surprised to learn that the movie is based only on the first three of seven stories in this book. The first three are of a Mowgli who is considerably more adult than the films lead one to believe. He is a child at the very beginning, when he is, indeed, adopted by wolves. However, the story very quickly picks up from a point where he is more-or-less a man and is more than a match for most other creatures of the jungle or civilization. The first story ends with Mowgli driving off Shere Khan (the tiger) with the "red flower": fire. Akela (the lead wolf) stays in control of the pack. In the second part, he is kidnapped by the monkeys (the "Bandar-log") and is rescued by Kaa (python), Baloo (bear) and Bagheera (black panther). The movie was relatively faithful here, as well, taking liberties only in inventing "King Louie", king of the orangutans. The monkeys are not individualized and are not treated as co-equal jungle denizens by the other animals. In the third part, Mowgli goes to live in the village with men. Shere Kahn continues to cause trouble and, with his acolytes, takes over the wolf pack. Mowgli is herding cows for the village. He hears from his animal friends that Shere Kahn is nearby and, that he just fed and will be slow and sleepy. Mowgli hatches a plan to drive his cattle through the canyon where Shere Kahn sleeps, trapping him and then trampling him. Akela and Gray brother wolf are instrumental in Shere Kahn's demise. Despite his advanced age, Akela is restored as leader of the pack. Mowgli returns to the jungle, The fourth story is of Kotick, a white-furred seal, son of the greatest fighter of all the seals. His father fights each year for a place for his family on the shores of an island shared with men. Men sneak into the rear lines and take many seals each year. Kotick does not understand why they return to that island. His father is powerful and is not in danger (other than the grievous wounds he suffers each year in defending his place). Kotick instead travels the world, growing powerful. Finally, he swims with seacows to discover a secluded cove/island, protected from the eyes of man. There is plenty of room for all -- he returns to the original island to bring his tribe with him. They refuse, so he fights them all. His savagery and power awe everyone, including his father. Convinced, many of them go with him and discover that he was right all along. Men no longer plunder their tribe. The fifth story is the also-famous one of Rikki-Tikki-Tavi, the mongoose who defended a family from cobras. The cobra couple Nag and Nagina plot to kill members of the family, but Rikki jumps in and kills Nag. Furious, Nagina swears revenge, but Rikki goes on the offensive, attacking her nest and destroying all but one egg. She takes the last egg back her nest, but Rikki plunges after her -- although very few mongooses ever return from a cobra nest. The other animals in the yard wait with bated breath, until Rikki emerges victorious, bruised but not beaten. Nag and Nagina are dead and no eggs have survived. The sixth story is of Toomai, the son of a mahout, master of the elephant Kala Nag. They are tasked with catching wild elephants. Toomai helps but is reprimanded for being in the elephant enclosure. The boss tells him he may only return once he has "seen elephants dance". He thinks that he has banished the boy for good. Kala Nag takes the boy along on the next giant meeting of wild and domesticated elephants. On the night of the dance, they all break their chains and trample acres of forest. The boss cannot deny that they'd danced and that Toomai had seen it and welcomes him as a mahout. The final story follows the conversations of the various animals employed by the British on a battle field in Afghanistan. The mules, camels, horses, bullocks and elephants detail their fears and tasks and how and why they serve. The animals that already serve the queen are there to convince the Afghan animals that they should obey, as well. I suppose there's a metaphor in there somewhere. [Citations] ""The pity of the Monkey People!" Baloo snorted. "The stillness of the mountain stream! The cool of the summer sun!" "Little Toomai turned, rustling in the fodder, and watched the curve of his big back against half the stars in heaven, and while he watched he heard, so far away that it sounded no more than a pinhole of noise pricked through the stillness, the "hoot-toot" of a wild elephant." "("Two Tails" is camp slang for the elephant.)" ""You could put a whole regiment of Dicks on my back without making me feel any better. I know just enough to be uncomfortable, and not enough to go on in spite of it."" ]]> </content> </entry> <entry> <title type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Bad Chili (a Hap and Leonard Novel) by Joe R. Lansdale (1997) (read in 2018)]]> </title> <id>https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3611</id> <link href="https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3611"/> <updated>2018-12-27T10:35:37+01:00</updated> <author> <name type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Marco von Ballmoos]]> </name> <uri>https://earthli.com/users/marco</uri> </author> <summary type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA["Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is" ... ]]> </summary> <content type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Published by marco on 27. Dec 2018 10:35:37 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I've failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an interest in this book, then I'm happy for you." Hap starts off the book with rabies. Leonard starts off the book as a suspect in the murder of a biker who was fooling around with Raul. Hap's rabies leads him to meet Brett Sawyer, a dirty night nurse with whom he begins a torrid affair. Leonard and Hap investigate to clear Leonard's name, all the while staying out of the reach of the law -- except for Charlie, who's almost certain that Leonard didn't do it. Things get more complicated as the biker turns out to have been not only an undercover cop, but also a dirty (different meaning than for Brett) undercover cop. In the mix is a local Chili King, who's got a lot of markets cornered and is mixed up in some very sordid businesses. There's also the matter of some videotapes that show gay guys getting thrashed for being gay. They team up with Jim-Bob Luke -- a private investigator with a lot of luck and very loose ethics -- to finally crack the case. [Citations] “You seem happy enough,” I said. “It’s smile or die, darlin’.” “Then why do you do this?” “’Cause I’m divorced and the landlord won’t fuck me for the rent.” I laughed and she laughed. Kevin said, “What you gonna do, fuckhead?” “I can either sit you down and have a nice talk, or punch your lights out. Since I figure you’ll be a boring conversationalist, I like the second idea.” ]]> </content> </entry> <entry> <title type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Star Maker by Olaf Stapledon (1937) (read in 2018)]]> </title> <id>https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3613</id> <link href="https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3613"/> <updated>2018-12-27T10:21:34+01:00</updated> <author> <name type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Marco von Ballmoos]]> </name> <uri>https://earthli.com/users/marco</uri> </author> <summary type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA["Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is" ... ]]> </summary> <content type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Published by marco on 27. Dec 2018 10:21:34 Updated by marco on 27. Dec 2018 20:13:35 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I've failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an interest in this book, then I'm happy for you." This book is the description of an astral journey. The author describes leaving his home to take a walk to a local hilltop and then going much, much further. He travels the remaining distance -- in all four dimensions -- in his mind. He starts off in the local solar system, but quickly ranges to other stars, flitting to and fro, without regard for the speed of light. At first, he talks of blue and red shifts, but he soon realizes he can travel free of physical constraint by attuning himself to an "affinity" for worlds that have intelligent life on them. This all sounds absolutely bizarre, but the book was written in 1937, in the early Einstein era. It's a remarkably sophisticated treatise and holds up reasonably well, even today. He posits the fast mode of travel in order to be able to describe what he experienced. He is also capable of "landing" on planets and merging with the consciousness of individuals there. He spends a long time on a planet of quasi-human beings who experience the world more through scent than through visual apprehension. At the end of his sojourn, his host Bvalltu leaves with him and, together, they range across star systems. The overarching theme is communal life and intelligence. He talks of ever-higher levels of intelligence, straining to a perfection, to being worthy of returning to the so-called Star Maker. Clan intelligences form nation intelligences, which form world intelligences, then star-system and, finally, galactic intelligences. At this point, the story picks up temporal speed and they talk of visiting other galaxies. Each of these galaxies is in a different level of development toward a hive mind. Some of their powers are awesome: they can move planets and stars. There is talk of decay, where some civilizations fail. At one point, all of the stars begin exploding -- at which point it is discovered that they, too, are intelligent. Their society is folded into the galactic ones. And so on, and so forth. In the end, the author is part of the cosmic mind, the sum total of all galactic intelligences that sees through to the Star Maker and looks on his many works, of which this universe is but one. It is a sort-of ecclesiastic re-telling of the Big Bang, with some of the Star Maker's creations collapsing back and others dispersing until a heat death. The thought experiment folds back in on itself as the author subsides back into his body and returns to his wife and home, that which he now realizes is the most important, the seed of all that is to follow. As noted in "Wikipedia" <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Maker>, prominent contemporaries like Jorge Luis Borges, H.G. Wells, Virginia Woolf, Brian Aldiss, Doris Lessing (recent Nobel Prize winner), Arthur C. Clarke and Stanislaw Lem held this book and its author in high esteem. Even Freeman Dyson credited his "Dyson Spheres" to Stapledon, since he'd already envisioned them in this book. [Citations] "And in particular, this partnership of ours, this seemingly so well-based fulcrum for activity in the world, was it after all nothing but a little eddy of complacent and ingrown domesticity, ineffectively whirling on the surface of the great flux, having in itself no depth of being, and no significance?" "Overhead, obscurity unveiled a star. One tremulous arrow of light, projected how many thousands of years ago, now stung my nerves with vision, and my heart with fear." "But now irrationally I was seized with a strange worship, not, surely of the star, that mere furnace which mere distance falsely sanctified," "a long-married couple we fitted rather neatly, like two close trees whose trunks have grown upwards together as a single shaft, mutually distorting, but mutually supporting." "perceived that I was on a little round grain of rock and metal, filmed with water and with air, whirling in sunlight and darkness. And on the skin of that little grain all the swarms of men, generation by generation, had lived in labor and blindness, with intermittent joy and intermittent lucidity of spirit. And all their history, with its folk-wanderings, its empires, its philosophies, its proud sciences, its social revolutions, its increasing hunger for community, was but a flicker in one day of the lives of stars." "Evidently I was traveling not only upwards but eastwards, and swinging round into the day. Soon the sun leapt into view, devouring the huge crescent of dawn with its brilliance." "There below me lay huge industrial regions, blackening the air with smoke. Yet all this thronging life and humanly momentous enterprise had made no mark whatever on the features of the planet. From this high look-out the Earth would have appeared no different before the dawn of man. No visiting angel, or explorer from another planet, could have guessed that this bland orb teemed with vermin, with world-mastering, self-torturing, incipiently angelic beasts." "am dismayed at the contrast between the spiritual treasure which I aspired to hand over to my fellow men and the paucity of my actual tribute. This failure was perhaps due to the fact that, though I did indeed accept the challenge of the adventure, I accepted it only with secret reservations. Fear and the longing for comfort, I now recognize, dimmed the brightness of my will. My resolution, so boldly formed, proved after all frail." "Governments soon discovered that the new invention gave them a cheap and effective kind of power over their subjects. Slum-conditions could be tolerated if there was an unfailing supply of illusory luxury. Reforms distasteful to the authorities could be shelved if they could be represented as inimical to the national radio-system. Strikes and riots could often be broken by the mere threat to close down the broadcasting studios, or alternatively by flooding the ether at a critical moment with some saccharine novelty." "Children, if future generations were required, would be produced ectogenetically. The World Director of Broadcasting would be requested to submit psychological and physiological specifications of the ideal “listening breed.” Infants produced in accordance with this pattern would then be educated by special radio programs to prepare them for adult radio life. They would never leave their cots, save to pass by stages to the full-sized beds of maturity. At the latter end of life, if medical science did not succeed in circumventing senility and death, the individual would at least be able to secure a painless end by pressing an appropriate button." "Of course for the most part people went about their affairs with the same absorbed and self-satisfied interest as on my own planet. They were far too busy making a living, marrying, rearing families, trying to get the better of one another, to spare time for conscious doubt about the aim of life." "Men would become on the whole less sincere, less self-searching, less sensitive to the needs of others, in fact less capable of community. Social machinery, which had worked well so long as citizens attained a certain level of humanity, would be dislocated by injustice and corruption. Tyrants and tyrannical oligarchies would set about destroying liberty. Hate-mad submerged classes would give them good excuse. Little by little, though the material benefits of civilization might smolder on for centuries, the flame of the spirit would die down into a mere flicker in a few isolated individuals." "Bvalltu, on the other hand, suspected that deterioration was due to some factor in human nature itself. He was inclined to believe that it was a consequence of civilization, that in changing the whole environment of the human species, seemingly for the better, science had unwittingly brought about a state of affairs hostile to spiritual vigor. He did not pretend to know whether the disaster was caused by the increase of artificial food, or the increased nervous strain of modern conditions, or interference with natural selection, or the softer upbringing of children, or to some other cause." "In Bvalltu’s view man had climbed approximately to the same height time after time, only to be undone by some hidden consequence of his own achievement." "It was known to scientists that, owing to the weak gravitational hold of their world, the atmosphere, already scant, was steadily deceasing. Sooner or later humanity would have to face the problem of stopping this constant leakage of precious oxygen. Hitherto life had successfully adapted itself to the progressive rarefaction of atmosphere, but the human physique had already reached the limit of adaptability in this respect. If the loss were not soon checked, the race would inevitably decline. The only hope was that some means to deal with the atmospheric problem would be discovered before the onset of the next age of barbarism." It sounds very much like he's talking about global warming in 1937. "Not so to Bvalitu. “Even if the powers destroy us,” he said, “who are we, to condemn them? As well might a fleeting word judge the speaker that forms it. Perhaps they use us for their own hihg ends, use our strength and our weakness, our joy and our pain, in some theme inconceivable to us, and excellent.”" "“If he saved all the worlds, but tormented just one man, would you forgive him? Or if he was a little harsh only to one stupid child? What has our pain to do with it, or our failure? Star Maker! It is a good word, though we can have no notion" "Bvalitu was silent in his mind for a moment. Then he looked up, searching among the smoke-clouds for a daytime star. And then he said to me in his mind, “If he saved all the worlds, but tormented just one man, would you forgive him? Or if he was a little harsh only to one stupid child? What has our pain to do with it, or our failure? Star Maker! It is a good word, though we can have no notion of its meaning. Oh, Star Maker, even if you destroy me, I must praise you. Even if you torture my dearest. Even if you torment and waste all your lovely worlds, the little figments of your imagination, yet I must praise you. For if you do so, it must be right. In me it would be wrong, but in you it must be right.”" The sentiment of being "harsh only to one stupid child" was developed further in Ursula K. LeGuin's short story, Those Who Walk Away from Omelas. "What was the significance of this physical immensity and complexity? By itself, plainly, it constituted nothing but sheer futility and desolation. But with awe and hope we told ourselves that it promised an even greater complexity and subtlety and diversity of the psychical. This alone could justify it. But this formidable promise, though inspiring, was also terrifying. Like a nestling that peers over the nest’s rim for the first time, and then shrinks back from the great world into its tiny home, we had emerged beyond the confines of that little nest of stars which for so long, but falsely, men called “the universe.” And now we sank back to bury ourselves once more in the genial precincts of our native galaxy." "Only a few here and there, now and then, were solaced, goaded, or tortured by moments of true wakefulness. Still fewer attained a clear and constant vision, even of some partial aspect of truth; and their half-truths they nearly always took to be absolute. Propagating their little partial truths, they bewildered and misdirected their fellow mortals as much as they helped them." "In size these quasi-human types were seldom larger than our largest gorillas, seldom much smaller than monkeys; but we could not estimate their size with any accuracy, as we had no familiar standards of measurements." This was an interesting point: as a non-corporeal mind, he would have literally no idea of the dimensions of objects that he observed, since he had nothing against which to measure. "He might in fact be a critical, self-respecting and other-respecting person. But in all matters connected with the super-tribes, whether national or economic, he behaved in a very different manner. All ideas coming to him with the sanction of nation or class would be accepted uncritically and with fervor by himself and all his fellows. As soon as he encountered one of the symbols or slogans of his super-tribe he ceased to be a human personality and became a sort of de-cerebrate animal, capable only of stereotyped reactions. In extreme cases his mind was absolutely closed to influences opposed to the suggestion of the super-tribe. Criticism was either met with blind rage or actually not heard at all. Persons who in the intimate community of their small native tribe were capable of great mutual insight and sympathy might suddenly, in response to tribal symbols, be transformed into vessels of crazy intolerance and hate directed against national or class enemies." "In several other worlds of this type we saw the struggle for the more awakened mentality definitely fail. Vindictive and superstitious herd-cults exterminated the best minds of the race, and drugged the rest with customs and principles so damaging that the vital sources of sensitivity and adaptability on which all mental progress depends were destroyed forever." "And only a few out of the great host of worlds could win through even to the social peace and fullness toward which all were groping. In the more lowly worlds, moreover, few were the individuals who won any satisfaction of life even within the narrow bounds of their own imperfect nature. No doubt one or two, here and there, in almost every world, found not merely happiness but the joy that passes all understanding." "The ichthyoids had not yet succumbed biologically to their inferior position, but psychologically they were already showing signs of deep mental decay. A profound disheartenment and lassitude attacked them, like that which so often undermines our primitive races when they find themselves struggling in the flood of European civilization." Despite the high-flying thought experiment in this book, it's still so difficult for the author to escape the unconscious prejudices of his time. "The pacific races had the courage to disarm. In the most spectacular and unmistakable manner they destroyed their weapons and their munition factories. They took care, too, that these events should be witnessed by enemy-swarms that had been taken prisoner. These captives they then freed, bidding them report their experiences to the enemy. In reply the enemy invaded the nearest of the disarmed countries and set about ruthlessly imposing the military culture upon it, by means of propaganda and persecution. But in spite of mass executions and mass torture, the upshot was not what was expected. For though the tyrant races were not appreciably more developed in sociality than Homo sapiens, the victims were far superior. Repression only strengthened the will for passive resistance. Little by little the tyranny began to waver. Then suddenly it collapsed. The invaders withdrew, taking with them the infection of pacifism. In a surprisingly short time that world became a federation, whose members were distinct species." This is the purest of wishful thinking. I can't imagine this working with people. "The climax came when it was found possible to do away with the day-time sleep altogether. The products of artificial photosynthesis could be rapidly injected into the living body every morning, so that the plant-man could spend practically the whole day in active work. Very soon the roots of the peoples were being dug up and used as raw material in manufacture. They were no longer needed for their natural purpose." Nice metaphor. "But in this “waking” there seemed to be nothing more mysterious in kind than in those many occasions in normal life when the mind delightedly relates together experiences that have hitherto been insulated from one another, or discovers in confused objects a pattern or a significance hitherto unnoticed." "But in a few worlds the spirit reacted to its desperate plight with a miracle. Or, if the reader prefers, the environment miraculously refashioned the spirit. There occurred a widespread and almost sudden waking into a new lucidity of consciousness and a new integrity of will. To call this change miraculous is only to recognize that it could not have been scientifically predicted even from" "In most cases it was not achieved. “Human nature,” or its equivalent in the many worlds, could not change itself; and the environment could not remake it. But in a few worlds the spirit reacted" "Only after a long-drawn agony of economic distress and maniac warfare, haunted by an increasingly clear vision of a happier world, could the second stage of waking be achieved. In most cases it was not achieved. “Human nature,” or its equivalent in the many worlds, could not change itself; and the environment could not remake it. But in a few worlds the spirit reacted to its desperate plight with a miracle. Or, if the reader prefers, the environment miraculously refashioned the spirit. There occurred a widespread and almost sudden waking into a new lucidity of consciousness and a new integrity of will. To call this change miraculous is only to recognize that it could not have been scientifically predicted even from the fullest possible knowledge of “human nature” as manifested in the earlier age. To later generations, however, it appeared as no miracle but as a belated wakening from an almost miraculous stupor into plain sanity." "We observed with incredulity situations in which the “absolute” world-government, faced with some exceptionally momentous and doubtful matter of policy, had made urgent appeals for a formal democratic decision, only to receive from all regions the reply, “We cannot advise. You must decide as your professional experience suggests. We will abide by your decision.”" This is not unusual -- what he's describing here is representative democracy. "And “social service” was apt to be interpreted very broadly. It seemed to permit many lives to be given over wholly to freakish and irresponsible self-expression. The community could well afford a vast amount of such wastage for the sake of the few invaluable jewels of originality which occasionally emerged from it." "Of positive eugenical enterprises I need only mention improvements of sensory range and acuity (chiefly in sight and touch), the invention of new senses, improvements in memory, in general intelligence, in temporal discrimination. These races came to distinguish ever more minute periods of duration, and at the same time to extend their temporal grasp so as to apprehend ever longer periods as “now.”" "In every world that had gained full eugenical power there arose sooner or later a sharp public discussion as to the most suitable length of individual life. All were agreed that life must be prolonged; but, while one party wished to multiply it only three or four times, another insisted that nothing less than a hundred times the normal life-span could afford the race that continuity and depth of experience which all saw to be desirable." "Actual interstellar voyaging was first effected by detaching a planet from its natural orbit by a series of well-timed and well-placed rocket impulsions, and thus projecting it into outer space at a speed far greater than the normal planetary and stellar speeds. Something more than this was necessary, since life on a sunless planet would have been impossible. For short interstellar voyages the difficulty was sometimes overcome by the generation of sub-atomic energy from the planet’s own substance; but for longer voyages, lasting for many thousands of years, the only method was to form a small artificial sun, and project it into space as a blazing satellite of the living world." "It must be remembered that a fully awakened world had no need to think in terms of such short periods as a human lifetime. Though its individuals might die, the minded world was in a very important sense immortal." "The race might then become travel-mad. Its social organization would be refashioned and directed with Spartan strictness to the new communal undertaking. All its members, hypnotized by the common obsession, would gradually forget the life of intense personal intercourse and of creative mental activity which had hitherto been their chief concern. The whole venture of the spirit, exploring the universe and its own nature with critical intelligence and delicate sensibility, would gradually come to a standstill. The deepest roots of emotion and will, which in the fully sane awakened world were securely within the range of introspection, would become increasingly obscured. Less and less, in such a world, could the unhappy communal mind understand itself. More and more it pursued its phantom goal. Any attempt to explore the galaxy telepathically was now abandoned. The passion of physical exploration assumed the guise of a religion. The communal mind persuaded itself that it must at all costs spread the gospel of its own culture throughout the galaxy. Though culture itself was vanishing, the vague idea of culture was cherished as a justification of world-policy." Again, a lovely metaphor. "For then travel was but the means to cultural and religious empire." "few, however, succeeded in attaining their end, and after voyages lasting for thousands of years were able to reach some neighboring planetary system. The invaders were often in a desperate plight. Generally they had used up most of the material of their little artificial sun. Economy had forced them to reduce their ration of heat and light so far that when at last they discovered a suitable planetary system their native world was almost wholly arctic. On arrival, they would first take up their position in a suitable orbit and, perhaps spend some centuries in recuperating. Then they would explore the neighboring worlds, seek out the most hospitable, and begin to adapt themselves or their descendants to life upon it." "Then followed wars such as had never before occurred in our galaxy. Fleets of worlds, natural and artificial, maneuvered among the stars to outwit one another, and destroyed one another with long-range jets of sub-atomic energy. As the tides of battle swept hither and thither through space, whole planetary systems were annihilated. Many a world-spirit found a sudden end. Many a lowly race that had no part in the strife was slaughtered in the celestial warfare that raged around it. Yet so vast is the galaxy that these intermundane wars, terrible as they were, could at first be regarded as rare accidents, mere unfortunate episodes in the triumphant march of civilization." The science-fiction series, The Expanse would build on this theme considerably. "Thus, even while the Symbiotics were voyaging among these worlds in rocket vessels and using the mineral resources of neighboring uninhabited planets, the intelligent worlds of pre-utopian rank were left unvisited. Not till these worlds had themselves entered the full Utopian phase and were exploring their neighbor planets were they allowed to discover the truth." And this theme was developed further in 2001: A Space Odyssey. "Aeon after aeon, the process would repeat itself under the calm telepathic observation of the Symbiotics, whose existence was never suspected by the primitive creatures under their gaze. So might we ourselves look down into some rock-pool where lowly creatures repeat with naive zest dramas learned by their ancestors aeons ago." "Sometimes a comparatively old world, or even a whole ring of worlds, would feel itself outstripped in mental excellence by younger worlds and races, whose structure, physical and biological, embodied increasing skill. Then either the superannuated world would simply continue its life in a sort of backwater of civilization, tolerated, loved, studied by the younger worlds; or it would choose to die and surrender the material of its planet for new ventures." "The Sub-Galactics knew that they had power to prevent any further disaster. Yet, to our surprise, our horror and incomprehension, they calmly awaited the third murder. Still more strange, the doomed worlds themselves, though in telepathic communication with the Sub-Galaxy, made no appeal for help. Victims and spectators alike studied the situation with quiet interest, even with a sort of bright exultation not wholly unlike amusement. From our lowlier plane this detachment, this seeming levity, at first appeared less angelic than inhuman." This is also an interesting point: that events unfold on different planes of understanding. What looks like madness on one plane is perfectly understandable on another. "The building of the galactic community of worlds lies far beyond the comprehension of the writer of this book. I cannot now remember at all clearly what I experienced of these obscure matters in the state of heightened lucidity which came to me through participation in the communal mind of the explorers. And even in that state I was bewildered by the effort to comprehend the aims of that close-knit community of worlds." "The great advance in mental caliber, and the attainment of communal mentality throughout the cosmos, had brought a change in the experience of time. The temporal reach of the mind had been very greatly extended. The awakened worlds experienced an aeon as a mere crowded day. They were aware of time’s passage as a man in a canoe might have cognizance of a river which in its upper reaches is sluggish but subsequently breaks into rapids and becomes swifter and swifter, till, at no great distance ahead, it must plunge in a final cataract down to the sea, namely to the eternal end of life, the extinction of the stars. Comparing the little respite that remained with the great work which they passionately desired to accomplish, namely the full awakening of the cosmical spirit, they saw that at best there was no time to spare, and that, more probably, it was already too late to accomplish the task." "We saw Man on his little Earth blunder through many alternating phases of dullness and lucidity, and again abject dullness. From epoch to epoch his bodily shape changed as a cloud changes. We watched him in his desperate struggle with Martian invaders; and then, after a moment that included further ages ofdarkness and of light, we saw him driven, by dread of the moon’s downfall, away to inhospitable Venus. Later still, after an aeon that was a mere sigh in the lifetime of the cosmos, he fled before the exploding sun to Neptune, there to sink back into mere animality for further aeons again. But then he climbed once more and reached his finest intelligence, only to be burnt up like a moth in a flame by irresistible catastrophe." "Plans were therefore made for projecting several stars with their attendant systems of worlds across the vast ocean of space that separated the two floating islets of civilization. The voyage would of course be thousands of times longer than anything hitherto attempted. At its completion many more of the stars in each galaxy would already have ceased to shine, and the end of all life in the cosmos would already be in sight." "The star itself, by means of its purchase on the electromagnetic field of the cosmos, apparently wills and executes this ideal course with all the attention and delicacy of response which a motorist exercises in threading his way through traffic on a winding road, or a ballet-dancer in performing the most intricate movements with the greatest economy of effort. Almost certainly, the star’s whole physical behavior is normally experienced as a blissful, an ecstatic, an ever successful pursuit of formal beauty. This the minded worlds were able to discover through their own most formalistic aesthetic experience. In fact it was through this experience that they first made contact with stellar minds. But the actual perception of the aesthetic (or religious?) rightness of the mysterious canon, which the stars so earnestly accepted, remained far beyond the mental range of the minded worlds." "The salamandrian races have never been able to gain mastery over their fiery worlds. Many of them succumb, soon or late, either to some natural disaster or to internecine strife or to the self-cleansing activities of their mighty host. Many others survive, but in a relatively harmless state, troubling their stars only with a mild irritation, and a faint shade of insincerity in all their dealings with one another. In the public culture of the stars the salamandrian pest was completely ignored. Each star believed itself to be the only sufferer and the only sinner in the galaxy. One indirect effect the pest did have on stellar thought. It introduced the idea of purity. Each star prized the perfection of the stellar community all the more by reason of its own secret experience of impurity." What an imagination! "Then followed that age of horror which I have already described from the point of view of the Society of Worlds. From the stellar point of view it was no less terrible, for the condition of the stellar society soon became desperate. Gone was the perfection and beatitude of former days. “The City of God” had degenerated into a place of hatred, recrimination and despair. Hosts of the younger stars had become premature and embittered dwarfs, while the elders had mostly grown senile. The dance pattern had fallen into chaos. The old passion for the canons of the dance remained, but the conception of the canons was obscured. Spiritual life had succumbed to the necessity of urgent action. The passion for the progress of insight into the nature of the cosmos also remained, but insight itself was obscured. Moreover, the former naive confidence, common to young and mature alike, the certainty that the cosmos was perfect and that the power behind it was righteous, had given place to blank despair." "Although my mind now gathered into itself all the wisdom of all worlds in all ages, and though the life of my cosmical body was itself the life of myriads of infinitely diverse worlds and myriads of infinitely diverse individual creatures, and though the texture of my daily life was one of joyful and creative enterprise, yet all this was as nothing. For around lay the host of the unfulfilled galaxies; and my own flesh was already grievously impoverished by the death of my stars; and the aeons were slipping past with fatal speed. Soon the texture of my cosmical brain must disintegrate. And then inev-itably I must fall away from my prized though imperfect state of lucidity, and descend, through all the stages of the mind’s second childhood, down to the cosmical death." "As time advanced, the internal heat of the encrusted stars was used up, and it became necessary to support civilization by atomic disintegration of the star’s rocky core. Thus in time each stellar world became an increasingly hollow sphere supported by a system of great internal buttresses. One by one the populations, or rather the new and specially adapted descendants of the former populations, retired into the interiors of the burnt-out stars." "Together they supported the communal mind, with all its awareness of the whole vivid, intricate past of the cosmos, and its tireless effort to achieve its spiritual goal before increase of entropy should destroy the tissue of civilizations in which it inhered." "Suffice it that to each galaxy and to each world was assigned a special creative mental function, and that all assimilated the work of all. At the close of this period I, the communal mind, emerged re-made, as from a chrysalis; and for a brief moment, which was indeed the supreme moment of the cosmos, I faced the Star Maker." "Somehow I must tell something of that experience. Inevitably I face the task with a sense of abysmal incompetence. The greatest minds of the human race through all the ages of human history have failed to describe their moments of deepest insight. Then how dare I attempt this task? And yet I must. Even at the risk of well-merited ridicule and contempt and moral censure, I must stammer out what I have seen. If a shipwrecked seaman on his raft is swept helplessly past marvelous coasts and then home again, he cannot hold his peace. The cultivated may turn away in disgust at his rude accent and clumsy diction. The knowing may laugh at his failure to distinguish between fact and illusion. But speak he must." "I saw myself still preserving, though with increasing difficulty, my lucid consciousness; battling against the onset of drowsiness and senility, no longer in the hope of winning through to any more glorious state than that which I had already known, or of laying a less inadequate jewel of worship before the Star Maker, but simply out of sheer hunger for experience, and out of loyalty to the spirit." "It is enough to mention that, in general, each cosmos was more complex, and in a sense more voluminous than the last; for in each the ultimate physical units were smaller in relation to the whole, and more multitudinous. Also, in each the individual conscious creatures were generally more in number, and more diverse in type; and the most awakened in each cosmos reached a more lucid mentality than any creatures in the previous cosmos." Here, the author is imagining God in his workshop, suddenly noticing that a creation is looking back at God. "Sometimes a cosmos started as a single lowly organism with an internal, non-organic environment. It then propagated by fission into an increasing host of increasingly small and increasingly individuated and awakened creatures. In some of these universes evolution would continue till the creatures became too minute to accommodate the complexity of organic structure necessary for intelligent minds. The Star Maker would then watch the cosmical societies desperately striving to circumvent the fated degeneration of their race." With this listing of other cosmos, he shows how the intricate description of the previous 90% of the book could be written about any one of a myriad other cosmos. "Sometimes the Star Maker flung off creations which were in effect groups of many linked universes, wholly distinct physical systems of very different kinds, yet related by the fact that the creatures lived their lives successively in universe after universe, assuming in each habitat an indigenous physical form, but bearing with them in their transmigration faint and easily misinterpreted memories of earlier existences." "This most subtle medium the Star Maker now rough-hewed into the general form of a cosmos. Thus he fashioned a still indeterminate space-time, as yet quite ungeometrized; an amorphous physicality with no clear quality or direction, no intricacy of physical laws; a more distinctly conceived vital trend and epic adventure of mentality; and a surprisingly definite climax and crown of spiritual lucidity." "For instance, some of the later creations were designed with two or more temporal dimensions, and the lives of the creatures were temporal sequences in one or other dimension of the temporal “area” or “volume.” These beings experienced their cosmos in a very odd manner. Living for a brief period along one dimension, each perceived at every moment of its life a simultaneous vista which, though of course fragmentary and obscure, was actually a view of a whole unique “transverse” cosmical evolution in the other dimension. In some cases a creature had an active life in every temporal dimension of the cosmos. The divine skill which arranged the whole temporal “volume” in such a manner that all the infinite spontaneous acts of all the creatures should fit together to produce a coherent system of transverse evolutions far surpassed even the ingenuity of the earlier experiment in “pre-established harmony.”" "Every cosmos that I had hitherto observed now turned out to be a single example of a myriad-fold class, like a biological species, or the class of all the atoms of a single element. The internal life of each “atomic” cosmos had seemingly the same kind of relevance (and the same kind of irrelevance) to the life of the ultimate cosmos as the events within a brain cell, or in one of its atoms, to the life of a human mind. Yet in spite of this huge discrepancy I seemed to sense throughout the whole dizzying hierarchy of creations a striking identity of spirit." "There had been a time when I myself, as the communal mind of a lowly cosmos, had looked upon the frustration and sorrow of my little members with equanimity, conscious that the suffering of these drowsy beings was no great price to pay for the lucidity that I myself contributed to reality. But the suffering individuals within the ultimate cosmos, though in comparison with the hosts of happy creatures they were few, were beings, it seemed to me, of my own, cosmical, mental stature, not the frail, shadowy existences that had contributed their dull griefs to my making. And this I could not endure." "I singled out our window. We had been happy together! We had found, or we had created, our little treasure of community. This was the one rock in all the welter of experience. This, not the astronomical and hypercosmical immensity, nor even the planetary grain, this, this alone, was the solid ground of existence. On every side was confusion, a rising storm, great waves already drenching our rock. And all around, in the dark welter, faces and appealing hands, half-seen and vanishing." ]]> </content> </entry> <entry> <title type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[The New Watch by Sergei Lukyanenko (2011 -- en/2012) (read in 2018)]]> </title> <id>https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3569</id> <link href="https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3569"/> <updated>2018-12-26T21:02:21+01:00</updated> <author> <name type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Marco von Ballmoos]]> </name> <uri>https://earthli.com/users/marco</uri> </author> <summary type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA["Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is" ... ]]> </summary> <content type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Published by marco on 26. Dec 2018 21:02:21 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I've failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an interest in this book, then I'm happy for you." The first volume deals with Prophets and Clairvoyants and how the Twilight deals with them. We learn that the Twilight has not just Mirrors, but Tigers. The Tiger is unstoppable and is there to prevent anyone from hearing a Prophet's "main prophecy". Anton is there, once again, this time with the help of his now ten-year--old daughter, Nadya (the zero-point enchantress). The young prophet is saved from the Tiger in the nick of time -- but the Twilight doesn't know about recording devices. And Kesha (the Prophet) was clutching a toy tape recorder when he emerged from the room into which he'd revealed his prophecy to (supposedly) no-one. In the second volume, Anton travels once again to London to meet a former Prophet, a Dark One named Erasmus Darwin to find out what his prophecy was and to find out more about Tigers and how to stop them. Darwin had avoided dying for his prophecy in a similar way to Kesha -- by yelling into into the bole of an oak tree. Anton returns from London with a cup made from the wood of that tree. [Citations] "If you know for certain that it’s impossible to win but, if you don’t fight, someone’s going to be killed . . . what would you do?” “If it’s impossible, why should I die too?” asked Las. “If you have to fight, it’s not important if you’re going to win,” Alisher answered." "said Semyon, nodding. “Exalted feelings, noble impulses, reckless courage, foolhardy self-sacrifice—that’s all very fine. But there has to be a reason for it. A real reason. Otherwise all your Light Other aspirations amount to no more than stupidity. The annals of the Watches recall many Others who were noble but stupid. But they’re history now. And unfortunately their example is not worth imitating.”" "Children were not special creatures, requiring different treatment, food, and clothing. They were simply little human beings who might possibly be fortunate enough to become full-fledged adults. Even in the paintings of the finest artists of that time the bodies and faces of children were indistinguishable from the bodies and faces of adults—if the artist’s eye did detect the difference in proportions, his mind rejected the distinction. A boy was simply a little man. A girl was simply a little woman . . . indeed, girls changed their status and became women very quickly, and no one found that disconcerting. Leavened with the first yeast of civilization, the human dough was seething and expanding. Humankind had to grow. And for that, there had to be as many births as possible, because it was beyond human power to reduce the number of deaths." "You foretell the future, even though with little skill as yet. But tell me: in three or four hundred years, who will rule on the Capitol Hill?” “A black man will ascend the throne and all will glorify him as a peacemaker. But he will send iron birds across the ocean to seize the treasures of the Libyans and the Persians, and by that shall be caused a great war and convulsions in the world . . .” the boy intoned slowly, as if he was sleepy. “Hmm,” said Erasmus’s companion, scratching the tip of his nose. “No, you are still far from your main prophecy. Too many errors. The Italians are always fighting the Arabs, but how can a black man rule in Rome? Persia—well and good . . . but there are no treasures in Libya, it is all desert that engenders nothing but a useless black oil. And even if there are iron birds in the world at that time—what ocean is this? Italy is separated from Libya by only a sea. No, too many errors—you are not yet ready." "Fan laughed. “The Twilight needs the blue moss for one purpose. The Tiger for another. And the Others for yet another. But all of us together do the same thing—we stir up humankind, we jolt people, make them do something, invent something, strive for something . . . sometimes they achieve success, sometimes they take a beating. We are all part of the Twilight, its symbiotes if you like. Its hands and feet, eyes and ears. The rakes and spades it uses to cultivate its vegetable patch—humankind. Do you wish to rebel against the Tiger? You will be rebelling against the Twilight." "“Overall there has been some progress,” I said, disagreeing. “In wartime they used to annihilate people or turn them into slaves, the peasants starved to death . . .” “And now in wartime they torture them and poison them with gas in concentration camps, bomb them with high-precision smart bombs, or, in the very best of cases, they occupy countries economically and turn them into powerless satellites. And where there is no war—they dumb down their own people and treat them like cattle.” Las spread his hands emphatically. “All those Genghis Khans, Xerxeses, and Caligulas were more honest, I reckon. So far, there is nothing to respect human beings for.”" ]]> </content> </entry> <entry> <title type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[The Sixth Watch by Sergei Lukyanenko (2012 -- en/2013) (read in 2018)]]> </title> <id>https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3582</id> <link href="https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3582"/> <updated>2018-12-26T21:00:22+01:00</updated> <author> <name type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Marco von Ballmoos]]> </name> <uri>https://earthli.com/users/marco</uri> </author> <summary type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA["Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is" ... ]]> </summary> <content type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Published by marco on 26. Dec 2018 21:00:22 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I've failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an interest in this book, then I'm happy for you." This is final installment in the Watch Series. In this one, Anton's daughter Nadya is threatened at her school, where two magicians sweep through with a power completely beyond what each has on his own. The prophets have foretold attacks of this sort and predict the end of the world in five days' time. We learn more about the ancient order of the vampires -- the world's supposed first children. The day and night watch of Moscow are basically working together, attending the high councils of the vampires and witches as they each seek to elect a member to be part of the Sixth Watch. There are also the form-takers and the Foundation. All representatives of the watch will likely die when the council convenes. The watch is there to combat the Twilight itself, which is embodied in a human-like figure. In the end, it is Anton who thwarts the twilight and restores order and balance. [Citations] "Or take the healers’ recipes. Light magic, no horror involved . . . as a general rule. Looking at the popular recipe for a migraine elixir, we discover that five of the seven ingredients are not written down, but are denoted by smells! That is, you have to sniff the pages of the book! And yes, you’re quite right, if you write in “vanilla,” “chestnut honey,” or “rye bread” instead of including the smells, the elixir won’t work. The healer has to sniff the ingredients as he makes up the recipe, even “powdered chalk,” which doesn’t smell of anything much. Even “spring water,” which doesn’t have any kind of odor at all." "In a modern city you don’t often come across anyone running. People often plod slowly past the shop windows. When they walk, it’s always fast. But running . . . There are two scenarios for that: a short sprint to the bus stop, hoping to catch a bus that’s already leaving, and the daily spurt of some enthusiastic follower of a healthy lifestyle—somewhere in a park or close to one—wearing a natty tracksuit with headphones jammed into their ears. Anyone running, who isn’t running to a bus stop or wearing a tracksuit, automatically arouses suspicion." "And those who can’t are dealing with their usual business. Their own bread, their own melody, their own pickpockets. Their own foolish little investigation. Even if the apocalypse is upon us. Because if it doesn’t happen, the grain must not rot in the ground, and the song must still be sung. And the thief must sit in jail. And abuses of office must be investigated.”" "“But where is it any better? Russian pigheadedness and drunkenness? American chauvinism and hypocrisy? European self-righteousness? Asiatic cruelty?” “They’re all people,” I said. “And are we any better?” asked the witch. “Our side or your side . . . Perhaps we should just let it happen, eh?” I turned my eyes toward the half-open door of the sleeping room, where the children were lying in their beds. Little arms and legs dangling out from under blankets, socks and sandals lying on the floor. “Are they guilty too?” I asked. “Do they have to die too?” “Everyone has to die sometime,” the witch replied. “They might not be guilty of anything, but that’s only for now . . . It will all happen sooner or later. A hundred years ago I’d definitely have turned a couple of them into piglets, to keep them out of mischief.”" "“Nadenka, don’t ever think you’re more cunning than your parents are. I was a little girl too, and I remember very well all the thoughts you have swarming around in your head right now. And believe me, not many of them are clever ones.”" "“I feel very sorry for the pure, organic beefcake, the passionate Caucasian, and the innocent blond boy,” I said. “But in a few days all the beefcakes, Caucasians, and blond-haired boys in the world could die. And if the death of three innocents will save the world, then so be it.” “So you’re no longer trying to solve the problem of a child’s tears?” Zabulon asked merrily, slumping back in his chair. “So now you’re looking at the problem of Omelas?”" "“You have a quarter of an hour,” said the witch. “You can have a glass of beer or wine in the bar. Or vodka, if you like. What do you usually drink in the evenings?” “No, I can’t have vodka, I promised my bear that I wouldn’t drink any without him,”" "“You see, Anton, we witches are rather superstitious. So we’ve been holding the six hundred and sixty-fifth session of our Conclave for almost a century now. It has become a tradition.” “An interesting solution,” I said. “That’s what I think too,” the witch replied without a trace of irony. “After all, the most important things in life are peace of mind and a positive attitude.”" "I sighed, and stepped toward the Tiger. “Just as I thought,” he remarked sadly. “Gorodetsky, why don’t you like simple solutions?” “They usually have complicated consequences,” I replied." "The Two-in-One is the great balancer, the eraser, the purger. If human civilization goes off the rails, he comes and destroys it. He reduces life to the most basic, banal truths. Eating, drinking, killing, reproducing. That’s what the Two-in-One does, he simplifies.”" "“What’s so strange about that?” Zabulon exclaimed gleefully. “It’s not evil to smack your neighbor over the head with a club, make him work in your field, and make his wife warm your bed. That’s normal, natural behavior. Basic practicality. Animals are also beyond good and evil—when a wolf kills a hare, it doesn’t feel any hatred. Evil is when you convince your neighbor that he ought to work in your field, give his wife to you, and sing your praises at the same time.”" "THE DAY WATCH OFFICE WAS EMPTY. ZABULON HAD SENT ALL his colleagues home, even the operational duty officers, before we appeared. They wouldn’t have been a help in any case. So the tea and sandwiches were brought by Sveta and Nadya." Because of course they were "“Yes it does!” Nadya protested. “The kids asked me in school: ‘Gorodetsky, are you a Jew?’ And I said there weren’t any Jews in my family. But there are. I lied to them all!”" A couple of times this has happened. The anti-semitism is a bit thicker than seems appropriate for the context. ]]> </content> </entry> <entry> <title type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[The Last Watch by Sergei Lukyanenko (2006 -- en/2008) (read in 2018)]]> </title> <id>https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3568</id> <link href="https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3568"/> <updated>2018-09-01T20:59:04+02:00</updated> <author> <name type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Marco von Ballmoos]]> </name> <uri>https://earthli.com/users/marco</uri> </author> <summary type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA["Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is" ... ]]> </summary> <content type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Published by marco on 1. Sep 2018 20:59:04 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I've failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an interest in this book, then I'm happy for you." As a result of Kostya's activity with the Fuaran in the previous book, Anton is now a Higher magician. Gesar sends him to Scotland to investigate a mysterious vampire killing. It turns out that there is a trio of Others -- a Light One, a Dark One and an Inquisitor -- trying to get at Merlin's greatest creation. Merlin is/was a so-called zero-point magician -- a magician who was zero natural magic and can absorb more Power from the environment than any Others and is therefore more powerful. The only other known such magician is Nadya, Anton and Svetlana's daughter. In this volume, we learn that Merlin hid the Crown of All Things on the seventh level of the Twilight. The second volume expands on this, sending Anton to Uzbekistan to find Rustam, an ancient wizard who used to ride with Gesar, back in the day. He was with Gesar when they called down the most terrible spell every used against Dark Ones -- the White Mist. Instead of killing them, it froze them into statues without any sensory input, driving them mad over the ensuring millennia. Rustam is still punishing himself for having taken part in this travesty, whereas Gesar had made his peace with it. We discover that Edgar is the Inquisitor that is part of the trio trying to get Merlin's secret. In the third volume, more is revealed about Merlin's spell as well as how the Twilight works and how many levels it actually has. Where is the Crown of All Things hidden? Anton eventually finds out and uses his Higher power to wield it in an unexpected way, freeing the age-old Dark Ones frozen in time to their final reward -- as well as Merlin and thousands of Others from the Purgatory/Paradise of the sixth level of the Twilight. [Citations] "Cars didn’t often come this way, and they were mostly taxis. Most of the people were walking. The streams moving in the direction of the castle and back intermingled, swirling together in quiet whirlpools around the performers doing their thing in the middle of the street; thin rivulets trickled into the pubs, filtered in through the doorways of the shops. The boundless river of humanity." "“If you haven’t seen the body, don’t be in a hurry to bury it.”" "You shall receive all and nothing, when you are able to take it. Proceed, if you are as strong as I; Or go back, if you are as wise as I. Beginning and end, head and tail, all is fused in one In the Crown of All Things. Thus are life and death inseparable." "“Even dollars or euros,” the driver replied nonchalantly. “Give me as much as you think you can spare. I can see you’re a good man, so why haggle? A good man is ashamed not to pay a poor taxi driver enough. He pays more than my conscience will allow me to ask.”" "But we have one spell in reserve, a spell that has never yet been uttered beneath this sun. It was brought back by Rustam from an island far away in the north, where it was invented by a cunning Light One by the name of Merlin. But even he, who stood so dangerously close to the Dark, had been horrified by it…. The White Mist. Rustam pronounces strange, coarse-sounding words. I repeat them after him, without even trying to understand their meaning. The words are important, but they are only the hand of the potter, giving shape to the clay, shaping the clay mold into which the molten metal will be poured, creating bronze manacles that allow no freedom to the hands. There are words at the beginning and end, words that provide the form and the direction, but it is Power that decides everything. Power and Will. I can no longer hold back the force that is pulsing within me, ready to tear my pitiful human body apart with every beat of my heart. I open my mouth at the same time as Rustam. I shout, but I shout without words. The time for words is over." "But we have one spell in reserve, a spell that has never yet been uttered beneath this sun. It was brought back by Rustam from an island far away in the north, where it was invented by a cunning Light One by the name of Merlin. But even he, who stood so dangerously close to the Dark, had been horrified by it…. The White Mist. Rustam pronounces strange, coarse-sounding words. I repeat them after him, without even trying to understand their meaning. The words are important, but they are only the hand of the potter, giving shape to the clay, shaping the clay mold into which the molten metal will be poured, creating bronze manacles that allow no freedom to the hands. There are words at the beginning and end, words that provide the form and the direction, but it is Power that decides everything. Power and Will. I can no longer hold back the force that is pulsing within me, ready to tear my pitiful human body apart with every beat of my heart. I open my mouth at the same time as Rustam. I shout, but I shout without words. The time for words is over." ]]> </content> </entry> <entry> <title type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[The Night Watch by Sergei Lukyanenko (1998 -- en/2006) (read in 2018)]]> </title> <id>https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3567</id> <link href="https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3567"/> <updated>2018-09-01T20:54:20+02:00</updated> <author> <name type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Marco von Ballmoos]]> </name> <uri>https://earthli.com/users/marco</uri> </author> <summary type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA["Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is" ... ]]> </summary> <content type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Published by marco on 1. Sep 2018 20:54:20 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I've failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an interest in this book, then I'm happy for you." This is the first novel in what would end up being a six-book series, set in the real world with the Twilight as a backdrop. The world is the same as the one we know, but some people are not humans, but Others. These Others are divided (unevenly) into Dark and Light Ones. This book introduces characters that would be in all of the books, but focuses on the development of Anton Gorodetsky, a low-level Light Other who works in the Night Watch. The Night Watch works at night and keeps an eye on the Dark Others. The Day Watch works during the day and keeps an eye on the Light Others. The Twilight is another layer of reality to which Others have access, but humans do not. It is from here that Others draw their power to perform magic. It's a very interesting mythology, equal to the Harry Potter world, I think, with a bit more for adults than the earlier books in that series. In this book, Lukyanenko develops Anton as well as Sveltana (a Great Enchantress) and Egor (a potential Mirror) and Maxim (an eventual Inquisitor) as well as introducing Boris Ignatievich, or Gesar, the oldest and most powerful of the Light Ones in the Moscow Night Watch. [Citations] "The car hurtled through the night, as if it were trying to overtake the beams of its own headlights." "You know, they’ve started selling fake New Year Tree decorations in Moscow. They look just like the real thing, but they don’t bring people any joy at all.” She told the short joke with an absolutely straight face, without even changing her tone of voice." "He could tell himself a thousand times over that no arguments and disputes between states had anything to do with the concerns of the Light and the Darkness. He could accept that in a war this airman-magician was far more likely not to aim his bombs at civilians. But even so . . . Just how could he manage to go out on bombing raids and drop his explosives on people’s heads, and still remain a Light One? Because he was a Light One, no doubt about that! But he almost certainly had human lives on his conscience. How did he manage not to fall back into the Twilight? What incredible faith he must have in his own righteousness, to be able to combine active military service and the cause of the Light." "And what if I had defied all the stipulations of the Treaty and made that intervention in secret? A brief gesture of the hand . . . And then what? There wasn’t any work in the village. And nobody in the city wanted Kolya, a former collective farm mechanic. Kolya didn’t have any money to start “his own business.” He couldn’t even buy a piglet. So he’d go off again to look for moonshine, getting by on money from odd jobs, and working off his anger on his wife, who drank as much as he did and was just as weary of everything. It wasn’t the man I needed to heal—it was the entire planet Earth. Or at least this particular sixth part of the planet Earth. The part with the proud name of Russia." "It all sounded pretty strange. In my own mind, I’d always thought of Others as individuals with strongly developed magical abilities. But the point of view expressed here was the exact opposite of that. In fact the following amusing comparison was used as an example: Say the temperature throughout the entire world is 97.7˚F. Then most people, with a body temperature higher than that, will radiate heat outward and “warm nature.” But the small number of people who for some reason have a body temperature lower than 97.7˚F will start taking in heat. And since they receive a constant influx of Power, they will be able to make use of it, while people with far warmer temperatures carry on aimlessly “heating nature.”" "There’ll never be a time when all people become Others. We’ll never reveal ourselves to them. And we’ll never allow people to build a more or less decent society. Capitalism, communism . . . that’s not the point. The only world that will ever suit us is one in which people are preoccupied with the size of the trough and the quality of hay. Because the moment they lift their heads out of the trough, look around and see us, we’ll be finished.”" ]]> </content> </entry> <entry> <title type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Rogues edited by George R.R. Martin and Gardner Dozois (2014) (read in 2018)]]> </title> <id>https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3555</id> <link href="https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3555"/> <updated>2018-09-01T16:51:36+02:00</updated> <author> <name type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Marco von Ballmoos]]> </name> <uri>https://earthli.com/users/marco</uri> </author> <summary type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA["Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is" ... ]]> </summary> <content type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Published by marco on 1. Sep 2018 16:51:36 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I've failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an interest in this book, then I'm happy for you." This is a collection of short stories and novellas edited by two of the titans of fantasy and science fiction. See the "Wikipedia article" <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogues_(anthology)> for a list of all 21 stories. The stories all star a "rogue" of one type or other, with authors ranging from Gillian Flynn (Gone Girl) to Joe Lansdale (Hap and Leonard) to Neil Gaiman to Patrick Rothfuss and, finally, to George R.R. Martin himself. A good collection of stories with something for everyone, I think. [Citations] "Until then, Javre walked, swift and steady, with her shoulders back. She loved to walk. With every stride, she felt her own strength. Every muscle utterly relaxed, yet ready to turn the next step in a split instant into mighty spring, sprightly roll, deadly strike. Without needing to look, she felt each person about her, judged their threat, predicted their attack, imagined her response, the air around her alive with calculated possibilities, the surroundings mapped, the distances known, all things of use noted. The sternest tests are those you do not see coming, so Javre was the weapon always sharpened, the weapon never sheathed, the answer to every question." "Raffalon groaned. In his experience, entities that spoke in such a high-toned manner tended to have an acute regard for themselves that was inversely matched by a lack of concern for the comfort of those who minioned for them—indeed, even for their continued existence." "Then he addressed the little piece of carved wood in his hand and repeated his original question: “What are you?” Less than I was, less than I shall be. Raffalon groaned. In his experience, entities that spoke in such a high-toned manner tended to have an acute regard for themselves that was inversely matched by a lack of concern for the comfort of those who minioned for them—indeed, even for their continued existence." "“The ancients had a saying,” Surplus interjected. “ ‘If you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans.’" "“Love is like a baby sleeping on its mother’s breast,” Steppan said. “Inchoate and likely to piss itself?” “Ah, you can play at being a cynic, my friend, but I’ve known you too long. You’re a romantic at heart. You’re in love with the world.” “I’d say I’m inchoate and likely to piss myself,” Asa said, trying not to smile. Steppan’s pleasure was simple and unfeigned and infectious. “Fine! Fine, then love isn’t like a baby. Love is like falling from a window and discovering you can fly.” “Unlikely to happen and dangerous to try.”" "For a long moment, they were silent with their private thoughts. “Love,” Asa said, “is like a pigeon shitting over a crowd.” “How so?” “Where it lands hasn’t got much to do with who deserves it.”" "The triangle produced a massive number of Bruce-generated headlines, in which Ella wept to her friends, or broke down on the set of Kimberley, or flew to the States to beg me to come back to her. Some weeks the tabloids dutifully reported that Loni and I were fighting on the set or had broken up; some weeks we were about to announce our engagement. Sometimes she’d catch me talking on the phone to Ella and be furious, and sometimes I secretly flew off to Africa to be with Ella. I was always happy to see myself in the headlines, even if the stories weren’t remotely true." "To me, the drones are cheating. As far as I’m concerned, the tabloids are supposed to report the stories our publicists give them, not start their own air force and find out stuff on their own." "I have seen many things in my life,” said Piros, “and I have never found fear to be useful." "It was baffling. These creatures. They were fraught and frayed in their desire. A snake would never poison itself, but these folk made an art of it. They wrapped themselves in fears and wept at being blind. It was infuriating. It was enough to break a heart." ]]> </content> </entry> <entry> <title type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Dispatches by Michael Herr (1977) (read in 2018)]]> </title> <id>https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3566</id> <link href="https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3566"/> <updated>2018-09-01T16:37:11+02:00</updated> <author> <name type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Marco von Ballmoos]]> </name> <uri>https://earthli.com/users/marco</uri> </author> <summary type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA["Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is" ... ]]> </summary> <content type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Published by marco on 1. Sep 2018 16:37:11 Updated by marco on 1. Sep 2018 16:39:30 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I've failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an interest in this book, then I'm happy for you." This is a journal about the Vietnam War, written by journalist Michael Herr, who spent two years there in the late 60s. The storytelling is visceral and well-written, describing soldiers and attacks and life in Vietnam under the occupation. The impression is surreal and the book doesn't try to explain or clean up the ugliness of it all. It presents information, within a scaffolding of disapproval of the war, but at the same time acknowledging the seductiveness of it for reporters, for those involved in it, for those poisoned into not being able to live without it. An excellent book, probably the best thing I've ever read about one of America's wars -- or, indeed, any colonial occupation. It's likely that this book describes them all adequately, not just Vietnam, but Iraq and Afghanistan or India and Africa for the European powers. A sobering look into the depths of human cruelty and stupidity. Herr has only one movie-writing credit: Apocalypse Now. [Citations] "They were wired into their listening posts out around the camp, into each other, into themselves, and when it got dark it got worse. The moon came up nasty and full, a fat moist piece of decadent fruit. It was soft and saffron-misted when you looked up at it, but its light over the sandbags and into the jungle was harsh and bright." "I went to cover the war and the war covered me; an old story, unless of course you’ve never heard it. I went there behind the crude but serious belief that you had to be able to look at anything, serious because I acted on it and went, crude because I didn’t know, it took the war to teach it, that you were as responsible for everything you saw as you were for everything you did. The problem was that you didn’t always know what you were seeing until later, maybe years later, that a lot of it never made it in at all, it just stayed stored there in your eyes. Time and information, rock and roll, life itself, the information isn’t frozen, you are." "But once in a while you’d hear something fresh, and a couple of times you’d even hear something high, like the corpsman at Khe Sanh who said, “If it ain’t the fucking incoming it’s the fucking outgoing. Only difference is who gets the fucking grease, and that ain’t no fucking difference at all.” The mix was so amazing; incipient saints and realized homicidals, unconscious lyric poets and mean dumb motherfuckers with their brains all down in their necks; and even though by the time I left I knew where all the stories came from and where they were going, I was never bored, never even unsurprised." "Beautiful for once and only once, just past dawn flying toward the center of the city in a Loach, view from a bubble floating at 800 feet. In that space, at that hour, you could see what people had seen forty years before, Paris of the East, Pearl of the Orient, long open avenues lined and bowered over by trees running into spacious parks, precisioned scale, all under the soft shell from a million breakfast fires, camphor smoke rising and diffusing, covering Saigon and the shining veins of the river with a warmth like the return of better times." "By 7:30 it was beyond berserk with bikes, the air was like L.A. on short plumbing, the subtle city war inside the war had renewed itself for another day, relatively light on actual violence but intense with bad feeling: despair, impacted rage, impotent gnawing resentment; thousands of Vietnamese in the service of a pyramid that wouldn’t stand for five years, plugging the feed tube into their own hearts, grasping and gorging; young Americans in from the boonies on TDY, charged with hatred and grounded in fear of the Vietnamese; thousands of Americans sitting in their offices crying in bored chorus, “You can’t get these people to do a fucking thing, you can’t get these people to do a fucking thing.” And all the others, theirs and ours, who just didn’t want to play, it sickened them." "They could snap a Rolex off your wrist like a hawk hitting a field mouse; wallets, pens, cameras, eyeglasses, anything; if the war had gone on any longer they’d have found a way to whip the boots off your feet." "You’d either meet an optimism that no violence could unconvince or a cynicism that would eat itself empty every day and then turn, hungry and malignant, on whatever it could for a bite, friendly or hostile, it didn’t matter. Those men called dead Vietnamese “believers,” a lost American platoon was “a black eye,” they talked as though killing a man was nothing more than depriving him of his vigor." "You’d stand nailed there in your tracks sometimes, no bearings and none in sight, thinking, Where the fuck am I?, fallen into some unnatural East-West interface, a California corridor cut and bought and burned deep into Asia, and once we’d done it we couldn’t remember what for. It was axiomatic that it was about ideological space, we were there to bring them the choice, bringing it to them like Sherman bringing the Jubilee through Georgia, clean through it, wall to wall with pacified indigenous and scorched earth." "In wood-paneled, air-conditioned chapels in Saigon, MACV padres would fire one up to sweet muscular Jesus, blessing ammo dumps and 105’s and officers’ clubs. The best-armed patrols in history went out after services to feed smoke to people whose priests could let themselves burn down to consecrated ash on street corners. Deep in the alleys you could hear small Buddhist chimes ringing for peace, hoa bien; smell incense in the middle of the thickest Asian street funk; see groups of ARVN with their families waiting for transport huddled around a burning prayer strip. Sermonettes came over Armed Forces radio every couple of hours, once I heard a chaplain from the 9th Division starting up, “Oh Gawd, help us learn to live with Thee in a more dynamic way in these perilous times, that we may better serve Thee in the struggle against Thine enemies.…” Holy war, long-nose jihad like a face-off between one god who would hold the coonskin to the wall while we nailed it up, and another whose detachment would see the blood run out of ten generations, if that was how long it took for the wheel to go around." "Maybe it was already over for us in Indochina when Alden Pyle’s body washed up under the bridge at Dakao, his lungs all full of mud; maybe it caved in with Dien Bien Phu. But the first happened in a novel, and while the second happened on the ground it happened to the French, and Washington gave it no more substance than if Graham Greene had made it up too." "I met a ranger-recondo who could go to sleep just like that, say, “Guess I’ll get some,” close his eyes and be there, day or night, sitting or lying down, sleeping through some things but not others; a loud radio or a 105 firing outside the tent wouldn’t wake him, but a rustle in the bushes fifty feet away would, or a stopped generator.)" "There were spots in the jungle where you had to have a cigarette going all the time, whether you smoked or not, just to keep the mosquitoes from swarming into your mouth. War under water, swamp fever and instant involuntary weight control, malarias that could burn you out and cave you in, put you into twenty-three hours of sleep a day without giving you a minute of rest," "One night I woke up and heard the sounds of a firefight going on kilometers away, a “skirmish” outside our perimeter, muffled by distance to sound like the noises we made playing guns as children, KSSSHH KSSSHH; we knew it was more authentic than BANG BANG, it enriched the game and this game was the same, only way out of hand at last, too rich for all but a few serious players. The rules now were tight and absolute, no arguing over who missed who and who was really dead; No fair was no good, Why me? the saddest question in the world." "Even bitter refracted faith was better than none at all, like the black Marine I’d heard about during heavy shelling at Con Thien who said, “Don’t worry, baby, God’ll think of something.”" "A lot of people knew that the country could never be won, only destroyed, and they locked into that with breathtaking concentration, no quarter, laying down the seeds of the disease, roundeye fever, until it reached plague proportions, taking one from every family, a family from every hamlet, a hamlet from every province, until a million had died from it and millions more were left uncentered and lost in their flight from it." "deep in all their hearts, there were always the Nukes, they loved to remind you that we had some, “right here in-country.” Once I met a colonel who had a plan to shorten the war by dropping piranha into the paddies of the North. He was talking fish but his dreamy eyes were full of mega-death." "Charles really wrote the book on fire control, putting one round into the heart of things where fifty of ours might go and still not hit anything. Sometimes we put out so much fire you couldn’t tell whether any of it was coming back or not. When it was, it filled your ears and your head until you thought you were hearing it with your stomach." "“Quakin’ and Shakin’,” they called it, great balls of fire, Contact. Then it was you and the ground: kiss it, eat it, fuck it, plow it with your whole body, get as close to it as you can without being in it yet or of it, guess who’s flying around about an inch above your head? Pucker and submit, it’s the ground. Under Fire would take you out of your head and your body too, the space you’d seen a second ago between subject and object wasn’t there anymore, it banged shut in a fast wash of adrenaline. Amazing, unbelievable, guys who’d played a lot of hard sports said they’d never felt anything like it, the sudden drop and rocket rush of the hit, the reserves of adrenaline you could make available to yourself, pumping it up and putting it out until you were lost floating in it, not afraid, almost open to clear orgasmic death-by-drowning in it, actually relaxed. Unless of course you’d shit your pants or were screaming or praying or giving anything at all to the hundred-channel panic that blew word salad all around you and sometimes clean through you. Maybe you couldn’t love the war and hate it inside the same instant, but sometimes those feelings alternated so rapidly that they spun together in a strobic wheel rolling all the way up until you were literally High On War, like it said on all the helmet covers. Coming off a jag like that could really make a mess out of you." "So you learned about fear, it was hard to know what you really learned about courage. How many times did somebody have to run in front of a machine gun before it became an act of cowardice? What about those acts that didn’t require courage to perform, but made you a coward if you didn’t? It was hard to know at the moment, easy to make a mistake when it came, like the mistake of thinking that all you needed to perform a witness act were your eyes. A lot of what people called courage was only undifferentiated energy cut loose by the intensity of the moment, mind loss that sent the actor on an incredible run; if he survived it he had the chance later to decide whether he’d really been brave or just overcome with life, even ecstasy. A lot of people found the guts to just call it all off and refuse to ever go out anymore, they turned and submitted to the penalty end of the system or they just split. A lot of reporters, too, I had friends in the press corps who went out once or twice and then never again. Sometimes I thought that they were the sanest, most serious people of all, although to be honest I never said so until my time there was almost over." "Vietnam was a dark room full of deadly objects, the VC were everywhere all at once like spider cancer, and instead of losing the war in little pieces over years we lost it fast in under a week. After that, we were like the character in pop grunt mythology, dead but too dumb to lie down." "We took space back quickly, expensively, with total panic and close to maximum brutality. Our machine was devastating. And versatile. It could do everything but stop." "was on one of those days that I realized that the only corpse I couldn’t bear to look at would be the one I would never have to see." "The inside of the dining room was freezing with air-conditioning. I sat at a table and ordered a hamburger and a brandy from one of the peasant girls who waited tables. I sat there for a couple of hours and ordered four more hamburgers and at least a dozen brandies. It wasn’t possible, just not possible, to have been where we’d been before and to be where we were now, all in the same afternoon." "The large bronze urns were dented beyond restoring, and the rain poured through a hole in the roof of the throne room, soaking the two small thrones where the old Annamese royalty had sat. In the great hall (great once you’d scaled it to the Vietnamese) the red lacquer work on the upper walls was badly chipped, and a heavy dust covered everything. The crown of the main gate had collapsed, and in the garden the broken branches of the old cay-dai trees lay like the forms of giant insects seared in a fire, wispy, delicate, dead. It was rumored during those days that the Palace was being held by a unit of student volunteers who had taken the invasion of Hue as a sign and had rushed to join the North Vietnamese." "Tactically, its value to the Command was thought so great that General Westmoreland could announce that the Tet Offensive was merely Phase II of a brilliant Giap strategy. Phase I had been revealed in the autumn skirmishes between Loc Ninh and Dak To. Phase III (“the capstone,” the general called it) was to be Khe Sanh. It seems impossible that anyone, at any time, even in the chaos of Tet, could have actually called something as monumental (and decisive?) as that offensive a mere diversion for something as negligible as Khe Sanh, but all of that is on record." "Or did it get born in those same Pentagon rooms where six years of failure had made the air bad, where optimism no longer sprang from anything viable but sprang and sprang, all the way to Saigon, where it was packaged and shipped north to give the grunts some kind of reason for what was about to happen to them?" "The C-47 was a standard prop flareship, but many of them carried .20- and .762-mm. guns on their doors, Mike-Mikes that could fire out 300 rounds per second, Gatling style, “a round in every square inch of a football field in less than a minute,” as the handouts said. They used to call it Puff the Magic Dragon, but the Marines knew better: they named it Spooky. Every fifth round fired was a tracer, and when Spooky was working, everything stopped while that solid stream of violent red poured down out of the black sky. If you watched from a great distance, the stream would seem to dry up between bursts, vanishing slowly from air to ground like a comet tail, the sound of the guns disappearing too, a few seconds later. If you watched at a close range, you couldn’t believe that anyone would have the courage to deal with that night after night, week after week, and you cultivated a respect for the Viet Cong and NVA who had crouched under it every night now for months. It was awesome, worse than anything the Lord had ever put down on Egypt, and at night, you’d hear the Marines talking, watching it, yelling, “Get some!” until they grew quiet and someone would say, “Spooky understands.”" "We never announced a scorched-earth policy; we never announced any policy at all, apart from finding and destroying the enemy, and we proceeded in the most obvious way. We used what was at hand, dropping the greatest volume of explosives in the history of warfare over all the terrain within the thirty-mile sector which fanned out from Khe Sanh. Employing saturation-bombing techniques, we delivered more than 110,000 tons of bombs to those hills during the eleven-week containment of Khe Sanh. The smaller foothills were often quite literally turned inside out, the steeper of them were made faceless and drawless, and the bigger hills were left with scars and craters of such proportions that an observer from some remote culture might see in them the obsessiveness and ritual regularity of religious symbols, the blackness at the deep center pouring out rays of bright, overturned earth all the way to the circumference; forms like Aztec sun figures, suggesting that their makers had been men who held Nature in an awesome reverence." "“No more boom-boom for that mamma-san,” the Marine said, that same, tired remark you heard every time the dead turned out to be women. It was so routine that I don’t think he even realized that he’d said it." "We thought at first that he was dead, taken off by a booby trap on the trail, but his color was much too awful for that. Even the dead held some horrible light that seemed to recede, vanishing through one layer of skin at a time and taking a long time to go completely, but this kid had no color about him anywhere. It was incredible that anything so motionless and white could still be alive." "And always, they would ask you with an emotion whose intensity would shock you to please tell it, because they really did have the feeling that it wasn’t being told for them, that they were going through all of this and that somehow no one back in the World knew about it. They may have been a bunch of dumb, brutal killer kids (a lot of correspondents privately felt that), but they were smart enough to know that much." "What a time they were having there, it had all broken down, one battalion had taken 60 percent casualties, all the original NCO’s were gone, the grunts were telling their officers to go die, to go fuck themselves, to go find some other fools to run up those streets awhile," "At first, I got it all mixed up, I didn’t understand and I felt sorry for myself, misjudged. “Well fuck you too,” I’d think. “It could have been me just as easily, I take chances too, can’t you see that?” And then I realized that that was exactly what it was all about, it explained itself as easily as that, another of the war’s dark revelations. They weren’t judging me, they weren’t reproaching me, they didn’t even mind me, not in any personal way. They only hated me, hated me the way you’d hate any hopeless fool who would put himself through this thing when he had choices, any fool who had no more need of his life than to play with it in this way." "I keep thinking about all the kids who got wiped out by seventeen years of war movies before coming to Vietnam to get wiped out for good. You don’t know what a media freak is until you’ve seen the way a few of those grunts would run around during a fight when they knew that there was a television crew nearby; they were actually making war movies in their heads, doing little guts-and-glory Leatherneck tap dances under fire, getting their pimples shot off for the networks. They were insane, but the war hadn’t done that to them." "Because they worked in the news media, for organizations that were ultimately reverential toward the institutions involved: the Office of the President, the Military, America at war and, most of all, the empty technology that characterized Vietnam. There is no way of remembering good friends without remembering the incredible demands put on them from offices thousands of miles away." "Except to pick up my mail and get my accreditation renewed, I never had to frequent JUSPAO unless I wanted to. (That office had been created to handle press relations and psychological warfare, and I never met anyone there who seemed to realize that there was a difference.)" "(A Paris-Match photograph showed Flynn and a French photographer carrying him on a door, his face half covered by bandages, “Tim Page, blessé à la tête.”)" "He was broke, so friends got him a place to sleep, gave him piastres, cigarettes, liquor, grass. Then he made a couple of thousand dollars on some fine pictures of the Offensive, and all of those things came back on us, twice over. That was the way the world was for Page; when he was broke you took care of him, when he was not he took care of you. It was above economics." "Some guys come back and see their nightmares break in the streets in daylight, some become inhabited and stay that way, all kinds of things can trail after you, and besides, after a while my thing went away almost completely, the dream, too. I know a guy who had been a combat medic in the Central Highlands, and two years later he was still sleeping with all the lights on. We were walking across 57th Street one afternoon and passed a blind man carrying a sign that read, MY DAYS ARE DARKER THAN YOUR NIGHTS. “Don’t bet on it, man,” the ex-medic said." "Page gave me a small ball of opium to eat on the flight back; stoned dreaming through Wake, Honolulu, San Francisco, New York and the hallucination of home. Opium space, a big round O, and time outside of time, a trip that happened in seconds and over years; Asian time, American space, not clear whether Vietnam was east or west of center, behind me or somehow still ahead." ]]> </content> </entry> <entry> <title type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[On the Beach by Nevil Shute (1957) (read in 2018)]]> </title> <id>https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3565</id> <link href="https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3565"/> <updated>2018-09-01T16:26:59+02:00</updated> <author> <name type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Marco von Ballmoos]]> </name> <uri>https://earthli.com/users/marco</uri> </author> <summary type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA["Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is" ... ]]> </summary> <content type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Published by marco on 1. Sep 2018 16:26:59 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I've failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an interest in this book, then I'm happy for you." A nuclear conflagration has engulfed the world. In the aftermath, it's not clear who started it or who even fought on which side. Stories differ. There is the officially accepted truth -- something to do with the Russians, the Chinese and the Americans. And then there are other theories that bubble up as we meet more people. All that is clear is that the entire northern hemisphere is gone. There is an inexorable radioactive cloud creeping southward at a predictable pace. Cities go dark, day by day. The story takes place in Australia, centered on sailor Peter Holmes in the Australian navy, an entity that has all but ceased to exist. An American submarine lands on the shores of Melbourne. Peter befriends the caption of the vessel, Commander Towers. Although there are breaks with customs and morals, many of the people stick to their lives as they were. Until they're not anymore. The end. There is a fuel shortage (of course) and the scope of life contracts back to earlier times, humanity slowly fading into oblivion with barely a whimper. Many take their own lives with government-provided pills. The submarine goes on several missions, but discovers nothing on the entire planet. It's all dead. There is no reprieve. There is no happy ending for humanity. The Earth has been boiled free of life -- not instantly, but definitely. [Citations] "These bloody women, sheltered from realities, living in a sentimental dream world of their own! If they’d face up to things they could help a man, help him enormously. While they clung to the dream world they were just a bloody millstone round his neck." This, in a world whose cruelty was guaranteed by men. "Very soon, perhaps in a month’s time, there would be no one here, no living creatures but the cats and dogs that had been granted a short reprieve. Soon they too would be gone; summers and winters would pass by and these houses and these streets would know them. Presently, as time passed, the radioactivity would pass also; with a cobalt half-life of about five years these streets and houses would be habitable again in twenty years at the latest, and probably much sooner than that. The human race was to be wiped out and the world made clean again for wiser occupants without undue delay. Well, probably that made sense." "In the bedroom he found his mother lying on her back with her eyes closed, the bed very neat and tidy. He moved a little closer and touched her hand, but she was dead. On the table by her side was a glass of water, a pencilled note, and one of the little red cartons, open, with the empty vial beside it. He had not known that she had that. He picked up the note. It read, My dear son, It’s quite absurd that I should spoil the last days of your life by hanging on to mine, since it is such a burden to me now. Don’t bother about any funeral. Just close the door and leave me in my own bed, in my own room, with my own things all round me. I shall be quite all right. Do whatever you think best for little Ming. I am so very, very sorry for him, but I can do nothing. I am so very glad you won your race. My very dearest love. MOTHER." The race to which she refers is an all-out, no-holds-barred, super-dangerous race in which George Osborne took part. George is the scientist/engineer who refurbished a race car and, along with other enthusiasts, took part in a world-championship race. He won, nearly by default, because he was one of the only ones to survive. Ming is his mother's dog. ]]> </content> </entry> <entry> <title type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula K. Le Guin (1971) (read in 2018)]]> </title> <id>https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3564</id> <link href="https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3564"/> <updated>2018-09-01T16:06:44+02:00</updated> <author> <name type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Marco von Ballmoos]]> </name> <uri>https://earthli.com/users/marco</uri> </author> <summary type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA["Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is" ... ]]> </summary> <content type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Published by marco on 1. Sep 2018 16:06:44 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I've failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an interest in this book, then I'm happy for you." This is the story of George Orr, a man whose dreams change reality. He lives in a world where he's required to visit a psychiatrist to address his affliction. Soon, though, the world no longer requires him to do so -- because his psychiatrist is manipulating him into changing the world to the doctor's benefit. Orr's effective dreams are not without side-effects -- anyone who lives through one ends up with multiple memories, remembering both the way the world was and also the way the world is (including the history leading up to the world in which they now live). Doctor Haber invents a machine called the Augmentor that focuses Orr's power. Orr's dreams don't change reality so much as shift himself and those around him into different timelines. Eventually, he chooses a timeline in which aliens invade the planet -- ostensibly with the goal of finding him, the one capable of bending reality. The aliens don't try to stop so much as try to get him to control himself, to get out from under Dr. Haber's thumb. Orr is OK, but Haber is dangerous. Philip K. Dick worked very much in this vein, where the line between observed and actual reality is blurred into nothingness. The story is a mix of various potential realities, composed of the dreams of Haber and Orr as well as strands of the original reality. Read the "Wikipedia article" <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lathe_of_Heaven> for a more in-depth description of the plot. [Citations] "Those whom heaven helps we call the sons of heaven. They do not learn this by learning. They do not work it by working. They do not reason it by using reason. To let understanding stop at what cannot be understood is a high attainment. Those who cannot do it will be destroyed on the lathe of heaven. — CHUANG TSE : XXIII" "There were nine train and truck tunnels under the Willamette, sixteen bridges across it, and concrete banks along it for twenty-seven miles. Flood control on both it and its great confluent the Columbia, a few miles downstream from central Portland, was so highly developed that neither river could rise more than five inches even after the most prolonged torrential rains. The Willamette was a useful element of the environment, like a very large, docile draft animal harnessed with straps, chains, shafts, saddles, bits, girths, hobbles. If it hadn’t been useful, of course it would have been concreted over, like the hundreds of little creeks and streams that ran in darkness down from the hills of the city under the streets and buildings." "Above the heads of those now riding the GPRT train in the Broadway Tunnel were tons of rock and gravel, tons of water running, the piles of wharves and the keels of ocean-going ships, the huge concrete supports of elevated freeway bridges and approaches, a convoy of steamer trucks laden with frozen battery-produced chickens, one jet plane at 34,000 feet, the stars at 4.3 + light-years." "Nothing endures, nothing is precise and certain (except the mind of a pedant), perfection is the mere repudiation of that ineluctable marginal inexactitude which is the mysterious inmost quality of Being. — H. G. WELLS, A MODERN UTOPIA" "Orr stood up, but didn’t head for the door. “Did you ever happen to think, Dr. Haber,” he said, quietly enough but stuttering a little, “that there, there might be other people who dream the way I do? That reality’s being changed out from under us, replaced, renewed, all the time—only we don’t know it? Only the dreamer knows it, and those who know his dream. If that’s true, I guess we’re lucky not knowing it. This is confusing enough.”" "Not quite night yet: late twilight on the fields. Clumps of trees looked black and moist. The road he was walking on picked up the faint, last light from the sky; it ran long and straight, an old country highway, cracked blacktop. A goose was walking ahead of him, about fifteen feet in advance and visible only as a white, bobbing blur. Now and then it hissed a little. The stars were coming out, white as daisies. A big one was blooming just to the right of the road, low over the dark country, tremulously white. When he looked up at it again it had already become larger and brighter. It’s enhuging, he thought. It seemed to grow reddish as it brightened. It enreddenhuged. The eyes swam. Small blue-green streaks zipped about it zigzagging Brownian roundianroundian. A vast and creamy halo pulsated about big star and tiny zips, fainter, clearer, pulsing. Oh no no no! he said as the big star brightened hugendly BURST blinding." "He never spoke with any bitterness at all, no matter how awful the things he said. Are there really people without resentment, without hate? she wondered. People who never go cross-grained to the universe? Who recognize evil, and resist evil, and yet are utterly unaffected by it? Of course there are. Countless, the living and the dead. Those who have returned in pure compassion to the wheel, those who follow the way that cannot be followed without knowing they follow it, the sharecropper’s wife in Alabama and the lama in Tibet and the entomologist in Peru and the millworker in Odessa and the greengrocer in London and the goatherd in Nigeria and the old, old man sharpening a stick by a dry streambed somewhere in Australia, and all the others. There is not one of us who has not known them. There are enough of them, enough to keep us going. Perhaps." "You’ll be the greatest benefactor humanity has ever had in spite of yourself. All the time and energy humans have wasted on trying to find religious solutions to suffering, then you come along and make Buddha and Jesus and the rest of them look like the fakirs they were. They tried to run away from evil, but we, we’re uprooting it—getting rid of it, piece by piece!”" Actually, no, not according to Haber's own theory. If they're just jumping continua, the suffering continues, but they don't live with it. They're just fine-tuning their own experience, changing nothing. "“I am tired,” he said. “I did a lot today. That is, I did something. The only thing I have ever done. I pressed a button. It took the entire willpower, the accumulated strength of my entire existence, to press one damned OFF button.” “You have lived well,” the Alien said." "He lay back. He clearly sensed the pity and protective compassion of the Alien standing across the dark room. It saw him, not with eyes, as short-lived, fleshly, armorless, a strange creature, infinitely vulnerable, adrift in the gulfs of the possible: something that needed help. He didn’t mind. He did need help. Weariness took him over, picked him up like a current of the sea into which he was sinking slowly. “Er’ perrehnne,” he muttered, surrendering to sleep." "Orr slept. He dreamed. There was no rub. His dreams, like waves of the deep sea far from any shore, came and went, rose and fell, profound and harmless, breaking nowhere, changing nothing. They danced the dance among all the other waves in the sea of being. Through his sleep the great, green sea turtles dived, swimming with heavy, inexhaustible grace through the depths, in their element." ]]> </content> </entry> <entry> <title type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Grand Forks: A History of American Dining in 128 Reviews by Marilyn Hagerty (2013) (read in 2018)]]> </title> <id>https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3563</id> <link href="https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3563"/> <updated>2018-09-01T15:31:39+02:00</updated> <author> <name type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Marco von Ballmoos]]> </name> <uri>https://earthli.com/users/marco</uri> </author> <summary type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA["Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is" ... ]]> </summary> <content type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Published by marco on 1. Sep 2018 15:31:39 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I've failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an interest in this book, then I'm happy for you." This is a collection of restaurant reviews from restaurants all over North Dakota, but mostly from the metropolitan region (such as it is) in and around Grand Forks. A couple of the reviews are of top-flight restaurants in New York City, thrown in seemingly to point out that Ms. Hagerty isn't just a country bumpkin. Her book is refreshingly honest and simple, the reviews eminently useful, concentrating as they do on describing decor, menu and prices. She weaves stories of the proprietor's lives into her reviews. Through these, we follow how the city of Grand Forks grew over the years. The reviews start in the 80s and continue into the first decade of the 21st century. We also see how expectations of price and quality grew over the years -- and how some restaurants managed to remain focused on providing quality food for what seems likely nearly impossible prices for the time. There was a bit of monotony to the reviews, a bit of ritual, but not of boredom, necessarily. Almost like a book of zen koans, delivered by a woman seemingly without malice. Almost like listening to a song by a favorite band that sounds very much like all of the other songs that band has made -- it's nice to listen to, even though familiar. I imagine that Marilyn's reviews served over the years as a bulwark against ugly reality for many residents. I discovered this book when Anthony Bourdain died: someone I read had mentioned that he'd written the foreword to Marilyn's book. His foreword is nicely written and generous and reveals a man capable of appreciating the simpler things, just like Marilyn. Appropriately, it is overshadowed by the simple power of Ms. Hagerty's reviews. [Citations] "When CC showed up, he ordered the breakfast special [...]" CC is "Constant Companion" whose constancy is a bit optimistic. Somewhere near the middle of the book, we no longer hear of him and his adorable predilections for normal food. Whether he left or died is not mentioned, nor very important to the book. At this point, Marilyn started eating with groups of friends -- and the level of restaurant that she started to visit increased as well. "[...] fond farewell when you visit the new Red Lobster restaurant. And to visit there is rather [...]" Marilyn wrote about all places equally: a decent-quality seafood restaurant in Grand Forks was well-worth a visit, even though it was a chain restaurant. "I remembered one of the sayings on the Kaffe Huset menu. “Det kjelper life a skynde seg nor man er pa gal vei.” In other words, “It doesn’t pay to hurry when you are on the wrong road.”" The Scandinavian character of the northern midwest of America shines through in many of the reviews. "The quesadilla also was mildly flavored with a pleasing combination of lettuce, green pepper, beef, olives and tomato." This is typical of Marilyn's reviews of food. She always found something nice to say, even about something as simple as a quesadilla -- which she described in detail, knowing that many of her readers wouldn't know what the hell that even was. You'll also note from the above sentence one of her authorial idiosyncrasies: she refuses to split an infinitive. ]]> </content> </entry> <entry> <title type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[The Forever War by Joe Haldeman (1974) (read in 2018)]]> </title> <id>https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3532</id> <link href="https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3532"/> <updated>2018-04-08T21:23:57+02:00</updated> <author> <name type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Marco von Ballmoos]]> </name> <uri>https://earthli.com/users/marco</uri> </author> <summary type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA["Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is" ... ]]> </summary> <content type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Published by marco on 8. Apr 2018 21:23:57 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I've failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an interest in this book, then I'm happy for you." The parallels between the Forever War and the Vietnam War are not coincidental. This book was written at the tail-end of the Vietnam war by a veteran. In the Forever War, the enemy is an alien race that no-one has ever seen. The war starts with an incident and escalates quickly. There are years between incidents, relativistic limits being what they are. The soldiers are chosen from the best and the brightest -- the elite scientists and minds of the current generation. The story touches on many topics that would be covered again and again in subsequent novels, but which were featured first in this book. The population of Earth turns to homosexuality as a form of population control, the soldiers sent off to war experience jarring shifts in the culture to which they return -- just like Vietnam veterans did -- but in the Forever War, it's due to extreme time-dilation effects from their relativistic flights to their battlegrounds. Haldeman conjectures that any given battle between humans and the Taurans could go either way because it was never clear which side was more advanced in any given confrontation. Because of relativistic travel times, it was possible for there to be nearly a century of additional scientific and military development between them. Haldeman also likens what it would be like to return to Earth after many decades to the feeling of disjuncture experienced by any war veterans. What's the point of fighting at all when the homeland can barely remember that there's a war on at all? Why not run away when no-one can prove that you did? He discusses how language and culture shifts so much that returning soldiers need translators for both language and customs. During the final battle, I was convinced that the Taurans didn't actually exist and that humans had actually been fighting themselves all along -- just separated across relativistic time. This turned out not to be the case -- instead the Taurans and the humans of the future have more in common with each other than the human soldiers of the past. The humans of the future become a hive-mind -- just like the Taurans were all along. [Citations] "‘One cannot make command decisions simply by assessing the tactical situation and going ahead with whatever course of action will do the most harm to the enemy with a minimum of death and damage to your own men and material. "Modern warfare has become very complex, especially during the last century. Wars are won not by a simple series of battles won, but by a complex interrelationship among military victory, economic pressures, logistic maneuvering, access to the enemy’s information, political postures — dozens, literally dozens of factors.’" "Relativity traps us in the enemy’s past; relativity brings them from our future. We can only hope that next time, the situation will be reversed." "Doctors don’t seem to realize that most of us are perfectly content not having to visualize ourselves as animated bags of skin filled with obscene glop." "And in the past, people whose country was at war were constantly in contact with the war. The newspapers would be full of reports, veterans would return from the front; sometimes the front would move right into town, invaders marching down Main Street or bombs whistling through the night air — but always the sense of either working toward victory or at least delaying defeat. "The enemy was a tangible thing, a propagandist’s monster whom you could understand, whom you could hate. But this war … the enemy was a curious organism only vaguely understood, more often the subject of cartoons than nightmares." "I wouldn’t know a potato or green bean plant if it stood up and took a bite out of my ankle, but I knew how to walk a half-meter step. So I resolved to count to 3800 and take a deep breath. I supposed I could tell the difference between the smell of chicken manure and the absence thereof." "We sat there for some time, not touching the exquisite food, ignoring the beauty around us and beneath us, only conscious of each other and the two sheets of paper that separated us with a gulf as wide and real as death. "We went back to Threshold. I protested but my arguments were shrugged off. I tried to get Marygay assigned to my company, as my exec. They said my personnel had all been allotted. I pointed out that most of them probably hadn’t even been born yet. "Nevertheless, allotted, they said. It would be almost a century, I said, before I even get to Stargate. They replied that Strike Force Command plans in terms of centuries. Not in terms of people. "We had a day and a night together. The less said about that, the better. It wasn’t just losing a lover. Marygay and I were each other’s only link to real life, the Earth of the 1980s and 90s. Not the perverse grotesquerie we were supposedly fighting to preserve. When her shuttle took off it was like a casket rattling down into a grave." "‘Surviving is a virtue in a private.’ Couldn’t resist it. ‘But an officer should provide gallant example. Go down with the ship. Stride the parapet as if unafraid.’" "A few lucky souls, about one in eight thousand, are invited to volunteer for combat training. Refusing is ‘sociopathic,’ even though it means signing up for an extra five years. And your chance of surviving the ten years is so small as to be negligible; nobody ever had. "Your best chance is to have the war end before your ten (subjective) years of service are up. Hope that time dilation puts many years between each of your battles. Since you can figure on going into battle roughly once every subjective year, and since an average of 34 percent survive each battle, it’s easy to compute your chances of being able to fight it out for ten years. "It comes to about two one-thousandths of one percent. Or, to put it another way, get an old-fashioned six-shooter and play Russian Roulette with four of the six chambers loaded. If you can do it ten times in a row without decorating the opposite wall, congratulations! You’re a civilian." "‘Our voyage will require four collapsar jumps and will last some four months, subjective. Maneuvering into collapsar insertion will put us about three hundred years behind Stargate’s calendar by the time we reach Sade-138.’ And another seven hundred years gone, if I lived to return. Not that it would make that much difference; Marygay was as good as dead and there wasn’t another person alive who meant anything to me." "‘The idea was to keep people from making babies the biological way. Because, A, people showed a regrettable lack of sense in choosing their genetic partner. And B, the Council saw that racial differences had an unnecessarily divisive effect on humanity; with total control over births, they could make everybody the same race in a few generations.’" "She cracked the capsule under her nose and took two deep breaths. ‘As a woman, though, I’m all in favor of it.’ "Hilleboe and Rusk nodded vigorously. ‘Not having to go through childbirth?’ "‘That’s part of it.’ She crossed her eyes comically, looking at the capsule, gave it a final sniff. ‘Mostly, though, it’s not … having to … have a man. Inside me. You understand. It’s disgusting.’ "Moore laughed. ‘If you haven’t tried it, Diana, don’t—’ ‘Oh, shut up.’ She threw the empty capsule at him playfully. "‘But it’s perfectly natural,’ I protested. "‘So is swinging through trees. Digging for roots with a blunt stick. Progress, my good major; progress.’ "‘Anyway,’ Moore said, ‘it was only a crime for a short period. Then it was considered a, oh, curable …’ "‘Dysfunction,’ Alsever said. ‘Thank you. And now, well, it’s so rare … I doubt that any of the men and women have any strong feelings about it, one way or the other.’ "‘Just an eccentricity,’ Diana said, magnanimously. ‘Not as if you ate babies.’" "‘It’s not as though we’d be actually lost,’ he said with a rather wicked expression. ‘We could zip up in the tanks, aim for Earth and blast away at full power. We’d get there in about three months, ship time.’ "‘Sure,’ I said. ‘But 150,000 years in the future.’ At twenty-five gees, you get to nine-tenths the speed of light in less than a month. From then on, you’re in the arms of Saint Albert." "It made you wonder how many soldiers had gotten out of the war in just that way. There were forty-two strike forces lost somewhere and unaccounted for. It was possible that all of them were crawling through normal space at near-lightspeed and would show up at Earth or Stargate one-by-one over the centuries." "Most of them either had English as their native tongue or as a second language, but it had changed so drastically over 450 years that I could barely understand it, not at all if it was spoken rapidly. "Fortunately, they had all been taught early twenty-first century English during their basic training; that language, or dialect, served as a temporal lingua franca through which a twenty-fifth century soldier could communicate with someone who had been a contemporary of his nineteen-times-great-grandparents" "My duties were more varied but offered little satisfaction, since the problems that percolated up to me were of the ‘the buck stops here’ type; those with pleasing, unambiguous solutions were taken care of in the lower echelons." "Evidently the Taurans had the same problem — or they had copied the process from us in the first place — because they had also scaled down to nova bombs that used less than a hundred kilograms of degenerate matter. And they deployed them much the same way we did, the warhead separating into dozens of pieces as it approached the target, only one of which was the nova bomb." We have met the enemy and they are us. Here is where I suspected that, due to relativistic effects, we were fighting ourselves -- or perhaps Marygay? "The Taurans hadn’t known war for millennia, and toward the beginning of the twenty-first century it looked as though mankind was ready to outgrow the institution as well. "But the old soldiers were still around, and many of them were in positions of power. They virtually ran the United Nations Exploratory and Colonization Group, that was taking advantage of the newly-discovered collapsar jump to explore interstellar space. "Many of the early ships met with accidents and disappeared. The ex-military men were suspicious. They armed the colonizing vessels, and the first time they met a Tauran ship, they blasted it. They dusted off their medals and the rest was going to be history. "You couldn’t blame it all on the military, though. The evidence they presented for the Taurans’ having been responsible for the earlier casualties was laughably thin. The few people who pointed this out were ignored. The fact was, Earth’s economy needed a war, and this one was ideal. It gave a nice hole to throw buckets of money into, but would unify humanity rather than dividing it." "It took all of my money, and all the money of five other old-timers, but we bought a cruiser from UNEF. And we’re using it as a time machine. So I’m on a relativistic shuttle, waiting for you. "All it does is go out five light years and come back to Middle Finger, very fast. Every ten years I age about a month. So if you’re on schedule and still alive, I’ll only be twenty-eight when you get here. "Hurry! I never found anybody else and I don’t want anybody else. I don’t care whether you’re ninety years old or thirty. If I can’t be your lover, I’ll be your nurse." "If you had friends or lovers lost in the relativistic maze of the Forever War, you could wait for them on the Time Warp, a converted battlewagon that shuttled back and forth between Mizar and Alcor fast enough to almost halt aging." ]]> </content> </entry> <entry> <title type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Ten Days That Shook The World by John Reed (1919) (read in 2018)]]> </title> <id>https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3530</id> <link href="https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3530"/> <updated>2018-04-08T20:55:39+02:00</updated> <author> <name type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Marco von Ballmoos]]> </name> <uri>https://earthli.com/users/marco</uri> </author> <summary type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA["Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is" ... ]]> </summary> <content type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Published by marco on 8. Apr 2018 20:55:39 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I've failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an interest in this book, then I'm happy for you." This is a first-hand account of the ten days prior to and just after the Russian Revolution in November of 1917, John Reed was living in St. Petersburg as things got into full swing. He was a strongly left-leaning journalist with at least a partial grasp of the Russian language, though it's unclear how well he could read it. It's hard to believe that he didn't understand any of it, considering how much of the book seems to have been transcribed from meetings or conversations in the street. The book offers an enthusiastic and detailed account of the involvement of the myriad participants and factions. The book covers many of the intrigues between factions involved in the revolutions as well as the external pressures of the other nations of Europe -- Finland, England, Germany and others. These were trying from the very beginning to extinguish the Bolshevik revolution that they saw as an infectious threat to all that they'd taken for themselves. The Russian refusal to continue fighting alongside the other nations in WWI, throwing away its young men's lives for the capitalists, was the final straw: they had to be eliminated before they were allowed to show that another way was possible. Internal forces -- particularly in the person of Yussov Djugashvili-Stalin took care of the rest. [Citations] "On October 15th I had a conversation with a great Russian capitalist, Stepan Georgevitch Lianozov, known as the "Russian Rockefeller"-a Cadet by political faith. "Revolution," he said, "is a sickness. Sooner or later the foreign powers must intervene here-as one would intervene to cure a sick child, and teach it how to walk. Of course it would be more or less improper, but the nations must realize the danger of Bolshevism in their own countries-such contagious ideas as 'proletarian dictatorship,' and 'world social revolution'... There is a chance that this intervention may not be necessary. Transportation is demoralized, the factories are closing down, and the Germans are advancing. Starvation and defeat may bring the Russian people to their senses...."" "As in all such times, the petty conventional life of the city went on, ignoring the Revolution as much as possible. The poets made verses-but not about the Revolution. The realistic painters painted scenes from medieval Russian history-anything but the Revolution. Young ladies from the provinces came up to the capital to learn French and cultivate their voices, and the gay young beautiful officers wore their gold-trimmed crimson bashliki and their elaborate Caucasian swords around the hotel lobbies. The ladies of the minor bureaucratic set took tea with each other in the afternoon, carrying each her little gold or silver or jewelled sugar-box, and half a loaf of bread in her muff, and wished that the Tsar were back, or that the Germans would come, or anything that would solve the servant problem.... The daughter of a friend of mine came home one afternoon in hysterics because the woman street-car conductor had called her "Comrade!"" ""Comrades," he cried, and there was real anguish in his drawn face and despairing gestures. "The people at the top are always calling upon us to sacrifice more, sacrifice more, while those who have everything are left unmolested. "We are at war with Germany. Would we invite German generals to serve on our Staff? Well we're at war with the capitalists too, and yet we invite them into our Government.... "The soldier says, 'Show me what I am fighting for. Is it Constantinople, or is it free Russia? Is it the democracy, or is it the capitalist plunderers? If you can prove to me that I am defending the Revolution then I'll go out and fight without capital punishment to force me.'" "At once every one began asking me questions about America: Was it true that people in a free country sold their votes for money? If so, how did they get what they wanted? How about this "Tammany"? Was it true that in a free country a little group of people could control a whole city, and exploited it for their personal benefit? Why did the people stand it? Even under the Tsar such things could not happen in Russia; true, here there was always graft, but to buy and sell a whole city full of people! And in a free country! Had the people no revolutionary feeling? I tried to explain that in my country people tried to change things by law. "Of course," nodded a young sergeant, named Baklanov, who spoke French. "But you have a highly developed capitalist class? Then the capitalist class must control the legislatures and the courts. How then can the people change things? I am open to conviction, for I do not know your country; but to me it is incredible...."" "A couch lay along the wall, and on this was stretched a young workman. Two Red Guards were bending over him, but the rest of the company did not pay any attention. In his breast was a hole; through his clothes fresh blood came welling up with every heart-beat. His eyes were closed and his young, bearded face was greenish-white. Faintly and slowly he still breathed, with every breath sighing, "Mir boudit! Mir boudit! (Peace is coming! Peace is coming!)"" These scenes remind me of "Idi i smotri" <https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0091251/>. ""You foreigners look down on us Russians because so long we tolerated a mediæval monarchy," said he. "But we saw that the Tsar was not the only tyrant in the world; capitalism was worse, and in all the countries of the world capitalism was Emperor.... Russian revolutionary tactics are best...."" "Executing the will of these Congresses, the Council of People's Commissars has resolved to establish as a basis for its activity in the question of Nationalities, the following principles: (1) The equality and sovereignty of the peoples of Russia. (2) The right of the peoples of Russia to free self-determination, even to the point of separation and the formation of an independent state. (3) The abolition of any and all national and national religious privileges and disabilities. (4) The free development of national minorities and ethnographic groups inhabiting the territory of Russia. Decrees will be prepared immediately upon the formation of a Commission on Nationalities. In the name of the Russian Republic, People's Commissar for Nationalities YUSSOV DJUGASHVILI-STALIN President of the Council of People's Commissars V. ULYANOV (LENIN)" "the Ministry of Agriculture, the Ministry of Supplies, the Ministry of Finance, similar incidents occurred. And the employees, summoned to return or forfeit their positions and their pensions, either stayed away or returned to sabotage.... Almost all the intelligentsia being anti-Bolshevik, there was nowhere for the Soviet Government to recruit new staffs.... The private banks remained stubbornly closed, with a back door open for speculators. When Bolshevik Commissars entered, the clerks left, secreting the books and removing the funds. All the employees of the State Bank struck except the clerks in charge of the vaults and the manufacture of money, who refused all demands from Smolny and privately paid out huge sums to the Committee for Salvation and the City Duma." "The opposition newspapers, suppressed one day and reappearing next morning under new names, heaped bitter sarcasm on the new regime. (See App. XI, Sect. 5) Even Novaya Zhizn characterized it as "a combination of demagoguery and impotence." From day to day (it said) the Government of the People's Commissars sinks deeper and deeper into the mire of superficial haste. Having easily conquered the power... the Bolsheviki can not make use of it. Powerless to direct the existing mechanism of Government, they are unable at the same time to create a new one which might work easily and freely according to the theories of social experimenters." ""The attitude of Socialists on the question of freedom of the Press should be the same as their attitude toward the freedom of business.... The rule of the democracy which is being established in Russia demands that the domination of the Press by private property must be abolished, just as the domination of industry by private property.... The power of the Soviets should confiscate all printing-plants." (Cries, "Confiscate the printing-shop of Pravda!")" ""The monopoly of the Press by the bourgeoisie must be abolished. Otherwise it isn't worth while for us to take the power! Each group of citizens should have access to print shops and paper.... The ownership of print-type and of paper belongs first to the workers and peasants, and only afterwards to the bourgeois parties, which are in a minority.... The passing of the power into the hands of the Soviets will bring about a radical transformation of the essential conditions of existence, and this transformation will necessarily be evident in the Press.... If we are going to nationalize the banks, can we then tolerate the financial journals? The old régime must die; that must be understood once and for all...." Applause and angry cries." The internet as originally envisioned is socialist. ""We have thrown off the yoke of capitalism, just as the first revolution threw off the yoke of Tsarism. If the first revolution had the right to suppress the Monarchist papers, then we have the right to suppress the bourgeois press. It is impossible to separate the question of the freedom of the Press from the other questions of the class struggle. We have promised to close these newspapers, and we shall do it. The immense majority of the people is with us! "Now that the insurrection is over, we have absolutely no desire to suppress the papers of the other Socialist parties, except inasmuch as they appeal to armed insurrection, or to disobedience to the Soviet Government. However, we shall not permit them, under the pretence of freedom of the Socialist press, to obtain, through the secret support of the bourgeoisie, a monopoly of printing-presses, ink and paper.... These essentials must become the property of the Soviet Government, and be apportioned, first of all, to the Socialist parties in strict proportion to their voting strength...."" "There remained several centres of dangerous opposition, such as the "republics" of Ukraine and Finland, which were showing definitely anti-Soviet tendencies. Both at Helsingfors and at Kiev the Governments were gathering troops which could be depended upon, and entering upon campaigns of crushing Bolshevism, and of disarming and expelling Russian troops. The Ukrainean Rada had taken command of all southern Russia, and was furnishing Kaledin reinforcements and supplies. Both Finland and Ukraine were beginning secret negotiations with the Germans, and were promptly recognized by the Allied Governments, which loaned them huge sums of money, joining with the propertied classes to create counter-revolutionary centres of attack upon Soviet Russia. In the end, when Bolshevism had conquered in both these countries, the defeated bourgeoisie called in the Germans to restore them to power...." "Not by compromise with the propertied classes, or with the other political leaders; not by conciliating the old Government mechanism, did the Bolsheviki conquer the power. Nor by the organized violence of a small clique. If the masses all over Russia had not been ready for insurrection it must have failed. The only reason for Bolshevik success lay in their accomplishing the vast and simple desires of the most profound strata of the people, calling them to the work of tearing down and destroying the old, and afterward, in the smoke of falling ruins, cooperating with them to erect the frame-work of the new...." "In the industrial, agrarian and supply departments the politics of the propertied classes, acting with the Government, increases the natural disorganization caused by the war. The propertied classes, which are provoking a peasants' revolt! The propertied classes, which are provoking civil war, and openly hold their course on the bony hand of hunger, with which they intend to overthrow the Revolution and finish with the Constituent Assembly!" "The interview of which this is an excerpt was cabled to the United States, and in a few days sent back by the American State Department, with a demand that it be "altered." This Kerensky refused to do; but it was done by his secretary, Dr. David Soskice—and, thus purged of all offensive references to the Allies, was given to the press of the world…." "The printing of advertisements, in newspapers, books, bill-boards, kiosks, in offices and other establishments is declared to be a State monopoly." "Advertising offices are confiscated by the Government, the owners being entitled to compensation in cases of necessity. Small proprietors, depositors and stock-holders of the confiscated establishments will be reimbursed for all moneys held by them in the concern." "Every conscious worker understands perfectly that we cannot avoid this hostility, because the high officials have set themselves against the People and do not wish to abandon their posts without resistance. But the working classes are not for one moment afraid of that resistance. The majority of the people are for us. For us are the majority of the workers and the oppressed of the whole world. We have justice on our side. Our ultimate victory is certain." ]]> </content> </entry> <entry> <title type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Industrial Society and its Future by Theodore Kaczynski (1995) (read in 2018)]]> </title> <id>https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3538</id> <link href="https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3538"/> <updated>2018-04-08T20:33:17+02:00</updated> <author> <name type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Marco von Ballmoos]]> </name> <uri>https://earthli.com/users/marco</uri> </author> <summary type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA["Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is" ... ]]> </summary> <content type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Published by marco on 8. Apr 2018 20:33:17 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I've failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an interest in this book, then I'm happy for you." The full text of this long essay/short book is available online at "Unabomber Special Report" <https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/longterm/unabomber/manifesto.text.htm>. To the Post's credit, it's still online after over 20 years. There is very little that is particularly incendiary about this document (if you'll pardon the phrase). Though his actions were mad -- despite his railing against society's deprivation of freedom, he saw fit to rob several people of their own freedom by killing them -- his reasoning is not. I wanted to see what the fuss was about and what the Unabomber's actual demands were. His arguments are lucid, if not always convincing. I was expecting a bit more craziness, like in Dianetics, but Kaczynski was much smarter, apparently -- he was certainly a better writer. The essay is basically structured as follows: 1. He rails against leftists for about 20% of the essay, discussing their psychology and "oversocialization". As a university professor without a more rational and less strictly left-leaning tendency, he seems to have felt himself in a minority against which he needed to lash out. Some of the characteristics he pointed out are quite negative, but his inability to nail down who, exactly, he considers to be a leftist -- or which modes of thought are the types of leftism to avoid -- robs his argument of much of its power. 2. He then discusses different types of work, including surrogate activities and a definition of the power process. 3. He goes into detail in the Disruption of the Power Process in Modern Society chapter. Here he expands on an idea that the main goal of society is subjugation through disempowerment. He builds up the argument reasonably well, without too much bombast. 4. He discusses freedom and the logical tension between freedom and technology/industrial society. Pre-industrial societies are by definition more free because the lack of long-distance communication and travel prevent the overarching, larger systems of control that are inevitably wrought by technology (and those who control it). 5. He moves from mind control through propaganda to control via pharmaceuticals and genetic modification (even less far-fetched 20 years later). 6. From there, he discusses how technology becomes a self-promulgating end in itself, inevitably leading to a place where humankind is so dependent on it that it no longer matters whether it is in charge because it took over or because the humans capitulated. The dependency implies the control. 7. Next up are more predictions, many of which have unsurprisingly come true (or have been much more concretely realized than in the 90s). The world we have, dominated as it is by surveilling corporations and governments and a nearly useless media landscape is not far off from Kaczynski's nightmare vision. 8. Finally, there are concrete action plans and ideas for how to foment the required revolution to devolve society to pre-industry. He also acknowledges that it won't be easy, regardless of how he's proven its necessity if we are to survive as psychologically independent individuals with even a modicum of freedom (paraphrased from his ideas, by the way). There is a discussion of revolutionary techniques, how to build an intelligent core with rational argument and then bring the rabble on board with simpler reasoning (that is pitched to inspire the second group without alienating the first group). Any group that inspired such a devolution would necessarily be rejected for the loss in lifestyle that they'd engendered, after which the technological elite would quickly take the reins again. 9. In the end, he manages to prove the inevitability of technology, the zero-sum game it has with individual freedom and the near impossibility of freedom winning out. [Citations] "Many people who pursue surrogate activities will say that they get far more fulfillment from these activities than they do from the “mundane” business of satisfying their biological needs, but that is because in our society the effort needed to satisfy the biological needs has been reduced to triviality. More importantly, in our society people do not satisfy their biological needs AUTONOMOUSLY but by functioning as parts of an immense social machine. In contrast, people generally have a great deal of autonomy in pursuing their surrogate activities." "47. Among the abnormal conditions present in modern industrial society are excessive density of population, isolation of man from nature, excessive rapidity of social change and the breakdown of natural small-scale communities such as the extended family, the village or the tribe." "For example, a variety of noise-making devices: power mowers, radios, motorcycles, etc. If the use of these devices is unrestricted, people who want peace and quiet are frustrated by the noise. If their use is restricted, people who use the devices are frustrated by the regulations. But if these machines had never been invented there would have been no conflict and no frustration generated by them.)" It's a logically correct point, but hard to call valid. Is he arguing here for picking and choosing technological advances? As we'll see later, he's actually working his way toward a complete negation of technology beyond that which is necessary to provide basic physical comforts. He tries to prove that to allow technology a longer leash than that leads inevitably to a complete loss of freedom and enslavement by the system wrought by technological advance. "Would-be industrial societies that have done a poor job of subordinating personal or local loyalties to loyalty to the system are usually very inefficient. (Look at Latin America.) Thus an advanced industrial society can tolerate only those small-scale communities that are emasculated, tamed and made into tools of the system." "In fact, 19th century American society had an optimistic and self-confident tone, quite unlike that of today’s society. [8]" He's all over the place here. Isn't it just as likely that people in the nineteenth century were just as unhappy as those today, but they didn't say anything? Or, more precisely, they didn't have any way of saying it in a way that would be passed down to us? How can we even begin to imagine we can estimate the relative happiness of a culture that never measured such a thing? Even today, we aren't even close to agreement about what the purpose of life is, or what it means to be happy. Kaczynski implies his definition is axiomatic and that to question it is to give in to "leftist" tendencies. What is a leftist? Oh boy, how much time have you got? Just kidding, he ends his essay by pointing out that he can't really pin it down either, but he knows one when he sees one. That's a little unfair to him, actually. He makes quite an effort to define "leftists" but does admit to a bit of hand-waving. The next chapter, Disruption of the Power Process in Modern Society, is interesting, discussing how people's power over their own lives is subverted by propaganda and advertising that often masquerades as education programs. "Advertising and marketing techniques have been developed that make many people feel they need things that their grandparents never desired or even dreamed of. It requires serious effort to earn enough money to satisfy these artificial needs, hence they fall into group 2. (But see paragraphs 80-82.) Modern man must satisfy his need for the power process largely through pursuit of the artificial needs created by the advertising and marketing industry [11], and through surrogate activities." "66. Today people live more by virtue of what the system does FOR them or TO them than by virtue of what they do for themselves. And what they do for themselves is done more and more along channels laid down by the system. Opportunities tend to be those that the system provides, the opportunities must be exploited in accord with rules and regulations [13], and techniques prescribed by experts must be followed if there is to be a chance of success." "Our lives depend on decisions made by other people; we have no control over these decisions and usually we do not even know the people who make them." "Our lives depend on whether safety standards at a nuclear power plant are properly maintained; on how much pesticide is allowed to get into our food or how much pollution into our air; on how skillful (or incompetent) our doctor is; whether we lose or get a job may depend on decisions made by government economists or corporation executives; and so forth. Most individuals are not in a position to secure themselves against these threats to more [than] a very limited extent. The individual’s search for security is therefore frustrated, which leads to a sense of powerlessness." "But threats to the modern individual tend to be MAN-MADE. They are not the results of chance but are IMPOSED on him by other persons whose decisions he, as an individual, is unable to influence. Consequently he feels frustrated, humiliated and angry." "72. Modern society is in certain respects extremely permissive. In matters that are irrelevant to the functioning of the system we can generally do what we please. We can believe in any religion we like (as long as it does not encourage behavior that is dangerous to the system). We can go to bed with anyone we like (as long as we practice “safe sex”). We can do anything we like as long as it is UNIMPORTANT. But in all IMPORTANT matters the system tends increasingly to regulate our behavior." "80. People vary in their susceptibility to advertising and marketing techniques. Some are so susceptible that, even if they make a great deal of money, they cannot satisfy their constant craving for the the shiny new toys that the marketing industry dangles before their eyes. So they always feel hard-pressed financially even if their income is large, and their cravings are frustrated." "It only remains to point out that in many cases a person’s way of earning a living is also a surrogate activity. Not a PURE surrogate activity, since part of the motive for the activity is to gain the physical necessities and (for some people) social status and the luxuries that advertising makes them want. But many people put into their work far more effort than is necessary to earn whatever money and status they require, and this extra effort constitutes a surrogate activity." "Consider the case of Dr. Edward Teller, who had an obvious emotional involvement in promoting nuclear power plants. Did this involvement stem from a desire to benefit humanity? If so, then why didn’t Dr. Teller get emotional about other “humanitarian” causes? If he was such a humanitarian then why did he help to develop the H- bomb? As with many other scientific achievements, it is very much open to question whether nuclear power plants actually do benefit humanity. Does the cheap electricity outweigh the accumulating waste and the risk of accidents? Dr. Teller saw only one side of the question. Clearly his emotional involvement with nuclear power arose not from a desire to “benefit humanity” but from a personal fulfillment he got from his work and from seeing it put to practical use." "It is important not to confuse freedom with mere permissiveness (see paragraph 72)." "95. It is said that we live in a free society because we have a certain number of constitutionally guaranteed rights. But these are not as important as they seem. The degree of personal freedom that exists in a society is determined more by the economic and technological structure of the society than by its laws or its form of government." "In part this was because they lacked efficient mechanisms for enforcing the ruler’s will: There were no modern, well-organized police forces, no rapid long-distance communications, no surveillance cameras, no dossiers of information about the lives of average citizens. Hence it was relatively easy to evade control." "In any technologically advanced society the individual’s fate MUST depend on decisions that he personally cannot influence to any great extent. A technological society cannot be broken down into small, autonomous communities, because production depends on the cooperation of very large numbers of people and machines. Such a society MUST be highly organized and decisions HAVE TO be made that affect very large numbers of people." "There is no conceivable way to remedy this in a technologically advanced society. The system tries to “solve” this problem by using propaganda to make people WANT the decisions that have been made for them, but even if this “solution” were completely successful in making people feel better, it would be demeaning." "It is the needs of the system that are paramount, not those of the human being. For example, the system provides people with food because the system couldn’t function if everyone starved; it attends to people’s psychological needs whenever it can CONVENIENTLY do so, because it couldn’t function if too many people became depressed or rebellious." We find this situation in many places in our society -- that the cottage industry or parasite grows to control the system. Recruiting is an example where the logical goal of allocating jobs efficiently is completely subverted by poor incentives. Companies would like to have long-lasting relationships with talented, dedicated, interested, engaged and happy employees. Similarly, employees would like to be productive and happy. Optimally efficient is if the relationship is as long as possible. No time and effort is wasted in looking for new employees or jobs. However, we now have a system where the logical middleman runs the show by its own incentives. A company's main business is not recruitment and hence is happy to use outside experts. Employees are the same: they are only very occasionally involved in the labor market and are happy for expertise to help them navigate the unfamiliar waters. However, the incentive of the recruiter is for each employee to work just long enough that the recruiter gets paid and not one second more. At that point, the employee is worth nothing to the recruiting company and its overriding interest is to get that employee back into the job pool in order to glean another payday. The interest of the recruiter is also to artificially escalate pay regardless of value provided because that also increase the size of the payday. The least economically and societally useful part of the process has given itself primacy in the process, making itself somehow indispensable with its bullshit business practices. But, after a while, employees feel that they can't get a job without a recruiter and companies are at the recruiters' mercy because all of the good employees have signed up with one. It's madness and a nearly inevitable outgrowth of unchecked "improvement" and "capitalization" of a system. The original need is completely subsumed by a cancerous outgrowth. "[...] employees are never given autonomy as to ultimate goals—their “autonomous” efforts can never be directed toward goals that they select personally, but only toward their employer’s goals, such as the survival and growth of the company." "Similarly, in any enterprise within a socialist system, workers must direct their efforts toward the goals of the enterprise, otherwise the enterprise will not serve its purpose as part of the system." I'm not sure I agree completely with these two. The argument certainly holds for larger companies -- of which there are many. Most people are employed at larger firms, for which this holds. But there is room for success in other models, as well. But one must, of course, jettison most of the conventional wisdom about "how to run a business". That much is certainly true. "You can’t get rid of the “bad” parts of technology and retain only the “good” parts. Take modern medicine, for example. Progress in medical science depends on progress in chemistry, physics, biology, computer science and other fields. Advanced medical treatments require expensive, high-tech equipment that can be made available only by a technologically progressive, economically rich society. Clearly you can’t have much progress in medicine without the whole technological system and everything that goes with it." "(Note this important point that we have just illustrated with the case of motorized transport: When a new item of technology is introduced as an option that an individual can accept or not as he chooses, it does not necessarily REMAIN optional. In many cases the new technology changes society in such a way that people eventually find themselves FORCED to use it.)" "Educators, humanitarian groups, conservation organizations do not hesitate to use propaganda or other psychological techniques to help them achieve their laudable ends. Corporations and government agencies, when they find it useful, do not hesitate to collect information about individuals without regard to their privacy. Law enforcement agencies are frequently inconvenienced by the constitutional rights of suspects and often of completely innocent persons, and they do whatever they can do legally (or sometimes illegally) to restrict or circumvent those rights. Most of these educators, government officials and law officers believe in freedom, privacy and constitutional rights, but when these conflict with their work, they usually feel that their work is more important." "Major social problems, if they get “solved” at all, are rarely or never solved through any rational, comprehensive plan. They just work themselves out through a process in which various competing groups pursuing their own (usually short- term) self-interest [23] arrive (mainly by luck) at some more or less stable modus vivendi. In fact, the principles we formulated in paragraphs 100-106 make it seem doubtful that rational, long-term social planning can EVER be successful." "Take our environmental problems, for example. Here the conflict of values is straightforward: economic expedience now versus saving some of our natural resources for our grandchildren." "In effect, antidepressants are a means of modifying an individual’s internal state in such a way as to enable him to tolerate social conditions that he would otherwise find intolerable." "an individual whose attitudes or behavior bring him into conflict with the system is up against a force that is too powerful for him to conquer or escape from, hence he is likely to suffer from stress, frustration, defeat. His path will be much easier if he thinks and behaves as the system requires. In that sense the system is acting for the benefit of the individual when it brainwashes him into conformity.)" "In practice, the word “abuse” tends to be interpreted to include any method of child-rearing that produces behavior inconvenient for the system. Thus, when they go beyond the prevention of obvious, senseless cruelty, programs for preventing “child abuse” are directed toward the control of human behavior on behalf of the system." It's an interesting question: are those who do their work "for the children" doing it for the ethical reasons they espouse or have they been brainwashed into helping society produce conforming individuals? "Generally speaking, technological control over human behavior will probably not be introduced with a totalitarian intention or even through a conscious desire to restrict human freedom. [28] Each new step in the assertion of control over the human mind will be taken as a rational response to a problem that faces society, such as curing alcoholism, reducing the crime rate or inducing young people to study science and engineering." "When parents send their children to Sylvan Learning Centers to have them manipulated into becoming enthusiastic about their studies, they do so from concern for their children’s welfare. It may be that some of these parents wish that one didn’t have to have specialized training to get a job and that their kid didn’t have to be brainwashed into becoming a computer nerd. But what can they do? They can’t change society, and their child may be unemployable if he doesn’t have certain skills. So they send him to Sylvan." "In paragraph 127 we pointed out that if the use of a new item of technology is INITIALLY optional, it does not necessarily REMAIN optional, because the new technology tends to change society in such a way that it becomes difficult or impossible for an individual to function without using that technology. This applies also to the technology of human behavior. In a world in which most children are put through a program to make them enthusiastic about studying, a parent will almost be forced to put his kid through such a program, because if he does not, then the kid will grow up to be, comparatively speaking, an ignoramus and therefore unemployable." "Human freedom mostly will have vanished, because individuals and small groups will be impotent vis-a-vis large organizations armed with supertechnology and an arsenal of advanced psychological and biological tools for manipulating human beings, besides instruments of surveillance and physical coercion." "And, as nuclear proliferation has shown, new technology cannot be kept out of the hands of dictators and irresponsible Third World nations. Would you like to speculate about what Iraq or North Korea will do with genetic engineering?" Talk about misplaced concerns. This is totally mainstream thinking. It's always interesting to see that even someone who has spent so much time coming up with an independent framework, who rails against the conventional wisdom still ends up espousing the most mainstream views that benefit the ruling class the most. It's kind of surprising to see Kaczynski knee-jerk assume that one of the official enemies of the state would be so much more horrible with technology than the U.S. had already proved itself to be. This makes him no different from those who wonder aloud what Russia would do with their nukes -- as if the U.S. had never completely maliciously wiped out two whole cities with them. "We only point out that the fate of the human race would be at the mercy of the machines. It might be argued that the human race would never be foolish enough to hand over all power to the machines. But we are suggesting neither that the human race would voluntarily turn power over to the machines nor that the machines would willfully seize power. What we do suggest is that the human race might easily permit itself to drift into a position of such dependence on the machines that it would have no practical choice but to accept all of the machines’ decisions. As society and the problems that face it become more and more complex and as machines become more and more intelligent, people will let machines make more and more of their decisions for them, simply because machine-made decisions will bring better results than man-made ones. Eventually a stage may be reached at which the decisions necessary to keep the system running will be so complex that human beings will be incapable of making them intelligently. At that stage the machines will be in effective control. People won’t be able to just turn the machines off, because they will be so dependent on them that turning them off would amount to suicide." "Of course, life will be so purposeless that people will have to be biologically or psychologically engineered either to remove their need for the power process or to make them “sublimate” their drive for power into some harmless hobby. These engineered human beings may be happy in such a society, but they most certainly will not be free. They will have been reduced to the status of domestic animals." "Very repellent is a society in which a person can satisfy his need for power only by pushing large numbers of other people out of the way and depriving them of THEIR opportunity for power." "Thus people would spent their time shining each other’s shoes, driving each other around in taxicabs, making handicrafts for one another, waiting on each other’s tables, etc. This seems to us a thoroughly contemptible way for the human race to end up, and we doubt that many people would find fulfilling lives in such pointless busy-work. They would seek other, dangerous outlets (drugs, crime, “cults,” hate groups) unless they were biologically or psychologically engineered to adapt them to such a way of" So, that happened, I guess: Uber, Etsy and Blue Apron. "However, propaganda of the rabble-rousing type may be necessary when the system is nearing the point of collapse and there is a final struggle between rival ideologies to determine which will become dominant when the old world-view goes under." A literal description of the Bolshevik revolution that he disparaged earlier. Kaczynski doesn't seem to know how to feel about those pesky Russians. He admits that their methods (and those of the French) worked, but is always quick to follow up with relief that the program they wanted to enact never truly came to fruition. Here, too, Kaczynski shows his susceptibility to anti-Communist and anti-Socialist brainwashing (i.e. his hatred of the group of haphazardly thrown-together people he terms "leftists"). "The line of conflict should be drawn between the mass of the people and the power-holding elite of industrial society (politicians, scientists, upper-level business executives, government officials, etc.). It should NOT be drawn between the revolutionaries and the mass of the people. For example, it would be bad strategy for the revolutionaries to condemn Americans for their habits of consumption. Instead, the average American should be portrayed as a victim of the advertising and marketing industry, which has suckered him into buying a lot of junk that he doesn’t need and that is very poor compensation for his lost freedom." "192. But the way to discourage ethnic conflict is NOT through militant advocacy of minority rights (see paragraphs 21, 29). Instead, the revolutionaries should emphasize that although minorities do suffer more or less disadvantage, this disadvantage is of peripheral significance. Our real enemy is the industrial- technological system, and in the struggle against the system, ethnic distinctions are of no importance." This is the point being made today: the most important fight is the class war, not the ethnic one. It is the war in which we are all one side. There is no sense in getting equal rights for all, regardless of ethnicity if all you've won is the equal right to a be a wage slave. If you win the war against being wage slaves together, then you automatically win the other war as well. Certain people do have it much, much worse but fighting that battle first is a distraction happily promulgated by the elites, most of whom will happily grant minorities more rights as long as the kowtow to the system of which they are the undisputed head. "Suppose for example that some “green” party should win control of the United States Congress in an election. In order to avoid betraying or watering down their own ideology they would have to take vigorous measures to turn economic growth into economic shrinkage. To the average man the results would appear disastrous: There would be massive unemployment, shortages of commodities, etc. Even if the grosser ill effects could be avoided through superhumanly skillful management, still people would have to begin giving up the luxuries to which they have become addicted. Dissatisfaction would grow, the “green” party would be voted out of office and the revolutionaries would have suffered a severe setback. For this reason the revolutionaries should not try to acquire political power until the system has gotten itself into such a mess that any hardships will be seen as resulting from the failures of the industrial system itself and not from the policies of the revolutionaries." "And as long as anyone harbors in some corner of his mind a negative attitude toward some minority, the leftist has to re-educated him. And ethnic minorities are not enough; no one can be allowed to have a negative attitude toward homosexuals, disabled people, fat people, old people, ugly people, and on and on and on. It’s not enough that the public should be informed about the hazards of smoking; a warning has to be stamped on every package of cigarettes." It really sounds like Jordan Peterson has stolen quite a bit from the Unabomber's playbook. "Because of their capacity for single-minded devotion to a cause, True Believers are a useful, perhaps a necessary, ingredient of any revolutionary movement. This presents a problem with which we must admit we don’t know how to deal. We aren’t sure how to harness the energies of the True Believer to a revolution against technology." "The conservatives are just taking the average man for a sucker, exploiting his resentment of Big Government to promote the power of Big Business." "For another thing, most of the deregulation affects business rather than the average individual, so that its main effect is to take power from the government and give it to private corporations. What this means for the average man is that government interference in his life is replaced by interference from big corporations, which may be permitted, for example, to dump more chemicals that get into his water supply and give him cancer. The conservatives are just taking the average man for a sucker, exploiting his resentment of Big Government to promote the power of Big Business." "If a society needs a large, powerful law enforcement establishment, then there is something gravely wrong with that society; it must be subjecting people to severe pressures if so many refuse to follow the rules, or follow them only because forced. Many societies in the past have gotten by with little or no formal law- enforcement." ]]> </content> </entry> <entry> <title type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Adults in the Room: My Battle with the European and American Deep Establishment by Yanis Varoufakis (2017) (read in 2018)]]> </title> <id>https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3533</id> <link href="https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3533"/> <updated>2018-04-08T18:21:52+02:00</updated> <author> <name type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Marco von Ballmoos]]> </name> <uri>https://earthli.com/users/marco</uri> </author> <summary type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA["Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is" ... ]]> </summary> <content type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Published by marco on 8. Apr 2018 18:21:52 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I've failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an interest in this book, then I'm happy for you." As you can tell by the copious notes and citations I've made below, I loved this book. It is the story of how Europe is just as fundamentally broken as any other human construction. If it every meant anything greater, it no longer does. It is a construct of self-serving functionaries bent on consolidating their own political capital. Its main goal is to provide wealth to the financial sector. It does not care for its member nations, as such. It does not care for long-term sustainability. It is afflicted by the same blinkered, short-term thinking that poisons most other human endeavors. It continues mainly on inertia, in some sense unaware that it is already dead. The corpse can still pump blood, so the vampires continue to feed. This is the story of the five months during which Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis tried to save Greece from continued debt bondage. Continued debt bondage was seen as the only way forward for the European troika. Varoufakis preferred a debt-restructuring that benefitted both parties and had the added benefit of being financially feasible. The only other alternative acknowledged by both sides was Grexit -- Greece leaving the euro zone and reëstablishing the drachma. Varoufakis threatened Grexit and vowed never to comply to continued debt bondage. His government was behind him in this, until...almost the very end. Despite reams of proposals and studies and endorsement from extremely knowledgable individuals showing that Varoufakis's plans would be effective, the troika never seriously entertained them. Honestly, it's hard to believe that they even read them. They just didn't care. Their only goal was to arrange a new loan deal -- because they were never interested in getting their money back. How could this be? Because the money they were interested in getting back was loaned to Greece, immediately after which it was funneled right back to the true victims of Greece's financial crisis -- the French and German banks that had loaned money to Greece in the first place. These banks took no haircut on their risky loans. The EU made sure that they were paid back in full, but that the Greek government took the full blame for the profligacy. The troika wasn't interested in being paid back because, once the banks had recharged their coffers and learned the harsh lesson that they would not only not be allowed to fail, they would also not be allowed to not turn a profit, it was only the people of Europe who were left with outstanding debts. And who cares about them when you and all of your friends have not only come out smelling like roses politically but also benefited handsomely financially? What could you do? It was those dirty, lazy Greeks who nearly ruined everything -- thank God the troika came to the rescue to limit the losses and avoid true catastrophe. Why did Varoufakis fail to save Greece from continued debt bondage? Because literally everyone was against him. They all hated him. It was obvious to the troika that he was never going to budge the way they wanted him to. They resented him for making them work that hard to get what they had always gotten much more easily. They saw the result as inevitable; why bother struggling so hard and making everyone look bad? He was always going to look bad anyway, as the representative of a reprehensible land of swarthy, shiftless ingrates suckling at the teat of superior, northern, caucasian, European generosity. His own side resented and grew to hate him because he was so much smarter and more organized and more well-informed than they were. He knew everything. He knew the history and the minutiae of everything that had happened in the EU in the last 20 years. He did not despair (at least not publicly). His ramrod discipline and dedication shamed his own leadership into continuing when they'd long-since capitulated in their hearts. His presence became a constant reminder to them of their own moral failing and their failure of the Greek people. As for his enemies in the EU and the IMF and ECB and Euro Group? They were just stunned that he'd even dared to open his mouth at all -- other than to pleasure them with it, as stipulated in their agreement with the previous government. I imagine to them Varoufakis showed up like an escort whose pimp had extracted a very good price for someone who was accommodating and open to anything -- only for her to show up and want to talk and cuddle and "get to know one another" so that they could "figure out how to both come to orgasm". The EU's incredulity was like that of the john in such a situation -- simply uncomprehending how someone could so completely fail to be on-script. After the initial confusion, the way forward was clear: punishment and humiliation and, of course, the f$%king. I apologize for the invective, but it is not just to spare the degree of criminality with which the EU behaved by employing a more diplomatic vernacular. And the other nations that backed Germany unquestioningly in the Euro Group, like Latvia, were like the members of the pimp's stable who had long since capitulated all honor -- and were resentful of the uppity new broad who thought she was better than them. As Varoufakis points out, Latvia became the troika's darling, an economic success story, by proving that a country could tighten its belt to improve its per-capita GDP -- but only by shedding half of its working population through emigration. When Varoufakis re-hired cleaning staff fired during a previous administration, he was reproached endlessly by the EU for not being sufficiently dedicated to cutting costs. The cost of 300 cleaners making a pittance per month was nothing compared to the salaries of several advisers from big banks and financial institutions that Yanis simultaneously let go, of course. But that's not the point, is it? The troika were bent on punishing him for having fired its crony friends at Goldman Sachs (who'd earned millions per year). The initial firing of the cleaning staff was described as a “reform”, the rolling back of which indicates an abdication of adherence to fiduciary responsibility. This was the modus operandi for the troika, always demanding more and more from an increasingly harried and chronically understaffed finance department. And if it took Yanis a long time to realize that his enemy truly was an enemy that was not at all interested in a compromise, it wasn't his fault, really. In the heat of battle, and probably exhausted and sleep-deprived from having spent three straight days preparing a document they demanded and have now ignored, he failed to recognize their duplicitous nature. He continued to give them the benefit of the doubt, assuming that they too saw the looming danger to everyone and were interested in working together to avoid the worst of it. They were not. Life had taught them all that they would be just fine, that they would continue to fail upward no matter what happened. I count nearly everyone he mentions in this book in this group -- Lagarde, Poulson...everyone. Not a single one of them every did anything to actually help. No matter how much hand-wringing and soul-searching they play-acted behind closed doors, they always knew which side their bread was buttered on when it came to public pronouncements -- and then they reverted to the most simplistic mantras that they all knew were ineffective and could not be implemented, but for which they could not be blamed for promoting. They had all proved themselves liars and backstabbers, incapable of even a shred of honesty. Their paramount goal was to get everything they personally wanted while conceding nothing, on principle. He failed to notice that they considered it distasteful to deal with him at all. There was probably no small amount of disgust at the chutzpah of a filthy foreigner upstart daring to attend their institutions (he attended university in England in the 70s) and for daring to seem smarter and more reasonable than they, when it is they who wield the power and he who is to capitulate. Their fury was not at his proposals, but that he was wasting their time, making them pretend to do their jobs, while reminding them that they had always failed to do so. They punished him and Greece for daring to remove their mask of plausible deniability. And when the time came to execute the only threat that Greece held over the troika, Yanis hesitated, convinced that his government had his back and that they would "take collective responsibility for the decision over the precise timing of [Greece's] withdrawal from the negotiations." They did not. And that is his regret: that he did not take unilateral action at the solitary moment when he had the power to do so. He opted for democracy and was betrayed by his compatriots. I think he’s too hard on himself. And his friends in the Greek government didn't collapse all at once: no, the Troika had its agents embedded everywhere. Steter Tropfen hoehlt den Stein, as we say in German. They didn't have to push too much -- we've seen time and again how much human suffering a single person is willing to engender for what appears to be a ludicrously meager personal gain. How can you succeed when all your enemy need do is turn one functionary? And he probably sold out for a pittance? Even if it was blackmail, or the guy failed to grasp the import of his duplicity, he didn’t seem to care. An appeal to ego was probably sufficient. As mentioned above, there are also the impossible time constraints imposed on these processes. Where the EU drags its feet for years on other issues, they pressed one of its member nations to make momentous decisions in days, if not hours. There were so many late-night and weekend meetings. As things came to a head, they would work all night. In one such meeting, Yanis and Alexis (the prime minister) were working on a bank official, "Alexis and I strove to shift him from [his viewpoint] with a mixture of logic and firmness. In the end, our pressure bore fruit." Well, of course it did: it was four in the morning. These are such momentous decisions being taken by people rendered provably incompetent by lack of sleep or respite from pressure. This is akin to torture. The tight deadlines are not coincidental. Here he describes a moment when he realized that most of his government had already gone over to the other side. "The mask was off. The cynicism was extraordinary. He had just told me, quite brazenly, that he was ready to work directly for the troika rather than sever his privileged links with the troika’s functionaries in my ministry. Not only this, he had openly admitted that he was already in cahoots with the troika’s primary ally, the governor of the Greek Central Bank, who had begun the bank run in the run-up to our election as part of their bid to keep us from office. I was aghast." This is a veritable tsunami of opposition, all betraying their people, likely for paltry personal gain or simply ego-stroking. And here, he describes his thinking about his old friend (and Prime Minister) Alexis. "I would blame it on fear, depression and inexperience, relying eventually on sheer faith that the moment would come when he would bounce back, shake off the tentacles, reactivate his belief in our cause and honour the magnificent words with which he inspired me that first day at Maximos." Such is the nature of a politician. Alexis probably doesn't even remember what he said, having uttered the words purely out of instinct, knowing only their placatory effects. And Yanis heard only what he wanted to hear, replacing pragmatism with optimism in the face of overwhelming odds. During the final negotiations, when Greece had secured a deal with China to "prove" that there were countries willing to invest, Varoufakis learned that the troika had undermined that as well. "The next day Alexis relayed the news from Beijing. Someone had apparently called Beijing from Berlin with a blunt message: stay out of any deals with the Greeks until we are finished with them." So like the mafia. So duplicitous. So evil. No concern at all for the lives hanging in the balance. Just concerned about winning. Once the screws had turned, the EU could only suggest further cuts -- again, not caring at all what that would mean for the people of one of its member nations who'd already suffered more austerity and cuts than any other nation in recorded history. "‘Independently of our preferences and political will,’ I said, ‘our liquidity will run out well before then [April 30th].’ He replied that we could last much longer by plundering the reserves of non-governmental but publicly owned institutions such as pension funds, universities, utility companies and local authorities." They're just relentless and inhuman. Bent on destruction at all costs. More precisely: not recognizing costs that come at the expense of non-people, where a "person" is defined as "someone who has influence over my career, my power base, my wealth, or that of anyone who does have such power over me." Without direct or transitive personally positive effect, there is no incentive to act. Morality certainly won't enter into it. Likewise, Jeff Sachs had a rude awakening. "Jeff tried valiantly one more time. ‘Mario,’ he said, ‘I have been listening to this discussion and I must tell you that I am concerned. Yanis has been trying to propose a practical solution to a simple-to-solve problem. You rejected that solution, which is fair enough if there are technical problems, but I have not heard from you any alternative solutions.’ Mario shrugged his shoulders. ‘It is not for the central bank to offer such solutions. This is a matter for the politicians.’ ‘Just wait and see what the politicians do when I raise the subject with them,’ I said to Jeff as we were leaving. ‘They will refer me to back to the ECB, possibly to Poul Thomsen.’ Jeff shook his head in disbelief." At long last: have you no shame? Categorically, no. There were those who were convinced that it wasn't even worth trying in the first place. "Some, especially those under the control of the Left Platform, refused point-blank to cooperate on the grounds that the whole exercise was a charade. That was a fair point, but for better or worse our government’s policy was to cooperate fully within the framework of my agreement with Pierre Moscovici and within the spirit of the 20 February Eurogroup agreement, which committed us to doing our utmost to establish common ground with the creditors." They were 100% right, though. It was a tremendous and deliberate waste of time and capital. Varoufakis had to try, of course. He had to try for that less-than-1% chance that the troika weren't what they appeared to be, weren't what they'd proven themselves time and again to be. In hindsight, though, they should have just pulled the ripcord early and given the EU a double middle-finger as they were all pulled over the abyss. And then, describing the end of a meeting with Obama, who'd made some placatory mouth-movements. "Another warm handshake, another friendly smile and he was gone." Obama, as ever, full of false assurances, feigned agreement and zero support for anyone or anything that doesn't support his ego-myth. Even when talking to someone in dire straits, he talks of his own capitulation, encouraging their own ("we all float down here..."). Is he evil or stupid? He doesn't get the luxury of being considered stupid. Varoufakis was indefatigable, always to some degree still-optimistic. "We had to work on two fronts: compile our own comprehensive anti-MoU Plan for Greece while convincing Alexis to send an envoy to Berlin with the message Lee had scripted for us. It was the only way. But was it one that my exhausted comrade at Maximos would countenance?" Yanis, you're drowning and you don't recognize it. Your party won't help you. Everyone's pretending to cooperate. In the face of this, you redouble your efforts, fighting on two simultaneous fronts, exhausted, and nearly alone. I, of course, respect him immensely for making them show their true colors, for having given them every opportunity not to be assholes. I also have newfound respect for Jeff Sachs for sticking by you. He's clearly one of the good ones. "The words of caution that Jeff Sachs had once shared with me rang true: ‘These people lie. Don’t trust them.’ Still I could hardly believe that Poul could have been so blatant." I guess Yanis's honesty is refreshing, but his naiveté is disheartening. Highly recommended. [Citations] "For all who eagerly seek compromise but would rather be crushed than end up compromised." "So, in order to be as fair and impartial as possible, I have tried to see their actions and my own through the lens of an authentic ancient Greek or Shakespearean tragedy in which characters, neither good nor bad, are overtaken by the unintended consequences of their conception of what they ought to do. I suspect that I have come closer to succeeding in this task in the case of those people whom I found fascinating and rather less so in the case of those whose banality numbed my senses. For this I find it hard to apologize, not least because to present them otherwise would be to diminish the historical accuracy of this account." "When a large-scale crisis hits, it is tempting to attribute it to a conspiracy between the powerful. Images spring to mind of smoke-filled rooms with cunning men (and the occasional woman) plotting how to profit at the expense of the common good and the weak. These images are, however, delusions. If our sharply diminished circumstances can be blamed on a conspiracy, then it is one whose members do not even know that they are part of it. That which feels to many like a conspiracy of the powerful is simply the emergent property of any network of super black boxes." Here I feel he's being overly generous, but he may have a point. The petty interests seem to align for the same result as if there had been a conspiracy. "The result is a network of power within other pre-existing networks, involving participants who conspire de facto without being conscious conspirators." Do not attribute to malice what can be explained by a confluence of many petty self-interests "Once caught in this web of power it takes an heroic disposition to turn whistle-blower, especially when one cannot hear oneself think amid the cacophony of so much money-making. And those few who do break ranks end up like shooting stars, quickly forgotten by a distracted world." "The reason why my signature mattered so much was that, curiously, it is not presidents or prime ministers of fallen countries that sign bailout loan agreements with the IMF or with the European Union. That poisoned privilege falls to the hapless finance minister. It is why it was crucial to Greece’s creditors that I be bent to their will, that I should be co-opted or, failing that, crushed and replaced by a more pliant successor. Had I signed, another outsider would have turned insider and praise would have been heaped upon me. The torrent of foul adjectives directed at me by the international press, arriving right on cue only a little more than a week after that Washington visit, just as the US official had warned me it would, would never have descended onto my head. I would have been ‘responsible’, a ‘trustworthy partner’, a ‘reformed maverick’ who had put his nation’s interests above his ‘narcissism’." "For capitalism to advance in the nineteenth century, the absurd notion that all debts are sacred had to be ditched and replaced with the notion of limited liability. After all, if all debts are guaranteed, why should lenders lend responsibly? And why should some debts carry a higher interest rate than other debts, reflecting the higher risk of going bad?" "It’s not hard to imagine the panic enveloping President Sarkozy of France and his finance minister, Christine Lagarde, as they realized that they might have to conjure up €562 billion from thin air. And it’s not difficult to picture the angst of one of Lagarde’s predecessors in France’s finance ministry, the notorious Dominic Strauss-Kahn, who was then managing director of the IMF and intent on using that position to launch his campaign for France’s presidency in two years’ time. France’s top officials knew that Greece’s bankruptcy would force the French state to borrow six times its total annual tax revenues just to hand it over to three idiotic banks." "After a few weeks they figured out their fib: they would portray the second bailout of their banks as an act of solidarity with the profligate and lazy Greeks, who while unworthy and intolerable were still members of the European family and would therefore have to be rescued. Conveniently, this necessitated providing them with a further gargantuan loan with which to pay off their French and German creditors, the failing banks." "In my book The Global Minotaur, which I was writing in 2010 while Greece was imploding, I argued that free-market capitalist ideology expired in 2008, seventeen years after communism kicked the bucket. Before 2008 free-market enthusiasts portrayed capitalism as a Darwinian jungle that selects for success among heroic entrepreneurs. But in the aftermath of the 2008 financial collapse, the Darwinian natural selection process was stood on its head: the more insolvent a banker was, especially in Europe, the greater his chances of appropriating large chunks of income from everyone else: from the hard-working, the innovative, the poor and of course the politically powerless. Bankruptocracy is the name I gave to this novel regime." "Was Greek’s unholy treatment a conspiracy? If so, it was one without conscious conspirators, at least at the outset. Christine Lagarde and her ilk never set out to found Europe’s bankruptocracy. When the French banks faced certain death, what choice did she have as France’s finance minister, alongside her European counterparts and the IMF, but to do whatever it took to save them – even if this entailed lying to nineteen European parliaments at once about the purpose of the Greek loans? But having lied once and on such a grand scale, they were soon forced to compound the deceit in an attempt to hide it beneath fresh layers of subterfuge. Coming clean would have been professional suicide. Before they knew it, bankruptocracy had enveloped them too, just as surely as it had enveloped Europe’s outsiders." "To illustrate the point, in 2015 the British Treasury repaid a bond issued during the South Sea Bubble crisis of the 1720s." "Not being a natural-born politician, I would respond with a line by John Kenneth Galbraith: ‘There are times in politics when you must be on the right side and lose.’ Little did I know how prophetic that would prove." "In 2010, for every $100 of income a Greek made, the state owed €146 to foreign banks. A year later, every €100 of income earned in 2010 had shrunk to €91 before shrinking again to €79 by 2012. Meanwhile, as the official loans from European taxpayers came in before being funnelled to France and Germany’s banks, the equivalent government debt rose from €146 in 2010 to €156 in 2011. Even if God and all the angels were to invade the soul of every Greek tax evader, turning us into a nation of parsimonious Presbyterian Scots, our incomes were too low and our debts too high to reverse the bankruptcy. Investors understood this and wouldn’t touch a Greek investment project with a bargepole." "Once I was there, with the international Left in permanent disarray, US libertarians and UK free marketeers were among my most effective supporters. Interestingly, their ideological, quasi-Darwinian commitment to letting the market’s losers perish was pushing them towards my side. Mindful of the dangers of too much credit, their dictum that ‘To every irresponsible borrower there corresponds an irresponsible lender’ led them to the conclusion that bad loans should burden irresponsible lenders, not taxpayers." "Banks restructure the debt of stressed corporations every day, not out of philanthropy but out of enlightened self-interest. But the problem was that, now that we had accepted the EU–IMF bailout, we were no longer dealing with banks but with politicians who had lied to their parliaments to convince them to relieve the banks of Greece’s debt and take it on themselves." "Austerity is an awful economic policy that, as explained previously, is guaranteed to fail in bad times. But austerity is not really an economic policy at all. Austerity is a morality play pressed into the service of legitimizing cynical wealth transfers from the have-nots to the haves during times of crisis, in which debtors are sinners who must be made to pay for their misdeeds." "President Sarkozy and Chancellor Merkel resigned themselves to the idea of Greek debt restructuring on condition that it would burn only those creditors who were incapable of harming them much. By the summer of 2011, it was decided: the haircut would mainly hit Greek pension funds, Greek semi-public institutions and Greek savers who had bought government bonds, while the loans provided by the IMF and the European institutions in 2010 would of course remain inviolable." "Glossy prospectuses, featuring everything from the nation’s ports and railways to pristine beaches and small islands, invited potential buyers to make an offer. The family silver was for sale, and the proceeds were to be collected by Greece’s foreign creditors through local appointees." "In Bailoutistan 2.0 privatizations meant something else: selling public assets for small change, as the economic depression had sent prices through the floor, with the proceeds thrown into the bottomless pit of Greece’s unpayable public debt." "That a European country embedded in the continent’s great common currency experiment would end up being pushed around like a banana republic is a devastating indictment of a union supposedly founded on the promise of shared prosperity and mutual respect." "Of course Europe’s establishment had willed none of this. Before 2008 the elites in Berlin, Brussels, Paris and Frankfurt had believed their own rhetoric, as had those in the United States and the City of London: capitalism had delivered the Great Moderation; boom and bust was a thing of the past; banks had found a magical way to produce ‘riskless risk’and were self-regulating marvellously. Those in authority believed that history had ended, and their job was one of micro-management, of nudging a magnificent self-guided, self-managing system in a broadly predetermined, rational direction." "The triangle of sin was complete: the insolvent media were kept in a zombified condition by the zombie banks, which were maintained in their undead condition by a bankrupt government, itself preserved in a condition of permanent bankruptcy by the EU and the IMF’s bailout loans." "I agreed that we would be better off if we had never entered the eurozone but hastened to add that it was one thing to have stayed out of the euro and quite another to leave it. Exiting would not get us to where we would have been had we not entered!" "Taken together, these two debt restructuring exercises would signal a new era: the EU and the IMF would no longer operate like a pre-Christmas Ebenezer Scrooge. Rather, they would become Greece’s partners in promoting its economic recovery, without which their bailout loans would be haircut savagely anyway." "could – so much so that the swingeing austerity introduced" "didn’t believe in technocrats being parachuted into a political process. In truth I still had fundamental concerns. Negotiating on a country’s behalf requires a democratic mandate. The Modest Proposal represented my personal convictions, and I had no desire to legitimize the de-politicization of economic policy, that most political of realms." "The Thessaloniki Programme, as Alexis’s speech was labelled, was well meaning but incoherent and definitely inconsistent with the Five-Pronged Strategy, which Alexis and Pappas had supposedly endorsed. It promised wage rises, subsidies, benefits and investment paid for with sources of funding which were either imaginary or illegal." "I explained that I thought the private sector should pay more in total tax revenue, but the only way to achieve an overall increase in their contribution at a time of next to no sales and with bankrupt banks unable to provide credit even to profitable firms was to reduce the corporate tax rate." "I replied that unless we were prepared to turn the banks over to the European Union, we would not be able to unburden the Greek state of the liabilities incurred by their fake recapitalization. Bank nationalization would only make sense in the event of Grexit." "‘Debt restructuring comes first. Second, a primary surplus of no more than 1.5 per cent of national income and no new austerity measures. Third, wide-ranging reductions in sales and business tax rates. Fourth, strategic privatizations under conditions that preserve labour rights and boost investment. Fifth, the creation of a development bank that would use remaining public assets as collateral to generate a domestic investment drive, and whose dividends would be channelled into public pension funds. Sixth, a policy of transferring bank shares and management to the European Union while creating a public “bad bank” to deal with the banks’ non-performing loans, so as to prevent evictions and the mass expropriation of small business by vulture funds.’" "I confirmed that that was exactly my point: there was no point entering into a tough negotiation with the world’s most powerful credit institutions unless we were after a viable agreement within the euro, did nothing to jeopardize such an agreement, but were also clear in our minds that between surrender to a renewed sentence in debtors’ prison and Grexit we preferred the latter." "‘But what happens if you do not get elected?’ Alexis insisted. ‘Then the people will have said that they do not want me to represent them in the Eurogroup. Simple! The idea of technocrats negotiating economic treaties on behalf of the ignorant masses is repugnant to me and deserves to be buried.’" "recalled an old joke: two golfers exchange their life stories as they move from one hole to the next. The first one confesses that he made his fortune when his ailing factory burned down and he was able to claim the insurance. The second golfer then confesses that he also made it big when his own business was destroyed by a flood, netting him a nice cheque from the insurance company. The first golfer looks puzzled. ‘But how did you start the flood?’ he asks." "Do you possess no thin red line of your own? If you don’t, does this not mean that you are relying on the kindness, and wisdom, of the creditors? Does it not also rely on them caring about Greece, rather than using Greece’s crisis as collateral damage in their tussle against Paris, Rome and Madrid. Please tell the voters and let them decide which policy is most dangerous and least dignified. Yours or ours?" "In a rational Europe this absurd debt would simply be written off. Alas, the ECB’s charter does not allow for this. To accommodate the ECB’s charter, I took a leaf from the British Treasury’s book. The British government had long practised the issue of open-ended, or perpetual, bonds. These yield interest, but the government may repay the principal at a time of its choosing, if ever. Indeed, perpetual bonds issued at the time of the South Sea Bubble in the 1720s and by Neville Chamberlain and Winston Churchill during and just after the Great War were only repaid by the British Treasury in late 2014 and early 2015." "They signalled to the public and to potential investors that the EU was accepting a new role: no longer the harsh creditor of an insolvent state, it would become a partner in Greece’s growth, as its own returns would be proportional to Greek nominal income growth. They would have been enough to cause an influx of investment into an investment-starved Greece. They would have ended the Greek recession with winners all round, the only exceptions being the cockroaches that flourish in the filth caused by prolonged misery." "However, not for a moment did I believe, back then in January 2015, that the unquestionable logic and obvious moderation of my proposals would win our creditors over. As I had been telling Alexis since 2012, any proposal from us that contradicted the troika’s Greek programme would be met with naked aggression and the threat of shuttered banks. Logic hardly mattered. Mutual economic advantage was irrelevant. The creditors did not want their money back. What mattered to them was their authority, and that was being challenged by a leftist government whose success at negotiating a new deal for its country was the creditors’ greatest nightmare, as it might give ideas to other Europeans labouring under the same crisis and the same irrational policies." "As well as creating the Hellenic Financial Stability Facility (HFSF), which after 2012 held the banks’ majority shareholdings on behalf of the state, and a privatization unit whose job was to conduct fire sales of Greece’s public assets, both of which answered not to the Greek people but to the troika, the jurisdiction of the tax office had also been co-opted by our creditors – specifically, to the Eurogroup Working Group, presided over by Thomas Wieser. By scooping out these three crucial chunks of the Ministry of Finance and placing them beyond the reach of Greece’s democratic process, they had effectively turned the ministry into something resembling a Swiss cheese." "On paper Roubatis seemed well qualified to head an intelligence service better known for US-sponsored subversion of Greek democrats and leftists than for defending Greece from foreign foes: as a young man he had written a doctoral thesis at Johns Hopkins University that exposed the infiltration of the Greek government by the CIA, and the government he served in the 1980s did a great deal to sever the link between foreign agencies and Greek spooks." "‘It is a sad day for Europe when the Eurogroup president presents a freshly elected finance minister with an impossible ultimatum,’ I said. ‘We were not elected to clash with the Eurogroup, and I am not interested in clashing with you. But nor were we elected to abdicate during our first week in office by espousing an impossible programme that we came in with a mandate to renegotiate.’" "1953 the US government brokered the so-called London Debt Agreement. In essence, the United States leaned on Britain, France, Greece, Italy, Spain, Sweden, Yugoslavia, Norway, Switzerland and many other countries to write off the greatest part of Germany’s pre-war debt to them. The British government protested, arguing that Germany had both the capacity and the moral duty to pay. Washington vetoed London and, to lead by example, immediately wrote off the loans that it had forwarded to Bonn after 1945. Germany’s debts to nations and private creditors were haircut by more than 70 per cent." "‘We are going to destroy the basis upon which they have built for decade after decade a system, a network that viciously sucks the energy and the economic power from everybody else in society.’" "For years I had recited to my students Adam Smith’s famous lines ‘It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages.’22 Similarly, it would be a waste of breath to appeal to the creditors’ humanity, to claim that Greece had been unfairly treated or to invoke some moral right to debt relief. These people knew perfectly well how the Greeks had been treated and they cared not one bit. My task was to win a war not a debating society argument. To do so I had to address myself to the creditors’ own advantages." "The only colleague that I trusted to understand fully and support my debt-restructuring proposals was Euclid. As a Syriza insider, he could present my proposals to the party faithful for what they were: a shrewd strategy for getting Greece the debt relief it needed without putting Chancellor Merkel in a politically impossible situation." "No one owes us a living. But no one has the right either to hold us in debtors’ prison in perpetuity, preventing us from earning our keep." "Moscovici was given the job, but a new position, vice president of the European Commission, was invented to oversee him. To add insult to injury, Berlin gave this new post to the former prime minister of Latvia, whose greatest claim to fame was the imposition of austerity measures" "This conundrum was solved in a manner that anyone in Pierre Moscovici’s place would have found demeaning: Moscovici was given the job, but a new position, vice president of the European Commission, was invented to oversee him. To add insult to injury, Berlin gave this new post to the former prime minister of Latvia, whose greatest claim to fame was the imposition of austerity measures so harsh that they ‘solved’ his country’s economic crisis by causing half the population to emigrate." "The notion of ‘Bankruptocracy’ in Varoufakis, 2011, is relevant: a regime in which bankrupt banks rule based on the principle that the greater one’s losses, the greater one’s power to extract rents from the rest of society." "‘Having to borrow now from EU taxpayers to pay the ECB for bonds that it should not have purchased in the first place is ridiculous to say the least,’" "if the ECB didn’t do what was necessary to end a bank run of its own making, if it didn’t extend to us the helping hand we needed in order to conduct our negotiations, many would see it as political intervention by the ECB – one set of standards for the Samaras government, another for ours." "I shared my own sense of the dilemma: ‘I find myself in the peculiar situation of constantly proposing policies for shoring up a currency whose design and creation I had opposed. But I do believe that even those of us most critical of the euro have a moral and a political duty to try to fix it, simply because its disintegration will cause so much human pain.’" "trick. London-based financiers, Tory politicians, influential journalists and former members of the IMF all appeared to see my point. Yes, we were a left-wing government, but all we were asking was for some basic common sense to prevail at the centre of European power." "Of course it made perfect sense: swapping outstanding debt for growth-linked bonds accompanied by a crackdown on tax evasion and moderate budget surpluses was more a libertarian’s cup of tea than a left-winger’s. As I had remarked to the City’s financiers the previous day, it was a measure of the depth of the euro crisis that it took a radical left-wing government to table mainstream liberal proposals for its solution." "The problem was that this temporary fix had become permanent as a result of our collective failure to deal with the underlying insolvency. ‘Surely our task now is to end the death embrace, the doom loop, between insolvent banks – that the ECB is forced to keep afloat against its rules – and an insolvent state at which Europe’s taxpayers keep throwing good money after bad?’ Peter Praet and Sabine Lautenschläger, sitting on Mario’s left, looked aghast, not because what I was saying was preposterous but – I am convinced – because it was very close to their own criticism of the Greek bailouts and the ECB’s role in them." "‘I appreciate you going through all sorts of interesting channels to find me and inform me in person, Mario,’ I said. ‘Since you are giving me the opportunity to respond in person on the telephone, allow me to say that this decision – the withdrawal of the waiver a day after I single-handedly lifted the banks’ shares and reversed the bank run, a week after our election, indeed a week before my first Eurogroup meeting, and three whole weeks before the expiry of the programme extension – can only be interpreted as a hostile, deeply political move by the ECB against my government.’" "On the way to the federal finance ministry I noticed two emails had arrived on my phone. One was from Jamie Galbraith informing me that Bernie Sanders was about to write to Janet Yellen, the US Federal Reserve chair, to ask her to indicate to the ECB that its behaviour had been appalling and ultimately globally destabilizing." "minister. Before getting into the lift, he asked me playfully, but with enough of a hint of aggression to establish that he was not actually joking, ‘When am I getting my money back?’ I was tempted to reply, ‘When you persuade Deutsche Bank to return it to you.’ I said nothing, smiling widely, my mind on the main game." "Second was the topic he chose to turn to instead: his theory that the ‘overgenerous’ European social model was no longer sustainable and had to be ditched. Comparing the costs to Europe of maintaining welfare states with the situation in places like India and China, where no social safety net exists at all, he argued that Europe was losing competitiveness and would stagnate unless social benefits were curtailed en masse. It was as if he was telling me that a start had to be made somewhere and that that somewhere might as well be Greece." Here he's talking about that German asshole Schaüble. "I feel that the German nation is the one that can understand us better than anyone else. No one understands better than the people of this land how a severely depressed economy combined with ritual national humiliation and unending hopelessness can hatch the serpent’s egg within one’s society. When I return to Athens tonight, I shall find myself in a parliament in which the third-largest party is a Nazi one." "‘the whole point is to forge new motives. To fashion a fresh mindset that transcends national divides, dissolves the creditor–debtor distinction in favour of a pan-European perspective, and places the common European good above petty politics, dogma that proves toxic if universalized, and an us-versus-them mindset.’" "I began by confessing to the ambassador that I had never aspired to be a minister. Yes, I was happy to be doing the job, I told him, but only out of my sense of duty to a nation in debt bondage, a duty whose sole purpose was to rewrite the terms of our contract with the EU and the IMF, so as to turn it from a predatory relationship into a workable and equitable one. So accepting the current parameters of that contract was simply not an option. Here again the ambassador interjected, this time with a vague, implicit but perfectly recognizable threat. Out of respect for the people who had appointed me to my office, I felt obliged to cut him short." "then suggested that the failure of previous governments to rescue Greece from its plight was due to their acceptance ‘of impossible conditions they could never carry out, even if they had intended to – an acceptance which made successive Greek governments almost as guilty in accepting what they could not fulfil as the creditors were in imposing what they were not entitled to exact’." "to rescue Greece from its plight was due to their acceptance ‘of impossible conditions they could never carry out, even if they had intended to – an acceptance which made successive Greek governments almost as guilty in accepting what they could not fulfil as the creditors were in imposing what they were not entitled to exact’." "I then suggested that the failure of previous governments to rescue Greece from its plight was due to their acceptance ‘of impossible conditions they could never carry out, even if they had intended to – an acceptance which made successive Greek governments almost as guilty in accepting what they could not fulfil as the creditors were in imposing what they were not entitled to exact’." "If you cannot imagine walking out of a negotiation, you should never enter it. If you cannot fathom the idea of an impasse you might as well confine yourself to the role of a supplicant who implores the despot to grant him several privileges but who accepts in the final analysis whatever the despot grants." "But, I concluded, an agreement requires compromise on both sides. Many of the measures in the MoU list were unproblematic and could be implemented without any of the sacrifices that we rejected as unacceptable. Indeed, some of the measures, such as the idea of a minimum guaranteed income, were to be desired." "Such evidence included the rehiring of the cleaners who had been dismissed from the Finance Ministry illegally (according to the Greek courts) as well as a few hundred state school janitors, and a pledge not to reduce pensions beyond the twelve separate cuts that had already reduced them by a stupendous 40 per cent." These were described as "reforms", the rolling back of which indicates an abdication of adherence to fiduciary responsibility. "To think of the illegal firing of a cleaner as a reform, and her rehiring as evidence that reforms were being rolled back was unhelpful if not absurd." "As he spoke, Schäuble directed a piercing look at Sapin. ‘Elections cannot be allowed to change economic policy,’ he began. Greece had obligations that could not be reconsidered until the Greek programme had been completed, as per the agreements between my predecessors and the troika. The fact that the Greek programme could not be completed was apparently of no concern to him. What startled me more than Wolfgang Schäuble’s belief that elections are irrelevant was his total lack of compunction in admitting to this view." "Democracy is not a luxury to be afforded to the creditors and denied to the debtors. Indeed, it is the lack of due democratic process in the heart of our monetary union that is perpetuating the euro crisis. Then again, I might be wrong. Colleagues, if you think that I am wrong, if you agree with Wolfgang, then I invite you to say so explicitly by proposing that elections should be suspended in countries like Greece until the country’s programme is completed. What is the point of spending money on elections and asking our people to get all fired up to elect governments that will have no capacity to change anything?" "‘I cannot accept this,’ Jeroen said. ‘The term “humanitarian crisis” is too political!’ ‘There is nothing more political, Jeroen,’ I snapped back, ‘than the attempt to overlook a humanitarian crisis because it would be too political to acknowledge it.’" "Jeroen approached to tell me that it was not normal for a minister to call their prime minister while in a Eurogroup meeting. I replied that it was not normal to force a minister to make an on-the-spot decision that could lead to the instant closure of his country’s banking system" "My message to you is that this is a government interested only in Greece’s recovery within a policy framework that is therapeutic for the eurozone as a whole. This is not going to be another government that tries to fool you into believing that we shall adopt a certain reform programme just in order to get the next loan tranche. You may have gathered that we do not give a damn about the next loan tranche. We prefer to go down in flames than to keep extending this indignity." "That same weekend Jeff Sachs was hard at work on the other side of the Atlantic, trying to convince the Fed to weigh in on our behalf and persuade the ECB to abandon its ongoing asphyxiation strategy. His message to Janet Yellen was simple: the new Greek government’s programme of reforms and fiscal targets was reasonable; they understood well that Grexit was an exceptionally dangerous path, one that would not be taken at their instigation but only under duress from the ECB; Yellen ought to tell the Europeans not to risk destabilizing the world economy over a few billion dollars and to advise Draghi to desist from introducing capital controls that would solve nothing." "Bill Black, the American economist who had campaigned so effectively against Wall Street, came to my defence. So why does the BBC treat Varoufakis as a sexy leftist and Dijsselbloem as the respected spokesperson for the troika even though Dijsselbloem is a fanatic ideologue who has caused massive human misery because of the intersection of his inflexible ideology and economic incompetence?" "The troika, by contrast, is led entirely by ideologues. The primary difference is that they are exceptionally bad economists and exceptionally indifferent to the human misery they inflict on the workers of the periphery that they despise and ridicule." "The European Commission is the closest the EU has to a government, and a commissioner has a status equivalent to a minister of state, whereas the Eurogroup, as previously mentioned, has no legal standing in any of the EU treaties. In that sense, Dijsselbloem was, officially and legally, no more than the Dutch finance minister, outranked in law by Moscovici." "Listening to him express views in the meeting that were subservient to Schäuble and Dijsselbloem, views that I knew perfectly well he did not agree with, I was hearing the sound of the EU’s descent into ignominy. His humiliation was emblematic to me of the complete subjugation of the European Commission to forces lacking legal standing or democratic legitimacy." "We are ready and willing to do whatever it takes to reach an honourable agreement over the next two days. Our government will accept all the conditions that it can deliver upon and which do not reinforce our society’s crisis. No one has the right to work towards an impasse, especially one that is mutually detrimental to the people of Europe." "Even at the best of times, twenty-four hours often prove insufficient to deal with the tsunami of problems that rise through the bureaucracy each day to land in a finance minister’s in-box. Imagine the difficulty of running the finance ministry of a bankrupt country in the midst of an all-consuming negotiation such as ours." "I proposed we interpret their request in a nuanced way: a corporation can ‘recognize’ a debt to its bankers while still seeking deep debt restructuring to help it recover from a crisis that threatens to ruin both its shareholders and the bank. Similarly, we could ‘recognize’ Greece’s public debt while at the same time insisting that it be immediately restructured so that the creditors could get more of their money" "The more likely scenario, however, was that the extension was a tactical ploy: by delaying any outcome they were simply waiting for the depletion of both our current popularity and our small liquidity reserves so that by the time the extension expired in June they could be sure of our exhausted government’s total capitulation. If the latter was indeed the case then, I argued, our best strategy would be to request the extension while at the same time signalling to the troika that any attempt to wear us down through a tightening of the liquidity noose would be met with a refusal to make the forthcoming repayments to the IMF; that any effort to push us back into the straitjacket of its failed programme or to deny us debt restructuring would be met with a cessation of negotiations; and that any threat of closing down our banks and imposing capital controls would be met with unilateral haircuts of the ECB’s SMP bonds," "I am often asked whether I thought there was ever a serious probability of successfully navigating those treacherous waters to a new deal for Greece within the eurozone. I answer that the actual probability was neither computable nor important. We had to give our creditors the chance to come to the table with humane, logical ideas, and the opportunity to listen to ours. It was always going to be a long shot, but our mandate from the people of Greece was to do our utmost to secure a sustainable future within the eurozone." "It is remarkable that a minister of state had to negotiate for the right to introduce a clause into an agreement with international creditors stating that the courts of the land should be allowed to carry out the duties vested in them by the constitution." "It was a tough call. But I should have made it." In the heat if battle, and probably exhausted and sleep-deprived from having spent three straight days preparing a document they demanded and have now ignored, he failed to recognize their duplicitous nature. All of them had proved themselves liars and backstabbers, incapable of even a shred of honesty. Their paramount goal was to get everything they personally wanted while conceding nothing, on principle. He failed to notice that they considered it distasteful to deal with him at all. Probably no small amount of disgust at the chutzpah of a filthy foreigner upstart daring to attend their institutions and for daring to seem smarter and more reasonable than they, when it is they who wield the power and he who is to capitulate. Their fury was not at his proposals, but that he was wasting their time, making them pretend to do their jobs, while reminding them that they had always failed to do so. They punished him and Greece for daring to remove their mask of plausible deniability. "The government, united and steeled by the creditors’ connivance, would, and should, take collective responsibility for the decision over the precise timing of our withdrawal from the negotiations." They did not. And that is his regret: that he did not take unilateral action at the solitary moment when he had the power to do so. He opted for democracy and was betrayed by his compatriots. I think he's too hard on himself. "It was late in the afternoon when the reply came. Wieser’s office informed mine that the email of 21 February with all relevant information regarding the extension request process had been sent to five Greek officials: Chouliarakis, in his capacity as my Eurogroup deputy and Eurogroup Working Group representative; Dragasakis (deputy prime minister); Stournaras, as governor of the Bank of Greece; the head of my ministry’s public debt management authority; and the head of the banks’ bailout fund, the HFSF. I asked to see the email. It was there in black and white: dated 21 February, it was indeed addressed to those five people. I was flabbergasted. My accusation that Brussels had set the deadline retrospectively had been conclusively refuted." Stabbed in the back. The machinations are not unlike those in Mr. Robot. Just giant machines grinding inexorably on. "‘How can such an email get lost in your in-box, George?’ I asked, barely able to believe what I had heard. Just as he had two days earlier when I had confronted him with Costello’s creation of the Word file, Chouliarakis reacted as if he had nothing to be apologetic about, as if nothing much had happened." How can you succeed when all your enemy need do is turn one functionary? And he probably sold out for a pittance? Even if it was blackmail, or the guy failed to grasp the import of his duplicity, he didn't seem to care. An appeal to ego was probably sufficient. "He remained in that state for some time, during which Alexis and I strove to shift him from it with a mixture of logic and firmness. In the end, our pressure bore fruit." At four in the morning. Such momentous decisions being taken by people rendered provably incompetent by lack of sleep or respite from pressure. This is akin to torture. The tight deadlines are not coincidental. "The mask was off. The cynicism was extraordinary. He had just told me, quite brazenly, that he was ready to work directly for the troika rather than sever his privileged links with the troika’s functionaries in my ministry. Not only this, he had openly admitted that he was already in cahoots with the troika’s primary ally, the governor of the Greek Central Bank, who had begun the bank run in the run-up to our election as part of their bid to keep us from office. I was aghast." This is a veritable tsunami of opposition, all betraying their people, likely for paltry personal gain or simply ego-stroking. "I would blame it on fear, depression and inexperience, relying eventually on sheer faith that the moment would come when he would bounce back, shake off the tentacles, reactivate his belief in our cause and honour the magnificent words with which he inspired me that first day at Maximos." Such is the nature of a politician. Alexis probably doesn't even remember what he said, having uttered the words purely out of instinct, knowing only their placatory effects. And Yanis heard only what he wanted to hear, replacing pragmatism with optimism in the face of overwhelming odds. "I understood perfectly why the troika wished to get me and Nicholas out of the way. In contrast to Chouliarakis, Nicholas understood the econometric models the troika used for its fiscal predictions better than Wieser and the others did, knew what their weak points were, and was determined to oppose the Eurogroup Working Group’s lazy assumptions before they ended up as ‘facts’ at the Eurogroup. As for me, they knew I would never sign a third bailout agreement, and since it is only the finance minister who can sign a loan agreement on behalf of a eurozone member state, my removal was fundamental." "What I had not seen coming was Alexis’s readiness to acquiesce. Divide and rule produced a farce featuring a troika appointee negotiating with the troika on behalf of a government elected to oppose it." "The uninitiated may be excused for thinking that this eurozone runaround was the result of incompetence on the part of the creditors. While there is an element of truth in this, it would be the wrong conclusion. The runaround is a systemic means of control over governments of countries whose banking and/or public sectors are financially stressed. Indeed, to politicians like Wolfgang Schäuble it is a welcome feature of the eurozone." "As for apparatchiks like Wieser and Costello, the runaround is essential to their personal power." "Possibly because of my academic background, this was the Brussels experience I least expected and found most frustrating. In academia one gets used to having one’s thesis torn apart, sometimes with little decorum; what one never experiences is dead silence, a refusal to engage, a pretence that no thesis has been put forward at all. At a party when you find yourself stuck with a self-centred bore who says what they want to say irrespective of your contribution to the conversation, you can take your glass and disappear to some distant corner of the room. But when your country’s recovery depends on the ongoing conversation, when there is no other corner of the room to retreat to, irritation can turn into despair – or fury if you grasp what is really going on: a tactic whose purpose is to nullify anything that is inimical to the troika’s power." "Why not get companies like Foxconn to build production or assembly facilities in a tech park, enjoying a special business tax regime in an area close to Piraeus?’" Did Varoufakis just suggest that Foxconn -- a criminally bad employer -- transplant their labor policies to Greece? That's a bit naive. "The next day Alexis relayed the news from Beijing. Someone had apparently called Beijing from Berlin with a blunt message: stay out of any deals with the Greeks until we are finished with them." So like the mafia. so duplicitous. So evil. No concern at all for the lives hanging in in the balance. Just concerned about winning. And that lady in St. Gallen wants me to distract myself with Jesus. It's pure ego to do so. To waste time worrying about my own life after death when so many suffer now. "War cabinet meetings were turning into exercises in weighing up the utility of different forms of surrender based on Syriza survivability come the next election." "‘Independently of our preferences and political will,’ I said, ‘our liquidity will run out well before then [April 30th].’ He replied that we could last much longer by plundering the reserves of non-governmental but publicly owned institutions such as pension funds, universities, utility companies and local authorities." Just relentless and inhuman. Bent on destruction at all costs. More precisely: not recognizing costs that come at the expense of non-people, where a "person" is defined as "someone who has influence over my career, my power base, my wealth, or that of anyone who does have such power over me. Without direct or transitive personally positive effect, there is no incentive to act. Morality certainly won't enter into it. "I shall speak only the language of cooperation and goodwill. But if, Alexi, they respond with their usual mix of aggression and truth reversal, leaving us no room to manoeuvre, upon my return we must act decisively. I trust that you agree.’ Alexis agreed. "And so I set off for Brussels determined to be maximally compromising – to make sure beyond a shadow of a doubt that Greece’s creditors were committed to denying us even a minimally rational agreement. Soon I had my proof that this was so. And Jeff Sachs, who accompanied me in all the bilateral meetings I had, is my witness." "Jeff tried valiantly one more time. ‘Mario,’ he said, ‘I have been listening to this discussion and I must tell you that I am concerned. Yanis has been trying to propose a practical solution to a simple-to-solve problem. You rejected that solution, which is fair enough if there are technical problems, but I have not heard from you any alternative solutions.’ Mario shrugged his shoulders. ‘It is not for the central bank to offer such solutions. This is a matter for the politicians.’ ‘Just wait and see what the politicians do when I raise the subject with them,’ I said to Jeff as we were leaving. ‘They will refer me to back to the ECB, possibly to Poul Thomsen.’ Jeff shook his head in disbelief." At long last: have you no shame? Categorically, no. "As it was, I headed for Wolfgang’s office with Jeff and Nicholas Theocarakis, dreading what might occur but with a plan. Thinking back to what transpired I am reminded of Mike Tyson’s fantastic line at the height of his tumultuous boxing career: ‘Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.’" "Some, especially those under the control of the Left Platform, refused point-blank to cooperate on the grounds that the whole exercise was a charade. That was a fair point, but for better or worse our government’s policy was to cooperate fully within the framework of my agreement with Pierre Moscovici and within the spirit of the 20 February Eurogroup agreement, which committed us to doing our utmost to establish common ground with the creditors." They were 100% right, though. It was a tremendous and deliberate waste of time and capital. "In the spring of 2015 Greece’s creditors were in no mood to negotiate; they were resolved to re-establish their authority over a territory of their empire that had rebelled and to ensure that none of their other possessions got a similar idea." "When our people see the same figures, aided and abetted by the troika, retain control of bankrupt banks and bankrupt media with new debt burdening the little people against whose interests the banks and the media labour, you cannot expect them to take you seriously. Or take us seriously if we do as you tell us." "Alas, all the people of Greece now see is your functionaries in bed with our oligarchy’s triangle of sin: bankrupt banks, toxic television channels, corrupt procurement…’" "Rich Trumka, its president, told me that our success would strengthen labour’s voice within the Democratic Party, while Damon Silvers, the policy director, encouraged me with some wise advice: ‘They complain you are unreasonable until they realize they can’t buy you or bluff you or intimidate you. Then they really negotiate, often late at night.’ Rich showed me a sign over his desk that read, NOTHING WAS EVER ACCOMPLISHED BY A REASONABLE PERSON." "Another warm handshake, another friendly smile and he was gone." Obama, as ever, full of false assurances, feigned agreement and zero support for anyone or anything that doesn't support his ego-myth. Even when talking to someone in dire straits, he talks of his own capitulation, encouraging their own ("we all float down here..."). Is he evil or stupid? He doesn't get the luxury of being considered stupid. "I met Jeff Sachs, who was bearing bad news: Wolfgang had managed to turn most of Washington’s establishment against us, he told me." I don't believe that Wolfgang turned them. Wolfgang is such an asshole that the only way he could get them to agree with him is if he was saying what they had already decided they wanted to hear. "[...] was exactly what I had been thinking: to utilize David Lipton’s advice we would have to combine it with Lee Buccheit’s. We had to work on two fronts: compile our own comprehensive anti-MoU Plan for Greece while convincing Alexis to send an envoy to Berlin with the message Lee had scripted for us. It was the only way. But was it one that my exhausted comrade at Maximos would countenance?" You're drowning and you don't recognize it. Your party won't. Everyone's pretending to cooperate. In the face of this, you redouble your efforts, fighting on two simultaneous fronts, exhausted, and nearly alone. I have newfound respect for Jeff Sachs for sticking by you. He's clearly one of the good ones. "It all made perfect sense. The troika that had been born and raised in Athens was now Paris-bound because its ultimate mission was to control the French national budget. The harsh and failed policies imposed upon Greece had nothing to do with our country. The threat to close down Greece’s banks that Benoît had been relaying to me at the very moment Michel yelled at Wolfgang had nothing to do with our banks. They were Wolfgang’s signal to Paris: if France wanted the euro, it must forfeit sovereignty over its budget deficits." "It was an extraordinary if unsurprising act of bad faith. Having promised Alexis that the two of them would find a solution behind the scenes while Varoufakis and Schäuble cancelled each other out, [Merkel] was now hanging him out to dry." "The main number I had in mind – which had snagged my attention like a rusty nail – was 3.5. The pages were a letter signed by the Greek prime minister and addressed to the troika, committing to a budget with a primary surplus target of 3.5 per cent of national income. Unbelievably, the same number appeared next to the years 2018, 2019 … all the way to 2028. With the exceptions of Singapore and oil-rich Norway, no country in the world has ever posted a 3.5 per cent budget primary surplus for ten years in succession. The chance that a depressed economy lacking functional banks and with negative investment could do so was the nearest to the theatre of the absurd that economic policy can produce." "Beneath Alexis’s political, economic and moral error in surrendering to austerity lay another, larger error: his belief that the troika would give him a speedy agreement and a third bailout in return. Undoubtedly, Merkel and Wieser had encouraged Alexis and Chouliarakis to believe this. But setting aside the fact that we had no mandate from our voters for such an agreement, there were two reasons why not even this was on the cards. First, the creditors would surely want to make an example of Alexis – who had spent years in opposition, and some months in government, lambasting them – as a deterrent to any other politician in Spain, Italy, Portugal or indeed France who might be tempted to confront them. For this they would need not just his capitulation but his very public humiliation too. Second, the troika had been denying for years that either a third bailout loan or significant debt relief were necessary. The only way they could explain a third bailout loan now was by claiming, as Poul Thomsen had done during the Riga Eurogroup, that the Greek debt had in fact been sustainable until Syriza won government, and to prove their charge it would be necessary to close down Greece’s banks, cause massive new losses and bankruptcies and then blame the costs on Alexis’s government." "Half an hour later my phone rang again. It was Jeff, laughing uncontrollably. ‘You will not believe this, Yanis,’ he said. ‘Five minutes after we hung up, I received a call from the [US] National Security Council. They asked me if I thought you meant what you’d said! I told them that you did mean it and that, if they want to avert a default to the IMF, they’d better knock some sense into the Europeans.’ I had fully expected my phone to be tapped, but two things made Jeff’s news remarkable. First, the eavesdroppers not only had the capacity to recognize that what I had said was of real significance but they must also have had an open line to the NSC. Second, they had no compunction whatsoever about revealing they were tapping my phone!" "But there was another French politician I met that day who truly engaged with the plan, who told me it was a good one and who encouraged me to proceed with it: Emmanuel Macron." The best of the worst, apparently? "Co-signed by policymakers who combined exceptional pedigrees with experience of the highest levels of governance from across the political spectrum, it was a powerful weapon." God-damned if I might not have to throw Larry Summers a bit of a bone for putting his name to that document. "‘But Wolfgang,’ I replied, still reeling at his words, ‘as responsible leaders and Europeans, we should do all we can to prevent Grexit and to offer our peoples a clear vision of a decent life within the eurozone. Pushing them to make a choice between a catastrophic fiscal policy within the eurozone and a catastrophic exit from the eurozone is not the mark of an enlightened political leadership. Don’t you see that the problem with the MoU is that it offers no hope whatsoever for a decent future?’" "You reject my ideas; your own proposal was rejected by your chancellor, and meanwhile the negotiations between my prime minister’s team and the troika in the Brussels Group are heading in a direction that is the opposite of a solution. What should I do, Wolfgang?’ He looked up for the first time in a while and said without any enthusiasm, ‘Sign the MoU.’ We had come full circle. ‘OK,’ I said. ‘Let’s suppose I do it. Let’s assume that I sign the damned thing. Tell me this: are we not going to be in the same situation again in six or twelve months? With another funding crunch feeding GREECE ON THE VERGE AGAIN headlines, more recession, and a political backlash in the Eurogroup?’ Perking up a little, Wolfgang agreed and said, ‘This is why I told you to convince your prime minister to consider a time out.’ ‘Except that your chancellor put an end to that discussion.’ ‘Well, that leaves you with the MoU,’ he said, falling back once more on the same non-solution." How does one have such patience to talk endlessly in circles? I wonder how much this is due to an inability to understand or properly communicate in English with enough confidence to be certain that one is not giving away undue advantage. "‘Would you sign the MoU if you were in my place?’ I was expecting him to give me the predictable answer – that, under the circumstances, there was no alternative – along with all the usual, senseless arguments. He didn’t. Instead he looked out of the window. By Berlin standards, it was a hot and sunny day. Then he turned and stunned me with his answer. ‘As a patriot, no. It’s bad for your people.’" "As I departed that day, I was not leaving behind me a Machiavellian dictator; I was leaving behind a sunken heart, a man ostensibly more powerful than almost anyone in Europe who nevertheless felt utterly powerless to do what he knew was right. As the great tragedians have taught us, nothing causes greater wretchedness than the combination of supreme authority and wholesale powerlessness." "To demonstrate the flaw, I performed a simple exercise: I asked the troika’s model to simulate the impact on the government’s revenues of raising the VAT rate from 23 per cent to 223 per cent. We all know what would happen in reality after such a ludicrous tax hike: sales would collapse and so would the government’s revenues. But not in the troika’s model, which produced a massive increase in revenues." That has to be a poor jest. Or a lie. "The words of caution that Jeff Sachs had once shared with me rang true: ‘These people lie. Don’t trust them.’ Still I could hardly believe that Poul could have been so blatant." I guess Yanis's honesty is refreshing, but his naiveté is disheartening. "The situation was truly absurd: a left-wing finance minister representing Syriza, the Alliance of the Radical Left, was arguing like a Reaganite Republican in favour of lower tax rates, including for business, against supposedly neoliberal functionaries insisting on increasing them. It was a sure sign that this negotiation had no basis in economics." "Meanwhile, Jeff Sachs was sending me urgent warnings: ‘They demand an SLA first, promising talks about debt relief and the like later. But they lie! Once you give them the SLA they will deny they ever promised you anything. Don’t fall for it!’ How could I tell Jeff that I no longer had Alexis’s ear? That he seemed compelled to go inexorably down that path?" "Christine looked off-colour. It later transpired that the previous night the IMF had been pressured into withholding its latest sustainability analysis of Greece’s debt. No doubt the reason was that, as the New York Times reported, ‘having run the numbers, the fund now accepted the central argument being made by Mr Varoufakis: Greece was bankrupt and needed debt relief from Europe to survive.’" "Greece was, and unfortunately remains, a laboratory where the destructive powers of extend-and-pretend loans plus self-defeating austerity were tried and tested. Greece is a battleground on which a war against European democracy, against French democracy, is tried and tested. Greece was never the issue for the troika and its minions. You are! This is why I am here. I am here because what happened to us is beginning to happen to you." "Even some who sympathize with DiEM25’s pan-Europeanism dismiss it as utopian. But allow me, dear reader, to share a strongly held belief as my parting shot: our movement may be utopian, but its policy of constructive disobedience within the EU, of being both in and against this illiberal and anti-democratic Europe, is the only practical alternative to the dystopia unfolding as Europe disintegrates. That was my stance as Greece’s finance minister. It remains my stance today." "Despite its spectacular predictive blunder Greece proved a nice little earner for the IMF. By the time I resigned, the bankrupt state had paid over €3.5 billion in interest and fees to the IMF, averaging 37 per cent of IMF total net income, and covering 79 per cent of its total internal expenses. Ever since Greece entered debtors’ prison, the IMF has had an average operating profit of 63 per cent, much larger than that of Goldman Sachs or J.P. Morgan. And where have the IMF’s profits come from? Europe’s taxpayers, of course." ]]> </content> </entry> <entry> <title type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Margaret Atwood: the Price of Fame]]> </title> <id>https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3539</id> <link href="https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3539"/> <updated>2018-04-08T12:31:17+02:00</updated> <author> <name type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Marco von Ballmoos]]> </name> <uri>https://earthli.com/users/marco</uri> </author> <summary type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Margaret Atwood published The Handmaid's Tale in 1985 (I "read it in 2015" <https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3134>). Last year, Hulu aired a television series based on the book. So, now, poor Margaret is famous, taking opprobrium from the new feminists who hadn't even been born when Atwood was already fighting for women's rights. She is... ]]> </summary> <content type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Published by marco on 8. Apr 2018 12:31:17 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Margaret Atwood published The Handmaid's Tale in 1985 (I "read it in 2015" <https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3134>). Last year, Hulu aired a television series based on the book. So, now, poor Margaret is famous, taking opprobrium from the new feminists who hadn't even been born when Atwood was already fighting for women's rights. She is also in rarified company: since a TV show now accompanies her book, she can be thrown into a list alongside Fifty Shades Freed (the last entry in the well-known feminist trilogy), the latest Maze Runner book and The Girl in the Spider's Web, which extends the universe created in Stieg Larsson's Millennium Series (that includes Girl with the Dragon Tattoo), a universe that was decent, but didn't really need extending. [image] I was a bit surprised to see the NYC Public Library using the criteria "books from which audio-visual media have been produced" to come up with a list of recommendations for me. What did poor Margaret do to deserve this? She became popular, I guess. I imagine if Raskolnikov were to get his own TV series, Dostoyevsky would be consigned to the same fate of lining up with the latest YA authors and comic-book-movie novelizations. ]]> </content> </entry> <entry> <title type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[The Ministry of Utmost Happiness by Arundhati Roy (2017) (read in 2018)]]> </title> <id>https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3522</id> <link href="https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3522"/> <updated>2018-02-18T16:22:38+01:00</updated> <author> <name type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Marco von Ballmoos]]> </name> <uri>https://earthli.com/users/marco</uri> </author> <summary type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA["Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is" ... ]]> </summary> <content type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Published by marco on 18. Feb 2018 16:22:38 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I've failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an interest in this book, then I'm happy for you." This is a story of Kashmir. It is a story of the downtrodden peoples of India, of the second-class quasi-citizens, of those at the edges of society who actually make up the large part of India's population. It is a story of those left behind, those ignored, those who protest the status quo, the communists, the Marxists, the Maoists, who cry for justice for all. It is a story of fiction that starts off in the poorest neighborhoods of Delhi where a young girl is born in a boy's body. She has both parts and must decide which to keep. She names herself Anjum and moves into a community of fellow travelers, making a living in this community. There is the starving professional, professorial protester, Dr. Azad Bharatiya. There is a man who named himself Saddam Hussein. There are four university friends who go their separate ways, crossing paths again and again throughout the dingy, evil history of India's occupation of Kashmir. S. Tilottama is a reclusive young architect who doesn't work as an architect. Garson Hobart (Biplab Dasgupta) works in the Indian secret service, helping her out from time to time as well as being her landlord in latter years. Musa Yeswi drifts into the Kashmir conflict on the side of the militants, rising through the ranks -- but only after his wife and daughter are killed by casual, careless Indian troops firing indiscriminately into a crowd out of fear at an exploding drinks container. His daughter is Miss Jebeen the first. And, finally, there is the rudderless and therefore successful "journalist" Nagaraj Hariharan, to whom Tilo is married for years, though her affair with Musa continues throughout. It's complicated. Garson tells the story retrospectively, having moved back into the apartment that he'd rented to Tilo after she'd left for Anjum's compound built on a graveyard, where she finally finds peace and happiness in a community that includes her "daughter" Miss Jebeen the second. Garson goes through all of Tilo's notes about Musa's activities but, instead of using it against them all in his capacity of high-level Indian secret-service operative, he becomes convinced of Kashmir's side of the argument -- that India should remove itself and leave them people free. The story is told out of order (as was The God of Small Things) and most of the people lead very unorthodox lives. Roy is highly critical of the direction of Indian society, highly critical of the rules-that-be, of the duplicitous middle class. The path that India has take is similar to that taken by the US: the historical and cultural racism of the caste system has the same disastrous effect as the endemic racism in America. [Citations] "Then came Partition. God’s carotid burst open on the new border between India and Pakistan and a million people died of hatred. Neighbors turned on each other as though they’d never known each other, never been to each other’s weddings, never sung each other’s songs." "What escaped them was that the couplet was a sly snack, a perfidious samosa, a warning wrapped in mourning, being offered with faux humility by an erudite man who had absolute faith in his listeners’ ignorance of Urdu, a language which, like most of those who spoke it, was gradually being ghettoized." "numbers of the Bird Hospital, Phoolan Devi, the surrendered dacoit" "her from Iraq where he seemed to have decided to live." "Around her the city sprawled for miles. Thousand-year-old sorceress, dozing, but not asleep, even at this hour. Gray flyovers snaked out of her Medusa skull, tangling and untangling under the yellow sodium haze. Sleeping bodies of homeless people lined their high, narrow pavements, head to toe, head to toe, head to toe, looping into the distance. Old secrets were folded into the furrows of her loose, parchment skin. Each wrinkle was a street, each street a carnival. Each arthritic joint a crumbling amphitheater where stories of love and madness, stupidity, delight and unspeakable cruelty had been played out for centuries. But this was to be the dawn of her resurrection. Her new masters wanted to hide her knobby, varicose veins under imported fishnet stockings, cram her withered tits into saucy padded bras and jam her aching feet into pointed high-heeled shoes. They wanted her to swing her stiff old hips and re-route the edges of her grimace upwards into a frozen, empty smile. It was the summer Grandma became a whore." "The passengers looked out of their car windows and saw only the new apartment they planned to buy, the Jacuzzi they had just installed and the ink that was still wet on the sweetheart deal they had just closed. They were calm from their meditation classes and glowing from yoga practice." "The summer of the city’s resurrection had also been the summer of scams—coal scams, iron-ore scams, housing scams, insurance scams, stamp-paper scams, phone-license scams, land scams, dam scams, irrigation scams, arms and ammunition scams, petrol-pump scams, polio-vaccine scams, electricity-bill scams, school-book scams, God Men scams, drought-relief scams, car-number-plate scams, voter-list scams, identity-card scams—in which politicians, businessmen, businessmen-politicians and politician-businessmen had made off with unimaginable quantities of public money." "Gulabiya would lose his job in the morning. Thousands like him would line up hoping to replace him. (One might even be the street poet himself.) But for now, Gulabiya slept soundly and dreamed deep. In his dream he had enough money to feed himself and send a little home to his family in his village. In his dream his village still existed. It wasn’t at the bottom of a dam reservoir. Fish didn’t swim through his windows. Crocodiles didn’t knife through the high branches of the Silk Cotton trees. Tourists didn’t go boating over his fields, leaving rainbow clouds of diesel in the sky." "Ironically both of them were on the pavement that night to escape their past and all that had circumscribed their lives so far. And yet, in order to arm themselves for battle, they retreated right back into what they sought to escape, into what they were used to, into what they really were." "I don’t want dollars. Capitalism is like poisoned honey. People swarm to it like bees. I don’t go to it." "maader chod behen chod maa ki choot behen ka lauda. (Urdu for "Motherfucker sisterfucker your mother’s cunt your sister’s cock.")" "I feel a rush of anger at those grumbling intellectuals and professional dissenters who constantly carp about this great country. Frankly, they can only do it because they are allowed to. And they are allowed to because, for all our imperfections, we are a genuine democracy. I would not be crass enough to say this too often in public, but the truth is that it gives me great pride to be a servant of the Government of India." "Normality in our part of the world is a bit like a boiled egg: its humdrum surface conceals at its heart a yolk of egregious violence. It is our constant anxiety about that violence, our memory of its past labors and our dread of its future manifestations, that lays down the rules for how a people as complex and as diverse as we are continue to coexist—continue to live together, tolerate each other and, from time to time, murder one another. As long as the center holds, as long as the yolk doesn’t run, we’ll be fine. In moments of crisis it helps to take the long view." "It was as though the Apparition whose presence we in India are all constantly and acutely aware of had suddenly surfaced, snarling, from the deep, and had behaved exactly as we expected it to. Once its appetite was sated it sank back into its subterranean lair and normality closed over it. Maddened killers retracted their fangs and returned to their daily chores—as clerks, tailors, plumbers, carpenters, shopkeepers—life went on as before." "The complete absence of a desire to please, or to put someone at their ease, could, in a less vulnerable person, have been construed as arrogance. In her it came across as a kind of reckless aloneness. Behind her plain, unfashionable spectacles, her slightly slanting cat-eyes had the insouciant secretiveness of a pyromaniac. She gave the impression that she had somehow slipped off her leash. As though she was taking herself for a walk while the rest of us were being walked—like pets. As though she was watching considerately, somewhat absent-mindedly, from a distance, while we minced along, grateful to our owners, happy to perpetuate our bondage." "(Irresponsible, virulently anti-India dailies that exaggerated body counts and got their facts wrong had their uses too—they undermined the local media in general and made it easier for us to tar them all with the same brush. To tell you the truth, we even funded some of them.)" "She remembered reading somewhere that even after people died, their hair and nails kept growing. Like starlight, traveling through the universe long after the stars themselves had died. Like cities. Fizzy, effervescent, simulating the illusion of life while the planet they had plundered died around them." "She remembered reading somewhere that even after people died, their hair and nails kept growing. Like starlight, traveling through the universe long after the stars themselves had died. Like cities. Fizzy, effervescent, simulating the illusion of life while the planet they had plundered died around them. She thought of the city at night, of cities at night. Discarded constellations of old stars, fallen from the sky, rearranged on Earth in patterns and pathways and towers. Invaded by weevils that have learned to walk upright." "In the matter of the Martyrs’ Graveyard, however, the question of whether the first grave contained a bag or a body turned out to be of no real consequence. The substantive truth was that a relatively new graveyard was filling up, with real bodies, at an alarming pace." "As wars go, this was only a small one. Nobody paid much attention. So it went on and on. So it folded and unfolded over decades, gathering people into its unhinged embrace. Its cruelties became as natural as the changing seasons, each came with its own unique range of scent and blossom, its own cycle of loss and renewal, disruption and normalcy, uprisings and elections." "It was late afternoon when the bus emerged from the long tunnel that bored through the mountains, the only link between India and Kashmir. Autumn in the Valley was the season of immodest abundance. The sun slanted down on the lavender haze of zaffran crocuses in bloom. Orchards were heavy with fruit, the Chinar trees were on fire." "I was washing at night in the courtyard, Harsh stars shone in the sky. Starlight, like salt on an ax-head— The rain-butt was brim-full and frozen. “What’s a rain-butt? Don’t know…must check.” The gates are locked, And the earth in all conscience is bleak. There’s scarcely anything more basic and pure Than truth’s clean canvas. A star melts, like salt, in the barrel And the freezing water is blacker, Death cleaner, misfortune saltier, And the earth more truthful, more awful. “Another Kashmiri poet.” “Russian Kashmiri,” Tilo said. “He died in a prison camp, during Stalin’s Gulag. His ode to Stalin wasn’t considered sincere enough.” She regretted reading the poem." "“You know what the hardest thing for us is? The hardest thing to fight? Pity. It’s so easy for us to pity ourselves…such terrible things have happened to our people…in every single household something terrible has happened…but self-pity is so…so debilitating. So humiliating. More than Azadi, now it’s a fight for dignity. And the only way we can hold on to our dignity is to fight back. Even if we lose. Even if we die. But for that we as a people—as an ordinary people—have to become a fighting force…an army. To do that we have to simplify ourselves, standardize ourselves, reduce ourselves…everyone has to think the same way, want the same thing…we have to do away with our complexities, our differences, our absurdities, our nuances…we have to make ourselves as single-minded…as monolithic…as stupid…as the army we face. But they’re professionals, and we are just people. This is the worst part of the Occupation…what it makes us do to ourselves. This reduction, this standardization, this stupidification…" "The same depthless, blank, black eyes that had pretended to laugh about pretending to forget his pistol in Musa’s home now stared at Tilo in the moonlit bog. That gaze called forth something in her blood—a mute rage, a stubborn, suicidal impulse. A stupid resolve that she would say nothing, no matter what." "When the women found out that Tilo was there for what was called MTP—Medical Termination of Pregnancy—they could not hide their hostility and disgust. The doctors too were disapproving. She listened to their lectures impassively. When she made it clear that she would not change her mind, they said they could not give her general anesthetic unless there was somebody with her to sign the consent form, preferably the father of the child. She told them to do it without anesthetic. She passed out with the pain and woke in the general ward. Someone else was with her in the bed. A child, with a kidney disorder, screaming in pain. There was more than one patient in every bed. There were patients on the floor, most of the visitors and family members who were crowded around them looked just as ill. Harried doctors and nurses picked their way through the chaos. It was like a wartime ward. Except that in Delhi there was no war other than the usual one—the war of the rich against the poor." "The steel bubble floated on, past shanty towns and industrial swamps where the air was a pale mauve haze, past railway tracks packed thick with trash and lined with slums. Finally they arrived at their destination. The Edge. Where the countryside was trying, quickly, clumsily and tragically, to turn itself into the city." "We circled around the subject of Kashmir, but only in abstract ways. “You may be right after all,” I said to him in the kitchen. “You may be right, but you’ll never win.” “I think the opposite,” he smiled, stirring the pot from which a wonderful aroma of rogan josh arose. “We may turn out to be wrong, but we have already won.”" "“One day Kashmir will make India self-destruct in the same way. You may have blinded all of us, every one of us, with your pellet guns by then. But you will still have eyes to see what you have done to us. You’re not destroying us. You are constructing us. It’s yourselves that you are destroying. Khuda Hafiz, Garson bhai.”" "He would leave for Kashmir the next morning, to return to a new phase in an old war from which, this time, he would not return. He would die the way he wanted to, with his Asal boot on. He would be buried the way he wanted to be—a faceless man in a nameless grave. The younger men who would take his place would be harder, narrower and less forgiving. They would be more likely to win any war they fought, because they belonged to a generation that had known nothing but war." ]]> </content> </entry> <entry> <title type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy (1997) (read in 2018)]]> </title> <id>https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3513</id> <link href="https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3513"/> <updated>2018-02-18T16:16:00+01:00</updated> <author> <name type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Marco von Ballmoos]]> </name> <uri>https://earthli.com/users/marco</uri> </author> <summary type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA["Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is" ... ]]> </summary> <content type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Published by marco on 18. Feb 2018 16:16:00 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I've failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an interest in this book, then I'm happy for you." This is a chronological jumble of images from the lives of a family in Kerala that languorously focuses to a story about India itself and its age-old problem with caste -- with its inherent and deeply seated racism. The focus is on two time periods: the 50s and the 80s. In the 50s, a pair of odd twins (Rahel and Estha) are young and precocious. They eagerly await the arrival of another young girl (Sophie Mol) from England, with her mother. Her mother (Margaret) had divorced their uncle many years before. Their uncle Chacko is a frustrated anglophile and faux-Communist. There are real communists (Comrade K. N. M. Pillai) in this story, there are untouchables. There are older generations whose story is told as well -- of their upbringing in an even-more unforgiving world than the already-awful late 60s/early 70s in India. This is long after Partition, but still enemies are everywhere and anti-Communism rides high. In the late 60s, the twins befriend and untouchable (Velutha) who is older than they. He is more their mother's (Ammu) age -- and those two become lovers. The family, deep-set in their racist ways, cannot abide this and punishes her. They send her away; she dies young. The children are scattered to the winds, only to return years later to the poisoned home, still run by the same inbred-thinking people who'd chased everyone away to protect themselves and their pitiful reputations (Baby Kochama and her erstwhile compatriot. Estha hasn't spoken in years; Rahel drags around a lifetime of bad decisions, including a divorced husband in the States. They all mostly live short, brutish lives of quiet desperation in a country that has no plan or pity for most of the people who live in it. Roy's prose is beautiful at times, describing an India whose heart is decayed -- and whose outward appearance becomes increasingly so. [Citations] "Heaven opened and the water hammered down, reviving the reluctant old well, greenmossing the pigless pigsty, carpet bombing still, tea-colored puddles the way memory bombs still, tea-colored minds. The grass looked wetgreen and pleased. Happy earthworms frolicked purple in the slush. Green nettles nodded. Trees bent." "Past the new, freshly baked, iced, Gulf-money houses built by nurses, masons, wire-benders and bank clerks, who worked hard and unhappily in faraway places. Past the resentful older houses tinged green with envy, cowering in their private driveways among their private rubber trees. Each a tottering fiefdom with an epic of its own." "“But we can’t go in,” Chacko explained, “because we’ve been locked out. And when we look in through the windows, all we see are shadows. And when we try and listen, all we hear is a whispering. And we cannot understand the whispering, because our minds have been invaded by a war. A war that we have won and lost. The very worst sort of war. A war that captures dreams and re-dreams them. A war that has made us adore our conquerors and despise ourselves.”" "Mammachi told Estha and Rahel that she could remember a time, in her girlhood, when Paravans were expected to crawl backwards with a broom, sweeping away their footprints so that Brahmins or Syrian Christians would not defile themselves by accidentally stepping into a Paravano footprint. In Mammachi’s time, Paravans, like other Untouchables, were not allowed to walk on public roads, not allowed to cover their upper bodies, not allowed to carry umbrellas. They had to put their hands over their mouths when they spoke, to divert their polluted breath away from those whom they addressed." "Apart from his carpentry skills, Velutha had a way with machines. Mammachi (with impenetrable Touchable logic) often said that if only he hadn’t been a Paravan, he might have become an engineer." "You must demand what is rightfully yours. Yearly bonus. Provident fund. Accident insurance.”" Rightfully? Odd for a communist. Should be demanding shares rather than crumbs. "Comrade K. N. M. Pillai never came out openly against Chacko. Whenever he referred to him in his speeches he was careful to strip him of any human attributes and present him as an abstract functionary in some larger scheme. A theoretical construct. A pawn in the monstrous bourgeois plot to subvert the revolution. He never referred to him by name, but always as “the Management.” As though Chacko was many people. Apart from it being tactically the right thing to do, this disjunction between the man and his job helped Comrade Pillai to keep his conscience clear about his own private business dealings with Chacko. His contract for printing the Paradise Pickles labels gave him an income that he badly needed. He told himself that Chacko-the-client and Chacko-the-Management were two different people. Quite separate of course from Chacko-the-Comrade." The devious communist who, above all, looks out for number one. "They dreamed of their river. Of the coconut trees that bent into it and watched, with coconut eyes, the boats slide by. Upstream in the mornings. Downstream in the evenings. And the dull, sullen sound of the boatmen’s bamboo poles as they thudded against the dark, oiled boatwood. It was warm, the water. Graygreen. Like rippled silk. With fish in it. With the sky and trees in it. And at night, the broken yellow moon in it." "Despite the fact that it was June, and raining, the river was no more than a swollen drain now. A thin ribbon of thick water that lapped wearily at the mud banks on either side, sequined with the occasional silver slant of a dead fish. It was choked with a succulent weed, whose furred brown roots waved like thin tentacles underwater. Bronze-winged lily-trotters walked across it. Splay-footed, cautious. Once it had had the power to evoke fear. To change lives. But now its teeth were drawn, its spirit spent. It was just a slow, sludging green ribbon lawn that ferried fetid garbage to the sea. Bright plastic bags blew across its viscous, weedy surface like subtropical flying-flowers." "Upstream, clean mothers washed clothes and pots in unadulterated factory effluents. People bathed. Severed torsos soaping themselves, arranged like dark busts on a thin, rocking, ribbon lawn." "So they went ahead and plugged their smelly paradise— God’s Own Country they called it in their brochures—because they knew, those clever Hotel People, that smelliness, like other peoples’ poverty, was merely a matter of getting used to. A question of discipline. Of Rigor and Air-conditioning. Nothing more." "The old colonial bungalow with its deep verandah and Doric columns, was surrounded by smaller, older, wooden houses—ancestral homes—that the hotel chain had bought from old families and transplanted in the Heart of Darkness. Toy Histories for rich tourists to play in. Like the sheaves of rice in Joseph’s dream, like a press of eager natives petitioning an English magistrate, the old houses had been arranged around the History House in attitudes of deference. “Heritage,” the hotel was called." "In the evenings (for that Regional Flavor) the tourists were treated to truncated kathakali performances (“Small attention spans,” the Hotel People explained to the dancers). So ancient stories were collapsed and amputated. Six-hour classics were slashed to twenty-minute cameos. The performances were staged by the swimming pool. While the drummers drummed and the dancers danced, hotel guests frolicked with their children in the water. While Kunti revealed her secret to Kama on the riverbank, courting couples rubbed suntan oil on each other. While fathers played sublimated sexual games with their nubile teenaged daughters, Poothana suckled young Krishna at her poisoned breast. Bhima disemboweled Dushasana and bathed Draupadi’s hair in his blood." "The slow ceiling fan sliced the thick, frightened air into an unending spiral that spun slowly to the floor like the peeled skin of an endless potato." "“Mostly sweeper class,” Baby Kochamma said grimly, and looked away while a mother, not wanting to give up her Good Place near the railing, aimed her distracted baby’s penis into an empty bottle while he smiled and waved at the people around him. “Sssss…” his mother hissed. First persuasively, then savagely. But her baby thought he was the pope. He smiled and waved and smiled and waved. With his penis in a bottle." "Then the Bombay-Cochin people came out. From the cool air into the hot air. Crumpled people uncrumpled on their way to the Arrivals Lounge. And there they were, the Foreign Returnees, in wash’n’wear suits and rainbow sunglasses. With an end to grinding poverty in their Aristocrat suitcases. With cement roofs for their thatched houses, and geysers for their parents’ bathrooms. With sewage systems and septic tanks. Maxis and high heels. Puff sleeves and lipstick. Mixy-grinders and automatic flashes for their cameras." "And the Air was full of Thoughts and Things to Say. But at times like these, only the Small Things are ever said. The Big Things lurk unsaid inside." "It was a grand old house, the Ayemenem House, but aloof-looking. As though it had little to do with the people who lived in it. Like an old man with rheumy eyes watching children play, seeing only transience in their shrill elation and their wholehearted commitment to life." "She had short, thick forearms, fingers like cocktail sausages, and a broad fleshy nose with flared nostrils. Deep folds of skin connected her nose to either side of her chin, and separated that section of her face from the rest of it, like a snout. Her head was too large for her body. She looked like a bottled fetus that had escaped from its jar of formaldehyde in a Biology lab and unshriveled and thickened with age." Just brutal. A nearly perfectly ungenerous description of an odious woman. "when Rahel told her that an American astronaut called Neil Armstrong had walked on the moon, she laughed sarcastically and said that a Malayali acrobat called O. Muthachen had done handsprings on the sun. With pencils up his nose. She was prepared to concede that Americans existed, though she’d never seen one. She was even prepared to believe that Neil Armstrong might conceivably even be some absurd kind of name. But the walking on the moon bit? No sir." "The man standing in the shade of the rubber trees with coins of sunshine dancing on his body, holding her daughter in his arms, glanced up and caught Ammu’s gaze. Centuries telescoped into one evanescent moment. History was wrong-footed, caught off guard. Sloughed off like an old snakeskin. Its marks, its scars, its wounds from old wars and the walking-backwards days, all fell away. In its absence it left an aura, a palpable shimmering that was as plain to see as the water in a river or the sun in the sky. As plain to feel as the heat on a hot day, or the tug of a fish on a taut line. So obvious that no one noticed." "“Let’s leave one alive so that it can be lonely,” Sophie Mol suggested." "Margaret Kochamma’s tiny, ordered life relinquished itself to this truly baroque bedlam with the quiet gasp of a warm body entering a chilly sea." "She had never before met a man who spoke of the world—of what it was, and how it came to be, or what he thought would become of it—in the way in which other men she knew discussed their jobs, their friends or their weekends at the beach." "She saw it as God’s Way of punishing Ammu for her sins and simultaneously avenging her (Baby Kochamma’s) humiliation at the hands of Velutha and the men in the march—the Modalali Mariakutty taunts, the forced flagwaving. She set sail at once. A ship of goodness ploughing through a sea of sin." "Inspector Thomas Mathew, receding behind his bustling Air India mustache, understood perfectly. He had a Touchable wife, two Touchable daughters—whole Touchable generations waiting in their Touchable wombs" "“You people,” Inspector Thomas Mathew said, “first you spoil these people, carry them about on your head like trophies, then when they misbehave you come running to us for help.”" "Both in their own way truly, terrifyingly adult. They looked out at the world and never wondered how it worked, because they knew They worked it. They were mechanics who serviced different parts of the same machine." "It is unreasonable to expect a person to remember what she didn’t know had happened." "“Nothing specifically as such,” Comrade K. N. M. Pillai said. “But see, comrade, any benefits that you give him, naturally others are resenting it. They see it as a partiality. After all, whatever job he does, carpenter or electrician or whateveritis, for them he is just a Paravan. It is a conditioning they have from birth. This I myself have told them is wrong. But frankly speaking, comrade, Change is one thing. Acceptance is another. You should be cautious. Better for him you send him off.” “My dear fellow,” Chacko said, “that’s impossible. He’s invaluable. He practically runs the factory—and we can’t solve the problem by sending all the Paravans away. Surely we have to learn to deal with this nonsense.” Comrade Pillai disliked being addressed as My Dear Fellow. It sounded to him like an insult couched in good English, which, of course, made it a double-insult—the insult itself, and the fact that Chacko thought he wouldn’t understand it. It spoiled his mood completely. “That may be,” he said caustically. “But Rome was not built in a day. Keep it in mind, comrade, that this is not your Oxford college. For you what is a nonsense for Masses it is something different.”" Here, the man of the people argues for patience while the capitalist is already past it. "Chacko said. “I am going to formally organize them into a union. They will elect their own representatives.” “But comrade, you cannot stage their revolution for them. You can only create awareness. Educate them. They must launch their own struggle. They must overcome their fears.” “Of whom?” Chacko smiled. “Me?” “No, not you, my dear comrade. Of centuries of oppression.” Then Comrade Pillai, in a hectoring voice, quoted Chairman Mao. In Malayalam. His expression curiously like his niece’s. “Revolution is not a dinner party. Revolution is an insurrection, an act of violence in which one class overthrows another.”" "The policemen stopped and fanned out. They didn’t really need to, but they liked these Touchable games. They positioned themselves strategically. Crouching by the broken, low stone boundary wall. Quick Piss. Hotfoam on warmstone. Police-piss. Drowned ants in yellow bubbly. Deep breaths. Then together, on their knees and elbows, they crept towards the house. Like Film-policemen. Softly, softly through the grass. Batons in their hands. Machine guns in their minds. Responsibility for the Touchable Future on their thin but able shoulders." "They heard the thud of wood on flesh. Boot on bone. On teeth. The muffled grunt when a stomach is kicked in. The muted crunch of skull on cement. The gurgle of blood on a man’s breath when his lung is torn by the jagged end of a broken rib. Blue-lipped and dinner-plate-eyed, they watched, mesmerized by something that they sensed but didn’t understand: the absence of caprice in what the policemen did. The abyss where anger should have been. The sober, steady brutality, the economy of it all. They were opening a bottle. Or shutting a tap. Cracking an egg to make an omelette. The twins were too young to know that these were only history’s henchmen. Sent to square the books and collect the dues from those who broke its laws. Impelled by feelings that were primal yet paradoxically wholly impersonal. Feelings of contempt born of inchoate, unacknowledged fear—civilization’s fear of nature, men’s fear of women, power’s fear of powerlessness. Man’s subliminal urge to destroy what he could neither subdue nor deify." "If they hurt Velutha more than they intended to, it was only because any kinship, any connection between themselves and him, any implication that if nothing else, at least biologically he was a fellow creature—had been severed long ago. They were not arresting a man, they were exorcising fear. They had no instrument to calibrate how much punishment he could take. No means of gauging how much or how permanently they had damaged him." "His skull was fractured in three places. His nose and both his cheekbones were smashed, leaving his face pulpy, undefined. The blow to his mouth had split open his upper lip and broken six teeth, three of which were embedded in his lower lip, hideously inverting his beautiful smile. Four of his ribs were splintered, one had pierced his left lung, which was what made him bleed from his mouth. The blood on his breath bright red. Fresh. Frothy. His lower intestine was ruptured and hemorrhaged, the blood collected in his abdominal cavity. His spine was damaged in two places, the concussion had paralyzed his right arm and resulted in a loss of control over his bladder and rectum. Both his kneecaps were shattered. Still they brought out the handcuffs." "On the roof of the abandoned factory, the lonely drummer drummed. A gauze door slammed. A mouse rushed across the factory floor. Cobwebs sealed old pickle vats. Empty, all but one—in which a small heap of congealed white dust lay. Bone dust from a Bar Nowl. Long dead. Pickledowl." "As she watched him she understood the quality of his beauty. How his labor had shaped him. How the wood he fashioned had fashioned him. Each plank he planed, each nail he drove, each thing he made had molded him. Had left its stamp on him. Had given him his strength, his supple grace." ]]> </content> </entry> <entry> <title type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[The Stone Sky by N. K. Jemisin (2017) (read in 2018)]]> </title> <id>https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3507</id> <link href="https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3507"/> <updated>2018-02-18T16:01:53+01:00</updated> <author> <name type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Marco von Ballmoos]]> </name> <uri>https://earthli.com/users/marco</uri> </author> <summary type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA["Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is" ... ]]> </summary> <content type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Published by marco on 18. Feb 2018 16:01:53 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I've failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an interest in this book, then I'm happy for you." This is the third book of the Broken Earth series. The underground city of Castrima is no longer habitable after the epic battle at the end of the Obelisk Gate. Alabaster is gone, having been turned into a stone eater. Essun's arm below the elbow is also stone, leading her on the same path as Alabaster. This means that she can no longer perform orogeny without sacrificing parts of her body to stone. She can choose, though, so after the first time, where she loses a hand and part of an arm, she funnels the damage to a breast instead. But it's not really stone, is it? It's solidified magic and she is growing ever more adept at manipulating the magic that underlies orogeny, that is it's founding principle. Jemisin weaves the massive myth ever larger, telling us of the deep history of mankind. How mankind built the obelisks to harness magic power, how humanity enslaved a race that was the master of deep magic, but not the master of technology. She tells of how this race was wiped out, but rebuilt in the form of several adepts who would become the original stone eaters (including Hoa). The ossification process Essun is undergoing -- and which Alabaster completed -- is the stone-eater's form of reproduction, of getting new members of their ancient race. The story tells of how mankind bored down to the core -- through the core -- to tap what it thought would be an unlimited supply of magic, how humanity sought to harness this power with the original stone-eaters from a moon base and using the massive obelisks to focus their power. She tells of how Father Earth exists -- and that he's pissed. He struck back, taking over some of the obelisks, thwarting the process, making humanity blow the moon out of orbit and starting the first of the Seasons that would plague the planet for dozens of Millennia. The story of the Guardians is also fleshed-out: they are agents of Father Earth, imbued with magical power through a bit of the Earth's core lodged in their sessapinae (in their brains). The technology and the world and the history and myth is a wonderfully imagined and woven tale, bringing together many elements of magic and science and also strongly reflecting our own history, predilections and prejudices. The plot follows Nassun as she ends up in a colony in Antarctica with her father Jija -- and under the tutelage of Schaffa, her mother's former Guardian. Schaffa has changed, though, and is no longer fully under the control of Father Earth. He wants to help Nassun achieve her goal of burning everything to the ground -- destroying the Earth and humanity that would produce such a blighted landscape and unending torture for her and her people (orogenes). For this, she ventures to Corepoint, but first travels to an ancient city from which the attack on Father Earth was originally launched. Here, we learn more about its history, before she and Schaffa take an ancient monorail through the heart of the planet to Corepoint. At the same time, Essun and the rest of Castrima adventure their way to Rennanis, the city that they defeated at the end of the second book. They establish themselves in this old and enormous city, but Essun knows she must move on. She must accompany Hoa, her stone-eater, to try to right what humanity broke many, many years ago. All of her friends come with her, traveling in a group through the center of the Earth, slipped through the strata by Hoa. They are attacked by other stone eaters along the way and there is attrition. Essun seeks to recapture the Moon and put it back in orbit, to make peace with Father Earth and put an end to the seasons. She must fight Nassun on this -- who wants to use the Obelisk Gate to plow the Moon into the Earth and kill everyone. Having seen how the stone eaters live, Nassun changes her plan (she's only 10 or 11) and decides to use the power of the Obelisk Gate to change all of humanity into stone eaters instead. Essun battles against her, but eventually gives up, expending her last power to let her daughter have her own way and turning to stone. Nassun takes pity and fulfills her mother's plan instead, using the power of the Obelisk Gate to align the Moon back into its former orbit. Father Earth is pleased and agrees to a truce with mankind. In the epilogue, Essun awakes as a stone eater and starts to pick up the pieces of an Earth that knows peace with Father Earth, that once again has a moon, with hopefully much-humbled humans and no more Seasons. [Citations] "When a slave rebels, it is nothing much to the people who read about it later. Just thin words on thinner paper worn finer by the friction of history. (“So you were slaves, so what?” they whisper. Like it’s nothing.)" "When a comm builds atop a fault line, do you blame its walls when they inevitably crush the people inside? No; you blame whoever was stupid enough to think they could defy the laws of nature forever. Well, some worlds are built on a fault line of pain, held up by nightmares. Don’t lament when those worlds fall. Rage that they were built doomed in the first place." "For a very long time I could not tell the difference between one of their kind and another. They all look different, but they have the same non-presence within the ambient. I still have to remind myself that hair textures and eye shapes and unique body odors each have as much meaning to them as the perturbations of tectonic plates have to me." "Perhaps this is because we have earthtalk?" Earthtalk seems to be a lot like the Adem sign language from the Kingkiller chronicles. It functions differently but serves the same purpose. "They’re afraid because we exist, she says. There’s nothing we did to provoke their fear, other than exist. There’s nothing we can do to earn their approval, except stop existing—so we can either die like they want, or laugh at their cowardice and go on with our lives." "It doesn’t matter what we do. The problem is them." "Even the idea of Yumenes is hard for Nassun to comprehend: millions of people, none of them farmers or miners or anything that fits within the range of her experience, many of them obsessed with strange fads and politics and alignments far more complex than those of caste or race." That is what mystifies me about our world: so many people with no worthwhile capabilities feel entitled to so much. The most naturally useless are somehow the wealthiest. "Would’ve been nice if we could’ve all had normal, of course, but not enough people wanted to share. So now we all burn." "[...] the people of the world would not survive without it. Orogenes are essential. And yet because you are essential, you cannot be permitted to have a choice in the matter. You must be tools—and tools cannot be people. Guardians keep the tool … and to the degree possible, while still retaining the tool’s usefulness, kill the person.”" "It is the way of the world, but it isn’t. The things that happen to orogenes don’t just happen. They’ve been made to happen, by the Guardians, after years and years of work on their part. Maybe they whispered ideas into the ears of every warlord or Leader, in the time before Sanze. Maybe they were even there during the Shattering—inserting themselves into ragged, frightened pockets of survivors to tell them who to blame for their misery, and how to find them, and what to do with the culprits found." "But there are none so frightened, or so strange in their fear, as conquerors. They conjure phantoms endlessly, terrified that their victims will someday do back what was done to them—even if, in truth, their victims couldn’t care less about such pettiness and have moved on. Conquerors live in dread of the day when they are shown to be, not superior, but simply lucky. (Emphasis added.)" "“The Leadership families of Yumenes believed that orogenes once ruled the world,” he says. “That their duty was to keep your kind from ever regaining that much power. That you would be monstrous rulers of the world, doing back to ordinary folk what had been done to you, if you ever got the chance. I don’t think they were right about any of it—and yet.” He gestures, as she stands there illuminated by the fire of the earth. “Look at you, little one. If you are the monster they imagined you to be … you are also glorious.”" "Magic, Steel called the silver. The stuff underneath orogeny, which is made by things that live or once lived. This silver deep within Father Earth wends between the mountainous fragments of his substance in exactly the same way that they twine among the cells of a living, breathing thing. And that is because a planet is a living, breathing thing; she knows this now with the certainty of instinct. All the stories about Father Earth being alive are real." "There’s some solidity to it; as they draw closer, Nassun can detect anomalies dotting the surface of the bright sphere, made tiny by contrast—even as she realizes they are obelisks. Several dozen of them, jammed into the heart of the world like needles in a pincushion. But these are nothing. Nothing." "When the Earth speaks, it does not do so in words, exactly. This is a thing you know already, but that Nassun only learns in this moment. She sesses the meanings, hears the vibrations with the bones of her ears, shudders them out through her skin, feels them pull tears from her eyes. It is like drowning in energy and sensation and emotion. It hurts. Remember: The Earth wants to kill her. But remember, too: Nassun wants it just as dead. So it says, in microshakes that will eventually stir a tsunami somewhere in the southern hemisphere, Hello, little enemy. (This is an approximation, you realize. This is all her young mind can bear.)" "The silver—magic—comes from life. Those who made the obelisks sought to harness magic, and they succeeded; oh, how they succeeded. They used it to build wonders beyond imagining. But then they wanted more magic than just what their own lives, or the accumulated aeons of life and death on the Earth’s surface, could provide. And when they saw how much magic brimmed just beneath that surface, ripe for the taking … It may never have occurred to them that so much magic, so much life, might be an indicator of … awareness. The Earth does not speak in words, after all—and perhaps, Nassun realizes, having seen entirely too much of the world to still have much of a child’s innocence, perhaps these builders of the great obelisk network were not used to respecting lives different from their own. Not so very different, really, from the people who run the Fulcrums, or raiders, or her father. So where they should have seen a living being, they saw only another thing to exploit. Where they should have asked, or left alone, they raped." "This is only fair, it reasons—coldly, with an anger that still shudders up from the depths to crack the world’s skin and touch off Season after Season. It is only right. The Earth did not start this cycle of hostilities, it did not steal the Moon, it did not burrow into anyone else’s skin and snatch bits of its still-living flesh to keep as trophies and tools, it did not plot to enslave humans in an unending nightmare. It did not start this war, but it will rusting well have. Its. Due." "Once, after all, I believed I was the finest tool ever created by a great civilization. Now, I have learned that I am a mistake cobbled together by paranoid thieves who were terrified of their own mediocrity. I don’t know how to feel, except reckless." "He doesn’t want you to hear him say “like one of you,” Remwha signals, humming with irritation at my obtuseness. And he doesn’t want you to know what it means, if he says it. He reassures himself that he is not like the people who made his own life harder. It’s a lie, but he needs it, and he needs us to support that lie. She should not have told us that we were Niess. We aren’t Niess, I gravitic-pulse back. Mostly I’m annoyed that he had to point this out. Gallat’s behavior is obvious, now that Remwha has explained. To them we are." "Later, when we process all this, I will tell the others, She wants to be a person. She wants the impossible, Dushwha will say. Gallat thinks it better to own her himself, rather than allow Syl Anagist to do the same. But for her to be a person, she must stop being … ownable. By anyone. Then Syl Anagist must stop being Syl Anagist, Gaewha will add sadly. Yes." "Nonliving, inorganic things like crystal are inert to magic. Therefore, in order to help the fragments initiate the generative cycle, raw magic must be used as a catalyst. Every engine needs a starter. Enter the sinklines: They look like vines, thick and gnarled, twisting and curling to form a lifelike thicket around the fragment’s base. And ensnared in these vines— We’re going to see them, Kelenli told me, when I asked her where the Niess were." "You cannot go to people like that and ask them to fund a research project that makes heroes of roggas! You just can’t. They’ll faint, and when they wake up, they’ll have you killed. They’ll destroy you as surely as they would any threat to their livelihoods and legacy. Yes, I know that’s not what you think you’re doing, but it is." "Corepoint sits at the peak of an enormous underwater shield volcano, and the first few miles of the hole drilled at its center are actually lined with a hollowed-out complex of living quarters, laboratories, and manufactories. These underground facilities, originally meant to house Corepoint’s geomagests and genegineers, have long since been turned to a wholly different purpose—because this flip side of Corepoint is Warrant, where Guardians are made and dwell between Seasons." "Threads of silver roam over her body, determining her discomfort by touching her nerves and then repairing her bruises and scrapes; other threads whip the particles of the bed until friction warms them; yet more threads search her skin for infinitesimal dry flakes and flecks of dust, and scrub them away." Magic as nanotech? Nanotech as magic? "No wonder the people who built the obelisks needed so much silver, if they used it in lieu of wearing blankets, or taking baths, or letting themselves heal over time." "What follows won’t be good, but it’ll be bad for everyone—rich and poor, Equatorials and commless, Sanzeds and Arctics, now they’ll all know. Every season is the Season for us. The apocalypse that never ends. They could’ve chosen a different kind of equality. We could’ve all been safe and comfortable together, surviving together, but they didn’t want that. Now nobody gets to be safe. Maybe that’s what it will take for them to finally realize things have to change." "Some accept their fate. Swallow their pride, forget the real truth, embrace the falsehood for all they’re worth—because, they decide, they cannot be worth much. If a whole society has dedicated itself to their subjugation, after all, then surely they deserve it? Even if they don’t, fighting back is too painful, too impossible. At least this way there is peace, of a sort. Fleetingly. The alternative is to demand the impossible. It isn’t right, they whisper, weep, shout; what has been done to them is not right. They are not inferior. They do not deserve it. And so it is the society that must change. There can be peace this way, too, but not before conflict." "No one really wants to face the fact that the world is the way it is because some arrogant, self-absorbed people tried to put a leash on the rusting planet. And no one was ready to accept that the solution to the whole mess was simply to let orogenes live and thrive and do what they were born to do." "That he was the scion of a people abused; that those people’s forebears were, too, in their turn; that the world as he knew it could not function without forcing someone into servitude. At the time he could see no end to the cycle, no way to demand the impossible of society" "I see the elegant vinework on the surrounding buildings and I know that somewhere, a biomagest is tabulating how many lammotyrs of magic can be harvested from such beauty. Life is sacred in Syl Anagist—sacred, and lucrative, and useful." "Because this is what the Sylanagistines truly made us for: to affirm a philosophy. Life is sacred in Syl Anagist—as it should be, for the city burns life as the fuel for its glory. The Niess were not the first people chewed up in its maw, just the latest and cruelest extermination of many. But for a society built on exploitation, there is no greater threat than having no one left to oppress. And now, if nothing else is done, Syl Anagist must again find a way to fission its people into subgroupings and create reasons for conflict among them. There’s not enough magic to be had just from plants and genegineered fauna; someone must suffer, if the rest are to enjoy luxury." "[...] this reasoning is still flawed, because Syl Anagist is ultimately unsustainable. It is parasitic; its hunger for magic grows with every drop it devours. The Earth’s core is not limitless. Eventually, if it takes fifty thousand years, that resource will be exhausted, too. Then everything dies. What we are doing is pointless and Geoarcanity is a lie. And if we help Syl Anagist further down this path, we will have said, What was done to us was right and natural and unavoidable." "Remember, too, that the Earth does not fully understand us. It looks upon human beings and sees short-lived, fragile creatures, puzzlingly detached in substance and awareness from the planet on which their lives depend, who do not understand the harm they tried to do—perhaps because they are so short-lived and fragile and detached." "As big as the world is, Nassun is beginning to realize it’s also really small. The same stories, cycling around and around. The same endings, again and again. The same mistakes eternally repeated." "Yet for all its grandeur, despite the evidence it offers of feats of geneering long lost to humankind, Nassun cannot bring herself to be impressed by it. The hole feeds no one, provides no shelter against ash or assault." I like that the planet is alive, an implacable life-form bent on shaking these meddlesome ticks from its skin. It wants neither peace nor symbiosis. It wants them gone. They dared to try to enslave it. No soft Gaia, this. "It knows she means to bring the Moon down, and that this will create a cataclysm far worse than the Shattering. It wants to live." "I don’t bother to explain that just because something is horrible does not make it any less true." ]]> </content> </entry> <entry> <title type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[The Obelisk Gate by N.K. Jemisin (2016) (read in 2017)]]> </title> <id>https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3474</id> <link href="https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3474"/> <updated>2018-02-18T15:51:05+01:00</updated> <author> <name type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Marco von Ballmoos]]> </name> <uri>https://earthli.com/users/marco</uri> </author> <summary type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA["Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is" ... ]]> </summary> <content type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Published by marco on 18. Feb 2018 15:51:05 Updated by marco on 18. Feb 2018 15:55:14 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I've failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an interest in this book, then I'm happy for you." This is the second book of the Broken Earth series. We follow Essun on her journey south, away from the massive Rift at the equator -- the one that Alabaster ripped in order to break the stranglehold on humanity of the Fulcrum and the equatorial cities. Essun still seeks Nassun, her daughter, who is even further south. She joins up with Hoa, a strange child and Tonkee, a filthy but intelligent comm-less woman. They end up in Castrima, an underground chamber of crystals that are run by ancient technology to provide water and energy for its denizens. There is a sort of safety there, with an uneasy peace between humans and orogenes. We learn that Tonkee is actually a Leader who Essun met many years ago, when she was in-training at the Fulcrum. We also learn that Hoa is actually stone eater -- and that there are other stone eaters in Castrima. They have their own agenda. There are others that helping a city to attack Castrima (Rennanis). The crystal cave is indefensible. Even Alabaster -- who has also returned, with his own stone-eater Antimony in tow -- cannot help, as he is turning to stone himself (every time he practices orogeny -- or magic, as he teaches Essun). He teaches Essun much more of humanity's deep history and much more about how to control orogeny on a deeper level -- on the level of magic (the silver). Meanwhile Nassun is learning all of this on her own, without anyone's help, mastering magic in a way the Essun likely never will. Still, Essun uses the Obelisk Gate to fight off Renannis's attack -- and to strike at the heart of the city to destroy them once and for all. She also uses the tremendous power to hunt and trap (but not kill -- even she can't do that) stone eaters in the crystals of Castrima. She is the second person to control the gate in millenia, after Alabaster, who used the Gate to create the Rift that started the latest Season. The book ends with Alabaster having died (or been transformed), Castrima on the move and Nassun in Antarctica. We have learned much more about the myths underlying this world and this version of humanity's history -- but it's nothing compared to what comes in the third book. [Citations] "There is something underneath the heat of the volcano, interspersed amid the wavelets of motion that dance through the earth. It’s easy to manipulate the waves and heat, but hard to even perceive this other thing, which is perhaps why Mama taught Nassun to look for waves and heat instead. But if Nassun can grasp the other thing, which is finer and more delicate and also more precise than the heat and waves… if she can shape it into a kind of sharp edge, and file it down to infinite fineness, and slice it across the shaft like so— There is a quick, high-pitched hiss as the air between her and Jija stirs. Then the chain tip of the harpoon shaft drops loose, the shorn faces of metal glimmering mirror-smooth in the afternoon light." "Who knows when some version of our ancestors first crawled out of the ash and started jabbering at each other? Thirty thousand years? Forty? A long time to be the pathetic creatures we are now, huddling behind our walls and putting all our wits, all our learning, toward the singular task of staying alive. That’s all we make now: Better ways to do field surgery with improvised equipment. Better chemicals, so we can grow more beans with little light. Once, we were so much more.”" "I don’t think it’s what they’re made of that makes stone eaters so different. I think it’s that no one can live that long and not become something entirely alien.”" "You’d almost forgotten this part of him: the dreamer, the rebel, always reconsidering the way things have always been because maybe they should never have been that way in the first place. He’s right, too. Life in the Stillness discourages reconsideration, reorientation. Wisdom is set in stone, after all;" "The Guardians who work with the Fulcrum are one of the factions I told you about, so to speak. They’re the ones who want the status quo: roggas made safe and useful, stills doing all the work and thinking they run the place, Guardians actually in charge of everything. Controlling the people who can control natural disasters.”" "But then you haven’t spent much time thinking about Guardians, when you weren’t in the immediate vicinity of one. Maybe this is another kind of thought aversion you’ve been conditioned to: Don’t look up, and don’t think about those damned smiles. You decide to make yourself think about them now. “But Guardians die during a Season…” Shit. “They say they die…” Shit. “Of course they don’t.” Alabaster lets out a rusty sound that might be a laugh. “I’m a bad influence.”" "She seizes you. If you hadn’t been used to this from Alabaster, you would have panicked, but it’s the same as what happened back then: Ykka’s orogeny sort of melds with and consumes yours. You relax and let her take control, because instantly you realize you are stronger than her and could, should, take control yourself—but you are the learner here, and she is the teacher. So you hold back, to learn. It is a dance, of sorts. "Her orogeny is like… a river with eddies, curling and flowing in patterns and at a pace. Yours is faster, deeper, more straightforward, more forceful, but she modulates you so efficiently that the two flows come together. You flow slower and more loosely. She flows faster, using your depth to boost her force. For an instant you open your eyes, see her leaning against the crystal column and sliding down to crouch at its base so that she doesn’t have to pay attention to her body while she concentrates… and then you are within the geode’s crystal substrate, through its shell and burrowing into the rock that surrounds it, flowing around the warps and wends of ancient cold stone. "Flowing with Ykka, so easily that you are surprised. Alabaster was rougher than this, but maybe he wasn’t used to doing it when he first tried it with you. Ykka has done this with others, and she is as fine a teacher as any you have ever had. But— But. Oh! You see it so easily now. Magic. There are threads of it interwoven with Ykka’s flow. Supporting and catalyzing her drive where it is weaker than yours, soothing the layer of contact between you. Where’s all this coming from? She drags it out of the rock itself, which is another wonder, because you have not realized until now that there is any magic in the rock. But there it is, flitting between the infinitesimal particles of silicon and calcite as easily as it did between the particles of Alabaster’s stone substance." "The boilbugs move. You perceive them as a wave of bright heat that surges out of underground nests and aboveground feeding piles that have formed around their many victims—hundreds of nests, millions of bugs, you had no idea the forest of Castrima was so riddled with them. Tonkee’s warning about the meat shortage is meaningless and too late; you could never have competed against such successful predators. You were always going to have to get used to the taste of human anyway." "Pissed off the wrong rogga, Hoa said of his own incarceration. Yes, these enemy stone eaters rusting did. You shout again but this time it is effort, it is aggression. SNAP and you break lattices and magic strands and reseal them to your own design. CRACK and you lift whole crystal shafts to throw them like spears and grind your enemies beneath. You look for Gray Man, the stone eater who hurt Hoa, but he is not among the mountains that threaten your home. These are just his minions. Fine. You’ll send him a message, then, written in their fear." "Some flee north. Unacceptable, and distance is nothing for you now. You pull up and wheel and pierce down again, and there is Rennanis, nestled within its lattice of nodes like a spider among its bundled, sucked-dry prey. The Gate is meant to do things on a planetary scale. It is nothing to you to drive power down and inflict upon every citizen of Rennanis the same thing you did to the woman who would’ve beaten Penty to death. Bullies are bullies. So simple to twist the flickering silver between their cells until those cells grow still, solid. Stone. It is done, and Castrima’s war won, in the span of a breath." "Suddenly it doesn’t matter. Nassun sighs and rubs her face with her hands, as weary as Father Earth must be after so many eternities of hate. Hate is tiring. Nihilism is easier, though she does not know the word and will not for a few years. It’s what she’s feeling, regardless: an overwhelming sense of the meaninglessness of it all." ]]> </content> </entry> <entry> <title type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Books read in 2017]]> </title> <id>https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3357</id> <link href="https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3357"/> <updated>2018-01-15T23:20:44+01:00</updated> <author> <name type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Marco von Ballmoos]]> </name> <uri>https://earthli.com/users/marco</uri> </author> <summary type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine (2010) by Michael Lewis This is the book on which the "movie" <https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3325> was based. My review in that link was extensive and I liked the book just as much. Lewis really did a good job outlining the players, explaining the financial instruments and their holders, ... ]]> </summary> <content type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Published by marco on 15. Jan 2018 23:20:44 Updated by marco on 18. Feb 2018 16:07:14 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine (2010) by Michael Lewis This is the book on which the "movie" <https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3325> was based. My review in that link was extensive and I liked the book just as much. Lewis really did a good job outlining the players, explaining the financial instruments and their holders, inventors, connections, weaknesses and ramifications. It's an extremely financially technical book and will prove a challenge for many to figure out what's really going on. Lewis emphasizes several times that most people in the industry didn't know how these things worked, but knew for approximately how long they would work, so they made money and unloaded them on unsuspecting saps before everything blew up. Others knew that the government would bail them out and just drove their companies into a wall, coming out smelling like roses anyway. Lewis does a good job of highlighting both the criminality and the stupidity of so many in the industry -- and also the hopelessness of any change coming out of the worldwide debacle. I've included "notes, citations and errata" <https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3369> in a separate post. The Swift Programming Language (Swift 3.0.1) (2016) by Apple This is an incredibly detailed language specification for Swift and programming guide for iOS and OS X. The language itself is quite complex and includes so many programming features that it's nearly dizzying. There are a lot of examples, as well as English-language translations of all of the examples. This leads to a lot of text, but you can get into the rhythm of skipping the few paragraphs after the examples to move on to the next concepts (especially if the code sample was abundantly clear). The kitchen sink includes: * Functional switch statements (matching) * Inferred types * Argument labels * Very wordy Error-handling * An unbelievable number of keywords: * autoclosure: required when the developer wants to avoid closing over certain variables and creating cycles (which the reference-counter in Swift cannot break on its own) * convenience: identifies initialization methods that are not required * convention: indicates the calling convention to use: swift, block or c * defer: Swift's version of finally * deprecated: An attribute to indicate when a feature was deprecated (see obsoleted) * discardableResult: functions are pure and results must be used; add this attribute to allow a result to be ignored * dynamic: trigger the compiler to use Objective-C--style method-dispatch * escaping: indicate that a lambda parameter is used outside of the called function * extension: add features to a type * infix: operator type * introduced: An attribute to indicate when a feature was introduced * lazy: explicitly indicate that a property initialization should be delayed until it is first called * obsoleted: An attribute to indicate when a feature was made obsolete (see deprecated) * optional: a feature of a protocol that does not have to be implemented in the implementing type (it can be satisfied by an extension instead) * postfix: operator type * prefix: operator type * required: identifies initialization methods that are not convenience * subscript: an indexer function (e.g. [x]) * testable: an attribute that subverts the type/member/function visibility so that a test framework has access to internals * unowned: use a weak reference that allows the owner to cascade-delete the object that has the unowned reference to it * weak: a classic weak reference: the reference will be set to nil when the referenced object is deleted. * two types of generic constraints * and so on... I've included "notes, citations and errata" <https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id= 3366> in a separate post. Notes from Underground (1850) by Fyodor Dostoyevsky This is a short book, split into two main parts. The first part is a cry of anger at society, spit out at the world from "underground" by the narrator. It is delivered in a nearly stream-of-consciousness form and opines on all sorts of social and philosophical issues -- often winding back on itself to second-guess or to revise. The attached notes give abundant examples. The second part is told by the same author, but in a more refined tone. It seems to describe an incident of mortifying self-awareness and banal evil that seems to have been the trigger for the previous narrator's (same person, but 20 years later) having turned his back on society. The young man was exceedingly poor and exceedingly proud and took out his frustrations on an even poorer and more unfortunate young woman, destroying her feelings. All the while, he was completely aware of what it cost her and what it would cost him, but his brutal honesty in his internal -- and, often, external -- dialogue, didn't allow him to stop himself. I've included "notes, citations and errata" <https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3371> in a separate post. Rigged: How Globalization and the Rules of the Modern Economy Were Structured to Make the Rich Richer (2016) by Dean Baker Dean Baker puts together a comprehensive program to address massive inequality in America. The same inexorable and relatively straightforward logic could easily apply to other countries as well. The only problem with Baker's suggestions is that they utterly fail to benefit the masters of the universe. Still, his proposals for addressing the real issues facing the American economy are breathtakingly easily explained. He lays out his plan without regard for political interest or ideology. He explains how an economy does not exist in some sort of natural state -- that it is the creation of explicit policy. This is perhaps his most important point. Anyone who claims that the system that they prefer, which just happens to benefit them immensely, is also the morally pure one because it is "natural" -- is full of shit. Baker explains in detail which parts of the economy are actually productive and which are just collecting rent. There are vast parts of the economy that could be trimmed, with quite significant effects for the majority. For example, the financial industry, including what used to be traditional banking, is almost purely rent-seeking, providing no substantial or commensurate value. Another area is healthcare, where the U.S. pays twice as much per person as any other first-world nation. Or professions, like dentistry, medicine or law, where salaries are twice as high as in other nations (at least). Out-of-control CEO pay and the twisted incentives and controls of the boards of large corporations is another area where a rational cleanup would yield giant gains. Then there are copyrights and patents, which are government-granted monopolies -- again, not a natural outgrowth of a so-called free-market system. All told, Baker's book illustrates in no uncertain terms the astounding degree -- it's nearly total -- with which the benefits of increased productivity and income have been collected and funneled to a handful of rich people. All the while, they pay everyone in the intelligentsia and media to convince the sheep that this is just a natural result of them being so much better. It's all bullshit. Economies are human constructions and the one we currently enjoy has been constructed by the winners to benefit those winners. The first step is to open your eyes. Baker's book will help immensely. Highly recommended. I've included "notes, citations and errata" <https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3393> in a separate post. A Man Called Ove (2012) (en/2014) by Fredrik Backman This is the story of Ove, a man living in a town on the outskirts of a city in Sweden. Ove likes things predictable and can't see why anyone would want it any other way. Other people are distractions and annoyances and constantly disappointing. The story is told in the third person, but from the viewpoint of a 59-year--old Ove. Some of the chapters are flashbacks to help readers understand why Ove is the way he is, how it's possible for him to be at once cantankerous beyond all imagining and also a generous person. His life arc starts with a mother who dies too soon and being raised until 16 by a father he honors and worships, until his father, too, is taken away by the grim reaper. Ove takes over his father's job and his lifestyle, simple and direct, working hard and sticking to rigid principle. Most appreciate him for his work and attitude and forthrightness but there are opponents, one of whom, Tom, eventually leads him to lose his job. He learns construction during the day while cleaning trains at night. He meets Sonja, from then on his only reason for waking and drawing breath. She is likewise -- and for all of her friends, mysteriously -- enchanted. Though he doesn't say much, he listens well -- and he is bulky with workman's muscle to compensate for his taciturnity. They make a life together, moving in to the district where Ove lives in the present, with life dealing them one raw deal after another. They go to Spain on holiday, where a pregnant Sonja takes siestas with gusto while Ove wanders the countryside, making himself useful with his skills despite an almost complete language barrier. On the way home, the bus crashes, taking their unborn child as well as Sonja's ability to walk. Nevertheless, they weather these tragedies well enough, settling into a happy and comfortable routine. The world begins to outpace Ove, with his dedication to fine craftsmanship in homes and cars seeing less and less value in the real world, a world filled with distracted idiots, flitting between ephemeral obsessions. This includes his new neighbors with whom he has entirely too much to do -- the Pregnant Foreign Woman and the Lanky Fool with their two children. Throw into the mix a Bent and unwanted Housemate, a Mailman who doesn't understand propriety or boundaries and a cat who seems to embody Sonja's now-passed--on conscience. Ove wants nothing more than to join Sonja wherever she's ended up after succumbing to cancer but his neighbors manage to distract him from several attempts at ending it all, always in the nick of time. Ove grudgingly finds himself useful again, even loved. He teaches Parvaneh to drive, he helps Anders fix a bike and buy a car, he teaches a bigoted father to stop being a jackass and to be happy he has a son at all. He continues to be the man that Sonja always knew him to be. Until, eventually, and after a few years of a second life, he finally joins her. I've included "notes, citations and errata" <https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3399> in a separate post. The Road to Wigan Pier (1937) by George Orwell This book is nearly divided into two parts. The first details Orwell's travel to the northern part of England to live amongst miners in their communities. These are not nice communities. There is nothing green about them. They live cheek by jowl in atrocious sanitary conditions, surviving on scraps of food and barely making meager rents on their meager salaries. The work is nearly incomprehensibly back-breaking. Shifts are long. Life is without purpose other than to greet another day of misery. Orwell swings in tone from somewhat judgmental (of the bad seeds) to exceedingly praising (of the stalwart workers). He compares moral/ethical life in the north favorably to what is to be found in the south, where the posh Englanders reside. Many of his observations of the working class as well as the intransigencies of capitalism are just as true today as they were then. For example, "In a way it is even humiliating to watch coal-miners working. It raises in you a momentary doubt about your own status as an “intellectual” and a superior person generally. For it is brought home to you, at least while you are watching, that it is only because miners sweat their guts out that superior persons can remain superior." "This business of petty inconvenience and indignity, of being kept waiting about, of having to do everything at other people’s convenience, is inherent in working-class life. A thousand influences constantly press a working man down into a passive rôle." "It is only when you lodge in streets where nobody has a job, where getting a job seems about as probable as owning an aeroplane and much less probable than winning fifty pounds in the Football Pool, that you begin to grasp the changes that are being worked in our civilisation." "Life is still fairly normal, more normal than one really has the right to expect. Families are impoverished, but the family-system has not broken up. The people are in effect living a reduced version of their former lives. Instead of raging against their destiny they have made things tolerable by lowering their standards." "Twenty million people are underfed but literally everyone in England has access to a radio. What we have lost in food we have gained in electricity. Whole sections of the working class who have been plundered of all they really need are being compensated, in part, by cheap luxuries which mitigate the surface of life." "And the peculiar evil is this, that the less money you have, the less inclined you feel to spend it on wholesome food. A millionaire may enjoy breakfasting off orange juice and Ryvita biscuits; an unemployed man doesn’t." "Every middle-class person has a dormant class-prejudice which needs only a small thing to arouse it; and if he is over forty he probably has a firm conviction that his own class has been sacrificed to the class below." Sound or feel familiar? These things seem to be constants in our society, by now. These are the hard nubs of capitalism that remain when surface affectation has worn away. The second half of the book is a treatise on the state of Socialism in his day. He is very supportive of socialism but quite critical of its practitioners. He exhorts them to be more practical and to come up with realistic recruitment plans that don't involve insulting everyone who doesn't immediately agree with them. There is a lot of material here that is 100% applicable to leftist (and, perhaps still, especially socialist) movements today, in the first quarter of the 21st century, nearly 100 years after Orwell wrote his remarks. He offers some solid and practical advice: "To oppose Socialism now, when twenty million Englishmen are underfed and Fascism has conquered half Europe, is suicidal. It is like starting a civil war when the Goths are crossing the frontier." "To recoil from Socialism because so many individual Socialists are inferior people is as absurd as refusing to travel by train because you dislike the ticket-collector’s face." "The Socialist movement has not time to be a league of dialectical materialists; it has got to be a league of the oppressed against the oppressors." "But if you are constantly bullying me about my “bourgeois ideology,” if you give me to understand that in some subtle way I am an inferior person because I have never worked with my hands, you will only succeed in antagonising me. For you are telling me either that I am inherently useless or that I ought to alter myself in some way that is beyond my power." "These are the sinking middle class, and most of them are clinging to their gentility under the impression that it keeps them afloat. It is not good policy to start by telling them to throw away the life-belt." A full listing of citations is below. The first half of the book may be more amenable to most, but both halves are well-worth reading. Highly recommended. I've included "notes, citations and errata" <https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3407> in a separate post. Divided: The Perils of Our Growing Inequality (2014) by David Cay Johnston This book is a collection of essays and studies on many different facets and types of inequality: Income. Education, Health-Care, Debt and Poverty, Policy and Family. The title and sub-headings listed prior say it all, actually: this book is about the root of America’s problem—Inequality. And not just income inequality, but wealth, opportunity, all of which add up to a purportedly democratic system that looks exactly like feudalism. You can read the essays in any order, but I read the book front to back. The book was published in 2014 and only one essay/study includes data from as recently as 2013. The others stretch back over decades, pinpointing the point when the U.S. left its path to turn the screws on its own populace. These essays show not only the problems we face, they show how we got here and what we need to do to get out of it. Spoiler alert: I bet we don’t take any of their advice. Recommended. I've included "notes, citations and errata" <https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3416> in a separate post. The New Jim Crow (2012) by Michelle Alexander This is an impeccably researched, devastatingly factual, relentlessly focused and canonical volume on ongoing institutional racism against blacks in the United States. The argument is that the power over blacks that whites had through slavery was not eradicated with the end of slavery, but rather made to go (very temporarily) underground only to reappear as Jim Crow laws -- laws that subjugated blacks just as effectively as slavery without the stigma of human chattel. She continues the argument that the 20th-century (and now, 21st-century) United States prison system almost totally subverts civil-rights achievements by continuing the subjugation of blacks, sending them once again to a second-class society in America, just as effectively as slavery and the Jim Crow laws did. The U.S. slavery laws designated black people as property. This kept them in an official lower caste. Once owning people was no longer socially acceptable, the caste system was continued by denying all sorts of rights with poll tests and other extremely precisely defined qualification systems, collectively known as Jim Crow laws. Once the Jim Crow laws were deemed illegal -- and, more importantly, no longer socially acceptable -- the elites pivoted once again and came up with a new way of relegating blacks to a second-class caste: criminalization. Fueled by a tremendous propaganda effort -- as well as very willing participants -- one law after another was created, targeting blacks specifically in order to mark them as voluntary criminals and therefore unworthy of participation in mainstream society. The U.S. Drug War was instrumental in this mission. The many ways in which the criminalization of blacks was achieved are breathtakingly insidious and devious. The most devious part is that the latest incarnation disarmed the civil-rights movement's best weapon: the morally offensive racial bias of Jim Crow laws tended to pull people together to support their discriminated brethren. By swapping race for criminality, they drive a wedge between potential non-criminal supporters and those who have supposedly chosen a life of crime. Alexander presents her thesis relentlessly, heaping an irrefutable amount of information on the reader until the propaganda wall of all but the most hardened racists must be broken down. That might be giving people too much credit, though. I've included "notes, citations and errata" <https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id= 3429> in a separate post. Based on a True Story: Not a Memoir (2016) by Norm McDonald Norm's purported autobiography is at-once multi-layered and tightly written. In few words, he paints a plethora of possibilities. The style is reminiscent of Twain, Vonnegut, Kafka and Burroughs. His stories -- as was the case with these auspicious predecessors -- are often seemingly inspired by hallucinogenic substances as well as completely fictitious -- often bald-facedly so -- and not at all autobiographical. He is deeply funny. He is easily insightful. His writing is a pleasure to read. Some passages rear out of the work, standing alone as jewels of prosaic creation. He tells of his days and nights on the road, of his heroin and alcohol addiction, of his at-once madcap and lethargic friend, of his gambling addictions. He tells of growing up on an farm in Canada with the mysterious Old Jack, of his obsession with Sarah Silverman, his verbal sparring with Lorne Michaels, his simultaneous lack of and spectacular surfeit of success at comedy, his killer jokes that at-once cannot fail and always backfire. His denouement or resurrection comes in the form of a ghost writer who emulates his employer to such a degree that the narrative line blurs and shifts and whipsaws, with Matryoshka-like nesting of ideas, plot-lines and authorial voices. Norm escapes to fight another day. Highly recommended. I've included "notes, citations and errata" <https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id= 3430> in a separate post. The Devils of Loudon (1952) by Aldous Huxley In this book, Huxley tackles the historical subject of the possession by the devil of the Urseline nuns in Loudun in the 17th century. The affair was a scientific and judicial disaster, by today's standards. And our standards aren't even very high, to be honest. The story centers on the prosecution of Father Urban Grandier, a priest in early 17th-century France in the Diocese of Lourdes. He is eminently fallible, especially as far as his vow of celibacy goes. He is not a very nice man, loving and leaving and focusing fairly narrowly on Father Urban Grandier rather than the concerns of his flock. He gives interesting and rousing services, but that's about where his dedication to the flock ends. He is far more interested in personal power, in climbing the Church ladder and in boinking pretty young things. Naturally, there are other forces at work, not including local and powerful merchants as well as other members of the Church in places as far-flung from Lourdes as Paris. Even Richelieu and Louis XIII are involved, at least by name. Grandier's single-mindedness eventually backfires as he collects far too many enemies -- all of whom are bereft of any scruples or devotion to a sound justice system. When the prioress of a local convent goes off her gourd, her obsession with Grandier is the key to his undoing. His enemies harness her insanity, use several torturers/exorcisers to rouse similar libidinous and salacious feelings in the other nuns and then begin a campaign to blame the whole sordid situation on Urban's consorting with the Devil and then corrupting and/or possessing and/or fucking the nuns (naturally, in absentia and through the demons he controls). The exorcism circus continues for months, if not years, establishing itself as very lucrative -- if exhausting -- for the nuns, who are forced to put on sometimes-daily shows It's all utter hogwash, as most participants -- the accusers, Grandier and the nuns -- know. Some believe in the possessions, but they are willing participants like the exorcist, who delights in sexually torturing the nuns with enemas and other implements, all in the name of God. The book sounds more exciting than it actually is. There are long, historical sections as well as treatises on the mind of the average citizen of France (or the world, for that matter) at the time. These discussions of the state of psychology, science and sociology at the time are fascinating, if a bit long-winded. As well, the notion of demonic possession is placed into historical and scientific perspective. Huxley's fascination and experience with psychedelics and altered mental states serves him well here, I think. Huxley is extremely well- and widely read, freely mixing passages in the original, archaic French and Latin. The material is thoroughly footnoted and draws on both original source material as well as other studies of on this supposed possession done throughout the intervening centuries. His approach differs in that he examines the whole sordid tale through the lens of the 16th-century Frenchman's context, complete with the social and scientific mores of the day that an average citizen had at his or her disposal. He dismisses the reality of the possession and tries to understand what lessons we can learn about human nature, religion and our capability of understanding the universe to any reliable degree whatsoever. Again, this may still sound more interesting than it actually is. The prose is dense as well as a bit dated. I liked the overall story arc and was brought to the book by Ken Russell's 1970 film, The Devils, which was fantastic. I've included "notes, citations and errata" <https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3441> in a separate post. The Doors of Perception / Heaven and Hell (1954/1956) by Aldous Huxley This is a book in two parts. The first is called The Doors of Perception and is an analysis of one of Huxley's mescaline trips. It interweaves nigh-painfully evocative descriptions of what he saw on his 8-hour trip with a history of visions and visionaries. The discussion includes an examination of social implications of various intoxicants and their relative efficacy in providing escape, insight and advancement. The second book Heaven and Hell is a discussion of the thesis that much religious symbology is anchored in an effort to replicate/evoke/commemorate/trigger the majestic preternatural visions experienced on mescaline, peyote or sensory or nourishment deprivation. He discusses the relative facility of some artwork to transport individuals to other, more-visionary inner places. The efficacy of art to transport is relative to the age within which it was observed: modern society's surfeit of color and distraction serves to dampen the power of artwork that would otherwise be more easily able to induce visions and insight. While he does not offer a scientific or empirical base for his thoughts, his rumination on their ineffability -- and his attempts to make it more effable with some sort of framework, a model -- is very interesting. He seeks not to diminish religion but neither does he lend credence to any of their models as the one true way. The subconscious is to be mined for insight -- and insight exists outside of provability. His model is of the antipodes of the mind, places separate from the conscious and even most of the subconscious mind, where a clearer, unfiltered lens on reality exists. Or, at least, seems to exist. At that level of abstraction, it doesn't matter whether it's "real" in a physical or measurable sense, but that it influences your everyday consciousness and makes you a more observant, peaceful and reasonable person. These books, like The Devils of Loudon, are an investigation by a prodigiously learned, patient, curious, intelligent and open mind into difficult but overwhelmingly interesting topics for which there are no single answers, no roadmaps to enlightenment. The book includes voluminous appendices that comprise more than 1/3 of its pages. It's not a self-help book. It's not a scientific treatise. It's a notebook of observations written by a master. Recommended. I've included "notes, citations and errata" <https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3440> in a separate post. Die Kraft der Kälte (2015 - 2017/de) by Wim Hof and Koen de Jong I'd heard about Wim Hof before and was quite intrigued with his accomplishments, many of which are detailed in this book. The book is a series of stories about Wim Hof and how he came up with his regimen for resisting cold and disease. He is called the Ice Man because he can control his body temperature and metabolism directly rather than autonomically. His technique works not only for him, but also for others. The book details how he's been in sports laboratories to measure his metabolism, energy throughput, body temperature, pulse, blood pressure and so on. He's been in an ice bath for almost two hours without his body temperature dropping from 37ºC. He's run a marathon in Finland, above the Arctic Circle. It took him over five hours, but he made it and he didn't freeze. It was -16ºC. He ran in just jogging shorts and running sneakers. He did the same thing up to Base Camp 2 on Everest. On Kilimanjaro, he hiked up in 48 hours instead of the recommended 6 days, again in just shorts and no shirt. That time, he was accompanied by 24 people who'd trained in his technique. None of them were mountain climbers, some were afflicted with various diseases. All but one made it all the way up to 5500m and back down without assistance. None of them wore shirts or long pants. He's undergone experiments where he was injected with a light virus, that he then actively rejected. Soon after, a dozen of his students did the same thing, showing that the technique isn't just limited to a one-time physiognomy. The technique is pretty simple, outlined below (in German, because I read the book in German). "Tief in den Bauch einatmen, dann ausatmen. Tief in den Bauch einatmen, dann ausatmen. Tief in den Bauch einatmen, dann ausatmen. "Atmen sie in dem Tempo und Rhythmus, der Ihnen am angenehmsten ist. "30-mal wiederholen. "Beim letzten Mal komplett ausatmen, dann erneut sehr tief einatmen, wieder langsam ausatmen und warten." "Duschen sie wie gewohnt warm. Dann, immer noch mit warmem Wasser, beginnen Sie mit den Atemübungen. Atmen Sie langsam ein und aus. Machen Sie dies ein paarmal und drehen Sie die Dusche dann auf kalt. Versuchen Sie, ruhig weiterzuatmen. Stehen Sie eine Minute unter der kalten Dusche. In der zweiten Woche stehen Sie erst unter der warmen, dann zwei Minuten unter der kalten Dusche. In der dritten Woche stehen Sie erst unter der Warmen, dann drei Minuten unter der kalten Dusche. Under in der vierten Woche stehen Sie fünf Minuten unter der kalten Dusche, ohne vorher warm geduscht zu haben. "Gut ist es auch, wenn Ihre Hände und Füsse einmal pro Woche ein Eisbad nehmen. Füllen Sie eine Schüssel mit kaltem Wasser und fügen Sie Eiswürfel hinzu. [...] Halten Sie die Hände zwei Minuten lang in das Eiswasser, anschliessend die Füsse." That's pretty much it. October: The Story of the Russian Revolution (2017) by China Miéville This is a thoroughly researched retelling of the Russian revolution, as written by a master of Science Fiction and Fantasy. It takes the reader from February 1917 to October/November 2017. There follows a bit of an epilogue, sketching the following decades roughly, but that's not the focus of the book. The focus is on how the initial coup of Nicholas II transformed over nearly a year to the Bolshevik revolution. The summer sees a cavalcade of famous names, each placed in history: Lenin, Trotsky, Maslov, Kolchak, Semenov, Stalin, Sukhanov ... the list goes on an on. Allegiances whipsaw, bolsheviks gain in power over the summer, the second revolution in October was a near-inevitability in hindsight. A very interesting and very well-written unsnarling of an incredibly complicated and singularly important sequence of events. The hopefulness and solidarity of the socialists shines through at nearly every moment. They would, in the end, win for a only a few shining months before the clouds of totalitarianism descended. Highly recommended. I've included "notes, citations and errata" <https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3439> in a separate post. The Island of the Day Before (1994/en--1995) by Umberto Eco This is the story of Roberto de la Griva, an Italian stranded on an island somewhere in the Pacific Ocean. We hear of how he was at the wars between the Spanish, French and Italians over northern Italy. We hear of how he lost his father. We learn of his education in the salons of Paris. We hear how he is railroaded into a journey to the other side of the world by French intriguers high up in government bent on learning the secrets of the Meridians before the Dutch. We learn of various mechanisms by which one might determine the Meridian. Many are absolutely hare-brained and doubtless thoroughly researched by the author. When Roberto ends up stranded on the island, he has arrived there after his first ship -- The Amaryllis -- has shipwrecked. On that boat, he'd befriended an Englishman (Byrd) who'd seemingly discovered a way of determining the meridian by using "empathy at a distance", a ludicrous scientific theory whereby the blade that caused a wound can be used to influence the wound afterwards. Apply salve to the blade and the wounded is instantaneously soothed; apply fire and the wounded writhes in further pain. Since the action is instantaneous and occurs at a distance with no known physical mechanism, the clever Englishman wounds a dog in England, takes it with him on his journey, and then keeps the wound open for the entire journey to the Antipodes. The blade is subjected to actions at agreed-upon times, so that Byrd knows the time accurately enough in England to calculate his longitudinal position. This is obvious balderdash and good riddance to the lot of them. Roberto sees that Byrd is most likely seeing what he wants to see and likely has no more real idea where he is than countless sailors before him. When the ship wrecks, Roberto escapes with his life, bumping up against the Daphne, a pristine and (nearly) abandoned ship moored about a mile off of the eponymous island. Roberto investigates the boat, only to find unexpected scientific treasures that indicate that the Daphne was perhaps on the same mission as the Amaryllis. He suspects an "Intruder" on his boat and eventually meets Father Caspar (or does he?): a Jesuit, with whom he discusses various scientific topics like the position and motion of astral bodies, the composition of matter and so on. Many of these concepts are discarded theories from past centuries, lovingly brought back to life by Eco, the master of such arcana. In a way, the theories of today sound just as hare-brained, leading one to wonder with what laughter they will be greeted by subsequent generations. The good father can make not only a water-pumped musical organ but can also teach Roberto to swim and has also invented an underwater diving apparatus. It is a veritable tour-de-force of 16th-century science. He drowns in it, trying to get to the Island of the Day Before? Why is it called that? Because the good father believes he has navigated to the antemeridian, the Antipodes, so that the island lies constantly in yesterday relative to the Daphne's today. Was he correct? It is hard to know. He was trying to reach the island to get to the Speculum Melitensis, a device he'd constructed on the island that somehow encompasses every amazing bit of scientific knowledge and insight wrapped in one giant, delicate object. It was set up by Caspar and the sailors but has now likely dropped into disrepair. Subsequent chapters throw doubt on the reality of Father Caspar entirely. Roberto also spends an interminable time wondering about the fire dove that Caspar described seeing on the island, but he fails to descry it even once. This does not stop Eco -- in the form of the modern-day editor of Roberto's tale -- from going on at tedious length about everything he knows about doves and their significance in legend. The book picks up significantly in the final third, as Roberto spins onion-shells of stories around his lady love, Lydia, whom he forces into a tryst with his nonexistent brother Ferrante (resurrected from his psyche) so that Roberto's own love can be best expressed in a white-hot jealousy that he himself controls. Ferrante's track through Europe and purported/fictitious crossing with Roberto -- and all of the people Roberto met in Paris, like Richelieu and Mazarin -- is a rollicking tale, well-told. He ends up a pirate, heading for the exact island off of which the Daphne is anchored, on a ship crewed by micreants, with Lydia hidden on-board as an androgyne sailor and his nemesis lashed to a cross in the hold, serving in the role of the wounded dog in Ferrante's ship's longitudinal instrument. They visit island after island, one more bizarre than the next (similar to Gulliver in Swift's tale, with Roberto serving in the role of the narrator from Cloud Atlas). None of this actually happens, other than in Roberto's fevered mind, desperately trying to build a life with his love from hallucinatory fragments. As usual with Eco, it's nearly impossible to tell which way is up, which tale is true, whether Roberto is even on the boat or trapped on the island in the form of Ferrante, imagining himself elsewhere, or vice versa. The master at work. I've included "notes, citations and errata" <https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3442> in a separate post. The Making of Donald Trump (2016) by David Cay Johnston Johnston writes a book that outlines several of Trump's failed real-estate--development plans. But he, at the same time, documents how people were trying to sue Trump because they invested in him because of his good name only to find out that Trump is only tangentially involved with their real-estate investment. Are these people just stupid to think that Trump would be good for their property? Reading this book, there would be no other conclusion, since you don't hear about a single successful thing that Trump has done. He seems to somehow own property all over the world, but none of it belongs to him and he's only ever ripped off, failed or otherwise disappointed every investor who's ever associated with him. However, people still think his name is worth investing in, Companies pay him millions to use his name on their projects, even if he's not involved. There must be a reason for this, but Johnston's book does not provide it. Either everyone is an utter and irredeemable moron or Trump must have some successes to his name. There must be some -- even a majority of -- investors who've walked away satisfied, probably even coming back for more. Many of the investors in his get-rich-quick schemes kind of seem like people who are getting what's coming to them. They want to get rich, so they sink all of their money into a single opportunity with Trump. The man must have something going for him, or these people wouldn't do that. Trump inflates his own story and ego all the time, nearly constantly turning the conversation to himself (as Johnston documents). He is a germophobe with poor social skills (as Johnston also documents). And yet, people invest their entire fortune with him. Johnston is clearly only telling part of the story. He's telling the part of the story where we shouldn't vote for this man as President, where we shouldn't do deals with him, shouldn't invest money with him or go anywhere near him, where we shouldn't ever pay attention to him again. Agreed. I'd been doing that already, before I read this biography. However, the story Johnston tells is of sealed court decisions, suspicious and quite facially reprehensible behavior, but never a conviction. Trump's had his casino license for decades but Johnston seems to attribute it to luck. Trump's run multiple casinos for decades (even having the most successful casino in Atlantic City, according to Johnston) but he doesn't know anything about the business and everyone makes fun of how stupid he is. Trump is a bad businessman and a more terrible person, but everyone seems to be on Trump's side, helping him out. Why? The story Johnston tells is of a person who is horrible, stupid and financially inept, who hangs out with obvious criminals, but who succeeds despite all of that. He can't seem to fail enough to stop being a billionaire. It's hard to feel sorry for some of his "investors". Whenever a story ends with someone having signed without reading because of time pressure...I kind of get distracted. I know that old people get entrapped in stuff like this. In those cases, the charge is always of some information that Trump and his associates or partners failed to disclose properly. I'm almost sure it was disclosed somewhere -- it was just that people didn't read it in their eagerness to cash in. Otherwise, why would the court not nail Trump to the wall if it was so open-and-shut? But why no prosecution? Is it because Trump -- the bumbling, asocial fool -- is so slick? Or because America's system is so morally bankrupt? In a place like America, don't sign anything without reading it. It's your own fault if you're trying to get rich quick. The fact that these cases ended in a settlement with no criminal charges or sentence suggests to me that there's more to the story again. It's possible that such malfeasance is nearly impossible to prove in America, or that Trump really knows everyone and buys off judges and DAs -- but that's a much bigger charge. Instead, we're expected to believe that he just gets away with it because "reasons". No charges or sentence -- but we know he did it. Trump gets away with everything short of murder, associating with terrible people and having a very suspicious business. But he's still going. He's still in business. He's now President of the USA. The story Johnston tells goes nowhere in explaining how this could be. He just deepens the mystery. Trump says many things that are not true. Are they lies we should care about? Or did he change his mind? Or does he just not care what the answer is to a question he feels he shouldn't have to answer from someone who he feels doesn't have the right to ask it? Trump is an egomaniac, of course. He's a liar, of course. But, as a private citizen, he has no obligation to answer a journalist's question truthfully, especially when it concerns his near-future whereabouts or his personal affairs. It is here that, again, I feel Johnston is really reaching for straws, trying to paint every nugget of data he has on Trump as not only negative (and that it most certainly is and probably fairly) but damning. I think it unfortunately weakens his case because he's taken the shotgun approach, with topics of wildly varying import. The ones that sound important peter out into no prosecution (and hence possibly speculation) and the ones that don't sound important then just seem petty and cheap. He expects us to conclude that where there's smoke, there's fire, despite decades of smoke without ever having proof of fire. His evidence is persuasive, but I'm not a judge or a lawyer. I'm not in charge of prosecuting Trump: dozens of judges have had that pleasure. None of them have put him away. He's still going. A true believer would round up each allegation to a conviction, but thats not how our system works. Johnston seems to vaguely imply some sort of angel on Trump's shoulder, but it's more of a condemnation of the American system as a whole that Johnston isn't willing to come right out and make. The system is corrupt from top to bottom and a creature like Trump is perfectly suited to swim in those fetid waters. Johnston seems to be desperately trying to show how obvious it is that Trump shouldn't be a winner in a sane society. He makes a good case. The fact that Trump is winning more than ever suggest a whole other book that needs to be written -- this one about America. I've included "notes, citations and errata" <https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3450> in a separate post. In Cold Blood (1966) by Truman Capote This is the story of a brutal multiple-murder in Kansas in the late 1950s. Truman Capote puts together an exquisitely researched and well-told tale. It is a masterful exemplar of historical fiction, in that the facts are clearly represented, but they are decorated with fictive imagining of conversations that add a lot of flavor without distracting from the story or making it feel fake. In particular, a lot of the book involves the interaction between the two perpetrators before, during and after the murders -- something that Capote could only have gleaned from interviews and notes, but that he writes as if he'd been there. Expertly and nigh-poetically written. Highly recommended. I've included "notes, citations and errata" <https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3452> in a separate post. Planet Hulk (2006) by Marvel This is a comic-book series that follows the banishment of the Hulk from planet Earth by Reed Richards, Tony Stark, Dr. Strange and Black Bolt. The Hulk is enraged (obviously) and, instead of landing on the intended peaceful planet, where he would have been safe from harming anyone, he lands on a gladiator planet. Naturally, he excels there and ends up conquering the planet, solving all of their societal problems and ending up as a benevolent and much-loved dictator. At the very end, his rage is pushed to galactic levels by a final explosion from his ship that obliterates much of his capital city, killing his wife and unborn child and paving the way for World War Hulk. Some of the book were beautifully drawn -- the stories were less inspiring. It's difficult to write a book about a character who cannot be harmed, has ultimate power linked to rage and who has a healing factor. Everything feels like a deus ex machina and there's little tension. Still and all, a fun and distracting ride. World War Hulk (2007) by Marvel This is the follow-up to Planet Hulk. I started reading this one first, but was so intrigued by all of the flashbacks that I stopped and read the original series first. It's not that you wouldn't be able to figure it out without it -- the books not only repeated more than enough detail from Planet Hulk to let a reader know exactly what was going on, they also repeated the details of this current series again and again, each time from a different perspective -- that of the main characters of the book in which that segment of the story appeared. This is the story of the Hulk's enraged and revenge-seeking return to planet Earth, accompanied by his "war-bound" -- friends that he won though common combat on the planet to which he'd been inadvertently banished. Over the course of this series, the Hulk defeats absolutely every being sent against him, even heretofore unbeatable enemies like Black Bolt and the Sentinel. His powers are God-like and make storytelling somewhat difficult (again). There is at-times little tension, except when he is somehow and mysteriously weakened in order for him to be temporarily defeated by much-weaker opponents. The storytelling is quite uneven and plagued by everybody being awesome and smartest in the universe and unfathomably powerful, etc. etc. Is it Sentinel? Galactus? The Hulk? Dr. Strange? I lost track of the ordering and just enjoyed the at-times spectacular artwork. Don't some for the story, come for the pictures. The Fifth Season (2015) by N.K. Jemisin This is a very good book. It took me about a 100 pages to get into it, to get used to the storytelling rhythms of the author, to the at-times deliberate obfuscation and confusion. I feel that it took Jemisin that long to get into it as well, because the storytelling felt much more fluid in the later 70% of the book than in the first 30%. It is entirely possible that this is purely my fault, I'll admit. I'm not getting any less-set in my ways. I just offer it as a warning to those who may be similarly put-off by the storytelling style -- stick with it; it's worth it. This is the story of an alternate Earth -- one we learn follows our own auspicious, but ultimately doomed age -- on which "Father Earth" plays a much-more active and vicious role, through extreme geologic events. Humans have split into distinct species, with distinct powers. The primary focus of this book is on the orogenes -- humans who can draw power from any source, but primarily use the immense powers of the Earth itself. There is an arcane hierarchy amongst them. The least of them can manipulate the earth, but with no fine control. The most advanced of them can control molecules and draw immense power from disparate sources. There is so much going on in this book: The Guardians, the Fulcrum, the Leadership class, the Orogenes, the Geomesters, the Stone-eaters, Alabaster's power and history and rebelliousness, Syenites power and connection to the floating obelisks, supposed relics of long-dead and failed human civilizations that followed the loss of Father Earth's "child". These relics litter the planet in innumerable number, each serving as the tombstone of a civilization that failed to prepare properly for the often-long Fifth Seasons -- sometime decades-long intermezzos initiated by cataclysmic geologic events. The book is ostensibly about Syenite but is split between three tales, each of which tells of another facet of her life, though this doesn't become clear until late in the book (a feature that requires trust on the part of the reader -- a trust Jemisin is ultimately a worthy of). It felt a bit derivative at first, but then I realized that it was following in the lines of other books and series that I've really liked (e.g. Potter, Dune, Song of Ice and Fire) and that it was mixing these concepts in its own unique and well-written way. It's a rollicking tale -- at times almost too quick-moving, cramming in so much at once, but somehow suitably controlled -- and I'm looking forward to book two. I've included "notes, citations and errata" <https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3455> in a separate post. The Name of the Wind (2007) by Patrick Rothfuss This is book one of the Kingkiller Chronicles. It details the life of Kvothe, a preternaturally gifted young man. He is of the Edema Ruh, a family that is a traveling troupe of unparalleled talent. His parents are the leaders of this particular clan and teach him much of what they know. Along the way, they pick up an arcanist, Abernathy, who begins to teach the precocious young Kvothe much of what he would need to know to attend the University. Tragedy strikes when the boy is just 12 years old. His father has written a song about ancient tales of ancient powers whose feats and powers -- and evil -- have largely been lost in the mists of time: the Chandrian. These creatures were wakened by the constant repetition of their names -- names are powerful things -- and they sought out and savagely killed the entire troupe. All, save Kvothe, who survives with only the clothes on his back. He makes his way to a local city named Tarbean where he lives on the streets as a pitiful wretch, a beggar on the edge of existence. After several years, he finally manages to escape and makes his way to the University. There are adventures galore and Rothfuss tells the tale well. Kvothe gains entrance with his precocity, gains favor among some of the masters and makes lifelong enemies of others. His time spent studying with Abernathy serves him well. He ekes out a living playing the lute. Even at his young age, he's extremely talented from his genetics and his upbringing. Near the end of his first year of school -- after having more interesting and believable adventures, usually with his three bosom companions, Manet, Simmon and Wilem -- he finally gets wind of a possible Chandrian sighting and heads off on a grand adventure. He ends up battling a dragon (of sorts), learns more of Denna, a fair maiden who he will continue to pursue (kind of) and returns with enough wealth to finance his next semester of school. The story is told as a retrospective from Kvothe's (Kote's) inn, in a world grown gray and evil, long after the tales he tells. I've included "notes, citations and errata" <https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3462> in a separate post. The Mammoth Book of the Best of Best New SF (2007) by Gardner Dozois This is a gigantic collection of science-fiction short stories and novellas. From the title, it's the "best of the best". That is, there is a "best of" collection edited every year by Gardner Dozois -- and this is a "best of" just the stories already distilled from those works. There is a wide range of authors represented, though almost all of them have won one or many more of the most renowned and prestigious sci-fi and fantasy awards, like the Hugo and/or the Nebula. The stories are, for the most part, extremely good and well-worth reading. As someone who raised himself on a diet of golden-age and silver-age science fiction as well as a lot of 80s and 90s science fiction, it's really interesting to see where things have gone over the last 20 years during which I've been paying far less-close attention (though I never went away entirely: I follow some authors, like Gibson and Stephenson and Egan and Baxter very closely). I've included "notes, citations and errata" <https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3453> in a separate post. Charlie One (2016) by Seán Hartnett This is an autobiography by a man who grew up in the Republic of Ireland and joined the British Army in the early 2000s. At that time, the non-sectarian civil war had subsided to a great degree, but the British Army had a (supposedly) incredibly dense surveillance network in Norther Ireland, to keep an eye on the Republicans there. Seán rose quickly to become a quite adept signals technician and served at one of the most highly secretive and deep-undercover bases in Northern Ireland. They were allowed no contact with the outside world while on duty and had very little leave. The book details the major operations in which he was involved, focusing heavily on the technology of surveillance. It was more interesting than I expected it to be. The writing style is as you would expect from ex-military: Hartnett comes off extremely well in his re-tellings and there is lots of drinking. The Secret History of Twin Peaks (2016) by Mark Frost The book starts a bit slowly, but quickly picks up pace as the early mythology of the TP universe starts to weave into parts we know from the TV show. The story is told from the point-of-view of an FBI agent pulling together all of the threads, assisted immensely by a research document put together by someone called The Archivist. The agent’s contributions are solely in footnotes. It is there that ze [1] pursues the identity of the Archivist. The story weaves in every UFO and presidential and military conspiracy theory known in the States, with JFK and Nixon featuring prominently. The ur-myth of Twin Peaks is rooted in the terror that the world has at the discovery and use of nuclear weapons -- and the accompanying caution with which this discovery is observed by other beings. I say "other beings" because it is clear that the term "extra-terrestrial" is explicitly not appropriate. While the term "otherworldly" might fit, it's clear that there is a strong likelihood that these beings have been on the planet longer than sentient mankind. It’s an interesting story, nicely told. I read it after watching all three seasons and it was quite satisfying. In the end, the author’s initials TP stand for Tamara Preston. The identity of the Archivist? Major Garland Briggs. The format is not very E-book--friendly. It includes many newspaper clippings that can only be properly read -- especially in dimmed light -- by zooming in and panning. They do, however, lend a realistic, investigative feel to the material, though they slow down reading considerably. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] He or she. I've included "notes, citations and errata" <https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id= 3490> in a separate post. The Wise Man's Fear (2011) by Patrick Rothfuss This is the second book in the Kingkiller Chronicles, the story of Kvothe. This, too, is a story of a modern world that has forgotten its origins, its old power. Where each step along the path of knowledge is on a newly visible but well-worn path. A rediscovery of ancient truth, of deeper currents beneath the eddies of the superficial, modern, meaningless and ephemeral world. The deep origins of the world of the Fae, the shapers and their God, the original and most powerful one. As if all that ensued was a fading of the original nova, much as our universe is the mere echo of the big bang. That is, perhaps, the difference between science fiction and fantasy: one tells of expansion from strength to strength, a climb out of benighted ignorance, whereas the other tells of a relearning of ancient pinnacles, lost in the mists of time. The shape of its vast greatness can be vaguely discerned, but not in any way recaptured. Mortals live in their world of material goods, squabbling over table scraps, while deeper currents of power course through an unseen world, intrinsically entwined with theirs, but separate and accessible only through twisted passages like the Adem’s Lenthian or the Arcanist’s Heart of Stone, Alar or the Names of things. The lines of force of the world are accessible to precious few and then only through nigh-inscrutable byways with little relation to rhyme or reason. Only instinct and a meditative letting-go of all that one knows is sometimes the only way to perceive it, to say nothing of harnessing it. The more one sees of this deeper world, the more easily one dips into its powerful eddies and currents, the more unmoored one becomes from the mortal realm. That is the nature of the Sleeping Mind. This concept was also mentioned in the Star Wars canon: access to the Force is only possible through slippery, peripheral means, exercising muscles over which there is, at least at first, only autonomic control. The deep history is unknown to the surface dwellers, the Amyr are a warrior sect mere centuries old to them, the powerful evil of the Chandrian hidden and woven into inconsequence behind tapestries of children’s stories. The Chandrian are mixed up in this somehow, nearly invisible in the mortal realm and deeply feared in the world of the Fae. This tale is paralleled on our world as the superficial world in which most people live versus the deeper world of science and logic, the knowledge of which transforms so much magic to mundanity. We see in Star Wars as well, when Luke discards the light saber: he has realized that this is the crude toy of a child, that the Sleeping Mind is much more powerful without such crude tools. It explains Luke’s look of disappointment when Rey still didn’t understand that the light saber isn't anything compared to the true power of the force, of the Sleeping Mind. In a sense, these are all religious stories. This is a particularly interesting and good one. Kvothe continues at University, but then takes time off to seek patronage from the richest man in the kingdom, the Mair. He serves him well and climbs the echelons of power there before being sent on an excursion to wipe out a nest of bandits in the Mair's lands. This he does with a band of mercenaries, one of whom (Tempi) is Adem, a sort of Shaolin cult. They find the bandits, Kvothe uses his power to call the wind and his arcanist tricks to overwhelm them -- and catches a glimpse of their leader, who is Cinder, of the Chandrian. They collect a tremendous amount of gold from the defeated bandits' camp and head back. On the way, Kvothe is seduced by Felurian, a queen among the Fae, a mystical sidereal realm. We learn all about that realm, hear the Cthaeh's oracular predictions and then witness Kvothe's miraculous return to the mortal world. From here, he learns more of Tempi's martial art and then accompanies him back to his lands. Here he is trained in the art and passes an initiation rite, once again using the name of the wind. Instead of staying at the school, he leaves, defending the honor of the Edema Ruh as well as saving some damsels in distress along the way. He returns to the Mair, then to University. He doesn't have a patronage, but he does have guaranteed tuition as well as a salary from the Mair. He leverages these things to enrich himself and establish a solid life at the University. He now knows how to learn what Elodin is teaching (which is good, because that's the smartest man in the book). He finds Denna again and reconciles with her, after a fashion. The book ends with Kvothe (Kote) once again the innkeeper, long after the time of the tales he tells. We all wait with bated breath for the final installment. Recommended. I've included "notes, citations and errata" <https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id= 3492> in a separate post. The Obelisk Gate (2016) by N. K. Jemisin This is the second book of the Broken Earth series. We follow Essun on her journey south, away from the massive Rift at the equator -- the one that Alabaster ripped in order to break the stranglehold on humanity of the Fulcrum and the equatorial cities. Essun still seeks Nassun, her daughter, who is even further south. She joins up with Hoa, a strange child and Tonkee, a filthy but intelligent comm-less woman. They end up in Castrima, an underground chamber of crystals that are run by ancient technology to provide water and energy for its denizens. There is a sort of safety there, with an uneasy peace between humans and orogenes. We learn that Tonkee is actually a Leader who Essun met many years ago, when she was in-training at the Fulcrum. We also learn that Hoa is actually stone eater -- and that there are other stone eaters in Castrima. They have their own agenda. There are others that helping a city to attack Castrima (Rennanis). The crystal cave is indefensible. Even Alabaster -- who has also returned, with his own stone-eater Antimony in tow -- cannot help, as he is turning to stone himself (every time he practices orogeny -- or magic, as he teaches Essun). He teaches Essun much more of humanity's deep history and much more about how to control orogeny on a deeper level -- on the level of magic (the silver). Meanwhile Nassun is learning all of this on her own, without anyone's help, mastering magic in a way the Essun likely never will. Still, Essun uses the Obelisk Gate to fight off Renannis's attack -- and to strike at the heart of the city to destroy them once and for all. She also uses the tremendous power to hunt and trap (but not kill -- even she can't do that) stone eaters in the crystals of Castrima. She is the second person to control the gate in millenia, after Alabaster, who used the Gate to create the Rift that started the latest Season. The book ends with Alabaster having died (or been transformed), Castrima on the move and Nassun in Antarctica. We have learned much more about the myths underlying this world and this version of humanity's history -- but it's nothing compared to what comes in the third book. I've included "notes, citations and errata" <https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id= 3474> in a separate post. ]]> </content> </entry> <entry> <title type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[The Name of the Wind (The Kingkiller Chronicles Book 1) by Patrick Rothfuss (2007; read in 2017)]]> </title> <id>https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3462</id> <link href="https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3462"/> <updated>2018-01-15T23:16:11+01:00</updated> <author> <name type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Marco von Ballmoos]]> </name> <uri>https://earthli.com/users/marco</uri> </author> <summary type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA["Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is" ... ]]> </summary> <content type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Published by marco on 15. Jan 2018 23:16:11 Updated by marco on 27. Dec 2020 12:46:20 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I've failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an interest in this book, then I'm happy for you." This is book one of the Kingkiller Chronicles. It details the life of Kvothe, a preternaturally gifted young man. He is of the Edema Ruh, a family that is a traveling troupe of unparalleled talent. His parents are the leaders of this particular clan and teach him much of what they know. Along the way, they pick up an arcanist, Abernathy, who begins to teach the precocious young Kvothe much of what he would need to know to attend the University. Tragedy strikes when the boy is just 12 years old. His father has written a song about ancient tales of ancient powers whose feats and powers -- and evil -- have largely been lost in the mists of time: the Chandrian. These creatures were wakened by the constant repetition of their names -- names are powerful things -- and they sought out and savagely killed the entire troupe. All, save Kvothe, who survives with only the clothes on his back. He makes his way to a local city named Tarbean where he lives on the streets as a pitiful wretch, a beggar on the edge of existence. After several years, he finally manages to escape and makes his way to the University. There are adventures galore and Rothfuss tells the tale well. Kvothe gains entrance with his precocity, gains favor among some of the masters and makes lifelong enemies of others. His time spent studying with Abernathy serves him well. He ekes out a living playing the lute. Even at his young age, he's extremely talented from his genetics and his upbringing. Near the end of his first year of school -- after having more interesting and believable adventures, usually with his three bosom companions, Manet, Simmon and Wilem -- he finally gets wind of a possible Chandrian sighting and heads off on a grand adventure. He ends up battling a dragon (of sorts), learns more of Denna, a fair maiden who he will continue to pursue (kind of) and returns with enough wealth to finance his next semester of school. The story is told as a retrospective from Kvothe's (Kote's) inn, in a world grown gray and evil, long after the tales he tells. [Citations] "But I wouldn’t trust half these people to piss leeward without help.”" "Skarpi spoke to the man’s back. “It’s not as if I expect you to bound off looking for Haliax and the Seven yourself. ‘Small deeds for small men,’ I always say. I imagine the trouble is in finding the job small enough for men such as yourselves. But you are resourceful. You could pick trash, or check brothel beds for lice when you are visiting.”" "Then I felt something inside me break and music began to pour out into the quiet. My fingers danced; intricate and quick they spun something gossamer and tremulous into the circle of light our fire had made. The music moved like a spiderweb stirred by a gentle breath, it changed like a leaf twisting as it falls to the ground, and it felt like three years Waterside in Tarbean, with a hollowness inside you and hands that ached from the bitter cold." "With another nod toward the seated students, I left the lecture hall without a backward glance." This is a bit too much, too much like the fantasies every young person has. "“What do you know of poetry?” Ambrose said without bothering to turn around. “I know a limping verse when I hear it,” I said. “But this isn’t even limping. A limp has rhythm. This is more like someone falling down a set of stairs. Uneven stairs. With a midden at the bottom.”" "“No offense, but would you mind checking again? I’m not sure I can trust the literacy of someone who tries to rhyme ‘north’ with ‘worth.’ No wonder you have to hold women down to get them to listen to it.” Ambrose stiffened and his arm slid off the back of the chair to fall at his side. His expression was pure venom. “When you’re older, E’lir, you’ll understand that what a man and a woman do together—” “What? In the privacy of the entrance hall of the Archives?” I gestured around us. “God’s body, this isn’t some brothel. And, in case you hadn’t noticed, she’s a student, not some brass nail you’ve paid to bang away at. If you’re going to force yourself on a woman, have the decency to do it in an alleyway. At least that way she’ll feel justified screaming about it.”" "And there was Ambrose. To deem us simply enemies is to lose the true flavor of our relationship. It was more like the two of us entered into a business partnership in order to more efficiently pursue our mutual interest of hating each other." "[...] sing opposite you? Is one of the boys you came in with a castrati?”" "The man stepped into the light and the farmers’ excitement was smothered by the sight of the piecemeal leather armor and heavy sword that marked a mercenary. A lone mercenary was never reassuring, even in the best of times. Everyone knew that the difference between an unemployed mercenary and a highwayman was mostly one of timing." "“The truth is deeper than that. It’s…” Bast floundered for a moment. “It’s like everyone tells a story about themselves inside their own head. Always. All the time. That story makes you what you are. We build ourselves out of that story.”" "Bast leaned closer until their faces were mere inches apart, his eyes gone white as opal, white as a full-bellied moon. “You are an educated man. You know there are no such things as demons.” Bast smiled a terrible smile. “There is only my kind.” Bast leaned closer still, Chronicler smelled flowers on his breath. “You are not wise enough to fear me as I should be feared. You do not know the first note of the music that moves me.”" ]]> </content> </entry> <entry> <title type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[The Secret History of Twin Peaks by Mark Frost (2016) (read in 2017)]]> </title> <id>https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3490</id> <link href="https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3490"/> <updated>2018-01-14T23:33:47+01:00</updated> <author> <name type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Marco von Ballmoos]]> </name> <uri>https://earthli.com/users/marco</uri> </author> <summary type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA["Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is" ... ]]> </summary> <content type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Published by marco on 14. Jan 2018 23:33:47 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I've failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an interest in this book, then I'm happy for you." The book starts a bit slowly, but quickly picks up pace as the early mythology of the TP universe starts to weave into parts we know from the TV show. The story is told from the point-of-view of an FBI agent pulling together all of the threads, assisted immensely by a research document put together by someone called The Archivist. The agent’s contributions are solely in footnotes. It is there that ze [1] pursues the identity of the Archivist. The story weaves in every UFO and presidential and military conspiracy theory known in the States, with JFK and Nixon featuring prominently. The ur-myth of Twin Peaks is rooted in the terror that the world has at the discovery and use of nuclear weapons -- and the accompanying caution with which this discovery is observed by other beings. I say "other beings" because it is clear that the term "extra-terrestrial" is explicitly not appropriate. While the term "otherworldly" might fit, it's clear that there is a strong likelihood that these beings have been on the planet longer than sentient mankind. It’s an interesting story, nicely told. I read it after watching all three seasons and it was quite satisfying. In the end, the author’s initials TP stand for Tamara Preston. The identity of the Archivist? Major Garland Briggs. The format is not very E-book--friendly. It includes many newspaper clippings that can only be properly read -- especially in dimmed light -- by zooming in and panning. They do, however, lend a realistic, investigative feel to the material, though they slow down reading considerably. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] He or she. [Citations] "And then she started following Ed whenever he went to the Double R. Just staring at him and Norma through the window while he’s at the counter minding his own business. By now he’s getting the idea his little firecracker might be carrying an extra load of powder, and of course he doesn’t know what to do about" "PRESIDENT NIXON: In my experience, what defines a crime depends on who’s getting screwed." "The years I’d spent among authentic native people had left me bored to death with the garden-variety neuroses of “modern Americans.” The maladaptations of disaffected housewives and hostile teenagers were symptomatic to me of a larger, collective societal disorder—all right, I’ll Cliff Note them for you: rising corporate greed, enabled by institutional corruption, fueled and distorted by dirty money, leading to generalized rampant materialism, militant ignorance, military triumphalism and widespread loss of spiritual authenticity—that was eating away at the foundation of our culture." "We are creatures of darkness and light, capable of barbarism and limitless cruelty, and also love, and laughter and the creation of the most sublime beauty. We are both these things, clearly, but which are we more of? I don’t know the answer. Is “evil” a thing—independent, outside of us—or is it an essential part of who we are? I don’t know the answer. Life is but a dream from which we seem able to only rarely awaken. Whatever it means is beyond words. Words lose their meaning when you look at them too long. “God.” “Science.” “Meaning.” Everything melts into silence. The trades have eased. The whitecaps are gone and there’s sunlight on the water. I’m going to go bury my brother now." "After he was escorted in to view his brother’s body in the honeymoon suite that morning--wearing only a smile no mortician in his right mind would try to remove--Dwayne tried to persuade Sheriff Truman to press homicide charges, claiming that a copy of the Kama Sutra found at the scene was the murder weapon. That was grief disguised as bluster; Dwayne, I believe, despite their quarrelsome differences, truly loved his brother. Of course nothing came of Dwayne’s talk about manslaughter. If anything, as news of the circumstances of his death leaked out, there was--among his male friends--universal envy that Doug Milford had stage-managed the perfect exit from the cockeyed caravan of life. As one of them--who shall remain nameless--said to me that day: “If that was manslaughter, sign me up.”" "BRIGGS: You’re not who I thought you were. MILFORD: I’m the white rabbit, drawing you closer to the rabbit hole. And like the rabbit, I’m late for a very important date. You’re my replacement, Garland. You’re going to become the Watcher in the Woods. (The colonel rolled up his sleeve, revealing a series of three triangular marks or tattoos on the inside of his forearm.)" "“A secret’s only a secret as long as you keep it. Once you tell someone it loses all its power--for good or ill--like that, it’s just another piece of information. But a real mystery can’t be solved, not completely. It’s always just out of reach, like a light around the corner; you might catch a glimpse of what it reveals, feel its warmth, but you can’t know the heart of it, not really. That’s what gives it value: It can’t be cracked, it’s bigger than you and me, bigger than everything we know. Those tight-ass suits can keep their secrets, they don’t add up to anything. This deep in the game, pal, I’ll take mystery every time." "THE OWLS MAY INDEED NOT BE WHAT THEY SEEM BUT STILL SERVE AN IMPERATIVE FUNCTION: they remind us to look into the darkness." ]]> </content> </entry> <entry> <title type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[The Wise Man's Fear by Patrick Rothfuss (2011; read in 2017)]]> </title> <id>https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3492</id> <link href="https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3492"/> <updated>2018-01-14T23:03:32+01:00</updated> <author> <name type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Marco von Ballmoos]]> </name> <uri>https://earthli.com/users/marco</uri> </author> <summary type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA["Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is" ... ]]> </summary> <content type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Published by marco on 14. Jan 2018 23:03:32 Updated by marco on 27. Dec 2020 12:47:12 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I've failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an interest in this book, then I'm happy for you." This is the second book in the Kingkiller Chronicles, the story of Kvothe. This, too, is a story of a modern world that has forgotten its origins, its old power. Where each step along the path of knowledge is on a newly visible but well-worn path. A rediscovery of ancient truth, of deeper currents beneath the eddies of the superficial, modern, meaningless and ephemeral world. The deep origins of the world of the Fae, the shapers and their God, the original and most powerful one. As if all that ensued was a fading of the original nova, much as our universe is the mere echo of the big bang. That is, perhaps, the difference between science fiction and fantasy: one tells of expansion from strength to strength, a climb out of benighted ignorance, whereas the other tells of a relearning of ancient pinnacles, lost in the mists of time. The shape of its vast greatness can be vaguely discerned, but not in any way recaptured. Mortals live in their world of material goods, squabbling over table scraps, while deeper currents of power course through an unseen world, intrinsically entwined with theirs, but separate and accessible only through twisted passages like the Adem’s Lenthian or the Arcanist’s Heart of Stone, Alar or the Names of things. The lines of force of the world are accessible to precious few and then only through nigh-inscrutable byways with little relation to rhyme or reason. Only instinct and a meditative letting-go of all that one knows is sometimes the only way to perceive it, to say nothing of harnessing it. The more one sees of this deeper world, the more easily one dips into its powerful eddies and currents, the more unmoored one becomes from the mortal realm. That is the nature of the Sleeping Mind. This concept was also mentioned in the Star Wars canon: access to the Force is only possible through slippery, peripheral means, exercising muscles over which there is, at least at first, only autonomic control. The deep history is unknown to the surface dwellers, the Amyr are a warrior sect mere centuries old to them, the powerful evil of the Chandrian hidden and woven into inconsequence behind tapestries of children’s stories. The Chandrian are mixed up in this somehow, nearly invisible in the mortal realm and deeply feared in the world of the Fae. This tale is paralleled on our world as the superficial world in which most people live versus the deeper world of science and logic, the knowledge of which transforms so much magic to mundanity. We see in Star Wars as well, when Luke discards the light saber: he has realized that this is the crude toy of a child, that the Sleeping Mind is much more powerful without such crude tools. It explains Luke’s look of disappointment when Rey still didn’t understand that the light saber isn't anything compared to the true power of the force, of the Sleeping Mind. In a sense, these are all religious stories. This is a particularly interesting and good one. Kvothe continues at University, but then takes time off to seek patronage from the richest man in the kingdom, the Mair. He serves him well and climbs the echelons of power there before being sent on an excursion to wipe out a nest of bandits in the Mair's lands. This he does with a band of mercenaries, one of whom (Tempi) is Adem, a sort of Shaolin cult. They find the bandits, Kvothe uses his power to call the wind and his arcanist tricks to overwhelm them -- and catches a glimpse of their leader, who is Cinder, of the Chandrian. They collect a tremendous amount of gold from the defeated bandits' camp and head back. On the way, Kvothe is seduced by Felurian, a queen among the Fae, a mystical sidereal realm. We learn all about that realm, hear the Cthaeh's oracular predictions and then witness Kvothe's miraculous return to the mortal world. From here, he learns more of Tempi's martial art and then accompanies him back to his lands. Here he is trained in the art and passes an initiation rite, once again using the name of the wind. Instead of staying at the school, he leaves, defending the honor of the Edema Ruh as well as saving some damsels in distress along the way. He returns to the Mair, then to University. He doesn't have a patronage, but he does have guaranteed tuition as well as a salary from the Mair. He leverages these things to enrich himself and establish a solid life at the University. He now knows how to learn what Elodin is teaching (which is good, because that's the smartest man in the book). He finds Denna again and reconciles with her, after a fashion. The book ends with Kvothe (Kote) once again the innkeeper, long after the time of the tales he tells. We all wait with bated breath for the final installment. Recommended. [Citations] "Kote wiped at the bar for a long moment, as if reluctant to speak. “I think things are usually bad one way or another,” he said. “It might be that only us older folk can see it.”" "“It’s not just you,” Kote said. “Things are bad, and my gut tells me they’ll get worse yet. It wouldn’t hurt a man to get ready for a hard winter. And maybe see that he can defend himself if need be.” The innkeeper shrugged. “That’s what my gut tells me, anyway.” Graham’s mouth set into a grim line. He bobbed his head once in a serious nod. “I’m glad it’s not just my gut, I suppose.” Then he forced a grin and began to cuff up his shirt-sleeves as he turned to the door. “Still,” he said, “you’ve got to make hay while the sun shines.”" "Luckily, Manet played with the precision of a gear-clock: no mislaid tricks, no wild bids, no hunches." "Manet gave a low chuckle. “That is a woman and a half,” he said. “Which means she’s five times more woman than any of you know what to do with.” At a different time, such a statement might have goaded the three of us into swaggering protest. But Manet stated it without a hint of taunt in his voice, so we let it pass. Especially as it was probably true. “Not for me,” Simmon said. “She always looks like she’s getting ready to wrestle someone. Or go off and break a wild horse.” “She does.” Manet chuckled again. “If we were living in a better age they’d build a temple around a woman like that.”" "“Do you know what would happen if you tried to knife Ambrose?” Simmon asked. I thought for a second. It was like trying to remember what you’d eaten for breakfast a month ago. “There’d be a trial, I suppose,” I said slowly, “and people would buy me drinks.” Fela muffled a laugh behind her hand." "“But, if you’re teaching other students, why not me?” “Because you are too eager to be properly patient,” he said flippantly. “You’re too proud to listen properly. And you’re too clever by half. That’s the worst of it.” “Some masters prefer clever students,” I muttered as we emerged into a wide hallway. “Yes,” Elodin said. “Dal and Kilvin and Arwyl like clever students. Go study with one of them. Both our lives will be considerably easier because of it.”" "Elodin turned to look at me, his dark eyes serious. “You think you can trust me to teach you,” he said. “You think I will keep you safe. But that is the worst sort of foolishness.”" "But Elodin just looked at me. “What makes you think I’m not teaching you?” he asked, puzzled. “Aside from the fact that you refuse to learn.”" "But how quickly you can finger notes is the smallest part of music. The real key is timing. It’s like telling a joke. Anyone can remember the words. Anyone can repeat it. But making someone laugh requires more than that. Telling a joke faster doesn’t make it funnier. As with many things, hesitation is better than hurry." "“In point of fact,” Wilem said, “I have no use for blood, and play for money instead.” He fingered through his purse until he found a jot, which he pressed firmly onto the table. “I am willing to play a practice game, but if she finds the thought insulting, I will thrash her and take whatever she is willing to lay on the table.” Denna grinned at that. “You’re my kind of guy, Wil.”" "“Clever,” Wilem chuckled. “So clever. I went a year before I thought to ask that.” He eyed her in admiration. “Some energy is lost into the air.” He waved one hand. “Some goes into the objects themselves, and some goes into the body of the sympathist who is controlling the link.” He frowned. “That can get dangerful.”" "Sleat’s expression remained impassive, his body loose and relaxed. But I could see a slight tension in his shoulders. Very little escapes me when I’m watching closely. “They say that, do they?” I gave a shrug that put his to shame. My shrug was so nonchalant it would make a cat jealous. “I’m a musician. I play three nights a span in a busy tavern. I hear all manner of things.” I reached for my mug. “And what have you heard of me?”" "Elodin’s face lit up. “That’s it exactly!” he said. “Translation. All explicit knowledge is translated knowledge, and all translation is imperfect.”" "“Re’lar Kvothe,” he said seriously. “I am trying to wake your sleeping mind to the subtle language the world is whispering. I am trying to seduce you into understanding. I am trying to teach you.” He leaned forward until his face was almost touching mine. “Quit grabbing at my tits.”" "“It is a high place with a chance of falling. Things are more easily seen from edges. Danger rouses the sleeping mind. It makes some things clear. Seeing things is a part of being a namer.”" Elodin has the best lines. "“Things have changed. There are even fewer edges now than there were before. The world is less wild. There are fewer magics, more secrets, and only a handful of people who know the name of the wind.”" Elodin again. "“Remember: there are three things all wise men fear: the sea in storm, a night with no moon, and the anger of a gentle man.”" "On the other hand, I had a vast wealth of secondary knowledge. Ten thousand romantic songs, plays, and stories taken all together had to be worth something. And on the negative side, I’d seen Simmon pursue nearly every woman within three miles of the University with the doomed enthusiasm of a child trying to fly. What’s more, I had watched a hundred men dash themselves to pieces against Denna like ships attempting to ignore the tide." "Bredon’s expression softened, and his voice became almost like an entreaty. “Tak reflects the subtle turning of the world. It is a mirror we hold to life. No one wins a dance, boy. The point of dancing is the motion that a body makes. A well-played game of tak reveals the moving of a mind. There is a beauty to these things for those with eyes to see it.” He gestured at the brief and brutal lay of stones between us. “Look at that. Why would I ever want to win a game such as this?” I looked down at the board. “The point isn’t to win?” I asked. “The point,” Bredon said grandly, “is to play a beautiful game.” He lifted his hands and shrugged, his face breaking into a beatific smile. “Why would I want to win anything other than a beautiful game?”" "Modern philosophers scorn Teccam, but they are vultures picking at the bones of a giant. Quibble all you like, Teccam understood the shape of the world." "“Not pointless,” I protested. “It’s the questions we can’t answer that teach us the most. They teach us how to think. If you give a man an answer, all he gains is a little fact. But give him a question and he’ll look for his own answers.” I spread my blanket on the ground and folded over the threadbare tinker’s cloak to wrap myself in. “That way, when he finds the answers, they’ll be precious to him. The harder the question, the harder we hunt. The harder we hunt, the more we learn. An impossible question …” I trailed off as realization burst onto me. Elodin. That is what Elodin had been doing. Everything he’d done in his class. The games, the hints, the cryptic riddling. They were all questions of a sort. Marten shook his head and wandered off, but I was lost in my thoughts and hardly noticed. I had wanted answers, and in spite of all I had thought, Elodin had been trying to give them to me. What I had taken as a malicious crypticism on his part was actually a persistent urging toward the truth. I sat there, silent and stunned by the scope of his instruction. By my lack of understanding. My lack of sight." "“Yes. Law is bridle and bit. It controls from outside. The Lethani …” He pointed between his eyes, then at his chest. “… lives inside. Lethani helps decide. Law is made because many have no understanding of Lethani.”" "“No. If you fall and break a leg in mountain pass, it is still the pass. If I fail while following the Lethani, it is still the Lethani.” Serious. “This is why we are talking now. Today. With your knife. That was not the Lethani. It was not a right thing.” “I was afraid you would be hurt.” “The Lethani does not put down roots in fear,” he said, sounding as if he were reciting. “Would it be the Lethani to let you be hurt?” A shrug. “Perhaps.” “Would it be of the Lethani to let you be …” Extreme emphasis. “Hurt?” “Perhaps no. But they did not. To be first with the knife is not of the Lethani. If you win and are first with the knife, you do not win.” Vast disapproval." "Tempi made a triumphant gesture. “Yes! You can do many things when meeting tinker. But there is only one right thing.” He calmed himself a little. Caution. “But only doing is not the Lethani. First knowing, then doing. That is the Lethani.” I thought on this for a moment. “So being polite is the Lethani?” “Not polite. Not kind. Not good. Not duty. The Lethani is none of these. Each moment. Each choice. All different.” He gave me a penetrating look. “Do you understand?” “No.” Happiness. Approval. Tempi got to his feet, nodding. “It is good you know you do not. Good that you say. That is also of the Lethani.”" "It was during one of our many breaks that Tempi began my true instruction in the Ketan. Fool that I was, I’d assumed he had already been teaching me. The truth was, he had merely been correcting my more horrifying mistakes because they irritated him. Much the same way I’d be tempted to tune someone’s lute if they were playing off-key in the same room. This instruction was a different thing entirely. We started at the beginning of the Ketan and he corrected my mistakes. All my mistakes. He found eighteen in the first motion alone, and there are more than a hundred motions in the Ketan. I quickly began to have doubts about this apprenticeship." "There was only one person I’d ever heard whose voice was similar to this. Elodin. On rare occasions his voice would fill the air as if the world itself were listening. Felurian’s voice was not resonant. It did not fill the forest glade. Hers was the hush before a sudden summer storm. It was soft as a brushing feather. It made my heart step sideways in my chest." "felt as if this was the only time in my life I had been fully awake. Everything looked clear and sharp, as if I was seeing with a new set of eyes. As if I wasn’t bothering with my eyes at all, and was looking at the world directly with my mind. The sleeping mind, some piece of me realized faintly. No longer sleeping, I thought and smiled." "I could see a slight shimmer in the air around Felurian, some shred of her power returning. I ignored it as I struggled frantically to keep some part of what I had learned. But it was like trying to hold a handful of sand. If you have ever dreamed of flying, then come awake, dismayed to realize you had lost the trick of it, you have some inkling how I felt." "You might think these thousand facts gave me some insight into the Fae. That I somehow fit them together like puzzle pieces and discovered the true shape of things. A thousand facts is quite a lot, after all…. But no. A thousand seems like a lot, but there are more stars than that in the sky, and they make neither a map nor a mural." "“When you know the name of a thing you have mastery over it,” I said. “no,” she said, startling me with the weight of rebuke in her voice. “mastery was not given. they had the deep knowing of things. not mastery. to swim is not mastery over the water. to eat an apple is not mastery of the apple.” She gave me a sharp look. “do you understand?”" "Felurian had worked her way up from starlight and was wefting moonlight into the shaed. She didn’t look up from her work when she replied, “so many thoughts, my kvothe. you know too much to be happy.” That sounded uncomfortably like something Elodin would say." "“Oracle. How quaint. Do not try to pin me with small names. I am Cthaeh. I am. I see. I know.” Two iridescent blue-black wings fluttered separately where there had been a butterfly before. “At times I speak.”" "“What can you tell me of the Amyr?” “Kyxxs,” the Cthaeh spat an irritated noise. “What is this? Why so guarded? Why the games? Ask me of the Chandrian and have done.” I stood, stunned and silent. “Surprised? Why should you be? Goodness boy, you’re like a clear pool. I can see ten feet through you, and you’re barely three feet deep.”" "“Are you going to try to kill the Chandrian?” The voice sounded fascinated, almost taken aback. “Track and kill them all yourself? My word, how will you manage it? Haliax has been alive five thousand years. Five thousand years and not one second’s sleep. “Clever to go looking for the Amyr, I suppose. Even one proud as you can recognize the need for help. The Order might give it to you. Trouble is they’re as hard to find as the Seven themselves. Oh dear, oh dear. Whatever is a brave young boy to do?”" "The Cthaeh gave a thin, dry chuckle. “Blood, bracken, and bone, I wish you creatures had the wit to appreciate me. Whatever else you might forget, remember what I just said. Eventually you’ll get the joke. I guarantee. You’ll laugh when the time comes.”" "“What?” the Cthaeh asked. “Are you looking for a different why? Are you wondering why I tell you these things? What good comes of it? Maybe this Cinder did me a bad turn once. Maybe it amuses me to set a young pup like you snapping at his heels. Maybe the soft creaking of your tendons as you clench your fists is like a sweet symphony to me. Oh, yes it is. And you can be sure." "Without taking his eyes from Chronicler, Bast laid his bloody palm flat on the table. The wood groaned and the broken timbers snapped back into place with a sudden crackling sound. Bast lifted his hand, then brought it down sharply on the table, and the dark runnels of ink and beer suddenly twisted and shaped themselves into a jet-black crow that burst into flight, circling the taproom once. Bast caught it with both hands and tore the bird carelessly in half, casting the pieces into the air where they exploded into great washes of flame the color of blood. It all happened in the space of a single breath. “Everything you know about the Fae could fit inside a thimble,” Bast said, looking at the scribe with no expression at all, his voice flat and even. “How dare you doubt me? You have no idea who I am.”" "Jax spoke to the Cthaeh before he stole the moon, and that sparked the entire creation war. Lanre spoke to the Cthaeh before he orchestrated the betrayal of Myr Tariniel. The creation of the Nameless. The Scaendyne. They can all be traced back to the Cthaeh.”" "“It’s not over if you’re still here,” Chronicler said. “It’s not a tragedy if you’re still alive.” Bast nodded eagerly at this, looking back at Kvothe. Kvothe looked at both of them for a moment, then smiled and chuckled low in his chest. “Oh,” he said fondly. “You’re both so young.”" "She moved like nothing I had ever seen. It wasn’t that she was fast, though she was fast, but that was not the heart of it. Shehyn moved perfectly, never taking two steps when one would do. Never moving four inches when she only needed three. She moved like something out of a story, more fluid and graceful than Felurian dancing." "Vashet leaned forward seriously. “Part of the problem is with your language,” she said. “Aturan is very explicit. It is very precise and direct. Our language is rich with implication, so it is easier for us to accept the existence of things that cannot be explained. The Lethani is the greatest of these.”" "As my student, it is only tolerable because you are a barbarian. It’s as if Tempi brought home a dog that can whistle. The fact that you are out of tune stands quite beside the point.”" "Aturan was like a wide, shallow pool; it had many words, all very specific and precise. Ademic was like a deep well. There were fewer words, but they each had many meanings. A well-spoken sentence in Aturan is a straight line pointing. A well-spoken sentence in Adem is like a spiderweb, each strand with a meaning of its own, a piece of something greater, more complex." "Vashet was kind enough not to laugh at me again. “Shehyn is not the head of the school because no one can beat her. What an odd notion. What chaos that would be, everything tipping this way and that, changing with the luck of one fight or another.” She shook her head. “Shehyn is the head because she is a marvelous teacher, and because her understanding of the Lethani is deep. She is the head because she is wise in the ways of the world, and because she is clever at dealing with troublesome problems.”" "She sighed. “Kvothe, you need to remember. You come from a barbarous place. Much of what you grew up thinking is quite wrongheaded and foolish. None of it as much as the strange customs you barbarians have built around your sexplay.”" "Gran put her cup down gently on the table, her expression composed again. “If a leg goes bad, you cut it off.” She made a firm gesture with the flat of her hand, then picked up her slice of pudding and began to eat it with her fingers. “And some folk need killing. That’s all there is to it.”" ]]> </content> </entry> <entry> <title type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[American Gods by Neil Gaiman (2002) (read in 2018)]]> </title> <id>https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3496</id> <link href="https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3496"/> <updated>2018-01-14T14:15:29+01:00</updated> <author> <name type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Marco von Ballmoos]]> </name> <uri>https://earthli.com/users/marco</uri> </author> <summary type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA["Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is" ... ]]> </summary> <content type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Published by marco on 14. Jan 2018 14:15:29 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I've failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an interest in this book, then I'm happy for you." This is a fantasy novel about gods. It is less about the nature of faith and more about the gods themselves: on how they are called into being by the myriad flickers of belief of humans, gaining power as this belief hardens to nigh-fanaticism. All gods have power, but many have faded as their believers have faded. There are the old gods of early man, the gods of the Native Americans, the all-but-forgotten gods of even their precursors, the Egyptian pantheon, more recent African gods, the Norse pantheon, the plethora of spirits and pixies (piskies) and kobolds and gremlins and leprechauns of Europe. Gaiman doesn't once mention any Greek or Roman gods, oddly enough. When people came over from Europe to America, they brought their gods with them. They nurtured the flame of belief in their minds, carrying a simulacrum from one shore to another. The original god remained in Europe or Africa or Asia and was aware of its copy in the new world. The copy flourished after a fashion, but soon discovered that America was poor soil for gods. Faith and belief guttered and the gods were forgotten in favor of new gods, like Mammon. The copies become shadows, imbued with power, but left to fend for themselves in whatever way they could, going along to get along. The Gods of Egypt run a funeral home, ferrying the dead to their final destination, as they always have. Odin, the all-father, is a grifter, running one scheme/scam after another. Bathsheba is a prostitute, consuming her faithful to stay alive. The story centers on Shadow. He is serving time in prison for a crime of violence. He is due to be out soon. He has improved himself. He is a giant of a man, a former physical trainer. He has learned the ancient philosophers. He has learned coin tricks. His mind is clean and his soul is more-or-less pure. He is a stoic. He yearns to return to his wife and start a fresh life. He is allowed to leave a few days early for a horrible reason: his wife is dead. She was killed in a car accident with his best friend, who was also to be his future employer. Shadow's dreams are truncated neatly. He has nowhere to go; nothing to do. He has only a funeral to attend and then nothing. This is where Mr. Wednesday (named after his own day, HINT) swoops in to draw Shadow into his own plans. Shadow learns many things and meets many people (mostly gods) and learns that there is a war coming: between the old gods and the new. The new gods are television, media, the Internet and so on. The new gods have the arrogance of youth, brash and powerful, feeling the power of the faith of millions coursing through their veins. They don't see the undercurrents of rot in America; they don't see that faith cannot take root in fallow soil. They don't know, as many of the old gods do, that they are doomed. Perhaps some do and they fear their demise and, American to the core, they ignore what they know and plow ahead, heedless of the damage and harm they cause for a few more moments of fleeting power. The land is represented by a buffalo and is the most powerful, but least felt or seen. He/she appears only in Shadow's dreams. Whiskey Jack is also of the land, an odd bystander who exists outside of belief. The native gods are the ones most comfortable in this landscape, as is to be expected. Wednesday schemes with 'Low Key' Lyesmith (guess who?) to bring the "war" to a head, a bloodbath of heretofore unheard-of proportions, all to fuel their power: Odin/Wotan's because the battle would be dedicated to him and Loki's because chaos is his milieu. Shadow foils this plan with his stoic self-sacrifice that ends up not killing him, but making him stronger. He tells the gods that they have been fooled into hating each other, into killing each other. They disperse, most going back to their meager existence on the edges of humanity. The status quo continues. Gaiman weaves this tale around many side-narratives and fables of how various gods came to be, how they were carried over, how they survived. Recommended. [Citations] "You’re walking on gallows ground, and there’s a hempen rope around your neck and a raven-bird on each shoulder, waiting for your eyes, and the gallows tree has deep roots, for it stretches from heaven to hell, and our world is only the branch from which the rope is swinging." "Death had vanished from the streets of America, thought Shadow; now it happened in hospital rooms and in ambulances. We must not startle the living, thought Shadow. Mr. Ibis had told him that they move the dead about in some hospitals on the lower level of apparently empty covered gurneys, the deceased traveling their own paths in their own covered ways." "Mad Sweeney himself began to throw both details and irrelevancies into Ibis’s narrative (“…such a girl she was, with breasts cream-colored and spackled with freckles, with the tips of them the rich reddish pink of the sunrise on a day when it’ll be bucketing down before noon but glorious again by supper…”) and then Sweeney was trying, with both hands, to explain the history of the gods in Ireland, wave after wave of them as they came in from Gaul and from Spain and from every damn place, each wave of them transforming the last gods into trolls and fairies and every damn creature until Holy Mother Church herself arrived and every god in Ireland was transformed into a fairy or a saint or a dead king without so much as a by-your-leave…" "They think,” said Shadow, “that they think they’re the white hats.” “Of course they do. There’s never been a true war that wasn’t fought between two sets of people who were certain they were in the right. The really dangerous people believe that they are doing whatever they are doing solely and only because it is without question the right thing to do. And that is what makes them dangerous.” “And you?” asked Shadow. “Why are you doing what you’re doing?” “Because I want to,” said Wednesday. And then he grinned. “So that’s all right.” "There are stories that are true, in which each individual’s tale is unique and tragic, and the worst of the tragedy is that we have heard it before, and we cannot allow ourselves to feel it too deeply. We build a shell around it like an oyster dealing with a painful particle of grit, coating it with smooth pearl layers in order to cope. This is how we walk and talk and function, day in, day out, immune to others’ pain and loss. If it were to touch us it would cripple us or make saints of us; but, for the most part, it does not touch us. We cannot allow it to." "Tonight, as you eat, reflect if you can: there are children starving in the world, starving in numbers larger than the mind can easily hold, up in the big numbers where an error of a million here, a million there, can be forgiven. It may be uncomfortable for you to reflect upon this or it may not, but still, you will eat." "We need individual stories. Without individuals we see only numbers: a thousand dead, a hundred thousand dead, “casualties may rise to a million.” With individual stories, the statistics become people—but even that is a lie, for the people continue to suffer in numbers that themselves are numbing and meaningless" "Look, see the child’s swollen, swollen belly, and the flies that crawl at the corners of his eyes, his skeletal limbs: will it make it easier for you to know his name, his age, his dreams, his fears? To see him from the inside? And if it does, are we not doing a disservice to his sister, who lies in the searing dust beside him, a distorted, distended caricature of a human child? And there, if we feel for them, are they now more important to us than a thousand other children touched by the same famine, a thousand other young lives who will soon be food for the flies’ own myriad squirming children?" "Wututu was put in with the children, not with the women; and she was not chained, merely locked in. Agasu, her brother, was forced in with the men, in chains, packed like herrings. It stank under that deck, although the crew had scrubbed it down since their last cargo. It was a stink that had entered the wood: the smell of fear and bile and diarrhea and death, of fever and madness and hate." "She could have told you of her daughter, twelve years old and already eight months pregnant by an overseer, and how they dug a hole in the red earth to take her daughter’s pregnant belly, and then they whipped her until her back had bled. Despite the carefully dug hole, her daughter had lost her baby and her life on a Sunday morning, when all the white folks were in church…" "America has invested her religion as well as her morality in sound income-paying securities. She has adopted the unassailable position of a nation blessed because it deserves to be blessed; and her sons, whatever other theologies they may affect or disregard, subscribe unreservedly to this national creed. "—AGNES REPPLIER, TIMES AND TENDENCIES" "“It’s a holy place,” said Wednesday. “That’s the American Way—they need to give people an excuse to come and worship. These days, people can’t just go and see a mountain. Thus, Mister Gutzon Borglum’s tremendous presidential faces. Once they were carved, permission was granted, and now the people drive out in their multitudes to see something in the flesh that they’ve already seen on a thousand postcards.”" "They will win,” said Whiskey Jack flatly. “They won already. You lost already. Like the white man and my people. They won. And when they lost, they made treaties. Then they broke the treaties. And they won again. I’m not fighting for another lost cause." "It’s like the idiots who figure that hummingbirds worry about their weight or tooth decay or some such nonsense, maybe they just want to spare hummingbirds the evils of sugar,” explained Wednesday. “So they fill the hummingbird feeders with fucking NutraSweet. The birds come to the feeders and they drink it. Then they die, because their food contains no calories even though their little tummies are full. That’s Paul Bunyan for you. Nobody ever told Paul Bunyan stories. Nobody ever believed in Paul Bunyan. He came staggering out of a New York ad agency in 1910 and filled the nation’s myth stomach with empty calories." "They took our lands, they settled here, now they’re leaving. They go south. They go west. Maybe if we wait for enough of them to move to New York and Miami and L.A. we can take the whole of the middle back without a fight.”" "I believe that life is a game, life is a cruel joke and that life is what happens when you’re alive and that you might as well lie back and enjoy it." "“This isn’t about what is,” said Mr. Nancy. “It’s about what people think is. It’s all imaginary anyway. That’s why it’s important. People only fight over imaginary things.”" "You got to understand the god thing. It’s not magic. Not exactly. It’s about focus. It’s about being you, but the you that people believe in. It’s about being the concentrated, magnified essence of you. It’s about becoming thunder, or the power of a running horse, or wisdom. You take all the belief, all the prayers, and they become a kind of certainty, something that lets you become bigger, cooler, more than human. You crystallize.” He paused. “And then one day they forget about you, and they don’t believe in you, and they don’t sacrifice, and they don’t care, and the next thing you know you’re running a three-card monte game on the corner of Broadway and Forty-third.”" "“Think of us as symbols—we’re the dream that humanity creates to make sense of the shadows on the cave wall." “It’s not going to be a war.” “Then what is it?” Whiskey Jack crushed the beer can between his hands, pressing it until it was flat. “Look,” he said, and pointed to the waterfall. The sun was high enough that it caught the waterfall spray: a rainbow nimbus hung in the air. Shadow thought it was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen. “It’s going to be a bloodbath,” said Whiskey Jack, flatly. Shadow saw it then. He saw it all, stark in its simplicity. He shook his head, then he began to chuckle, and he shook his head some more, and the chuckle became a full-throated laugh. “You okay?” “I’m fine,” said Shadow. “I just saw the hidden Indians. Not all of them. But I saw them anyhow.” “Probably Ho Chunk, then. Those guys never could hide worth a damn.” He looked up at the sun. “Time to go back,” he said. He stood up. “It’s a two-man con,” said Shadow. “It’s not a war at all, is it?” Whiskey Jack patted Shadow’s arm. “You’re not so dumb,” he said. "She wondered how far he had traveled, and what it had cost him to return. He was not the first whose return she had initiated, and she knew that, soon enough, the million-year stare would fade, and the memories and the dreams that he had brought back from the tree would be elided by the world of things you could touch. That was the way it always went." "People believe, thought Shadow. It’s what people do. They believe. And then they will not take responsibility for their beliefs; they conjure things, and do not trust the conjurations. People populate the darkness; with ghosts, with gods, with electrons, with tales. People imagine, and people believe: and it is that belief, that rock-solid belief, that makes things happen." "Shadow felt sorry for them all. There was an arrogance to the new ones. Shadow could see that. But there was also a fear. They were afraid that unless they kept pace with a changing world, unless they remade and redrew and rebuilt the world in their image, their time would already be over." "One describes a tale best by telling the tale. You see? The way one describes a story, to oneself or to the world, is by telling the story. It is a balancing act and it is a dream. The more accurate the map, the more it resembles the territory. The most accurate map possible would be the territory, and thus would be perfectly accurate and perfectly useless. The tale is the map which is the territory. You must remember this. "—FROM THE NOTEBOOKS OF MR. IBIS" "He sat down on a grassy bank and looked at the city that surrounded him, and thought, one day he would have to go home. And one day he would have to make a home to go back to. He wondered whether home was a thing that happened to a place after a while, or if it was something that you found in the end, if you simply walked and waited and willed it long enough." ]]> </content> </entry> <entry> <title type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[The Mammoth Book of the Best of Best New SF by Gardner Dozois (2007) (read in 2017)]]> </title> <id>https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3453</id> <link href="https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3453"/> <updated>2017-12-03T22:35:19+01:00</updated> <author> <name type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Marco von Ballmoos]]> </name> <uri>https://earthli.com/users/marco</uri> </author> <summary type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA["Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is" ... ]]> </summary> <content type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Published by marco on 3. Dec 2017 22:35:19 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I've failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an interest in this book, then I'm happy for you." This is a gigantic collection of science-fiction short stories and novellas. From the title, it's the "best of the best". That is, there is a "best of" collection edited every year by Gardner Dozois -- and this is a "best of" just the stories already distilled from those works. There is a wide range of authors represented, though almost all of them have won one or many more of the most renowned and prestigious sci-fi and fantasy awards, like the Hugo and/or the Nebula. The stories are, for the most part, extremely good and well-worth reading. As someone who raised himself on a diet of golden-age and silver-age science fiction as well as a lot of 80s and 90s science fiction, it's really interesting to see where things have gone over the last 20 years during which I've been paying far less-close attention (though I never went away entirely: I follow some authors, like Gibson and Stephenson and Egan and Baxter very closely). [Citations] [Salvador by Lucius Shepard] "He felt weak and weakening, as if threads of himself were being spun loose and sucked into the blackness. He had popped three ampules prior to the firefight, and his experience of Tecolutla had been a kind of mad whirling dance through the streets, spraying erratic bursts that appeared to be writing weird names on the walls. The leader of the Sandinistas had worn a mask – a gray face with a surprised hole of a mouth and pink circles around the eyes. A ghost face. Dantzler had been afraid of the mask and had poured round after round into it." "He saw nothing aberrant in this; even the doctors would admit that men were little more than organized pretense. If he was different from other men, it was only that he had a deeper awareness of the principles on which his personality was founded." [Flying Saucer Rock and Roll by Howard Waldrop] "The sun had just gone down, and Sparks was a silhouette against the purpling sky that poked between the buildings." "Leroy sang like he was Frankie Lymon – not just some kid from the projects who wanted to be him – and the Kool-Tones were the Teenagers, and they began to pull and heave that song like it was a dead whale. And soon they had it in the water, and then it was swimming a little, then it was moving, and then the sonofabitch started spouting water, and that was the place where Leroy went into the falsetto “wyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy,” and instead of chopping it where it should have been, he kept on." [Dinner in Audogast by Bruce Sterling] "The man inched into the lamplight like a crippled insect. His voluminous dust-gray cloak was stained with sweat, and nameless exudations. He was an albino. His pink eyes were shrouded with cataracts, and he had lost a foot, and several fingers, to leprosy. One shoulder was much lower than the other, suggesting a hunchback, and the stub of his shin was scarred by the gnawing of canal-worms." "death comes in its own time, as it will to all of you.” Manimenesh cleared his throat. “Can you see our destinies, then?” “I see the world,” said the Sufferer. “To see the fate of one man is to follow a single ant in a hill.”" [The Winter Market by William Gibson] "He cruises Greater Van in a spavined truck-thing chopped down from an ancient Mercedes airporter, its roof lost under a wallowing rubber bag half-filled with natural gas. He looks for things that fit some strange design scrawled on the inside of his forehead by whatever serves him as Muse." "Trash fires gutter in steel canisters around the Market. The snow still falls and kids huddle over the flames like arthritic crows, hopping from foot to foot, wind whipping their dark coats. Up in Fairview’s arty slum-tumble, someone’s laundry has frozen solid on the line, pink squares of bedsheet standing out against the background dinge and the confusion of satellite dishes and solar panels. Some ecologist’s eggbeater windmill goes round and round, round and round, giving a whirling finger to the Hydro rates." "She’s big because she was what they are, only more so. She knew, man. No dreams, no hope. You can’t see the cages on those kids, Casey, but more and more they’re twigging to it, that they aren’t going anywhere.”" "I didn’t attain a state of partytime that night. Neither did I exhibit adult common sense and give up, go home, watch some ancient movie, and fall asleep on my futon. The tension those three weeks had built up in me drove me like the mainspring of a mechanical watch, and I went ticking off through nighttown, lubricating my more or less random progress with more drinks. It was one of those nights, I quickly decided, when you slip into an alternate continuum, a city that looks exactly like the one where you live, except for the peculiar difference that it contains not one person you love or know or have even spoken to before." "And I know something now. I know that if I hadn’t happened in there, hadn’t seen them, I’d have been able to accept all that came later. Might even have found a way to rejoice on her behalf, or found a way to trust in whatever it is that she’s since become, or had built in her image, a program that pretends to be Lise to the extent that it believes it’s her. I could have believed what Rubin believes, that she was so truly past it, our hi-tech Saint Joan burning for union with that hardwired godhead in Hollywood, that nothing mattered to her except the hour of her departure. That she threw away that poor sad body with a cry of release, free of the bonds of polycarbon and hated flesh. Well, maybe, after all, she did. Maybe it was that way. I’m sure that’s the way she expected it to be." "The heat was like syrup. The sun drove shadows deep into corners, left them flattened at the feet of the people on the sidewalk. It made the plate glass of the store window into a dark negative of the positive print that was Wornall Road. August." [The Pure Product by John Kessel] "We got into the front seat, beneath the trees on a street at the edge of the park. It was quiet. I reached over, grabbed her hair at the nape of her neck, and jerked her face toward me, covering her little mouth with mine. Surprise: she threw her arms around my neck and slid across the seat into my lap. We did not talk. I yanked at the shorts; she thrust her hand into my pants. St. Augustine asked the Lord for chastity, but not right away." "On the Great American Plains, the summer nights are not silent. The fields sing the summer songs of insects – not individual sounds, but a high-pitched drone of locusts, crickets, cicadas, small chirping things for which I have no names. You drive along the superhighway and that sound blends with the sound of wind rushing through your opened windows, hiding the thrum of the automobile, conveying the impression of incredible velocity. Wheels vibrate, tires beat against the pavement, the steering wheel shudders, alive in your hands, droning insects alive in your ears. Reflecting posts at the roadside leap from the darkness with metronomic regularity, glowing amber in the headlights, only to vanish abruptly into the ready night when you pass. You lose track of time, how long you have been on the road, where you are going. The fields scream in your ears like a thousand lost, mechanical souls, and you press your foot to the accelerator, hurrying away." "When the videotape started repeating itself I got bored, crossed the street, and lost myself in the crowd." This story reminds me of the Strugatsky brothers, Octavia Butler, Robert Harris (Hannibal), Robert Silverberg (Up the Line) [Even the Queen by Connie Willis] A perfectly lovely story about women's liberation from an age-old curse...and the naïve fools who would try to unliberate them. [None So Blind by Joe Haldeman] "When a baritone saxophone player has to transpose sheet music from cello, he (few women are drawn to the instrument) merely pretends that the music is written in treble clef rather than bass, eyeballs it up an octave, and then plays without the octave key pressed down. It’s so simple a child could do it, if a child wanted to play such a huge, ungainly instrument. As his eye dances along the little fence posts of notes his fingers automatically perform a one-to-one transformation that is the theoretical equivalent of adding and subtracting octaves, fifths, and thirds, but all of the actual mental work is done when he looks up in the top right corner of the first page and says, “Aw hell. Cello again.” Cello parts aren’t that interesting to saxophonists." [Mortimer Gray's History of Death by Brian Stableford] "“Planning a life,” I explained to a whole series of faces, indistinguishable by virtue of having been sculptured according to the latest theory of telegenicity, “is an exercise in story-making. Living people are forever writing the narratives of their own lives, deciding who to be and what to do, according to various aesthetic criteria. In olden days, death was inevitably seen as an interruption of the business of life, cutting short life-stories before they were – in the eyes of their creators – complete. Nowadays, people have the opportunity to plan whole lives, deciding exactly when and how their life-stories should reach a climax and a conclusion. We may not share their aesthetic sensibilities, and may well think them fools, but there is a discernible logic in their actions. They are neither mad nor evil.”" "He argued that syphilis was primarily responsible for the rise and spread of Puritanism, repressive sexual morality being the only truly effective weapon against its spread. He then deployed well-tried sociological arguments to the effect that Puritanism and its associated habits of thought had been importantly implicated in the rapid development of Capitalism in the Western World, in order that he might claim that syphilis ought to be regarded as the root cause of the economic and political systems that came to dominate the most chaotic, the most extravagantly progressive, and the most extravagantly destructive centuries of human history." "Throughout the next two centuries, Gray argued, war and publicity were entwined in a Gordian knot. Control of the news media became vital to propagandist control of popular morale, and governments engaged in war had to become architects of the mythology of war as well as planners of military strategy. Heroism and jingöism became the currency of consent; where governments failed to secure the public image of the wars they fought, they fell." "Gray dissented from the view of other modern historians who saw the World Wars as an unmitigated disaster and a horrible example of the barbarity of ancient man. He agreed that the nationalism that had replaced the great religions as the main creator and definer of a sense of community was a poor and petty thing, and that the massive conflicts that it engendered were tragic – but it was, he asserted, a necessary stage in historical development. The empires of faith were, when all was said and done, utterly incompetent to their self-defined task, and were always bound to fail and to disintegrate. The groundwork for a genuine human community, in which all mankind could properly and meaningfully join, had to be relaid, and it had to be relaid in the common experience of all nations, as part of a universal heritage." "Sometimes, I thought of this failure as a result of cowardice, or evidence of the decadence that the fabers and other subspecies attributed to the humans of Earth. I sometimes imagined myself as an insect born at the bottom of a deep cave, who had – thanks to the toil of many preceding generations of insects – been brought to the rim from which I could look out at the great world, but who dared not take the one final step that would carry me out and away." "[...] death, Gray insisted, would forever remain a fact of life. The annihilation of the individual human body and the individual human mind could never become impossible, no matter how far biotechnology might advance or how much progress the Cyborganizers might make in downloading minds into entirely new matrices. The victory that had been achieved, he argued, was not an absolute conquest but rather the relegation of death to its proper place in human affairs. Its power was now properly circumscribed, but had to be properly respected." "One or two Thanatic apologists and fellow-travelers publicly expressed their hope that Gray, having completed his thesis, would now recognize the aesthetic propriety of joining their ranks. Khan Mirafzal, when asked to relay his opinion back from an outward-bound microworld, opined that this was quite unnecessary, given that Mortimer Gray and all his kind were already immured in a tomb from which they would never be able to escape." "[...] remind myself that it is not her fault that the war turned her into an old woman, or that her mind is full of holes and everything new drains out. But it’s not my fault either. I don’t even try to curb my feelings and I know that they rise up to my face. The only way to be true is to be true from the inside and I am not. I am full of unchristian feelings. My mother’s infirmity is her trial, and it is also mine." [Wang's Carpets by Greg Egan] "Paolo slowed his clock rate a thousandfold, allowing C-Z to circumnavigate the planet in twenty subjective seconds," How do you have relationships when everyone is on their own clock? The problem exists today, with many choosing to live in the absolutely ephemeral, while others wait and see and digest. By the time the second group is ready, the first group doesn't even remember the event anymore. "In a quarter of a billion years, would the citizens of Carter-Zimmerman be debating the ethics of intervening to rescue the Orpheans – or would they all have lost interest, and departed for other stars, or modified themselves into beings entirely devoid of nostalgic compassion for organic life?" "Did human consciousness bootstrap all of space-time into existence, in order to explain itself? Or had a neutral, pre-existing universe given birth to a billion varieties of conscious life, all capable of harboring the same delusions of grandeur – until they collided with each other? Anthrocosmology was used to justify the inward-looking stance of most polises: if the physical universe was created by human thought, it had no special status which placed it above virtual reality. It might have come first – and every virtual reality might need to run on a physical computing device, subject to physical laws – but it occupied no privileged position in terms of “truth” versus “illusion.” If the ACs were right, then it was no more honest to value the physical universe over more recent artificial realities than it was honest to remain flesh instead of software, or ape instead of human, or bacterium instead of ape." "Paolo was relieved to be back to normal; ceremonial regression to the ancestral form was a venerable C-Z tradition – and being human was largely self-affirming, while it lasted – but every time he emerged from the experience, he felt as if he’d broken free of billion-year-old shackles. There were polises on Earth where the citizens would have found his present structure almost as archaic: a consciousness dominated by sensory perception, an illusion of possessing solid form, a single time coordinate." "Life – embedded in the accidental computations of Wang’s Carpets, with no possibility of ever relating to the world outside. This was an affront to Carter-Zimmerman’s whole philosophy: if nature had evolved “organisms” as divorced from reality as the inhabitants of the most inward-looking polis, where was the privileged status of the physical universe, the clear distinction between truth and illusion?" [The Dead by Michael Swanwick] "The slums below me stretched to infinity. They were a vast necropolis, a never-ending city of the dead. I thought of the millions out there who were never going to hold down a job again. I thought of how they must hate me – me and my kind – and how helpless they were before us. And yet. There were so many of them and so few of us. If they were to all rise up at once, they’d be like a tsunami, irresistible. And if there was so much as a spark of life left in them, then that was exactly what they would do. That was one possibility. There was one other, and that was that nothing would happen. Nothing at all." [A Dry, Quiet War by Tony Daniel] "“Soldiers who don’t go home after the war. The fighting gets into them, and they don’t want to give it up, or can’t. Sometimes they have . . . modifications that won’t let them give it up. They wander the timeways – and since they don’t belong to the time they show up in, they’re hard to kill. In the early times, where people don’t know about the war or have only heard rumors of it, they had lots of names. Vampires. Hagamonsters. Zombies.”" "About how there is not enough dark matter to pull the cosmos back together again, not enough mass to undulate in an eternal cycle. Instead, there is an end, and all the stars are either dead or dying, and all that there is is nothing but dim night. I told her about the twilight armies gathered there, culled from all times, all places. Creatures, presences, machines, weapons fighting galaxy-to-galaxy, system-to-system, fighting until the critical point is reached when entropy flows no more, but pools, pools in endless stagnant pools of nothing. No light. No heat. No effect. And the universe is dead, and so those who remain . . . inherit the dark field. They win." [Story of Your Life by Ted Chiang] "just mean that the human auditory system isn’t an absolute acoustic instrument; it’s optimized to recognize the sounds that a human larynx makes. With an alien vocal system, all bets are off.” I shrugged. “Maybe we’ll be able to hear the difference between alien phonemes, given enough practice, but it’s possible our ears simply can’t recognize the distinctions they consider meaningful. In that case we’d need a sound spectrograph to know what an alien is saying.”" "And after graduation, you’ll be heading for a job as a financial analyst. I won’t understand what you do there, I won’t even understand your fascination with money, the preeminence you gave to salary when negotiating job offers. I would prefer it if you’d pursue something without regard for its monetary rewards, but I’ll have no complaints. My own mother could never understand why I couldn’t just be a high school English teacher. You’ll do what makes you happy, and that’ll be all I ask for." Barf. Isn't this part of the problem? "the physical attributes that the heptapods found intuitive, like “action” or those other things defined by integrals, were meaningful only over a period of time. And these were conducive to a teleological interpretation of events: by viewing events over a period of time, one recognized that there was a requirement that had to be satisfied, a goal of minimizing or maximizing. And one had to know the initial and final states to meet that goal; one needed knowledge of the effects before the causes could be initiated." "Consider the phenomenon of light hitting water at one angle, and traveling through it at a different angle. Explain it by saying that a difference in the index of refraction caused the light to change direction, and one saw the world as humans saw it. Explain it by saying that light minimized the time needed to travel to its destination, and one saw the world as the heptapods saw it. Two very different interpretations. The physical universe was a language with a perfectly ambiguous grammar. Every physical event was an utterance that could be parsed in two entirely different ways, one causal and the other teleological, both valid, neither one disqualifiable no matter how much context was available." "For the heptapods, all language was performative. Instead of using language to inform, they used language to actualize. Sure, heptapods already knew what would be said in any conversation; but in order for their knowledge to be true, the conversation would have to take place." "suddenly remembered that a morphological relative of “performative” was “performance,” which could describe the sensation of conversing when you knew what would be said: it was like performing in a play." "Like physical events, with their causal and teleological interpretations, every linguistic event had two possible interpretations: as a transmission of information and as the realization of a plan." "Before I learned how to think in Heptapod B, my memories grew like a column of cigarette ash, laid down by the infinitesimal sliver of combustion that was my consciousness, marking the sequential present." [People came from Earth by Stephen Baxter] "But Berge wasn’t listening. He turned away, to look again at the bloated sun. “All this will pass,” he said. “The sun will die. The universe may collapse on itself, or spread to a cold infinity. In either case it may be possible to build a giant machine that will recreate this universe – everything, every detail of this moment – so that we will all live again. But how can we know if this is the first time? Perhaps the universe has already died, many times, to be born again. Perhaps Leonardo was no traveler. Perhaps he was simply remembering.”" [The Real World by Stephen Utley] "“Now let’s say someone from our present-day visits a prehistoric Earth and returns. After a while, after the initial excitement’s died down, he starts to ponder the implications of travel back and forth between multiple Earths. He’s come back to a present-day Earth that may or may not be his own present-day Earth. If it’s virtually identical, well, if the only difference is, say, the outcome of some subatomic occurrence, then it doesn’t matter. But maybe there’s something subtly off on the macro level. It wouldn’t be anything major. Napoleon, Hitler, and the Confederate States would all’ve gone down to defeat. Or maybe the time-traveler only suspects that something may be subtly off. His problem is, he’s never quite sure, he can’t decide whether something is off or he only thinks it is, so he’s always looking for the telling detail. But there are so many details. If he never knew in the first place how many plays Shakespeare really wrote or who all those European kings were . . .”" [Lobsters by Charles Stross] "“Nyet – no, sorry. Am apologize for we not use commercial translation software. Interpreters are ideologically suspect, mostly have capitalist semiotics and pay-per-use APIs. Must implement English more better, yes?”" "He slips his glasses on, takes the universe off hold, and tells it to take him for a long walk while he catches up on the latest on the cosmic background radiation anisotropy (which it is theorized may be waste heat generated by irreversible computations; according to the more conservative cosmologists, an alien superpower – maybe a collective of Kardashev type three galaxy-spanning civilizations – is running a timing channel attack on the computational ultrastructure of spacetime itself, trying to break through to whatever’s underneath)." [Breathmoss by Ian R. MacLeod] "“This ant, Jalila, which crawls across this sheet of paper from here to there. She is much like us as we crawl across the surface of this planet. Even if she had the wings some of her kind sprout, just as I have my caleche, it would still be the same.” The tiny creature, waving feelers, was plainly lost. A black dot. Jalila understood how it felt. “But say, if we were to fold both sides of the paper together. You see how she moves now. . . ?” The ant, antennae waving, hesitant, at last made the tiny jump. “We can move more quickly from one place to another by not traveling across the distance that separates us from it, but by folding space itself. “Imagine now, Jalila, that this universe is not one thing alone, one solitary series of this following that, but an endless branching of potentialities. Such it has been since the Days of Creation, and such it is even now, in the shuffle of that leaf as the wind picks at it, in the rising steam of your coffee. Every moment goes in many ways. Most are poor, half-formed things, the passing thoughts and whims of the Almighty. They hang there and they die, never to be seen again. But others branch as strongly as this path that we find ourselves following. There are universes where you and I have never sat here in this qasr. There are universes where there is no Jalila. . . . Will you get that for me. . . ?” The tariqua was pointing to an old book in a far corner. Its leather was cracked, the wind lifted its pages. As she took it from her, Jalila felt the hot brush of the old woman’s hand. “So now, you must imagine that there is not just one sheet of a single universe, but many, as in this book, heaped invisibly above and beside and below the page upon which we find ourselves crawling. In fact . . .” The ant recoiled briefly, sensing the strange heat of the tariqua’s fingers, then settled on the open pages. “You must imagine shelf after shelf, floor upon floor of books, the aisles of an infinite library. And if we are to fold this one page, you see, we or the ant never quite knows what lies on the other side of it. And there may be a tear in that next page as well. It may even be that another version of ourselves has already torn it.”" [Zima Blue by Alistair Reynolds] "“There’s always been something about blue. A thousand years ago Yves Klein said it was the essence of colour itself: the colour that stood for all other colours. A man once spent his entire life searching for a particular shade of blue that he remembered encountering in childhood. He began to despair of ever finding it, thinking he must have imagined that precise shade, that it could not possibly exist in nature. Then one day he chanced upon it. It was the colour of a beetle in a museum of natural history. He wept for joy.”" ]]> </content> </entry> <entry> <title type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[The Fifth Season (The Broken Earth Book 1) by N.K. Jemisin (2015) (read in 2017)]]> </title> <id>https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3455</id> <link href="https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3455"/> <updated>2017-12-03T22:31:56+01:00</updated> <author> <name type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Marco von Ballmoos]]> </name> <uri>https://earthli.com/users/marco</uri> </author> <summary type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA["Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is" ... ]]> </summary> <content type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Published by marco on 3. Dec 2017 22:31:56 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I've failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an interest in this book, then I'm happy for you." This is a very good book. It took me about a 100 pages to get into it, to get used to the storytelling rhythms of the author, to the at-times deliberate obfuscation and confusion. I feel that it took Jemisin that long to get into it as well, because the storytelling felt much more fluid in the later 70% of the book than in the first 30%. It is entirely possible that this is purely my fault, I'll admit. I'm not getting any less-set in my ways. I just offer it as a warning to those who may be similarly put-off by the storytelling style -- stick with it; it's worth it. This is the story of an alternate Earth -- one we learn follows our own auspicious, but ultimately doomed age -- on which "Father Earth" plays a much-more active and vicious role, through extreme geologic events. Humans have split into distinct species, with distinct powers. The primary focus of this book is on the orogenes -- humans who can draw power from any source, but primarily use the immense powers of the Earth itself. There is an arcane hierarchy amongst them. The least of them can manipulate the earth, but with no fine control. The most advanced of them can control molecules and draw immense power from disparate sources. There is so much going on in this book: The Guardians, the Fulcrum, the Leadership class, the Orogenes, the Geomesters, the Stone-eaters, Alabaster's power and history and rebelliousness, Syenites power and connection to the floating obelisks, supposed relics of long-dead and failed human civilizations that followed the loss of Father Earth's "child". These relics litter the planet in innumerable number, each serving as the tombstone of a civilization that failed to prepare properly for the often-long Fifth Seasons -- sometime decades-long intermezzos initiated by cataclysmic geologic events. The book is ostensibly about Syenite but is split between three tales, each of which tells of another facet of her life, though this doesn't become clear until late in the book (a feature that requires trust on the part of the reader -- a trust Jemisin is ultimately a worthy of). It felt a bit derivative at first, but then I realized that it was following in the lines of other books and series that I've really liked (e.g. Potter, Dune, Song of Ice and Fire) and that it was mixing these concepts in its own unique and well-written way. It's a rollicking tale -- at times almost too quick-moving, cramming in so much at once, but somehow suitably controlled -- and I'm looking forward to book two. [Citations] "[...] they will kill her career and assign her permanently to the Fulcrum, leaving her nothing to do but lie on her back and turn men’s grunting and farting into babies. She’ll be lucky to have only six if that’s how things turn out." This is kind of writing found more at the beginning of the book, which smacks you in the face with modern American youth politics and is a bit jarring. When I read this, I wrote "Men are useless. as are the old. This does not bode well." I kept reading and was rewarded as my ability to Jemisin settled into her storytelling and my tolerance increased. "Nothing to do but follow your crazy, though. You’ve eaten something from your pack: cachebread smeared with salty akaba paste from the jar" Here, too, I was thrown out of the story with the hyper-modern colloquialism from our time ("follow your crazy") mixed with arcana from the world Jemisin is weaving. The subsequent 500 pages show that these lapses are rarities where the author's voice intrudes. The device of the second person was odd, at first (as it nearly always is), but there was a method to the madness if you stick with the book. At 100 pages in, I was seeing too much of other books I'd read. This one felt a bit like a "throw in everything but the kitchen sink" plot, with bits of Harry Potter, Game of Thrones, Dune, Fifty Shades (Schaffa, the Guardian's torture -- which also ended up having its point, in the end, but felt wildly out-of-place when introduced) and a smattering of SJW YA books I've never read. Still, several of those tomes are quite good, so I continued, hoping for the best (and being rewarded). "I didn’t know.” She slurs the words around the back of her hand. The words don’t make sense but she feels compelled to say them. “I didn’t.” “You think that matters?” It’s almost cruel, the emotionlessness of his voice and face. “It matters to me!” “You think you matter?” All at once he smiles. It’s an ugly thing, cold as the vapor that curls off ice. “You think any of us matter beyond what we can do for them? Whether we obey or not.” He jerks his head toward the body of the abused, murdered child. “You think he mattered, after what they did to him? The only reason they don’t do this to all of us is because we’re more versatile, more useful, if we control ourselves. But each of us is just another weapon, to them. Just a useful monster, just a bit of new blood to add to the breeding lines. Just another fucking rogga.” She has never heard so much hate put into one word before. Asael actually flinches as the analogies finally get through to her. Syenite waits in silence, letting it gather pressure. Finally Asael says, “I see.” “Maybe you do.” She keeps waiting, and Asael sighs. “What do you want? An apology? Then I apologize. You must remember, though, that most normal people have never seen an orogene, let alone had to do business with one, and—” She spreads her hands. “Isn’t it understandable that we might be… uncomfortable?” “Discomfort is understandable. It’s the rudeness that isn’t.” Rust this. This woman doesn’t deserve the effort of her explanation. Syen decides to save that for someone who matters. “And that’s a really shitty apology. ‘I’m sorry you’re so abnormal that I can’t manage to treat you like a human being.’” “You’re a rogga,” Asael snaps, and then has the gall to look surprised at herself. "Syenite flinches, suddenly remembering the dead child in the node station near Mehi. Oh. The Fulcrum controls all the node maintainers. What if they have some way to force those poor damaged children to listen, and to spit back what they listen to, like some kind of living telegraph receivers? Is that what he fears? Is the Fulcrum like a spider, perching in Yumenes’s heart and using the web of nodes to listen in on every conversation in the Stillness?" This part reminds me of Dune. The citations from millennia-old books at the ends of the chapters are very much like Dune, as well. "She is aware of Alabaster, twitching because he is convulsing, how did she not realize this before, he is not in control of his own body, there is something about the glassknife in his shoulder that has rendered him helpless for all his power, and the look on his face is of helpless fear and agony." This was a bit of a quick transition that seemed a bit of a crude way to manipulate the reader. Alabaster went from most powerful orogene ever to utterly helpless in seconds. This whipsaw is a little annoying. making me feel like I'm just along for the ride, unable to comprehend or predict anything about this world. It's kind of like reading comic books these days: everyone's a genius/billionaire/most-power-in-the-universe hero ... until they're not. And it's impossible to tell what will fell a hero. It feels cheaper than it needed to be -- there could have been more of a struggle. The Guardians and the Stone-Eaters function too much as Deux Ex Machinae for my taste. They need to be a bit more fallible, too, otherwise it's poor game balance. "(Friends do not exist. The Fulcrum is not a school. Grits are not children. Orogenes are not people. Weapons have no need of friends.)" The analogies to our world are clear: Stonelore is propaganda. Roggas are niggas. Sanze is the U.U. The islands are free nations, struggling to escape its yoke and influence. "There passes a time of happiness in your life, which I will not describe to you. It is unimportant. Perhaps you think it wrong that I dwell so much on the horrors, the pain, but pain is what shapes us, after all. "We are creatures born of heat and pressure and grinding, ceaseless movement. To be still is to be… not alive. But what is important is that you know it was not all terrible. "There was peace in long stretches, between each crisis. A chance to cool and solidify before the grind resumed. Here is what you need to understand. In any war, there are factions: those wanting peace, those wanting more war for a myriad of reasons, and those whose desires transcend either. And this is a war with many sides, not just two. Did you think it was just the stills and the orogenes? No, no. Remember the stone eaters and the Guardians, too—oh, and the Seasons. Never forget Father Earth. He has not forgotten you." You don’t want to understand, but you do. You don’t want to believe, but really, you have all along. “You tore that rift up north,” you breathe. Your hands are clenching into fists. “You split the continent. You started this Season. With the obelisks! You did… all of that.” “Yes, with the obelisks, and with the aid of the node maintainers. They’re all at peace now.” He exhales, wheezily. “I need your help.” You shake your head automatically, but not in refusal. “To fix it?” “Oh, no, Syen.” You don’t even bother to correct him this time. You can’t take your eyes from his amused, nearly skeletal face. When he speaks, you notice that some of his teeth have turned to stone, too. How many of his organs have done the same? How much longer can he—should he—live like this? “I don’t want you to fix it,” Alabaster says. “It was collateral damage, but Yumenes got what it deserved. No, what I want you to do, my Damaya, my Syenite, my Essun, is make it worse.” You stare at him, speechless. Then he leans forward. That this is painful for him is obvious; you hear the creak and stretch of his flesh, and a faint crack as some piece of stone somewhere on him fissures. But when he is close enough, he grins again, and suddenly it hits you. Evil, eating, Earth. He’s not crazy at all, and he never has been. ]]> </content> </entry> <entry> <title type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[In Cold Blood by Truman Capote (1966) (read in 2017)]]> </title> <id>https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3452</id> <link href="https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3452"/> <updated>2017-12-03T22:30:49+01:00</updated> <author> <name type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Marco von Ballmoos]]> </name> <uri>https://earthli.com/users/marco</uri> </author> <summary type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA["Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is" ... ]]> </summary> <content type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Published by marco on 3. Dec 2017 22:30:49 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I've failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an interest in this book, then I'm happy for you." This is the story of a brutal multiple-murder in Kansas in the late 1950s. Truman Capote puts together an exquisitely researched and well-told tale. It is a masterful exemplar of historical fiction, in that the facts are clearly represented, but they are decorated with fictive imagining of conversations that add a lot of flavor without distracting from the story or making it feel fake. In particular, a lot of the book involves the interaction between the two perpetrators before, during and after the murders -- something that Capote could only have gleaned from interviews and notes, but that he writes as if he'd been there. Expertly and nigh-poetically written. Highly recommended. [Citations] "Except for taking off his boots, he had not troubled to undress. He had merely fallen face down across the bed, as though sleep were a weapon that had struck him from behind." "There is much resentment in this community [that is, Garden City],” wrote Mr. Fox. “I have even heard on more than one occasion that the man, when found, should be hanged from the nearest tree. Let us not feel this way. The deed is done and taking another life cannot change it. Instead, let us forgive as God would have us do. It is not right that we should hold a grudge in our hearts. The doer of this act is going to find it very difficult indeed to live with himself. His only peace of mind will be when he goes to God for forgiveness. Let us not stand in the way but instead give prayers that he may find his peace." The car was moving. A hundred feet ahead, a dog trotted along the side of the road. Dick swerved toward it. It was an old half-dead mongrel, brittle-boned and mangy, and the impact, as it met the car, was little more than what a bird might make. But Dick was satisfied. “Boy!” he said—and it was what he always said after running down a dog, which was something he did whenever the opportunity arose. “Boy! We sure splattered him!" And yet it was true that the farm nowadays made him uneasy: the locked house, Nancy’s horse forlornly waiting in a field, the odor of windfall apples rotting under the apple trees, and the absence of voices—Kenyon calling Nancy to the telephone, Herb whistling, his glad “Good morning, Paul.” "[...] for he had lost his mother as well, learned to “despise” her; liquor had blurred the face, swollen the figure of the once sinewy, limber Cherokee girl, had “soured her soul,” honed her tongue to the wickedest point, so dissolved her self-respect that generally she did not bother to ask the names of the stevedores and trolley-car conductors and such persons who accepted what she offered without charge (except that she insisted they drink with her first, and dance to the tunes of a wind-up Victrola)." "(Sample page: “Thanatoid = deathlike; Omnilingual = versed in languages; Amerce = punishment, amount fixed by court; Nescient = ignorance; Facinorous = atrociously wicked; Hagiophobia = a morbid fear of holy places & things; Lapidicolous = living under stones, as certain blind beetles; Dyspathy = lack of sympathy, fellow feeling; Psilopher = a fellow who fain would pass as a philosopher; Omophagia = eating raw flesh, the rite of some savage tribes; Depredate = to pillage, rob, and prey upon; Aphrodisiac = a drug or the like which excites sexual desire; Megalodactylous = having abnormally large fingers; Myrtophobia = fear of night and darkness.”)" "Dewey’s ears ring with it—a ringing that almost deafens him to the whispery rush of Smith’s soft voice. But the voice plunges on, ejecting a fusillade of sounds and images: Hickock hunting the discharged shell; hurrying, hurrying, and Kenyon’s head in a circle of light, the murmur of muffled pleadings, then Hickock again scrambling after a used cartridge; Nancy’s room, Nancy listening to boots on hardwood stairs, the creak of the steps as they climb toward her, Nancy’s eyes, Nancy watching the flashlight’s shine seek the target (“She said, ‘Oh, no! Oh, please. No! No! No! No! Don’t! Oh, please don’t! Please!’ I gave the gun to Dick. I told him I’d done all I could do. He took aim, and she turned her face to the wall”); the dark hall, the assassins hastening toward the final door. Perhaps, having heard all she had, Bonnie welcomed their swift approach." "He scowled, as though the problem was new to him, a newly unearthed stone of surprising, unclassified color. “I don’t know why,” he said, as if holding it to the light, and angling it now here, now there." Perry said, “Am I sorry? If that’s what you mean—I’m not. I don’t feel anything about it. I wish I did. But nothing about it bothers me a bit. Half an hour after it happened, Dick was making jokes and I was laughing at them. Maybe we’re not human. I’m human enough to feel sorry for myself. Sorry I can’t walk out of here when you walk out. But that’s all.” When such senseless murders occur, they are seen to be an end result of a period of increasing tension and disorganization in the murderer starting before the contact with the victim who, by fitting into the unconscious conflicts of the murderer, unwittingly serves to set into motion his homicidal potential.” "But it is Dr. Satten’s contention that only the first murder matters psychologically, and that when Smith attacked Mr. Clutter he was under a mental eclipse, deep inside a schizophrenic darkness, for it was not entirely a flesh-and-blood man he “suddenly discovered” himself destroying, but “a key figure in some past traumatic configuration”: his father? the orphanage nuns who had derided and beaten him? the hated Army sergeant? the parole officer who had ordered him to “stay out of Kansas”? One of them, or all of them." "It is a relic of human barbarism. The law tells us that the taking of human life is wrong, then goes ahead and sets the example. Which is almost as wicked as the crime it punished. The state has no right to inflict it. It isn’t effective. It doesn’t deter crime, but merely cheapens human life and gives rise to more murders. All we ask is mercy. Surely life imprisonment is small mercy to ask.…" "In Exodus Twenty, Verse Thirteen, we have one of the Ten Commandments: ‘Thou shalt not kill.’ This refers to unlawful killing. Of course it does, because in the next chapter, Verse Twelve, the penalty for disobedience of that Commandment reads: ‘He that smiteth a man, so that he die, shall be surely put to death.’" "The bad part was saying goodbye. When you knew where he was going, and what would happen to him. That squirrel of his, he sure misses Perry. Keeps coming to the cell looking for him. I’ve tried to feed him, but he won’t have anything to do with me. It was just Perry he liked." "The question is this—do poor, plainly guilty defendants have a right to a complete defense? I do not believe that the State of Kansas would be either greatly or for long harmed by the death of these appellants. But I do not believe it could ever recover from the death of due process." "But for someone his age he was the smartest person I ever come across. A human library. When that boy read a book it stayed read." “They don’t feel nothing. Drop, snap, and that’s it. They don’t feel nothing.” “Are you sure? I was standing right close. I could hear him gasping for breath.” “Uh-huh, but he don’t feel nothing. Wouldn’t be humane if he did.” “Well. And I suppose they feed them a lot of pills. Sedatives.” “Hell, no. Against the rules." ]]> </content> </entry> <entry> <title type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[The Making of Donald Trump by David Cay Johnston (2016) (read in 2017)]]> </title> <id>https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3450</id> <link href="https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3450"/> <updated>2017-10-08T20:48:56+02:00</updated> <author> <name type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Marco von Ballmoos]]> </name> <uri>https://earthli.com/users/marco</uri> </author> <summary type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA["Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is" ... ]]> </summary> <content type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Published by marco on 8. Oct 2017 20:48:56 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I've failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an interest in this book, then I'm happy for you." Johnston writes a book that outlines several of Trump's failed real-estate--development plans. But he, at the same time, documents how people were trying to sue Trump because they invested in him because of his good name only to find out that Trump is only tangentially involved with their real-estate investment. Are these people just stupid to think that Trump would be good for their property? Reading this book, there would be no other conclusion, since you don't hear about a single successful thing that Trump has done. He seems to somehow own property all over the world, but none of it belongs to him and he's only ever ripped off, failed or otherwise disappointed every investor who's ever associated with him. However, people still think his name is worth investing in, Companies pay him millions to use his name on their projects, even if he's not involved. There must be a reason for this, but Johnston's book does not provide it. Either everyone is an utter and irredeemable moron or Trump must have some successes to his name. There must be some -- even a majority of -- investors who've walked away satisfied, probably even coming back for more. Many of the investors in his get-rich-quick schemes kind of seem like people who are getting what's coming to them. They want to get rich, so they sink all of their money into a single opportunity with Trump. The man must have something going for him, or these people wouldn't do that. Trump inflates his own story and ego all the time, nearly constantly turning the conversation to himself (as Johnston documents). He is a germophobe with poor social skills (as Johnston also documents). And yet, people invest their entire fortune with him. Johnston is clearly only telling part of the story. He's telling the part of the story where we shouldn't vote for this man as President, where we shouldn't do deals with him, shouldn't invest money with him or go anywhere near him, where we shouldn't ever pay attention to him again. Agreed. I'd been doing that already, before I read this biography. However, the story Johnston tells is of sealed court decisions, suspicious and quite facially reprehensible behavior, but never a conviction. Trump's had his casino license for decades but Johnston seems to attribute it to luck. Trump's run multiple casinos for decades (even having the most successful casino in Atlantic City, according to Johnston) but he doesn't know anything about the business and everyone makes fun of how stupid he is. Trump is a bad businessman and a more terrible person, but everyone seems to be on Trump's side, helping him out. Why? The story Johnston tells is of a person who is horrible, stupid and financially inept, who hangs out with obvious criminals, but who succeeds despite all of that. He can't seem to fail enough to stop being a billionaire. It's hard to feel sorry for some of his "investors". Whenever a story ends with someone having signed without reading because of time pressure...I kind of get distracted. I know that old people get entrapped in stuff like this. In those cases, the charge is always of some information that Trump and his associates or partners failed to disclose properly. I'm almost sure it was disclosed somewhere -- it was just that people didn't read it in their eagerness to cash in. Otherwise, why would the court not nail Trump to the wall if it was so open-and-shut? But why no prosecution? Is it because Trump -- the bumbling, asocial fool -- is so slick? Or because America's system is so morally bankrupt? In a place like America, don't sign anything without reading it. It's your own fault if you're trying to get rich quick. The fact that these cases ended in a settlement with no criminal charges or sentence suggests to me that there's more to the story again. It's possible that such malfeasance is nearly impossible to prove in America, or that Trump really knows everyone and buys off judges and DAs -- but that's a much bigger charge. Instead, we're expected to believe that he just gets away with it because "reasons". No charges or sentence -- but we know he did it. Trump gets away with everything short of murder, associating with terrible people and having a very suspicious business. But he's still going. He's still in business. He's now President of the USA. The story Johnston tells goes nowhere in explaining how this could be. He just deepens the mystery. Trump says many things that are not true. Are they lies we should care about? Or did he change his mind? Or does he just not care what the answer is to a question he feels he shouldn't have to answer from someone who he feels doesn't have the right to ask it? Trump is an egomaniac, of course. He's a liar, of course. But, as a private citizen, he has no obligation to answer a journalist's question truthfully, especially when it concerns his near-future whereabouts or his personal affairs. It is here that, again, I feel Johnston is really reaching for straws, trying to paint every nugget of data he has on Trump as not only negative (and that it most certainly is and probably fairly) but damning. I think it unfortunately weakens his case because he's taken the shotgun approach, with topics of wildly varying import. The ones that sound important peter out into no prosecution (and hence possibly speculation) and the ones that don't sound important then just seem petty and cheap. He expects us to conclude that where there's smoke, there's fire, despite decades of smoke without ever having proof of fire. His evidence is persuasive, but I'm not a judge or a lawyer. I'm not in charge of prosecuting Trump: dozens of judges have had that pleasure. None of them have put him away. He's still going. A true believer would round up each allegation to a conviction, but thats not how our system works. Johnston seems to vaguely imply some sort of angel on Trump's shoulder, but it's more of a condemnation of the American system as a whole that Johnston isn't willing to come right out and make. The system is corrupt from top to bottom and a creature like Trump is perfectly suited to swim in those fetid waters. Johnston seems to be desperately trying to show how obvious it is that Trump shouldn't be a winner in a sane society. He makes a good case. The fact that Trump is winning more than ever suggest a whole other book that needs to be written -- this one about America. [Citations] "Trump, who presents himself as a modern Midas even when much of what he touches turns to dross, has studied the conventions of journalists and displays more genius at exploiting them to his advantage than anyone else I have ever known." "He was accepted into a Catholic school in New York City, Fordham College, but in his junior year transferred to an Ivy League school, the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. Penn has a famous and highly regarded graduate business school that Trump often invokes. He did not in fact study there. He was enrolled as an undergraduate and received a bachelor of science in economics." "The bank loaned Trump $2 million more than the purchase price, a total of $10 million, on his personal guarantee. Trump put up only $2,800 cash. He boasted that he got Mar-a-Lago for a song, a bargain that showed his extraordinary negotiating skills." "Five years after Trump acquired Mar-a-Lago with the unrecorded mortgage, casino regulatory hearings revealed that he had personally guaranteed more than a fourth of his more than $3 billion of debt. Many banks complained that they were unaware other banks had loaned money to Trump on his personal guarantee with no public record of the obligation." "More than one thousand lawyers working for Trump and his creditors had hammered out a “fragile” deal to keep him going, hoping to minimize losses on the loans they had extended without checking his finances carefully. The lawyers had already billed almost $11 million for their services. Part of the deal was" "The DGE prepared its own 111-page report. It noted that Trump owed (not owned, but owed) $3.2 billion. Of that, he had personally guaranteed $833.5 million. Absent an agreement by all creditors, Trump would face an uncontrolled, domino-effect chain of bankruptcies. If just one creditor moved against one Trump property, the others would follow, creating chaos. More than one thousand lawyers working for Trump and his creditors had hammered out a “fragile” deal to keep him going, hoping to minimize losses on the loans they had extended without checking his finances carefully. The lawyers had already billed almost $11 million for their services. Part of the deal was putting Trump on an allowance. He would have to get by on $450,000 per month, down from his May 1990 spending of $583,000 (the equivalent of more than one million 2016 dollars). The allowance was so astonishingly large that The New York Times quoted one billionaire as saying, “I would have no idea how to spend $450,000 a month. It’s just phenomenal.”" "The tax bill is not wiped out, however. Under the rules set by Congress, the tax is deferred into the future. The $23 million is therefore the economic equivalent of a loan from Uncle Sam at zero interest. Someday, that loan must be paid off. Typically, real estate partnerships last two decades, so let’s assume that Trump invests those loan proceeds for twenty years and earns an annual net return of 10 percent (a return that Trump would consider modest and below his skill level as an investor). When time came to repay his loan, Trump would write the Treasury a check for the almost $23 million and keep his investment gains: $130 million. In this way, Congress further enriches people like Trump, people who have the capital to go into real estate and qualify for tax exemptions under rules that exclude nearly all of their fellow Americans." "Also in 1990, Trump and Khashoggi were again linked through a prank designed to find out who was the cheapest rich person in New York. The satirical magazine Spy created a phony business and sent $1.11 refund checks to fifty-eight rich New Yorkers. Those who cashed the checks then got another refund check from the fake firm for half as much money. The prank ended when only two self-proclaimed billionaire penny pinchers were left. Donald Trump and Adnan Khashoggi had the dubious distinction of endorsing and depositing into their bank accounts fake refund checks for thirteen cents each." "Trump pointed out that he was campaigning against a rigged system. The Phoenix meeting was “evidence of a rigged system,” he said. He made no comment about his own investigation in Florida or his substantial campaign donation to Bondi." Trump failed to open a dialogue about his own hypocrisy. Color me shocked. I'm not sure what kind of person would do such a thing. Johnston insinuates that this is a special failing on Trump's part, but that's not obvious. "Trump campaign that the IRS had revoked the nonprofit status of Veterans for a Strong America due to their failure to file required disclosure reports. A charity disclosure organization, Guidestar, reported that it had no record of any board of directors. Every indication pointed to Veterans for a Strong America being a one-man enterprise run by a South Dakota lawyer named Joel Arends, whose operation was under investigation for suspected election improprieties in Arizona and Texas. Reporters later learned the organization had thirty dollars in the bank and debts ten times that size." "Instead, the paper got a call from “John Baron, a vice president of the Trump Organization.” Baron described himself as Donald Trump’s spokesperson. He said that taking the sculptures down would have cost $32,000, delayed the construction of Trump Tower by three weeks, and run the risk of killing people if the stones crashed to the ground. As for the missing grillwork, Baron said, “We don’t know what happened.” But there was no John Baron. The caller was Donald Trump. For years, Trump telephoned journalists using the name John Baron (or Barron)." "The reasons Trump was not forthright and candid are, ultimately, known only to Trump. But the Howard Stern Show was not his last opportunity to come clean about his use of fake identities to create the impression that the world’s most desirable women were banging on his bedroom door. The next time he was presented with a chance to set the record straight, Trump chose to tell a whopper on national television. This time, it served a very specific purpose: to advance his pursuit of the Oval Office." I just don't get the tone. He's presenting gossip and expecting us to be shocked. It's penny-ante stuff. Celebrity bullshit. Is it beneath the office? I think Kennedy, Nixon and Clinton have proved to us already that this is not the case. "Trump often threatens to sue journalists, ensuring caution from publishers and broadcasters who want to avoid a costly lawsuit—even one Trump cannot win. This tends to discourage investigation beyond the official talking points." That also goes a long way toward explaining the dryness, the toothlessness, of a lot of this book. "In his second core strategy, Trump distorts information, contradicts himself, and blocks inquiries into his conduct by journalists, law enforcement, business regulators, and other people’s lawyers. Again, the record shows decades of Trump’s skill in pursuing this strategy successfully." "That last option would seem unavailable to Trump, since he declared in October that he enjoys “the world’s greatest memory.”" Johnston leans really heavily on this statement (as well as the one about "being the best at the Bible"). But Johnston's entire book shows what a bloviating bag of hot air Trump is, a man whose statements often don't even last a day before he contradicts them. What is the point -- the power -- of using logic to trap him? He clearly doesn't care. Nor does he seem to have to since most Americans don't seem to care either. "Trump does not want reporters telling people, especially voters, about anything in his past that does not add a sheen to his marketing image. On the campaign trail, Trump dismisses questions about his past as beneath the dignity of journalists, even as he raises decades-old issues about the conduct of his Democratic opponent’s husband." In fairness, Trump was just making fake phone calls about imaginary girlfriends whereas Clinton was disenfranchising black people with actual legislation as president. Trump was bragging about grabbing women by the pussy while Clinton was shoving a cigar into a very young one in the oval office. "Satter obviously had an intimate familiarity with Trump’s intentions—only the day before, Trump had said he had no plans to inspect the site." Is this a lie? Or did he change his mind? Or does he just not care what the answer is to a question he feels he shouldn't have to answer from someone who he feels doesn't have the right to ask it? Trump is an egomaniac, of course. He's a liar, of course. But, as a private citizen, he has no obligation to answer a journalist's question truthfully, especially when it concerns his near-future whereabouts. It is here that, again, I feel Johnston is really reaching for straws, trying to paint every nugget of data he has on Trump as not only negative (and that it most certainly is and probably fairly) but damning. I think it unfortunately weakens his case because he's taken the shotgun approach, with topics of wildly varying import. The ones that sound important peter out into no prosecution (and hence possibly speculation) and the ones that don't sound important then just seem petty and cheap. "Nearly two hundred people bought in, putting down more than $22 million in deposits in 2006, confident that the project was about to get underway and that before long they would move into their beachfront property and enjoy the security of a smart investment in a Trump-developed resort. A June 2007 newsletter notified buyers that construction was underway. The next month, the Trump Baja News reported, “our new and excited homeowners now" "Much later, three people who had made exclusive priority reservations complained that they were given five minutes to buy or walk. That didn’t even give them enough time to read the terms of their purchase contract, much less consult a lawyer. They signed, writing checks totaling more than $200,000. Some buyers later said they put their life’s savings into their eagerly anticipated new homes by the sea. They came to regret being so hasty and so trusting. Nearly two hundred people bought in, putting down more than $22 million in deposits in 2006, confident that the project was about to get underway and that before long they would move into their beachfront property and enjoy the security of a smart investment in a Trump-developed resort. A June 2007 newsletter notified buyers that construction was underway. The next month, the Trump Baja News reported, “our new and excited homeowners now are part of an elite group of vacation homeowners who own property developed by one of the most respected names in real estate, Donald J. Trump.” Three months later, in October, when Wall Street crashed under the weight of toxic mortgages and other Baja real estate projects faltered, the same newsletter carried a message “From the desk of Ivanka Trump.” Ivanka assured the buyers that their investment was sound. “Though it may be true that some of Baja’s developments could slow down, these market conditions simply do not apply to Trump Ocean Resort—or any other Trump development,” she wrote. Two months later, in December 2007, the newsletter advised buyers of newly discovered geological problems afflicting the building site. A few months later, in March 2008, anxious buyers received calls or letters. Construction loans had been approved, would be funded shortly, and work would be underway. This was nine months after buyers had been told in writing that construction had already begun. Still, construction did not proceed." "Trump’s lawyers made no mention of testimony from buyers that they were given just minutes to sign the purchase and other documents, leaving no time to read them or ask questions about the several pages of arcane legal details." It's hard to feel sorry for these "investors". Whenever a story ends with someone having signed without reading because of time pressure...I kind of get distracted. I know that old people get entrapped in stuff like this. But why no prosecution? Is it because Trump -- the bumbling, asocial fool -- is so slick? Or because America's system is so morally bankrupt? In a place like America, don't sign anything without reading it. It's your own fault if you're trying to get rich quick. "Hawaii state law (like California and federal securities laws) protects buyers from false and misleading sales pitches. Hawaii law requires disclosure of all material facts to buyers. Trump’s status as a mere licensor was obviously material to making an investment decision based on the supposed value the Trump name would add to the building." I'm sure it was disclosed somewhere -- it was just that people didn't read it in their eagerness to cash in. The fact that this case -- once again, and like many others -- ended in a settlement with no criminal charges or sentence, suggests to me that there's more to the story again. It's possible that such malfeasance is nearly impossible to prove in America, or that Trump really knows everyone and buys of judges and DAs -- but that's a much bigger charge. Instead, we're expected to believe that he just gets away with it because "reasons". No charges or sentence -- but we know he did it. "What kept Trump up all night was a Japanese gambler with a serene smile, a white shirt open at the collar, and gray wool slacks with pockets as big as bank vaults. Akio Kashiwagi was one of the world’s five biggest gamblers, literally a one-in-a-billion customer, who at that late hour in May 1990 was sitting at a green-felt table at Trump Plaza Hotel & Casino calmly wagering $14 million an hour. He had been there for nearly a week." "Casino executives in London, Las Vegas, and Darwin, Australia, all pursued Kashiwagi, one of that rare breed of gamblers known as “whales,” because they risked $1 million or more during each casino visit. Kashiwagi—with his marathon multimillion-dollar sittings—remains, by far, the biggest whale ever beached in Atlantic City. Like the rest of the casino whales, Kashiwagi lived a financial life every bit as mysterious as the real denizens of the deep. The size and true source of his fortune were unfathomable." "The state deftly avoided investigating the more extensive wrongdoings that Libutti said he knew about. If proven, those claims would surely have cost Trump his license. Trump’s conduct with Libutti, including his claim that he hardly knew the man, was just one part of a long history of flouting the supposedly strict regulations of New Jersey casinos." I guess, but this whole book is full of allegations that went nowhere. If there's smoke there's fire, but dammit the guy is untouched over forty years. A true believer would round up each allegation to a conviction, but thats not how it works. "As the many episodes recounted in these pages have shown, Trump is remarkably agile at doing as he chooses and getting away with it." "Trump’s relationships with criminals were often profitable, sometimes gratuitous, and never properly examined by those whose duty was to investigate." That's actually the crux of the book: the failure of the state in its duty, the crookedness of America. "Whether one adores Trump or is aghast, his public conduct should prompt us all to think about what qualities we want in our political leaders and why there is so much opportunity for someone like Trump to garner tens of millions of votes. We should ask ourselves why so many Americans are excited at the prospect of someone whose public statements show utter disregard for the checks and balances that buttress our system of self-government—a system that has made America, flaws and all, a beacon to the world for more than two centuries. (Emphasis added.)" That's a good, strong statement, right up until the utter, pandering, jingoistic and fact-free idiocy at the end. America is not a fucking beacon. Get over your stupid American exceptionalism. Obama was an asshole to keep babbling about that and Johnston should reexamine his own politics if believes that enough to cram into into an otherwise strong book. I can't help but feel Johnston threw that in for the potential Trump voter that he's trying to convince -- to show that voter that Johnston is on their side. "A president cannot dismiss a troublemaking foreign head of state, cannot order Congress to pass laws, and cannot disobey the rulings of judges—not if we are to be a free people, living subject to the rule of law that protects our individual liberties. Yet Trump makes clear that he would do all these things. His vision is, in many ways, not that of a president but of a dictator, as many others have observed in both political parties and beyond America’s borders." But you just wrote a book about how Trump is full of hot air and can't get anything done. Now you want us to believe he'll do what he says? Or that he'll somehow start accomplishing what he promises to do? "One need not be a believer to notice how at odds Trump’s many statements on religion are with the teachings of the Bible, Old Testament and New, and thus with his claim to be a Christian." Utterly of no greater interest to me than any of his other lies. Perhaps Johnston cares more -- or thinks Trump's potential voters will care more when they see Trump's deception in this specific area. It is here where Johnston seems to veer from journalistic documentation to advocacy. "While both Trump and Sanders can rally people, neither has put forth actual policy proposals that could move America from where things are to a fairer, more just, and widely prosperous society. Nothing in their pasts suggests that they have the political skill to wring change from the system if elected to the presidency. Hillary Clinton has the skill, but despite her decades of action on behalf of the less fortunate, it is not at all clear that this is foremost on her political agenda." WTF. Why broadside Bernie in the epilogue? To reluctantly push Hillary? Or try to pretend that you're not pushing Hillary? Bernie has decades of experience and his policies haven't moved much. "The Founders believed that knowledge and reason must be the cornerstones of our representative democracy if we are to govern ourselves. So spend time learning and then do your duty as a citizen. Vote." Also utterly untrue. The founders as a whole believed no such thing. A few espoused views to that effect, but their overall influence on the group and on the Constitution was not large enough to effect their policies. ]]> </content> </entry> <entry> <title type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[The Island of the Day Before by Umberto Eco (1994/en-1995) (read in 2017)]]> </title> <id>https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3442</id> <link href="https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3442"/> <updated>2017-10-02T22:12:31+02:00</updated> <author> <name type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Marco von Ballmoos]]> </name> <uri>https://earthli.com/users/marco</uri> </author> <summary type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA["Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is" ... ]]> </summary> <content type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Published by marco on 2. Oct 2017 22:12:31 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I've failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an interest in this book, then I'm happy for you." This is the story of Roberto de la Griva, an Italian stranded on an island somewhere in the Pacific Ocean. We hear of how he was at the wars between the Spanish, French and Italians over northern Italy. We hear of how he lost his father. We learn of his education in the salons of Paris. We hear how he is railroaded into a journey to the other side of the world by French intriguers high up in government bent on learning the secrets of the Meridians before the Dutch. We learn of various mechanisms by which one might determine the Meridian. Many are absolutely hare-brained and doubtless thoroughly researched by the author. When Roberto ends up stranded on the island, he has arrived there after his first ship -- The Amaryllis -- has shipwrecked. On that boat, he'd befriended an Englishman (Byrd) who'd seemingly discovered a way of determining the meridian by using "empathy at a distance", a ludicrous scientific theory whereby the blade that caused a wound can be used to influence the wound afterwards. Apply salve to the blade and the wounded is instantaneously soothed; apply fire and the wounded writhes in further pain. Since the action is instantaneous and occurs at a distance with no known physical mechanism, the clever Englishman wounds a dog in England, takes it with him on his journey, and then keeps the wound open for the entire journey to the Antipodes. The blade is subjected to actions at agreed-upon times, so that Byrd knows the time accurately enough in England to calculate his longitudinal position. This is obvious balderdash and good riddance to the lot of them. Roberto sees that Byrd is most likely seeing what he wants to see and likely has no more real idea where he is than countless sailors before him. When the ship wrecks, Roberto escapes with his life, bumping up against the Daphne, a pristine and (nearly) abandoned ship moored about a mile off of the eponymous island. Roberto investigates the boat, only to find unexpected scientific treasures that indicate that the Daphne was perhaps on the same mission as the Amaryllis. He suspects an "Intruder" on his boat and eventually meets Father Caspar (or does he?): a Jesuit, with whom he discusses various scientific topics like the position and motion of astral bodies, the composition of matter and so on. Many of these concepts are discarded theories from past centuries, lovingly brought back to life by Eco, the master of such arcana. In a way, the theories of today sound just as hare-brained, leading one to wonder with what laughter they will be greeted by subsequent generations. The good father can make not only a water-pumped musical organ but can also teach Roberto to swim and has also invented an underwater diving apparatus. It is a veritable tour-de-force of 16th-century science. He drowns in it, trying to get to the Island of the Day Before? Why is it called that? Because the good father believes he has navigated to the antemeridian, the Antipodes, so that the island lies constantly in yesterday relative to the Daphne's today. Was he correct? It is hard to know. He was trying to reach the island to get to the Speculum Melitensis, a device he'd constructed on the island that somehow encompasses every amazing bit of scientific knowledge and insight wrapped in one giant, delicate object. It was set up by Caspar and the sailors but has now likely dropped into disrepair. Subsequent chapters throw doubt on the reality of Father Caspar entirely. Roberto also spends an interminable time wondering about the fire dove that Caspar described seeing on the island, but he fails to descry it even once. This does not stop Eco -- in the form of the modern-day editor of Roberto's tale -- from going on at tedious length about everything he knows about doves and their significance in legend. The book picks up significantly in the final third, as Roberto spins onion-shells of stories around his lady love, Lydia, whom he forces into a tryst with his nonexistent brother Ferrante (resurrected from his psyche) so that Roberto's own love can be best expressed in a white-hot jealousy that he himself controls. Ferrante's track through Europe and purported/fictitious crossing with Roberto -- and all of the people Roberto met in Paris, like Richelieu and Mazarin -- is a rollicking tale, well-told. He ends up a pirate, heading for the exact island off of which the Daphne is anchored, on a ship crewed by micreants, with Lydia hidden on-board as an androgyne sailor and his nemesis lashed to a cross in the hold, serving in the role of the wounded dog in Ferrante's ship's longitudinal instrument. They visit island after island, one more bizarre than the next (similar to Gulliver in Swift's tale, with Roberto serving in the role of the narrator from Cloud Atlas). None of this actually happens, other than in Roberto's fevered mind, desperately trying to build a life with his love from hallucinatory fragments. As usual with Eco, it's nearly impossible to tell which way is up, which tale is true, whether Roberto is even on the boat or trapped on the island in the form of Ferrante, imagining himself elsewhere, or vice versa. The master at work. [Citations] "It is difficult to reconstruct the actions and feelings of a character surely afire with true love, for you never know whether he is expressing what he feels or what the rules of amorous discourse prescribe in his case—but then, for that matter, what do we know of the difference between passion felt and passion expressed, and who can say which has precedence?" Classic Eco. ""Sir," Pozzo said, "be so kind as to make way for us, for we must go and take up our proper position in order to fire on you." The officer doffed his hat, bowed with a salute that would have swept dust two meters before him, and said: "Señor, no es menor gloria veneer al enemigo con la cortesía en la paz que con las armas en la guerra." Then, in good Italian, he added: "Proceed, sir. If a fourth of our men prove to have one half of your courage, we will win. May Heaven grant me the pleasure of meeting you on the field of battle, and the honor of killing you."" "In short, there will be glory for all. Now let us go to supper. The siege has only begun and provisions are still plentiful. It will be a while before we start eating the rats."" "Now Jesuits lascivious as rams fulminate against the readers of Rabelais and the Latin poets, and would have us all be virtuous and kill the Huguenots. Lord God, war is a beautiful thing, but I want to fight for my own pleasure and not because my adversary eats meat on Friday. The pagans were wiser than we. They had their three gods, but at least their mother Cybele did not claim to give birth and yet remain a virgin."" "the first quality of an honest man is contempt for religion, which would have us afraid of the most natural thing in the world, which is death; and would have us hate the one beautiful thing destiny has given us, which is life. We should rather aspire to a heaven where only the planets live in eternal bliss, receiving neither rewards nor condemnations, but enjoying merely their own eternal motion in the arms of the void. Be strong like the sages of ancient Greece and look at death with steady eye and no fear. Jesus sweated too much, awaiting it. Why should he have been afraid, for that matter, since he was going to rise again?" "The wise man must attack falsehood not only with his sword but also with his tongue. My friends, how can you call merciful a divinity that desires our eternal unhappiness only to appease his rage of an instant? We must forgive our neighbor, and he need not? And we should love such a cruel being?" "That infinity of worlds of which Saint-Savin spoke to him was to be sought beyond the constellations, in the very center of this bubble of space of which he, pure eye, was now the source of infinite parallaxes." "Stop, Monsieur de la Grive, draw your sword once again, like that, parry, there! You set your heels along the same line: a mistake, for you jeopardize the steadiness of your legs. The head must not be held erect, because the space between the shoulder and the neck exposes an excessive surface to the blows of the adversary...."" "But you see how man is also machine, and it suffices to turn one wheel on the surface and other wheels then turn inside: the brother and the enmity are merely the reflection of the fear that each man has of himself, of the recesses of his own soul, where unconfessed desires lurk, or, as they are saying in Paris, unconscious concepts." ""You cannot believe what you are saying." "Well, no. Hardly ever. But the philosopher is like the poet. The latter composes ideal letters for an ideal nymph, only to plumb with his words the depths of passion. The philosopher tests the coldness of his gaze, to see how far he can undermine the fortress of bigotry." "If Genius, & therefore Learning, consists in connecting remote Notions & finding Similitude in things dissimilar, then Metaphor, the most acute and farfetched among Tropes, is the only one capable of producing Wonder, which gives birth to Pleasure, as do changes of scene in the theater. And if the Pleasure produced by Figures derives from learning new things without effort & many things in small volume, then Metaphor, setting our mind to flying betwixt one Genus & another, allows us to discern in a single Word more than one Object."" "Hear me out. For half an hour you have been interrupting me to say what you think and, under the guise of questioning me, you would show me I am mistaken. Never do this again, especially with the powerful. Occasions will arise when confidence in your own perspicacity and the impulse to tell the truth will enable you to give sound advice to someone of higher station. Never do it. Every victory produces hatred in the vanquished, and if the victory is over one's own master, then it is foolish or harmful. Princes wish to be assisted, not outstripped. But you must be prudent also with your equals. Do not humiliate them by your merits." "Dissimulating means drawing a veil composed of honest shadows, which does not constitute falsehood but allows truth some respite." "He envisaged situations in which La Novarese, pursued by Landsknechts, fell overcome into his arms as he routed the assailants and led her, exhausted, into a garden where he enjoyed her wild gratitude." "As His Eminence the Cardinal is accustomed to saying, the innate frivolity of the French brings them to desire change" ""You have succumbed to the vices of this city and this country. As His Eminence the Cardinal is accustomed to saying, the innate frivolity of the French brings them to desire change because of the tedium caused by the present. Some of these light-minded gentlemen, whom the King has taken care to make still lighter by relieving them of their head, seduced you with their subversive propositions. Your case is not the sort that need disturb any tribunal. The States, whose preservation is of necessity extremely dear to us, would quickly be ruined if in matters of crime that tend to their subversion we demanded proofs of the sort required in common" ""We would be lacking in Christian charity if we absolutely denied the possibility of your innocence or of our being victim of a misunderstanding. But the misunderstanding so coincides with our plans that we see no reason to examine it. For that matter, you would not wish to insinuate that we are proposing to you a dishonest exchange, as if to say either you are innocent and to the block with you, or self-confessed guilty and, by perjury, in our service...."" "The plague is transmitted, as everyone knows, through venenific unguents, and he had read of people who died by wetting a finger with saliva as they leafed through works whose pages had in fact been smeared with a poison." From The Name of the Rose. Cheeky. "It is as if from a held breath, from a coal reddening through an inner respiration, from that göldene Quelle des Universums was born a scale of luminous excellences gradually descending towards the most irreparable of imperfections; as if the creative afflatus came from the infinite and concentrated luminous power of the Divinity, so searing that it seems to us dark night, down through the relative perfection of the Cherubim and the Seraphim, through the Thrones and the Dominions, to the lowest waste where the worm crawls and the insensible stone survives at the very border of the Void. "And this was the Offenbarung gottlicher Mayestat!"" "Was it not beautiful to imagine the Father of the Universe blowing on that still-green ball, urging it to celebrate its victory twelve hours after the birth of Time, right here on the Antipodal Meridian where they stood at this moment?" "Roberto reasoned that if God removed the water of yesterday and placed it in today, the earth of yesterday might undergo a succussation thanks to that damned center of gravity, but to human beings this should not matter: in their yesterday the succussation had not taken place; it had happened instead in a yesterday of God, who clearly knew how to handle different times and different stories, as a Narrator who writes several novels, all with the same characters, but making different things befall them from story to story." ""Bravo, Signor Roberto! You would not allow that the heavens are of crystal, because you were afraid the comets would break them, but you like them to be liquid, so the birds inside them drown! Further, this idea of vortices explains that the earth turns around the sun, but does not turn on itself as a child's top spins!" "Yes, but that philosopher said also that in this case it is the surface of the seas and the superficial crust of our globe that revolve, while the deep core remains still. I think."" The discussion of scientific ideas and theories reminds me of the Baroque Cycle. the search for truth. the discovery of the meridians... "But Roberto already knew what the Jesuit's real objection would be. Like that of the abbé on that evening of the duel when Saint-Savin provoked him: If there are infinite worlds, the Redemption can no longer have any meaning, and we are obliged either to imagine infinite Calvaries or to look on our terrestrial flowerbed as a privileged spot of the Cosmos, on which God permitted His Son to descend and free us from sin, while the other worlds were not granted this grace—to the discredit of His infinite goodness. And, in fact, this was the response of Father Caspar, which allowed Roberto to attack." "He lied often but never pointlessly. He knew that to be believed he had to make everyone see that sometimes he told the truth to his own disadvantage, and kept silent when the truth might win him praise. On the other hand, he tried to gain the reputation of a man sincere with his inferiors, so that their words would reach the ears of the powerful. He became convinced that to simulate with one's equals is a fault, but not to simulate with one's superiors is foolhardiness." "[...] with his betters he took care to make his ignorance evident, while seeming to admire in them what he already knew." "Here, wishing to invent a passage that no author of novels had yet conceived, to portray the feelings of that greedy youth preparing to conquer the city that was a compendium of Europe's civility, Asia's profusion, Africa's extravagance, and America's riches, where novelty had its realm, deceit its palace, luxury its center, courage its arena, beauty its hemicycle, fashion its cradle, and virtue its grave, Roberto put into Ferrante's mouth an arrogant cry: "Paris, a nous deux!"" "Ferrante considered woman the portrait of inconstancy, minister of fraud, fickle in speech, belated in action, and quick in caprice. Educated by would-be ascetics who never ceased reminding him that El hombre es el fuego, la mujer la estopa, viene el diablo y sopla, he was accustomed to considering every daughter of Eve an imperfect animal, an error of Nature, a torture for the eyes if ugly, a suffering of the heart if beautiful, tyrant of any who loved her, enemy of any who scorned her, disordered in her desires, implacable in her dislikes, capable of enchanting with the mouth and enchaining with the eyes." "Why not consider these fish the inhabitants of a world that has its forests, its peaks, its trees, and its valleys, and knows nothing of the world above the surface? Similarly, we live with no knowledge that the curved sky conceals other worlds, where people do not walk or swim but fly and navigate through the air. If what we call planets are the keels of their vessels, of which we see only the shining bottom, then these children of Neptune must see above them the shadow of our galleons and consider them heavenly bodies moving through their aqueous firmament." ""In person, my dear brother. I, who—as you were struggling like a dog or a frog—found my ship again on the far side of the Island, and sailed through my long Thursday towards Jerusalem, found the other Judas on the verge of betraying, hanged him from a fig tree, preventing him from handing over the Son of Man to the Sons of Darkness, entered the Garden of Olives with my men and abducted Our Lord, stealing Him from Calvary! And now you, I, all of us are living in a world that has never been redeemed!" "But Christ? Where is Christ now?" "Do you then not know that the ancient texts already said there are doves the color of flame because the Lord, before being crucified, wore a scarlet tunic? Have you not yet understood? For one thousand six hundred and ten years Christ has been prisoner on the Island, whence He tries to escape in the form of an Orange Dove, but is unable to abandon that place, where next to the Specula Melitensis I have left Judas's scapular, and where it is therefore forever the same day." "For that matter, how long was the time when I did not exist, and for how long in the future will I not be? I occupy a very small space in the abyss of the years. This little interval does not succeed in distinguishing me from the nothingness into which I shall go. I came into the world only to swell the ranks. My part was so small that even if I had remained in the wings, everyone would still have declared the play perfect." "But an atom divisible to infinity, producing parts ever smaller and ever more divisible, would lead me to a moment where matter would be nothing but infinite divisibility, and all its hardness and its fullness would be sustained by this simple balancing among voids. Matter, rather than feeling a horror of the Void, would then worship it, and would be composed of it, would be void-in-itself, absolute vacuity. Absolute vacuity would be at the very heart of the unthinkable geometrical point, and this point would be only the island of Utopia we dream of, in an ocean made always and only of water." "[...] movements of the atoms that compose me, that is, the stable vibration of the positions that the parts of my parts of my parts maintain among themselves. I would feel the hum of my stoning. But I could not say I, because to say I there must be others, something else against which to oppose myself. In principle the stone cannot know if there is anything outside itself. It hums. Its stoning is a stoning of stoning. Of the rest it knows nothing. It is a world. A world that worlds along on its own." "[...] the Austral Winds, with Boreas and Eurus, staunch enemies of the calm of the sea—even if till now they had left to the placid Zephyrs the responsibility of following the path along which the Tweede Daphne continued her voyage—were beginning to show signs of impatience in the confinement of their subterranean chambers. He made them burst forth all at once. The groan of the timbers covered the ground bass of the sailors' lamentations, the sea vomited upon them and they vomited into the sea, and sometimes a wave so enfolded them that from the shore one might have mistaken that deck for a coffin of ice, around which the thunderbolts flared like wax tapers." "At first the storm set clouds against clouds, waters against waters, winds against winds. But soon the sea abandoned its prescribed limits and grew, swelling, towards the sky, and rain came pouring down, the water mixed with the air, the birds learning to swim and the fish to fly. It was no longer a struggle of Nature against the seamen but a battle of the elements among themselves. Not one atom of air swirled but that it was not transformed into a pellet of hail, and Neptune rose to extinguish the fire in Jove's hands, to rob him of the pleasure of burning those humans whom Neptune wanted instead to drown." "All was enveloped in a light haze, as happens when the sun has just disappeared and the night has not yet taken possession of the sky." "Thus each of us yearns for a decomposition that—as well we know—will never be total; we wish that for us Eternity has not yet begun, yet we fear that we have been in it ever since our remote arrival on this shore. Living, we believed Hell was the place of eternal despair, because so they told us. Alas, no, for it is the place of undying hope, which makes each day worse than the one before, as this thirst, which is kept alive in us, is never slaked." ""And God—?" Ferrante asked. "Does God laugh?" "No, alas," the excoriated man replied, "because even humiliation would exalt us. How beautiful it would be if we could see at least a laughing God come to taunt us! What distraction, the spectacle of the Lord who from His throne, among His saints, makes sport of us. We would have the sight of another's joy, as cheering as the sight of another's frown. No, here no one is outraged, no one laughs, no one shows himself. God is not here. Here there is only hope without goal."" "But Roberto, as we have seen, having begun with the idea that the Land of Romances was completely separate from his own world, had finally come to make the two universes flow effortlessly one into the other, and he had mingled their laws. He thought that he could arrive at the Island because he was imagining his arrival, and that he could imagine hers at the moment when he was already there, because this was what he wished. On the other hand, he was transferring to his own world that freedom to will events and to see them achieved which makes Romances unpredictable. Finally, he would reach the Island for the simple reason that if he did not reach it, he would no longer know what story to tell." "[...] phantom vessel, its bulwarks encrusted with shells, green with seaweed, water stagnating in its riven hold, a refuge of mollusks and poisonous fish." "Nor could I elude the childish curiosity of the reader, who would want to know if Roberto really wrote the pages on which I have dwelt far too long. In all honesty, I would have to reply that it is not impossible that someone else wrote them, someone who wanted only to pretend to tell the truth. And thus I would lose all the effect of the novel: where, yes, you pretend to tell true things, but you must not admit seriously that you are pretending." Here he sounds so much like Žižek, who also dwells on the difference between knowing something and having proof of it. ]]> </content> </entry> <entry> <title type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[The Devils of Loudon by Aldous Huxley (1953) (read in 2017)]]> </title> <id>https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3441</id> <link href="https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3441"/> <updated>2017-10-02T21:50:12+02:00</updated> <author> <name type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Marco von Ballmoos]]> </name> <uri>https://earthli.com/users/marco</uri> </author> <summary type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA["Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is" ... ]]> </summary> <content type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Published by marco on 2. Oct 2017 21:50:12 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I've failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an interest in this book, then I'm happy for you." In this book, Huxley tackles the historical subject of the possession by the devil of the Urseline nuns in Loudun in the 17th century. The affair was a scientific and judicial disaster, by today's standards. And our standards aren't even very high, to be honest. The story centers on the prosecution of Father Urban Grandier, a priest in early 17th-century France in the Diocese of Lourdes. He is eminently fallible, especially as far as his vow of celibacy goes. He is not a very nice man, loving and leaving and focusing fairly narrowly on Father Urban Grandier rather than the concerns of his flock. He gives interesting and rousing services, but that's about where his dedication to the flock ends. He is far more interested in personal power, in climbing the Church ladder and in boinking pretty young things. Naturally, there are other forces at work, not including local and powerful merchants as well as other members of the Church in places as far-flung from Lourdes as Paris. Even Richelieu and Louis XIII are involved, at least by name. Grandier's single-mindedness eventually backfires as he collects far too many enemies -- all of whom are bereft of any scruples or devotion to a sound justice system. When the prioress of a local convent goes off her gourd, her obsession with Grandier is the key to his undoing. His enemies harness her insanity, use several torturers/exorcisers to rouse similar libidinous and salacious feelings in the other nuns and then begin a campaign to blame the whole sordid situation on Urban's consorting with the Devil and then corrupting and/or possessing and/or fucking the nuns (naturally, in absentia and through the demons he controls). The exorcism circus continues for months, if not years, establishing itself as very lucrative -- if exhausting -- for the nuns, who are forced to put on sometimes-daily shows It's all utter hogwash, as most participants -- the accusers, Grandier and the nuns -- know. Some believe in the possessions, but they are willing participants like the exorcist, who delights in sexually torturing the nuns with enemas and other implements, all in the name of God. The book sounds more exciting than it actually is. There are long, historical sections as well as treatises on the mind of the average citizen of France (or the world, for that matter) at the time. These discussions of the state of psychology, science and sociology at the time are fascinating, if a bit long-winded. As well, the notion of demonic possession is placed into historical and scientific perspective. Huxley's fascination and experience with psychedelics and altered mental states serves him well here, I think. Huxley is extremely well- and widely read, freely mixing passages in the original, archaic French and Latin. The material is thoroughly footnoted and draws on both original source material as well as other studies of on this supposed possession done throughout the intervening centuries. His approach differs in that he examines the whole sordid tale through the lens of the 16th-century Frenchman's context, complete with the social and scientific mores of the day that an average citizen had at his or her disposal. He dismisses the reality of the possession and tries to understand what lessons we can learn about human nature, religion and our capability of understanding the universe to any reliable degree whatsoever. Again, this may still sound more interesting than it actually is. The prose is dense as well as a bit dated. I liked the overall story arc and was brought to the book by Ken Russell's 1970 film, The Devils, which was fantastic. [Citations] "Partisan loyalty is socially disastrous; but for individuals it can be richly rewarding—more rewarding, in many ways, than even concupiscence or avarice. Whoremongers and money-grubbers find it hard to feel very proud of their activities. But partisanship is a complex passion which permits those who indulge in it to make the best of both worlds. Because they do these things for the sake of a group which is, by definition, good and even sacred, they can admire themselves and loathe their neighbors, they can seek power and money, can enjoy the pleasures of aggression and cruelty, not merely without feeling guilty, but with a positive glow of conscious virtue. Loyalty to their group transforms these pleasant vices into acts of heroism." "To think about events realistically, in terms of multiple causations, is hard and emotionally unrewarding. How much easier, how much more agreeable to trace each effect to a single and, if possible, a personal cause! To the illusion of understanding will be joined, in this case, the pleasure of hero worship, if the circumstances are favorable, and the equal, or even greater pleasure, if they should be unfavorable, of persecuting a scapegoat." "In fact, of course, destiny had already begun to render its account, but unobtrusively. He had suffered no hurt that he could feel, only an imperceptible coarsening and hardening, only a progressive darkening of the inner light, a gradual narrowing of the soul’s window on the side of eternity." "Descent is always easy, and in this case there would be plenty of casuistry to lubricate the slide, and, after the bottom had been reached, all the absolution a girl could ask for." Methinks lubricate and bottom here are not at all accidental "From the many well-authenticated cases on record it is clear that ESP and prevision sometimes take place spontaneously, and that the persons in whom they occur are aware of the event and strongly convinced of the truth of the information which is being conveyed. In the spiritual field we find analogous records of spontaneous theophanies. By a grace of sudden intuition, the normally unknowable makes itself known, and the knowledge is self-validating beyond the possibility of doubt." "It is worth remarking that this experience of a divinity immanent in natural objects came also to Surin. In a few brief notations he records that there were times when he actually perceived the full majesty of God in a tree, a passing animal. But, strangely enough, he never wrote at any length about this beatific vision of the Absolute in the relative. And even to the recipients of his spiritual letters he never suggested that obedience to Christ’s injunction to consider the lilies might help the blindly groping soul to come to a knowledge of God. One can only suppose that the acquired belief in the total depravity of fallen nature was stronger, in his mind, than the givenness of his own experience. The dogmatic words he had learned at Sunday School were opaque enough to eclipse the immediate Fact. “If you wish to see It before your eyes,” writes the Third Patriarch of Zen, “have no fixed notions either for or against It.” But fixing notions is the professional occupation of theologians, and both Surin and his master were theologians before they were seekers for enlightenment." “[...] one busies oneself with works of zeal and charity; but is it from a pure motive of zeal and charity? Is it not, perhaps, because one finds a personal satisfaction in this kind of thing, because one does not care for prayer or study, because one cannot bear to stay in one’s room, cannot stomach seclusion and recollectedness?” "It is by thinking and acting in any given situation, not as we would normally think and act, but rather as we imagine that we should do, if we were like some other and better person, that we finally cease to be like our old selves and come, instead, to resemble our ideal model." "We all imagine ourselves to be simultaneously clear-sighted and impenetrable; but, except when blinded by some infatuation, other people can see through us just as easily as we can see through them. The discovery of this fact is apt to be exceedingly disconcerting." "A generation earlier than the Marquis, François Boucher had produced, in L’Attente du Clystère, the most terrific pin-up girl of the century, perhaps of all time. From the savagely obscene and the gracefully pornographic there is an easy modulation to Rabelaisian fun and the smoking-room joke." "In medieval and early modern Christendom the situation of sorcerers and their clients was almost precisely analogous to that of Jews under Hitler, capitalists under Stalin, Communists and fellow travelers in the United States. They were regarded as the agents of a Foreign Power, unpatriotic at the best and, at the worst, traitors, heretics, enemies of the people. Death was the penalty meted out to these metaphysical Quislings of the past and, in most parts of the contemporary world, death is the penalty which awaits the political and secular devil-worshipers known here as Reds, there as Reactionaries." "[...] medieval village life, for which the sentimentalists, whose dislike of the present blinds them to the no less enormous horrors of the past, still nostalgically yearn." "And Montaigne concludes with one of those golden sentences which deserve to be inscribed over the altar of every church, above the bench of every magistrate, on the walls of every lecture hall, every senate and parliament, every government office and council chamber. “After all,” (write the words in neon, write in letters as tall as a man!) “after all, it is rating one’s conjectures at a very high price to roast a man alive on the strength of them.”" "(The history of spiritualism makes it very clear that fraud, especially pious fraud, is perfectly compatible with faith.)" "AT ANY given time and place certain thoughts are completely unthinkable. But this radical unthinkableness of certain thoughts is not paralleled by any radical unfeelableness of certain emotions, or any radical undoableness of the actions inspired by such emotions. Anything can at all times be felt and acted upon, albeit sometimes with great difficulty and in the teeth of general disapproval. But though individuals can always feel and do whatever their temperament and constitution permit them to feel and do, they cannot think about their experiences except within the frame of reference which, at that particular time and place, has come to seem self-evident. Interpretation is in terms of the prevailing thought-pattern, and this thought-pattern conditions to some extent the expression of urges and emotions, but can never completely inhibit them. For example, a firm belief in eternal damnation can coexist in the believer’s mind with the knowledge that he or she is committing mortal sin." "For our ancestors there was only the soul or conscious self, on the one hand, and on the other God, the saints and a host of good and evil spirits. Our conception of a vast intermediate world of subconscious mental activity, much more extensive and, in certain respects, more effective than the activity of the conscious self, was unthinkable. The current theory of human nature had left no place for it; consequently, so far as our ancestors were concerned, it did not exist. The phenomena which we now explain in terms of this subconscious activity had either to be denied altogether, or else attributed to the action of nonhuman spirits. Thus, catalepsy was either a humbug or a symptom of diabolic infestation." "The coming of Descartes and the general acceptance of what at that time seemed a more “scientific” theory of human nature did not improve matters; indeed, in some respects it caused men’s thinking about themselves to become less realistic than it had been under the older dispensation. Devils passed out of the picture; but along with the devils went any kind of serious consideration of the phenomena once attributed to diabolic agency. The exorcists had at least recognized such facts as trance, catalepsy, split personality and extrasensory perception. The psychologists who came after Descartes were inclined either to dismiss the facts as nonexistent, or to account for them, if they did not permit themselves to be dismissed, as the product of a something called “imagination.” For men of science, “imagination” was almost synonymous with “illusion.”" "But there were many who never thought of the matter in purely psychological terms. To them it seemed obvious that such phenomena as were manifested by Sœur Jeanne could be explained in terms of physiology and ought to be treated accordingly. The more Draconian among them prescribed the application to the bare skin of a good birch rod. Tallemant records that the Marquis de Couldray-Montpensier withdrew his two possessed daughters from the hands of the exorcists and “had them well fed and soundly whipped; the devil took his leave immediately.” At Loudun itself, during the later stages of the possession, the whip was prescribed with increasing frequency, and Surin records that devils who merely laughed at the rites of the Church were often routed by the discipline." "However farcically the figure of fun, Fitzdottrel is nonetheless a truly Representative Man. He stands for a whole epoch, whose intellectual life was straddled insecurely between two worlds. That he tried to make the worst of both worlds, instead of the best, is also sadly typical. For the unregenerate, occultism and “projects” are considerably more attractive than pure science and the worship of God in spirit." "We have seen that the plausibility of the hypothesis of possession was exactly proportionate to the inadequacy of a physiology without cell structure or chemistry, and of a psychology which took practically no account of mental activity on subconscious levels. Once universal, belief in possession is entertained at the present time only by Roman Catholics and Spiritists." "Nothing compels us to believe that the only intelligences in the universe are those connected with the bodies of human beings and the lower animals. If the evidence for clairvoyance, telepathy and prevision is accepted (and it is becoming increasingly difficult to reject it), then we must allow that there are mental processes which are largely independent of space, time and matter. And if this is so, there seems to be no reason for denying a priori that there may be nonhuman intelligences, either completely discarnate, or else associated with cosmic energy in some way of which we are still ignorant. (We are still ignorant, incidentally, of the way in which human minds are associated with that highly organized vortex of cosmic energy known as a body. That some association exists is evident; but how energy gets transformed into mental processes, and how mental processes affect energy, we still have no idea.*)" "The effects which follow too constant and intense a concentration upon evil are always disastrous. Those who crusade, not for God in themselves, but against the devil in others, never succeed in making the world better, but leave it either as it was, or sometimes even perceptibly worse than it was, before the crusade began. By thinking primarily of evil we tend, however excellent our intentions, to create occasions for evil to manifest itself." "Today it is everywhere self-evident that we are on the side of Light, they on the side of Darkness. And being on the side of Darkness, they deserve to be punished and must be liquidated (since our divinity justifies everything) by the most fiendish means at our disposal. By idolatrously worshiping ourselves as Ormuzd, and by regarding the other fellow as Ahriman, the Principle of Evil, we of the twentieth century are doing our best to guarantee the triumph of diabolism in our time." "For the moment, let us place ourselves in the intellectual position of the exorcists and their contemporaries. Accepting as valid the Church’s criteria of possession, let us examine the evidence on which the nuns were pronounced to be demoniacs and the parson, a sorcerer." "Maitland’s father had told him of a Scottish peasant woman, through whose mouth a demon had corrected the bad Latin of a Presbyterian minister, and the young man had consequently grown up with an a priori belief in possession." "From all this it must be evident that if, as the Roman Church maintained, ESP phenomena and PK effects are the hallmark of diabolic possession (or, alternatively, are extraordinary graces), then the Ursulines of Loudun were merely hysterics who had fallen into the hands, not of the fiend, not of the living God, but of a crew of exorcists, all superstitious, all hungry for publicity, and some deliberately dishonest and consciously malevolent." "The nuns, they asserted, must be possessed by devils; for how, otherwise, could one account for the shamelessness of their actions, the smut and irreligion of their conversation? “In what school of rakes and atheists,” asks Father Tranquille, “have they learned to spew forth such blasphemies and obscenities?” And with a touch almost of boastfulness, de Nion assures us that the good sisters “made use of expressions so filthy as to shame the most debauched of men, while their acts, both in exposing themselves and in inviting lewd behavior from those present, would have astounded the inhabitants of the lowest brothel in the country.”* As for their oaths and blasphemies—these were “so unheard of that they could not have suggested themselves to a merely human mind.”" "The ushers called for silence. In vain. The sobbing was uncontrollable. Laubardemont was greatly disturbed. Nothing was going according to plan. Better than anyone else he must have known that Grandier was not guilty of the crimes for which he was to be tortured and burned alive. And yet, in some sublimely Pickwickian sense, the parson was a sorcerer. On the basis of a thousand pages of worthless evidence, thirteen hireling judges had said so. Therefore, though certainly false, it must somehow be true. Now, by all the rules of the game, Grandier should be spending his last hours in despair and rebellion, cursing the devil who had ensnared him and the God who was sending him to hell. Instead of which, the scoundrel was talking like a good Catholic and giving the most touching, the most heart-rending example of Christian resignation. The thing was insufferable. And what would His Eminence say, when he heard that the only result of this carefully stage-managed ceremony had been to convince the spectators that the parson was innocent? There was only one thing to do, and Laubardemont, who was a man of decision, promptly did it. “Clear the court,” he ordered." "Our ancestors invented the rack and the iron maiden, the boot and the water torture; but in the subtler arts of breaking the will and reducing the human being to subhumanity, they still had much to learn. In a sense, it may be, they did not even wish to learn these things. They had been brought up in a religion which taught that the will is free, the soul immortal; and they acted upon these beliefs even in relation to their enemies." "For the totalitarians of our more enlightened century, there is no soul and no Creator; there is merely a lump of physiological raw material molded by conditioned reflexes and social pressures into what, by courtesy, is still called a human being. This product of the man-made environment is without intrinsic significance and possesses no rights to self-determination. It exists for Society and must conform to the Collective Will. In practice, of course, Society is nothing but the national State, and as a matter of brute fact, the Collective Will is merely the dictator’s will-to-power, sometimes mitigated, sometimes distorted to the verge of lunacy, by some pseudoscientific theory of what, in the gorgeous future, will be good for an actuarial abstraction labeled “Humanity.”" "[...] remembered those Latin lessons and his abandonment of the desperately weeping girl—and partly out of a fear lest the spectacle of their triumph might move him to bitterness and make him forget that God was even here, even now, Grandier dropped his eyes. A hand touched him on the shoulder. It was La Grange, the captain of the guard, who had come to ask the parson’s forgiveness" "The treasury ceased to pay the salary of the surviving exorcists, who were all recalled to their various houses. Left to themselves such devils as remained soon took their leave. After six years of incessant struggle, the Church Militant gave up the fight. Its enemies promptly disappeared. The long orgy was at an end. If there had been no exorcists, it would never have begun." "The charm of history and its enigmatic lesson consist in the fact that, from age to age, nothing changes and yet everything is completely different. In the personages of other times and alien cultures we recognize our all too human selves and yet are aware, as we do so, that the frame of reference within which we do our living has changed, since their day, out of all recognition, that propositions which seemed axiomatic then are now untenable and that what we regard as the most self-evident postulates could not, at an earlier period, find entrance into even the most boldly speculative mind. But however great, however important for thought and technology, for social organization and behavior, the differences between then and now are always peripheral." "“Do not hunt after the truth,” advises one of the Zen masters, “only cease to cherish opinions.”" "To be mad with lucidity and in complete possession of one’s intellectual faculties—this, surely, must be one of the most terrible of experiences. Unimpaired, Surin’s reason looked on helplessly, while his imagination, his emotions and his autonomic nervous system comported themselves like an alliance of criminal maniacs, bent on his destruction. It was a struggle, in the last analysis, between the active person and the victim of suggestion, between Surin the realist, doing his best to cope with actual facts, and Surin the verbalist, converting words into hideous pseudo-realities, in regard to which it was only logical to feel terror and despair." "Far more dangerous than crimes of passion are the crimes of idealism—the crimes which are instigated, fostered and moralized by hallowed words. Such crimes are planned when the pulse is normal and committed in cold blood and with unwavering perseverance over a long course of years. In the past, the words which dictated the crimes of idealism were predominantly religious; now they are predominantly political. The dogmas are no longer metaphysical, but positivistic and ideological. The only things that remain unchanged are the idolatrous superstition of those who swallow the dogmas, and the systematic madness, the diabolic ferocity, with which they act upon their beliefs." "The fundamental human problem is ecological: men must learn how to live with the cosmos on all its levels, from the material to the spiritual. As a race, we have to discover how a huge and rapidly increasing population can go on existing satisfactorily on a planet of limited size and possessed of resources, many of which are wasting assets that can never be renewed." "Against excessive sexuality, as against excessive drug-taking, societies seem to be able to protect themselves with some degree of success. Their defense against crowd-delirium and its often disastrous consequences is, in all too many cases, far less adequate. The professional moralists who inveigh against drunkenness are strangely silent about the equally disgusting vice of herd-intoxication—of downward self-transcendence into subhumanity by the process of getting together in a mob." "Individually and in the co-ordinated and purposive groups which constitute a healthy society, men and women display a certain capacity for rational thought and free choice in the light of ethical principles. Herded into mobs, the same men and women behave as though they possessed neither reason nor free will. Crowd-intoxication reduces them to a condition of infrapersonal and antisocial irresponsibility. Drugged by the mysterious poison which every excited herd secretes, they fall into a state of heightened suggestibility, resembling that which follows an injection of sodium amytal or the induction, by whatever means, of a light hypnotic trance. While in this state they will believe any nonsense that may be bawled at them, will act upon any command or exhortation, however senseless, mad or criminal." "That is why men in authority—the priests and the rulers of peoples—have never unequivocally proclaimed the immorality of this form of downward self-transcendence. True, crowd-delirium evoked by members of the opposition and in the name of heretical principles has everywhere been denounced by those in power. But crowd-delirium aroused by government agents, crowd-delirium in the name of orthodoxy, is an entirely different matter. In all cases where it can be made to serve the interests of the men controlling church and state, downward self-transcendence by means of herd-intoxication is treated as something legitimate, and even highly desirable." "Religious and political ceremonials are welcomed by the masses as opportunities for getting drunk on herd-poison, and by their rulers as opportunities for planting suggestions in minds which have momentarily ceased to be capable of reason or free will." "“Patriotism,” as a great patriot concluded on the eve of her execution by her country’s enemies, “is not enough.” Neither is socialism, nor communism, nor capitalism; neither is art, nor science, nor public order, nor any given religion or church. All these are indispensable, but none of them is enough. Civilization demands from the individual devoted self-identification with the highest of human causes. But if this self-identification with what is human is not accompanied by a conscious and consistent effort to achieve upward self-transcendence into the universal life of the Spirit, the goods achieved will always be mingled with counterbalancing evils." ]]> </content> </entry> <entry> <title type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell by Aldous Huxley (1954/1956) (read in 2017)]]> </title> <id>https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3440</id> <link href="https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3440"/> <updated>2017-10-02T21:33:13+02:00</updated> <author> <name type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Marco von Ballmoos]]> </name> <uri>https://earthli.com/users/marco</uri> </author> <summary type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA["Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is" ... ]]> </summary> <content type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Published by marco on 2. Oct 2017 21:33:13 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I've failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an interest in this book, then I'm happy for you." This is a book in two parts. The first is called The Doors of Perception and is an analysis of one of Huxley's mescaline trips. It interweaves nigh-painfully evocative descriptions of what he saw on his 8-hour trip with a history of visions and visionaries. The discussion includes an examination of social implications of various intoxicants and their relative efficacy in providing escape, insight and advancement. The second book Heaven and Hell is a discussion of the thesis that much religious symbology is anchored in an effort to replicate/evoke/commemorate/trigger the majestic preternatural visions experienced on mescaline, peyote or sensory or nourishment deprivation. He discusses the relative facility of some artwork to transport individuals to other, more-visionary inner places. The efficacy of art to transport is relative to the age within which it was observed: modern society's surfeit of color and distraction serves to dampen the power of artwork that would otherwise be more easily able to induce visions and insight. While he does not offer a scientific or empirical base for his thoughts, his rumination on their ineffability -- and his attempts to make it more effable with some sort of framework, a model -- is very interesting. He seeks not to diminish religion but neither does he lend credence to any of their models as the one true way. The subconscious is to be mined for insight -- and insight exists outside of provability. His model is of the antipodes of the mind, places separate from the conscious and even most of the subconscious mind, where a clearer, unfiltered lens on reality exists. Or, at least, seems to exist. At that level of abstraction, it doesn't matter whether it's "real" in a physical or measurable sense, but that it influences your everyday consciousness and makes you a more observant, peaceful and reasonable person. These books, like The Devils of Loudon, are an investigation by a prodigiously learned, patient, curious, intelligent and open mind into difficult but overwhelmingly interesting topics for which there are no single answers, no roadmaps to enlightenment. The book includes voluminous appendices that comprise more than 1/3 of its pages. It's not a self-help book. It's not a scientific treatise. It's a notebook of observations written by a master. Recommended. [Citations] "Reflecting on my experience, I find myself agreeing with the eminent Cambridge philosopher, Dr. C. D. Broad, “that we should do well to consider much more seriously than we have hitherto been inclined to do the type of theory which Bergson put forward in connection with memory and sense perception. The suggestion is that the function of the brain and nervous system and sense organs is in the main eliminative and not productive. Each person is at each moment capable of remembering all that has ever happened to him and of perceiving everything that is happening everywhere in the universe. The function of the brain and nervous system is to protect us from being overwhelmed and confused by this mass of largely useless and irrelevant knowledge, by shutting out most of what we should otherwise perceive or remember at any moment, and leaving only that very small and special selection which is likely to be practically useful.”" "Every individual is at once the beneficiary and the victim of the linguistic tradition into which he has been born—the beneficiary inasmuch as language gives access to the accumulated records of other people’s experience, the victim in so far as it confirms him in the belief that reduced awareness is the only awareness and as it bedevils his sense of reality, so that he is all too apt to take his concepts for data, his words for actual things." "Most people, most of the time, know only what comes through the reducing valve and is consecrated as genuinely real by the local language." "Visual impressions are greatly intensified and the eye recovers some of the perceptual innocence of childhood, when the sensum was not immediately and automatically subordinated to the concept." "It was on Van Gogh, and the picture at which the book opened was “The Chair”—that astounding portrait of a Ding an Sich, which the mad painter saw, with a kind of adoring terror, and tried to render on his canvas. But it was a task to which the power even of genius proved wholly inadequate. The chair Van Gogh had seen was obviously the same in essence as the chair I had seen. But, though incomparably more real than the chairs of ordinary perception, the chair in his picture remained no more than an unusually expressive symbol of the fact." Giacometti went down this road as well. "Poring over Judith’s skirts, there in the World’s Biggest Drug Store, I knew that Botticelli—and not Botticelli alone, but many others too—had looked at draperies with the same transfigured and transfiguring eyes as had been mine that morning. They had seen the Istigkeit, the Allness and Infinity of folded cloth and had done their best to render it in paint or stone. Necessarily, of course, without success. For the glory and the wonder of pure existence belong to another order, beyond the power of even the highest art to express." "The untalented visionary may perceive an inner reality no less tremendous, beautiful and significant than the world beheld by Blake; but he lacks altogether the ability to express, in literary or plastic symbols, what he has seen." "As recently as three hundred years ago an expression of thoroughgoing world denial and even world condemnation was both orthodox and comprehensible. “We should feel wonder at nothing at all in Nature except only the Incarnation of Christ.” In the seventeenth century, Lallemant’s phrase seemed to make sense. Today it has the ring of madness." "For what seemed an immensely long time I gazed without knowing, even without wishing to know, what it was that confronted me. At any other time I would have seen a chair barred with alternate light and shade. Today the percept had swallowed up the concept. I was so completely absorbed in looking, so thunderstruck by what I actually saw, that I could not be aware of anything else. Garden furniture, laths, sunlight, shadow—these were no more than names and notions, mere verbalizations, for utilitarian or scientific purposes, after the event. The event was this succession of azure furnace doors separated by gulfs of unfathomable gentian. It was inexpressibly wonderful, wonderful to the point, almost, of being terrifying. And suddenly I had an inkling of what it must feel like to be mad. Schizophrenia has its heavens as well as its hells and purgatories." "The schizophrenic is a soul not merely unregenerate, but desperately sick into the bargain. His sickness consists in the inability to take refuge from inner and outer reality (as the sane person habitually does) in the homemade universe of common sense—the strictly human world of useful notions, shared symbols and socially acceptable conventions." "Here, in spite of the peculiar hideousness of the architecture, there were renewals of transcendental otherness, hints of the morning’s heaven. Brick chimneys and green composition roofs glowed in the sunshine, like fragments of the New Jerusalem. And all at once I saw what Guardi had seen and (with what incomparable skill) had so often rendered in his paintings—a stucco wall with a shadow slanting across it, blank but unforgettably beautiful, empty but charged with all the meaning and the mystery of existence. The revelation dawned and was gone again within a fraction of a second." "That humanity at large will ever be able to dispense with Artificial Paradises seems very unlikely. Most men and women lead lives at the worst so painful, at the best so monotonous, poor and limited that the urge to escape, the longing to transcend themselves if only for a few moments, is and has always been one of the principal appetites of the soul." "We can never dispense with language and the other symbol systems; for it is by means of them, and only by their means, that we have raised ourselves above the brutes, to the level of human beings. But we can easily become the victims as well as the beneficiaries of these systems. We must learn how to handle words effectively; but at the same time we must preserve and, if necessary, intensify our ability to look at the world directly and not through that half opaque medium of concepts, which distorts every given fact into the all too familiar likeness of some generic label or explanatory abstraction." "About the physiological effects of mescalin we know a little. Probably (for we are not yet certain) it interferes with the enzyme system that regulates cerebral functioning. By doing so it lowers the efficiency of the brain as an instrument for focusing the mind on the problems of life on the surface of our planet. This lowering of what may be called the biological efficiency of the brain seems to permit the entry into consciousness of certain classes of mental events, which are normally excluded, because they possess no survival value." "“I was sitting on the seashore, half listening to a friend arguing violently about something which merely bored me. Unconsciously to myself, I looked at a film of sand I had picked up on my hand, when I suddenly saw the exquisite beauty of every little grain of it; instead of being dull, I saw that each particle was made up on a perfect geometrical pattern, with sharp angles, from each of which a brilliant shaft of light was reflected, while each tiny crystal shone like a rainbow…. The rays crossed and recrossed, making exquisite patterns of such beauty that they left me breathless…. Then, suddenly, my consciousness was lighted up from within and I saw in a vivid way how the whole universe was made up of particles of material which, no matter how dull and lifeless they might seem, were nevertheless filled with this intense and vital beauty. For a second or two the whole world appeared as a blaze of glory. When it died down, it left me with something I have never forgotten and which constantly reminds me of the beauty locked up in every minute speck of material around us.”" "Thanks to glass, Paolo Uccello could design a circular jewel thirteen feet in diameter—his great window of the Resurrection, perhaps the most extraordinary single work of vision-inducing art ever produced." "Familiarity breeds indifference. We have seen too much pure, bright color at Woolworth’s to find it intrinsically transporting. And here we may note that, by its amazing capacity to give us too much of the best things, modern technology has tended to devaluate the traditional vision-inducing materials." "With the development of chiaroscuro, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, night came out of the background and installed itself within the picture, which became the scene of a kind of Manichean struggle between Light and Darkness. At the time they were painted these works must have possessed a real transporting power. To us, who have seen altogether too much of this kind of thing, most of them seem merely theatrical. But a few still retain their magic. There is Caravaggio’s “Entombment,” for example; there are a dozen magical paintings by Georges de Latour;* there are all those visionary Rembrandts where the lights have the intensity and significance of light at the mind’s antipodes, where the darks are full of rich potentialities waiting their turn to become actual, to make themselves glowingly present to our consciousness." "The meditating philosopher sits there in his island of inner illumination; and at the opposite end of the symbolic chamber, in another, rosier island, an old woman crouches before the hearth. The firelight touches and transfigures her face, and we see, concretely illustrated, the impossible paradox and supreme truth—that perception is (or at least can be, ought to be) the same as Revelation," "There hangs in the Louvre a “Méditation du Philosophe,” whose symbolical subject matter is nothing more nor less than the human mind, with its teeming darknesses, its moments of intellectual and visionary illumination, its mysterious stairways winding downward and upward into the unknown. The meditating philosopher sits there in his island of inner illumination; and at the opposite end of the symbolic chamber, in another, rosier island, an old woman crouches before the hearth. The firelight touches and transfigures her face, and we see, concretely illustrated, the impossible paradox and supreme truth—that perception is (or at least can be, ought to be) the same as Revelation, that Reality shines out of every appearance, that the One is totally, infinitely present in all particulars." "Many schizophrenics have their times of heavenly happiness; but the fact that (unlike the mescalin taker) they do not know when, if ever, they will be permitted to return to the reassuring banality of everyday experience causes even heaven to seem appalling. But for those who, for whatever reason, are appalled, heaven turns into hell, bliss into horror, the Clear Light into the hateful glare of the land of lit-upness." "For the living, the doors of heaven, hell and limbo are opened, not by “massy keys of metals twain,” but by the presence in the blood of one set of chemical compounds and the absence of another set. The shadow world inhabited by some schizophrenics and neurotics closely resembles the world of the dead, as described in some of the earlier religious traditions." "To both, again, all is significant, but negatively significant, so that every event is utterly pointless, every object intensely unreal," "all is significant, but negatively significant, so that every event is utterly pointless, every object intensely unreal, every self-styled human being a clockwork dummy, grotesquely going through the motions of work and play, of loving, hating, thinking, of being eloquent, heroic, saintly, what you will—the robots are nothing if not versatile." ]]> </content> </entry> <entry> <title type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[October: The Story of the Russian Revolution by China Miéville (2017) (read in 2017)]]> </title> <id>https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3439</id> <link href="https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3439"/> <updated>2017-10-02T21:00:12+02:00</updated> <author> <name type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Marco von Ballmoos]]> </name> <uri>https://earthli.com/users/marco</uri> </author> <summary type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA["Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is" ... ]]> </summary> <content type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Published by marco on 2. Oct 2017 21:00:12 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I've failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an interest in this book, then I'm happy for you." This is a thoroughly researched retelling of the Russian revolution, as written by a master of Science Fiction and Fantasy. It takes the reader from February 1917 to October/November 2017. There follows a bit of an epilogue, sketching the following decades roughly, but that's not the focus of the book. The focus is on how the initial coup of Nicholas II transformed over nearly a year to the Bolshevik revolution. The summer sees a cavalcade of famous names, each placed in history: Lenin, Trotsky, Maslov, Kolchak, Semenov, Stalin, Sukhanov ... the list goes on an on. Allegiances whipsaw, bolsheviks gain in power over the summer, the second revolution in October was a near-inevitability in hindsight. A very interesting and very well-written unsnarling of an incredibly complicated and singularly important sequence of events. The hopefulness and solidarity of the socialists shines through at nearly every moment. They would, in the end, win for a only a few shining months before the clouds of totalitarianism descended. Highly recommended. [Citations] "In its wake come more reading circles, cells of agitators, gatherings of the variously like-minded, aghast at a world of ruthless, exploitative capital and the subordination of need to profit. The future for which the Marxists yearn, communism, is as absurd to their detractors as any peasant’s Belovode. It is rarely distinctly outlined, but they know it beckons beyond private property and its violence, beyond exploitation and alienation, to a world where technology reduces labour, the better for humanity to flourish. ‘The true realm of freedom’, in Marx’s words: ‘the development of human powers as an end in itself’. This is what they want." "The Petrograd police blocked the bridges. But the gods of weather showed solidarity in the form of this brutal winter. The streets were lined with thick snowpiles, and the great Neva itself remained frozen. The demonstrators descended in their thousands from the embankments onto the ice. They walked across the face of the waters." "Alongside such appeals to the war’s new legitimacy, the Coalition Government knew that its international standing, certainly among the Allies, was heavily dependent on whether it was seen to be doing its bit to win the war – and doing so on those Allies’ decidedly unsocialist terms. Some were clear-sighted that this was a contradiction, and, continuing to laud the anti-imperialist necessity of the war’s continuation, they were entirely cynical." "Either way, it is a curio of the moment that hard-left advocates of ‘all power to the soviets’ were delegated by a soviet opponent to defend the Soviet currently arguing furiously against taking the power they wanted it to take." "Then came a sadism so startling it stunned the left. ‘The bony hand of hunger and national destitution will seize by the throat the friends of the people.’ Those ‘friends of the people’ he dreamed into the grasp of predatory skeletal fingers were socialists." "Lenin suggested Trotsky for commissar of the interior. But Trotsky foresaw that enemies on the right would attack him – as a Jew. ‘Of what importance are such trifles?’ Lenin snapped. ‘There are still a good many fools left,’ Trotsky replied. ‘Surely we don’t keep step with fools?’ ‘Sometimes’, said Trotsky, ‘one has to make some allowance for stupidity. Why create additional complications at the outset?’" "There, their world collapsing, the sullen embers of the Provisional Government still glowed." "With all the seriousness in the world, like burnt-out matches telling grim stories of the conflagration they will soon start, the ashes of Russia’s Provisional Government debated which of them to make dictator." "The minister Semion Maslov of the Right SRs screamed down the phone line to a Duma representative, who relayed his words to the hushed house. ‘The democracy sent us into the Provisional Government: we didn’t want the appointments, but we went. Yet now … when we are being shot, we are not supported … Of course we will die. But my final words will be: “Contempt and damnation to the democracy which knew how to appoint us but was unable to defend us.”’" "When the cheering subsided, Trotsky himself rose to respond to Martov. ‘A rising of the masses of the people requires no justification,’ he said. ‘What has happened is an insurrection, and not a conspiracy. We hardened the revolutionary energy of the Petersburg workers and soldiers. We openly forged the will of the masses for an insurrection, and not a conspiracy. The masses of the people followed our banner and our insurrection was victorious. And now we are told: renounce your victory, make concessions, compromise. With whom? I ask: with whom ought we to compromise? With those wretched groups which have left us or who are making this proposal? But after all we’ve had a full view of them. No one in Russia is with them any longer. A compromise is supposed to be made, as between two equal sides, by the millions of workers and peasants represented in this congress, whom they are ready, not for the first time or the last, to barter away as the bourgeoisie sees fit. No, here no compromise is possible. To those who have left and to those who tell us to do this we must say: you are miserable bankrupts, your role is played out. Go where you ought to go: into the dustbin of history!’" "Russia gains peace but loses swathes of land and population, some of its most fertile regions, and vast industrial and financial resources. In these vacated territories, the Central Powers install counter-revolutionary puppet regimes." "David Francis, the American ambassador to Russia, writes of his concern that ‘if these damned Bolsheviks are permitted to remain in control of the country it will not only be lost to its devoted people but Bolshevik rule will undermine all governments and be a menace to society itself’." "Churchill is particularly obsessed with the ‘nameless beast’, the ‘foul baboonery of Bolshevism’, and perfectly explicit that it is his greatest enemy. ‘Of all the tyrannies in history, the Bolshevist tyranny is the worst, the most destructive, and the most degrading,’ he declares in 1919. ‘It is sheer humbug to pretend that it is not far worse than German militarism.’ As the war ends, he publicises his intention to ‘Kill the Bolshie, Kiss the Hun’." "The Allies pour troops into Russia, screwing down an embargo, stopping food from reaching the starving population of Soviet Russia. And they funnel funds to the Whites, no matter how unsavoury – supporting a dictatorship under Alexander Kolchak, and regarding Grigory Semenov, whose Cossack forces unleash a reign of terror in Siberia, as, in the words of one American observer, ‘tolerably severe’." Plus ça change. "And there is no doubt that its reach and depth expand beyond control; that some agents of the Cheka, the political police, seduced by personal power, sadism or the degradation of the moment, are thugs and murderers unconstrained by political conviction and wielding new authority. There are no shortage of testimonials as to their dreadful acts." "Under such unrelenting pressures, these are months and years of unspeakable barbarity and suffering, starvation, mass death, the near-total collapse of industry and culture, of banditry, pogroms, torture and cannibalism" "Major General William Graves, who commanded US forces in Siberia, considers himself ‘well on the side of safety when I say that the anti-Bolsheviks killed one hundred people in Eastern Siberia, to every one killed by the Bolsheviks’." Despite this, the US would support the other, more-evil side. And then they'd blame bolshevism when it fails to flourish despite their onslaught. "Threats against the regime multiply, and Stalin consolidates his rule. As crisis grips the world economy, he inaugurates the ‘great change’. ‘The tempo must not be reduced!’ he announces in 1931. This is his first Five-Year Plan. ‘We are fifty or 100 years behind the advanced countries. We must make good this distance in ten years. Either we do it or they crush us.’" "Lenin rather startlingly allows as ‘incontrovertible’ that Russia had not been ‘ready’ for revolution. He wonders pugnaciously, however, whether a people ‘influenced by the hopelessness of its situation’ could be blamed" "In his short piece ‘Our Revolution’, written in January 1923 in response to Sukhanov’s memoir, Lenin rather startlingly allows as ‘incontrovertible’ that Russia had not been ‘ready’ for revolution. He wonders pugnaciously, however, whether a people ‘influenced by the hopelessness of its situation’ could be blamed for ‘fling[ing] itself into a struggle that would offer it at least some chance of securing conditions for the further development of civilisation that were somewhat unusual’. It is not absurd to argue that the ground-down of Russia had no real choice but to act, on the chance that in so doing they might alter the very parameters of the situation. That things might thereby improve." "The party’s shift after Lenin’s death, from that plaintive, embattled sense that there had been little alternative but to strive in imperfect conditions, to the later bad hope of Socialism in One Country, is a baleful result of recasting necessity as virtue." "It is not for nostalgia’s sake that the strange story of the first socialist revolution in history deserves celebration. The standard of October declares that things changed once, and they might do so again." "Those who count themselves on the side of the revolution must engage with these failures and crimes. To do otherwise is to fall into apologia, special pleading, hagiography – and to run the risk of repeating such mistakes. It is not for nostalgia’s sake that the strange story of the first socialist revolution in history deserves celebration. The standard of October declares that things changed once, and they might do so again." "October, for an instant, brings a new kind of power. Fleetingly, there is a shift towards workers’ control of production and the rights of peasants to the land. Equal rights for men and women in work and in marriage, the right to divorce, maternity support. The decriminalisation of homosexuality, 100 years ago. Moves towards national self-determination. Free and universal education, the expansion of literacy. And with literacy comes a cultural explosion, a thirst to learn, the mushrooming of universities and lecture series and adult schools. A change in the soul, as Lunacharsky might put it, as much as in the factory. And though those moments are snuffed out, reversed, become bleak jokes and memories all too soon, it might have been otherwise." "The revolutionaries want a new country in a new world, one they cannot see but believe they can build." "Twilight, even remembered twilight, is better than no light at all. It would be equally absurd to say that there is nothing we can learn from the revolution. To deny that the sumerki of October can be ours, and that it need not always be followed by night." "By the Forest Shacks are the points, the switches onto hidden tracks through wilder history. The question for history is not only who should be driving the engine, but where. The Prokopoviches have something to fear, and they police these suspect, illegal branch lines, all the while insisting they do not exist. Onto such tracks the revolutionaries divert their train, with its contraband cargo, unregisterable, supernumerary, powering for a horizon, an edge as far away as ever and yet careering closer. Or so it looks from the liberated train, in liberty’s dim light." Two books in the list of references that looked interesting: * Leon Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution (1930). Justly celebrated as a towering, vivid, historically vital work. * Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, The February Revolution, Petrograd: 1917 (1981). Outstanding. The definitive telling of the early days of 1917. ]]> </content> </entry> <entry> <title type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell by Aldous Huxley (1954) (read in 2017)]]> </title> <id>https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3437</id> <link href="https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3437"/> <updated>2017-08-13T23:09:04+02:00</updated> <author> <name type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Marco von Ballmoos]]> </name> <uri>https://earthli.com/users/marco</uri> </author> <summary type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA["Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is" ... ]]> </summary> <content type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Published by marco on 13. Aug 2017 23:09:04 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I've failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an interest in this book, then I'm happy for you." This is a book in two parts. The first is called The Doors of Perception and is an analysis of one of Huxley's mescaline trips. It interweaves nigh-painfully evocative descriptions of what he saw on his 8-hour trip with a history of visions and visionaries. The discussion includes an examination of social implications of various intoxicants and their relative efficacy in providing escape, insight and advancement. The second Heaven and Hell is a discussion of the thesis that much religious symbology is anchored in an effort to replicate/evoke/commemorate/trigger the majestic preternatural visions experienced on mescaline, peyote or sensory or nourishment deprivation. He discusses the relative facility of some artwork to transport individuals to other, more-visionary inner places. The efficacy of art to transport is relative to the the age within which it was observed: modern society's surfeit of color and distraction serves to dampen the power of artwork that would otherwise be more easily able to induce visions and insight. While he does not offer a scientific or empirical base for his thoughts, his rumination on their ineffability -- and his attempts to make it more effable with some sort of framework, a model -- is very interesting. He seeks not to diminish religion but neither does he lend credence to any of their models as the one true way. The subconscious is to be mined for insight -- and insight exists outside of provability. His model is of the antipodes of the mind, places separate from the conscious and even most of the subconscious mind, where a clearer, unfiltered lens on reality exists. Or, at least, seems to exist. At that level of abstraction, it doesn't matter whether it's "real" in a physical or measurable sense, but that it influences your everyday consciousness and makes you a more observant, peaceful and reasonable person. These books, like The Devils of Loudon are an investigation by a prodigiously learned, patient, curious, intelligent and open mind into difficult but overwhelmingly interesting topics for which there are no single answers, no roadmaps to enlightenment. The book includes voluminous appendices that comprise more than 1/3 of its pages. It's not a self-help book. It's not a scientific treatise. It's a notebook of observations written by a master. Recommended. [Citations] "Reflecting on my experience, I find myself agreeing with the eminent Cambridge philosopher, Dr. C. D. Broad, “that we should do well to consider much more seriously than we have hitherto been inclined to do the type of theory which Bergson put forward in connection with memory and sense perception. The suggestion is that the function of the brain and nervous system and sense organs is in the main eliminative and not productive. Each person is at each moment capable of remembering all that has ever happened to him and of perceiving everything that is happening everywhere in the universe. The function of the brain and nervous system is to protect us from being overwhelmed and confused by this mass of largely useless and irrelevant knowledge, by shutting out most of what we should otherwise perceive or remember at any moment, and leaving only that very small and special selection which is likely to be practically useful.”" "Every individual is at once the beneficiary and the victim of the linguistic tradition into which he has been born—the beneficiary inasmuch as language gives access to the accumulated records of other people’s experience, the victim in so far as it confirms him in the belief that reduced awareness is the only awareness and as it bedevils his sense of reality, so that he is all too apt to take his concepts for data, his words for actual things." "Most people, most of the time, know only what comes through the reducing valve and is consecrated as genuinely real by the local language." "Visual impressions are greatly intensified and the eye recovers some of the perceptual innocence of childhood, when the sensum was not immediately and automatically subordinated to the concept." "It was on Van Gogh, and the picture at which the book opened was “The Chair”—that astounding portrait of a Ding an Sich, which the mad painter saw, with a kind of adoring terror, and tried to render on his canvas. But it was a task to which the power even of genius proved wholly inadequate. The chair Van Gogh had seen was obviously the same in essence as the chair I had seen. But, though incomparably more real than the chairs of ordinary perception, the chair in his picture remained no more than an unusually expressive symbol of the fact." Giacometti went down this road as well. "Poring over Judith’s skirts, there in the World’s Biggest Drug Store, I knew that Botticelli—and not Botticelli alone, but many others too—had looked at draperies with the same transfigured and transfiguring eyes as had been mine that morning. They had seen the Istigkeit, the Allness and Infinity of folded cloth and had done their best to render it in paint or stone. Necessarily, of course, without success. For the glory and the wonder of pure existence belong to another order, beyond the power of even the highest art to express." "The untalented visionary may perceive an inner reality no less tremendous, beautiful and significant than the world beheld by Blake; but he lacks altogether the ability to express, in literary or plastic symbols, what he has seen." "As recently as three hundred years ago an expression of thoroughgoing world denial and even world condemnation was both orthodox and comprehensible. “We should feel wonder at nothing at all in Nature except only the Incarnation of Christ.” In the seventeenth century, Lallemant’s phrase seemed to make sense. Today it has the ring of madness." "For what seemed an immensely long time I gazed without knowing, even without wishing to know, what it was that confronted me. At any other time I would have seen a chair barred with alternate light and shade. Today the percept had swallowed up the concept. I was so completely absorbed in looking, so thunderstruck by what I actually saw, that I could not be aware of anything else. Garden furniture, laths, sunlight, shadow—these were no more than names and notions, mere verbalizations, for utilitarian or scientific purposes, after the event. The event was this succession of azure furnace doors separated by gulfs of unfathomable gentian. It was inexpressibly wonderful, wonderful to the point, almost, of being terrifying. And suddenly I had an inkling of what it must feel like to be mad. Schizophrenia has its heavens as well as its hells and purgatories." "The schizophrenic is a soul not merely unregenerate, but desperately sick into the bargain. His sickness consists in the inability to take refuge from inner and outer reality (as the sane person habitually does) in the homemade universe of common sense—the strictly human world of useful notions, shared symbols and socially acceptable conventions." "Here, in spite of the peculiar hideousness of the architecture, there were renewals of transcendental otherness, hints of the morning’s heaven. Brick chimneys and green composition roofs glowed in the sunshine, like fragments of the New Jerusalem. And all at once I saw what Guardi had seen and (with what incomparable skill) had so often rendered in his paintings—a stucco wall with a shadow slanting across it, blank but unforgettably beautiful, empty but charged with all the meaning and the mystery of existence. The revelation dawned and was gone again within a fraction of a second." "That humanity at large will ever be able to dispense with Artificial Paradises seems very unlikely. Most men and women lead lives at the worst so painful, at the best so monotonous, poor and limited that the urge to escape, the longing to transcend themselves if only for a few moments, is and has always been one of the principal appetites of the soul." "We can never dispense with language and the other symbol systems; for it is by means of them, and only by their means, that we have raised ourselves above the brutes, to the level of human beings. But we can easily become the victims as well as the beneficiaries of these systems. We must learn how to handle words effectively; but at the same time we must preserve and, if necessary, intensify our ability to look at the world directly and not through that half opaque medium of concepts, which distorts every given fact into the all too familiar likeness of some generic label or explanatory abstraction." "About the physiological effects of mescalin we know a little. Probably (for we are not yet certain) it interferes with the enzyme system that regulates cerebral functioning. By doing so it lowers the efficiency of the brain as an instrument for focusing the mind on the problems of life on the surface of our planet. This lowering of what may be called the biological efficiency of the brain seems to permit the entry into consciousness of certain classes of mental events, which are normally excluded, because they possess no survival value." "“I was sitting on the seashore, half listening to a friend arguing violently about something which merely bored me. Unconsciously to myself, I looked at a film of sand I had picked up on my hand, when I suddenly saw the exquisite beauty of every little grain of it; instead of being dull, I saw that each particle was made up on a perfect geometrical pattern, with sharp angles, from each of which a brilliant shaft of light was reflected, while each tiny crystal shone like a rainbow…. The rays crossed and recrossed, making exquisite patterns of such beauty that they left me breathless…. Then, suddenly, my consciousness was lighted up from within and I saw in a vivid way how the whole universe was made up of particles of material which, no matter how dull and lifeless they might seem, were nevertheless filled with this intense and vital beauty. For a second or two the whole world appeared as a blaze of glory. When it died down, it left me with something I have never forgotten and which constantly reminds me of the beauty locked up in every minute speck of material around us.”" "Thanks to glass, Paolo Uccello could design a circular jewel thirteen feet in diameter—his great window of the Resurrection, perhaps the most extraordinary single work of vision-inducing art ever produced." "Familiarity breeds indifference. We have seen too much pure, bright color at Woolworth’s to find it intrinsically transporting. And here we may note that, by its amazing capacity to give us too much of the best things, modern technology has tended to devaluate the traditional vision-inducing materials." "With the development of chiaroscuro, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, night came out of the background and installed itself within the picture, which became the scene of a kind of Manichean struggle between Light and Darkness. At the time they were painted these works must have possessed a real transporting power. To us, who have seen altogether too much of this kind of thing, most of them seem merely theatrical. But a few still retain their magic. There is Caravaggio’s “Entombment,” for example; there are a dozen magical paintings by Georges de Latour;* there are all those visionary Rembrandts where the lights have the intensity and significance of light at the mind’s antipodes, where the darks are full of rich potentialities waiting their turn to become actual, to make themselves glowingly present to our consciousness." "There hangs in the Louvre a “Méditation du Philosophe,” whose symbolical subject matter is nothing more nor less than the human mind, with its teeming darknesses, its moments of intellectual and visionary illumination, its mysterious stairways winding downward and upward into the unknown. The meditating philosopher sits there in his island of inner illumination; and at the opposite end of the symbolic chamber, in another, rosier island, an old woman crouches before the hearth. The firelight touches and transfigures her face, and we see, concretely illustrated, the impossible paradox and supreme truth—that perception is (or at least can be, ought to be) the same as Revelation, that Reality shines out of every appearance, that the One is totally, infinitely present in all particulars." "Many schizophrenics have their times of heavenly happiness; but the fact that (unlike the mescalin taker) they do not know when, if ever, they will be permitted to return to the reassuring banality of everyday experience causes even heaven to seem appalling. But for those who, for whatever reason, are appalled, heaven turns into hell, bliss into horror, the Clear Light into the hateful glare of the land of lit-upness." "For the living, the doors of heaven, hell and limbo are opened, not by “massy keys of metals twain,” but by the presence in the blood of one set of chemical compounds and the absence of another set. The shadow world inhabited by some schizophrenics and neurotics closely resembles the world of the dead, as described in some of the earlier religious traditions." "[...] all is significant, but negatively significant, so that every event is utterly pointless, every object intensely unreal, every self-styled human being a clockwork dummy, grotesquely going through the motions of work and play, of loving, hating, thinking, of being eloquent, heroic, saintly, what you will—the robots are nothing if not versatile." ]]> </content> </entry> <entry> <title type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[The Road to Wigan Pier by George Orwell (1937) (read in 2017)]]> </title> <id>https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3407</id> <link href="https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3407"/> <updated>2017-07-26T17:23:55+02:00</updated> <author> <name type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Marco von Ballmoos]]> </name> <uri>https://earthli.com/users/marco</uri> </author> <summary type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA["Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is" ... ]]> </summary> <content type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Published by marco on 26. Jul 2017 17:23:55 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I've failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an interest in this book, then I'm happy for you." This book is nearly divided into two parts. The first details Orwell's travel to the northern part of England to live amongst miners in their communities. These are not nice communities. There is nothing green about them. They live cheek by jowl in atrocious sanitary conditions, surviving on scraps of food and barely making meager rents on their meager salaries. The work is nearly incomprehensibly back-breaking. Shifts are long. Life is without purpose other than to greet another day of misery. Orwell swings in tone from somewhat judgmental (of the bad seeds) to exceedingly praising (of the stalwart workers). He compares moral/ethical life in the north favorably to what is to be found in the south, where the posh Englanders reside. Many of his observations of the working class as well as the intransigencies of capitalism are just as true today as they were then. For example, "In a way it is even humiliating to watch coal-miners working. It raises in you a momentary doubt about your own status as an “intellectual” and a superior person generally. For it is brought home to you, at least while you are watching, that it is only because miners sweat their guts out that superior persons can remain superior." "This business of petty inconvenience and indignity, of being kept waiting about, of having to do everything at other people’s convenience, is inherent in working-class life. A thousand influences constantly press a working man down into a passive rôle." "It is only when you lodge in streets where nobody has a job, where getting a job seems about as probable as owning an aeroplane and much less probable than winning fifty pounds in the Football Pool, that you begin to grasp the changes that are being worked in our civilisation." "Life is still fairly normal, more normal than one really has the right to expect. Families are impoverished, but the family-system has not broken up. The people are in effect living a reduced version of their former lives. Instead of raging against their destiny they have made things tolerable by lowering their standards." "Twenty million people are underfed but literally everyone in England has access to a radio. What we have lost in food we have gained in electricity. Whole sections of the working class who have been plundered of all they really need are being compensated, in part, by cheap luxuries which mitigate the surface of life." "And the peculiar evil is this, that the less money you have, the less inclined you feel to spend it on wholesome food. A millionaire may enjoy breakfasting off orange juice and Ryvita biscuits; an unemployed man doesn’t." "Every middle-class person has a dormant class-prejudice which needs only a small thing to arouse it; and if he is over forty he probably has a firm conviction that his own class has been sacrificed to the class below." Sound or feel familiar? These things seem to be constants in our society, by now. These are the hard nubs of capitalism that remain when surface affectation has worn away. The second half of the book is a treatise on the state of Socialism in his day. He is very supportive of socialism but quite critical of its practitioners. He exhorts them to be more practical and to come up with realistic recruitment plans that don't involve insulting everyone who doesn't immediately agree with them. There is a lot of material here that is 100% applicable to leftist (and, perhaps still, especially socialist) movements today, in the first quarter of the 21st century, nearly 100 years after Orwell wrote his remarks. He offers some solid and practical advice: "To oppose Socialism now, when twenty million Englishmen are underfed and Fascism has conquered half Europe, is suicidal. It is like starting a civil war when the Goths are crossing the frontier." "To recoil from Socialism because so many individual Socialists are inferior people is as absurd as refusing to travel by train because you dislike the ticket-collector’s face." "The Socialist movement has not time to be a league of dialectical materialists; it has got to be a league of the oppressed against the oppressors." "But if you are constantly bullying me about my “bourgeois ideology,” if you give me to understand that in some subtle way I am an inferior person because I have never worked with my hands, you will only succeed in antagonising me. For you are telling me either that I am inherently useless or that I ought to alter myself in some way that is beyond my power." "These are the sinking middle class, and most of them are clinging to their gentility under the impression that it keeps them afloat. It is not good policy to start by telling them to throw away the life-belt." A full listing of citations is below. The first half of the book may be more amenable to most, but both halves are well-worth reading. Highly recommended. [Citations] "people will go on hypnotising themselves and others with a formula, even when that formula is patently outworn: so that it is still necessary, and will be necessary for a long time yet, to show that modern methods of production do work under Socialism and no longer work under capitalism." "What is indeed essential, once that first appeal has been made to “liberty” and “justice,” is a careful and patient study of just how the thing works: of why capitalism inevitably means oppression and injustice and the horrible class society which Mr. Orwell so brilliantly depicts: of the means of transition to a Socialist society in which there will be neither oppressor nor oppressed." "It struck me then that we are mistaken when we say that “It isn’t the same for them as it would be for us,” and that people bred in the slums can imagine nothing but the slums. For what I saw in her face was not the ignorant suffering of an animal. She knew well enough what was happening to her—understood as well as I did how dreadful a destiny it was to be kneeling there in the bitter cold, on the slimy stones of a slum backyard, poking a stick up a foul drain-pipe." "them. In a crowded, dirty little country like ours one takes defilement almost for granted. Slag-heaps and chimneys seem a more normal, probable landscape than grass and trees, and even in the depths of the country when you drive your fork into the ground you half expect to lever up a broken bottle or a rusty can. But out here the snow was untrodden and lay so deep that only the tops of the stone boundary-walls were showing, winding over the hills like black paths." "coal. In the metabolism of the Western world the coal-miner is second in importance only to the man who ploughs the soil. He is a sort of grimy caryatid upon whose shoulders nearly everything that is not grimy is supported." "This is the coal face. Overhead is the smooth ceiling made by the rock from which the coal has been cut; underneath is the rock again, so that the gallery you are in is only as high as the ledge of coal itself, probably not much more than a yard. The first impression of all, overmastering everything else for a while, is the frightful, deafening din from the conveyor belt which carries the coal away. You cannot see very far, because the fog of coal dust throws back the beam of your lamp, but you can see on either side of you the line of half-naked kneeling men, one to every four or five yards, driving their shovels under the fallen coal and flinging it swiftly over their left shoulders. They are feeding it on to the conveyor belt, a moving rubber belt a couple of feet wide which runs a yard or two behind them." "When I am digging trenches in my garden, if I shift two tons of earth during the afternoon, I feel that I have earned my tea. But earth is tractable stuff compared with coal, and I don’t have to work kneeling down, a thousand feet underground, in suffocating heat and swallowing coal dust with every breath I take; nor do I have to walk a mile bent double before I begin. The miner’s job would be as much beyond my power as it would be to perform on the flying trapeze or to win the Grand National." "But on the whole we are not aware of it; we all know that we “must have coal,” but we seldom or never remember what coal-getting involves. Here am I, sitting writing in front of my comfortable coal fire. It is April but I still need a fire. Once a fortnight the coal cart drives up to the door and men in leather jerkins carry the coal indoors in stout sacks smelling of tar and shoot it clanking into the coal-hole under the stairs. It is only very rarely, when I make a definite mental effort, that I connect this coal with that far-off labour in the mines." "It is not long since conditions in the mines were worse than they are now. There are still living a few very old women who in their youth have worked underground, with a harness round their waists and a chain that passed between their legs, crawling on all fours and dragging tubs of coal. They used to go on doing this even when they were pregnant. And even now, if coal could not be produced without pregnant women dragging it to and fro, I fancy we should let them do it rather than deprive ourselves of coal." "It is not long since conditions in the mines were worse than they are now. There are still living a few very old women who in their youth have worked underground, with a harness round their waists and a chain that passed between their legs, crawling on all fours and dragging tubs of coal. They used to go on doing this even when they were pregnant. And even now, if coal could not be produced without pregnant women dragging it to and fro, I fancy we should let them do it rather than deprive ourselves of coal. But most of the time, of course, we should prefer to forget that they were doing it. It is so with all types of manual work; it keeps us alive, and we are oblivious of its existence." "In a way it is even humiliating to watch coal-miners working. It raises in you a momentary doubt about your own status as an “intellectual” and a superior person generally. For it is brought home to you, at least while you are watching, that it is only because miners sweat their guts out that superior persons can remain superior." "You and I and the editor of the Times Lit. Supp., and the Nancy poets and the Archbishop of Canterbury and Comrade X, author of Marxism for Infants—all of us really owe the comparative decency of our lives to poor drudges underground, blackened to the eyes, with their throats full of coal dust, driving their shovels forward with arms and belly muscles of steel." "Apparently the old superstition that it is bad luck to see a woman before going to work on the morning shift is not quite extinct." "Watching this man go to the colliery to draw his compensation, I was struck by the profound differences that are still made by status. Here was a man who had been half blinded in one of the most useful of all jobs and was drawing a pension to which he had a perfect right, if anybody has a right to anything. Yet he could not, so to speak, demand this pension—he could not, for instance, draw it when and how he wanted it. He had to go to the colliery once a week at a time named by the company, and when he got there he was kept waiting about for hours in the cold wind. For all I know he was also expected to touch his cap and show gratitude to whom-ever paid him; at any rate he had to waste an afternoon and spend sixpence in bus fares. It is very different for a member of the bourgeoisie," "This business of petty inconvenience and indignity, of being kept waiting about, of having to do everything at other people’s convenience, is inherent in working-class life. A thousand influences constantly press a working man down into a passive rôle." "But mere notes like these are only valuable as reminders to myself. To me as I read them they bring back what I have seen, but they cannot in themselves give much idea of what conditions are like in those fearful northern slums. Words are such feeble things. What is the use of a brief phrase like “roof leaks” or “four beds for eight people”? It is the kind of thing your eye slides over, registering nothing. And yet what a wealth of misery it can cover I Take the question of overcrowding, for instance. Quite often you have eight or even ten people living in a three-roomed house. One of these rooms is a living-room, and as it probably measures about a dozen feet square and contains, besides the kitchen range and the sink, a table, some chairs and a dresser, there is no room in it for a bed. So there are eight or ten people sleeping in two small rooms, probably in at most four beds." "One must remember that these people are not gypsies; they are decent English people who have all, except the children born there, had homes of their own in their day; besides, their caravans are greatly inferior to those of gypsies and they have not the great advantage of being on the move. No doubt there are still middle-class people who think that the Lower Orders don’t mind that kind of thing and who, if they happened to pass a caravan-colony in the train, would immediately assume that the people lived there from choice. I never argue nowadays with that kind of person. But it is worth noticing that the caravan-dwellers don’t even save money by living there, for they are paying about the same rents as they would for houses." "But the northern working people do not take kindly to flats; even where flats exist they are contemptuously named “tenements.” Almost everyone will tell you that he “wants a house of his own,” and apparently a house in the middle of an unbroken block of houses a hundred yards long seems to them more “their own” than a flat situated in mid-air." "It is a great achievement to get slum-dwellers into decent houses, but it is unfortunate that, owing to the peculiar temper of our time, it is also considered necessary to rob them of the last vestiges of their liberty. The people themselves feel this, and it is this feeling that they are rationalising when they complain that their new houses—so much better, as houses, than those they have come out of—are cold and uncomfortable and “unhomelike.”" "But in addition there are great numbers of people who are in work but who, from a financial point of view, might equally well be unemployed, because they are not drawing anything that can be described as a living wage." "Still, an unemployed man who feels at home with books can at any rate occupy himself by reading. But what about the man who cannot read without discomfort? Take a miner, for instance, who has worked in the pit since childhood and has been trained to be a miner and nothing else. How the devil is he to fill up the empty days? It is absurd to say that he ought to be looking for work. There is no work to look for, and everybody knows it. You can’t go on looking for work every day for seven years." "It is only when you lodge in streets where nobody has a job, where getting a job seems about as probable as owning an aeroplane and much less probable than winning fifty pounds in the Football Pool, that you begin to grasp the changes that are being worked in our civilisation." "But at that time nobody cared to admit that unemployment was inevitable, because this meant admitting that it would probably continue. The middle classes were still talking about “lazy idle loafers on the dole” and saying that “these men could all find work if they wanted to,” and naturally these opinions percolated to the working class themselves. I remember the shock of astonishment it gave me, when I first mingled with tramps and beggars, to find that a fair proportion, perhaps a quarter, of these beings whom I had been taught to regard as cynical parasites, were decent young miners and cotton-workers gazing at their destiny with the same sort of dumb amazement as an animal in a trap. They simply could not understand what was happening to them. They had been brought up to work, and behold! it seemed as if they were never going to have the chance of working again." "Take, for instance, the fact that the working class think nothing of getting married on the dole. It annoys the old ladies in Brighton, but it is a proof of their essential good sense; they realise that losing your job does not mean that you cease to be a human being. So that in one way things in the distressed areas are not so bad as they might be. Life is still fairly normal, more normal than one really has the right to expect. Families are impoverished, but the family-system has not broken up. The people are in effect living a reduced version of their former lives. Instead of raging against their destiny they have made things tolerable by lowering their standards." "Twenty million people are underfed but literally everyone in England has access to a radio. What we have lost in food we have gained in electricity. Whole sections of the working class who have been plundered of all they really need are being compensated, in part, by cheap luxuries which mitigate the surface of life." "They have neither turned revolutionary nor lost their self-respect; merely they have kept their tempers and settled down to make the best of things on a fish-and-chip standard. The alternative would be God knows what continued agonies of despair; or it might be attempted insurrections which, in a strongly governed country like England, could only lead to futile massacres and a régime of savage repression." "Therefore we are sometimes told that the whole thing is an astute manoeuvre by the governing class—a sort of “bread and circuses” business—to hold the unemployed down. What I have seen of our governing class does not convince me that they have that much intelligence. The thing has happened, but by an unconscious process—the quite natural interaction between the manufacturer’s need for a market and the need of half-starved people for cheap palliatives." "The basis of their diet, therefore, is white bread and margarine, corned beef, sugared tea and potatoes—an appalling diet. Would it not be better if they spent more money on wholesome things like oranges and wholemeal bread or if they even, like the writer of the letter to the New Statesman, saved on fuel and ate their carrots raw? Yes, it would, but the point is that no ordinary human being is ever going to do such a thing. The ordinary human being would sooner starve than live on brown bread and raw carrots." "And the peculiar evil is this, that the less money you have, the less inclined you feel to spend it on wholesome food. A millionaire may enjoy breakfasting off orange juice and Ryvita biscuits; an unemployed man doesn’t." "When you are unemployed, which is to say when you are underfed, harassed, bored and miserable, you don’t want to eat dull wholesome food. You want something a little bit “tasty.”" "the modern industrial technique which provides you with cheap substitutes for everything. We may find in the long run that tinned food is a deadlier weapon than the machine gun." "But the English palate, especially the working-class palate, now rejects good food almost automatically. The number of people who prefer tinned peas and tinned fish to real peas and real fish must be increasing every year, and plenty of people who could afford real milk in their tea would much sooner have tinned milk—even that dreadful tinned milk which is made of sugar and cornflour and has UNFIT FOR BABIES on the tin in huge letters. In some districts efforts are now being made to teach" "He gave this as an instance of the mentality of the English governing class. First you condemn a family to live on thirty shillings a week, and then you have the damned impertinence to tell them how they are to spend their money." "slag-heap is at best a hideous thing, because it is so planless and functionless. It is something just dumped on the earth, like the emptying of a giant’s dust-bin. On the outskirts of the mining towns there are frightful landscapes where your horizon is ringed completely round by jagged grey mountains, and underfoot is mud and ashes and overhead the steel cables where tubs of dirt travel slowly across miles of country. Often the slag-heaps are on fire, and at night you can see the red rivulets of fire winding this way and that, and also the slow-moving blue flames of sulphur, which always seem on the point of expiring and always spring out again. Even when a slag-heap sinks, as it does ultimately, only an evil brown grass grows on it, and it retains its hummocky surface." "I remember a winter afternoon in the dreadful environs of Wigan. All round was the lunar landscape of slag-heaps, and to the north, through the passes, as it were, between the mountains of slag, you could see the factory chimneys sending out their plumes of smoke. The canal path was a mixture of cinders and frozen mud, criss-crossed by the imprints of innumerable clogs, and all round, as far as the slag-heaps in the distance, stretched the “flashes”—pools of stagnant water that has seeped into the hollows caused by the subsidence of ancient pits. It was horribly cold. The “flashes” were covered with ice the colour of raw umber, the bargemen were muffled to the eyes in sacks, the lock gates wore beards of ice. It seemed a world from which vegetation had been banished; nothing existed except smoke, shale, ice, mud, ashes and foul water. But even Wigan is beautiful compared with Sheffield." "But the beauty or ugliness of industrialism hardly matters. Its real evil lies far deeper and is quite ineradicable. It is important to remember this, because there is always a temptation to think that industrialism is harmless so long as it is clean and orderly." "If there are still such things as evening papers there will certainly be no racing news in them, for gambling will be meaningless in a world where there is no poverty and the horse will have vanished from the face of the earth." HAHAHA joke's on you, George Orwell! we avoided your future by not solving poverty. On purpose. So there. "The real bourgeoisie, those in the £2,000 a year class and over, have their money as a thick layer of padding between themselves and the class they plunder; in so far as they are aware of the Lower Orders at all they are aware of them as employees, servants and tradesmen." "But it was not long before I was forbidden to play with the plumber’s children; they were “common” and I was told to keep away from them. This was snobbish, if you like, but it was also necessary, for middle-class people cannot afford to let their children grow up with vulgar accents. So, very early, the working class ceased to be a race of friendly and wonderful beings and became a race of enemies. We realised that they hated us, but we could never understand why, and naturally we set it down to pure, vicious malignity. To me in my early boyhood, to nearly all children of families like mine, “common” people seemed almost sub-human. They had coarse faces, hideous accents and gross manners, they hated everyone who was not like themselves, and if they got half a chance they would insult you in brutal ways. That was our view of them, and though it was false it was understandable." "Before the war their economic position was comparatively strong, for though there was no dole to fall back upon, there was not much unemployment, and the power of the boss class was not so obvious as it is now. A man did not see ruin staring him in the face every time he cheeked a “toff,” and naturally he did cheek a “toff” whenever it seemed safe to do" "It is a pity that those who idealise the working class so often think it necessary to praise every working-class characteristic and therefore to pretend that dirtiness is somehow meritorious in itself." "I have dwelt on these subjects because they are vitally important. To get rid of class-distinctions you have got to start by understanding how one class appears when seen through the eyes of another. It is useless to say that the middle classes are “snobbish” and leave it at that. You get no further if you do not realise that snobbishness is bound up with a species of idealism. It derives from the early training in which a middle-class child is taught almost simultaneously to wash his neck, to be ready to die for his country, and to despise the “lower classes.”" "Every middle-class person has a dormant class-prejudice which needs only a small thing to arouse it; and if he is over forty he probably has a firm conviction that his own class has been sacrificed to the class below." "Suggest to the average unthinking person of gentle birth who is struggling to keep up appearances on four or five hundred a year that he is a member of an exploiting parasite class, and he will think you are mad." "The notion that the working class have been absurdly pampered, hopelessly demoralised by doles, old age pensions, free education, etc., is still widely held; it has merely been a little shaken, perhaps, by the recent recognition that unemployment does exist." "The interest of passages like these (and they are scattered all through Saintsbury’s work) lies in their having been printed at all. Most people are a little shy of putting that kind of thing on paper. But what Saintsbury is saying here is what any little worm with a fairly safe five hundred a year thinks, and therefore in a way one must admire him for saying it." "A middle-class person embraces Socialism and perhaps even joins the Communist Party. How much real difference does it make? Obviously, living within the framework of capitalist society, he has got to go on earning his living, and one cannot blame him if he clings to his bourgeois economic status. But is there any change in his tastes, his habits, his manners, his imaginative background—his “ideology,” in Communist jargon? Is there any change in him except that he now votes Labour, or, when possible. Communist at the elections? It is noticeable that he still habitually associates with his own class; he is vastly more at home with a member of his own class, who thinks him a dangerous Bolshie, than with a member of the working class who supposedly agrees with him; his tastes in food, wine, clothes, books, pictures, music, ballet, are still recognisably bourgeois tastes; most significant of all, he invariably marries into his own class." "You forget your Latin and Greek within a few months of leaving school—I studied Greek for eight or ten years, and now, at thirty-three, I cannot even repeat the Greek alphabet—but your snobbishness, unless you persistently root it out like the bindweed it is, sticks by you till your grave." "Say what you will, our criminal law (far more humane, by the way, in India than in England) is a horrible thing. It needs very insensitive people to administer it. The wretched prisoners squatting in the reeking cages of the lock-ups, the grey cowed faces of the long-term convicts, the scarred buttocks of the men who had been flogged with bamboos, the women and children howling when their menfolk were led away under arrest—things like these are beyond bearing when you are in any way directly responsible for them." "In the end I worked out an anarchistic theory that all government is evil, that the punishment always does more harm than the crime and that people can be trusted to behave decently if only you will let them alone. This of course was sentimental nonsense. I see now as I did not see then, that it is always necessary to protect peaceful people from violence. In any state of society where crime can be profitable you have got to have a harsh criminal law and administer it ruthlessly; the alternative is A1 Capone." "It seemed to me then—it sometimes seems to me now, for that matter—that economic injustice will stop the moment we want it to stop, and no sooner, and if we genuinely want it to stop the method adopted hardly matters." "For in the last resort, the only important question is, Do you want the British Empire to hold together or do you want it to disintegrate? And at the bottom of his heart no Englishman, least of all the kind of person who is witty about Anglo-Indian colonels, does want it to disintegrate. For, apart from any other consideration, the high standard of life we enjoy in England depends upon our keeping a tight hold on the Empire, particularly the tropical portions of it such as India and Africa. Under the capitalist system, in order that England may live in comparative comfort, a hundred million Indians must live on the verge of starvation—an evil state of affairs, but you acquiesce in it every time you step into a taxi or eat a plate of strawberries and cream. The alternative is to throw the Empire overboard and reduce England to a cold and unimportant little island where we should all have to work very hard and live mainly on herrings and potatoes. That is the very last thing that any left-winger wants. Yet the left-winger continues to feel that he has no moral responsibility for imperialism. He is perfectly ready to accept the products of Empire and to save his soul by sneering at the people who hold the Empire together." "But the working-class intelligentsia is sharply divisible into two different types. There is the type who remains working-class—who goes on working as a mechanic or a dock-labourer or whatever it may be and does not bother to change his working-class accent and habits, but who “improves his mind” in his spare time and works for the I.L.P. or the Communist Party; and there is the type who does alter his way of life, at least externally, and who by means of State scholarships succeeds in climbing into the middle class. The first is one of the finest types of man we have. I can think of some I have met whom not even the most hidebound Tory could help liking and admiring." "It hardly needs pointing out that at this moment we are in a very serious mess, so serious that even the dullest-witted people find it difficult to remain unaware of it. We are living in a world in which nobody is free, in which hardly anybody is secure, in which it is almost impossible to be honest and to remain alive. For enormous blocks of the working class the conditions of life are such as I have described in the opening chapters of this book, and there is no chance of those conditions showing any fundamental improvement." "Indeed, from one point of view, Socialism is such elementary common sense that I am sometimes amazed that it has not established itself already. The world is a raft sailing through space with, potentially, plenty of provisions for everybody; the idea that we must all co-operate and see to it that everyone does his fair share of the work and gets his fair share of the provisions, seems so blatantly obvious that one would say that no one could possibly fail to accept it unless he had some corrupt motive for clinging to the present system. Yet" "The whole thing amounts to a kind of malaise produced by dislike of individual Socialists, especially of the cocksure Marx-quoting type. Is it childish to be influenced by that kind of thing? Is it silly? Is it even contemptible? It is all that, but the point is that it happens, and therefore it is important to keep it in mind." "You see here the defects of the method. Because he has detected the underlying economic cause of Fascism, he tacitly assumes that the spiritual side of it is of no importance. Fascism is written off as a manoeuvre of the “ruling class,” which at bottom it is. But this in itself would only explain why Fascism appeals to capitalists. What about the millions who are not capitalists, who in a material sense have nothing to gain from Fascism and are often aware of it, and who, nevertheless, are Fascists?" "machine evolves by becoming more efficient, that is, more foolproof; hence the objective of mechanical progress is a foolproof world—which may or may not mean a world inhabited by fools." "In tying yourself to the ideal of mechanical efficiency, you tie yourself to the ideal of softness. But softness is repulsive; and thus all progress is seen to be a frantic struggle towards an objective which you hope and pray will never be reached. Now and again, but not often, you meet somebody who grasps that what is usually called progress also entails what is usually called degeneracy, and who is nevertheless in favour of progress." "The labourer set free from digging may want to spend his leisure, or part of it, in playing the piano, while the professional pianist may be only too glad to get out and dig at the potato patch." "Mechanise the world as fully as it might be mechanised, and whichever way you turn there will be some machine cutting you off from the chance of working—that is, of living." "The sensitive person’s hostility to the machine is in one sense unrealistic, because of the obvious fact that the machine has come to stay. But as an attitude of mind there is a great deal to be said for it. The machine has got to be accepted, but it is probably better to accept it rather as one accepts a drug—that is, grudgingly and suspiciously. Like a drug, the machine is useful, dangerous and habit-forming. The oftener one surrenders to it the tighter its grip becomes." There's where you're wrong. They're not thinking at all. It's not background; it's replacement. "There are now millions of people, and they are increasing every year, to whom the blaring of a radio is not only a more acceptable but a more normal background to their thoughts than the lowing of cattle or the song of birds." "Mechanisation leads to the decay of taste, the decay of taste leads to the demand for machine-made articles and hence to more mechanisation, and so a vicious circle is established." The same with information. "Give a Western man a job of work and he immediately begins devising a machine that would do it for him; give him a machine and he thinks of ways of improving it. I understand this tendency well enough, for in an ineffectual sort of way I have that type of mind myself. I have not either the patience or the mechanical skill to devise any machine that would work, but I am perpetually seeing, as it were, the ghosts of possible machines that might save me the trouble of using my brain or muscles." "The Socialists are right, therefore, when they claim that the rate of mechanical progress will be much more rapid once Socialism is established. Given a mechanical civilisation the process of invention and improvement will always continue, but the tendency of capitalism is to slow it down, because under capitalism any invention which does not promise fairly immediate profits is neglected; some, indeed, which threaten to reduce profits are suppressed almost as ruthlessly as the flexible glass mentioned by Petronius." "Verbally, no doubt, we would agree that machinery is made for man and not man for machinery; in practice any attempt to check the development of the machine appears to us as an attack on knowledge and therefore a kind of blasphemy." "I am a degenerate modern semi-intellectual who would die if I did not get my early morning cup of tea and my New Statesman every Friday. Clearly I do not, in a sense, “want” to return to a simpler, harder, probably agricultural way of life. In the same sense I don’t “want” to cut down my drinking, to pay my debts, to take enough exercise, to be faithful to my wife, etc., etc. But in another and more permanent sense I do want these things, and perhaps in the same sense I want a civilisation in which “progress” is not definable as making the world safe for little fat men." "Meanwhile the thinking person, by intellect usually left-wing but by temperament often right-wing, hovers at the gate of the Socialist fold. He is no doubt aware that he ought to be a Socialist. But he observes first the dullness of individual Socialists, then the apparent flabbiness of Socialist ideals, and veers away." "Till quite recently it was natural to veer towards indifferentism. Ten years ago, even five years ago, the typical literary gent wrote books on baroque architecture and had a soul above politics. But that attitude is becoming difficult and even unfashionable. The times are growing harsher, the issues are clearer, the belief that nothing will ever change (i.e. that your dividends will always be safe) is less prevalent. The fence on which the literary gent sits, once as comfortable as the plush cushion of a cathedral stall, is now pinching his bottom intolerably; more and more he shows a disposition to drop off on one side or the other." "I believe that when the pinch comes there is a terrible danger that the main movement of the intelligentsia will be towards Fascism." "That will also be the moment when every person with any brains or any decency will know in his bones that he ought to be on the Socialist side. But he will not necessarily come there of his own accord; there are too many ancient prejudices standing in the way. He will have to be persuaded, and by methods that imply an understanding of his viewpoint. Socialists cannot afford to waste any more time in preaching to the converted." "In order to combat Fascism it is necessary to understand it, which involves admitting that it contains some good as well as much evil. In practice, of course, it is merely an infamous tyranny, and its methods of attaining and holding power are such that even its most ardent apologists prefer to talk about something else. But the underlying feeling of Fascism, the feeling that first draws people into the Fascist camp, may be less contemptible. It is not always, as the Saturday Review would lead one to suppose, a squealing terror of the Bolshevik bogey-man. Everyone who has given the movement so much as a glance knows that the rank-and-file Fascist is often quite a well-meaning person—quite genuinely anxious, for instance, to better the lot of the unemployed. But more important than this is the fact that Fascism draws its strength from the good as well as the bad varieties of conservatism." "[...] more to the fact that Socialists have, so to speak, presented their case wrong side foremost. They have never made it sufficiently clear that the essential aims of Socialism are justice and liberty. With their eyes glued to economic facts, they have proceeded on the assumption that man has no soul, and explicitly or implicitly they have set up the goal of a materialistic Utopia. As a result Fascism has been able to play upon every instinct that revolts against hedonism and a cheap conception of “progress.” It has been able to pose as the upholder of the European tradition, and to appeal to Christian belief, to patriotism and to the military virtues. It is far worse than useless to write Fascism off as “mass sadism,” or some easy phrase of that kind. If you pretend that it is merely an aberration which will presently pass off of its own accord, you are dreaming a dream from which you will awake when somebody coshes you with a rubber truncheon." "It is usual to speak of the Fascist objective as the “beehive state,” which does a grave injustice to bees. A world of rabbits ruled by stoats would be nearer the mark." "The distaste for “progress” and machine-civilisation which is so common among sensitive people is only defensible as an attitude of mind. It is not valid as a reason for rejecting Socialism, because it presupposes an alternative which does not exist. When you say, “I object to mechanisation and standardisation—therefore I object to Socialism,” you are saying in effect, “I am free to do without the machine if I choose,” which is nonsense. We are all dependent upon the machine, and if the machines stopped working most of us would die. You may hate the machine-civilisation, probably you are right to hate it, but for the present there can be no question of accepting or rejecting it. The machine-civilisation is here, and it can only be criticised from the inside, because all of us are inside" "To oppose Socialism now, when twenty million Englishmen are underfed and Fascism has conquered half Europe, is suicidal. It is like starting a civil war when the Goths are crossing the frontier." "To recoil from Socialism because so many individual Socialists are inferior people is as absurd as refusing to travel by train because you dislike the ticket-collector’s face." "The Socialist movement has not time to be a league of dialectical materialists; it has got to be a league of the oppressed against the oppressors." "You have got to attract the man who means business, and you have got to drive away the mealy-mouthed Liberal who wants foreign Fascism destroyed in order that he may go on drawing his dividends peacefully—the type of humbug who passes resolutions “against Fascism and Communism,” i.e. against rats and rat-" "It is fatal to let the ordinary enquirer get away with the idea that being a Socialist means wearing sandals and burbling about dialectical materialism. You have got to make it clear that there is room in the Socialist movement for human beings, or the game is up." "And what about that far larger class, running into millions this time—the office-workers and black-coated employees of all kinds—whose traditions are less definitely middle class but who would certainly not thank you if you called them proletarians? All of these people have the same interests and the same enemies as the working class. All are being robbed and bullied by the same system. Yet how many of them realise it? When the pinch came nearly all of them would side with their oppressors and against those who ought to be their allies. It is quite easy to imagine a middle class crushed down to the worst depths of poverty and still remaining bitterly anti-working class in sentiment; this being, of course, a ready-made Fascist Party." "Once again it is a question of sticking to essentials; and the essential point here is that all people with small, insecure incomes are in the same boat and ought to be fighting on the same side. Probably we could do with a little less talk about “capitalist” and “proletarian” and a little more about the robbers and the robbed. But at any rate we must drop that misleading habit of pretending that the only proletarians are manual labourers." "The people who have got to act together are all those who cringe to the boss and all those who shudder when they think of the rent. This means that the small-holder has got to ally himself with the factory-hand, the typist with the coal-miner, the schoolmaster with the garage mechanic. There is some hope of getting them to do so if they can be made to understand where their interest lies. But this will not happen if their social prejudices, which in some of them are at least as strong as any economic consideration, are needlessly irritated." "Once again, here am I, with my middle-class origins and my income of about three pounds a week from all sources. For what I am worth it would be better to get me in on the Socialist side than to turn me into a Fascist. But if you are constantly bullying me about my “bourgeois ideology,” if you give me to understand that in some subtle way I am an inferior person because I have never worked with my hands, you will only succeed in antagonising me. For you are telling me either that I am inherently useless or that I ought to alter myself in some way that is beyond my power." "These are the sinking middle class, and most of them are clinging to their gentility under the impression that it keeps them afloat. It is not good policy to start by telling them to throw away the life-belt." ]]> </content> </entry> <entry> <title type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander (2012) (read in 2017)]]> </title> <id>https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3429</id> <link href="https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3429"/> <updated>2017-07-25T22:57:28+02:00</updated> <author> <name type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Marco von Ballmoos]]> </name> <uri>https://earthli.com/users/marco</uri> </author> <summary type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA["Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is" ... ]]> </summary> <content type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Published by marco on 25. Jul 2017 22:57:28 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I've failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an interest in this book, then I'm happy for you." This is an impeccably researched, devastatingly factual, relentlessly focused and canonical volume on ongoing institutional racism against blacks in the United States. The argument is that the power over blacks that whites had through slavery was not eradicated with the end of slavery, but rather made to go (very temporarily) underground only to reappear as Jim Crow laws -- laws that subjugated blacks just as effectively as slavery without the stigma of human chattel. She continues the argument that the 20th-century (and now, 21st-century) United States prison system almost totally subverts civil-rights achievements by continuing the subjugation of blacks, sending them once again to a second-class society in America, just as effectively as slavery and the Jim Crow laws did. The U.S. slavery laws designated black people as property. This kept them in an official lower caste. Once owning people was no longer socially acceptable, the caste system was continued by denying all sorts of rights with poll tests and other extremely precisely defined qualification systems, collectively known as Jim Crow laws. Once the Jim Crow laws were deemed illegal -- and, more importantly, no longer socially acceptable -- the elites pivoted once again and came up with a new way of relegating blacks to a second-class caste: criminalization. Fueled by a tremendous propaganda effort -- as well as very willing participants -- one law after another was created, targeting blacks specifically in order to mark them as voluntary criminals and therefore unworthy of participation in mainstream society. The U.S. Drug War was instrumental in this mission. The many ways in which the criminalization of blacks was achieved are breathtakingly insidious and devious. The most devious part is that the latest incarnation disarmed the civil-rights movement's best weapon: the morally offensive racial bias of Jim Crow laws tended to pull people together to support their discriminated brethren. By swapping race for criminality, they drive a wedge between potential non-criminal supporters and those who have supposedly chosen a life of crime. Alexander presents her thesis relentlessly, heaping an irrefutable amount of information on the reader until the propaganda wall of all but the most hardened racists must be broken down. That might be giving people too much credit, though. [Citations] "In Washington, D.C., our nation’s capitol, it is estimated that three out of four young black men (and nearly all those in the poorest neighborhoods) can expect to serve time in prison. Similar rates of incarceration can be found in black communities across America." "In some states, black men have been admitted to prison on drug charges at rates twenty to fifty times greater than those of white men." "The only country in the world that even comes close to the American rate of incarceration is Russia, and no other country in the world incarcerates such an astonishing percentage of its racial or ethnic minorities." "These days, activists who advocate “a world without prisons” are often dismissed as quacks, but only a few decades ago, the notion that our society would be much better off without prisons—and that the end of prisons was more or less inevitable—not only dominated mainstream academic discourse in the field of criminology but also inspired a national campaign by reformers demanding a moratorium on prison construction." "One in three young African American men will serve time in prison if current trends continue, and in some cities more than half of all young adult black men are currently under correctional control—in prison or jail, on probation or parole.20 Yet mass incarceration tends to be categorized as a criminal justice issue as opposed to a racial justice or civil rights issue (or crisis)." "The popular narrative that emphasizes the death of slavery and Jim Crow and celebrates the nation’s “triumph over race” with the election of Barack Obama, is dangerously misguided. The colorblind public consensus that prevails in America today—i.e., the widespread belief that race no longer matters—has blinded us to the realities of race in our society and facilitated the emergence of a new caste system." "Few legal rules meaningfully constrain the police in the drug war, and enormous financial incentives have been granted to law enforcement to engage in mass drug arrests through military-style tactics. Once swept into the system, one’s chances of ever being truly free are slim, often to the vanishing point." "The demand for land was met by invading and conquering larger and larger swaths of territory. American Indians became a growing impediment to white European “progress,” and during this period, the images of American Indians promoted in books, newspapers, and magazines became increasingly negative." "In an effort to protect their superior status and economic position, the planters shifted their strategy for maintaining dominance. They abandoned their heavy reliance on indentured servants in favor of the importation of more black slaves. Instead of importing English-speaking slaves from the West Indies, who were more likely to be familiar with European language and culture, many more slaves were shipped directly from Africa. These slaves would be far easier to control and far less likely to form alliances with poor whites." "The notion of white supremacy rationalized the enslavement of Africans, even as whites endeavored to form a new nation based on the ideals of equality, liberty, and justice for all. Before democracy, chattel slavery in America was born. It may be impossible to overstate the significance of race in defining the basic structure of American society. The structure and content of the original Constitution was based largely on the effort to preserve a racial caste system—slavery—while at the same time affording political and economic rights to whites, especially propertied whites." "Nine Southern states adopted vagrancy laws—which essentially made it a criminal offense not to work and were applied selectively to blacks—and eight of those states enacted convict laws allowing for the hiring-out of county prisoners to plantation owners and private companies. Prisoners were forced to work for little or no pay." "Once again, vagrancy laws and other laws defining activities such as “mischief” and “insulting gestures” as crimes were enforced vigorously against blacks. The aggressive enforcement of these criminal offenses opened up an enormous market for convict leasing, in which prisoners were contracted out as laborers to the highest private bidder." "As described by sociologist Katherine Beckett, “The (alleged) misbehaviors of the poor were transformed from adaptations to poverty that had the unfortunate effect of reproducing it into character failings that accounted for poverty in the first place.”56 The “social pathologies” of the poor, particularly street crime, illegal drug use, and delinquency, were redefined by conservatives as having their cause in overly generous relief arrangements. Black “welfare cheats” and their dangerous offspring emerged, for the first time, in the political discourse and media imagery." "By 1968, 81 percent of those responding to the Gallup Poll agreed with the statement that “law and order has broken down in this country,” and the majority blamed 'Negroes who start riots' and 'Communists.'" "One study indicates that as late as 1970, more than 70 percent of all blacks working in metropolitan areas held blue-collar jobs.78 Yet by 1987, when the drug war hit high gear, the industrial employment of black men had plummeted to 28 percent." Can those numbers even be properly compared? "The articles typically featured black “crack whores,” “crack babies,” and “gangbangers,” reinforcing already prevalent racial stereotypes of black women as irresponsible, selfish “welfare queens,” and black men as “predators”—part of an inferior and criminal subculture." "The bonanza continued into 1989, as the media continued to disseminate claims that crack was an “epidemic,” a “plague,” “instantly addictive,” and extraordinarily dangerous—claims that have now been proven false or highly misleading." "One senator insisted that crack had become a scapegoat distracting the public’s attention from the true causes of our social ills, arguing: “If we blame crime on crack, our politicians are off the hook. Forgotten are the failed schools, the malign welfare programs, the desolate neighborhoods, the wasted years. Only crack is to blame. One is tempted to think that if crack did not exist, someone somewhere would have received a Federal grant to develop it.” (Emphasis added.)" "Shortly thereafter, a New York Times/CBS News Poll reported that 64 percent of those polled—the highest percentage ever recorded—now thought that drugs were the most significant problem in the United States.94 This surge of public concern did not correspond to a dramatic shift in illegal drug activity, but instead was the product of a carefully orchestrated political campaign. The level of public concern about crime and drugs was only weakly correlated with actual crime rates, but highly correlated with political initiatives, campaigns, and partisan appeals. (Emphasis added.)" "During Clinton’s tenure, Washington slashed funding for public housing by $17 billion (a reduction of 61 percent) and boosted corrections by $19 billion (an increase of 171 percent), “effectively making the construction of prisons the nation’s main housing program for the urban poor.” (Emphasis added.)" "More than 2 million people found themselves behind bars at the turn of the twenty-first century, and millions more were relegated to the margins of mainstream society, banished to a political and social space not unlike Jim Crow, where discrimination in employment, housing, and access to education was perfectly legal, and where they could be denied the right to vote. The system functioned relatively automatically, and the prevailing system of racial meanings, identities, and ideologies already seemed natural. Ninety percent of those admitted to prison for drug offenses in many states were black or Latino, yet the mass incarceration of communities of color was explained in race-neutral terms, an adaptation to the needs and demands of the current political climate. The New Jim Crow was born." "Full-blown trials of guilt or innocence rarely occur; many people never even meet with an attorney; witnesses are routinely paid and coerced by the government; police regularly stop and search people for no reason whatsoever; penalties for many crimes are so severe that innocent people plead guilty, accepting plea bargains to avoid harsh mandatory sentences; and children, even as young as fourteen, are sent to adult prisons." "[...] state and local law enforcement agencies were granted the authority to keep, for their own use, the vast majority of cash and assets they seize when waging the drug war. This dramatic change in policy gave state and local police an enormous stake in the War on Drugs—not in its success, but in its perpetual existence. (Emphasis added.)" "When a drug dealer is sent to jail, there are many others ready and willing to take his place, but seizing the means of production, some legislators reasoned, may shut down the trafficking business for good. Over the years, the list of properties subject to forfeiture expanded greatly, and the required connection to illegal drug activity became increasingly remote, leading to many instances of abuse. But it was not until 1984, when Congress amended the federal law to allow federal law enforcement agencies to retain and use any and all proceeds from asset forfeitures, and to allow state and local police agencies to retain up to 80 percent of the assets’ value, that a true revolution occurred." "Quite predictably, the enormous economic rewards created by both the drug-war forfeiture and Byrne-grant laws has created an environment in which a very fine line exists between the lawful and the unlawful taking of other people’s money and property—a line so thin that some officers disregard the formalities of search warrants, probable cause, and reasonable suspicion altogether." "In Virginia, for example, fees paid to court-appointed attorneys for representing someone charged with a felony that carries a sentence of less than twenty years are capped at $428. And in Wisconsin, more than 11,000 poor people go to court without representation every year because anyone who earns more than $3,000 per year is considered able to afford a lawyer." "“All too often, defendants plead guilty, even if they are innocent, without really understanding their legal rights or what is occurring. Sometimes the proceedings reflect little or no recognition that the accused is mentally ill or does not adequately understand English. The fundamental right to a lawyer that Americans assume applies to everyone accused of criminal conduct effectively does not exist in practice for countless people across the United States.”" "For those released on probation or parole, the risks are especially high. They are subject to regular surveillance and monitoring by the police and may be stopped and searched (with or without their consent) for any reason or no reason at all. As a result, they are far more likely to be arrested (again) than those whose behavior is not subject to constant scrutiny by law enforcement." "In this system of control, failing to cope well with one’s exile status is treated like a crime. If you fail, after being released from prison with a criminal record—your personal badge of inferiority—to remain drug free, or if you fail to get a job against all the odds, or if you get depressed and miss an appointment with your parole officer (or if you cannot afford the bus fare to take you there), you can be sent right back to prison—where society apparently thinks millions of Americans belong." "Human Rights Watch reported in 2000 that, in seven states, African Americans constitute 80 to 90 percent of all drug offenders sent to prison. In at least fifteen states, blacks are admitted to prison on drug charges at a rate from twenty to fifty-seven times greater than that of white men. In fact, nationwide, the rate of incarceration for African American drug offenders dwarfs the rate of whites." "When the War on Drugs gained full steam in the mid-1980s, prison admissions for African Americans skyrocketed, nearly quadrupling in three years, and then increasing steadily until it reached in 2000 a level more than twenty-six times the level in 1983." "Any notion that drug use among blacks is more severe or dangerous is belied by the data; white youth have about three times the number of drug-related emergency room visits as their African American counterparts." "The racial bias inherent in the drug war is a major reason that 1 in every 14 black men was behind bars in 2006, compared with 1 in 106 white men." "The problem with this abbreviated analysis is that violent crime is not responsible for mass incarceration. As numerous researchers have shown, violent crime rates have fluctuated over the years and bear little relationship to incarceration rates—which have soared during the past three decades regardless of whether violent crime was going up or down." "What is painfully obvious when one steps back from individual cases and specific policies is that the system of mass incarceration operates with stunning efficiency to sweep people of color off the streets, lock them in cages, and then release them into an inferior second-class status. Nowhere is this more true than in the War on Drugs. (Emphasis added.)" "These findings are consistent with numerous other studies, including a study of network television news from 1990 and 1991, which found that a predictable “us against them” frame was used in the news stories, with “us” being white, suburban America, and “them” being black Americans and a few corrupted whites." "Viewed as a whole, the relevant research by cognitive and social psychologists to date suggests that racial bias in the drug war was inevitable, once a public consensus was constructed by political and media elites that drug crime is black and brown." "According to the Court, whether or not police discriminate on the basis of race when making traffic stops is irrelevant to a consideration of whether their conduct is “reasonable” under the Fourth Amendment." "The real issue at hand was whether—and to what extent—the Supreme Court would tolerate racial bias in the criminal justice system as a whole. The Court’s answer was that racial bias would be tolerated—virtually to any degree—so long as no one admitted it." "The very evidence that the Court demanded in McCleskey—evidence of deliberate bias in his individual case—would almost always be unavailable and/or inadmissible due to procedural rules that shield jurors and prosecutors from scrutiny. This dilemma was of little concern to the Court. It closed the courthouse doors to claims of racial bias in sentencing. There is good reason to believe that, despite appearances, the McCleskey decision was not really about the death penalty at all; rather, the Court’s opinion was driven by a desire to immunize the entire criminal justice system from claims of racial bias. (Emphasis added.)" "“The presumption of innocence is now a legal myth,” he declared. “The 100-to-1 ratio, coupled with mandatory minimum sentencing provided by federal statute, has created a situation that reeks with inhumanity and injustice. . . . If young white males were being incarcerated at the same rate as young black males, the statute would have been amended long ago.” Judge Cahill sentenced Clary as if the drug he had carried home had been powder cocaine. The sentence imposed was four years in prison. Clary served his term and was released." "The Georgia Supreme Court ruled, by a 4–3 vote, that the stark racial disparity presented a threshold case of discrimination and required the prosecutors to offer a race-neutral explanation for the results. Rather than offer a justification, however, the Georgia attorney general filed a petition for rehearing signed by every one of the state’s forty-six district attorneys, all of whom were white. The petition argued that the Court’s decision was a dire mistake; if the decision were allowed to stand and prosecutors were compelled to explain gross racial disparities such as the ones at issue, it would be a “substantial step toward invalidating” the death penalty and would “paralyze the criminal justice system”—apparently because severe and inexplicable racial disparities pervaded the system as a whole. (Emphasis added.)" "Most prosecutors’ offices lack any manual or guidebook advising prosecutors how to make discretionary decisions. Even the American Bar Association’s standards of practice for prosecutors are purely aspirational; no prosecutor is required to follow the standards or even consider them." "With no trace of irony, the Court demanded that Armstrong produce in advance the very thing he sought in discovery: information regarding white defendants who should have been charged in federal court. That information, of course, was in the prosecution’s possession and control, which is why Armstrong filed a discovery motion in the first place." "A report in 2000 observed that among youth who have never been sent to a juvenile prison before, African Americans were more than six times as likely as whites to be sentenced to prison for identical crimes." "Achieving an all-white jury, or nearly all-white jury, is easy in most jurisdictions, because relatively few racial minorities are included in the jury pool. Potential jurors are typically called for service based on the list of registered voters or Department of Motor Vehicle lists—sources that contain disproportionately fewer people of color, because people of color are significantly less likely to own cars or register to vote. Making matters worse, thirty-one states and the federal government subscribe to the practice of lifetime felon exclusion from juries. As a result, about 30 percent of black men are automatically banned from jury service for life. Accordingly, no more than a handful of strikes are necessary in many cases to eliminate all or nearly all black jurors." "As noted earlier, at least 10 percent of Americans violate drug laws every year, and people of all races engage in illegal drug activity at similar rates. With such an extraordinarily large population of offenders to choose from, decisions must be made regarding who should be targeted and where the drug war should be waged. From the outset, the drug war could have been waged primarily in overwhelmingly white suburbs or on college campuses. SWAT teams could have rappelled from helicopters in gated suburban communities and raided the homes of high school lacrosse players known for hosting coke and ecstasy parties after their games. The police could have seized televisions, furniture, and cash from fraternity houses based on an anonymous tip that a few joints or a stash of cocaine could be found hidden in someone’s dresser drawer." "Instead, when police go looking for drugs, they look in the ’hood. Tactics that would be political suicide in an upscale white suburb are not even newsworthy in poor black and brown communities. So long as mass drug arrests are concentrated in impoverished urban areas, police chiefs have little reason to fear a political backlash, no matter how aggressive and warlike the efforts may be. (Emphasis added.)" "The hypersegregation of the black poor in ghetto communities has made the roundup easy. Confined to ghetto areas and lacking political power, the black poor are convenient targets. Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton’s book, American Apartheid, documents how racially segregated ghettos were deliberately created by federal policy, not impersonal market forces or private housing choices. The enduring racial isolation of the ghetto poor has made them uniquely vulnerable in the War on Drugs." "The facts were as follows: Seattle residents were far more likely to report suspected narcotics activities in residences—not outdoors—but police devoted their resources to open-air drug markets and to the one precinct that was least likely to be identified as the site of suspected drug activity in citizen complaints. In fact, although hundreds of outdoor drug transactions were recorded in predominantly white areas of Seattle, police concentrated their drug enforcement efforts in one downtown drug market where the frequency of drug transactions was much lower. In racially mixed open-air drug markets, black dealers were far more likely to be arrested than whites, even though white dealers were present and visible." "The Seattle Police Department’s] focus on black and Latino individuals and on the drug most strongly associated with ‘blackness’ suggest that law enforcement policies and practices are predicated on the assumption that the drug problem is, in fact, a black and Latino one, and that crack, the drug most strongly associated with urban blacks, is ‘the worst.’” This racialized cultural script about who and what constitutes the drug problem renders illegal drug activity by whites invisible. “White people,” the study’s authors observed, “are simply not perceived as drug offenders by Seattle police officers.” (Emphasis added.)" "A black kid arrested twice for possession of marijuana may be no more of a repeat offender than a white frat boy who regularly smokes pot in his dorm room. But because of his race and his confinement to a racially segregated ghetto, the black kid has a criminal record, while the white frat boy, because of his race and relative privilege, does not. Thus, when prosecutors throw the book at black repeat offenders or when police stalk ex-offenders and subject them to regular frisks and searches on the grounds that it makes sense to “watch criminals closely,” they are often exacerbating racial disparities created by the discretionary decision to wage the War on Drugs almost exclusively in poor communities of color. (Emphasis added.)" "What most surprised many analysts was that, in both studies, whites were actually more likely than people of color to be carrying illegal drugs or contraband in their vehicles. In fact, in New Jersey, whites were almost twice as likely to be found with illegal drugs or contraband as African Americans, and five times as likely to be found with contraband as Latinos. Although whites were more likely to be guilty of carrying drugs, they were far less likely to be viewed as suspicious, resulting in relatively few stops, searches, and arrests of whites." "Although the NYPD frequently attempts to justify stop-and-frisk operations in poor communities of color on the grounds that such tactics are necessary to get guns off the streets, less than 1 percent of stops (0.15 percent) resulted in guns being found, and guns and other contraband were seized less often in stops of African Americans and Latinos than of whites." "The NYPD made 50,300 marijuana arrests in 2010 alone, mostly of young men of color. As one report noted, these marijuana arrests offer “training opportunities” for rookie police who can practice on ghetto kids while earning overtime." "These arrests serve another purpose as well: they “are the most effective way for the NYPD to collect fingerprints, photographs and other information on young people not yet entered into the criminal databases.”" "A simple arrest for marijuana possession can show up on criminal databases as “a drug arrest” without specifying the substance or the charge, and without clarifying even whether the person was convicted. These databases are then used by police and prosecutors, as well as by employers and housing officials—an electronic record that will haunt many for life." "Hundreds of years ago, our nation put those considered less than human in shackles; less than one hundred years ago, we relegated them to the other side of town; today we put them in cages. Once released, they find that a heavy and cruel hand has been laid upon them." "When a defendant pleads guilty to a minor drug offense, nobody will likely tell him that he may be permanently forfeiting his right to vote as well as his right to serve on a jury—two of the most fundamental rights in any modern democracy." Most democracies do not have jury systems. "As Jeremy Travis has observed, “In this brave new world, punishment for the original offense is no longer enough; one’s debt to society is never paid.” Other commentators liken the prison label to “the mark of Cain” and characterize the perpetual nature of the sanction as “internal exile.”" "Myriad laws, rules, and regulations operate to discriminate against ex-offenders and effectively prevent their reintegration into the mainstream society and economy. These restrictions amount to a form of “civic death” and send the unequivocal message that “they” are no longer part of “us.”" "[The] offender may be sentenced to a term of probation, community service, and court costs. Unbeknownst to this offender, and perhaps any other actor in the sentencing process, as a result of his conviction he may be ineligible for many federally-funded health and welfare benefits, food stamps, public housing, and federal educational assistance. His driver’s license may be automatically suspended, and he may no longer qualify for certain employment and professional licenses. If he is convicted of another crime he may be subject to imprisonment as a repeat offender. He will not be permitted to enlist in the military, or possess a firearm, or obtain a federal security clearance. If a citizen, he may lose the right to vote; if not, he becomes immediately deportable." "Despite the brutal, debilitating impact of these “collateral consequences” on ex-offenders’ lives, courts have generally declined to find that such sanctions are actually “punishment” for constitutional purposes. As a result, judges are not required to inform criminal defendants of some of the most important rights they are forfeiting when they plead guilty to a felony." "Prisoners returning “home” are typically the poorest of the poor, lacking the ability to pay for private housing and routinely denied public housing assistance—the type of assistance which could provide some much-needed stability in their lives. For them, “going home” is more a figure of speech than a realistic option. More than 650,000 people are released from prison each year, and for many, finding a new home appears next to impossible, not just in the short term, but for the rest of their lives." "[...] employers and their recruitment/staffing agencies routinely limit the pool of qualified candidates to those with spotless records, thus excluding millions of people from having the opportunity even to interview for jobs. Millions find themselves locked out of the legal economy, and no one with a record has a more difficult time getting hired than black men." "Throughout the United States, newly released prisoners are required to make payments to a host of agencies, including probation departments, courts, and child-support enforcement offices. In some jurisdictions, ex-offenders are billed for drug testing and even for the drug treatment they are supposed to receive as a condition of parole. These fees, costs, and fines are generally quite new—created by law within the past twenty years—and are associated with a wide range of offenses. Every state has its own rules and regulations governing their imposition. Florida, for example, has added more than twenty new categories of financial obligations for criminal defendants since 1996, while eliminating most exemptions for those who cannot pay." "Many states utilize “poverty penalties”—piling on additional late fees, payment plan fees, and interest when individuals are unable to pay all their debts at once, often enriching private debt collectors in the process. Some of the collection fees are exorbitant. Alabama charges a 30 percent collection fee, and Florida allows private debt collectors to tack on a 40 percent surcharge to the underlying debt." "Hurley’s attorney decried the trap she was in: “This is a situation where if this woman was able to write a check for the amount of the fine, she would be out of there. And because she can’t, she’s still in custody. It’s as simple as that.” Although she worked a full-time job while in custody, most of her income went to repay the diversion program, not the underlying fine that put her in custody in the first place. This harsh reality harks back to the days after the Civil War, when former slaves and their descendents were arrested for minor violations, slapped with heavy fines, and then imprisoned until they could pay their debts. The only means to pay off their debts was through labor on plantations and farms—known as convict leasing—or in prisons that had been converted to work farms." "A black minister in Waterloo, Mississippi, explained his outrage at the fate that has befallen African Americans in the post–civil rights era. “It’s a hustle,” he said angrily. “‘Felony’ is the new N-word. They don’t have to call you a nigger anymore. They just say you’re a felon. In every ghetto you see alarming numbers of young men with felony convictions. Once you have that felony stamp, your hope for employment, for any kind of integration into society, it begins to fade out. Today’s lynching is a felony charge. Today’s lynching is incarceration. Today’s lynch mobs are professionals. They have a badge; they have a law degree. A felony is a modern way of saying, ‘I’m going to hang you up and burn you.’ Once you get that F, you’re on fire.” (Emphasis added.)" "Poor people of color, like other Americans—indeed like nearly everyone around the world—want safe streets, peaceful communities, healthy families, good jobs, and meaningful opportunities to contribute to society. The notion that ghetto families do not, in fact, want those things, and instead are perfectly content to live in crime-ridden communities, feeling no shame or regret about the fate of their young men is, quite simply, racist. It is impossible to imagine that we would believe such a thing about whites." "We condemn their baggy pants (a fashion trend that mimics prison-issue pants) and the music that glorifies a life many feel they cannot avoid. When we are done shaming them, we throw up our hands and then turn our backs as they are carted off to jail." "When the system of mass incarceration collapses (and if history is any guide, it will), historians will undoubtedly look back and marvel that such an extraordinarily comprehensive system of racialized social control existed in the United States. How fascinating, they will likely say, that a drug war was waged almost exclusively against poor people of color—people already trapped in ghettos that lacked jobs and decent schools. They were rounded up by the millions, packed away in prisons, and when released, they were stigmatized for life, denied the right to vote, and ushered into a world of discrimination. Legally barred from employment, housing, and welfare benefits—and saddled with thousands of dollars of debt—these people were shamed and condemned for failing to hold together their families. They were chastised for succumbing to depression and anger, and blamed for landing back in prison. (Emphasis added.)" "The fact that Barack Obama can give a speech on Father’s Day dedicated to the subject of fathers who are “AWOL” without ever acknowledging that the majority of young black men in many large urban areas are currently under the control of the criminal justice system is disturbing, to say the least. What is more problematic, though, is that hardly anyone in the mainstream media noticed the oversight." "Today, the political fanfare and the vehement, racialized rhetoric regarding crime and drugs are no longer necessary. Mass incarceration has been normalized, and all of the racial stereotypes and assumptions that gave rise to the system are now embraced (or at least internalized) by people of all colors, from all walks of life, and in every major political party. (Emphasis added.)" "It is simply taken for granted that, in cities like Baltimore and Chicago, the vast majority of young black men are currently under the control of the criminal justice system or branded criminals for life. This extraordinary circumstance—unheard of in the rest of the world—is treated here in America as a basic fact of life, as normal as separate water fountains were just a half century ago. (Emphasis added.)" "The widespread and mistaken belief that racial animus is necessary for the creation and maintenance of racialized systems of social control is the most important reason that we, as a nation, have remained in deep denial." "And while all previous methods of control have blamed the victim in one way or another, the current system invites observers to imagine that those who are trapped in the system were free to avoid second-class status or permanent banishment from society simply by choosing not to commit crimes. It is far more convenient to imagine that a majority of young African American men in urban areas freely chose a life of crime than to accept the real possibility that their lives were structured in a way that virtually guaranteed their early admission into a system from which they can never escape. (Emphasis added.)" "The entrapment occurs in three distinct phases, each of which has been explored earlier, but a brief review is useful here. The first stage is the roundup. Vast numbers of people are swept into the criminal justice system by the police, who conduct drug operations primarily in poor communities of color. They are rewarded in cash—through drug forfeiture laws and federal grant programs—for rounding up as many people as possible, and they operate unconstrained by constitutional rules of procedure that once were considered inviolate. Police can stop, interrogate, and search anyone they choose for drug investigations, provided they get “consent.”" "About 90 percent of those sentenced to prison for a drug offense in Illinois are African American. White drug offenders are rarely arrested, and when they are, they are treated more favorably at every stage of the criminal justice process, including plea bargaining and sentencing. Whites are consistently more likely to avoid prison and felony charges, even when they are repeat offenders. Black offenders, by contrast, are routinely labeled felons and released into a permanent racial undercaste." "The total population of black males in Chicago with a felony record (including both current and ex-felons) is equivalent to 55 percent of the black adult male population and an astonishing 80 percent of the adult black male workforce in the Chicago area." "More than 70 percent of all criminal cases in the Chicago area involve a class D felony drug possession charge, the lowest-level felony charge. Those who do go to prison find little freedom upon release." "Formally race-neutral devices were adopted to achieve the goal of an all-white electorate without violating the terms of the Fifteenth Amendment. The devices worked quite well. Because African Americans were poor, they frequently could not pay poll taxes. And because they had been denied access to education, they could not pass literacy tests. Grandfather clauses allowed whites to vote even if they couldn’t meet the requirements, as long as their ancestors had been able to vote." "Under the usual-residence rule, the Census Bureau counts imprisoned individuals as residents of the jurisdiction in which they are incarcerated. Because most new prison construction occurs in predominately white, rural areas, white communities benefit from inflated population totals at the expense of the urban, overwhelmingly minority communities from which the prisoners come." "Rather than merely shunting black people to the other side of town or corralling them in ghettos, mass incarceration locks them in cages. Bars and walls keep hundreds of thousands of black and brown people away from mainstream society—a form of apartheid unlike any the world has ever seen." "Because the term white crime lacks social meaning, the term white criminal is also perplexing. In that formulation, white seems to qualify the term criminal—as if to say, “he’s a criminal but not that kind of criminal.” Or, he’s not a real criminal—i.e., not what we mean by criminal today." "For the system to succeed—that is, for it to achieve the political goals described in chapter 1—black people must be labeled criminals before they are formally subject to control. The criminal label is essential, for forms of explicit racial exclusion are not only prohibited but widely condemned. Thus black youth must be made—labeled—criminals. (Emphasis added.)" "As previously noted, poll taxes, literacy tests, and felon disenfranchisement laws were all formally race-neutral practices that were employed in order to avoid the prohibition on race discrimination in voting contained in the Fifteenth Amendment. These laws operated to create an all-white electorate because they excluded African Americans from the franchise but were not generally applied to whites. Poll workers had the discretion to charge a poll tax or administer a literacy test, or not, and they exercised their discretion in a racially discriminatory manner. Laws that said nothing about race operated to discriminate because those charged with enforcement were granted tremendous discretion, and they exercised that discretion in a highly discriminatory manner. The same is true in the drug war. Laws prohibiting the use and sale of drugs are facially race neutral, but they are enforced in a highly discriminatory fashion. (Emphasis added.)" "As discussed in chapter 4, during Jim Crow, racial stigma contributed to racial solidarity in the black community. Racial stigma today, however—that is, the stigma of black criminality—has turned the black community against itself, destroyed networks of mutual support, and created a silence about the new caste system among many of the people most affected by it. The implications of this difference are profound. Racial stigma today makes collective action extremely difficult—sometimes impossible; whereas racial stigma during Jim Crow contained the seeds of revolt. (Emphasis added.)" "Racial violence has been rationalized, legitimated, and channeled through our criminal justice system; it is expressed as police brutality, solitary confinement, and the discriminatory and arbitrary imposition of the death penalty." "[...] many whites during the Jim Crow era sincerely believed that African Americans were intellectually and morally inferior. They meant blacks no harm but believed segregation was a sensible system for managing a society comprised of fundamentally different and unequal people. The sincerity of many people’s racial beliefs is what led Martin Luther King Jr. to declare, “Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.” The notion that racial caste systems are necessarily predicated on a desire to harm other racial groups, and that racial hostility is the essence of racism, is fundamentally misguided. Even slavery does not conform to this limited understanding of racism and racial caste. (Emphasis added.)" "By and large, plantation owners were indifferent to the suffering caused by slavery; they were motivated by greed." "We, as a nation, seem comfortable with 90 percent of the people arrested and convicted of drug offenses in some states being African American, but if the figure were 100 percent, the veil of colorblindness would be lost. We could no longer tell ourselves stories about why 90 percent might be a reasonable figure; nor could we continue to assume that good reasons exist for extreme racial disparities in the drug war, even if we are unable to think of such reasons ourselves. In short, the inclusion of some whites in the system of control is essential to preserving the image of a colorblind criminal justice system and maintaining our self-image as fair and unbiased people. Because most Americans, including those within law enforcement, want to believe they are nonracist, the suffering in the drug war crosses the color line. (Emphasis added.)" * What is an appropriate percentage of people in prison? In jail? On parole? In "the system"? * What is the ratio of historically privileged (white) to historically oppressed (black) prisoners? * How does that compare to the ratio in the overall population? * 1/3 of black men can expect to go to prison in their lifetime * What percentage would be more acceptable? * What is the percentage for whites? * What percentage of the poor are incarcerated? The rich? * How does the ratio of those percentages compare to the ratio in the overall population? "In fact, the number of deaths related to all illegal drugs combined was tiny compared to the number of deaths caused by drunk drivers. The total of all drug-related deaths due to AIDS, drug overdose, or the violence associated with the illegal drug trade, was estimated at 21,000 annually—less than the number of deaths directly caused by drunk drivers, and a small fraction of the number of alcohol-related deaths that occur every year." "[...] most states adopted tougher laws to punish drunk driving. Numerous states now have some type of mandatory sentencing for this offense—typically two days in jail for a first offense and two to ten days for a second offense. Possession of a tiny amount of crack cocaine, on the other hand, carries a mandatory minimum sentence of five years in federal prison. The vastly different sentences afforded drunk drivers and drug offenders speaks volumes regarding who is viewed as disposable—someone to be purged from the body politic—and who is not. Drunk drivers are predominantly white and male. White men comprised 78 percent of the arrests for this offense in 1990 when new mandatory minimums governing drunk driving were being adopted. They are generally charged with misdemeanors and typically receive sentences involving fines, license suspension, and community service. Although drunk driving carries a far greater risk of violent death than the use or sale of illegal drugs, the societal response to drunk drivers has generally emphasized keeping the person functional and in society, while attempting to respond to the dangerous behavior through treatment and counseling. People charged with drug offenses, though, are disproportionately poor people of color. They are typically charged with felonies and sentenced to prison. (Emphasis added.)" "In view of the nation’s treatment of predominately white drunk drivers and drug offenders, it is extremely difficult to imagine that our nation would have declared all-out war on drug offenders if the enemy had been defined in the public imagination as white." "The notion that African Americans support “get tough” approaches to crime is further complicated by the fact that “crime” is not a generic category. There are many different types of crime, and violent crime tends to provoke the most visceral and punitive response. Yet as we have seen in chapter 2, the drug war has not been aimed at rooting out the most violent drug traffickers, or so-called kingpins. The vast majority of those arrested for drug crimes are not charged with serious offenses, and most of the people in state prison on drug charges have no history of violence or significant selling activity. Those who are “kingpins” are often able to buy their freedom by forfeiting their assets, snitching on other dealers, or becoming paid government informants. Thus, to the extent that some African Americans support harsh policies aimed at violent offenders, they cannot be said to support the War on Drugs, which has been waged primarily against nonviolent, low-level offenders in poor communities of color." "Although African Americans do not engage in drug crime at significantly higher rates than whites, black men do have much higher rates of violent crime, and violent crime is concentrated in ghetto communities. Studies have shown that joblessness—not race or black culture—explains the high rates of violent crime in poor black communities. When researchers have controlled for joblessness, differences in violent crime rates between young black and white men disappear. (Emphasis added.)" "Civil rights advocates strenuously argued that it was the mentality and ideology that gave rise to Jim Crow that was the real source of the danger experienced by blacks. Of course they were right. But it is understandable why some blacks believed their immediate safety and security could best be protected by cooperation with the prevailing caste system. The fact that black people during Jim Crow were often complicit with the system of control did not mean they supported racial oppression." "[...] complicity with the prevailing system of control may seem like the only option. Parents and schoolteachers counsel black children that, if they ever hope to escape this system and avoid prison time, they must be on their best behavior, raise their arms and spread their legs for the police without complaint, stay in failing schools, pull up their pants, and refuse all forms of illegal work and moneymaking activity, even if jobs in the legal economy are impossible to find. Girls are told not to have children until they are married to a “good” black man who can help provide for a family with a legal job. They are told to wait and wait for Mr. Right even if that means, in a jobless ghetto, never having children at all. When black youth find it difficult or impossible to live up to these standards—or when they fail, stumble, and make mistakes, as all humans do—shame and blame is heaped upon them. If only they had made different choices, they’re told sternly, they wouldn’t be sitting in a jail cell; they’d be graduating from college. Never mind that white children on the other side of town who made precisely the same choices—often for less compelling reasons—are in fact going to college. (Emphasis added.)" "Who becomes a social pariah and excommunicated from civil society and who trots off to college bears scant relationship to the morality of crimes committed. Who is more blameworthy: the young black kid who hustles on the street corner, selling weed to help his momma pay the rent? Or the college kid who deals drugs out of his dorm room so that he’ll have cash to finance his spring break? Who should we fear? The kid in the ’hood who joined a gang and now carries a gun for security, because his neighborhood is frightening and unsafe? Or the suburban high school student who has a drinking problem but keeps getting behind the wheel?" "As legal scholar john a. powell once commented, only half in jest, “It’s actually better to be exploited than marginalized, in some respects, because if you’re exploited presumably you’re still needed.” (Emphasis added.)" "Rev. Al Sharpton captured the spirit of the protest when he stated boldly, “We’ve gone from plantations to penitentiaries. . . . They have tried to create a criminal justice system that particularly targets our young black men. And now we sit and stand in a city that says it’s a prank to hang a hangman’s noose, but that it is attempted murder to have a fight. We cannot sit by silently. That’s why we came, and that’s why we intend to keep coming.”" "[...] civil rights organizations—like all institutions—are comprised of fallible human beings. The prevailing public consensus affects everyone, including civil rights advocates. Those of us in the civil rights community are not immune to the racial stereotypes that pervade media imagery and political rhetoric; nor do we operate outside of the political context. Like most people, we tend to resist believing that we might be part of the problem. One day, civil rights organizations may be embarrassed by how long it took them to move out of denial and do the hard work necessary to end mass incarceration. (Emphasis added.)" "A prime example is the Rosa Parks story. Rosa Parks was not the first person to refuse to give up her seat on a segregated bus in Montgomery, Alabama. Civil rights advocates considered and rejected two other black women as plaintiffs when planning a test case challenging segregation practices: Claudette Colvin and Mary Louise Smith. Both of them were arrested for refusing to give up their seats on Montgomery’s segregated buses, just months before Rosa Parks refused to budge. Colvin was fifteen years old when she defied segregation laws." "One reason so many people have a false impression of the economic well-being of African Americans, as a group, is that poverty and unemployment statistics do not include people who are behind bars. Prisoners are literally erased from the nation’s economic picture, leading standard estimates to underestimate the true jobless rate by as much as 24 percentage points for less-educated black men." "During the much heralded economic boom of the 1990s, the true jobless rate among noncollege black men was a staggering 42 percent (65 percent among black male dropouts)." "If we hope to return to the rate of incarceration of the 1970s—a time when many civil rights activists believed rates of imprisonment were egregiously high—we would need to release approximately four out of five people currently behind bars today. Prisons would have to be closed across America, an event that would likely inspire panic in rural communities that have become dependent on prisons for jobs and economic growth." "Even beyond private prison companies, a whole range of prison profiteers must be reckoned with if mass incarceration is to be undone, including phone companies that gouge families of prisoners by charging them exorbitant rates to communicate with their loved ones; gun manufacturers that sell Taser guns, rifles, and pistols to prison guards and police; private health care providers contracted by the state to provide (typically abysmal) health care to prisoners; the U.S. military, which relies on prison labor to provide military gear to soldiers in Iraq; corporations that use prison labor to avoid paying decent wages; and the politicians, lawyers, and bankers who structure deals to build new prisons often in predominately white rural communities—deals that often promise far more to local communities than they deliver. All of these corporate and political interests have a stake in the expansion—not the elimination—of the system of mass incarceration. (Emphasis added.)" "[...] we hope to end this system of control, we cannot be satisfied with a handful of reforms. All of the financial incentives granted to law enforcement to arrest poor black and brown people for drug offenses must be revoked. Federal grant money for drug enforcement must end; drug forfeiture laws must be stripped from the books; racial profiling must be eradicated; the concentration of drug busts in poor communities of color must cease; and the transfer of military equipment and aid to local law enforcement agencies waging the drug war must come to a screeching halt." "Those who believe that advocacy challenging mass incarceration can be successful without overturning the public consensus that gave rise to it are engaging in fanciful thinking, a form of denial. Isolated victories can be won—even a string of victories—but in the absence of a fundamental shift in public consciousness, the system as a whole will remain intact. To the extent that major changes are achieved without a complete shift, the system will rebound. The caste system will reemerge in a new form, just as convict leasing replaced slavery, or it will be reborn, just as mass incarceration replaced Jim Crow. (Emphasis added.)" "Few would openly argue that we should lock up millions of poor people just so that other people can have jobs or get a good return on their private investments. Instead, familiar arguments would likely resurface about the need to be “tough” on criminals, not coddle them or give “free passes.” The public debate would inevitably turn to race, even if no one was explicitly talking about. (Emphasis added.)" "The deeply flawed nature of colorblindness, as a governing principle, is evidenced by the fact that the public consensus supporting mass incarceration is officially colorblind. It purports to see black and brown men not as black and brown, but simply as men—raceless men—who have failed miserably to play by the rules the rest of us follow quite naturally. The fact that so many black and brown men are rounded up for drug crimes that go largely ignored when committed by whites is unseen." "Finally, this is not an argument that affirmative action should be reconsidered simply on the grounds that it is “unfair” to white men as a group. The empirical evidence strongly supports the conclusion that declining wages, downsizing, deindustrialization, globalization, and cutbacks in government services represent much greater threats to the position of white men than so-called reverse discrimination." "Affirmative action, particularly when it is justified on the grounds of diversity rather than equity (or remedy), masks the severity of racial inequality in America, leading to greatly exaggerated claims of racial progress and overly optimistic assessments of the future for African Americans." "Seeing black people graduate from Harvard and Yale and become CEOs or corporate lawyers—not to mention president of the United States—causes us all to marvel at what a long way we have come. As recent data shows, however, much of black progress is a myth. Although some African Americans are doing very well—enrolling in universities and graduate schools at record rates thanks to affirmative action—as a group, in many respects African Americans are doing no better than they were when Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated and riots swept inner cities across America. (Emphasis added.)" "[...] mass incarceration is predicated on the notion that an extraordinary number of African Americans (but not all) have freely chosen a life of crime and thus belong behind bars. A belief that all blacks belong in jail would be incompatible with the social consensus that we have “moved beyond” race and that race is no longer relevant. But a widespread belief that a majority of black and brown men unfortunately belong in jail is compatible with the new American creed, provided that their imprisonment can be interpreted as their own fault. If the prison label imposed on them can be blamed on their culture, poor work ethic, or even their families, then society is absolved of responsibility to do anything about their condition. (Emphasis added.)" "Whereas black success stories undermined the logic of Jim Crow, they actually reinforce the system of mass incarceration. Mass incarceration depends for its legitimacy on the widespread belief that all those who appear trapped at the bottom actually chose their fate." "Viewed from this perspective, affirmative action no longer appears entirely progressive. So long as some readily identifiable African Americans are doing well, the system is largely immunized from racial critique. (Emphasis added.)" "Reports that minority officers may engage in nearly as much racial profiling as white officers have been met with some amazement, but the real surprise is that some minority police officers have been willing to speak out against the practice, given the ferocity of the drug war. A war has been declared against poor communities of color, and the police are expected to wage it. Do we expect minority officers, whose livelihood depends on the very departments charged with waging the war, to play the role of peacenik?" "Remarkably, the Obama administration chose to increase funding for Byrne programs twelvefold not in response to any sudden spike in crime rates or any new studies indicating the effectiveness of these programs, but instead because handing law enforcement billions of dollars in cash is an easy, efficient jobs program in the midst of an economic crisis. The dramatically increased funding for Byrne grants was included as part of the Economic Reinvestment Act of 2009. While the channeling of stimulus dollars to law enforcement may help some police officers keep their jobs at a time when state and local budgets are being slashed, there is a cost. As New York Times columnist Charles Blow observed, “[it’s] a callous political calculus. . . . The fact that they are ruining the lives of hundreds of thousands of black and Hispanic men and, by extension, the communities they belong to barely seems to register." "[...] could it be that many African Americans would actually prefer to ignore racial issues during Obama’s presidency, to help ensure him smooth sailing and a triumphant presidency, no matter how bad things are for African Americans in the meantime? The fact that the last question could plausibly be answered yes raises serious questions for the civil rights community." "Malcolm X understood that the United States was created by and for privileged white men. It was white men who dominated politics, controlled the nation’s wealth, and wrote the rules by which everyone else was forced to live. No group in the United States can be said to have experienced more privilege, and gone to greater lengths to protect it, than “the white man.” (Emphasis added.)" "As Lani Guinier points out, however, the racial liberalism expressed in the Brown v. Board of Education decision and endorsed by civil rights litigators “did not offer poor whites even an elementary framework for understanding what they might gain as a result of integration.” Nothing in the opinion or in the subsequent legal strategy made clear that segregation had afforded elites a crucial means of exercising social control over poor and working-class whites as well as blacks. The Southern white elite, whether planters or industrialists, had successfully endeavored to make all whites think in racial rather than class terms, predictably leading whites to experience desegregation, as Derrick Bell put it, as a net “loss.” (Emphasis added.)" "[...] if meaningful progress is to be made, whites must give up their racial bribes too, and be willing to sacrifice their racial privilege. Some might argue that in this game of chicken, whites should make the first move. Whites should demonstrate that their silence in the drug war cannot be bought by tacit assurances that their sons and daughters will not be rounded up en masse and locked away. Whites should prove their commitment to dismantling not only mass incarceration, but all of the structures of racial inequality that guarantee for whites the resilience of white privilege. After all, why should “we” give up our racial bribes if whites have been unwilling to give up theirs? In light of our nation’s racial history, that seems profoundly unfair. But if your strategy for racial justice involves waiting for whites to be fair, history suggests it will be a long wait. It’s not that white people are more unjust than others. Rather it seems that an aspect of human nature is the tendency to cling tightly to one’s advantages and privileges and to rationalize the suffering and exclusion of others. This tendency is what led Frederick Douglass to declare that “power concedes nothing without a demand; it never has and it never will.” (Emphasis added.)" "[...] we may still manage to persuade mainstream voters in the midst of an economic crisis that we have relied too heavily on incarceration, that prisons are too expensive, and that drug use is a public health problem, not a crime. But if the movement that emerges to end mass incarceration does not meaningfully address the racial divisions and resentments that gave rise to mass incarceration, and if it fails to cultivate an ethic of genuine care, compassion, and concern for every human being—of every class, race, and nationality—within our nation’s borders, including poor whites, who are often pitted against poor people of color, the collapse of mass incarceration will not mean the death of racial caste in America." "Inevitably a new system of racialized social control will emerge—one that we cannot foresee, just as the current system of mass incarceration was not predicted by anyone thirty years ago." "[...] when a young man who was born in the ghetto and who knows little of life beyond the walls of his prison cell and the invisible cage that has become his life, turns to us in bewilderment and rage, we should do nothing more than look him in the eye and tell him the truth." "We should tell him the same truth the great African American writer James Baldwin told his nephew in a letter published in 1962, in one of the most extraordinary books ever written, The Fire Next Time. With great passion and searing conviction, Baldwin had this to say to his young nephew: This is the crime of which I accuse my country and my countrymen, and for which neither I nor time nor history will ever forgive them, that they have destroyed and are destroying hundreds of thousands of lives and do not know it and do not want to know it. . . . It is their innocence which constitutes the crime. . . . This innocent country set you down in a ghetto in which, in fact, it intended that you should perish. The limits of your ambition were, thus, expected to be set forever. You were born into a society which spelled out with brutal clarity, and in as many ways as possible, that you were a worthless human being. You were not expected to aspire to excellence: you were expected to make peace with mediocrity. (Emphasis added.)" ]]> </content> </entry> <entry> <title type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Based on a True Story: Not a Memoir by Norm Macdonald (2016) (read in 2017)]]> </title> <id>https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3430</id> <link href="https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3430"/> <updated>2017-07-25T21:44:54+02:00</updated> <author> <name type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Marco von Ballmoos]]> </name> <uri>https://earthli.com/users/marco</uri> </author> <summary type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA["Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is" ... ]]> </summary> <content type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Published by marco on 25. Jul 2017 21:44:54 Updated by marco on 28. Dec 2023 21:13:13 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I've failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an interest in this book, then I'm happy for you." Norm's purported autobiography is at-once multi-layered and tightly written. In few words, he paints a plethora of possibilities. The style is reminiscent of Twain, Vonnegut, Kafka and Burroughs. His stories -- as was the case with these auspicious predecessors -- are often seemingly inspired by hallucinogenic substances as well as completely fictitious -- often bald-facedly so -- and not at all autobiographical. He is deeply funny. He is easily insightful. His writing is a pleasure to read. Some passages rear out of the work, standing alone as jewels of prosaic creation. He tells of his days and nights on the road, of his heroin and alcohol addiction, of his at-once madcap and lethargic friend, of his gambling addictions. He tells of growing up on an farm in Canada with the mysterious Old Jack, of his obsession with Sarah Silverman, his verbal sparring with Lorne Michaels, his simultaneous lack of and spectacular surfeit of success at comedy, his killer jokes that at-once cannot fail and always backfire. His denouement or resurrection comes in the form of a ghost writer who emulates his employer to such a degree that the narrative line blurs and shifts and whipsaws, with Matryoshka-like nesting of ideas, plot-lines and authorial voices. Norm escapes to fight another day. Highly recommended. [Citations] "The plain truth is that Adam Eget is an alcoholic and that’s why he doesn’t drink. Me, I’m not an alcoholic and that’s why I do drink. Life sure is funny that way." "“Oh, he was a sight to see. The rest of us, we all dressed in suit jackets and shoes like our dads wore, but Sam’s jacket was a long duster, and he always wore a bandana too. And when he talked, it was a wild shriek, but there was music in it. It put me in mind of a Pentecostal minister I’d seen once who hailed from West Texas and came up through the Ottawa Valley when I was a young boy—a man who handled snakes and talked unafraid." "Then the cat’s green eyes flashed black like the wing of a crow and her teeth tore into the mouse, and I could hear the tiny bones breaking as the cat’s neck swung from side to side until the mouse was still and limp, but the cat’s neck continued to swing. Then the cat slung the dead mouse into the short hay and strolled away. This last moment was what surprised and frightened me the most. This whole endeavor had nothing to do with food. And this is when I learned that hardscrabble truth: There is a difference between what a thing is and what it appears to be. A thing can appear to be content and happy as it lies with you so close that you feel its purr in your belly. And if you don’t look through the screen door and out into the world, you might never realize that the thing you think you know and love is another, more dangerous thing altogether." "And when I looked inside, a curious thought struck me, a thought that made my fear evaporate and my tears dry. You see, Old Jack wasn’t lying in the casket; why, it wasn’t him at all. It was just something that looked like him, the same way a suit lying on a bed resembles the man once wore it. Old Jack was the best fellow I ever knew and I’d been with him as often as anyone, but I wasn’t with him that day, not there in that room, where a line of people stood waiting to look at a thing in a box." "I don’t like it in the middle of the desert late at night. I know this is when the creatures emerge. They spend their days hiding from the merciless sun behind rocks and cactus, and it’s when the sun goes down that they make their living. In the black of night I can hear them, hungry, scrabbling over the rocks." "Sonofabitch, the drive was long. Why they built a hospital so damn far away from everybody, I couldn’t figure. It was way out in the middle of northern Ontario, where you have to pray your car doesn’t break down, and if it does, you have to pray you freeze to death before the timberwolves find you." "Oh, his name’s Fred Henshaw. He took his mother out to the cold northern tundra where the sun never sets and he cut off her eyelids. That way she couldn’t sleep or even shield her eyes from the sun. Then Fred had her wander around, tripping in the snow, falling, getting back up, falling again. Every day Fred would take a hypodermic needle and remove a half a pint of blood from the old lady. After about a week, his mother just lay down on the hard snow. Then he sat down and waited. Waited for the crows to come." "Don’t worry about that, Adam Eget. For idiots like you, they provide a ghostwriter. A ghostwriter is a man blessed with bright talent but cursed with dim luck. The brilliant ghostwriter will do all the work and receive a pittance, while you, an illiterate fool, will be given a king’s ransom. That’s God’s great joke, my son." "Julie had motioned me into her office that afternoon while Mr. Macdonald was telling a story about how he hated Eskimos. It was not so much a story, really, as a string of words that was randomly assembled, incoherent, unending, and filled with hate." "That was a long time ago, so I take a deep, deep drag and hold the magic stuff in my lungs, although it fights to get out. Finally, I can’t take it anymore and I lean over and cough like hell. When I look up again, there it is. The past. It’s directly in my face, like a forgotten child who’s hunted me down to find out when I’ll be returning with that pack of cigarettes." "And outside the Regency House, we all laughed loudly for different reasons in the cold autumn of New York." "As you place your chips on the craps table, you feel anxiety and impatience. When the red dice hit the green felt with a thunk and you’re declared the winner and the chips are pushed toward you, you feel relief. Relief is all. And relief is fine, but hardly what a man would give the whole rest of his life to gain. It has to be something else, and the best I’ve come up with is this: It is a particular moment. A magic moment that occurs after the placing of a bet and before the result of that bet. It is after the red dice are thrown but before they lie still on the green felt where they fall. It is when the dice are in the air, and as long as they are there, time stops. As long as the red dice are in the air, the gambler has hope. And hope is a wonderful thing to be addicted to." "I find my way through the casino and in a moment I am on the Strip. There is a dry chill that begins to freeze my naked face, and the buildings of iron and glass feel as immortal as the ancient streets they sit upon. I look above and the sun shining amid the blue sky and white, white clouds casts a pall of futility over the man-made monuments and their sickly neon light." "And the Lord begins to speak His message, but just as He begins, a second wave of the drug hits me, much harder, and the sidewalk becomes quicksand beneath my feet and I sink into it, fast. I clutch at a lamppost and hold on hard so that the sidewalk does not swallow me and fill my lungs with sand. Around me I see, in a circle that grows ever smaller, a pack of wildcats sauntering nearer and nearer, and their green eyes shine and their white teeth are slick with saliva and their breath can be seen in the cold, cold air. Time that is beyond all human calculation passes, and a crash of thunder makes the mountain cats race up to the top of the Luxor hotel, where they fasten themselves like gargoyles to the top of the pyramid." "The boy had been alive nine years, which made him young, but he would only be alive for one more year, which made him old." "Sometimes, Doc, in the deepest dark of night, I awake in my bed and I turn to my right, and with horror I see some old lady lying on my arm. An old lady that I once loved, Doc, in whose flesh I once found splendor and now see only decay, an old lady who insults me by her very existence." "And so I have one child now, a boy, whose name is Stephan Mikhailovitch Smokovnikov, and I tell you now, Doc, with great and deep shame, the terrible truth. I no longer love him. When I look into his eyes, all I see is the same cowardice that I see when I catch a glimpse of my own eyes in a mirror. It is this cowardice that keeps me living, Doc, that keeps me moving from place to place, saying hello and goodbye, eating though hunger has long left me, walking without destination, and, at night, lying beside the strange old lady in this burlesque of a life I endure." "When it’s unexpected, death comes fast like a ravenous wolf and tears open your throat with a merciful fury. But when it’s expected, it comes slow and patient like a snake, and the doctor tells you how far away it is and when, exactly, it will be at your door. And when it will be at the foot of your bed. And when it will be on your flesh. It’s all right there on their clipboards." "“Well, wouldn’t it be a better idea to let the audience decide whether it’s really funny?” “With all due respect, Lorne, I think that would be the worst thing we could possibly do. Believe me, I’ve been down that road before.”" "Women are attracted to funny men, it is often said. This is not true. It only appears this way because women laugh at everything a very handsome man says." "As we waited to spot a seal, I played a game with the boy. We would look up at the white clouds above and find figures in them. “That one looks like a bird,” I said. “Yeah, it does, and look at that one. It looks like a man rubbing his nose,” he returned. “I don’t see it.” “You see the bottom of it. That’s the man’s chin and then his mouth is wide open.” And then I saw it. And we played this game for two days, and we saw alligators and pickles and trees and every sort of thing, all of them white and still and living in the cold and limitless sky." "We’d only walked about fifty yards when a great weariness settled on me and I didn’t think I could go farther. Suddenly all I wanted to do was sleep. But Edward McClintock had warned me that the cold will trick a man and that sleep that sweetly beckons is not really sleep at all but the deeper thing." "“If you cry, sir, then cry with envy and not pity. For the boy is in the clouds and he is one with the clouds. It is we who are left who are reminded on this unacceptable day that life is swift and yet we are blind to its mighty splendor, which can be found in the simplest of things. Things like a walk in the park, a conversation with a good friend, a deep rich coffee leavened with half cream and half milk and served in a sturdy mug—one with some heft—and, with it, a delicious cookie that’s white and has red jelly in the middle. Thank you for listening, and, due to the solemnity of the occasion, I would ask you to hold your applause.”" "Afterward, I walked back alone down a long blacktop road, and it was cold, and in the sky there were white clouds, and they all looked like white clouds and nothing else." "Hey, Norm, how’d you get Weekend Update?” I’m out of cigarettes so I pour a few grains of liquid morphine into a glass pipe. I use a torch lighter that sends an obelisk of hard blue fire to attack the glass and make the morphine sizzle and spit like bacon grease. My mind begins a crazy dance. “Well, let me think, Adam Eget. Let me think.”" "Sarah had just announced she would be leaving the show. She said she could no longer live in New York, that she was being tormented day and night by some obsessive stalker. This caught me completely by surprise, as I had taken to hanging around Sarah’s apartment, hiding in the bushes day and night, watching her come and go, and I had never seen any signs of a stalker." "11. In music news, number one on the college charts this week was Better than Ezra. And at number two: Ezra." "15. Earlier this week, Marlon Brando met with Jewish leaders to apologize for comments he made on Larry King Live, among them that “Hollywood is run by Jews.” The Jewish leaders accepted the actor’s apology and announced that Brando is now free to work again." "20. Dr. James Watts, a neurosurgeon who performed the first frontal lobotomy, died this week in Washington. If you recall, a lobotomy involves drilling holes in the skull and then inserting and rotating a knife to destroy brain cells. What a genius. He’ll be missed." "24. A French man, who calls himself “The Human Snake,” was arrested this week after climbing up the side of a Manhattan high-rise. Yep, he climbed right up the side of a high-rise. Just like a snake!" "We look out the window, out at the uncertainty of it all. The town looks torn to hell, with the young meth heads stumbling around and giggling and scratching at itches that never go away, and the old men, rum-drunk, driving golf carts aimlessly through the rubble. No one goes near the beach. The sand beside the Salton Sea cannot be seen. This is because it is covered a foot deep in the broken skeletons of dead fish. And the stench is everywhere." "Here we are with two goons standing by Adam Eget, another with a red duffel bag full of money, and the fat man with the artificial hair is acting like we’re in a legitimate bank doing legitimate business. But I don’t care; I’ll sign anything. My name is as worthless as a bent penny, and if it helps me to scribble it on a piece of paper, no problem. But when I look down at the document on the table, I understand. It’s a life-insurance policy he wants me to sign. It will, upon my passing, pay two million dollars to my beneficiary. And across the table from me, smiling like a crocodile with salt-caked teeth and handing me a pen, sits my beneficiary. “It came to me in a dream,” he says. I smile right back at him and sign the paper." "“Well, Don, that’s because a jury of his peers found Mr. Simpson not guilty of all the charges filed against him. He’s as innocent as you or me. If I was to mention O.J. at all on the telecast, it would be to deliver a profound and heartfelt apology for the cruel, racist remarks I made in my self-appointed role as judge, jury, and executioner.”" "The funny thing is, the five-thousand-dollar chip was the very same size as the five-dollar chip. Probably cost the same to make. But it was worth a thousand times more." "I was winning big time now. I began to feel an extraordinary transformation taking place deep within me, one that mirrored my chip’s transformation, for I felt myself double in value and then redouble and press to the maximum. I was the same exact size physically, and yet I was worth much more, a thousand times more," "I walked onto the boardwalk, my heart and pockets full. The people around me all looked small, and I knew that I was once like them but now I was different—same on the outside maybe, but a thousand times as bright, a thousand times as powerful, a thousand times what they were." "I like having no phone and a phone-shaped hole in the window. The apartment can get pretty windy at night, but it doesn’t bother me. Nothing has bothered me since the day I awoke with the plan. It is just so perfectly rational. As you can see, I am not a romantic. No great writer is. But the public is a different story. A posthumous work can be highly appealing. A book that took twenty years to write, which was then summarily and callously rejected, causing its author to take his own life—now, that is downright irresistible. Add to this that the manuscript in question is top-notch literature and we have the makings of a tragedy. By ending my life, I will live forever." "They are hiding, they say, from the fat man with the artificial hair. And they might well be. This fat man with the artificial hair may well kill us all. There is a problem, though. He may not exist. I may have made him up. I can’t be sure of anything anymore." "Before I leave, I look in the mirror and am confronted by a slovenly fool. My eyes have gone blank, just like his. I am stunned for a moment. It has finally happened. I have become him. God help me, I have become him." "There is the way things are and then the way things appear, and it is the way things appear, even when false, that is often the truest. If I am remembered, it will always be by the four years I spent at Saturday Night Live and, maybe even more than that, by the events surrounding my departure from that show. As long as SNL exists, then so do I." "It can be difficult to define yourself by something that happened so long ago and is gone forever. It’s like a fellow at the end of the bar telling no one in particular about the silver medal he won in high school track, the one he still wears around his neck." That's my metaphor for America. "The only thing an old man can tell a young man is that it goes fast, real fast, and if you’re not careful it’s too late. Of course, the young man will never understand this truth." "But looking back now, I can see that my life since SNL has been a full sprint, trying with all my might to outrun the wolves of irrelevancy snapping at my heels. It has all been in vain, of course. They caught and devoured me years ago." "And as for my gambling, it’s true I lost it all a few times. But that’s because I always took the long shot and it never came in. But I still have some time before I cross that river. And if you’re at the table and you’re rolling them bones, then there’s no money in playing it safe. You have to take all your chips and put them on double six and watch as every eye goes to you and then to those red dice doing their wild dance and freezing time before finding the cruel green felt." "i just keep speaking words into the tape recorder because the faster i read the more words go into my book and each word is a part of my life even if the words dont make any sense because they dont have to because thats not in the contract. nobody ever said your life had to make a damn bit of sense just as long as it had enough words thats all." ]]> </content> </entry> <entry> <title type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Divided: The Perils of Growing Inequality by David Cay Johnston (2014) (read in 2017)]]> </title> <id>https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3416</id> <link href="https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3416"/> <updated>2017-05-14T20:38:12+02:00</updated> <author> <name type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Marco von Ballmoos]]> </name> <uri>https://earthli.com/users/marco</uri> </author> <summary type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA["Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is" ... ]]> </summary> <content type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Published by marco on 14. May 2017 20:38:12 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I've failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an interest in this book, then I'm happy for you." This book is a collection of essays and studies on many different facets and types of inequality: Income. Education, Health-Care, Debt and Poverty, Policy and Family. The title and sub-headings listed prior say it all, actually: this book is about the root of America's problem -- Inequality. And not just income inequality, but wealth, opportunity, all of which add up to a purportedly democratic system that looks exactly like feudalism. You can read the essays in any order, but I read the book front to back. The book was published in 2014 and only one essay/study includes data from as recently as 2013. The others stretch back over decades, pinpointing the point when the U.S. left its path to turn the screws on its own populace. These essays show not only the problems we face, they show how we got here and what we need to do to get out of it. Spoiler alert: I bet we don't take any of their advice. Recommended. [Citations] From the introduction by the author: "The resulting growth at the top has become so concentrated that between 2009, when the Great Recession ended, and 2012 just 16,000 households collected 31 percent of all the increased income in all of America with its 315 million people. That money went to the 1 percent of the 1 percent. The top 1 percent enjoyed 94.8 percent of all the increased income, with the small remainder going to the rest of the top 10 percent." From Inequality and Democracy by Barack Obama "And ever since, there’s been a raging debate over the best way to restore growth and prosperity, restore balance, restore fairness." Well, it certainly wasn't by punishing a single one of these people. Obama loves to talk like a bystander. "As infuriating as it was for all of us, we rescued our major banks from collapse, not only because a full-blown financial meltdown would have sent us into a second depression, but because we need a strong, healthy financial sector in this country." There's that helpless bystander again. "This is the law that we passed. We are in the process of implementing it now. All of this is being put in place as we speak. Now, unless you’re a financial institution whose business model is built on breaking the law, cheating consumers, and making risky bets that could damage the entire economy, you should have nothing to fear from these new rules." He's such a liar. "It will require greater responsibility from home owners not to take out mortgages they can’t afford. They need to remember that if something seems too good to be true, it probably is." So patronizing. You mean, like a President who says he can fix everything? "This broader obligation can take many forms. At a time when the cost of hiring workers in China is rising rapidly, it should mean more CEOs deciding that it’s time to bring jobs back to the United States—not just because it’s good for business, but because it’s good for the country that made their business and their personal success possible." His whole approach to policy is to try to guilt creatures without conscience rather than passing laws to constrain them. He hopes they play nice, based on no historical supporting evidence. "Our success has never just been about survival of the fittest. It’s about building a nation where we’re all better off. We pull together. We pitch in. We do our part. We believe that hard work will pay off, that responsibility will be rewarded, and that our children will inherit a nation where those values live." Is he talking about the Amish? "Today’s appliances are better made and last longer,..." I'm not convinced that that's true. From How Gains at the Top Injure the Middle Class by Robert H. Frank. "The median size of a newly constructed house in the United States was 1,600 square feet in 1980. By 2001, it was more than 2,100 square feet. Meanwhile, commutes were getting longer and roads more congested, savings rates were plummeting, personal bankruptcy filings were climbing to an all-time high, and there was at least a widespread perception of a sharp decline in employment security and autonomy." From Wage Theft by Kim Bobo. "Take the case of those whose jobs involve working in trenches—working in manholes or any confined space below ground level. Between 1985 and 1995, 522 workers in the United States were killed in trench-related mishaps, only 60 of whom worked for union shops. The other 462 were employed by nonunionized firms." But what percentage? From Home Depot's CEO-Size Tip by Barbara Ehrenreich. "Home Depot sales clerks get about $8 to $10 an hour for lifting heavy objects and running around the floor all day; the CEO gets a total of almost $300 million for sinking the stock. We’re not talking about a rational system of rewards—just random acts of kindness, vast sums of money alighting when and where they will, generally in the outstretched hands of those who already have far too much." From Why Do So Many Jobs Pay So Badly? by Christopher Jencks. "The net result of all these changes is that while the economy grew dramatically between 1973 and 2004, most of the benefits went to those who needed them least: affluent, college-educated couples." "which means that Americans are less likely to endorse policies for reducing wage inequality that involve government “meddling” in the marketplace." Should note that this is ill-informed. Meddling happens all the time, but to the benefit of the already-rich. From In The Heart of Our Economy and Our Lives by Beth Shulman. "Put another way, jobs that require no education and training beyond high school except on-the-job training will account for 57 percent of the job growth between 2000 and 2010. Only 27 percent of U.S. jobs will require a bachelor’s degree or above. (Emphasis added.)" And yet Obama sold college as the only solution. Who was he addressing? Not most of America. "Educating and caring for young children pays low wages. Of the over 3 million child-care workers, including family child-care providers, more than 80 percent earn less than $8.50 an hour. One-third of the workers earn less than $5.75 an hour. The 1.2 million teacher’s assistants do no better. And these occupations are expected to grow in the next ten years by over 400,000. This workforce—98 percent of whom are female—has a higher concentration of jobs that are paid below the official poverty line than almost any other occupation in the United States. These jobs are clearly important and the workers skilled and educated; indeed, these workers are better educated than the general population. Almost a third of the child-care workers and teacher’s aides have a college or advanced degree, and 44 percent have some college. But because of the low pay, there is a 30–40 percent average annual turnover rate in the industry that hurts the quality of care provided to our children." "The noise is deafening. The floors are slippery with chicken grease. The smell of chicken blood fills the air. Workers standing in pools of water, hang, slice, split, pull, and cut chickens at breakneck speeds of ninety-one birds per minute. Standing close together in their hair nets, gloves, coats, and boots, they wield knives in temperatures ranging from freezing to 120 degrees. The plant runs twenty-four hours a day, working three continuous shifts. Workers are on the line six days a week, sometimes seven. These are the jobs that put chicken on our tables." "Poultry production employs more workers than any other segment of the meat industry, growing from 19,000 workers in 1947 to today’s 200,000 workers. Although an essential job, poultry-processing workers suffer poor wages (75 percent earn less than $8.50 an hour), minimal benefits, and harrowing working conditions. Their counterparts in the meat and fish industries face the same harsh conditions." "Three-fourths of the retail jobs pay less than $8.50 an hour. Compounding the low pay is the frequency of part-time schedules. Thirty-eight percent of retail employees work part-time. As a result, nearly two-thirds of the non-managerial workers earn less than $12,500 per year. (Emphasis added.)" "Yet a majority of the 1.5 million receptionists earn less than $8.50 an hour. The number of jobs in this field is expected to increase by over 400,000 in the next five years." From Household Wealth Inequality by Edward N. Wolff. "In 1998, the top 1 percent of families as ranked by financial wealth owned 47 percent of the total (in contrast to 38 percent of total net worth). The top quintile, or fifth, accounted for 91 percent of total financial wealth, and the second quintile accounted for nearly all the remainder. The bottom 60 percent of Americans had virtually no financial wealth. (Emphasis added.)" From Graduates vs. Oligarchs by Paul Krugman. "Put it this way: having much of the wealth your state creates go to people who are in effect absentee landlords, whose income therefore shows up in another state’s statistics, doesn’t mean that you have an equal distribution of income. Out of state shouldn’t mean out of mind. Look, I understand that some people find the notion that we’ve become an oligarchy—with all that implies about class relations—disturbing. But that’s the way it is." From Achievement Gap by the Editorial Projects of the Education Research Center. "It is most often used to describe the troubling performance gaps between African American and Hispanic students, at the lower end of the performance scale, and their non-Hispanic white peers, and the similar academic disparity between students from low-income families and those who are better off." So what's the answer? Try harder? Careful with the argument that the only way to change things is by winning a rigged game. From Back to School by Mike Rose. "How well are we preparing students from a broad sweep of backgrounds for life after high school, and how adequate are the programs we have in place to remedy the failures of K–12 education? How robust is our belief in the ability of the common person, and what opportunities do we provide to realize that ability? Given the nature of Western capitalism, what mechanisms are there to compensate for boom-and-bust economic cycles, for “creative destruction,” for globalization? Do we have an adequate social safety net, and how effective are we at providing people a second chance? How open and welcoming are our core institutions—such as postsecondary education—and how adaptable?" "Breaking the numbers out by race the author writes of “a national tragedy,” that “Black and White children grow up in entirely different economic worlds.” “Living up to our values,” the writer suggests, “requires policymakers . . . to focus on increasing upward relative mobility from the bottom.”" "The Economist, not as fiscally conservative as National Review but in the same free-market ballpark, put it even more strongly in another recent cover story. The writers say that the real danger to the American economy is chronic, ingrained joblessness that is related to our social and economic structure: tens of millions of young, marginally educated people who drift in and out of low-paying, dead-end jobs and older low-skilled displaced workers, unable to find employment as industries transform and jobs disappear. This situation places a huge and, if left alone, intractable drag on the economy." "What is especially worthy of scrutiny is the role right-wing economic ideology is playing in these policy deliberations—and as the economy improves, the Right’s beliefs will still be a potent force in public policy. Antigovernment, anti–welfare state, antitax, this ideology forcefully undercuts broadscale public responses to hardship. Such responses are tarred as a “redistribution of wealth,” moving money, as Rep. Paul Ryan puts it, from the “makers” to the “takers.” Decisions are made on a ledger sheet profoundly bounded by simplistic assumptions about economics and opportunity and naive, often bigoted, beliefs about people who need help. (Emphasis added.)" "I’ve been working with one group of students who begin classes at 7:00 A.M., then work, participate in student government, go to the library to study, and leave in the evening—usually by public transportation—to homes that are anything but stable (thus the refuge of the library). One young man is currently homeless, sleeping in his inoperable car parked at a friend’s family’s house. He’s at school every day by 6:00 A.M. to clean up and get his day in order. Of course there are people at their school who are drifting, drawing what resources they can, sometimes deluding themselves, sometimes consciously gaming the system. Allow me to note that the students I’m mentoring can point them out in a heartbeat—because they are not the norm. Furthermore, and it’s a sign of the times that I even have to write this, such behaviors appear across the socioeconomic landscape. The deplorable thing is the degree to which moral and character flaws are disproportionately attributed to poor people. But if you are able to penetrate the ideological fog and actually enter other people’s lives, you’ll witness a quite different and much more complex human reality." "The Right’s stories present a world stripped of the physical and moral insult of poverty. Characters move upward, driven by self-reliance, optimism, faith, responsibility. Though there might be an occasional reference to teachers or employers who were impressed with the candidate’s qualities, the explanations for the candidate’s achievements rest pretty much within his or her individual spirit." From Educational Quality and Equality by Linda Darling-Hammond. "Those who are undereducated can no longer access the labor market. While the United States must fill many of its high-tech jobs with individuals educated overseas, a growing share of its own citizens are unemployable and relegated to the welfare or prison systems. The nation can ill afford to maintain the structural inequalities in access to knowledge and resources that produce persistent and profound barriers to educational opportunity for large numbers of its students." "Recent analyses of data prepared for school finance cases in Alabama, California, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Louisiana, South Carolina, and Texas have found that on every tangible measure—from qualified teachers and class sizes to textbooks, computers, facilities, and curriculum offerings—schools serving large numbers of students of color have significantly fewer resources than schools serving mostly white students" "[...] these compounded inequalities explain much of the achievement gap that has often been attributed to genetic differences in intelligence or child-rearing practices or a “culture of poverty,” rather than to the distribution of opportunity itself." From Inequality Kills by Stephen Bezruchka. "Creating awareness and understanding of the basic problems constraining our achievement of better health will be a major challenge. Americans as a people simply have not been good at evaluating information in a critical manner. A very successful ploy of advertisers is the endless repetition of simple statements that stick in people’s minds. That process of “manufacturing consent” has been used widely in political spheres as well; a few years ago the widely repeated slogan “Iraq Has Weapons of Mass Destruction” had the public enraged, supporting the invasion of Iraq despite any evidence to support the accusation." From Jailed for Being in Debt by Chris Serres and Glenn Howatt. "The debts—often five or six years old—are purchased from companies like cell-phone providers and credit-card issuers, and cost a few cents on the dollar. Using automated dialing equipment and teams of lawyers, the debt-buyer firms try to collect the debt, plus interest and fees. A firm aims to collect at least twice what it paid for the debt to cover costs. Anything beyond that is profit." Why are creditors allowed to us public forces to collect debts? Why are they even allowed to re-awaken old, long-forgotten, long-dead debts? What societal function does this serve? What does it even mean to "have the money"? What if that money is earmarked for other, more-pressing needs than paying off a ten-year--old debt? (As is very likely the case.) "Few debtors realize they can land in jail simply for ignoring debt-collection legal matters. Debtors also may not recognize the names of companies seeking to collect old debts. Some people are contacted by three or four firms as delinquent debts are bought and sold multiple times after the original creditor writes off the account." "“It’s arbitrary,” he conceded. “The bigger question is: Should you be allowed to get an order from a court for someone to be arrested because they owe money? You’ve got to remember there are people who have the money but just won’t pay a single penny.” If friends or family post a debtor’s bail, they can expect to kiss the money goodbye, because it often ends up with creditors, who routinely ask judges for the bail payment." From Georgia's Hunger Games by Neil deMause. "federal rules that, regardless of who’s in the White House, give states the leeway to use the 1996 law’s requirement for “work activities” to slam the door in the face of their neediest. This has created a land that welfare forgot, where a collection of private charities struggle to fill the resulting holes." Bill Clinton's legacy. "Kelda O’Neal, a young grandmother currently caring for an extended family of fifteen in her DeKalb County home, had a similar experience. “They treat you like you’re in a jail facility,” she said. O’Neal received benefits until her husband, a truck driver, applied for disability after suffering a mental breakdown following the murder of his daughter. He was told he would have to first attend sixty to ninety days of a state work program. When he missed one appointment, the state not only rejected him, but ended her $133 in monthly benefits as well." Man, have I got it good. From Living Down to Expectations by Stephen Pimpare. "I have no mercy or compassion in me for a society that will crush people, and then penalize them for not being able to stand up under the weight. —Malcolm X" From How Economics is Biased Toward the Rich by Moshe Adler. "Pope Leo XIII was moved enough by the prevailing economic disparity that in 1891 he issued an encyclical letter, Rerum Novarum [Of New Things], which was devoted to “The Condition of the Working Classes,” and in which he wrote: “The whole process of production as well as trade in every kind of goods has been brought almost entirely under the power of a few, so that a very few rich and exceedingly rich men have laid a yoke almost of slavery on the unnumbered masses of non-owning workers.”" "The economist Abba Lerner (1903–82) noted that Bentham was just applying the first principle of statistics: when it is not known that things that appear the same are really different, the best we can do is to assume that they are the same. This is why, with gambling dice, we assign the probability of 1/6 to each face of a die." "Unlike Bentham or Lerner, Pareto did not concern himself with the question of how likely it was that redistribution would hurt the rich more than it would help the poor. For him this theoretical possibility, no matter how remote, was reason enough to reject the level of equality as a yardstick of economic efficiency. And based solely on this theoretical possibility, the entire economics profession removed the distribution of resources from its definition of economic efficiency and replaced it with Pareto’s own definition." "According to him, an allocation of resources is efficient if it cannot be changed in a way that will make at least one person better off without making anybody else worse off. This definition is indifferent to the distribution of society’s resources. Today we call this Pareto efficiency, but economists usually omit the name Pareto. They equate efficiency with Pareto efficiency, ignoring the existence of competing definitions, including that of Utilitarian efficiency." From Don't Drink the Kool-Aid by Robert Kuttner. "The stock-market bubble of the late 1990s induced investors to put vast resources into enterprises that never paid back a nickel of return; they only lined the pockets of insiders. If the government squandered money on this scale, conservatives and conservative investment bankers would be up in arms. But they’re not, of course. When the government wastes hundreds of dollars, they tell us it’s an outrage; when the market wastes trillions of dollars, it’s a lamentable glitch. This is not economics. This is ideology, pure and simple. (Emphasis added.)" "We could have had a brand of globalization in which the ability to sell products to the United States depended on meeting certain social minimums, involving wages, organizing rights, environmental standards, treatment of children, and so on. But because that was not the globalization that corporate America sought, it is not what has evolved." From Social Security Reduces Inequality -- Efficiently, Effectively, and Fairly by Nancy Altman and Eric Kingson. "One change we believe should be made is increasing the maximum amount of wages on which Social Security’s contributions are assessed. Contributions are assessed only on the wages that are insured against loss." "Other streams of revenue that could eliminate Social Security’s projected shortfall while addressing income inequality would be a modest tax on annual incomes above $1 million, or a modest tax on financial speculation." "The case for expanding Social Security is strong. It is more efficient, secure, universal, and fair in its distribution than any private-sector counterpart is or could ever be, no matter how structured. The reason? Wage insurance works best when all workers are covered under the same plan and the coverage starts at the beginning of their working lives. The only entity that can mandate this kind of universal program is the federal government and it has." It's the same for Medicare. From Arguments For and Against Income Inequality by Thomas L. Hungerford. "But by far the largest contributor to increasing income inequality, regardless of how inequality is measured, is changes in income from capital gains and dividends. Policies that further concentrate capital ownership at or near the top of the income distribution will thus increase income inequality." From Inequality of Hazard by Frank Ackerman and Lisa Heinzerling. "The economists who originally came up with the idea of pollution trading, more than thirty years ago, would not have been surprised to learn that the California trading program created heavily polluted “hot spots.” In fact, they thought something like this might happen, and embraced the idea. In their naive optimism, they thought that local variation in pollution levels would be associated with freedom of choice, not with inequality of power and income." "This kind of logic was made infamous in a 1991 memo circulated by Lawrence Summers (who later became Treasury secretary and later still president of Harvard University) when he was the chief economist at the World Bank. Discussing the migration of “dirty industries” to developing countries, Summers’s memo explained: The measurements of the costs of health-impairing pollution depend on the foregone earnings from increased morbidity and mortality. From this point of view a given amount of health-impairing pollution should be done in the country with the lowest cost, which will be the country with the lowest wages. I think the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest-wage country is impeccable and we should face up to that." Obama's go-to economics advisor: what a monster. Unless he was kidding? I don't think he was kidding... "After this memo became public, Brazil’s then–secretary of the environment Jose Lutzenburger wrote to Summers: “Your reasoning is perfectly logical but totally insane. . . . Your thoughts [provide] a concrete example of the unbelievable alienation, reductionist thinking, social ruthlessness and the arrogant ignorance of many conventional ‘economists’ concerning the nature of the world we live in.”" From A Different Kind of Epidemic by Ernest Drucker. "The very large scale of incarceration in America defines its great public health significance, with tens of millions affected. The magnitude of our prison system has effectively made this country the world champion of incarceration. Today, the United States has the highest rate of imprisonment of any nation in the world—possibly the highest rate in the history of any nation. By comparison, European countries average less than one-fifth of the American rate, and many average only one-tenth of it. The U.S. rate of incarceration is the highest in the world—about 750 per 100,000—a rate more than seven times that of European Union countries and greater than that of Russia or South Africa. (Emphasis added.)" "But many of the sentencing policies that first built and filled these prisons continue unabated (fourteen states increased prison populations in 2010), with the focus of law enforcement increasingly shifting to lower-level offenses (e.g., marijuana arrests are up 5,000 percent in the last decade)." "Clear argues that massive levels of arrest and imprisonment concentrated in certain communities damage the social bonds that sustain life, especially for poor communities. By corroding or destroying this most common basis of social capital, mass incarceration sets up a perverse relationship: punishment leads to increased crime, as it replaces the moral mechanisms of family and community. These are the forces that normally function to assert social control, over young males especially, by the use of noncoercive means involving family and community. Furthermore, because so much money is diverted to incarceration, other public services that might play a role in keeping down crime in these communities are defunded in favor of funding to build and maintain more prisons. Programs including health care, job training, retirement benefits, housing, and community development have all suffered a loss of public revenues, even as funding allocated for mass incarceration has grown exponentially. All these are worsened by the economic downturn that began in 2008 and which further restricts ex-prisoners’ options." "Individuals who enter prison and become a case in the criminal-justice system today have a 50 percent or more chance of remaining under the system’s control for life with recurrent arrests and periods of incarceration." "Like the story of global warming and climate change, this epidemic of mass imprisonment includes many “inconvenient truths”—critical realities we do not care to know about—such as its sheer size, huge social disparities, and monumental costs. But unlike climate change, the scale and consequences of mass incarceration derive from relatively recent events and a deliberate set of public policies that continue to be defended as being in the public interest." From Prison's Dilemma by Glenn C. Loury. "Put it all together and look at what we have wrought. We have established what looks to the entire world like a racial caste system that leaves millions stigmatized as pariahs, living either behind bars or in conditions of concentrated crime and poverty that breed still more criminality. Why are we doing this?" "I am not saying that a criminal has no agency in his behavior. Rather, I am arguing that the larger society is implicated in a criminal’s choices because we have acquiesced to social arrangements that work to our benefit and to his detriment—that shape his consciousness and his sense of identity in a way that the choices he makes (and that we must condemn) are nevertheless compelling to him." From Race, Gender, Family Structure, and Poverty by Peter Edleman. "Between 1970 and 2009, the percentage of families headed by women with children under eighteen doubled—from 12.7 percent to 25.4 percent. For African American families the numbers rose from 37.1 percent in 1971 (the first year the statistics were broken down by race) to 52.7 percent in 2009. Most of these increases occurred during the 1970s. Reflecting these changes—and coupled with the increase in low-wage jobs and consequent difficulty for a single mother to support her family—the proportion of poor children under eighteen who lived in female-headed families rose from 24.1 percent in 1959 to 55 percent in 2010." "One reason why so many African American women are coping on their own in raising their children is what the criminal-justice system does to the men of the community, especially in the inner city. The massive and unnecessary imprisonment of African American men is preventing two-parent families from forming and destroying others on a large scale. (Emphasis added.)" "The solutions are not simple. The aim is to postpone childbearing until the partners marry or establish a long-term commitment to each other and have a realistic economic approach to making it work. Hackneyed slogans, shibboleths, or bumper-sticker simplicities will not suffice: improved educational and employment opportunities are critical, as are criminal-justice reform and strategies to build healthy neighborhoods. But programs at the community level that stress postponing parenthood and that support responsible parenthood should it still occur are essential as well, although, granted, messages about the wisdom of delaying parenthood are more likely to be heeded in a world in which there are viable escape routes out of poverty." From Employed Parents Who Can't Make a Living by Lisa Dodson. "On this day, the five men and two women started examining an idea that reemerged in employer conversations over the years that followed. They raised the notion that if you pay people wages that guarantee they can’t really “keep things organized at home” and then, because of that, the flow of work is disrupted, well, is that only the employee’s problem? (Emphasis added.) Or is it just built into this labor market? And if it is wired into America’s jobs, as Ellen, a middle-aged white woman, asked the others, “do we have any responsibility for what happens to them?” Over the course of hundreds of interviews and discussions this question was often at the center." "Today, one in four U.S. workers earns less than $9 an hour—about $19,000 per year; 39 percent of the nation’s children live in low-income households. (Emphasis added.)" "Essentially, this is the argument that other nations use to invest public funding in families raising children and guarantee a minimum family income. So there is a defensible set of arguments—albeit not a winning one in the United States, but a compelling one—that we ought to pay people a decent income because it takes care of our people, serves productivity, and upholds the nation as a whole." "This idea of work was almost always explained to me personally, not as a philosophical stand. Middle-income people would describe relationships with others at work whose earnings were so low that if you decided to think about it, you knew there was no way they could support a family. (Emphasis added.) Managers, business owners, and other professionals told me about getting to know certain people who seemed to be doing everything they possibly could, but that wasn’t enough. And so all kinds of personal and family troubles would mount up, spill over, and eventually turn up at work. I heard about how when you hire, supervise, or even just work next to working-poor people—and, like it or not, get close to them—the harms they live with can start leaking into your world too." ]]> </content> </entry> <entry> <title type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Rigged: How Globalization and the Rules of the Modern Economy Were Structured to Make the Rich Richer by Dean Baker (2016) (read in 2017)]]> </title> <id>https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3393</id> <link href="https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3393"/> <updated>2017-04-02T18:47:06+02:00</updated> <author> <name type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Marco von Ballmoos]]> </name> <uri>https://earthli.com/users/marco</uri> </author> <summary type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA["Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is" ... ]]> </summary> <content type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Published by marco on 2. Apr 2017 18:47:06 Updated by marco on 2. Apr 2017 21:17:51 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I've failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an interest in this book, then I'm happy for you." Dean Baker puts together a comprehensive program to address massive inequality in America. The same inexorable and relatively straightforward logic could easily apply to other countries as well. The only problem with Baker's suggestions is that they utterly fail to benefit the masters of the universe. Still, his proposals for addressing the real issues facing the American economy are breathtakingly easily explained. He lays out his plan without regard for political interest or ideology. He explains how an economy does not exist in some sort of natural state -- that it is the creation of explicit policy. This is perhaps his most important point. Anyone who claims that the system that they prefer, which just happens to benefit them immensely, is also the morally pure one because it is "natural" -- is full of shit. Baker explains in detail which parts of the economy are actually productive and which are just collecting rent. There are vast parts of the economy that could be trimmed, with quite significant effects for the majority. For example, the financial industry, including what used to be traditional banking, is almost purely rent-seeking, providing no substantial or commensurate value. Another area is healthcare, where the U.S. pays twice as much per person as any other first-world nation. Or professions, like dentistry, medicine or law, where salaries are twice as high as in other nations (at least). Out-of-control CEO pay and the twisted incentives and controls of the boards of large corporations is another area where a rational cleanup would yield giant gains. Then there are copyrights and patents, which are government-granted monopolies -- again, not a natural outgrowth of a so-called free-market system. All told, Baker's book illustrates in no uncertain terms the astounding degree -- it's nearly total -- with which the benefits of increased productivity and income have been collected and funneled to a handful of rich people. All the while, they pay everyone in the intelligentsia and media to convince the sheep that this is just a natural result of them being so much better. It's all bullshit. Economies are human constructions and the one we currently enjoy has been constructed by the winners to benefit those winners. The first step is to open your eyes. Baker's book will help immensely. Highly recommended. [Citations] "Bill Clinton would have much less need to fly around the world for the Clinton Foundation had he not inserted the TRIPS (Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights) provisions in the World Trade Organization (WTO) that require developing countries to adopt U.S.-style patent protections." "In short, there is no truth to the story that the job loss and wage stagnation faced by manufacturing workers in the United States and other wealthy countries was a necessary price for reducing poverty in the developing world.[5] This is a fiction that is used to justify the upward redistribution of income in rich countries." "Markets are never just given. Neither God nor nature hands us a worked-out set of rules determining the way property relations are defined, contracts are enforced, or macroeconomic policy is implemented. These matters are determined by policy choices. The elites have written these rules to redistribute income upward. Needless to say, they are not eager to have the rules rewritten — which means they also have no interest in even having them discussed." "The position of “deregulators” effectively amounted to arguing that they should not have to pay for the insurance they were receiving." "This means that the share of the 1 percent has more than doubled from its level during most of the period of the 1950s to 1980. Measured as a share of total income, this increase is roughly 10.0 percentage points. This would be sufficient to increase the income of everyone in the bottom 90 percent of the income distribution by more than 20 percent. It would be almost enough to double the income of the bottom 40 percent. In short, this upward redistribution has had a substantial impact on the living standards of the rest of the population." "A basic point of economic theory that economists don’t like to talk about is that reducing the rents going to a high-income person is a gain for the rest of us. This is a crucial point, since it is necessary to recognize that policies designed to reduce the incomes of high-end earners are not just a matter of being gratuitously nasty to those who were lucky enough to be successful. Whether or not these policies are nasty, it is important to recognize that the money enjoyed by these high-end earners comes from somewhere; it is not manna from heaven. And where it comes from is the pockets of the rest of us." "However, if the market distribution is indeed dependent on macroeconomic factors, like how close the economy is to its full-employment level of output, then we lose this independent point of reference. The distribution of income is then dependent on macroeconomic policies that determine the nearness to full employment. The market distribution is then inherently a function of policy decisions — there is no independent point of reference." "The basic logic behind this system was that, if the government is willing make up lost pay of workers when they are completely unemployed, why not pay workers when they are partially unemployed as a result of a reduction in work hours?[15]" "Specifically, because health care insurance is mostly an employment-based benefit, rather than universally provided through the government, employers typically see it as a fixed cost per worker. So rather than hiring additional workers and paying for their health insurance, employers would generally prefer their existing workforce to work more hours." "If the average work year in the United States were comparable to those in Western Europe, more workers would be employed at relatively well-paying jobs in sectors like manufacturing, construction, and communications instead of being forced to accept lower-paying jobs in sectors like retail and restaurants. By reducing the supply of workers in the lower-paying sectors, the reduction in average hours would lead to higher wages in low-paying sectors for the workers who were left behind. In short, it is reasonable to believe that the longer average work year in the United States has been a factor contributing to inequality." "The beneficiaries of the upward redistribution may like the outcome, but it is not because they prefer leaving matters to the market. Rather, they prefer government interventions that have the effect of giving them more money." "Washington is filled with politicians and organizations that hyperventilate about government debt and the burden it imposes on our children, but they ignore the burdens imposed by patent and copyright monopolies granted by the government." "That is the effect of various types of budget rules. They are not imposing some principle of neutrality or non-intervention, they are just making it more difficult to understand the government’s role in the economy." "As the Fed restricted the growth of the M2 measure of money, the banking system developed new systems of payments that were not counted in M2.[18] As a result, the Fed could meet its targets for M2 but not accomplish its goal of restricting the effective supply of money." The lukas rule again à la Mark Blyth "As research from the IMF and elsewhere indicate, this upward redistribution leads to lower consumption, other things equal, since the wealthy spend a smaller share of their income than do the poor and middle class. Without deliberate government policy to boost demand, the result is a shortfall in demand." "The idea that a large financial sector might be a drag on growth has been supported by recent research" But everyone wants to benefit from the windfall for themselves. They don't care what they do to get it. They just want to make a lot of money. "Contrary to what is often claimed, breaking up the banks would not be a complex administrative task. The government should not be micromanaging the project; the banks could do it themselves. The banks know their business and have an incentive to break themselves up in a way that maximizes shareholder value. The government need only set size caps and a timeline, as well as penalties for not meeting the timeline. The banks can figure out how best to downsize themselves." "The “buyer beware” argument in this story means that consumers would have to spend much more time reviewing contracts and that firms would devote more resources to deceiving customers. That is hardly an economically optimal outcome." "Since they are non-voting, the shares would give the government no control: the goal is to secure a claim to corporate profits, not to run companies. Apart from issues of control, the government’s shares would be treated just like other shares of common stock. If the company pays a dividend of $2 a share on its common stock, then it would also pay $2 a share on the stock held by the government. If it buys back 10 percent of outstanding shares at $100 per share, then it would buy back 10 percent of the shares held by the government at $100 per share. If a private equity firm buys out the company, paying $120 per share, then it would pay $120 for each share held by the government." "The Bayh-Dole Act of 1980 allowed for universities, research institutions, private companies, and individuals operating on government contracts to gain control of patents derived from their work, thereby creating the opportunity for universities to earn large rents from patents and for researchers to form their own companies, all relying on knowledge and expertise obtained on government contracts." "when the development of digital technologies and the Internet threatened the business model of the entertainment industry, the response was to pass laws to contain these technologies to preserve the sector’s mode of doing business. This is a great example of how it is not technology itself that is determining the distribution of income, but rather how various interest groups are able to write the laws governing the use of technology." "In effect, creative workers would be given the option of relying on one or the other system of support. They could choose to rely on copyrights to support their work or they could opt to join the tax-credit system, but they could not do both." "credit of $100 opted for by 90 percent of the adult population (a high percentage, but this is free money) would generate more than $22 billion a year to support books, movies, music, and other creative work. This amount would vastly exceed the amount currently going to creative workers through the copyright system, although it would total far less than the current subsidy for charitable contributions, which is likely in the neighborhood of at least $54 billion in 2016.[73]" "The goal of the creative work tax credit is to make a large amount of material available to the public that can be transferred at zero cost. Putting more material in the public domain in different areas is a positive benefit, as long as people value this work. The ultimate check on the boundaries of the system is what people are prepared to support with their tax credits. If few people opted to support journalism or video games, then these industries would remain largely dependent on copyright protection." "There are good reasons for believing that an alternative would be at least as effective, especially in the case of patents. The prospect of having fully open research, where the incentive is for dissemination rather than secrecy, would almost certainly lead to more rapid progress than the current patent system." "More importantly, bringing prices in line with production costs would offer enormous gains, especially in the case of drugs and medical equipment. It is difficult to understand the logic of paying for innovation at the point where a patient needs a drug or access to medical equipment. Monopoly pricing imposes an enormous burden on people at precisely the time when they are least able to bear it." "Weakening or eliminating patent and copyright support for innovation and creative work would radically reduce waste. In a market system, the best way to make profits should be to produce better products, not to run to court. But the patent system increasingly supports this second path to profits." "Stockholders are a diffuse group of individuals and institutions, most with little direct stake in the running of the company since the dividends and capital gains are a small portion of their income. Organizing among shareholders to improve corporate practices and to change top management has high transaction costs, and so it is far easier for shareholders to simply sell the stock of a company if they are unhappy with its performance. In this environment, top management will often have effective control over the running of a company." "One of the champions in this area was Erskine Bowles, who served as Chief of Staff to President Clinton in his second term and later went on to be president of the University of North Carolina. While serving in this latter position, Bowles simultaneously sat on the boards of General Motors, Morgan Stanley, and Cousins Properties. The first two companies needed bailouts from the government to stay in business, but sitting on the board of two companies that faced bankruptcy did not damage the demand for Bowles as a director. After General Motors’ bankruptcy cost Bowles his directorship there, he added directorships at Norfolk Southern and Facebook to his portfolio." "Quigley, Crossland, and Campbell (2016) looked at the impact of unexpected CEO deaths, like from an airplane or car crash, on stock prices. The reason for focusing on unexpected deaths is that it takes away the possibility that the death may have been anticipated and its impact already reflected in the stock price, as might be the case when a CEO dies after a long illness. In almost half of the cases examined since 1990 (44.3 percent), the price of the company’s stock rose following the death of the CEO. If incumbent CEOs are uniquely talented individuals who cannot be easily replaced, then their loss should be unambiguously bad news for the company’s shareholders. In fact, the market might be expected to overreact on the negative side to the unexpected death of a CEO, since there might be the expectation that the CEO actually was a major asset to the company even in cases where it is not true. After all, why else would they be paying them so much money?" "It is worth noting that pay at poorly governed companies will inevitably affect the pay at well-governed companies. While it is not common for CEOs to jump companies, having overpaid CEOs at poorly governed companies in the reference group for determining CEO pay will tend to increase the pay for CEOs at even the best-run companies. If the norm is for CEOs at large companies to be paid between $10 million and $20 million a year, a well-managed company will have a tough time retaining top-quality executives for $3 million to $4 million a year, even if that pay package were more appropriate given the marginal contribution of the CEO to profitability." In other words , everyone has to play along. "In fairness, many university presidents are paid largely for their ability to attract donations, and it is possible that these presidents were especially successful in attracting contributions. However, this is a skill that matters much more in an unequal society that depends on donations from the rich to support higher education. Being able to develop relationships with the wealthy is a much less valuable skill in a society where the wealthy have less money and education is supported through other channels." "However, should these highly visible athletic teams be getting special tax treatment as a result of their ties to the university? There is a solid argument for public subsidies for higher education, but the argument for subsidizing Ohio State’s football team is less clear cut." "The argument for the nonprofit sector is that these institutions are paying their top executives with public funds since they benefit from large tax subsidies. Just as the government puts all sorts of other restrictions on the activities of organizations receiving tax-exempt status, it can also make caps on pay a condition. Foundations and universities would still be free to pay their top executives whatever they wanted, but they wouldn’t be able to receive a subsidy if they violated the pay ceiling." "This chapter argues that the barriers to competition and high pay exist because the professionals who benefit have far more political power than ordinary workers. No economic rule states that doctors, dentists, lawyers, and other professionals at the top of the pay ladder should be protected from the wage-depressing effects of globalization." "Excessive pay for doctors and other high-end professionals, a group that makes up a large share of the top 1 percent of the wage distribution, should be thought of as a tax. The rest of the country is paying more than necessary for health care and a variety of other services. Freeing up markets for highly paid professionals can both reduce inequality and lead to more rapid economic growth." "Limiting the number of U.S. medical school positions and the number of residency positions, together with requiring a U.S. residency for licensure, are explicit efforts to limit the supply of doctors. At the same time, limiting the extent to which less highly paid medical professionals like nurse practitioners and nurse midwives are allowed to engage in tasks such as prescribing medicine or delivering babies increases the demand for physicians’ services. While there can be legitimate safety concerns associated with restrictions on the scope of practice of less highly trained professionals, the economic implications are straightforward: higher pay for doctors and higher health care costs for patients." "While the relatively large number of lawyers in the United States is a drain on the economy, factors unique to the United States might explain the higher ratio. Specifically, the rate of incarceration in the United States is far higher than in other wealthy countries, and so the demand for prosecutors and criminal defense lawyers is higher. In addition, the fact that the United States does not provide universal health insurance and has extraordinarily high health care costs means that people would have incentives that do not exist in other countries to pursue legal actions over physical injuries. Finally, regulation and litigation are alternative forms of protection. In countries with more extensive regulation for consumer protection and safety, there may be less need for legal action." "According to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the average health care expenses of a person over 65 are 260 percent of the overall average (CMS 2010).[98]" "According to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the average health care expenses of a person over 65 are 260 percent of the overall average (CMS 2010).[98] As a result, in 2010 the over-65 population accounted for almost 34 percent of total spending even though they were just 13.0 percent of the population.[99] And this share is projected to rise rapidly over the next two decades, reaching 20.7 percent by 2035. Assuming no change in the distribution of health care costs by age implies that the over-65 population will account for more than 47 percent of health care spending in 2035 (Table 7-7)." "How many retirees might opt to emigrate? As noted earlier, about 1.5 percent of Social Security beneficiaries already live in other countries, and it is reasonable to believe that this number will increase as incentives are implemented, as the percentage of the foreign born among the retired rises, as the quality of health care abroad increases, and as growing communities of retirees in places like Ireland and Mexico inspire more people to relocate." "Doctors, dentists, and lawyers don’t face the same downward pressure on their wages as textile workers, autoworkers, and retail clerks because the government’s policies are not trying to push their pay lower. We aren’t designing trade agreements to expose these professions to competition with lower-paid counterparts in the developing world. Nor are politicians constantly looking for new ways to alter regulations in ways that undermine these workers’ bargaining power. The workers in these professions sit near the top of the pay ladder not because of the inherent dynamics of globalization and the market economy, but because they have much more say than other workers in setting the rules." "There will always be genuine quality concerns in making these decisions, but if the assessment of quality issues is left to the professionals who stand to benefit, we can expect that these professionals will be enriching themselves at the expense of the rest of us." "Progressives have long been suspicious of the market. Some see it as an aberration to be contained, if not actually overcome. In the extreme case, the goal is some form of central planning in which the government makes the bulk of decisions on allocating resources. More tempered versions have the government taking possession of key industries, with smaller firms and less-consequential sectors left in private hands." "Both visions largely accept the view of the market held by Friedman-esque conservatives — that it is a fact of nature. Undesirable outcomes such as poverty or extreme inequality are givens, and the issue is the extent to which we want the government to supplant the market or ameliorate its effects. Markets are not fixed by nature; rather, they are infinitely malleable." "The enormous upward redistribution in the United States of the last four decades was not an inevitable outcome of technology or globalization. It was the result of deliberate policies, the purpose of which was to redistribute income upward." "If pension and health care benefits are no longer a per-worker cost, then employers have less incentive to force workers to put in longer hours rather than just hiring more workers." "Most other wealthy countries guarantee workers four to six weeks a year of paid vacation (Ray, Sanes, and Schmitt 2013), but the United States inadvertently put in place a structure of benefits that pushes workers toward taking the gains from higher productivity in the form of higher income rather than time off. There is nothing natural about this, and evidence suggests that many workers would value more leisure time even at the cost of income or less rapid income growth in the future.[107] But beyond these reasons, reducing average work hours spreads good jobs around more broadly and tightens up the labor market, improving workers’ bargaining positions." "For this reason, it is important to have policies that directly attack the source of high-end rents. Reducing the purchasing power of those at the top leaves more room for expanding the purchasing power of everyone else, without adding to inflation pressures." "It is unambiguously the case that the rest of the country comes ahead by having less of its savings effectively taxed away by the financial industry." "Companies would be allowed to issue a number of shares that is roughly proportionate to the percentage of the corporate income that it expected to pay. This policy could be enacted by states that have corporate income taxes. If states followed this practice, they would likely both be reducing their own enforcement costs and setting a model that could be copied elsewhere." "These industries, as currently structured, depend on an incredibly inefficient system of government-imposed monopolies. These monopolies make items that would otherwise be cheap, like prescription drugs and medical equipment, incredibly expensive. They also make it expensive to get recorded music, movies, and software — all items which could otherwise be transferred at zero cost. The" "Even the major pharmaceutical companies could still profit through a system of publicly funded research, since they would likely be the major recipients of contracts. However, as long as these companies can make large profits under the current system, they will be uninterested in a new route, regardless of the costs their system imposes on the country and the world." "Suppose a city of 200,000 made available a credit of $50 per adult. To be eligible for the credit, a creative worker would not only have to forego copyright protection for a period of time, but he or she would also have to physically live in the city for at least eight or nine months of the year. Donations by three quarters of the population (a high share, but it’s free, since the donor gets a full tax credit) would create a pool of $7.5 million to support creative workers. Since these workers would be required to live in the city much of the year, they would have an incentive to perform their music or plays, conduct writing workshops, or perform other work that would both support them and increase their visibility to people deciding what to do with their tax credit. It is easy to envision a scenario in which this sort of influx brings in enough tourist revenue to more than cover the cost of the tax credit." "is not uncommon for their pay to cross $1 million, or more than 25 times the pay of the typical worker. As was noted in the chapter, this pay is largely subsidized by taxpayer dollars, since donations to these institutions are tax-exempt. This means that roughly 40 percent of their salaries came from taxpayers. In the case of a foundation or university president getting $1 million a year, effectively $400,000 is coming from taxpayers." "If taxpayers are paying the bill, it is reasonable to put limits on the top salaries that these institutions can pay. The President of the United States is paid $400,000 a year, which seems like a fair limit on the pay of people employed by tax-exempt institutions. Just to be clear, this is not limiting what nonprofit institutions can pay their presidents or other top officials. It is only limiting what they can pay them while getting a subsidy from taxpayers." "The fruit of lower pay for those at the top is lower tuition costs and more money available for other employees." "if the market is rigged to redistribute ever more income upward, it will be difficult to design tax and transfer policies to reverse this effect. And if the rigging efforts are never challenged, then they will impose an ever greater burden on those trying to reduce inequality through tax and transfer policy." "there should be little doubt that there is potential to have a large impact on the distribution of income through economically plausible restructurings of the market. The gainers in the top 1 percent have structured the market over the last four decades in ways that increase their share of income. This restructuring can be reversed." "Government policy shapes market outcomes. It determines aggregate levels of output and employment, which in turn affect the bargaining power of different groups of workers. Government policy structures financial markets, and the policy giving the industry special protections allows for some individuals to get enormously rich. Government policy determines the extent to which individuals can claim ownership of technology and how much they can profit from it. Government policy sets up corporate governance structures that let top management enrich itself at the expense of shareholders. And government policy determines whether highly paid professionals enjoy special protection from foreign and domestic competition." "Pretending that the distribution of income and wealth that results from a long set of policy decisions is somehow the natural workings of the market is not a serious position. It might be politically convenient for conservatives who want to lock inequality in place." "It is a more politically compelling position to argue that we should not interfere with market outcomes than to argue for a system that is deliberately structured to make some people very rich while leaving others in poverty." "Pretending that distributional outcomes are just the workings of the market is convenient for any beneficiaries of this inequality, even those who consider themselves liberal. They can feel entitled to their prosperity by virtue of being winners in the market, yet sufficiently benevolent to share some of their wealth with the less fortunate. For this reason, they may also find it useful to pretend that we have a set of market outcomes not determined by policy decisions." "But we should not structure our understanding of the economy around political convenience." "As a technical matter, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York is a private bank. It is owned by the banks that are members of the Federal Reserve System in the New York District." "Individual income tax filings is another area that provides a considerable amount of often unnecessary work for lawyers. It should be possible for the IRS to calculate the returns of most low- and moderate-income workers and send the completed forms back to the taxpayer for approval. This is the practice in several European countries. Adopting this approach would radically reduce the need for tax consultants and for lawyers to challenge the work of these consultants." "Developing countries face the risk of a brain drain if a large portion of the professionals emigrate to the United States or other wealthy countries. This could be countered by refunding a portion of the gains, for example, the income tax on the earnings of immigrant doctors, to the home country. Such a rule would allow for the training of several professionals for every one that comes to the United States." "There is also reason to believe that taking the benefits of productivity growth in leisure rather than income will have environmental benefits (Rosnick" ]]> </content> </entry> <entry> <title type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[A Man Called Ove by Fredrik Backman (2012/en-2014) (read in 2017)]]> </title> <id>https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3399</id> <link href="https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3399"/> <updated>2017-04-02T17:41:45+02:00</updated> <author> <name type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Marco von Ballmoos]]> </name> <uri>https://earthli.com/users/marco</uri> </author> <summary type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA["Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is" ... ]]> </summary> <content type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Published by marco on 2. Apr 2017 17:41:45 Updated by marco on 21. Aug 2017 21:15:23 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I've failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an interest in this book, then I'm happy for you." This is the story of Ove, a man living in a town on the outskirts of a city in Sweden. Ove likes things predictable and can't see why anyone would want it any other way. Other people are distractions and annoyances and constantly disappointing. The story is told in the third person, but from the viewpoint of a 59-year--old Ove. Some of the chapters are flashbacks to help readers understand why Ove is the way he is, how it's possible for him to be at once cantankerous beyond all imagining and also a generous person. His life arc starts with a mother who dies too soon and being raised until 16 by a father he honors and worships, until his father, too, is taken away by the grim reaper. Ove takes over his father's job and his lifestyle, simple and direct, working hard and sticking to rigid principle. Most appreciate him for his work and attitude and forthrightness but there are opponents, one of whom, Tom, eventually leads him to lose his job. He learns construction during the day while cleaning trains at night. He meets Sonja, from then on his only reason for waking and drawing breath. She is likewise -- and for all of her friends, mysteriously -- enchanted. Though he doesn't say much, he listens well -- and he is bulky with workman's muscle to compensate for his taciturnity. They make a life together, moving in to the district where Ove lives in the present, with life dealing them one raw deal after another. They go to Spain on holiday, where a pregnant Sonja takes siestas with gusto while Ove wanders the countryside, making himself useful with his skills despite an almost complete language barrier. On the way home, the bus crashes, taking their unborn child as well as Sonja's ability to walk. Nevertheless, they weather these tragedies well enough, settling into a happy and comfortable routine. The world begins to outpace Ove, with his dedication to fine craftsmanship in homes and cars seeing less and less value in the real world, a world filled with distracted idiots, flitting between ephemeral obsessions. This includes his new neighbors with whom he has entirely too much to do -- the Pregnant Foreign Woman and the Lanky Fool with their two children. Throw into the mix a Bent and unwanted Housemate, a Mailman who doesn't understand propriety or boundaries and a cat who seems to embody Sonja's now-passed--on conscience. Ove wants nothing more than to join Sonja wherever she's ended up after succumbing to cancer but his neighbors manage to distract him from several attempts at ending it all, always in the nick of time. Ove grudgingly finds himself useful again, even loved. He teaches Parvaneh to drive, he helps Anders fix a bike and buy a car, he teaches a bigoted father to stop being a jackass and to be happy he has a son at all. He continues to be the man that Sonja always knew him to be. Until, eventually, and after a few years of a second life, he finally joins her. [Citations] "She had a golden brooch pinned to her dress, in which the sunlight reflected hypnotically through the train window. [...] Ove had just clocked off his shift and was actually supposed to be taking the train the other way. But then he saw her on the platform with all her rich auburn hair and her blue eyes and all her effervescent laughter. And he got back on the outbound train. Of course, he didn't quite know himself why he was doing it. He had never been spontaneous before in his life. But when he saw her it was as if something malfunctioned. "[...] "He didn't know what he was going to say. But he had hardly had time to sink into the seat before she turned to him cheerfully, smiled warmly , and said hello. And he found he was able to say hello back to her without any significant complications." "Chastened by recent experiences, he did not take the Saab, but walked instead to the station. Because this time neither Pregnant Foreign Woman, Blond Weed, Rune's wife, nor low-quality rope would be given an opportunity of ruining Ove's morning He'd bled these people's radiators, loaned them his things, given them lifts to the hospital. But now he was finally on his way." "He checked the timetable once more. He hated being late. It ruined the planning. Made everything out of step. His wife had been utterly useless at it, keeping to plans. But it was always like that with women. They couldn't stick to a plan even if you glued them to it, Ove had learned. When he was driving somewhere he drew up schedules and plans and decided where they'd fill up and when they'd stop for coffee, all in the interest of making the trip as time-efficient as possible. He studied maps and estimated exactly how long each leg of the journey would take and how they should avoid rush-hour traffic and the shortcuts to take that people with GPS systems wouldn't be able to make head nor tail of. Ove always had a clear travel strategy. His wife, on the other hand, always came up with insanities like "going by a sense of feel" and "taking it easy." As if that was a way for an adult person to get anywhere in life. [...] And when Ove got disgruntled she always had to challenge the importance of having a time plan when driving somewhere. "We're not in a hurry anyway," she'd say. As if that had anything to do with it." "Ove doesn't answer. He walks past the man behind the Plexiglas, back out into the snow-covered streets, and starts walking home. "The town slowly wakes up around him with its foreign-made cars and its statistics and credit-card debt and all its other crap. "And so this day was also ruined, he confirms with bitterness." "As for Ove, he felt he was at a job interview, and he had never been very good at that sort of thing. So when Sonja wasn't talking, which admittedly she did almost all of the time, there was a sort of silence in the room that can only arise between a man who does not want to lose his daughter and a man who has not yet completely understood that he has been chosen to take her away from there." "He hears voices from the living room. He can hardly believe his ears. Considering how they are constantly preventing him from dying, these neighbors of his are certainly not shy when it comes to driving a man to the brink of madness and suicide. That's for sure. "When Ove comes back down the stairs with the blanket in his hand, the overweight young man from next door is standing in the middle of his living room, looking with curiosity at the cat and Parvaneh. "[...] ""Okay," says Ove, silently appalled that you can pop upstairs for a moment only to find when you come back down that you've apparently started a bed-and-breakfast operation." "But Sonja loved Ernest so unconditionally that Ove managed to keep this kind of perfectly sensible observation to himself. He knew better than to speak ill of what she loved; after all he understood very keenly how it was to receive her love when no one else could understand why he was worthy of it." "Ove looks at the group assembled around him, as if he's been kidnapped and taken to a parallel universe. For a moment he thinks about swerving off the road, until he realizes that the worst-case scenario would be that they all accompanied him into the afterlife. After this insight, he reduces his speed and increases the gap significantly between his own car and the one in front." "He's silent. And then they both stand there, the fifty-nine-year-old and the teenager, a few yards apart, kicking at the snow. As if they were kicking a memory back and forth, a memory of a woman who insisted on seeing more potential in certain men than they saw in themselves. Neither of them knows what to do with the shared experience." "Everyone seems to be thinking the same thing: If a non-throat-tattooed man of Ove's age without any hesitation steps up to a throat-tattooed man of the age of this Throat Tattoo and presses him up against a car in this manner, then it's very likely not the throat-tattooed man one should be worried about annoying." ""Now, you listen to me," says Ove calmly while he carefully close the door. "You've given birth to two children and quite soon you'll be squeezing out a third. You've come here from a land far away and most likely you fled war and persecution and all sorts of other nonsense. You've learned a new language and got yourself an education and you're holding together a family of obvious incompetents. And I'll be damned if I've seen you afraid of a single bloody thing in this world before now." "Ove rivets his eyes into her. Parvaneh is still agape. Ove points imperiously at the pedals under the feet. ""I'm not asking for brain surgery. I'm asking you to drive a car. It's got an accelerator, a brake, and a clutch. Some of the greatest twits in world history have sorted out how it works. And you will as well. "Because you are not a complete twit."" "And Ove didn't know exactly when he became so quiet. He'd always been taciturn, but this was something quite different. Maybe he had started talking more inside his own head. Maybe he was going insane (he did wonder sometimes). It was as if he didn't want other people to talk to him, he was afraid that their chattering voices would drown out the memory of her voice." "The man in the white shirt smiles in a superior manner. The way men in white shirts, who are used to always having things their own way, smile when someone tries to disagree with them. ""Move it at once." ""I don't think so," says Ove. "The man in the white shirt sighs, as if the threatening statement he makes after that were directed at a child. ""Move the trailer, Ove. Or I'll call the police." "Ove shakes his head nonchalantly, pointing at the sign farther down the road. ""Motor vehicles prohibited inside the residential area. It says so clearly on the sign." ""Don't you have anything better to do than standing out here pretending to be the foreman?" groans the man in the white shirt. ""There was nothing good on TV," says Ove. "And that's when there's a little twitch at the temple of the man in the white shirt. As if his mask has slipped a little, just a fraction. He looks at the trailer, his boxed in Škoda, the sign, Ove standing in front of him with his arms crossed. [...] ""This was very silly of you, Ove. This was very, very silly," he hisses finally." This part reminded me very much of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. "It's as if all the energy in Ove's body is draining out of him even as he stands there. "Maybe it's the sight of Anita's worn-out face. Maybe it's the insight that a simple battle won is nothing in the greater scheme of things. A boxed-in Škoda makes no difference. They always come back. Just like they did with Sonja. Like they always do. With their clauses and documents. Men in white shirts always win. And men like Ove always lose people like Sonja. And nothing can bring her back to him." "So this should have been the day Ove finally died. Instead it became the evening before the morning when he woke with not only a cat but also a bent person living in his row house. Sonja would have liked it, most likely. She liked hotels." "And now Ove stands by Sonja's gravestone and manages to say something about how sorry he is. ""You get so damned worked up when I fight with people, I know that. But the reality of it is this. You'll just have to wait a bit longer for me up there. I don't have time to die right now." "Then he digs up the old, frozen pink flowers out of the ground, plants the new ones, straightens up, folds up his deck chair, and walks towards the parking area while muttering something that sounds suspiciously like "because there's a bloody war on."" "There wasn't much wrong with the meal last night, he can stretch to admitting that. Although Ove doesn't feel there's a need to make such a palaver about cooking, as Parvaneh does. Meat and potatoes and gravy are perfectly adequate. But if one has to complicate things like she does, Ove could possible agree that her rice with saffron is reasonably edible. It is. So he had two portions of it. And the cat had one and a half." "In the meantime Jimmy, Mirsad, and Patrick have managed to squeeze into Adrian's new car in front of them. A Toyota. Hardly and optimal choice of car for any kind of thinking person, Ove had pointed out to him many times while they stood there at the dealership. But at least it wasn't French. And Ove managed to get the price reduced by almost eight thousand kronor and made sure that the kid got winter tires thrown in for the same price. So it seemed acceptable, in spite of it all. "When Ove got to the dealership the bloody kid had been checking out a Hyundai. So it could have been worse." ]]> </content> </entry> <entry> <title type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1850) (read in 2017)]]> </title> <id>https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3371</id> <link href="https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3371"/> <updated>2017-02-06T23:30:47+01:00</updated> <author> <name type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Marco von Ballmoos]]> </name> <uri>https://earthli.com/users/marco</uri> </author> <summary type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA["Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is" ... ]]> </summary> <content type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Published by marco on 6. Feb 2017 23:30:47 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I've failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an interest in this book, then I'm happy for you." This is a short book, split into two main parts. The first part is a cry of anger at society, spit out at the world from "underground" by the narrator. It is delivered in a nearly stream-of-consciousness form and opines on all sorts of social and philosophical issues -- often winding back on itself to second-guess or to revise. The attached notes give abundant examples. The second part is told by the same author, but in a more refined tone. It seems to describe an incident of mortifying self-awareness and banal evil that seems to have been the trigger for the previous narrator's (same person, but 20 years later) having turned his back on society. The young man was exceedingly poor and exceedingly proud and took out his frustrations on an even poorer and more unfortunate young woman, destroying her feelings. All the while, he was completely aware of what it cost her and what it would cost him, but his brutal honesty in his internal -- and, often, external -- dialogue, didn't allow him to stop himself. [Citations] "But if you saw how proud is that mighty spirit who created this colossal setting and how proudly convinced this spirit is of its victory and of its triumph, then you would shudder for its pride, obstinacy, and blindness, but you would shudder also for those over whom this proud spirit hovers and reigns." I am more likely to reject religion than to try to reconcile it as intrinsic to the human condition. "This mighty spirit is the spirit of industrial capitalism, and the crystal palace is its temple." "The two time periods of the novel represent two stages in the evolution of the Russian intelligentsia: the sentimental, literary 1840s and the rational and utilitarian 1860s; the time of the liberals and the time of the nihilists." "Indeed, there could hardly be a more thorough denial of artistic unity than this last quoted passage. The naive blitheness of its expression is characteristic of Chernyshevsky and thinkers like him (utilitarians, nihilists; then Lenin, Lunacharsky, the theorists of “socialist realism”)." That's what Peterson is. "before we celebrate that at least eere not doing THAT think hoe much misery our own system produces killng souls rather than bodies" "Giftlessness, as Dostoevsky feared and Nabokov knew, became the dominant style in Russia; it eventually seized power, and in the process of “making people happy” destroyed them by millions, leaving its vast motherland broken and desolate." "In this respect the greatest foresight was shown by long-eared Shigalyov, the radical theoretician in Dostoevsky’s Demons: “I got entangled in my own data, and my conclusion directly contradicts the original idea I start from. Starting from unlimited freedom, I conclude with unlimited despotism. I will add, however, that apart from my solution to the social formula, there is no other.”" "He recognized that his opposition to the “Chernyshevskians” could not be a struggle for domination, that what was in question was the complex reality of the human being, the whole person, the “thing itself,” and that a true articulation of that reality could only come as the final “gift” of an artistic image." "1840s and 1850s: Slavophile versus Westernizer debate among Russian intellectuals. Westernizers advocate progress by assimilating Western rationalism and civic freedom. Slavophiles assert spiritual superiority of Russia to the West and argue that future development should be based upon the traditions of the Orthodox Church and the peasant commune or mir." Fuck you. are we seriously still fighting the exact same ideological battle 200 years later? "swear to you, gentlemen. that to be overly conscious is a sickness, a real, thorough sickness. For man’s everyday use, ordinary human consciousness would be more than enough; that is, a half, a quarter of the portion that falls to the lot of a developed man in our unfortunate nineteenth century," "not believe itself, slip back shamefacedly into its crack. There, in its loathsome, stinking underground, our offended, beaten-down, and derided mouse at once immerses itself in cold, venomous, and, above all, everlasting spite. For forty years on end it will recall its offense to the last, most shameful details, each time adding even more shameful details of its own, spitefully taunting and chafing itself with its fantasies. It will be ashamed of its fantasies, but all the same it will recall everything, go over everything, heap all sorts of figments on itself, under the pretext that they, too, could have happened, and forgive nothing." "“For pity’s sake,” they’ll shout at you, “you can’t rebel: it’s two times two is four! Nature doesn’t ask your permission; it doesn’t care about your wishes, or whether you like its laws or not. You’re obliged to accept it as it is, and consequently all its results as well. And so a wall is indeed a wall … etc., etc.” My God, but what do I care about the laws of nature and arithmetic if for some reason these laws and two times two is four are not to my liking?" "Formerly, he saw justice in bloodshed and with a quiet conscience exterminated whoever he had to; while now, though we do regard bloodshed as vile, we still occupy ourselves with this vileness, and even more than formerly. Which is worse? – decide for yourselves." "that now, too, though man has learned to see more clearly on occasion than in barbarous times, he is still far from having grown accustomed to acting as reason and science dictate. But even so you are perfectly confident that he will not fail to grow accustomed once one or two old bad habits have passed and once common sense and science have thoroughly re-educated and given a normal direction to human nature." "And it is then – this is still you speaking – that new economic relations will come, quite ready-made, and also calculated with mathematical precision, so that all possible questions will vanish in an instant, essentially because they will have been given all possible answers. Then the crystal palace will get built." This reminds me of V by Yevgeny Zamyatin. "And all this for the emptiest of reasons, which would seem not even worth mentioning: namely, that man, whoever he might be, has always and everywhere liked to act as he wants, and not at all as reason and profit dictate; and one can want even against one’s own profit, and one sometimes even positively must (this is my idea now)." "“Hm …” you decide, “our wantings are for the most part mistaken owing to a mistaken view of our profit. We sometimes want pure rubbish precisely because, in our stupidity, we see this rubbish as the easiest path to the attainment of some preconceived profit. Well, but when it’s all explained, worked out on a piece of paper (which is quite possible because, after all, it’s vile and senseless to believe beforehand that there are certain laws of nature which man will never learn) – then, to be sure, there will be no more so-called desires. For if wanting someday gets completely in cahoots with reason, then essentially we shall be reasoning and not wanting, because it really is impossible, for example, while preserving reason, to want senselessness and thus knowingly go against reason and wish yourself harm … And since all wantings and reasonings can indeed be calculated – because, after all, they will someday discover the laws of our so-called free will – then consequently, and joking aside, something like a little table can be arranged, so that we shall indeed want according to this little table." "But I repeat to you for the hundredth time, there is only one case, one only, when man may purposely, consciously wish for himself even the harmful, the stupid, even what is stupidest of all: namely, so as to have the right to wish for himself even what is stupidest of all and not be bound by an obligation to wish for himself only what is intelligent. For this stupidest of all, this caprice of ours, gentlemen, may in fact be the most profitable of anything on earth for our sort, especially in certain cases. And in particular it may be more profitable than all other profits even in the case when it is obviously harmful and contradicts the most sensible conclusions of our reason concerning profits – because in any event it preserves for us the chiefest and dearest thing, that is, our personality and our individuality." "Now I ask you: what can be expected of man as a being endowed with such strange qualities? Shower him with all earthly blessings, drown him in happiness completely, over his head, so that only bubbles pop up on the surface of happiness, as on water; give him such economic satisfaction that he no longer has anything left to do at all except sleep, eat gingerbread, and worry about the noncessation of world history – and it is here, just here, that he, this man, out of sheer ingratitude, out of sheer lampoonery, will do something nasty. He will even risk his gingerbread, and wish on purpose for the most pernicious nonsense, the most noneconomical meaninglessness, solely in order to mix into all this positive good sense his own pernicious, fantastical element." "But where is man to go? Something awkward, at any rate, can be noticed in him each time he achieves some such goal. Achieving he likes, but having achieved he does not quite like, and that, of course, is terribly funny." "Two times two is four has a cocky look; it stands across your path, arms akimbo, and spits. I agree that two times two is four is an excellent thing; but if we’re going to start praising everything, then two times two is five is sometimes also a most charming little thing." "Now look: if instead of a palace there is a chicken coop, and it starts to rain, I will perhaps get into the chicken coop to avoid a wetting, but all the same I will not take the chicken coop for a palace out of gratitude for its having kept me from the rain. You laugh, you even say that in that case it makes no difference – chicken coop or mansion. Yes, say I, if one were to live only so as not to get wet." "once saw a girl there, alone, by the door, on New Year’s day. Her own people had kicked her out for the fun of it, to cool her off a bit, because she was howling too much, and locked the door behind her. At nine o’clock in the morning she was already completely drunk, disheveled, half-naked, all beaten up. Her face was powdered white, and her eyes were black-and-blue; blood was flowing from her nose and teeth. some coachman had just given her a pasting. She sat down on the stone stairs, holding some kind of salted fish; she was howling and wailing something about her ‘miserble lot,’ beating her fish against the steps. And coachmen and drunken soldiers crowded around the steps, teasing her." "Our silence had already lasted some five minutes. The tea sat on the table; we didn’t touch it: it went so far that I purposely refused to begin drinking, so as to make it still harder for her; and it would have been awkward for her to begin. Several times she glanced at me in sad perplexity. I was stubbornly silent. The chief martyr, of course, was myself, because I was fully conscious of all the loathsome baseness of my spiteful stupidity, and at the same time I simply could not restrain myself." Such utterly manufactured and nonetheless uncomfortable tension. "“Why did you come? Answer! Answer!” I kept exclaiming, all but beside myself. “I’ll tell you why you came, my dear. You came because of the pathetic words I used with you then. So you went all soft, and you wanted more ‘pathetic words.’ Know, then, know that I was laughing at you that time. And I’m laughing now. Why do you tremble? Yes, laughing! I’d been insulted earlier, at dinner, by the ones who came there ahead of me. I came there to give a thrashing to one of them, the officer; but I didn’t succeed, he wasn’t there; I needed to unload my offense on someone, to get my own back, and you turned up, so I poured out my spite and laughed at you. I’d been humiliated, so I, too, wanted to humiliate; they’d ground me down like a rag, so I, too, wanted to show my power … That’s what it was, and you thought I came then on purpose to save you, right? That’s what you thought? That’s what you thought?”" So unbearably evil and at the same time honest. accepting that he himself is irredeemable. refusing even to try. "And all the rest of the time she listened to me with open mouth, with wide open eyes, and trembling in terrible fear. The cynicism, the cynicism of my words crushed her …" "But maybe I’m worse than you are. Why didn’t you fling it in my mug when I started reading you my oration: ‘And you, what did you come here for? To teach us morals, or what?’ Power, power, that’s what I wanted then, the game was what I wanted, I wanted to achieve your tears, your humiliation, your hysterics – that’s what I wanted then! But I couldn’t stand it myself, because I’m trash, I got all scared and, like a fool, gave you my address, devil knows why. And afterwards, even before I got home, I was already cursing you up and down for that address. I already hated you, because I’d lied to you then. Because I only talk a good game," Thoughts become words with him. no filter. "But can you possibly not have realized even now that I will never forgive you for having found me in this wretched dressing gown, as I was hurling myself like a vicious little cur at Apollon? The resurrector, the former hero, flinging himself like a mangy, shaggy mutt at his lackey, who just laughs at him! And those tears a moment ago, which, like an ashamed woman, I couldn’t hold back before you, I will never forgive you! And what I’m confessing to you now, I will also never forgive you! Yes – you, you alone must answer for all this, because you turned up here, because I’m a scoundrel, because I’m the most vile, the most ridiculous, the most petty, the most stupid, the most envious of all worms on earth, who are in no way better than I, but who, devil knows why, are never embarrassed; while I will just go on being flicked all my life by every nit – that’s my trait!" A pitiless level of self-awareness. "By tomorrow I’d have already dirtied her soul with myself and worn out her heart. But now the insult will never die in her, and however vile the dirt that awaits her – the insult will elevate and purify her … through hatred … hm … maybe also forgiveness … Though, by the way, will all that make it any easier for her?” And in fact I’m now asking an idle question of my own: which is better – cheap happiness, or lofty suffering? Well, which is better?" "“Excuse me, gentlemen, but I am not justifying myself with this allishness. As far as I myself am concerned, I have merely carried to an extreme in my life what you have not dared to carry even halfway, and, what’s more, you’ve taken your cowardice for good sense, and found comfort in thus deceiving yourselves." ]]> </content> </entry> <entry> <title type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine by Michael Lewis (2010) (read in 2017)]]> </title> <id>https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3369</id> <link href="https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3369"/> <updated>2017-02-06T22:50:02+01:00</updated> <author> <name type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Marco von Ballmoos]]> </name> <uri>https://earthli.com/users/marco</uri> </author> <summary type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA["Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is" ... ]]> </summary> <content type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Published by marco on 6. Feb 2017 22:50:02 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I've failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an interest in this book, then I'm happy for you." This is the book on which the "movie" <https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3325> was based. My review in that link was extensive and I liked the book just as much. Lewis really did a good job outlining the players, explaining the financial instruments and their holders, inventors, connections, weaknesses and ramifications. It's an extremely financially technical book and will prove a challenge for many to figure out what's really going on. Lewis emphasizes several times that most people in the industry didn't know how these things worked, but knew for approximately how long they would work, so they made money and unloaded them on unsuspecting saps before everything blew up. Others knew that the government would bail them out and just drove their companies into a wall, coming out smelling like roses anyway. Lewis does a good job of highlighting both the criminality and the stupidity of so many in the industry -- and also the hopelessness of any change coming out of the worldwide debacle. [Citations] "Over and over again, the financial system was, in some narrow way, discredited. Yet the big Wall Street banks at the center of it just kept on growing, along with the sums of money that they doled out to twenty-six-year-olds to perform tasks of no obvious social utility. The rebellion by American youth against the money culture never happened. Why bother to overturn your parents’ world when you can buy it and sell off the pieces? At some point, I gave up waiting. There was no scandal or reversal, I assumed, sufficiently great to sink the system." And you will have been right again. It's still unsinkable and bigger than ever. "Her message was clear: If you want to know what these Wall Street firms are really worth, take a cold, hard look at these crappy assets they’re holding with borrowed money, and imagine what they’d fetch in a fire sale." "This woman wasn’t saying that Wall Street bankers were corrupt. She was saying that they were stupid. These people whose job it was to allocate capital apparently didn’t even know how to manage their own." "By then there was a long and growing list of pundits who claimed they predicted the catastrophe, but a far shorter list of people who actually did." How does he not know the right tense to use here? It should be "who actually [had]" "Historically, a Wall Street firm worried over the creditworthiness of its customers; its customers often took it on faith that the casino would be able to pay off its winners. Mike Burry lacked faith. “I’m not making a bet against a bond,” he said. “I’m making a bet against a system.” He didn’t want to buy flood insurance from Goldman Sachs only to find, when the flood came, Goldman Sachs washed away and unable to pay him off. As the value of the insurance contract changed—say, as floodwaters approached but before they actually destroyed the building—he wanted Goldman Sachs and Deutsche Bank to post collateral, to reflect the increase in value of what he owned." "The U.S. mortgage bond market was huge, bigger than the market for U.S. Treasury notes and bonds. The entire economy was premised on its stability, and its stability in turn depended on house prices continuing to rise. “It is ludicrous to believe that asset bubbles can only be recognized in hindsight,” he wrote. “There are specific identifiers that are entirely recognizable during the bubble’s inflation. One hallmark of mania is the rapid rise in the incidence and complexity of fraud…. The FBI reports mortgage-related fraud is up fivefold since 2000.” Bad behavior was no longer on the fringes of an otherwise sound economy; it was its central feature." "At some point in between 1986 and 2006 a memo had gone out on Wall Street, saying that if you wanted to keep on getting rich shuffling bits of paper around to no obvious social purpose, you had better camouflage your true nature. Greg Lippmann was incapable of disguising himself or his motives. “I don’t have any particular allegiance to Deutsche Bank,” he’d say. “I just work there.” This was not an unusual attitude. What was unusual was that Lippmann said" "Lippmann himself described it more bluntly to a Deutsche Bank colleague who had seen the presentation and dubbed him “Chicken Little.” “Fuck you,” Lippmann had said. “I’m short your house.”" "It didn’t matter whether Düsseldorf was buying actual cash subprime mortgage bonds or selling credit default swaps on those same mortgage bonds, as they amounted to one and the same thing: the long side of the bet." "Eisman really only had a couple of questions. The first: Tell me again how the hell a credit default swap works? The second: Why are you asking me to bet against bonds your own firm is creating, and arranging for the rating agencies to mis-rate? “In my entire life I never saw a sell-side guy come in and say, ‘Short my market,’” said Eisman." "There was more than one way to think about Mike Burry’s purchase of a billion dollars in credit default swaps. The first was as a simple, even innocent, insurance contract. Burry made his semiannual premium payments and, in return, received protection against the default of a billion dollars’ worth of bonds. He’d either be paid zero, if the triple-B-rated bonds he’d insured proved good, or a billion dollars, if those triple-B-rated bonds went bad. But of course Mike Burry didn’t own any triple-B-rated subprime mortgage bonds, or anything like them. He had no property to “insure” it was as if he had bought fire insurance on some slum with a history of burning down. To him, as to Steve Eisman, a credit default swap wasn’t insurance at all but an outright speculative bet against the market—and this was the second way to think about" "The details were complicated, but the gist of this new money machine was not: It turned a lot of dicey loans into a pile of bonds, most of which were triple-A-rated, then it took the lowest-rated of the remaining bonds and turned most of those into triple-A CDOs. And then—because it could not extend home loans fast enough to create a sufficient number of lower-rated bonds—it used credit default swaps to replicate the very worst of the existing bonds, many times over." "Goldman would buy the triple-A tranche of some CDO, pair it off with the credit default swaps AIG sold Goldman that insured the tranche (at a cost well below the yield on the tranche), declare the entire package risk-free, and hold it off its balance sheet. Of course, the whole thing wasn’t risk-free: If AIG went bust, the insurance was worthless, and Goldman could lose everything. Today Goldman Sachs is, to put it mildly, unhelpful when asked to explain exactly what it did," "The original home mortgage loans on whose fate both sides were betting played no other role. In a funny way, they existed only so that their fate might be gambled upon." "If credit default swaps were insurance, why weren’t they regulated as insurance? Why, for example, wasn’t AIG required to reserve capital against them? Why, for that matter, were Moody’s and Standard & Poor’s willing to bless 80 percent of a pool of dicey mortgage loans with the same triple-A rating they bestowed on the debts of the U.S. Treasury? Why didn’t someone, anyone, inside Goldman Sachs stand up and say, “This is obscene. The rating agencies, the ultimate pricers of all these subprime mortgage loans, clearly do not understand the risk, and their idiocy is creating a recipe for catastrophe”?" "Confronted with the new fact—that his company was effectively long $50 billion in triple-B subprime mortgage bonds, masquerading as triple-A-rated diversified pools of consumer loans—Cassano at first sought to rationalize it. He clearly thought that any money he received for selling default insurance on highly rated bonds was free money. For the bonds to default, he now said, U.S. house prices had to fall, and Joe Cassano didn’t believe house prices could ever fall everywhere in the country at once. After all, Moody’s and S&P had both rated this stuff triple-A!" "Either piece of news—rising ratings standards or falling house prices—should have disrupted the subprime bond market and caused the price of insuring the bonds to rise. Instead, the price of insuring the bonds fell. Insurance on the crappiest triple-B tranche of a subprime mortgage bond now cost less than 2 percent a year. “We finally just did a trade with Lippmann,” says Eisman. “Then we tried to figure out what we’d done.”" "Which of these poor Americans were likely to jump which way with their finances? How much did their home prices need to fall for their loans to blow up? Which mortgage originators were the most corrupt? Which Wall Street firms were creating the most dishonest mortgage bonds? What kind of people, in which parts of the country, exhibited the highest degree of financial irresponsibility?" "Wall Street bond trading desks, staffed by people making seven figures a year, set out to coax from the brain-dead guys making high five figures the highest possible ratings for the worst possible loans." The Lukas criterium (as defined by Mark Blyth: Any system with rules will, at some point, be gamed.) "To meet the rating agencies’ standards—to maximize the percentage of triple-A-rated bonds created from any given pool of loans—the average FICO score of the borrowers in the pool needed to be around 615. There was more than one way to arrive at that average number. And therein lay a huge opportunity. A pool of loans composed of borrowers all of whom had a FICO score of 615 was far less likely to suffer huge losses than a pool of loans composed of borrowers half of whom had FICO scores of 550 and half of whom had FICO scores of 680. A person with a FICO score of 550 was virtually certain to default and should never have been lent money in the first place. But the hole in the rating agencies’ models enabled the loan to be made, as long as a borrower with a FICO score of 680 could be found to offset the deadbeat, and keep the average at 615." "Apparently the agencies didn’t grasp the difference between a “thin-file” FICO score and a “thick-file” FICO score. A thin-file FICO score implied, as it sounds, a short credit history. The file was thin because the borrower hadn’t done much borrowing. Immigrants who had never failed to repay a debt, because they had never been given a loan, often had surprisingly high thin-file FICO scores. Thus a Jamaican baby nurse or Mexican strawberry picker with an income of $14,000 looking to borrow three-quarters of a million dollars, when filtered through the models at Moody’s and S&P, became suddenly more useful, from a credit-rigging point of view." "Barbell-shaped loan pools, with lots of very low and very high FICO scores in them, were a bargain compared to pools clustered around the 615 average—at least until the rest of Wall Street caught on to the hole in the brains of the rating agencies and bid up their prices." "As the bonds were all priced off the Moody’s rating, the most overpriced bonds were the bonds that had been most ineptly rated. And the bonds that had been most ineptly rated were the bonds that Wall Street firms had tricked the rating agencies into rating most ineptly. “I cannot fucking believe this is allowed,” said Eisman. “I must have said that one thousand times.”" "He was shocked how much easier and cheaper it was to buy a credit default swap than it was to sell short an actual cash bond—even though they represented exactly the same bet. “I did half a billion. They said, ‘Would you like to do a billion?’ And I said, ‘Why am I pussyfooting around?’ It took two or three days to place twenty-five billion.” Paulson had never encountered a market in which an investor could sell short 25 billion dollars’ worth of a stock or bond without causing its price to move, even crash. “And we could have done fifty billion, if we’d wanted to.”" "The underlying mortgage loans were already going sour, and yet the prices of the bonds backed by the loans hadn’t budged. “That was the part that was so weird,” said Charlie. “They’d already started going bad. We just kept asking, ‘Who the hell is taking the other side of this trade?’ And the answer that kept coming back to us was, ‘It’s the CDOs.’”" "yet fully 80 percent of the CDO composed of nothing but triple-B bonds was rated higher than triple-B: triple-A, double-A, or A. To wipe out any triple-B bond—the ground floor of the building—all that was needed was a 7 percent loss in the underlying pool of home loans. That same 7 percent loss would thus wipe out, entirely, any CDO made up of triple-B bonds, no matter what rating was assigned it. “It took us weeks to really grasp it because it was so weird,” said Charlie. “But the more we looked at what a CDO really was, the more we were like, Holy shit, that’s just fucking crazy. That’s fraud. Maybe you can’t prove it in a court of law. But it’s fraud.”" "It was also a stunning opportunity: The market appeared to believe its own lie. It charged a lot less for insurance on a putatively safe double-A-rated slice of a CDO than it did for insurance on the openly risky triple-B-rated bonds. Why pay 2 percent a year to bet directly against triple-B-rated bonds when they could pay 0.5 percent a year to make effectively the same bet against the double-A-rated slice of the CDO? If they paid four times less to make what was effectively the same bet against triple-B-rated subprime mortgage bonds, they could afford to make four times more of it." "They didn’t realize yet that the bonds inside their CDOs were actually credit default swaps on the bonds, and so their CDOs weren’t ordinary CDOs but synthetic CDOs, or that the bonds on which the swaps were based had been handpicked by Mike Burry and Steve Eisman and others betting against the market. In many ways, they were still innocents." "Some of Lippmann’s former converts suspected that the subprime mortgage bond market was rigged by Wall Street to insure that credit default swaps would never pay off; others began to wonder if the investors on the other side of their bet might know something that they didn’t; and some simply wearied of paying insurance premiums to bet against bonds that never seemed to move." "Eisman had a curious way of listening; he didn’t so much listen to what you were saying as subcontract to some remote region of his brain the task of deciding whether whatever you were saying was worth listening to, while his mind went off to play on its own. As a result, he never actually heard what you said to him the first time you said it. If his mental subcontractor detected a level of interest in what you had just said, it radioed a signal to the mother ship, which then wheeled around with the most intense focus. “Say that again,” he’d say. And you would! Because now Eisman was so obviously listening to you, and, as he listened so selectively, you felt flattered" "Later, whenever Eisman set out to explain to others the origins of the financial crisis, he’d start with his dinner with Wing Chau. Only now did he fully appreciate the central importance of the so-called mezzanine CDO—the CDO composed mainly of triple-B-rated subprime mortgage bonds—and its synthetic counterpart: the CDO composed entirely of credit default swaps on triple-B-rated subprime mortgage bonds. “You have to understand this,” he’d say. “This was the engine of doom.” He’d draw a picture of several towers of debt. The first tower was the original subprime loans that had been piled together. At the top of this tower was the triple-A tranche, just below it the double-A tranche, and so on down to the riskiest, triple-B tranche—the bonds Eisman had bet against. The Wall Street firms had taken these triple-B tranches—the worst of the worst—to build yet another tower of bonds: a CDO. A collateralized debt obligation. The reason they’d done this is that the rating agencies, presented with the pile of bonds backed by dubious loans, would pronounce 80 percent of the bonds in it triple-A. These bonds could then be sold to investors—pension funds, insurance companies—which were allowed to invest only in highly rated securities." "Now that AIG had exited the market, the main buyers were CDO managers like Wing Chau. All by himself, Chau generated vast demand for the riskiest slices of subprime mortgage bonds, for which there had previously been essentially no demand. This demand led inexorably to the supply of new home loans, as material for the bonds." "That’s when Steve Eisman finally understood the madness of the machine. He and Vinny and Danny had been making these side bets with Goldman Sachs and Deutsche Bank on the fate of the triple-B tranche of subprime mortgage–backed bonds without fully understanding why those firms were so eager to accept them. Now he was face-to-face with the actual human being on the other side of his credit default swaps. Now he got it: The credit default swaps, filtered through the CDOs, were being used to replicate bonds backed by actual home loans. There weren’t enough Americans with shitty credit taking out loans to satisfy investors’ appetite for the end product." "Wall Street needed his bets in order to synthesize more of them. “They weren’t satisfied getting lots of unqualified borrowers to borrow money to buy a house they couldn’t afford,” said Eisman. “They were creating them out of whole cloth. One hundred times over! That’s why the losses in the financial system are so much greater than just the subprime loans. That’s when I realized they needed us to keep the machine running. I was like, This is allowed?”" "There was only one answer: The triple-A ratings gave everyone an excuse to ignore the risks they were running." "He walked around the Las Vegas casino incredulous at the spectacle before him: seven thousand people, all of whom seemed delighted with the world as they found it. A society with deep, troubling economic problems had rigged itself to disguise those problems, and the chief beneficiaries of the deceit were its financial middlemen." "“The ratings agency people were all like government employees.” Collectively they had more power than anyone in the bond markets, but individually they were nobodies. “They’re underpaid,” said Eisman. “The smartest ones leave for Wall Street firms so they can help manipulate the companies they used to work for. There should be no greater thing you can do as an analyst than to be the Moody’s analyst. It should be, ‘I can’t go higher as an analyst.’ Instead it’s the bottom! No one gives a fuck if Goldman likes General Electric paper. If Moody’s downgrades GE paper, it is a big deal. So why does the guy at Moody’s want to work at Goldman Sachs? The guy who is the bank analyst at Goldman Sachs should want to go to Moody’s. It should be that elite.”" "In Vegas the question lingering at the back of their minds ceased to be, Do these bond market people know something we do not? It was replaced by, Do they deserve merely to be fired, or should they be put in jail? Are they delusional, or do they know what they’re doing? Danny thought that the vast majority of the people in the industry were blinded by their interests and failed to see the risks they had created. Vinny, always darker, said, “There were more morons than crooks, but the crooks were higher up.” The rating agencies were about as low as you could go and still be in the industry, and the people who worked for them really did not seem to know just how badly they had been gamed by big Wall Street firms. Their" "To Charlie and Ben and Jamie it seemed perfectly clear that Wall Street was propping up the price of these CDOs so that they might either dump losses on unsuspecting customers or make a last few billion dollars from a corrupt market. In either case, they were squeezing and selling the juice from oranges that were undeniably rotten." "Complicated financial stuff was being dreamed up for the sole purpose of lending money to people who could never repay it." "To some meaningful number of his investors, it looked as if Burry simply did not want to accept the judgment of the marketplace: He’d made a bad bet and was failing to accept his loss. But to Burry, the judgment of the marketplace was fraudulent, and Joel Greenblatt didn’t know what he was talking about. “It became clear to me that they still didn’t understand the [credit default swap] positions,” he said." "That the panic inside Wall Street firms had begun before June 25 suggested to Michael Burry mainly that the Wall Street firms might be working with inside information about the remittance data. “The dealers often owned [mortgage] servicers,” he wrote, “and might have been able to get an inside track on the deterioration in the numbers.”" "I was in a state of perpetual disbelief. I would have thought that someone would have recognized what was coming before June 2007. If it really took that June remit data to cause a sudden realization, well, it makes me wonder what a ‘Wall Street analyst’ really does all day.”" "Morgan Stanley was making a bet not on the entire pool of subprime home loans but on the few loans in the pool least likely to be repaid. The size of the bet, however, remained the same as if no loan in the pool was ever repaid. They had bought flood insurance that, if a drop of water so much as grazed any part of the house, paid them the value of the entire house." "Between September 2006 and January 2007, the highest-status bond trader inside Morgan Stanley had, for all practical purposes, purchased $16 billion in triple-A-rated CDOs, composed entirely of triple-B-rated subprime mortgage bonds, which became valueless when the underlying pools of subprime loans experienced losses of roughly 8 percent. In effect, Howie Hubler was betting that some of the triple-B-rated subprime bonds would go bad, but not all of them. He was smart enough to be cynical about his market but not smart enough to realize how cynical he needed to be." "VaR measured only the degree to which a given stock or bond had jumped around in the past, with the recent movements receiving a greater emphasis than movements in the more distant past. Having never fluctuated much in value, triple-A-rated subprime-backed CDOs registered on Morgan Stanley’s internal reports as virtually riskless." "Triple-A-rated subprime CDOs, of which there were now hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth buried inside various Wall Street firms, and which were assumed to be riskless, were now, according to Greg Lippmann, only worth 70 cents on the dollar." And when marked to market, you have to pay the premium to ensure the bulk of the expected payment is in the right hands. "At which point Greg Lippmann just said, Dude, fuck your model. I’ll make you a market. They are seventy–seventy-seven. You have three choices. You can sell them back to me at seventy. You can buy some more at seventy-seven. Or you can give me my fucking one point two billion dollars. Morgan Stanley didn’t want to buy any more subprime mortgage bonds. Howie Hubler didn’t want to buy any more subprime-backed bonds: He’d released his grip on the rope that tethered him to the rising balloon. Yet he didn’t want to take a loss, and insisted that, despite his unwillingness to buy more at 77, his triple-A CDOs were still worth 95 cents on the dollar." "In taking Cornwall’s credit default swaps off its hands, neither UBS nor any of their other Wall Street buyers expressed the faintest reservations that they were now assuming the risk that Bear Stearns might fail:" "How do you explain to an innocent citizen of the free world the importance of a credit default swap on a double-A tranche of a subprime-backed collateralized debt obligation?" "To his founding investor, Gotham Capital, he shot off an unsolicited e-mail that said only, “You’re welcome.” He’d already decided to kick them out of the fund, and insist that they sell their stake in his business. When they asked him to suggest a price, he replied, “How about you keep the tens of millions you nearly prevented me from earning for you last year and we call it even?”" "There was now hardly an important figure on Wall Street whom Eisman had not insulted, or tried to. At a public event in Hong Kong, after the chairman of HSBC had claimed that his bank’s subprime losses were “contained,” Eisman had raised his hand and said, “You don’t actually believe that, do you? Because your whole book is fucked.”" "At the end of 2007, Bear Stearns had nevertheless invited Eisman to a warm and fuzzy meet and greet with their new CEO, Alan Schwartz. Christmas with Bear, they called it. Schwartz told his audience how “crazy” the subprime bond market was, as no one in it seemed to be able to agree on the price of any given bond. “And whose fault is that?” Eisman had blurted out. “This is how you guys wanted it. So you could rip off your customers.”" "“The upper classes of this country raped this country. You fucked people. You built a castle to rip people off. Not once in all these years have I come across a person inside a big Wall Street firm who was having a crisis of conscience. Nobody ever said, ‘This is wrong.’ And no one ever gave a shit about what I had to say.” Actually, Eisman didn’t speak those final sentences that morning; he merely thought them." "On Tuesday the U.S. Federal Reserve announced that it had lent $85 billion to the insurance company AIG, to pay off the losses on the subprime credit default swaps AIG had sold to Wall Street banks—the biggest of which was the $13.9 billion AIG owed to Goldman Sachs. When you added in the $8.4 billion in cash AIG had already forked over to Goldman in collateral, you saw that Goldman had transferred more than $20 billion in subprime mortgage bond risk into the insurance company, which was in one way or another being covered by the U.S. taxpayer. That fact alone was enough to make everyone wonder at once how much more of this stuff was out there, and who owned it." No, it makes me think that the people at the Fed were in cahoots with Goldman. Wait, the Fed is a council of the heads of banks ... the Fed is Goldman? "Merrill Lynch, which had begun by saying they had $7 billion in losses, now admitted the number was over $50 billion. Citigroup appeared to have about $60 billion. Morgan Stanley had its own $9-plus billion hit, and who knew what behind it. “We’d been wrong in our interpretation of what was going on,” said Charlie. “We had always assumed that they sold the triple-A CDOs to, like, the Korean Farmers Corporation. The way they were all blowing up implied they hadn’t. They’d kept it themselves.” The big Wall Street firms, seemingly so shrewd and self-interested, had somehow become the dumb money. The people who ran them did not understand their own businesses, and their regulators obviously knew even less." "The changes were camouflage. They helped to distract outsiders from the truly profane event: the growing misalignment of interests between the people who trafficked in financial risk and the wider culture. The surface rippled, but down below, in the depths, the bonus pool remained undisturbed." "What are the odds that people will make smart decisions about money if they don’t need to make smart decisions—if they can get rich making dumb decisions? The incentives on Wall Street were all wrong; they’re still all wrong." "All that was clear was that the profits to be had from smart people making complicated bets overwhelmed anything that could be had from servicing customers, or allocating capital to productive enterprise." "At the top of Charlie Ledley’s list of concerns, after Cornwall Capital had laid its bets against subprime loans, was that the powers that be might step in at any time to prevent individual American subprime mortgage borrowers from failing. The powers that be never did that, of course. Instead they stepped in to prevent the failure of the big Wall Street firms that had contrived to bankrupt themselves by making a lot of dumb bets on subprime borrowers." "U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, persuaded the U.S. Congress that he needed $700 billion to buy subprime mortgage assets from banks. Thus was born TARP, which stood for Troubled Asset Relief Program. Once handed the money, Paulson abandoned his promised strategy and instead essentially began giving away billions of dollars to Citigroup, Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, and a few others unnaturally selected for survival. For instance, the $13 billion AIG owed to Goldman Sachs, as a result of its bet on subprime mortgage loans, was paid off in full by the U.S. government: 100 cents on the dollar. These fantastic handouts—plus the implicit government guarantee that came with them—not only prevented Wall Street firms from failing but spared them from recognizing the losses in their subprime mortgage portfolios." "succeed. This new regime—free money for capitalists, free markets for everyone else—plus the more or less instant rewriting of financial history vexed all sorts of people, but few were as enthusiastically vexed as Steve Eisman. The world’s most powerful and most highly paid financiers had been entirely discredited; without government intervention every single one of them would have lost his job; and yet those same financiers were using the government to enrich themselves." "“I can understand why Goldman Sachs would want to be included in the conversation about what to do about Wall Street,” he said. “What I can’t understand is why anyone would listen to them.” In Eisman’s view, the unwillingness of the U.S. government to allow the bankers to fail was less a solution than a symptom of a still deeply dysfunctional financial system." "The ability of Wall Street traders to see themselves in their success and their management in their failure would later be echoed, when their firms, which disdained the need for government regulation in good times, insisted on being rescued by government in bad times. Success was individual achievement; failure was a social problem." ]]> </content> </entry> <entry> <title type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[The Swift Programming Language (Swift 3.0.1) by Apple Inc (2016) (read in 2017)]]> </title> <id>https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3366</id> <link href="https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3366"/> <updated>2017-01-31T09:00:03+01:00</updated> <author> <name type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Marco von Ballmoos]]> </name> <uri>https://earthli.com/users/marco</uri> </author> <summary type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA["Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is" ... ]]> </summary> <content type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Published by marco on 31. Jan 2017 09:00:03 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I've failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an interest in this book, then I'm happy for you." This is an incredibly detailed language specification for Swift and programming guide for iOS and OS X. The language itself is quite complex and includes so many programming features that it's nearly dizzying. There are a lot of examples, as well as English-language translations of all of the examples. This leads to a lot of text, but you can get into the rhythm of skipping the few paragraphs after the examples to move on to the next concepts (especially if the code sample was abundantly clear). The kitchen sink includes: * Functional switch statements (matching) * Inferred types * Argument labels * Very wordy Error-handling * An unbelievable number of keywords: * autoclosure: required when the developer wants to avoid closing over certain variables and creating cycles (which the reference-counter in Swift cannot break on its own) * convenience: identifies initialization methods that are not required * convention: * defer: Swift's version of finally * deprecated: An attribute to indicate when a feature was deprecated (see obsoleted) * discardableResult: functions are pure and results must be used; add this attribute to allow a result to be ignored * dynamic: trigger the compiler to use Objective-C--style method-dispatch * escaping: indicate that a lambda parameter is used outside of the called function * extension: add features to a type * infix: operator type * introduced: An attribute to indicate when a feature was introduced * lazy: explicitly indicate that a property initialization should be delayed until it is first called * obsoleted: An attribute to indicate when a feature was made obsolete (see deprecated) * optional: a feature of a protocol that does not have to be implemented in the implementing type (it can be satisfied by an extension instead) * postfix: operator type * prefix: operator type * required: identifies initialization methods that are not convenience * subscript: an indexer function (e.g. [x]) * testable: an attribute that subverts the type/member/function visibility so that a test framework has access to internals * unowned: use a weak reference that allows the owner to cascade-delete the object that has the unowned reference to it * weak: a classic weak reference: the reference will be set to nil when the referenced object is deleted. * two types of generic constraints * and so on... [Citations] "Sometimes it is clear from a program’s structure that an optional will always have a value, after that value is first set. In these cases, it is useful to remove the need to check and unwrap the optional’s value every time it is accessed, because it can be safely assumed to have a value all of the time. "These kinds of optionals are defined as implicitly unwrapped optionals. You write an implicitly unwrapped optional by placing an exclamation mark (String!) rather than a question mark (String?) after the type that you want to make optional." "A recursive enumeration is an enumeration that has another instance of the enumeration as the associated value for one or more of the enumeration cases. You indicate that an enumeration case is recursive by writing indirect before it, which tells the compiler to insert the necessary layer of indirection." These are pretty interesting. The arithmetic example is a very elegant way of implementing this behavior. "Use a weak reference when the other instance has a shorter lifetime—that is, when the other instance can be deallocated first. In the Apartment example above, it is appropriate for an apartment to be able to have no tenant at some point in its lifetime, and so a weak reference is an appropriate way to break the reference cycle in this case. In contrast, use an unowned reference when the other instance has the same lifetime or a longer lifetime." You can't pass a struct or enum by reference, so you're bound to value/ref usage at type-declaration time. That's a pretty harsh restriction. Deallocation is also immediate ([A]utomatic [R]eference [C]ounting takes care of it). This means that it is also predictable (unlike disposal/finalization in C#) It also means, however, that allocation cycles can only be resolved with developer intervention So....as usual, Swift solves it with multiple tools: weak and unowned references. Weak = set to null Unowned = cascade "In systems that use garbage collection, weak pointers are sometimes used to implement a simple caching mechanism because objects with no strong references are deallocated only when memory pressure triggers garbage collection. However, with ARC, values are deallocated as soon as their last strong reference is removed, making weak references unsuitable for such a purpose." "You indicate an unsafe unowned reference by writing unowned(unsafe). If you try to access an unsafe unowned reference after the instance that it refers to is deallocated, your program will try to access the memory location where the instance used to be, which is an unsafe operation." "However, there is a third scenario, in which both properties should always have a value, and neither property should ever be nil once initialization is complete. In this scenario, it is useful to combine an unowned property on one class with an implicitly unwrapped optional property on the other class." "Because capitalCity has a default nil value, a new Country instance is considered fully initialized as soon as the Country instance sets its name property within its initializer. This means that the Country initializer can start to reference and pass around the implicit self property as soon as the name property is set. The Country initializer can therefore pass self as one of the parameters for the City initializer when the Country initializer is setting its own capitalCity property." This is a very curious way of handling initialization. The ordering of parameter initialization determines at which point self can be used. "Swift requires you to write self.someProperty or self.someMethod() (rather than just someProperty or someMethod()) whenever you refer to a member of self within a closure. This helps you remember that it’s possible to capture self by accident." "Sometimes you know a throwing function or method won’t, in fact, throw an error at runtime. On those occasions, you can write try! before the expression to disable error propagation and wrap the call in a runtime assertion that no error will be thrown. If an error actually is thrown, you’ll get a runtime error." ]]> </content> </entry> <entry> <title type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Oblivion: Stories by David Foster Wallace (2005) (read in 2016)]]> </title> <id>https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3280</id> <link href="https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3280"/> <updated>2017-01-01T17:25:54+01:00</updated> <author> <name type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Marco von Ballmoos]]> </name> <uri>https://earthli.com/users/marco</uri> </author> <summary type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA["Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is" ... ]]> </summary> <content type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Published by marco on 1. Jan 2017 17:25:54 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I've failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an interest in this book, then I'm happy for you." This is a collection of short stories about various topics. Wallace's strength is in his exquisitely detailed and precise prose. He tells his stories through the subconscious ramblings of his characters, over interwoven and using tens of pages to describe a split second. Two of the stories are almost novellas; others are very, very short. Many of them have the feel of books that he started and never quite finished. There's also almost always that vague feeling of self-psychoanalysis, with characters exhibiting and working their way through insecurities that Wallace himself was known to have. The details of the stories are almost always vaguely bizarre: one unnamed and un-narrated character climbs a building in a blow-up advertising suit (Mister Squishy), in another a thread of thought about the litigation associated with his (formerly) secret black-widow farm haunts a man whose mother's botched plastic surgery makes her look constantly surprised, another is a school-hostage situation, as told by a daydreamer who nearly missed the whole thing but can recount the nano-details of daydream in a way that nearly supplants the "main" thread, another is the story of a man in psychoanalysis who reveals onion-skinned lies to eventually admit why he killed himself in a violent car accident, there is the man who is convinced he doesn't snore, the harpy to whom he's married who is convinced that he does, but both suffer from rare and strange disorders that mean they're both right and wrong and, finally, there's the final story, which is again set in the (at least semi-) bureaucratic world of advertising and market-analysis, which feels like a run at a chapter out of Infinite Jest. The first story did as well, and made me want to read The Pale King, although I'd heard that that work was unfinished. Although dissatisfying in the sense that the narrative loop isn't closed, even an unfinished David Foster Wallace story is a breathtaking jewel. [1] [Citations] "Inspired, according to agency rumor, by an R.S.B. Creative Director’s epiphanic encounter with something billed as Death by Chocolate in a Near North café, Felonies! were all-chocolate, filling and icing and cake as well, and in fact all-real-or-fondant-chocolate instead of the usual hydrogenated cocoa and high-F corn syrup, Felonies! conceived thus less as a variant on rivals’ Zingers, Ding Dongs, Ho Hos, and Choco-Diles than as a radical upscaling and re-visioning of same." "A domed cylinder of flourless maltilol-flavored sponge cake covered entirely in 2.4mm of a high-lecithin chocolate frosting manufactured with trace amounts of butter, cocoa butter, baker’s chocolate, chocolate liquor, vanilla extract, dextrose, and sorbitol (a relatively high-cost frosting, and one whose butter-redundancies alone required heroic innovations in production systems and engineering—an entire production line had had to be remachined and the lineworkers retrained and production and quality-assurance quotas recalculated more or less from scratch), which high-end frosting was then also injected by high-pressure confectionery needle into the 26 × 13mm hollow ellipse in each Felony!’s center (a center which in for example Hostess Inc.’s products was packed with what amounted to a sucrotic whipped lard), resulting in double doses of an ultrarich and near-restaurant- grade frosting whose central pocket—given that the thin coat of outer frosting’s exposure to the air caused it to assume traditional icing’s hard-yet-deliquescent marzipan character—seemed even richer, denser, sweeter, and more felonious than the exterior icing, icing that in most rivals’ Field tests’ IRPs and GRDS was declared consumers’ favorite part." That's one sentence, with the classic double possessive near the end. "All three of these youngest members sat back on their tailbones with their legs uncrossed and their hands spread out over their thighs and their faces arranged in the mildly sullen expressions of consumers who have never once questioned their entitlement to satisfaction or meaning." "sometimes taking her delicate oval eyeglasses off and not chewing on the arm but holding the glasses in such a way and in such proximity to her mouth that one got the idea she could, at any moment, put one of the frames’ arm’s plastic earguards just inside her mouth and nibble on it absently, an unconscious gesture of shyness and concentration at once." "This was the most simple and obvious example of the sort of complex system of large groups’ intragroup preferences influencing one another and building exponentially on one another, much more like a nuclear chain reaction or an epidemiological transmission grid than a simple case of each individual consumer deciding privately for himself what he wanted and then going out and judiciously spending his disposable income on it." "at least half the room’s men listening with what’s called half an ear while pursuing their own private lines of thought, and Schmidt had a quick vision of them all in the conference room as like icebergs and/or floes, only the sharp caps showing, unknown and -knowable to one another," "no no all that ever changed were the jargon and mechanisms and gilt rococo with which everyone in the whole huge blind grinding mechanism conspired to convince each other that they could figure out how to give the paying customer what they could prove he could be persuaded to believe he wanted, without anybody once ever saying stop a second or pointing out the absurdity of calling what they were doing collecting information or ever even saying aloud—not even Team Δy’s Field Researchers over drinks at Beyers’ Market Pub on E. Ohio together on Fridays before going home alone to stare at the phone—what was going on or what it meant or what the simple truth was." "That it made no difference. None of it." "dweebs and had managed at once to acknowledge, parody, and evect" "no no all that ever changed were the jargon and mechanisms and gilt rococo with which everyone in the whole huge blind grinding mechanism conspired to convince each other that they could figure out how to give the paying customer what they could prove he could be persuaded to believe he wanted, without anybody once ever saying stop a second or pointing out the absurdity of calling what they were doing collecting information or ever even saying aloud—not even Team Δy’s Field Researchers over drinks at Beyers’ Market Pub on E. Ohio together on Fridays before going home alone to stare at the phone—what was going on or what it meant or what the simple truth was. That it made no difference. None of it." "Undisplayed little tracking codes could be designed to tag and follow each consumer’s w3 interests and spending patterns—" "not only would there be no voir dire and no archaic per diem expenses but even the unnecessary variable of consumers even knowing they were part of any sort of market test was excised, since a consumer’s subjective awareness of his identity as a test subject instead of as a true desire-driven consumer had always been one of the distortions that market research swept under the rug because they had no way of quantifying subjective-identity-awareness on any known ANOVA. Focus Groups would go the way of the dodo and bison and art deco." "According to my brother’s own flights of fancy in childhood, the antique table we had possessed before I was old enough to be aware of anything that was going on had been burled walnut, with a large number of diamonds, sapphires, and rhinestones inset in the top in the likeness of the face of Queen Elizabeth I of England (1533-1603) as seen from the right side, and that the disappointment of its loss was part of the reason our father often looked so dispirited on coming home at the end of the day." "If asked, I could probably have told you the total number of letters, the most and the least used letters (in the latter case, a tie), as well as a number of different statistical functions by which the relative frequency of different letters’ appearance could be quantified, although I would not have put any of these data in this way, nor was I even quite aware that I could. The facts about the words were simply there, much the way a knowledge of how your tummy feels and where your arms are are there regardless of whether you’re paying attention to these parts or not." "jesus. that gives Melville's infected whale a run for its money for sheer pathos" "did not, though, initially recall the window’s narrative including any explanation of what fate befell the smaller, subordinate feral dog, with the sore, whose name was Scraps, and had run away from home because of the way its owner mistreated it when the tedium and despair of his lower level administrative job made him come home empty-eyed and angry and drink several highballs without any ice or even a lime, and later always found some excuse to be cruel to Scraps, who had waited alone at home all day and only wanted some petting or affection or to play tug of war with a rag or dog toy in order to take its mind off of its own bored loneliness, and whose life had been so awful that the backstory cut off abruptly after the second time the man kicked Scraps in the stomach so hard that Scraps couldn’t stop coughing and yet still tried to lick the man’s hand when he picked Scraps up and threw him in the cold garage and locked him in there all night, where Scraps lay alone in a tight ball on the cement floor coughing as quietly as he could." "The tableau, complete with the unfortunate piebald dog’s mouth open in agony and a rat or mutated roach abdomen protruding from his eyesocket as the predator’s anterior half consumed his eye and inner brain, was so traumatic that this narrative line was immediately stopped and replaced with a neutral view of the pipe’s exterior." "We often can remember the details and subjective associations far more vividly than the event itself. This explains the frequent tip-of-the-tongue feeling when trying to convey what is important about some memory or occurrence. Similarly, it is often what makes it so difficult to communicate meaningfully with others in later life. Often, the most vividly felt and remembered elements will appear at best tangential to someone else—" "the catastatic child apparently launches into an entire protodialectical inquiry into just why exactly the interlocutor believes in jealous and temperamental Yam Gods at all, and whether this villager has ever in quiet moments closed his eyes and sat very still and gazed deep inside himself to see whether in his very heart of hearts he truly believes in these ill-tempered Yam Gods or whether he’s merely been as it were culturally conditioned from an early age to ape what he has seen his parents and all the other villagers say and do and appear to believe, and whether it has ever late at night or in the humid quiet of the rain forest’s dawn occurred to the questioner that perhaps all these others didn’t really, truly believe in petulant Yam Gods either but were themselves merely aping what they in turn saw everyone else behaving as if they believed, and so on, and whether it was possible—just as a thought-experiment if nothing else—that everyone in the entire village had at some quiet point seen into their hearts’ hearts and realized that their putative belief in the Yam Gods was mere mimicry and so felt themselves to be a secret hypocrite or fraud; and, if so, that what if just one villager of whatever caste or family suddenly stood up and admitted aloud that he was merely following empty custom and did not in his heart of hearts truly believe in any fearsome set of Yam Gods requiring propitiation to prevent drought or decimation by yam-aphids: would that villager be stoned to death, or banished, or might his admission not just possibly be met with a huge collective sigh of relief because now everyone else could be spared oppressive inner feelings of hypocrisy and self-contempt and admit their own inner disbelief as well;" "‘You, child, who are so gifted and sagacious and wise: Is it possible that you have not realized the extent to which these primitive villagers have exaggerated your gifts, have transformed you into something you know too well you are not? Surely you have seen that they so revere you precisely because they themselves are too unwise to see your limitations? How long before they, too, see what you have seen when gazing deep inside yourself? Surely it has occurred to you. Surely one such as yourself must know already how terribly fickle the affections of a primitive Third World village can be. But tell me, child: Have you begun yet to be afraid? Have you begun yet then to plan for the day when they wake to a truth you already know: that you are not half so complete as they believe? That the illusion these children have made of you cannot be sustained?" "This is another paradox, that many of the most important impressions and thoughts in a person’s life are ones that flash through your head so fast that fast isn’t even the right word, they seem totally different from or outside of the regular sequential clock time we all live by, and they have so little relation to the sort of linear, one-word-after-another-word English we all communicate with each other with that it could easily take a whole lifetime just to spell out the contents of one split-second’s flash of thoughts and connections, etc.—and yet we all seem to go around trying to use English (or whatever language our native country happens to use, it goes without saying) to try to convey to other people what we’re thinking and to find out what they’re thinking, when in fact deep down everybody knows it’s a charade and they’re just going through the motions. What goes on inside is just too fast and huge and all interconnected for words to do more than barely sketch the outlines of at most one tiny little part of it at any given instant. The internal head-speed or whatever of these ideas, memories, realizations, emotions and so on is even faster, by the way—exponentially faster, unimaginably faster—when you’re dying, meaning during that vanishingly tiny nanosecond between when you technically die and when the next thing happens, so that in reality the cliché about people’s whole life flashing before their eyes as they’re dying isn’t all that far off—although the whole life here isn’t really a sequential thing" "but in the inter-office politics of the agency itself, like for example in sizing up what sorts of things your superiors want to believe (including the belief that they’re smarter than you and that that’s why they’re your superior) and then giving them what they want but doing it just subtly enough that they never get a chance to view you as a sycophant or yes-man (which they want to believe they do not really want) but instead see you as a tough-minded independent thinker who from time to time bows to the weight of their superior intelligence and creative firepower, etc. The whole agency was one big ballet of fraudulence and of manipulating people’s images of your ability to manipulate images, a virtual hall of mirrors." "also inserted that there was also a good possibility that, when all was said and done, I was nothing but just another fast-track yuppie who couldn’t love, and that I found the banality of this unendurable, largely because I was evidently so hollow and insecure that I had a pathological need to see myself as somehow exceptional or outstanding at all times." "which somehow entailed that real scenes like the one of my suicide note were now compelling and genuine only to their participants, and to anyone else would come off as banal and even somewhat cheesy or maudlin, which is somewhat paradoxical when you consider—as I did, sitting there at the breakfast nook—that the reason scenes like this will seem stale or manipulative to an audience is that we’ve already seen so many of them in dramas, and yet the reason we’ve seen so many of them in dramas is that the scenes really are dramatic and compelling and let people communicate very deep, complicated emotional realities that are almost impossible to articulate in any other way," "appointment and perhaps inquire about a prescription. And yet Hope has been wholly obdurate and unyielding on this point, insisting that it was I who was ‘the one who’s asleep,’ and that if I could or would not acknowledge this, my refusal to ‘trust’ her indicated that I must be ‘angry at [her]’ over something, or perhaps unconsciously wished to ‘hurt’ her, and that if anyone around here needed to ‘make an appointment’ it was myself, which according to Hope I would not hesitate to do if my respect and concern for her even slightly outweighed my own selfish insistence on being ‘right.’" "Nor does one hardly ever see actual flypaper anymore." Grammatically and semantically correct, but remarkably bitchy to read, especially considering the brevity. "The rear of the artist’s company van listed a toll free number to dial if one had any concerns about the employee’s driving." "But when she stood up with the excuse of asking to use the bathroom, even in the midst of asking she couldn’t stand the feeling of evil and began running for the door in stocking feet in order to get out, but it was not the front door she ran for, it was the other door, even though she didn’t know where it was, except she must know because there it was, with a decorative and terribly detailed metal scarab over the knob, and whatever the overwhelming evil was was right behind it, the door, but for some reason even as she’s overcome with fear she’s also reaching for the doorknob, she’s going to open it, she can see herself starting to open it—and that’s when she wakes." "She also had the kind of sick headache where it hurt to move her eyes, and whenever she moved her eyes she could not help but seem to feel all the complex musculature connecting her eyeballs to her brain, which made her feel even woozier." "There was something essentially soul killing about the print of the vegetable head clown that had made Atwater want to turn it to the wall, but it was bolted or glued and could not be moved. It was really on there, and Atwater now was trying to consider whether hanging a bath towel or something over it would or would not perhaps serve to draw emotional attention to the print and make it an even more oppressive part of the room for anyone who already knew what was under the towel. Whether the painting was worse actually seen or merely, so to speak, alluded to. Standing angled at the bathroom’s exterior sink and mirror unit, it occurred to him that these were just the sorts of overabstract thoughts that occupied his mind in motels, instead of the arguably much more urgent and concrete problem of finding the television’s remote control." "The second level’s ice machine roared without cease in a large utility closet next to Atwater’s room." This is lovely. These are the noise levels of America brought home in one sentence. "It is a fact of life that certain people are corrosive to others’ self esteem simply as a function of who and what they are." "One clue that there’s something not quite real about sequential time the way you experience it is the various paradoxes of time supposedly passing and of a so-called ‘present’ that’s always unrolling into the future and creating more and more past behind it. As if the present were this car—nice car by the way—and the past is the road we’ve just gone over, and the future is the headlit road up ahead we haven’t yet gotten to, and time is the car’s forward movement, and the precise present is the car’s front bumper as it cuts through the fog of the future, so that it’s now and then a tiny bit later a whole different now, etc. Except if time is really passing, how fast does it go? At what rate does the present change? See? Meaning if we use time to measure motion or rate—which we do, it’s the only way you can—95 miles per hour, 70 heartbeats a minute, etc.—how are you supposed to measure the rate at which time moves? One second per second? It makes no sense. You can’t even talk about time flowing or moving without hitting up against paradox right away. So think for a second: What if there’s really no movement at all? What if this is all unfolding in the one flash you call the present, this first, infinitely tiny split-second of impact when the speeding car’s front bumper’s just starting to touch the abutment, just before the bumper crumples and displaces the front end and you go violently forward and the steering column comes back at your chest as if shot out of something enormous? Meaning that what if in fact this now is infinite and never really passes in the way your mind is supposedly wired to understand pass, so that not only your whole life but every single humanly conceivable way to describe and account for that life has time to flash like neon shaped into those connected cursive letters that businesses’ signs and windows love so much to use through your mind all at once in the literally immeasurable instant between impact and death, just as you start forward to meet the wheel at a rate no belt ever made could restrain—THE END." -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] As to Foster Wallace's style, your mileage may vary: I've written the second paragraph in an approximation of his style. If that's already too much for you, then don't even bother picking up Oblivion. ]]> </content> </entry> <entry> <title type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[The Psychopath Test by Jon Ronson (2011) (read in 2016)]]> </title> <id>https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3281</id> <link href="https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3281"/> <updated>2017-01-01T17:25:42+01:00</updated> <author> <name type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Marco von Ballmoos]]> </name> <uri>https://earthli.com/users/marco</uri> </author> <summary type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA["Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is" ... ]]> </summary> <content type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Published by marco on 1. Jan 2017 17:25:42 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I've failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an interest in this book, then I'm happy for you." Jon Ronson is a journalist with an eccentric beat. He seems to cover what takes his fancy and his fancy often turns to the oddest -- though at least somewhat successful -- members of society. In this one, he delves into the business of psychology and the nature of psychopaths. He interviews various people who could be considered psychopaths, wonders whether he himself is one, takes a course with Bob Hare -- world-famous as the inventor of the original psychopath checklist -- to find out how to track and evaluate more professionally, then discovers that the power has gone to his head and perhaps psychopaths aren't another species entirely -- or near-to -- and there is a bandwidth of human behavior, some of which falls within norms and other that doesn't. There are also big players involved in making sure that people think they're sick. Society wants to benefit from the best minds, but also doesn't want to be changed too much by them. It is often difficult to tell the difference between a purported psychopath and a very intellectually engaged person. Ronson realizes that the checklist approach often just takes the human element out of evaluation and ends up making bad things happen to otherwise normal people -- or at least people who aren't a danger to anyone. At the end, he addresses the medical/psychiatric/pharmaceutical industry as a whole, seeing it for the capitalist engine of self-realization that it is. The engine gets people to participate because they're concerned about their mental well-being, but the engine is only concerned about selling unneeded medicines and making a profit. [Citations] "Any psychiatrist could pick up the manual they were creating—DSM-III—and if the patient’s overt symptoms tallied with the checklist, they’d get the diagnosis. And that’s how practically every disorder you’ve ever heard of or have been diagnosed with came to be invented, inside that chaotic conference room, under the auspices of Robert Spitzer, who was taking his inspiration from checklist pioneers like Bob Hare. “Give me some examples,” I asked him. “Oh . . .” He waved his arm in the air to say there were just so many. “Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Borderline Personality Disorder, Attention Deficit Disorder . . .” Then there was Autism, Anorexia Nervosa, Bulimia, Panic Disorder . . . every one a brand-new disorder with its own checklist of symptoms." "“Were there any proposals for mental disorders you rejected?” I asked Spitzer. He thought for a moment. “Yes,” he finally said. “I do remember one. Atypical Child Syndrome.” There was a short silence. “Atypical Child Syndrome?” I said. “The problem was when we tried to find out how to characterize it. I said, ‘What are the symptoms?’ The man proposing it replied, ‘That’s hard to say because the children are very atypical.’ ” He paused. “And we were going to include Masochistic Personality Disorder, but there were a bunch of feminists who were violently opposed.” “Why?” “They thought it was labeling the victim.” “What happened to it?” “We changed the name to Self-Defeating Personality Disorder and put it into the appendix.”" "But DSM-III, Spitzer’s DSM, was coming in at 494 pages. He turned the checklists into interview questionnaires and sent researchers out into America to ask hundreds of thousands of people at random how they felt. It turned out that almost all of them felt terrible. And according to the new checklists, more than 50 percent of them were suffering from a mental disorder. DSM-III was a sensation. Along with its revised edition, it sold more than a million copies. Sales to civilians hugely outweighed sales to professionals. Many more copies were sold than psychiatrists existed. All over the western world people began using the checklists to diagnose themselves. For many of them it was a godsend. Something was categorically wrong with them and finally their suffering had a name. It was truly a revolution in psychiatry, and a gold rush for drug companies, who suddenly had hundreds of new disorders they could invent medications for, millions of new patients they could treat. “The pharmaceuticals were delighted with DSM,” Spitzer told me, and this in turn delighted him: “I love to hear examples of parents who say, ‘It was impossible to live with him until we gave him medication and then it was night and day.’ That’s good news for a DSM person.”" "a surfeit of checklists, coupled with unscrupulous drug reps, is, Gary said, a dreadful combination." "I wondered if sometimes the difference between a psychopath in Broadmoor and a psychopath on Wall Street was the luck of being born into a stable, rich family." "“Ever since I went on a Bob Hare course, I’ve believed that psychopaths are monsters,” I said. “They’re just psychopaths, it’s what defines them, it’s what they are.” I paused. “But isn’t Tony kind of a semi-psychopath? A gray area? Doesn’t his story prove that people in the middle shouldn’t necessarily be defined by their maddest edges?” “I think that’s right,” he replied. “Personally I don’t like the way Bob Hare talks about psychopaths almost as if they are a different species.” Tony was standing alone now, staring at the wall. “He does have a very high level of some psychopathic traits,” he said. “He never takes responsibility, everything is somebody else’s fault, but not of others. He’s not a serious, predatory offender. So he can be a bully in the right circumstances but he doesn’t set out to do serious harm for its own sake. I would also say you can never reduce any person to a diagnostic label. Tony has many endearing qualities when you look beyond the label.”" ]]> </content> </entry> <entry> <title type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Books read in 2016]]> </title> <id>https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3209</id> <link href="https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3209"/> <updated>2016-12-31T07:01:36+01:00</updated> <author> <name type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Marco von Ballmoos]]> </name> <uri>https://earthli.com/users/marco</uri> </author> <summary type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Seveneves (2015) by Neal Stephenson This is another epic work by Stephenson, spanning almost 900 pages and over 5000 years. He picks up some themes I've seen in other books while including a lot of his standard fascination for technological detail, weaponry in particular. This is the story of the ... ]]> </summary> <content type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Published by marco on 31. Dec 2016 07:01:36 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Seveneves (2015) by Neal Stephenson This is another epic work by Stephenson, spanning almost 900 pages and over 5000 years. He picks up some themes I've seen in other books while including a lot of his standard fascination for technological detail, weaponry in particular. This is the story of the eradication of life as we know it on the planet Earth. Something called The Agent enters the Moon from one side and exits from the other, shattering it into seven large pieces and innumerable smaller ones. The Agent is a deus ex machina -- at least for this first novel -- and we cease thinking about its origins almost immediately to focus on the problems engendered by splitting the Moon. I've included "notes, citations and errata" <https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3213> in a separate post. Shift (2015) by Hugh Howey This is the second book in the Silo series, after Wool. In the first book, we were introduced to the people of the Silo, what we would learn at the very end is Silo 18 of 50. This book runs prior and then parallel to Wool, filling in the detail as to how mankind ended up in silos. It is the story of Donald, a freshman senator and his mentor, Thurman, an experience senator, a war hero and probably the most powerful man in America, president included. It is about 30 years in our future and nanomachines are being used by the rich and powerful to prolong their lives and health. They're also being used by the military. I've included "notes, citations and errata" <https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3218> in a separate post. Dust (2015) by Hugh Howey This novel picks up where Shift left off, with Juliette having returned to Silo 18. She’s mayor, Lukas is head of IT, Donald is feeding Lukas and Juliette information in an effort to help them survive while Charlotte (Donald’s sister) continues to launch drones, trying to fly far enough to see the world beyond the Silo zone. Juliette is mayor, but her people are not really behind her, because she brings tidings in which the populace is not interested. Don’t change anything. Please. She does, though. Can’t seem to stop picking that scab. So she digs to the other silo, goes outside to sample air, discovers things, talks to Donald and Charlene on the radio to find out more, to hear how they’ve pieced things together while not trusting and misinterpreting and stumbling toward some form of truth. Silo 18 follows 17's lead, 18 flees to 17, then flees the silo area for good, making good on what Donald and Charlene saw. After so much misery, hope. I've included "notes, citations and errata" <https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3219> in a separate post. Hard to be a God (1974; 1973 in English) by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky Since the movie followed the book so faithfully, I'll just include some of the text from my movie review. The story is of an Earth-like planet on which a similar evolutionary track was followed by a very human-like race, but they never experienced a Renaissance. Their buildings are of poor quality, their sanitation is a horror and their hygiene is non-existent. The filth is omnipresent. You can almost smell this movie. It’s incredible how absolutely everything is covered with mud, food remnants and shit. The fog and rain soak everything. Everything is of primitive construction, people shit and piss and blow their pus-running noses everywhere. They spit, they taste things, they scratch, they pick and they flick. Slaves have boards around their necks—almost everyone we see is a slave of some kind. People have eyes missing. Instead of a Renaissance, a Khmer Rouge-style revolution has occurred: all books and learning and instruments and advancement have been destroyed and their purveyors and inventors put to death. One form of execution we see is upending in a latrine. We follow the story of Don Rumata, an Earthman sent ostensibly to study these people but who has taken up as a God among them. We follow him from his “palace”, interacting with the various psychotic locals, to a local market (?) where he meets up with a group of other Earthlings. It is not hard to imagine that the people find him to be a God—he is so much cleaner than the others, with metal greaves and vambraces pretty much the only thing they see of him. Everything’s in a terrible state of disrepair and we see the only minds allowed to work involved in building new torture devices. The “bookworms” have all been hanged and left to rot on a gallows. The dialogue is also scattered, nonsensical, but enough sense can be distilled to follow a story. Everyone is near-mad, the actions unexplainable, the destruction they wreak on their environs chaotic. Random, wanton, childish. An unenlightened world of fools. It’s impossible to imagine how such a society survives, how it feeds itself, how it staves off disease. Every scene reflects their actions, implements and armor and chains and animals and fowl and bells pinned and tied and roped and chained everywhere, covered in filth and dripping water. The Strugatsky brothers certainly delivered a tour de force in this novel, a novel of science-fictional despair rather than triumph. Please see the "full movie review" <https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3212> for more detail. I've included "notes, citations and errata" <https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3226> in a separate post. The Dead Mountaineer's Inn (1970; 1982 in English) by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky This is a whodunnit mystery starring Peter Glebsky as a Russian customs and counterfeit officer on vacation at a remote mountain cabin -- somewhere in the Alps -- with several other guests. He has traveled there alone and wishes to enjoy two weeks away from work. Classic setup. The other guests are all odd in their own way: the exceedingly rich Mr. Morse and his ravishing wife, the illusionist Mr. Du Barnstoker and his androgynous and near-constantly be-sunglassed nibling Brun, Mr. Simonet, a world-renowned physicist and accomplished mountain climber, Mr. Hinckus, an odd, little and quiet attorney, as well as Olaf Andvarafors, a giant of a man in both size and personality. As you can well imagine, bodies start to appear, alcohol is drunk in prodigious quantities, accusations are thrown, people disappear, odd clues are found and Glebsky is drawn ever farther from the peace and relaxation he'd sought. The Mafia becomes involved. Some of the guests turn out to be robots. This is a story of first contact. As with Roadside Picnic, this alien contact does not lead to any satisfying conclusion for anyone. It is depicted as confusing and fruitless as such things usually are (i.e. when two cultures collide, if only briefly). In the light of not being able know for sure anything about anything, Glebsky muses that one unsatisfying "truth" is as good as any other, so one might as well choose the most satisfying one. I've included "notes, citations and errata" <https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3229> in a separate post. Roadside Picnic (1972; 1977 in English) by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky This is the book on which director Andrei Tarkovsky's Stalker was based. The world of the book has six Zones on it, areas tainted by the touch of alien contact. These areas have artifacts with fantastic properties but unknown use. The use to which humanity can put them may be incidental to their original purpose. For all intents and purposes, humanity has no chance of understanding what happened when the aliens visited -- the gulf is far too great. The aliens are much too advanced for humanity to even begin to empathize or understand them. We follow the story of Red Schuhart, a gifted stalker -- someone who enters the Zones to pilfer artifacts -- over several years, as he is hired and fired by a research company, as he goes to jail and is released to stalk again, as he tries to provide for his family, as he is trapped for his whole life in the whorl around the Zone in his town. The plot is different than the movie, though Red's final mission into the zone roughly matches up with the movie's plot: in the book, he seeks a wish-granting "golden sphere" whereas in the movie, it's a room. I love the Strugatsky brothers' style. It's very much cynical, with great characters, very much on a par with 60s and 70s-era science fiction in the the United States. This is a fantastic story and pairs extremely well with the film. I've included "notes, citations and errata" <https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3230> in a separate post. Gulliver's Travels (1726) by Jonathan Swift This tale follows the life of gentleman adventurer Gulliver along several ocean voyages, each of which ends in shipwreck. The first takes him to Lilliput, where he is much, much bigger than everyone else. He describes his nine months there as he quickly learns their language and ingratiates himself to the emperor. He returns home with adequate riches in the form of miniature livestock that he sells to finance the family he left behind. Soon after, he is on a boat again, stranding himself somewhere in the Pacific, on a large heretofore undiscovered continent in the Pacific Ocean called Brobdignag. On this continent, the residents are as much bigger than he as he was bigger than the Lilliputians. He tells of his rather mundane adventures there, but be assured that here, too, he befriends royalty and plants himself firmly at the top of the Brobdingnagian food-chain. He is swept off this continent by circumstance (and a bird) and is once again rescued on the open ocean. This most unfortunate of sailors is somehow taken up on another crew. This ship is attacked by pirates and Gulliver is stranded near idea. He is picked up by the flying island of Laputa, which is composed nearly entirely of adamant and has an adamant mechanism to guide its motion. After spending some time among the royalty there, he becomes bored and wants to visit the lands below, named Balnibarbi. Again, Gulliver is feted by all and invited everywhere important. In the great university of Lagado he finds the reason the country is so dilapidated: the entirety of the people's efforts have been perverted into non-rational and non-scientific pursuits that have no hope of accomplishing anything useful. There are only a few holdouts, whose homes and lands look normal and seem productive to Gulliver. A final side trip to Glubbdubdrib has him communing with the ghosts of all of the celebrities of the ages, thanks to the help of a great sorcerer. Gulliver again benefits from tremendous powers without any reason as to why he is singled out for the privilege. After once again returning home to his wife and children -- who must be teenagers by now -- he cannot stay put and takes advantage of an offer to captain his own vessel. This is a capital idea if you want to commit insurance fraud, as the vessel is almost certain to capsize or otherwise fail to reach its destination with Gulliver aboard. It turns out that, this time, Gulliver's crew is less than honorable and they hire criminals to replace expired members until he has no more control and they trap him in his cabin. After weeks, they resolve to rid themselves of him in a small dinghy. He of course fetches up on yet another previously undiscovered land, this one populated by Yahoos and Houyhnhnms. The Yahoos are life extremely vile humans with no civilizing characteristics. The Houyhnhnms are horses with pure rationality and no strife and perfect in every way. Gulliver, of course, lives with the Houyhnhnms, even though he looks just like a Yahoo, which they keep as work animals. He spends years with them, learning their language and their ways and resolving to never return to the debased culture whence he came. Alas, the Houyhnhnms decide to get rid of him because they cannot abide a Yahoo in their midst. He builds himself a canoe and -- lo and behold -- is rescued by a Portuguese ship. He is of two minds: he wants to be rescued, but he doesn't want to spend any time in the company of Yahoos. He doesn't even want to return to civilization, really. He abhors everything about his own kind and can no longer abide even the smell of them. This applies even to his family once he is returned to England, where he lives out the rest of his days as a recluse, unable to reintegrate with the Yahoos. I've included "notes, citations and errata" <https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3259> in a separate post. Blockade Billy (2010) by Stephen King This is a novella of just over 100 pages, so it's a short story by King's standards. It tells the story of 1950s major-league baseball, of the New Jersey Titans during one particular season when they needed a new catcher. These were the days when being a ball-player was just a job, not a chance at everlasting fame and wealth. With their starting catcher in jail and their backup injured beyond repair, the Titans found Billy Blakely. He's quiet, talks to himself, repeats what others say and seems a bit...off. But he can catch, he gets along well with the prima-donna pitcher and he hits a lot better than expected. The story is told from the point of view of "Granny", the manager of the Titans at the time. Granny is now in a home, bored out of his mind, and only to happy to tell this story, with its sad and bizarre ending, to a "Mr. King". Oblivion: Stories (2005) by David Foster Wallace This is a collection of short stories about various topics. Wallace's strength is in his exquisitely detailed and precise prose. He tells his stories through the subconscious ramblings of his characters, over interwoven and using tens of pages to describe a split second. Two of the stories are almost novellas; others are very, very short. Many of them have the feel of books that he started and never quite finished. There's also almost always that vague feeling of self-psychoanalysis, with characters exhibiting and working their way through insecurities that Wallace himself was known to have. The details of the stories are almost always vaguely bizarre: one unnamed and un-narrated character climbs a building in a blow-up advertising suit (Mister Squishy), in another a thread of thought about the litigation associated with his (formerly) secret black-widow farm haunts a man whose mother's botched plastic surgery makes her look constantly surprised, another is a school-hostage situation, as told by a daydreamer who nearly missed the whole thing but can recount the nano-details of daydream in a way that nearly supplants the "main" thread, another is the story of a man in psychoanalysis who reveals onion-skinned lies to eventually admit why he killed himself in a violent car accident, there is the man who is convinced he doesn't snore, the harpy to whom he's married who is convinced that he does, but both suffer from rare and strange disorders that mean they're both right and wrong and, finally, there's the final story, which is again set in the (at least semi-) bureaucratic world of advertising and market-analysis, which feels like a run at a chapter out of Infinite Jest. The first story did as well, and made me want to read The Pale King, although I'd heard that that work was unfinished. Although dissatisfying in the sense that the narrative loop isn't closed, even an unfinished David Foster Wallace story is a breathtaking jewel. [1] I've included "notes, citations and errata" <https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3280> in a separate post. The Psychopath Test (2011) by Jon Ronson Jon Ronson is a journalist with an eccentric beat. He seems to cover what takes his fancy and his fancy often turns to the oddest -- though at least somewhat successful -- members of society. In this one, he delves into the business of psychology and the nature of psychopaths. He interviews various people who could be considered psychopaths, wonders whether he himself is one, takes a course with Bob Hare -- world-famous as the inventor of the original psychopath checklist -- to find out how to track and evaluate more professionally, then discovers that the power has gone to his head and perhaps psychopaths aren't another species entirely -- or near-to -- and there is a bandwidth of human behavior, some of which falls within norms and other that doesn't. There are also big players involved in making sure that people think they're sick. Society wants to benefit from the best minds, but also doesn't want to be changed too much by them. It is often difficult to tell the difference between a purported psychopath and a very intellectually engaged person. Ronson realizes that the checklist approach often just takes the human element out of evaluation and ends up making bad things happen to otherwise normal people -- or at least people who aren't a danger to anyone. At the end, he addresses the medical/psychiatric/pharmaceutical industry as a whole, seeing it for the capitalist engine of self-realization that it is. The engine gets people to participate because they're concerned about their mental well-being, but the engine is only concerned about selling unneeded medicines and making a profit. I've included "notes, citations and errata" <https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3281> in a separate post. Finders, Keepers (2015) by Stephen King This is the sequel to Mr. Mercedes, reuniting the trio of detectives that formed at the end of that book: Holly, Jerome and Bill Hodges. They are a fun team to watch, typically interesting King characters. The story is good but feels a bit too well-oiled, especially if you’ve read a lot of Stephen King books. You know where it’s going and how it’s going to end. The bits of foreshadowing with Brady are eerie and quite well-done—much more like his best of old. This story follows (yet another) avid fan (Morris) of a noir-mystery writer (think Roth and Updike with a bit of the reclusive Salinger) who feels betrayed by how his hero’s character was made to end. He’s such an avid fan that he breaks into the writer’s home with two cohorts in order to rob him of supposedly large amounts of cash. He discovers a final novel with his hero in it, unpublished for decades. Enraged, he kills the writer for the multiple betrayals of this fictional hero, getting away with the crime and stashing the novel away where he can read it in peace. Before he can read a single page, though, he goes on a bender and rapes a girl. He is caught and sentenced to decades in prison. Fast-forward twenty years (or so) and Pete, a young guy in his last year of high school, discovers the book hidden in a trunk. He, too, is an avid fan of the writer and immediately recognizes the book for what it is. He also makes good use of the money stashed with the book to anonymously get his family through tough times. As you would expect, Morris is eventually paroled and comes looking for his book and his money, both of which are gone. He quickly ascertains what happened and pursues Pete. The detective trio are hot on his trail, trying to save Pete and solve the mystery. I've included "notes, citations and errata" <https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3290> in a separate post. We (1921) by Evgeny Zamyatin How do I even begin to describe a novel of this breadth and imagination and density of idea and thought? Zamyatin packed in seemingly every single concept he could think of, presaging many other novelists who would come after, not least of whom are Orwell, Huxley, Dick and more. As with those other authors, his novel is set in a dystopian future, in a glass city completely shut off from nature and the non-calculable, the non-rational, the unpredictable, from anything that is not 100% statistically predictable. The lives of the citizens of this city run like clockwork, with no deviations allowed or -- for the most part -- even attempted. Each person is assigned a letter and a number, the letter in some ways emotionally evocative of the kind of person, but only in an abstract way. The writing style is at-times florid and descriptive and sumptuous and rich -- nearly every paragraph bears re-reading, nearly every sentence feels hand-crafted to contribute to the overarching concept of the book in myriad ways, from the spelling of words to multi-layered allusions to mixing in of wordplay in English and other languages. The translation is, I feel, quite sublime. We follow the life of D-503, the main designer of the Integral, a majestic spaceship being built to seek the stars after 1000 years of the founding of the One State. We follow his turning from a cog in the machine to a rebel by I-330 and his subsequent falling in love with both her and O-90. As in novels that would follow -- like 1984 -- he walks the path to revolution and is then pulled back by the One State through surgery (essentially lobotomy of emotion and imagination). Despite his subjugation, damage is done to the One State and its glass-walled city, nature once again impinging on it, disrupting its clean rationality. The leaders of the revolution are captured and tortured but do not relent, even in death. The revolution will continue, somehow. I've included "notes, citations and errata" <https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3294> in a separate post. Definitely Maybe (1977; 1978 in English) by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky This is the story of a physics researcher, toiling alone on a problem, on the edge of a great discovery. The closer he gets to breaking through, to culminating his research, the more the universe seems to resist him. Distracting visitors drop by, his neighbor turns out to be much more than he'd appeared, then is murdered. The murder suspect is the researcher himself, with more visitors dropping in to threaten and cajole. He meets other researchers who, as they swap stories, all realize that they've been similarly stymied, that they each were gently nudged from their goal by an invisible and inexorable impasse. In a vein similar to how capital-T Time resists change in 11/22/63, Stephen King's novel about the Kennedy assassination, here it is the capital-U Universe that resists the plumbing of its deepest workings. They discover that its possible that the Universe tries to preserve a homeostatic balance between entropy and reasoning ability -- not actively, but by a principle similar to Heisenberg's about position and momentum. The cabal of scientists try to wrap their head around this concept and try to work out how they could even possibly continue to research it -- or even harness it -- if it is true. Because if it's true, then it means that the Universe will resist investigation into proving this principle, by definition. I've included "notes, citations and errata" <https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3293> in a separate post. The Hippopotamus: A Novel (1994) by Stephen Fry Edward is the "Hippo" and the star of this novel, so-called because of the combination of his girth and his penchant for long baths. He is a one-time up-and-coming poet reduced to a theater critic by waning talent, insufficient gumption and a teensy problem with alcohol. He is swept up in the affairs of his rich-and-famous family when they variously ask him to help discover the secret behind the seeming miraculous workings of his godson. He goes to the stately manor of his old friend, the child's father and proceeds to surreptitiously investigate the matter, collecting information and impressions from the various other hangers-on. He slowly forms a theory, dispensing disputable wisdom and folly all the while, until the story culminates -- as you would expect -- in a revelatory conclusion at a large dinner party, in which the Hippo explains all and solves the mystery. I've included "notes, citations and errata" <https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3295> in a separate post. Making History (1997) by Stephen Fry This is the story of Michael Young, a doctoral student who is on the verge of delivering his oral presentation of an obscure bit of history involving Adolf Hitler and his mother. Through a series of coincidences, he meets Leo Zuckerman, a physicist who has invented a machine that can look back in time. Together, with a shared interest and passion for the era of the rise of Hitler, they set about modifying the machine to enable them to not only look but to make slight changes. The slight change they make is to pollute the water supply of Brunau (the town in which Hitler was born) with an experimental male contraceptive, preventing Hitler's birth. Part two begins with Michael awakening not in England but in Princeton in America in an alternate future engendered by his and Leo's meddling. The alternate history is one even worse than the one with Hitler in it, a world dominated by a charming, brilliant anti-Semitic polyglot who not only survives WWII but leads Germany and his Nazi party to victory over the world. He exterminates all Jews using the Brunau water to sterilize the lot of them. Michael is horrified and endeavors to locate Leo, who is also wracked with guilt and has, once again, developed a Temporal Imager. They once again modify the machine and concoct a plan to poison the Brunau water with a dead rat, preventing anyone from drinking the water and therefore the contraceptive in it. The timeline is restored, with Michael waking to a more familiar reality, albeit it with some slight changes again. I've included "notes, citations and errata" <https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3296> in a separate post. Revenge: A Novel (2003) by Stephen Fry This book is also known as The Stars’ Tennis Balls, which is why this book was so familiar to me, but I couldn’t quite place why. I’d "read it before but under the other title" <https://www.earthli.com/news/news/view_article.php?id=2459>. This is a modern re-telling of Dumas's Count of Monte Christo, with Edward "Ned" Maddstone playing the main role. He is a good-looking, sporty, averagely intelligent and socially well-placed young man to whom everything has always come easily because no obstacles have ever been allowed to remain in his way. He is blissfully unaware of how good he has it. He has a lovely, lovely girlfriend. He has some friends, all of whom hate him very much, for various reasons. These friends conspire to get him arrested, but a bad coincidence leads him into the hands of a secret service with every reason to eliminate him, as well. So, what starts off as an evil schoolboy prank that would have resulted in real but limited prison time or at least parole, turns instead to permanent banishment to a remote island of political prisoners. Ned is, to say the least, utterly out of his depth and bewildered beyond knowing. Nothing in his life has prepared him for this challenge, as he's never had to surmount a real challenge himself. At the island, he is psychologically re-programmed to believe that his previous life was a fiction produced by his madness. There he meets "Babe", another prisoner, put there because he was nearly unbelievably dangerously talented and intelligent. He was a spy who'd outlived his usefulness. Babe takes Ned under his wing and teaches him everything he knows over the next twenty years. Babe helps him remember his past and helps him decipher what happened to him. Babe dies of a heart attack and Ned takes the opportunity to escape the island. Armed with Babes bank account and knowledge (not the least of nine languages), he builds a software empire as Simon Cotter and plans his complex and nefarious revenge on those who wronged him. The manner of this revenge is intricate and exquisitely detailed and deliciously just. He does not stumble or deviate from his path, although he loses everything he'd perhaps hoped to gain, retreating to the island whence he came. I've included "notes, citations and errata" <https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3297> in a separate post. Numero Zero (2015) by Umberto Eco As ever with Eco, this is not just a novel, but a meta-book about the making of a book detailing the inner workings and construction of a non-partisan newspaper that will tell the "truth". The newspaper is the brainchild of an eccentric tycoon Commendator Vimercate, but the purpose is that just the idea of the newspaper is to serve as a lever on shadowy figures of power, who will allow him into their inner sanctum in exchange for his shutting it down. In effect, the newspaper will never be and the book documenting its rise as well, but it has to be seen to have real potentiality in order for its effect to be served. Convoluted as ever, Eco's prose and his ability to make this concept believable carry him a long way. The story follows the tales of the various reporters from the various beats, going down the rabbit holes of one conspiracy after another (as usual for Eco, for whom the semiotics of conspiracy was a special passion). Though they should be telling the truth, the various journalists bandy about obviously fabricated stories that they purport get closer to the "truth" than true stories would. The main theory is proposed by Braggadocio (one of many puns) who doggedly pursues a story of Mussolini having survived the second World War and having pulled the levers of power long into the 1970s. As ever, there are enough bits of real history woven in so as to make it nearly impossible to tell what's true and false, as Eco was delighted to have it. See Foucault's Pendulum for an even more extravagant and interwoven and longer treatment of the same idea. In the end, the main character Colonna has a book but no publisher and no interest because the newspaper about which he wrote never existed. Nor could he be sure to be able to use his story without attracting the attention of possibly existing shadowy forces that he fear might try to stop him. He takes his salary and slinks away. I've included "notes, citations and errata" <https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3298> in a separate post. The Cyberiad (1965; 1974 in English) by Stanislaw Lem This is a collection of short stories qua science-fiction fairy tales about Trurl and Klapaucius, the "constructors". They travel far and wide through the galaxy, meeting monarchs great and small, constructing wonderful robots and thinking machines and even clockwork facsimiles of entire universes. Many of the stories elucidate physical principles in fantastical ways, like their "demon of the second kind" which is loosely related to Maxwell's Demon. Another story discusses dragons as quantum-like creatures whose probability of existence can be controlled technologically to make them appear where the possibility of their presence would otherwise be vanishingly small. Other stories explore the limits of human knowledge in philosophical ways, as expressed through nearly ludicrously advanced technology, some of which beggars belief. Their construction skills know seemingly no bounds. We see them start off as bitter rivals and grow to grudging compatriots who even come to one another's rescue, when needed. At the beginning, they seem to be human, but hints dropped throughout the run of stories show them to be clockwork creations themselves. I've included "notes, citations and errata" <https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3299> in a separate post. The Stars My Destination (1957) by Alfred Bester This is a classic, nearly the original, space opera, which, like We above, packs nearly every concept into it that would be explored by other authors over the next decades. But Alfred Bester was there first. We follow the life of Gully Foyle, a low-level technician on a space-freighter plying its trade from the Inner Planets to the Outer Satellites. Think The Expanse and you'll be close enough. The economy of this construction is severely affected by the discovery of "jaunting" which is a sort of personal teleportation available only to the planet-bound. Hi ship is attacked and the entire crew is left for dead. He survives for months until he is rescued/kidnapped by an asteroid cult that tattoos his face with a hideous tiger tattoo. Foyle is now driven purely by rage, with no allegiance to anyone but his ideation of revenge on the Presteign Corporation (think the globe-spanning corps of Gibson's works). Foyle is captured in his quest, tortured, does not break, is imprisoned where he can't jaunt, in a giant French subterranean fortress -- evincing memories of Le Chateau D'If from The Count of Monte Christo. He and a female companion are the first to break free, but he abandons her in their flight, choosing his quest for revenge above their love. He makes it to the Outer Satellites where he reinvents himself as Geoffrey Fourmyle, an extremely rich and profligate trader who has had his tattoo mostly removed -- it appears only when he loses control and his face reddens. He reestablishes contact with many of the elites who were at his throat before, but they don't recognize him, again inspiring echoes of Dumas-'s Monte Christo. Many characters plot and scheme with and against each other, changing allegiances as they all try to get a super-weapon in Foumyle/Foyle's possession that would tip the balance of the coming open war between the Inner Planets and the Outer Satellites. Fourmyle is trapped and captured but jaunts -- space-jaunts, something heretofore thought impossible -- to save himself, through sheer, desperate force of will. He discovers that he was able to do this before, when he saved himself at the beginning of the story, and we discover that the odd manifestations strewn throughout the book were also instantiations of him jaunting not just through space but through time folding part of the story Möbius-like, back upon itself. The book ends with Gully in sole possession of this powerful talent, on the verge of either revealing its secret to humanity so that it can conquer the stars or of building a cult of self based on it. This is truly a foundational book in the sci-fi pantheon. I'm really glad I finally got around to reading it. Das Letzte Theorem (2008) (de) by Arthur C. Clarke & Frederik Pohl I picked this up because of Clarke. This is the book he was working on shortly before he died. It's a mess. It's a barely science fiction. It's a mishmash of about 2/3 biography about a vain, entitled young man from Sri Lanka named Ranjit Subramanian. He's a brilliant autodidact mathematician to whom nothing bad ever happens. Except when he's kidnapped by pirates and held in captivity and tortured for years, but he turns that frown upside-down by discovering Fermat's original solution to his own Theorem in his head. Rich people befriend him and give him money, a place to stay in their palaces. The prettiest, smartest girl in Sri Lanka marries him and gives up her career in AI to have his babies. His best friend is an even bigger asshole, who rides the nepotism express to a powerful position in a self-elected, benign world government that rules via EMP technology that no-one else can discover. Happily, by the end of the book, China and Russia succumb to internal strife and the U.S. can reign as the sole remaining superpower. Does Ranjit's having found a better solution to Fermat's theorem matter to the plot at all? No, it does not. Is everything absolutely perfect for this family, all the time, no matter what? Yes, yes it is. Is this unbelievably boring and does it feel like reading the fairy tale of a child? Yes. I used to blame the sappy bullshit, personal storylines of Stephen Baxter/Arthur Clarke collaborations on Baxter, but it's now perfectly clear that this tripe stemmed from Clarke. There is no narrative tension at all. Everything is black and white. All main characters are rich and powerful and infallible. Ranjit's success is an utter mystery. It's not clear what his skills are or why he keeps getting offered jobs of such high caliber. The book is rapidly coming to a close and the mental deficits of his son seem to be leading absolutely nowhere. His daughter is a perfect goddess. There are Olympics on the Moon. His daughter, of course, wins. Everyone in the book is well-off or filthy rich. No-one suffers. Except for a whole family whom Ranjit befriended and who died on a pirate ship -- in what seems like a wholly separate (and equally boring) novella. Of the children we've never heard anything again. Why was Ranjit imprisoned? Why was he not allowed to speak of his imprisonment? All plot lines hinted at and not pursued. Why is Gamini so revered and so successful? No idea. Nepotism? This is tripe. Why do we keep hearing about Myra's trying to stay current in her research into AIs? Oh, because in the last 15 pages, she's uploaded into a computer -- and everybody's totally cool with that. Ranjit, in fact, doesn't seem fazed in the least. Holy crap, this is tripe. It gets worse. We fast-forward 13,000 years. Ranjit has survived in cyberspace and humanity has excelled to such a degree that the Grand Galactics retire and hand over the reins to the universe to humanity. The end. High-Rise: A Novel (1975) by J.G. Ballard This is another of Ballard's novels that seems to rage against our technological society. In ways, it critiques the same facets of modern, western life as Heller's Something Happened, which also finds nothing to love about modern society or the humans that people large swaths of it. The book documents the potential effects of living in a self-contained vertical village. The story follows the life of a doctor Laing who, rather than setting up private practice, teaches at a local medical school. In this we already see his satisfaction with middling success rather than a stretching for limits. He is recently divorced, but not unhappily. He is one of the first tenants of a gigantic new high-rise building, with 50 floors. He quickly begins to enjoy life in the building, leaving only for work. Things go sideways relatively quickly, with almost all residents avoiding outside contact, preferring to stay in the building, associating only with "their kind". Their kind being people who live in what they consider to be an acceptable striation of the building's floors. The residents all drink quite a lot, fool around quite a lot and grow increasingly violent and confrontational. Allegiances change, tribes form and split and re-form. They adopt their own signals and tags and signs and language. Elevators and power break down, water is sporadic, toilets block up, food is scarce. The upper floors fare better than the lower. It doesn't occur to anyone to leave. Not just the building's halls and lobbies and apartments, but also the parking lot is littered with garbage and half-destroyed cars. The story culminates in the triumph of a group of women over architect and self-crowned "king" of the building, Anthony Royal, as well as Richard Wilder, a burly ex-rugby player who fancied himself a believable pretender to the throne. All the while, Laing looks on and is satisfied with a kingdom over a tribe of two women further down the building. The descriptions of destruction and degradation of societal norms invite comparisons to Hard to Be a God, Blindness and Lord of the Flies. I've included "notes, citations and errata" <https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3307> in a separate post. One Human Minute (1971--1986) by Stanislaw Lem This is a short book containing three stories. The first is a fake review of a non-existent book called One Human Minute. The book purports to give an impression of what occurs on Earth each minute by compiling meticulous statistics about every conceivable facet of human life. E.g. the number of deaths of various kinds, the number of births, copulations, illnesses, etc. He actually reviews several editions of this book, each of which extends the concept of the original. The second is a foretelling of the development of 21st-century weapons, told as a history. This sounds contradictory, but actually works quite well. His idea is that the battlefield will be increasingly automated and miniaturized until the "war" moves entirely out of human hands and into the purely virtual. He's not far wrong, actually, so far. All signs point to his predictions coming true. The third is an interesting foray into cosmology, a discussion of how much luck had to do with the formation of life on Earth and the possible answers this provides to Fermi's purported paradox. The notion of how the inexorable rotation of the galactic spiral arms were timed perfectly with the cycles of life on Earth is a tempting explanation and entirely plausible, at least the way he presents it as a "fake" scientist. All three books were, as ever with Lem, very interesting and engaging and well-worth reading. He's never predictable. I've included "notes, citations and errata" <https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3309> in a separate post. Something Happened (1974) by Joseph Heller This is a sad book about a sad man named Slocum, adrift in a life he's sure he doesn't feel is worth living. He works for a large corporation, he has a five-person family. He seems to be quite comfortable. He is well-taken-care-of by his company. He does not seem to do anything for them, but he claims that he does it well and that his work is appreciated, that he excels among his peers. He drinks, he cheats, he lies. He is not special. He is not good. He is not especially bad. The story is told largely as an inner monologue from Slocum's perspective. The first long section discusses his work life and the people there, with flashbacks to his first job -- and his first flirtations and experiences with women. The second section focuses on his miserable and pointless home life, with a focus on his terrible, unsatisfying relationship with an ungrateful and difficult daughter. His "retarded" son is casually mentioned and discarded in the same thought, without any particular guilt on his part. Slocum seems to be more proud of his inability to lie to himself than ashamed of how he is as a person. The plot doesn't really go anywhere. Instead, it bounces from one topic to another, but always the same ones, the ones that engross Slocum, that have formed him as a person. There's Virginia, the slutty 21-year--old he flirted heavily with at his first job (he was 171/2) but with whom he never closed the deal. When he got back from the war, she'd killed herself (gas in a stove). There's the young Jane at the office, whom he half-heartedly tries to bed, knowing she's too young for him. There's his son Derek, but he never dwells there long. He thinks about his wife a lot, and how much he likes to fuck her (his words). There's his mistress of ten years, Penny, who's the only one other than his wife who can satisfy him. There are the machinations at the office with Horace White and Black and Green and Brown and Phelps and hid terrible daughter and the drugs he thinks she's doing and how she wants to steal his car and his pathetic son who thinks he's tortured by everything and is more helpless than the retarded son and then there's the speech at the convention in Puerto Rice that he's never allowed to give. Everyone has a name but his nuclear-family members. Slocum is mad, mentally unstable, driven around the bend by a country, a culture that is also mad. He cannot experience joy. He is honest with himself, brutally so. He is brutal with others. He does not let them know. He is the original American Psycho. He rambles, his internal monologues are heavily extemporaneous, tangential and parenthetical (sometimes a dozen pages or more). I've included "notes, citations and errata" <https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3308> in a separate post. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] As to Foster Wallace's style, your mileage may vary: I've written the second paragraph in an approximation of his style. If that's already too much for you, then don't even bother picking up Oblivion. ]]> </content> </entry> <entry> <title type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Something Happened by Joseph Heller (1974) (read in 2016)]]> </title> <id>https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3308</id> <link href="https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3308"/> <updated>2016-12-31T06:28:14+01:00</updated> <author> <name type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Marco von Ballmoos]]> </name> <uri>https://earthli.com/users/marco</uri> </author> <summary type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA["Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is" ... ]]> </summary> <content type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Published by marco on 31. Dec 2016 06:28:14 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I've failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an interest in this book, then I'm happy for you." This is a sad book about a sad man named Slocum, adrift in a life he's sure he doesn't feel is worth living. He works for a large corporation, he has a five-person family. He seems to be quite comfortable. He is well-taken-care-of by his company. He does not seem to do anything for them, but he claims that he does it well and that his work is appreciated, that he excels among his peers. He drinks, he cheats, he lies. He is not special. He is not good. He is not especially bad. The story is told largely as an inner monologue (a highly parenthetical one) providing Slocum's perspective. The first long section discusses his work life and the people there, with flashbacks to his first job -- and his first flirtations and experiences with women. The second section focuses on his miserable and pointless home life, with a focus on his terrible, unsatisfying relationship with an ungrateful and difficult daughter. His "retarded" son is casually mentioned and discarded in the same thought, without any particular guilt on his part. Slocum seems to be more proud of his inability to lie to himself than ashamed of how he is as a person. The plot doesn't really go anywhere. Instead, it bounces from one topic to another, but always the same ones, the ones that engross Slocum, that have formed him as a person. There's Virginia, the slutty 21-year--old he flirted heavily with at his first job (he was 171/2) but with whom he never closed the deal. When he got back from the war, she'd killed herself (gas in a stove). There's the young Jane at the office, whom he half-heartedly tries to bed, knowing she's too young for him. There's his retarded son Derek, but he never dwells there long. He thinks about his wife a lot, and how much he likes to fuck her (his words). There's his mistress of ten years, Penny, who's the only one other than his wife who can satisfy him. There are the machinations at the office with Horace White and Black and Green and Brown and Red Phelps and Andy Kagle and Arthur Baron and Martha the crazy receptionist (and there's even a Gray, at the end) and his terrible daughter and the drugs he thinks she's doing and how she wants to steal his car and his pathetic son who thinks he's tortured by everything and is more helpless than the retarded son and then there's the speech at the convention in Puerto Rice that he's never allowed to give. Everyone has a name but his nuclear-family members. Slocum is mad, mentally unstable, driven around the bend by a country, a culture that is also mad. He cannot experience joy. He is honest with himself, brutally so. He is brutal with others. He does not let them know. He is the original American Psycho. He rambles, his internal monologues are heavily extemporaneous, tangential and parenthetical (sometimes a dozen pages or more). He has no empathy, thinking in calculation only, he feels no remorse, either in real life or in his imagined scenarios. He doesn't engage with life, he has no goals, other than the simplistic, barbaric set given him by his society, by his country. He reacts, he doesn't act. He has no imagination. There's plenty of blame to go around for his behavior, but a lot of it is on him. Life continues at work after his great tragedy/murder. (Don't mention that, too big a spoiler). From "The New York Times book Review" by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. <http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/02/15/home/heller-something.html> called it "one of the unhappiest books ever written", which is as good and succinct a description as any. "We keep reading this overly long book, even though there is no rise and fall in passion and language, because it is structured as a suspense novel. The puzzle which seduces us is this one: Which of several possible tragedies will result from so much unhappiness? The author picks a good one. "I say that this is the most memorable, and therefore the most permanent variation on a familiar theme, in that it says baldly what the other variations only implied, what the other variations tried with desperate sentimentality not to imply: That many lives, judged by the standards of the people who live them, are simply not worth living. (Emphasis added.)" [Citations] "And I wasn’t so sure even then that I liked my family well enough as a group to want them pressing upon" "What would happen if, deliberately, calmly, with malice aforethought and obvious premeditation, I disobeyed? I know what would happen: nothing. Nothing would happen. And the knowledge depresses me. Some girl downstairs I never saw before (probably with a bad skin also) would simply touch a few keys on some kind of steel key punch that would set things right again, and it would be as though I had not disobeyed at all. My act of rebellion would be absorbed like rain on an ocean and leave no trace. I would not cause a ripple." "I can no longer change my environment or even disturb it seriously. They would simply fire and forget me as soon as I tried. They would file me away. That’s what will happen to Martha the typist when she finally goes crazy. She’ll be fired and forgotten. She’ll be filed away. She’ll be given sick pay, vacation pay, and severance pay. She’ll be given money from the pension fund and money from the profit-sharing fund, and then all traces of her will be hidden safely out of sight inside some old green cabinet for dead records in another room on another floor or in a dusty warehouse somewhere that nobody visits more than once or twice a year and few people in the company even know exists;" "People in the company like to live well and are unusually susceptible to nervous breakdowns. They have good tastes and enjoy high standards of living. We are well-educated and far above average in abilities and intelligence. Everybody spends. Nobody saves." This part reminds me a lot of David Foster Wallace's short story Mister Squishy, which he would write almost 50 years later. "When salesmen are doing well, there is pressure upon them to begin doing better, for fear they may start doing worse. When they are doing poorly, they are doing terribly." "am bored with my work very often now. Everything routine that comes in I pass along to somebody else. This makes my boredom worse. It’s a real problem to decide whether it’s more boring to do something boring than to pass along everything boring that comes in to somebody else and then have nothing to do at all." "I frequently feel I’m being taken advantage of merely because I’m asked to do the work I’m paid to do.)" "think an authentic miracle takes place in the universe every time I come awake again after going to sleep. What is happening to me when I am not conscious of myself? Where do I go? Where have I been? Who watches over me when I am gone to make sure I do get back?" "A vacuum cleaner that works well is more important to me than the atom bomb, and it makes not the slightest difference to anyone I know that the earth revolves around the sun instead of vice versa, or the moon around the earth, although the measured ebb and flow of the tides may be of some interest to mariners and clam diggers, but who cares about them? Green is more important to me than God. So, for that matter, is Kagle and the man who handles my dry cleaning, and a transistor radio that is playing too loud is a larger catastrophe to me than the next Mexican earthquake." "(more and more of us seem to be transferring our children into private schools, which are expensive and not much good, and then transferring them out again into other private schools that are not much better. We don’t like the heads of these private schools. More and more things seem to be slipping into a state of dissolution, and soon there will be nothing left. No more newspapers, magazines, or department stores. No more movie houses. Just discount stores and drugs. More and more of us, I think—not just me—really don’t care what happens to our children, as long as it doesn’t happen to them too soon)" "I wonder what kind of person would come out if I ever did erase all my inhibitions at once, what kind of being is bottled up inside me now. Would I like him? I think not. There’s more than one of me, probably. There’s more than just an id; I know that; I could live with my id if I ever looked upon it whole, sort of snuggle up and get cozy with it, exchange smutty stories. Deep down inside, I might really be great. Deep down inside, I think not. I hope I never live to see the real me come out. He might say and do things that would embarrass me and plunge him into serious trouble, and I hope I am dead and buried by the time he does. Ha," "“Are you angry?” “Do I look it? No, of course not.” “Sometimes I can’t tell.” “Sure, you can. You keep telling me I yell all the time. No, I’m not angry. I want you to talk to me about the things you’re thinking about, especially the things you can’t figure out.” “Do you? I will.” “I do. Ask me anything.” “Do you fuck Mommy,” he asks. “You said I could,” he pleads hastily, as he sees me gape at him in surprise. “Yes, you can,” I answer. “Sometimes.” “Why?” “It feels good, that’s why. It’s kind of fun. Do you know what it means?” He shakes his head unsurely. “Is it all right for me to ask you?” “It’s all right to ask if I do. I think it would be better to ask someone else what it is. It would also be a little better if you used a different word.” “I don’t know a different word. Screw?” “That’s almost the same. You can use the word you want. It’s a little funny, though, to use it with me. Use it. I suppose it’s good enough.” “Are you angry with me?” “No. Why do you keep asking me that? Don’t you know when I’m angry or not?”" "“Are you angry?” “Do I look it? No, of course not.” “Sometimes I can’t tell.” “Sure, you can. You keep telling me I yell all the time. No, I’m not angry. I want you to talk to me about the things you’re thinking about, especially the things you can’t figure out.” “Do you? I will.” “I do. Ask me anything.” “Do you fuck Mommy,” he asks. “You said I could,” he pleads hastily, as he sees me gape at him in surprise. “Yes, you can,” I answer. “Sometimes.” “Why?” “It feels good, that’s why. It’s kind of fun. Do you know what it means?” He shakes his head unsurely. “Is it all right for me to ask you?” “It’s all right to ask if I do. I think it would be better to ask someone else what it is. It would also be a little better if you used a different word.” “I don’t know a different word. Screw?” “That’s almost the same. You can use the word you want. It’s a little funny, though, to use it with me. Use it. I suppose it’s good enough.” “Are you angry with me?” “No. Why do you keep asking me that? Don’t you know when I’m angry or not?” “Not all the time.” “I thought I yelled so much.”" "don’t like Derek,” he remarks without pause. He wears a troubled, injured look. “You’re not supposed to say that,” I instruct him mildly. “You’re not supposed to feel that way, either.” “Do you?” “You’re not supposed to ask that.” “You just told me I could ask you anything. That’s another thing I always think about.” “Yes. You can. It was okay for you to say what you did and ask me. And it was also okay for me to answer you the way I did. It was all right for both of us. Can you understand that? I hope that’s not too confusing for you. I’m not trying to duck out on the question.” “Am I supposed to say it or not? I don’t know.” “I don’t know,” I admit resignedly. “I’m not sure I like Derek, either, the situation I mean, the way he is, maybe even him too. I’m not sure. But we often have to live with things we don’t like. Like my job. Me too. I don’t know what to do about him yet. And nobody can help me.”" "With my wife by now, I think it no longer matters very much either way to either one of us whether I make her happy or unhappy; the difference is not so great nor the effect lasting; by now, I think we have learned how to get through the rest of our lives with each other and are both already more than halfway there." "Lying awake listening for noises, he would hear the same creaks and footfalls we all do; but he would imagine human beings coming to get him, scaling stone by stone the outside wall of our apartment building, boring downward from the roof toward his bedroom, descending from an opening in the sky to the sill of his fragile glass window. Their faces were hooded or shaped in shadows they carried with them like shawls." "I think he believes me now, more readily than he used to, I think he feels a little bit more at home with us, I think he trusts me more. (At least he knows now that I am me, although neither one of us is all that positive who that me we know I am is.)" "If I were poor, I believe I might want to overthrow the government by force. I’m very glad, however, that everyone poor isn’t trying to overthrow the government, because I’m not poor. I don’t know why every Negro maid doesn’t steal from her white employer (but I’m glad our Negro maid doesn’t, or at least has not let us find out she does). If I were Black and poor, I don’t think I’d have any reason for obeying any law other than the risk of being caught. As it is, though, I’m glad colored people do obey the law (most of them, anyway), because I am afraid of Negroes and have moved away from them. I am afraid of cops. But I’m glad there are cops and wish there were more. (I don’t like cops.) (Except when they’re around to protect me.)" "used to want to rumple my daughter’s hair too, pat her head affectionately or touch or kiss her cheek or throw a hugging arm around her shoulders, but she began to shrink away from me as she grew up, kidding at first, I thought, and I would always pretend to be hurt. And then those times came when I began to comprehend that she was no longer kidding, and I no longer had to pretend I was really hurt. I really was hurt—and now I pretend I am not." "It’s so much sweeter when you’re young, so much hotter, so much more fun. I wish I had that frenetic heat back now instead of this sluggish, processed lust I put myself through and frequently have to make a laborious effort to enjoy.)" "So much of misfortune seems a matter of timing. We were late coming for him that day, and we saw him, half a block from the play area, standing alone on the sidewalk in his bare feet and bawling loudly, helplessly, because he thought we were never going to come for him at all. (I was incensed when I saw him. We were simply late. Nothing else had happened.) Other people, children and grown-ups, looked at my boy curiously as they walked past and saw him standing there crying: none of them offered to help, none of them questioned him. (Good God—even I will help a small child who seems to be in trouble, if no one else does.) He did nothing when he saw us, except shriek more piercingly, quail more frantically, in a tortured plea for us to rescue him from whatever odd spell was holding him to that spot in terror. (I was so deeply incensed with him for a moment that I was actually tempted to stop with a sneer and delay going to him.) He was convulsed with grief by the idea that we had abandoned him, just because we were a little bit late, that we had left him there purposely because we were dissatisfied and disgusted with him, and that he was never going to see us again or have anyone to take care of him." "We found him standing by himself along the shore about two hundred yards away, floundering in one spot as though lost: he was not certain if he had overshot us already, and he did not know, therefore, in which direction to proceed. His cheeks were white, his eyes were distant, and his jaws were clamped shut. The tendons in his neck were taut, and he had a lump in his throat. The landmarks along the boardwalk—all those familiar signs and structures—meant nothing to him. My first impulse was to kill him. “Were you lost?” I shouted to him. “I don’t know.” He shrugged. I wanted to kill him. I was enraged and disgusted with him for his helplessness and incompetence (standing there like that on the sidewalk in town that day as" "The company is still there. (She isn’t.) It hasn’t grown. Nobody ever hears of it. And life has pretty much been one damned sterile office desk after another for me ever since, apart from those few good years I spent away from home in the army." "There’s nobody else whose leg I want to kick except my daughter's ankle at the dinner table at times when it would be easier for me to do that than reach out to smack her in the face. She flinches as though I already have as soon as I feel I want to and raise my voice. My wife makes me want to hurl her back a foot or two to give me room to cock my arm and punch her in the jaw at least twice with my fist. I shake my finger at my boy. Derek I smother with a huge hand over his mouth to stifle his inarticulate noises and hide his driveling eyes, nose, and mouth. (It is not to put him out of his misery that I do it; it is to put me out of mine.) He’s a poor, pathetic, handicapped little human being, but I must not think about him as much as I could if I let myself." "It’s all Kagle’s fault, I feel by now: I blame him. Minute imperfections of his have become insufferable. Irritability sizzles inside me like electric shock waves, saws against the bones of my head like a serrated blade. I can quiver out of my skin, gag, get instant, knifing headaches from the way he sucks on a tooth, drums his fingers, mispronounces certain words, says byooteefool instead of byootafal and between you and I instead of between you and me, and laughs when I correct him—I have an impulse to correct him every single time and have to stifle it. The words spear through my consciousness and slam to a stop against bone, the inside of my skull. I can restrain myself from saying them, but I cannot suppress the need to want to. I am incensed with him for provoking it. He bubbles saliva in the corner of his mouth and still wears the white smudge on his chapped lips of whatever antacid pill or solution he has been taking for his stomach distress. “Heh-heh,” he has fallen into the habit of saying, with lowered, escaping eyes. “Heh-heh,” I want to mock back. I loathe Andy Kagle now because he has failed. I’d like to hit him across the face with the heavy brass lamp on his desk. I tell him. “Andy,” I tell him, “I’d like to hit you across the face with that lamp.” “Heh-heh,” he says. “Heh-heh,” I reply." "That was a man, that Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the last time I had a President I could look up to (the rest have not been mine), or maybe I only thought so because I was gullible. No—the whole country wept when he died. My mother wept. “One third of the nation,” said he, “is ill-housed, ill-clothed, and ill-fed.” By now, with our improved technology and humane social and political reforms, it must be more than half. When" "Horace White can go no further in the company because there is nothing more he can do than be Horace White. He can be named to prestigious government commissions that issue reports on matters of grave national importance that are methodically ignored." "The children sit as still as replicas in a store, hiding inside their own faces as they wait to see what will happen." "Dirty movies have gotten better, I’m told. Smut and weaponry are two areas in which we’ve improved. Everything else has gotten worse. The world is winding down. You can’t get good bread anymore even in good restaurants (you get commercial rolls), and there are fewer good restaurants. Melons don’t ripen, grapes are sour. They dump sugar into chocolate candy bars because sugar is cheaper than milk. Butter tastes like the printed paper it’s wrapped in. Whipped cream comes in aerosol bombs and isn’t whipped and isn’t cream. People serve it, people eat it. Two hundred and fifty million educated Americans will go to their graves and never know the difference." "It tastes like shit. Nobody cares but me. From sea to shining sea the country is filling with slag, shale, and used-up automobile tires. The fruited plain is coated with insecticide and chemical fertilizers. Even pure horseshit is hard to come by these days. They add preservatives. You don’t find fish in lakes and rivers anymore. You have to catch them in cans. Towns die. Oil spills. Money talks. God listens. God is good, a real team player. “America the Beautiful” isn’t: it was all over the day the first white man set foot on the continent to live." "(Last night, my wife had another one of her bad dreams. I didn’t wake her. Afterward, after all the smothered moaning and spastic shuddering, she began to snore lightly, and I did wake her, to tell her she was snoring and complain she was not letting me sleep. She apologized penitently in a drowsy, cranky voice and turned over on her side while I looked at her ass. I smiled and slept well.)" He's a monster. "The years are too short, the days are too long." "Someone like Amazonian Marie Jencks would have suctioned me right back up into the womb with a single siphoning contraction, and then puffed me out on a flat trajectory into the spongy, red catacombs of a testicle belonging to a man riding the subway trains in search of a curvy backside to splash me back out against. That’s what I call dismemberment. That’s regression. (It wasn’t so bad living in my old man’s scrotum, as far as I can recall. It was warm and humid, and there was lots of companionship. I had a ball.) (That was a good one.)" Now that's some stream-of-consciousness. In fact, a lot of his book takes place in parentheses... "I’m content with the boredom I have. (If I kill my wife, who will take care of the children? If I kill my children, my wife can take care of herself. A prudent family man must plan ahead toward possibilities like that in order to provide for his loved ones.) I almost wish my wife would go ahead and commit adultery already so I can get my divorce." "I’m content with the boredom I have. (If I kill my wife, who will take care of the children? If I kill my children, my wife can take care of herself. A prudent family man must plan ahead toward possibilities like that in order to provide for his loved ones.) I almost wish my wife would go ahead and commit adultery already so I can get my divorce. (I’m not sure I can do it without her.)" "It is so easy to make my wife happy it’s really a crime we don’t do it more often. (She’s even prettier when she’s feeling good, her face lights up. She doesn’t hide it.) I try. When I can. (It isn’t always easy to want to.) I’ll make the children come along with us to church when I go, and we’ll generally have a joyful time. (It isn’t always easy to want to be kind and make her happy when I’m thinking of death, murder, adultery, and divorce.)" "I can’t always get a divorce. I don’t know how it’s done." He didn't know how to start with Virginia and doesn't know how to end with his wife. "(Some nights I can sleep and she can’t: it registers upon me that she is leaving the bed repeatedly in some state of agitation, and I doze off again more blissfully as a result of this knowledge.)" "She hasn’t asked in years. Age and self-respect, I think, have stilled the question every time she wanted to ask: “Do you still love me?” It is in her mind, though. I can see it as a verbal sculpture. She fishes, hints. I decline to oblige. Or perhaps she believes I don’t love her any longer and fears that if she were to ask: “Do you love me?” I would answer: “No.” And then we would have to do something. (And wouldn’t know what.)" He's so mean to her, enjoying her suffering. he lets her nightmare end before waking her. "And I am so pleased she doesn’t ask, feel so grateful and deeply indebted to her at times, that I want to throw wide my arms in relief and proclaim: “I love you!”" "(I have sat at tables with men I’ve known a long time and have wanted to touch their hand.)" He also accuses his daughter of being gay. and his son. He is homophobic, too. He's the whole package. "I think there’s a sauna, for many of the more affluent, better-bred occupants of my thoughts seem the type that likes to scorch itself leisurely after playing squash. I suspect there’s a homosexual haunt located somewhere secret. Tiny shops are all about at which wicked contraband is exchanged by grimy, unshaven men who know how. Grimy, unshaven men expose themselves to me and to children of both sexes and go unpunished. All crimes go unpunished" All of this goes on in his head. "My memory does get faulty of late, merges indistinguishably with imagination, and I must make efforts to shake them apart." "(Some tickle my fancy. Some do not.) The day before yesterday, I walked into a luncheonette for a rare roast beef sandwich on a seeded roll and thought I found my barber working behind the counter. “What are you doing in a luncheonette?” I asked. “I’m not your barber,” he answered. I was afraid I was losing my mind. A week ago I looked out a taxi window and saw Jack Green begging in the street in the rain, dressed in a long wet overcoat and ragged shoes. He was a head taller, thinner, pale, and gaunt. It wasn’t him. But that’s what I saw. I was afraid I was losing my wits." He seems to be unraveling. "I’ll bet I’m probably one of the very few people in the entire world who know (not knows) that livid means blue and lurid means pale. A lot of good that knowledge has done me." "“Daddy!” He is dying. A terror, a pallid, pathetic shock more dreadful than any I have ever been able to imagine, has leaped into his face I can’t stand it. He can’t stand it. He hugs me. He looks beggingly at me for help. His screams are piercing. I can’t bear to see him suffering such agony and fright. I have to do something. I hug his face deeper into the crook of my shoulder. I hug him tightly with both my arms. I squeeze. “Death,” says the doctor, “was due to asphyxiation. The boy was smothered. He had superficial lacerations of the scalp and face, a bruised hip, a deep cut on his arm. That was all. Even his spleen was intact.”" "“Good-bye, Martha.” “Good-bye, Martha dear.” “Bye, bye, dear.” “Did you leave anything behind?” “Don’t worry, dear. We’ll send it along.” “Be gentle with her,” I adjure. “She’s a wonderful girl.” I hear applause when she’s gone for the way I handled it. No one was embarrassed. Everyone seems pleased with the way I’ve taken command." ]]> </content> </entry> <entry> <title type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Capsule Movie Reviews Vol.2016.12]]> </title> <id>https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3263</id> <link href="https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3263"/> <updated>2016-11-21T11:58:58+01:00</updated> <author> <name type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Marco von Ballmoos]]> </name> <uri>https://earthli.com/users/marco</uri> </author> <summary type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[These are my notes to remember what I watched and kinda what I thought about it. I've recently transferred my reviews to IMDb and made "the list" <http://www.imdb.com/user/ur1323291/ratings> of over 900 ratings publicly available. I've included the individual ratings with my notes for each movie. These ratings are not absolutely comparable to... ]]> </summary> <content type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Published by marco on 21. Nov 2016 11:58:58 Updated by marco on 23. Nov 2016 12:21:07 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ These are my notes to remember what I watched and kinda what I thought about it. I've recently transferred my reviews to IMDb and made "the list" <http://www.imdb.com/user/ur1323291/ratings> of over 900 ratings publicly available. I've included the individual ratings with my notes for each movie. These ratings are not absolutely comparable to each other -- I rate the film on how well it suited me for the genre and my mood. YMMV. Krull (1983) -- "5/10" <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0085811/> I saw this movie for the first time over fifteen years ago. It's actually better than I remembered, but still not a spectacular movie. The sets are pretty nice and the production quality is good. It's got Liam Neeson in it and failed to be ruined by him -- and that's not nothing. We follow the story of two star-crossed lovers on a planet with medieval technology that is somehow also bound up in galactic struggle. Krull is the son of one of two monarchs who agree to bind their kingdoms through marriage. The "Beast" -- an interstellar traveler with a ferocious army of "Slavers" -- sends his troops to seize the bride for his own. Krull embarks on a mission with the "Old One" to find the "glave" (the five-pointed throwing disk) and get to the teleporting dark fortress where the Beast makes its home and where his bride-to-be is being held captive. They encounter a band of robbers -- among them is Neeson -- that Krull convinces to join him in his quest. They have many predictable adventures, seeking one seer after another who can tell them how to find the dark fortress. The Beast sends minions and takes over bystanders to try to trick Krull into giving up his mission. He doesn't though and uses the glave to great effectiveness as a sort of extragalactic sawzall to knock the beast down. Down but not out. It turns out that the real weapon he needs was within him all along. Actually, he needs his bride to give him the fire that he then prolifically fires form his hand to solve all of his remaining problems. A good thing, too, because, like, can you imagine if she'd been the one to save everyone? Unthinkable. Airplane II: The Sequel (1982) -- "6/10" <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0083530/> Robert Hays is back as Striker and Julie Haggerty is Elaine as they crew a space shuttle bound for the moon. It's soon off course and headed for the sun. There are a shocking number of inside jokes (e.g. when Peter Graves -- Captain Oveur -- is trying to shut down the misbehaving computer, the Mission Impossible theme plays ominously). There are a bunch of inspired cameos and comic bits and parodies of countless films. I enjoyed it. Lloyd Bridges is brilliant, as are William Shatner and Rip Torn and Raymond Burr. A Good Day to Die Hard (2013) -- "3/10" <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1606378/> You know what? This movie fucking sucked. It's a travesty. It's a jingoistic mish-mash of action and endless, incoherent car chases and stupid arrogant Americans and hoo-rah violence celebration and ridiculous deus-ex-machina stashes of weapons and endless clips and stupid-not-cool smirking from Bruce Willis who is simultaneously sucking in his gut and fucking indestructible -- even more so than his musclebound and sulky son -- and cartoonish depictions of Russians as hapless lackeys to the combined might of two Americans -- one of whom, we are nearly constantly reminded, is "just on vacation" -- and the cartoonishness doesn't stop just at the Russian culture but continues with an utterly ridiculous depiction of how nuclear weapons work. Ugh. It's too tiring to even list it all. Watch the first one or the second one or the third one -- how can you go wrong with Jeremy Irons as an ethereally thin, ambiguously sexually oriented supervillain? -- or even, God forbid, the fourth one, because at least there you get to watch Bruce Willis call Kevin Smith "Dumptruck". Avoid number five at all costs. I avoided it for three years, but it came on just as I was laid low by a migraine and I was trapped like a spider in its stupid web. Deadpool (2016) -- "8/10" <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1431045/> Although the film self-referentially pokes fun at itself for even pretending to be a date movie, it really is the story of a young man and woman who fall in love only to have their paradise darkened by the cloud of an extremely aggressive cancer, the cure for which so horribly disfigures him that he decides not to return to her, letting her think him dead instead. The movie is the story of how he eventually does get the courage to return to her, only to realize that the only real problem he had was that he didn't trust her to be big-hearted enough to see past his once-handsome-and-now-gruesome visage to the man beneath. He didn't give her enough credit for having fallen in love with the man within rather than the stud-muffin without. So romantic, date-night fare, right? There's also a tremendous amount of violence -- not necessarily gratuitous, but over-the-top choreographed, at any rate -- a fuck-ton of swearing, some nudity (Ryan Reynolds's booty, ladies and germs) and seriously adult themes. The story is also told in a series of looping flashbacks over the course of two years with a lot of asides that break the fourth wall (as in the comic books, actually). It's a well-paced film. I liked how the taxi driver who takes Deadpool to the scenes of battle was a main character, I liked how we were introduced to two minor X-Men characters. I liked how they showed Wade and Vanessa's relationship develop as a shared experience, rather than the classic trope of making the woman try to rescue the man from himself, because he's obviously damaged. They were both damaged, but in the same way, so it worked for them. [1] It took me a while to get used to Ajax's and Angel's powers because they were both just as indestructible and impervious to pain as DeadPool and Colossus. But that's how superhero movies are, that's how these battles have always been, drawn-out like professional wrestling matches, with the bad guy always almost but not quite turning the odds before the "hero" triumphs. The hero in this case is Deadpool and he goes against the trope by making damned sure that Ajax isn't coming back. [2] Ryan Reynolds carries the film well and T.J. Miller as the bartender at his favorite bar/hangout was the only other actor I recognized. I only realized that Ajax's smirking face belonged to the same actor who'd first played Daario Neharis in Game of Thrones. Daredevil S02 (2016) -- "9/10" <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3322312/> This season centers on the Punisher, weaving in the Yakuza, the Hand, Wilson Fisk (still in prison) as well as Elektra. The plot with the punisher is more down to Earth, with his spectactular denouement at the hands of Daredevil and eventual arrest near the beginning of the season. Murdock and Foggy are defending the case against the Punisher, sensing corruption in the DA's office. Foggy is forced by Murdock's lackadaisical attitude (his focus on being Daredevil) to handle the case alone and does a great job. Frank Castle himself torpedoes his own case with his own testimony and goes to jail. There he is a target -- but no more than from Wilson Fisk, who wants to use him to eliminate his chief rival. The other plot line is more fantastical, involving Elektra, who is far from a sympathetic character. I found Elektra to be terribly annoying, with one-dimensional motivations. It turns out that she is the reincarnation of an ancient living weapon that the Hand wants to get their ... well ... hands on. Lots of back and forth between Daredevil, Stick and Elektra, lots of fighting until they prevail in the end. Well, kinda. Elektra takes the fall, but she can't die (not really) and the Hand collects her body and puts it into their sarcophagus. The end. Hangover Part III (2015) -- "4/10" <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1951261/> It's just not doing it for me, anymore. Minus one point for the start of the movie with the giraffe because it was just so deliberately and nonsensically stupid. Chow plays a central role -- they long since discovered he's the best thing about these movies -- but even he is too exaggerated, though he does the best he can with what he's given. 11.22.63 (2015) -- "8/10" <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2879552/> James Franco stars in this adaptation of the Stephen King book. The series follows the book relatively closely -- close enough any way -- and Franco is really good, as is Chris Cooper, looking grizzled and earnest as always. See my "notes on the book" <https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=2775>, which hold for the series as well. Jim Jeffries: Freedumb (2016) -- "7/10" <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt5849950/> I think Jeffries stretches his material a bit too much, meta-discussing his previous specials for a lot of the first third of the show. When he settles down to new material, some of it is quite good. Zootopia (2016) -- "8/10" <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2948356/> This is a surprisingly clever animated film about a city called Zootopia (Zootropolis on this side of the pond), populated by anthropomorphized animals. Their society is split along the lines of Predators and Prey but this split is fraying at the seams, with predator attacks rising just as the integration looked like it was working. Judy Hopps is a rabbit police officer intent on figuring out what's going on. Nick Wilde is a fox who witnessed the latest incident involving an otter (predator) who was kidnapped. Things are much more complex than they would seem, as machinations on both sides lead to evil that goes all the way to the top. Recommended. Walhalla Rising (2009) -- "6/10" <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0862467/> Interesting and moody film about a One Eye, a mute warrior of nearly supernatural strength, played by Mads Mikkelsen. He starts off as a warrior slave, used as a gladiator by a traveling band. He eventually escapes with a young boy in tow and, together, they escape on a boat and end up in the New World. The Towering Inferno (1974) -- "6/10" <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0072308/> This is a star-packed movie about the grand opening of a skyscraper of record-setting height. Paul Newman is the architect; Steve McQueen the chief firefighter. Together, they try to save the people trapped in the building. Everybody's in this movie: William Holden, Faye Dunaway, Fred Astaire, Richard Chamberlain, O.J. Simpson, Robert Vaughn, Robert Wagner and others more obscure to me. Most of the people overact and it's a bit on the long side, but a ton of money went into effects, so it's a good time. X-Men: Apocalypse (2016) -- "7/10" <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3385516/> An ages-old mutant named Apocalypse, who can permanently absorb powers from other mutants, rises again, from the ruins of the pyramid where he was buried milennia ago. This is another "young" X-Men movie, with Fassbender and McAvoy playing Professor X and Magneto respectively. When Apocalypse discovers these two, he wants to use Magneto to control the planet, then the Professor to enslave humanity utterly (using Cerebro). Call Me Lucky (2015) -- "6/10" <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3899932/> I was really happy to have been introduced to the comedy of Barry Crimmons and the first 30 minutes were really, really good. Barry, however, derives a lot of the anger that drives his comedy from having been molested by a priest when he was an altar boy. The movie spends a lot of time explaining this part of his life. While essential to his story, it drags quite a big, losing a lot of the momentum achieved in the first third. The movie still ends well, with what I feel is Crimmons's strength: his standup comedy. Flash Gordon (1980) -- "7/10" <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0080745/> This movie was much better than expected. Sure, it's cheesy now, but God would I have loved this movie if I'd somehow discovered it as a teenager. Princess Aura and her retinue as well as a Dale Arden lent an air of softcore porn to the whole affair, with big, dumb, blond Flash Gordon barely noticing any of it. Max von Sydow as Ming was magnificent; Haim Topol as Dr. Zarkov was also very good. Timothy Dalton was also in it, as Prince Barin, Gordon's chief rival for various affections but eventually a converted adherent. Mascots (2016) -- "6/10" <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt4936176/> Christopher Guest -- starred in This is Spinal Tap and wrote/directed Best in Show -- wrote and directed what feels like a sequel to the latter film. This is the story of a fictitious competition for sports mascots from all over the world. In an interview format, we are introduced to these characters and other family members as they prepare for, make their way to and partake in the competition. It's OK with a few chuckles, but nothing to write home about. Ukraine: Winter on Fire (2015) -- "4/10" <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt4908644/> I found this to be an incoherent propaganda-laden documentary about Maiden Square. It was interview-heavy, with interviews exclusively from one side, with information exclusively from one side, with no attempt made to offer explanations for actions other than "the other side was evil and wanted to capitulate utterly to Russia and Putin". It was utterly simplistic and didn't offer to explain how much of Ukraine might have felt differently than the relative handful of people that protested, many of which were obviously privileged youth, at the beginning. Of course they were upset that Ukraine didn't join the EU -- they were looking forward to moving to London to work for a big bank. The rest of their country would have been subjugated as a vassal country of the EU, a status thoroughly by Greece and other Balkan and Eastern states. The film was at its best when it focused on the violence by the government shock troops against citizens, but again motivations were not explained, alliances not elucidated. It was just taken from granted that the youth, the rebels, were the good guys. They overthrew a democratically elected government, then accused the president of abandoning his post when he fled their credibly violent threats. Joe Rogan: Triggered (2016) -- "9/10" <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt6023444/> This was a really solid special from Rogan with a good style and great material, well-delivered. Rogan has a family and mentions them a bit, but he hasn't capitulated his entire career to them (I'm looking at you, Patton Oswalt). He's funny, he's dirty and he's right enough of the time to make this a great special. Inside Out (2015) -- "8/10" <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2096673/> The concept is interesting and relatively well-executed, but it's overall too vanilla a treatment for my tastes. Everybody's too white and too nice and too bla. The parents and daughter don't even have a Minnesota accent -- they sound like plain middle-of-the-road Americans without the traditional inflection of the north. This kind of threw me because the girl was blubbering to go back to Minnesota but she sounded like she'd lived in San Fransisco her whole life. I wondered why? Pixar and Disney pay attention to these details, so the omission of the accent must have been a deliberate choice. Bo Burnham: Make Happy (2016) -- "8/10" <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt5192124/> He's young and got famous on YouTube at 16. He's kind of a mix of Jim Carrey, Weird Al, Tim Minchin. I liked him and appreciated his very unique style and presentation. A lot of his jokes came out of nowhere -- if the next special is the same, it'll get old, but this time around it felt fresh and funny. Better Call Saul (2015) -- "8/10" <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3032476/> Bob Odenkirk and Jonathan Banks reprise their roles as Saul Goodman and Mike Ehrmantraut, respectively. This two-season (so far) series presents their backstory: Saul started off as Jimmy McGill while Mike is a recently retired cop looking to make better money. It's well-acted, relatively well-written and very well-shot. Recommended. Luke Cage (2016) -- "8/10" <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3322314/> This series present the backstory and rise of Luke Cage as well as Misty Knight in Harlem, New York. They are pitted against criminal forces in the form of Cottonmouth (Cornell Stokes) and his cousin, councilwoman Mariah Dillard. Further into the show, Diamondback appears, seemingly out of nowhere, to seed chaos. The characters are interesting and, for the most part, well-written. It gets a bit weak in the middle, but finishes pretty strong again. First Blood (1982) -- "8/10" <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0083944/> I like this movie. I think Stallone is pretty good in it, the fight and forest-combat scenes are quite well-choreographed and the story is much more interesting than people give it credit for. Solomon Kane (2009) -- "7/10" <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0970452/> Solomon Kane is a pirate bound for hell, as he finds out when he attacks a castle to plunder it of its gold and finds it occupied by "The Devil's Reaper". An effects-heavy action flick with no actors of note, save Max von Sydow in a small role. In the second half, the relentless mud and rain and muck and blood reminded me a lot of the mood in Hard to be a God. The Good Dinosaur (2015) -- "2/10" <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1979388/> What a steaming pile of crap this movie is. More like "The Bad Dinosaur" or "The Good-for-nothing Dinosaur" or "Useless McWhinyPants gets a Participation Award". The Man with the Iron Fists (2012) -- "4/10" <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1258972/> This is pretty self-indulgent project on the part of RZA. He wrote and starred in this movie about a black blacksmith in a village in China called "the Jungle". Clans fight for power constantly, with much of the action centered on a brothel called The Pink Blossom (subtle). The cast is better than expected, with Lucy Liu playing Madam Blossom (more or less reprising her role from Kill Bill), Dave Bautista the physically impressive Brass Body, Russell Crowe as Jack Knife and Rick Yune as X-Blade. It's not even worth describing most of the plot. Blacksmith gets his arms chopped off by Brass Body, Jack Knife helps him forge and attach Iron Hands that are highly destructive. They all attack the blossom to defeat the usurpers of the Lion clan and get all the gold, ... oh, God, I can't go on. The production values, effects and cast are worth a couple of points. Tarentino was involved somehow, but I can't recommend this at all. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] E.g. when they celebrate various holidays in bed, with a role-reversal for International Woman's Day. Or when she pretends they were talking about the same thing when he was actually proposing to her and her mind was ... elsewhere. [1] Ajax may not be able to feel pain, but I have no idea whey he was laughing when Deadpool broke both his arms -- no healing power, as he'd mentioned earlier -- even if he's insane, he's still going to regret not being able to fight the way he used to be able to. Moot point, as Wade also shot him through the top of the head. ]]> </content> </entry> <entry> <title type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[High-Rise by J.G. Ballard (1975) (read in 2016)]]> </title> <id>https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3307</id> <link href="https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3307"/> <updated>2016-11-20T21:42:52+01:00</updated> <author> <name type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Marco von Ballmoos]]> </name> <uri>https://earthli.com/users/marco</uri> </author> <summary type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA["Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is" ... ]]> </summary> <content type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Published by marco on 20. Nov 2016 21:42:52 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I've failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an interest in this book, then I'm happy for you." This is another of Ballard's novels that seems to rage against our technological society. In ways, it critiques the same facets of modern, western life as Heller's Something Happened, which also finds nothing to love about modern society or the humans that people large swaths of it. The book documents the potential effects of living in a self-contained vertical village. The story follows the life of a doctor Laing who, rather than setting up private practice, teaches at a local medical school. In this we already see his satisfaction with middling success rather than a stretching for limits. He is recently divorced, but not unhappily. He is one of the first tenants of a gigantic new high-rise building, with 50 floors. He quickly begins to enjoy life in the building, leaving only for work. Things go sideways relatively quickly, with almost all residents avoiding outside contact, preferring to stay in the building, associating only with "their kind". Their kind being people who live in what they consider to be an acceptable striation of the building's floors. The residents all drink quite a lot, fool around quite a lot and grow increasingly violent and confrontational. Allegiances change, tribes form and split and re-form. They adopt their own signals and tags and signs and language. Elevators and power break down, water is sporadic, toilets block up, food is scarce. The upper floors fare better than the lower. It doesn't occur to anyone to leave. Not just the building's halls and lobbies and apartments, but also the parking lot is littered with garbage and half-destroyed cars. The story culminates in the triumph of a group of women over architect and self-crowned "king" of the building, Anthony Royal, as well as Richard Wilder, a burly ex-rugby player who fancied himself a believable pretender to the throne. All the while, Laing looks on and is satisfied with a kingdom over a tribe of two women further down the building. The descriptions of destruction and degradation of societal norms invite comparisons to Hard to Be a God, Blindness and Lord of the Flies. [Citations] "No one approached the crushed car, or the body embedded in its roof. Seeing the burst tuxedo and the small patent-leather shoes, Laing thought that he recognized the dead man as the jeweller from the 40th floor. His pebble spectacles lay on the ground by the front wheel of the car, their intact lenses reflecting the brilliant lights of the apartment building." "The further down Royal reached, the greater the damage. Fire safety doors leaned off their hinges, quartz inspection windows punched out. Few corridor and staircase lights still worked, and no effort had been made to replace the broken bulbs. By eight o’clock little light reached the corridors, which became dim tunnels strewn with garbage sacks. The lurid outlines of lettered slogans, aerosolled in luminous paint across the walls, unravelled around him like the decor of a nightmare. Rival" "leaving behind the quiet encampment and the young woman beside her yellow lake." "novels as The Drowned World and Cocaine Nights, but he is most well-known for Crash (1973) and his autobiographical novel Empire of the Sun (1984), both of which were made into movies and became box office hits." ]]> </content> </entry> <entry> <title type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[The Cyberiad by Stanislaw Lem (1965; 1974 in English) (read in 2016)]]> </title> <id>https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3299</id> <link href="https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3299"/> <updated>2016-11-20T21:37:42+01:00</updated> <author> <name type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Marco von Ballmoos]]> </name> <uri>https://earthli.com/users/marco</uri> </author> <summary type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA["Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is" ... ]]> </summary> <content type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Published by marco on 20. Nov 2016 21:37:42 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I've failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an interest in this book, then I'm happy for you." This is a collection of short stories qua science-fiction fairy tales about Trurl and Klapaucius, the "constructors". They travel far and wide through the galaxy, meeting monarchs great and small, constructing wonderful robots and thinking machines and even clockwork facsimiles of entire universes. Many of the stories elucidate physical principles in fantastical ways, like their "demon of the second kind" which is loosely related to Maxwell's Demon. Another story discusses dragons as quantum-like creatures whose probability of existence can be controlled technologically to make them appear where the possibility of their presence would otherwise be vanishingly small. Other stories explore the limits of human knowledge in philosophical ways, as expressed through nearly ludicrously advanced technology, some of which beggars belief. Their construction skills know seemingly no bounds. We see them start off as bitter rivals and grow to grudging compatriots who even come to one another's rescue, when needed. At the beginning, they seem to be human, but hints dropped throughout the run of stories show them to be clockwork creations themselves. [Citations] "[...] the spit and image of Trurl himself" I'd never heard of this form of "spitting image", but it makes sense, when you look up the "definition" <http://www.thefreedictionary.com/spit+and+image>. "After a while it became clear to him that the construction of the machine itself was child’s play in comparison with the writing of the program. The program found in the head of an average poet, after all, was written by the poet’s civilization, and that civilization was in turn programmed by the civilization that preceded it, and so on to the very Dawn of Time, when those bits of information that concerned the poet-to-be were still swirling about in the primordial chaos of the cosmic deep. Hence in order to program a poetry machine, one would first have to repeat the entire Universe from the beginning—or at least a good piece of it." "So they rolled up their sleeves and sat down to experiment—by simulation, that is mathematically and all on paper. And the mathematical models of King Krool and the beast did such fierce battle across the equation-covered table, that the constructors’ pencils kept snapping. Furious, the beast writhed and wriggled its iterated integrals beneath the King’s polynomial blows, collapsed into an infinite series of indeterminate terms, then got back up by raising itself to the nth power, but the King so belabored it with differentials and partial derivatives that its Fourier coefficients all canceled out (see Riemann’s Lemma), and in the ensuing confusion the constructors completely lost sight of both / King and beast. So they took a break, stretched their legs, had a swig from the Leyden jug to bolster their strength, then went back to work and tried it again from the beginning, this time unleashing their entire arsenal of tensor matrices and grand canonical ensembles, attacking the problem with such fervor that the very paper began to smoke. The King rushed forward with all his cruel coordinates and mean values, stumbled into a dark forest of roots and logarithms, had to backtrack, then encountered the beast on a field of irrational numbers (F1) and smote it so grievously that it fell two decimal places and lost an epsilon, but the beast slid around an asymptote and hid in an n-dimensional orthogonal phase space, underwent expansion and came out fuming factorially, and fell upon the King and hurt him passing sore. But the King, nothing daunted, put on his Markov chain mail and all his impervious parameters, took his increment Δk to infinity and dealt the beast a truly Boolean blow, sent it reeling through an x-axis and several brackets—but the beast, prepared for this, lowered its horns and—wham!!—the pencils flew like mad through transcendental functions and double eigentransformations," "[...] dragons are distinguished by their probability rather than by their actuality, though granted, that probability is overwhelming once they’ve actually come into being. Suppose, for example, one organizes a hunt for such a dragon, surrounds it, closes in, beating the brush. The circle of sportsmen, their weapons cocked and ready, finds only a burnt patch of earth and an unmistakable smell: the dragon, seeing itself cornered, has slipped from real to configurational space. An extremely obtuse and brutal creature, it does this instinctively, of course. Now, ignorant and backward persons will occasionally demand that you show them this configurational space of yours, apparently unaware that electrons, whose existence no one in his right mind would question, also move exclusively in configurational space, their comings and goings fully dependent on curves of probability. Though it is easier not to believe in electrons than in dragons: electrons, at least taken singly, won’t try to make a meal of you." "This gave him pause—though it wasn’t so surprising really, when you considered that the localization of these odious phenomena was subject to so-called dragonomalies, in which certain specimens, particularly when abstracted, underwent a “smearing” effect, which was in reality nothing more than a simple isotopic spin acceleration of asynchronous quantum moments. Much as a hand, emerging from the water fingers-first, appears above the surface in the form of five seemingly separate and independent items, so do dragons, emerging from the lairs of their configurational space, on occasion appear to be plural, though in point of fact they are quite singular." "the nearest stones slowly lifted into the air, while the dust that the dragon had kicked up, instead of settling, hung in midair and assumed the shape of a sign that clearly read AT YOUR SERVICE GOV. It grew dim—day was night and night was day, it grew cold—hell was freezing over; a couple of stones went out for a stroll and softly chatted of this and that; in short, miracles were happening right and left, yet that horrid monster sitting not more than thirty paces from Klapaucius apparently had no intention of disappearing." "Nor does the only peril there lie in its vortices, in debris pulled down from dizzy heights by the current, in meteors gone berserk; for some say that in an unknown place, among dark, crepuscular caverns, at the bottom of an immeasurably deep and unplumbed profundity, for ages and ages now there sits a certain creature, anomalous and wholly anonymous, for anyone who meets the thing and learns its name will surely never live to tell a soul." "“And are not we as well, if you examine us physically, mechanistically, statistically and meticulously, nothing but the minuscule capering of electron clouds? Positive and negative charges arranged in space? And is our existence not the result of subatomic collisions and the interplay of particles, though we ourselves perceive those molecular cartwheels as fear, longing, or meditation? And when you daydream, what transpires within your brain but the binary algebra of connecting and disconnecting circuits, the continual meandering of electrons?”" "There was no need, of course, for him to tell me that plenitude, when too plenitudinous, was worse than destitution, for—obviously—what could one do, if there was nothing one could not? Truly, how could a mind, besieged by a sea of paradises, benumbed by a plethora of possibilities, thoroughly stunned by the instant fulfillment of its every wish and whim—decide on anything?" "Mymosh, thus booted, went flying into the nearby puddle, where his chlorides and iodides mingled with the water, and electrolyte seeped into his head and, bubbling, set up a current there, which traveled around and about, till Mymosh sat up in the mud and thought the following thought:—Apparently, I am!" "And at the very moment when Mymosh was imagining the gentle, crystal Baucis and her faithful Ondragor, and as they journeyed hand in hand among the dark suns of his mind, and all the people of the Gozmos looked on in rapt silence, including the Beadlies, and as the pair softly called to one another—the rust-eaten skull cracked open at the touch of the earthenware shard, pushed by a puff of air, and the murky water rushed in over the copper coils and extinguished the current in the logic circuits, and the Gozmos of Mymosh the Selfbegotten attained the perfection, the ultimate perfection that comes with nothingness. And those who unwittingly had brought him, into the world never learned of his passing." It's hard to imagine that Douglas Adams never saw these lines before he wrote his magnum opus. "[...] in which I showed that each civilization may choose one of two roads to travel, that is, either fret itself to death, or pet itself to death. And in the course of doing one or the other, it eats its way into the Universe, turning cinders and flinders of stars into toilet seats, pegs, gears, cigarette holders and pillowcases, and it does this because, unable to fathom the Universe, it seeks to change that Fathomlessness into Something Fathomable, and will not stop until the nebulae and planets have been processed to cradles, chamber pots and bombs, all in the name of Sublime Order, for only a Universe with pavement, plumbing, labels and catalogues is, in its sight, acceptable and wholly respectable." "[...] let the vile thanatomites and necrophytes thereby be deprived of the chance to congratulate themselves, that Chlorian Theoreticus the Proph, peerless pundit of yore who limned the infinite tomorrow, was of their race! And as they grovel beneath my pedestal, let them have the knowledge that I wished them nothing but the very worst the Universe has to offer, and that the force of my hatred, hurled forth into the future, was equaled only by its impotence! Let them know that I disowned them utterly, and bestowed" "He wasn’t a robot, but on the other hand neither was he a man, nor any sapient proteinoid of the glutinous-albuminous variety. The head was round and plump, with red cheeks, but for eyes it had two penny whistles, and for ears it had thuribles, which gave off a thick cloud of incense. He was dressed in orchid pantaloons, a dark blue stripe down either side and appliquéd with dirty scraps of closely written paper, and he wore high heels. In one hand he held a mandolin made entirely of frosted gingerbread, a few bites already missing from the neck. He was snoring peacefully. I leaned over to read the appliqués on his trousers, but could make out only a few since my eyes watered copiously from the incense." "We had to bestow happiness, then, without violating any Higher Laws. The problem was further complicated by the fact that most cosmic civilizations long for things, in the depths of their souls, they would never openly admit to. Now what do you do: help them achieve the ends to which the little decency they have prompts them, or instead fulfill their innermost desires? Take, for example, the Dementians and Amentians. The Dementians, in their medieval piety, burnt at the stake all those consorting with the Devil, females especially, and they did this because, first, they envied them their unholy delights, and secondly, they found that administering torture in the form of justice could’ be a positive pleasure. The Amentians, on the other hand, worshiped nothing but their bodies, which they stimulated by means of machines, though in moderation, and this activity constituted their chief amusement. They had boxes of glass, and into these they placed various outrages, rapes and mutilations, the sight of which served to whet their sensual appetites. On this planet we dropped a multitude of devices designed to satisfy all desires in such a way that no one needed to be harmed, that is, each device created a separate artificial reality for each individual. Within six weeks both Dementians and Amentians had perished, to a man, from a surfeit of joy, groaning in ecstasy as they passed away! Is that the sort of ingenuity you had in mind, O undeveloped one?”" "True, the Anthropods are at constant war with the Arthropoids over the burning question of whether Moles Have Holes, or, contrariwise, Holes Moles, but observe that as a rule less than half of each generation perishes in that controversy. Now you would have me drive from their heads all belief in obbling, Dimbligensians and so forth, in order to prepare them for rational happiness. Yet this is tantamount to psychic murder, for the resultant minds would be no longer Anthropodous or Arthropoidal—surely you can see that.”" "“Unquestionably! But kindly observe that on that planet there are now close to seven million penitents who have spent a lifetime struggling against their own nature, solely that their fellow citizens might be delivered from the Gugh. And in less than a minute I am to tell them, convince them beyond a shadow of a doubt that all this effort was in vain, that they had wasted their entire lives in pointless, useless sacrifice? How cruel that would be! Superstition must yield to knowledge, but this takes time. Consider the hunchback we spoke of earlier—there Ignorance is indeed Bliss, for he believes his hump fulfills some cosmic role in the great work of Creation. Telling him that it’s actually the product of a molecular accident will only serve to make him despair." ]]> </content> </entry> <entry> <title type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Numero Zero by Umberto Eco (2015) (read in 2016)]]> </title> <id>https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3298</id> <link href="https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3298"/> <updated>2016-11-20T21:33:53+01:00</updated> <author> <name type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Marco von Ballmoos]]> </name> <uri>https://earthli.com/users/marco</uri> </author> <summary type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA["Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is" ... ]]> </summary> <content type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Published by marco on 20. Nov 2016 21:33:53 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I've failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an interest in this book, then I'm happy for you." As ever with Eco, this is not just a novel, but a meta-book about the making of a book detailing the inner workings and construction of a non-partisan newspaper that will tell the "truth". The newspaper is the brainchild of an eccentric tycoon Commendator Vimercate, but the purpose is that just the idea of the newspaper is to serve as a lever on shadowy figures of power, who will allow him into their inner sanctum in exchange for his shutting it down. In effect, the newspaper will never be and the book documenting its rise as well, but it has to be seen to have real potentiality in order for its effect to be served. Convoluted as ever, Eco's prose and his ability to make this concept believable carry him a long way. The story follows the tales of the various reporters from the various beats, going down the rabbit holes of one conspiracy after another (as usual for Eco, for whom the semiotics of conspiracy was a special passion). Though they should be telling the truth, the various journalists bandy about obviously fabricated stories that they purport get closer to the "truth" than true stories would. The main theory is proposed by Braggadocio (one of many puns) who doggedly pursues a story of Mussolini having survived the second World War and having pulled the levers of power long into the 1970s. As ever, there are enough bits of real history woven in so as to make it nearly impossible to tell what's true and false, as Eco was delighted to have it. See Foucault's Pendulum for an even more extravagant and interwoven and longer treatment of the same idea. In the end, the main character Colonna has a book but no publisher and no interest because the newspaper about which he wrote never existed. Nor could he be sure to be able to use his story without attracting the attention of possibly existing shadowy forces that he fear might try to stop him. He takes his salary and slinks away. [Citations] "Losers, like autodidacts, always know much more than winners. If you want to win, you need to know just one thing and not to waste your time on anything else: the pleasures of erudition are reserved for losers. The more a person knows, the more things have gone wrong." "“Take the major British or American newspapers. If they report, say, a fire or a car accident, then obviously they can’t indulge in saying what they think. And so they introduce into the piece, in quotation marks, the statements of a witness, a man in the street, someone who represents public opinion. Those statements, once put in quotes, become facts—in other words, it’s a fact that that person expressed that opinion. But it might be assumed that the journalist has only quoted someone who thinks like him. So there will be two conflicting statements to show, as a fact, that there are varying opinions on a particular issue, and the newspaper is taking account of this irrefutable fact. The trick lies in quoting first a trivial opinion and then another opinion that is more respectable, and more closely reflects the journalist’s view. In this way, readers are under the impression that they are being informed about two facts, but they’re persuaded to accept just one view as being more convincing." "From time to time I hoped it might have been Boggia, the killer from a hundred years ago, who had materialized at night in Via Bagnera, through a sudden rent in time and space (what did Vonnegut call it? a chrono-synclastic infundibulum)," "“You’re forgetting, my love, that Italy is slowly turning into one of those havens you want to banish yourself to. If we’ve managed to both accept and forget all those things the BBC has recounted, it means we are getting used to the idea of losing the sense of shame. Didn’t you see that all those interviewed were happily telling us what they’d done and were almost expecting a medal for it? No more Baroque chiaroscuro, everything in broad daylight, as though painted by the impressionists: corruption rife, Mafiosi officially in parliament, tax dodgers in government, and the only ones to end up in prison are Albanian chicken thieves. Decent people will carry on voting for the hoodlums because they won’t believe the BBC, or they don’t watch such programs because they’re glued to trash, perhaps Vimercate’s home shopping channels will end up on early evening television, and if someone important is murdered, he gets a state funeral." "All we have to do is wait: once this country of ours has finally joined the Third World, the living will be easy, as if it were all Copacabana, the hottest spot south of Havana.”" ]]> </content> </entry> <entry> <title type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Revenge: A Novel by Stephen Fry (2000) (read in 2016)]]> </title> <id>https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3297</id> <link href="https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3297"/> <updated>2016-11-20T21:29:57+01:00</updated> <author> <name type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Marco von Ballmoos]]> </name> <uri>https://earthli.com/users/marco</uri> </author> <summary type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA["Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is" ... ]]> </summary> <content type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Published by marco on 20. Nov 2016 21:29:57 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I've failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an interest in this book, then I'm happy for you." This book is also known as The Stars’ Tennis Balls, which is why this book was so familiar to me, but I couldn’t quite place why. I’d "read it before but under the other title" <https://www.earthli.com/news/news/view_article.php?id=2459>. This is a modern re-telling of Dumas's Count of Monte Christo, with Edward "Ned" Maddstone playing the main role. He is a good-looking, sporty, averagely intelligent and socially well-placed young man to whom everything has always come easily because no obstacles have ever been allowed to remain in his way. He is blissfully unaware of how good he has it. He has a lovely, lovely girlfriend. He has some friends, all of whom hate him very much, for various reasons. These friends conspire to get him arrested, but a bad coincidence leads him into the hands of a secret service with every reason to eliminate him, as well. So, what starts off as an evil schoolboy prank that would have resulted in real but limited prison time or at least parole, turns instead to permanent banishment to a remote island of political prisoners. Ned is, to say the least, utterly out of his depth and bewildered beyond knowing. Nothing in his life has prepared him for this challenge, as he's never had to surmount a real challenge himself. At the island, he is psychologically re-programmed to believe that his previous life was a fiction produced by his madness. There he meets "Babe", another prisoner, put there because he was nearly unbelievably dangerously talented and intelligent. He was a spy who'd outlived his usefulness. Babe takes Ned under his wing and teaches him everything he knows over the next twenty years. Babe helps him remember his past and helps him decipher what happened to him. Babe dies of a heart attack and Ned takes the opportunity to escape the island. Armed with Babes bank account and knowledge (not the least of nine languages), he builds a software empire as Simon Cotter and plans his complex and nefarious revenge on those who wronged him. The manner of this revenge is intricate and exquisitely detailed and deliciously just. He does not stumble or deviate from his path, although he loses everything he'd perhaps hoped to gain, retreating to the island whence he came. [Citations] "Mother and Father gave you that name. And the criminal part of it is that, as a name, it’s only just off. Roy or Lee or Kevin or Dean or Wayne, they’re the real thing. Echt Lumpenproletariat. Dennis and Desmond and Leonard and Norman and Colin and Neville and Eric are revolting, but they are honest. Ashley, though. It’s a Howard or a Lindsay or a Leslie kind of a name. It’s nearly there. It seems to be trying to be there. And that, surely, is the saddest thing of all." "Carry off the ease that belies any sense of anything at all having to be carried off, if that isn’t too baroque. Carry off that natural, effortless taking-it-all-for-granted air. But" "Slowly you have become infected by a northern accent. Not obvious, just a trace, but to your sensitive, highly attuned ears as glaring as a cleft palate. You began to pronounce “One” and “None” to rhyme with “Shone” and “Gone” instead of “Shun” and “Gun,” you gently sounded the “g’s in “Ringing” and “Singing.” At school you even rhyme “Mud” with “Good” and “Grass” with “Lass.” Fair enough, you would be beaten up as a southern poof otherwise, but you have trailed some of that linguistic mud into the house with you." "“Shall we formulate it this way? Money is to Everything as an Airplane is to Australia. The airplane isn’t Australia, but it remains the only practical way we know of reaching it. So perhaps, metonymically, the airplane is Australia after all.”" "Ashley wasn’t popular, he was fully aware of that. He wasn’t one of them. He sounded right, but he wasn’t one of them. He sounded too right. These cretinous sons of upper-class broodmares and high-pedigreed stallions, they were loutish and graceless, entirely undeserving of the privilege accorded them. He, Ashley Barson-Garland, stood apart because he wasn’t enough of an oik. Such splendid irony." "What she really wanted to say was “So we’re going to arrive at Lucca in time to find all the shops and cafés shut, are we? And as usual we’re going to have to wander around a completely empty and deserted town for five hours until everyone else has woken from their siestas. That’s a great plan, Pete.”" "Portia realized that saying “Neither did I, you don’t have to ‘study’ something to know about it” would sound arrogant, so once again, she curbed her tongue." "There seemed to be millions out there who could not understand that their problem was not this or that injustice or social ill, but the diminished sense of self that caused them to blame anything other than their own bitterness and rage: to bolster this delusion, that was the supreme dishonesty. There were people who believed that their opportunities to live a fulfilled life were hampered by the number of Asians in England, by the existence of a royal family, by the volume of traffic that passed by their house, by the malice of trade unions, by the power of callous employers, by the refusal of the health service to take their condition seriously, by communism, by capitalism, by atheism, by anything, in fact, but their own futile, weak-minded failure to get a fucking grip." "Most people, after all, can imagine having terminal cancer, they can’t begin to imagine having brains." "shrugged with open hands as if to suggest that, while I may have picked up the odd pebble of interest on the shore, like Newton I was all too aware of the great ocean of knowledge that lay undiscovered before me." "“Cradle of democracy” indeed. Did he not know that Americans regarded Washington as the cradle of democracy, just as the French did Paris and the Greeks Athens, and no doubt the Icelanders Reykjavík, each with as much reason? Such typically casual arrogance." "The essential truth that people always failed to understand about intelligence, Ashley believed, was that it allowed its possessor deeper intuition and keener instincts than those granted to others. Stupid people liked to delude themselves that while they may not be clever, they were at least able to compensate with feelings and insights denied to the intellectual. Drivel, Ashley thought. It was precisely this kind of false belief that made stupid people so stupid. The truth was that clever people had infinitely more resources from which to make the leaps of connection that the world called intuition. What was “intelligence,” after all, but the ability to read into things?" "“Well, please excuse me, your highness. I’m sorry I’m so shockingly unfamiliar with the delicate nuances of the social calendar. I’m afraid my time these days is taken up with trivial things like history and social justice. There just never seems to be enough left over to devote to the really important issues, like how the upper classes organize their year. I really must get round to it one day.”" "“Here before you were a watery drop of seed down your sinful father’s leg, you miserable perverted gobshite cunt,” murmured Babe, resetting the white queen with great care." "His course of instruction began with games played by Phillidor and Morphy and masterpieces of the romantic age, games that, like paintings, had titles: titles like the Evergreen, the Two Dukes, and the Immortal. Ned was moved from these towards the age of Steinitz and the modern style, then to an understanding of a positional theory called the hypermodern that made his head ache. Next came an induction into opening play and counterplay whose language made Ned laugh. The Caro-Kann and the Queen’s Indian, the Sicilian and the French Defenses, the Gioco Piano and the Ruy Lopez. The Dragon variation, the Tartakower, and the Nimzowitch. The Queen’s Gambit Declined and the Queen’s Gambit Accepted. The Marshall Attack. The Maroczy Bind. The Poisoned Pawn." "But more than that, you understand the greatest chess secret of all. The best move you can ever play in chess is not the best move. No, the best move you can ever play is the move your opponent least wants you to play. And that you did time after time. You knew that I hate the turgid tactical hell of the French, didn’t you? I never told you, but you sensed it. Oh my God, boy, I could hug you I’m so proud.”" "Babe’s brain and memory were, after all, a simple matter of genetic fortune, and he took no pride in them whatsoever: He had come to discover that it was his will and his will alone that marked him out from common men. And will—unlike cerebral proficiency—could be taught, passed on, and made to live forever." "“Fluency equals necessity times confidence over time,” Babe liked to say. “If a five-year-old can speak a language, it cannot be beyond a fifty-year-old.” “But a five-year-old can run around for hours, tumbling and falling over without getting tired,” Ned might often complain. “It doesn’t follow that a fifty-year-old can do the same.” “Bolshy talk. I’ll have none of it.”" "“And all we have, you and I, is that very thing, time, and if we look on this as the most magnificent gift afforded to mankind, then we can see that in this place we are one with Augustine in his cell and Montaigne in his tower. We are the chosen, the privileged. We have what the richest man on earth most covets and can never buy. We have what Henri Bergson saw as God’s chief instrument of torture and madness." "“And all we have, you and I, is that very thing, time, and if we look on this as the most magnificent gift afforded to mankind, then we can see that in this place we are one with Augustine in his cell and Montaigne in his tower. We are the chosen, the privileged. We have what the richest man on earth most covets and can never buy. We have what Henri Bergson saw as God’s chief instrument of torture and madness. Time. Oceans of time in which to be and to become.”" "But I had a conscience, Ned, and the day came when I went to see a writer friend of mine. I told him I wanted to collaborate on a book. A great book, to be published in America, for they would never have let it see the light of day in Britain. A book that would blow the whistle on every dirty trick, every hypocritical evasion, and every filthy lie that ever came out of the West in its squalid battle for supremacy over its perceived enemy. I’m not a traitor, Ned, nor never would be. I loved England. I loved it too well to let it sink lower than the level of a dung beetle in its pursuit of lost grandeur." "“Like anyone with a sliver of honesty in them, I believe what I find I believe when I wake up each morning. Sometimes I can only think we are determined by the writing in our genes; sometimes it seems to me that we are made or unmade by our upbringings. On better days, it is true that I hope with some conviction that we and we alone make ourselves everything that we are.”" "“We have a heap!” Babe clapped his hands. “A heap of fir cones! Seventeen of the darlings. So Ned Maddstone is telling the world that seventeen is officially a heap?” “Well . . .” “Seventeen fir cones constitute a heap, but sixteen do not?” “No, I’m not saying that exactly. . . .” “There we have the problem. The world is full of heaps like this, Ned. This is good, this is not good. This is bad luck, but this is a towering injustice. This is mass murder and this genocide. This is child killing, this abortion. This is lawful intercourse, this statutory rape. There is nothing but a single fir cone’s difference between them, sometimes just the one lonely only little cone telling us that it represents the difference between heaven and hell.”" "Whatever arrogance he may have displayed, Ned would never in those days have assumed that his feelings had primacy over those of others. That they could be so confident in their interpretation of him was an arrogance way beyond anything he had been capable of. They hid their rage. They pretended to like him. They coldly planned to disgrace him in the eyes of his father and his lover, as if he had no emotional life, no point of view, and no right to happiness of his own. That they could treat him as a symbol without life or capacity for pain marked them down as evil beyond imagining. There did not exist the faintest possibility that Ned could ever forgive them." "Babe opened the hand that had been grasping Ned’s. A small fold of paper was clipped between his fingers. “Take it. There is money there; perhaps after thirty years it is more than you can spend. The Cotter Bank, Geneva. When they found out that it was missing they came here to question me. I had hidden its trail and they were mad with rage. ‘Where is it? What have you done with it?’ I had been here no more than a month, but Mallo had passed that month jolting my brain with electricity and filling me with drugs. The violence of my behavior had given him no choice. I had known they would come, you see, and I wanted to be ready. When they arrived, I dribbled, I giggled, I simpered, I slobbered, and I wept. You would have been proud of me, Ned. I was the maddest of the mad. A ruin of a noble mind. They went away cursing, in the belief that they had destroyed the sanity of the only man who knew where all that money lay. I’d love to know how they explained it to their minister. Now, read that piece of paper, learn it, and destroy it. The Cotter Bank, Geneva. All the money will be yours when you leave here.”" "“Good-bye, my boy. You have already saved my life. My mind will live forever in yours. Build great things in my memory and to my memory. We have loved each other. For my sake now, stop your howling. Go quietly and pass this last day in remembering. Remember everything. You take my love and memory with you forever.”" "The Ned who traveled now was an entirely different being, a man of iron will, an avenging angel—an instrument of God." "No, the tide of history had washed weirder flotsam than Barson-Garland into Downing Street, and no doubt would do so again. If he succeeded in getting Simon Cotter to unbelt some of his millions and drop them in the Tory coffers, Ashley would take a deal of stopping." "“It grieves me to relate that I do not have the honor of Mr. Snow’s acquaintance." "The Barson-Garland Page was turning out to be something of a succès d’estime. Taking a cue from the regular columnists on the rival evening paper, Ashley found that he had a gift for tediously obvious opinions expressed in a formulaic polemical style that exactly suited the kind of brain-fagged commuter most ready to confuse polysyllabic misanthropy for intelligent thought." "I once shared a stage with Gore Vidal in Manchester, England, which was a very great honor indeed, although he did not appear to appreciate it. No, but, tush. Mr. Vidal was asked if he felt there had ever been an age in recent history that could boast so few good writers as the present. “There are as many good writers as ever there were,” he replied, and I wish I could reproduce on the page the trademark patrician Gore-drawl that transforms his lightest remark into a marmoreal epigram. “The problem is that there are so few good readers.”" ]]> </content> </entry> <entry> <title type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Making History by Stephen Fry (1997) (read in 2016)]]> </title> <id>https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3296</id> <link href="https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3296"/> <updated>2016-11-20T21:23:00+01:00</updated> <author> <name type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Marco von Ballmoos]]> </name> <uri>https://earthli.com/users/marco</uri> </author> <summary type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA["Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is" ... ]]> </summary> <content type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Published by marco on 20. Nov 2016 21:23:00 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I've failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an interest in this book, then I'm happy for you." This is the story of Michael Young, a doctoral student who is on the verge of delivering his oral presentation of an obscure bit of history involving Adolf Hitler and his mother. Through a series of coincidences, he meets Leo Zuckerman, a physicist who has invented a machine that can look back in time. Together, with a shared interest and passion for the era of the rise of Hitler, they set about modifying the machine to enable them to not only look but to make slight changes. The slight change they make is to pollute the water supply of Brunau (the town in which Hitler was born) with an experimental male contraceptive, preventing Hitler's birth. Part two begins with Michael awakening not in England but in Princeton in America in an alternate future engendered by his and Leo's meddling. The alternate history is one even worse than the one with Hitler in it, a world dominated by a charming, brilliant anti-Semitic polyglot who not only survives WWII but leads Germany and his Nazi party to victory over the world. He exterminates all Jews using the Brunau water to sterilize the lot of them. Michael is horrified and endeavors to locate Leo, who is also wracked with guilt and has, once again, developed a Temporal Imager. They once again modify the machine and concoct a plan to poison the Brunau water with a dead rat, preventing anyone from drinking the water and therefore the contraceptive in it. The timeline is restored, with Michael waking to a more familiar reality, albeit it with some slight changes again. [Citations] "Below me, Jamie and Double Eddie leaned forward from the bank, tugged on a fishing line and hauled in a bottle of white wine from the water. Whatever happened to them, I thought, they would have days like this to look back upon. In dank provincial libraries in February as, balding and bitter, they fussed over their mugs of Earl Grey; in local news production offices, fighting for budgets; in classrooms, floundering in the chaos of contemptuous thugs; at the Crush Bar in Covent Garden, twittering over a diva’s tessitura—wherever they might wash up, always they would have a memory of being nineteen, with flat stomachs, dazzling hair and bottles of river-cooled Sancerre." "“You are looking,” says Leo pointing at the screen, “at Auschwitz Concentration Camp on the ninth of October, 1942.” I frown in puzzlement. So slow. I am so slow. “How do you mean?” “I mean how I mean. This is Auschwitz on October ninth. Three o’clock in the afternoon. You are looking at that day.” I stare again at the lovely billowing shapes in their sweet rippling colors. “You mean . . . a film?” “Still you ask what I mean and still I mean what I mean and still you do not grasp what I mean. I mean that you are looking at both a place and a time.”" He disparages him for not immediately leaping to the conclusion that he's looking at a time machine. What a jerk. "“If you keep making that horrible hawking noise to clear it I’m going to leave the country and never come back,” says Jane. “You won’t even get a postcard.”" "Kurfürstendamm" ]]> </content> </entry> <entry> <title type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[The Hippopotamus by Stephen Fry (1994) (read in 2016)]]> </title> <id>https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3295</id> <link href="https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3295"/> <updated>2016-11-20T21:19:29+01:00</updated> <author> <name type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Marco von Ballmoos]]> </name> <uri>https://earthli.com/users/marco</uri> </author> <summary type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA["Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is" ... ]]> </summary> <content type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Published by marco on 20. Nov 2016 21:19:29 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I've failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an interest in this book, then I'm happy for you." Edward is the "Hippo" and the star of this novel, so-called because of the combination of his girth and his penchant for long baths. He is a one-time up-and-coming poet reduced to a theater critic by waning talent, insufficient gumption and a teensy problem with alcohol. He is swept up in the affairs of his rich-and-famous family when they variously ask him to help discover the secret behind the seeming miraculous workings of his godson. He goes to the stately manor of his old friend, the child's father and proceeds to surreptitiously investigate the matter, collecting information and impressions from the various other hangers-on. He slowly forms a theory, dispensing disputable wisdom and folly all the while, until the story culminates -- as you would expect -- in a revelatory conclusion at a large dinner party, in which the Hippo explains all and solves the mystery. [Citations] "You can’t imagine, if you’re younger than me, which statistically speaking you are bound to be, what it is like to have been born into the booze-and-smokes generation. It’s one thing for a man to find, as he ages, that the generations below him are trashier, more promiscuous, less disciplined and a whole continent more pig-ignorant and shit-stupid than his own—every generation makes that discovery— but to sense all around you a creeping puritanism, to see noses wrinkle as you stumble by, to absorb the sympathetic disgust of the pink-lunged, clean-livered, clear-eyed young, to be made to feel as if you have missed a bus no one ever told you about that’s going to a place you’ve never heard of, that can come a bit hard." "She brought them over, folded a leg under herself and sank down on an ottoman, which was moronically tricked out in a design which would turn out, I supposed, to be taken from some Mayan funeral shroud or mystic Balinese menstrual cloth. The grand idea behind such a squalid episode of cultural rape and the other equally feeble, equally impertinent conceits that littered this appalling room, I supposed, was that Jane would dispose herself there, surrounded by friends, the diversity of whose drinking habits would justify the ludicrous range of unopened liqueur, aperitif and spirit bottles on display, while gentle yet probing conversational topics were flicked like shuttlecocks about the room." "“Well, my darling. If you’ve made peace with your enemies and said goodbye to your friends, you shouldn’t be too sorry to leave the party early. It’s a grotty world and a grotty age and we’ll all be joining you soon enough.”" "there was a boy sitting half-way up the baroque steps that poured from the front portico like a thick stream of molten lava." "The rare words often annoy the punter, but they never think, they never stop to think about a poet’s life. A painter has oils, acrylics and pastels, turpentine, linseed, canvas, sable and hog’s hair. When did you last employ such things routinely? To oil a cricket bat or mascara an eyelid, perhaps. Come to think of it, you’ve probably never oiled a cricket bat in your life, but you know what I mean. And musicians: a musician has entire machines of wood, brass, gut and carbon fibre; he has augmented sevenths, accidentals, Dorian modes and twelve-note rows. When did you ever use an augmented seventh as a way of getting back at your boyfriend or a bassoon obbligato to order pizza? Never. Never, never, never. The poet, though. Oh, yes, the poor poet: pity the poor bloody poet. The poet has no reserved materials, no unique modes. He has nothing but words, the same tools that the whole cursed world uses to ask the way to the nearest lavatory, or with which they patter out excuses for the clumsy betrayals and shiftless evasions of their ordinary lives; the poet has nothing but the same, self-same, words that daily in a million shapes and phrases curse, pray, abuse, flatter and mislead. The poor bloody poet can no longer say “ope” for “open,” or “swain” for “youth,” he is expected to construct new poems out of the plastic and Styrofoam garbage that litters the twentieth-century linguistic floor, to make fresh art from the used verbal condoms of social intercourse. Is it any wonder that, from time to time, we take refuge in “gellies” and “ataractic” and “watchet”? Innocent words, virgin words, words uncontaminated and unviolated, the very mastery of which announces us to possess a relationship with language akin to that of the sculptor with his marble or the composer with his staves. Not that anyone is ever impressed, of course. They only moan about the “impenetrability” or congratulate themselves for being hep to the ellipsis, opacity and allusion that they believe deepens and enriches the work. It’s a bastard profession, believe me." "You catch sight of something perfectly ordinary, such as it might be bluebells nodding on an embankment, or a family picnicking in a lay-by, and suddenly your mind can no longer support the notion of a whole world full of life and objects and fellow-humans. The very idea of a universe appears monstrous and you become unable to participate. What on earth does that tree think it is up to? Why is that heap of gravel sitting there so patiently? What am I doing, staring out of a window? Why are all these molecules of glass hanging together so as to allow me to look through them? The moment passes, of course, and we return to the proper realm of our dull thoughts and our duller newspapers: in less than a second we are part of the world again, ready to be irritated into apoplexy by the stupidity of a government minister or lured into caring about some asinine new movement in conceptual art; once again we become a part of the great compost heap." "Simon, for whom poetry is a closed book in a locked cupboard in a high attic in a lonely house in a remote hamlet in a distant land," "“It was so sweet,” he went on, once Podmore had departed, “Gianni, for such was his name, anxiously explained, in one of those divinely dusty Italian voices, that he was afraid he might hurt me. ‘Carissimo,’ I said, ‘I’ll grant you it’s a monster, but after what I’ve been through this last week you’ll be lucky if it touches the sides. It’ll be like a paper boat up the Grand Canal.’ Still, that’s enough of me. You much of a traveller, Bishop?”" "For all I know, no one in the world has ever been pleased to see me," "One is always hearing a great deal of liberal waffle about the terrible state of the National Health Service. Waiting lists, cuts, low morale: you can’t help but soak up the thrust of the moronic yapping we have to put up with every day from the professionally disenchanted and humourlessly self-righteous wankers of the left. Even a sceptical old reactionary like me is, willy-nilly, influenced by this kind of talk into imagining that all NHS institutions are crowded with desperately sick patients lying about in the corridors on straw palliasses waiting for the health authority’s one overworked, under-rested teenage doctor to come and tell them to pull themselves together. Not a bit of it. Not a bloody bit of it. It may" "when Davey and I walked in through the automatic electrically operated doors and reported to the reception desk I felt less like a soldier dragging his wounded comrade into the filthy Crimean field-hospital of popular left-wing imagination and more like Richard Burton checking in to a five-star hotel in Gstaad with a tipsy Elizabeth Taylor on his arm." "They call me a cynic and sceptic too, but that’s because when I see a thing I call it what it is, not what I want it to be. If you spend your life on a moral hill-top, you see nothing but the mud below. If, like me, you live in the mud itself, you get a damned good view of clear blue sky and clean green hills above. There’s none so evil-minded as those with a moral mission, and none so pure in heart as the depraved" "He is not quite as intelligent as he would like to be, but then which of us is? He is not unintelligent, you understand, he is intelligent enough to glimpse valuable and serious ideas and to be maddened that they are beyond his reach. Because so much that he prizes is out of his intellectual grasp he imagines he can leap at the truth of things by intuition or with the help of some deeper agency, some spirit of nature." "Davey decided that he had to be as pure and natural as an animal. Pure and natural as a ladybird, of course, not pure and natural as the ladybird’s cousin, the dung-beetle. Pure and natural as a gazelle, not pure and natural as the hyenas that bite into the gazelle’s eyeballs and feast on its intestines. His ideas of purity and naturalness seem to have more in common with a Victorian hymnbook for children than any real understanding of the physical world." ]]> </content> </entry> <entry> <title type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Definitely, Maybe by Arkady Strugatsky (1977) (read in 2016)]]> </title> <id>https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3293</id> <link href="https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3293"/> <updated>2016-11-20T21:17:12+01:00</updated> <author> <name type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Marco von Ballmoos]]> </name> <uri>https://earthli.com/users/marco</uri> </author> <summary type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA["Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is" ... ]]> </summary> <content type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Published by marco on 20. Nov 2016 21:17:12 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I've failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an interest in this book, then I'm happy for you." This is the story of a physics researcher, toiling alone on a problem, on the edge of a great discovery. The closer he gets to breaking through, to culminating his research, the more the universe seems to resist him. Distracting visitors drop by, his neighbor turns out to be much more than he'd appeared, then is murdered. The murder suspect is the researcher himself, with more visitors dropping in to threaten and cajole. He meets other researchers who, as they swap stories, all realize that they've been similarly stymied, that they each were gently nudged from their goal by an invisible and inexorable impasse. In a vein similar to how capital-T Time resists change in 11/22/63, Stephen King's novel about the Kennedy assassination, here it is the capital-U Universe that resists the plumbing of its deepest workings. They discover that its possible that the Universe tries to preserve a homeostatic balance between entropy and reasoning ability -- not actively, but by a principle similar to Heisenberg's about position and momentum. The cabal of scientists try to wrap their head around this concept and try to work out how they could even possibly continue to research it -- or even harness it -- if it is true. Because if it's true, then it means that the Universe will resist investigation into proving this principle, by definition. [Citations] "“Phil,” Malianov said. “Wait. Don’t you see it either? What the hell kind of supercivilization is this? Some supercivilization that prods us like a blind kitten. Why all this meaningless nonsense? My investigator and the cognac? Zakhar’s women? Where is the fundamental principle of reason: expediency, economy?” “Those are particulars,” Vecherovsky replied softly. “Why measure nonhuman expediency in human terms? And then remember with what force you smack yourself on the cheek to kill a crummy mosquito. A blow like that could easily kill all the mosquitoes in the vicinity.” Weingarten added: “Or, for instance. What is the expediency of building a bridge over a river from the point of view of a trout?”" "You say: a united mankind. You see, for your plan, there may be some life-form that could do it, but not ours, not earthlings, I mean. Our people would never believe anything like that. You know when it will believe in a supercivilization? When that supercivilization stoops to our level and starts sprinkling us with bombs from whining spacecraft. Then we’ll believe, then we’ll be united, and even then not right away. We’ll probably wallop each other with a few salvos first.”" "If it was the Homeostatic Universe quelling a microrebellion, that’s just how it should have seemed. Like a man swatting a fly with a towel—vicious, whistling blows cutting through the air; vases tumbling from shelves; lamps breaking; innocent moths falling victim to the blows; the cat, its paw stomped on, making a beeline for the couch. Massed power and inefficiency." "It’s very unpleasant for a person to realize that he’s not at all what he thought he was. He wants to remain the way he was all his life, and that’s impossible if he capitulates. And so he has to … And yet there’s still a difference. In our century people shoot themselves because they’re ashamed before others—society, friends … In the last century people shot themselves because they were ashamed before themselves. You see, for some reason, in our century, everybody thinks that a person can always come to terms with himself. It’s probably true. I don’t know why. I don’t know what’s going on here. Maybe it’s because the world has become more complicated? Maybe it’s because now there are so many other concepts besides pride and honor that can be used to convince people.”" "The fear, loathing, despair, and feeling of impotence came back, and I realized with unbearable clarity that from that moment a line of fire and brimstone that could never be crossed was drawn between Vecherovsky and me. I would have to stop behind it for the rest of my life, while he went on through the land mines, dust, and mud of battles I would never know and disappeared in the flaming horizon. He and I would nod hello when we ran into each other on the stairs, but I would stay on this side of the line with Weingarten, Zakhar, and Glukhov—drinking tea or beer, or chasing vodka with beer, and gabbing about intrigues and promotions, saving up for a car, and eking out my existence over some dull, official project." "And I also thought that he said: “He knew how to scribble on paper under the candle’s crackle! He had something to die for by the Black River.” And his satisfied guffaws, like Wells’s Martian laughter, rang in my ears." "Billion became for BN (and naturally, according to the law of communicating vessels, for AN as well) a novella about the tormenting and essentially hopeless struggle of mankind to preserve the “right of primogeniture” against the dull, blind, persistent force that knows neither honor, nor nobility, nor charity, that knows only one thing—how to achieve its goals, by any means, without any setbacks" "“If you have the guts to be yourself,” as John Updike wrote, “other people’ll pay your price.”" "And as we all know, there is nothing more pleasurable than recalling unpleasantness that has bypassed us successfully." ]]> </content> </entry> <entry> <title type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[We by Yevgeny Zamyatin (1921) (read in 2016)]]> </title> <id>https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3294</id> <link href="https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3294"/> <updated>2016-11-20T21:16:44+01:00</updated> <author> <name type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Marco von Ballmoos]]> </name> <uri>https://earthli.com/users/marco</uri> </author> <summary type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA["Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is" ... ]]> </summary> <content type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Published by marco on 20. Nov 2016 21:16:44 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I've failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an interest in this book, then I'm happy for you." How do I even begin to describe a novel of this breadth and imagination and density of idea and thought? Zamyatin packed in seemingly every single concept he could think of, presaging many other novelists who would come after, not least of whom are Orwell, Huxley, Dick and more. As with those other authors, his novel is set in a dystopian future, in a glass city completely shut off from nature and the non-calculable, the non-rational, the unpredictable, from anything that is not 100% statistically predictable. The lives of the citizens of this city run like clockwork, with no deviations allowed or -- for the most part -- even attempted. Each person is assigned a letter and a number, the letter in some ways emotionally evocative of the kind of person, but only in an abstract way. The writing style is at-times florid and descriptive and sumptuous and rich -- nearly every paragraph bears re-reading, nearly every sentence feels hand-crafted to contribute to the overarching concept of the book in myriad ways, from the spelling of words to multi-layered allusions to mixing in of wordplay in English and other languages. The translation is, I feel, quite sublime. We follow the life of D-503, the main designer of the Integral, a majestic spaceship being built to seek the stars after 1000 years of the founding of the One State. We follow his turning from a cog in the machine to a rebel by I-330 and his subsequent falling in love with both her and O-90. As in novels that would follow -- like 1984 -- he walks the path to revolution and is then pulled back by the One State through surgery (essentially lobotomy of emotion and imagination). Despite his subjugation, damage is done to the One State and its glass-walled city, nature once again impinging on it, disrupting its clean rationality. The leaders of the revolution are captured and tortured but do not relent, even in death. The revolution will continue, somehow. [Citations] "Astounding: the extent to which this criminal instinct is deep-rooted" "Through the glass—foggy and dim—I saw the stupid muzzle of some kind of beast, his yellow eyes, obstinately repeating one and the same incomprehensible thought at me. We looked at each other for a long time, eye to eye, through the mineshafts from the surface world to that other world, beyond the surface. But a thought swarmed in me: what if he, this yellow-eyed being—in his ridiculous, dirty bundle of trees, in his uncalculated life—is happier than us?" "I don’t remember where things contracted into darkness but in the darkness we went up steps, endlessly and silently. I didn’t see it but I knew: she walked just like I did—eyes closed, blind, head thrown back, teeth biting lips while listening to the music of my barely audible tremble." "But here is the thing: if this world is mine alone, then why is it in these records? Why are these absurd “dreams,” closets, and endless corridors here? It is with regret that I see, instead of an orderly and strict mathematical epic poem in honor of the One State—I see some kind of fantastic adventure novel emerging from me. Ah, if only this was really only some sort of novel, and not this new life of mine: full of X’s, S's, and descents." "But it may be that this is for the best. It is highly likely that you, my unknown readers, are mere children in comparison with us (after all, we were bred by the One State, and consequently we have achieved the utmost pinnacle of human potentiality). And, like children, you will only swallow this bitter thing I am giving you if it is thoroughly coated with a thick adventuresome syrup." "Imagine this: a human finger, cut off from the whole, from the hand—a separate human finger, stooping, bent down, skipping, running along a glass sidewalk. This finger is me. And the strangest, most unnatural thing of all is that the finger doesn’t want to be on the hand, with the others, at all." Like Gogol's nose. "Before the action began (equals the blast), a dozen ciphers from our hangar were standing around and gaping under the barrel of the engine. Afterward, exactly nothing of them remained, except some crumbs and soot. I write this here with pride because the rhythm of our labor did not falter for even a second because of this—no one even flinched. We and our machines continued our straight-lined and circular movements with the same old precision, as if nothing had happened. A dozen ciphers are barely one hundred millionth part of the mass of the One State and, according to practical calculations, this is infinitely small of the third order. Arithmetically illiterate compassion was only something the Ancients knew; to us, it is amusing." "Their sentences are also the same: an untimely death. This is the very justice that people who lived in stone houses, lit by the rosy, innocent rays of the morning of history, could only dream about; their “God” punished those who disparaged the Holy Church in exactly the same way as he punished those who committed murder." "We departed from zero to the right then we returned to zero from the left, and so: instead of plus zero, we are at minus zero. Do you understand? This zero looks like a silent, colossal, narrow, knife-sharp cliff to me. In the ferocious, shaggy darkness, having held our breath, we cast off from the black, midnight side of the Zero Cliff. For centuries, we sailed and sailed, each of us a Columbus, we rounded the whole circle of the Earth, and finally, hooray! Ahoy and everyone’s up the mast: ahead of us is a different, as yet unknown side of the Zero Cliff, lit up by the aurora polaris of the One State, an azure mass, the sparks of a rainbow, the sun . . . hundreds of suns, billions of rainbows . . ." "The aero punched through the thicket of air with difficulty; transparent branches whistled and lashed. The city below looked made of pale-blue blocks of ice. All of a sudden, a cloud appears, a quick, slanted shadow. And the ice turns leaden and swollen and, like when standing on the banks of a river in the springtime, you anticipate—any moment now—a cracking, a surging, a twirling, a bolting away." "The enormous dial at the pinnacle of the Tower was a face: bending over through the clouds and spitting down seconds, waiting indifferently." "We walk—one million-headed body—with a humble joy in each of us, similar, I imagine, to what molecules, atoms, and phagocytes experience. The Christians of the ancient world (our only predecessors, as imperfect as they were) also understood this: humility is a virtue and pride is a vice; “WE” is divine, and “I” is satanic." "maybe I am one of thousands among us, still pretending, like me, to be phagocytes . . . What if today’s essentially irrelevant occurrence—what if all this is only the beginning, only the first meteorite in a whole series of rumbling, burning rocks, spilling through infinity toward our glass paradise?" "And I can see: I forgot again that I am not writing this for myself but for you, my unknowns, whom I love and pity, for you who are still plodding along in distant centuries, below." "They say that the Ancients conducted elections in some kind of secrecy, hiding like thieves; several of our historians even confirm that they appeared at the election festivities completely masked. (I imagine this fantastic, gloomy spectacle: nighttime, a square, figures in dark cloaks stealing along a wall; the crimson flame of torches cowering in the wind . . .) Why would all this mystery be necessary? Even today it is not understood conclusively; the likeliest explanation is that elections were connected to some sort of mystical, superstitious, maybe even criminal rites. For us, there is nothing to hide and nothing to be ashamed of: we celebrate election day in the daytime, openly and honestly. I see everyone vote for the Benefactor; everyone sees me vote for the Benefactor—and it couldn’t be any different, since “I” and “everyone” are the unified “WE.”" "And if you even suggest the impossible, that is, that there could be some dissonance in the usual homophony, then the invisible Guardians are here, among our ranks: at any moment, they can stop ciphers who are falling into error and save them from their next false step—and save the One State from them." "And I joined Him mentally, to see all this from above: the concentric circles of the tribunal contoured with fine, light-blue dotted lines like the circles of a cobweb strewn with microscopic suns (our shining badges); and the white, wise Spider would now sit at the center of it—the Benefactor, clad in white—who wisely binds us by our hands and feet with His benefactorly threads of happiness." "Morning. Through the ceiling: the sky has its usual strong, round, and red-cheeked appearance. I think I would have been less surprised if I had seen some unusual quadrilateral sun overhead, people in multicolored clothing made of bestial wool, and opaque stone walls. Could it be that the world—our world—still exists? Or is this just inertia, the generator is turned off but the gears are still rumbling and spinning: two rotations, three rotations, and it will freeze on the fourth . . ." "DISTURBANCE WROUGHT BY THE ENEMIES OF HAPPINESS, WHICH, NATURALLY, DEPRIVES THEM OF THE RIGHT TO BECOME BRICKS IN THE FOUNDATIONS OF THE ONE STATE, RENEWED YESTERDAY. IT IS CLEAR TO EACH OF US THAT TAKING THEIR VOICES INTO ACCOUNT WOULD BE AS RIDICULOUS AS TAKING THE ACCIDENTAL COUGHS OF SICK PEOPLE IN A CONCERT AUDIENCE AS A PART OF A MAJESTIC, HEROIC SYMPHONY ." "Everything is new, new, new—a sort of downpour of events—and one of me is not enough to collect it all. I am stretching out the flaps of my unif and cupping my hands and yet whole bucketfuls still flow past me, and only drops end up on these pages . . ." "“But we—we know, meanwhile, that there is no final number. Though we might forget it too. Yes—it’s highly probable that we will forget it when we grow older—and everyone inevitably grows older. And then, unavoidably, down we will go like autumn leaves from a tree . . ." Just like every other successful revolution. "BUT IT IS NOT YOUR FAULT: YOU ARE SICK. THE NAME OF THIS SICKNESS: IMAGINATION. THIS IS THE WORM THAT GNAWS BLACK WRINKLES ONTO YOUR FOREHEAD. THIS IS THE FEVER THAT CHASES YOU, AND YOU RUN OFF INTO THE DISTANCE EVEN THOUGH THIS “DISTANCE” BEGINS WHERE HAPPINESS ENDS. IT IS THE LAST BARRICADE ON THE PATH TO HAPPINESS." "[...] see the transparent, living cranes bending their swanlike necks, stretching out their beaks, thoughtfully and tenderly feeding the Integral with scary explosive food for its engine." "On the corner, the door of an auditorium was wide open and a slow, bulky column of about fifty people was coming through it. But “people” is not quite right: there were no feet to them but some kind of heavy forged wheel being turned by an invisible axle. They weren’t people but sort of person-looking tractors. Above their heads, flapping in the wind was a white flag, with a golden sun sewn onto it, and in its rays was the inscription: “We are the first! We have been Operated! Everyone follow us!”" "The bridge offered up its obedient, slavishly bowed-over spine to the three of us: [...]" "A second later everything below is tightening up and falling deeper and deeper into some sort of funnel: the protuberant, icy-blue sketch of the city, the round little bubbles of the cupolas, the lonely lead finger of the Accumulator Tower. Then: a fleeting wadded curtain of clouds. We break through and then: sun, blue sky. Seconds, minutes, miles and the blueness quickly hardens, filling with darkness, and stars come through like drops of cold, silver sweat . ." "Over the instruments and the maps: heads, circumnavigated with bristling gray, and other heads, yellow, bald, ripe. Quickly, I scooped up everyone—in one glance—and went backward, along the corridor, along the gangway, downstairs to the engine room. There: the heat and the din from the scorching, blasting pipes; the reckless, drunken, never-pausing squats of the glittering cranks; and the dials trembling just slightly . . ." "There you will be healed, there you will be fed full of sumptuous happiness, and once you’re satiated, you will slumber evenly and snore to an organized beat—can you not hear this great symphony of snores? You funny ciphers: they want to liberate you of the torturously gnawing question marks that wriggle like worms . . . But you’re standing here and listening to me instead. Go quickly—upstairs—to the Great Operation! What does it matter to you that I stay here alone? What does it matter to you if I don’t want them to want things for me—if I want to want things for myself—if I want the impossible . . . ?”" ]]> </content> </entry> <entry> <title type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[One Human Minute by Stanislaw Lem (1971--1986) (read in 2016)]]> </title> <id>https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3309</id> <link href="https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3309"/> <updated>2016-11-20T21:14:01+01:00</updated> <author> <name type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Marco von Ballmoos]]> </name> <uri>https://earthli.com/users/marco</uri> </author> <summary type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA["Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is" ... ]]> </summary> <content type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Published by marco on 20. Nov 2016 21:14:01 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I've failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an interest in this book, then I'm happy for you." This is a short book containing three stories. The first is a fake review of a non-existent book called One Human Minute. The book purports to give an impression of what occurs on Earth each minute by compiling meticulous statistics about every conceivable facet of human life. E.g. the number of deaths of various kinds, the number of births, copulations, illnesses, etc. He actually reviews several editions of this book, each of which extends the concept of the original. The second is a foretelling of the development of 21st-century weapons, told as a history. This sounds contradictory, but actually works quite well. His idea is that the battlefield will be increasingly automated and miniaturized until the "war" moves entirely out of human hands and into the purely virtual. He's not far wrong, actually, so far. All signs point to his predictions coming true. The third is an interesting foray into cosmology, a discussion of how much luck had to do with the formation of life on Earth and the possible answers this provides to Fermi's purported paradox. The notion of how the inexorable rotation of the galactic spiral arms were timed perfectly with the cycles of life on Earth is a tempting explanation and entirely plausible, at least the way he presents it as a "fake" scientist. All three books were, as ever with Lem, very interesting and engaging and well-worth reading. He's never predictable. [Citations] The following citations pertain to the review of One Human Minute, the book that details everything that happens in one minute on planet Earth. It is all seasons at once and there is an overwhelming amount of distraction and delight in a world where everything global is available locally -- an apt description of our Internet Age, made well before its time. "Because advertising, with monstrous effectiveness, attributes perfection to everything—and so to books, to every book—a person is beguiled by twenty thousand Miss Universes at once and, unable to decide, lingers unfulfilled in amorous readiness like a sheep in a stupor. So it is with everything. Cable television, broadcasting forty programs at once, produces in the viewer the feeling that, since there are so many, others must be better than the one he has on, so he jumps from program to program like a flea on a hot stove, proof that technological progress produces new heights of frustration. (Emphasis added.)" "There had to be a book, then, about what Everybody Else was doing, so that we would be tormented no longer by the doubt that we were reading nonsense while the Important Things were taking place Elsewhere." "While it is untrue that there is no such thing as mental illness, that it was invented by psychiatrists to torment their patients and squeeze money out of them, it is true that normal people do far madder things than the insane." "You may feel indignation, you may take it as an affront to the entire human race, aimed so skillfully that it is irrefutable, containing nothing but verified facts; you may console yourself that at least no one can possibly make a film or a television series out of it—but it will definitely be worthwhile to think about it, though your conclusions will not be pleasant." "You can have sympathy for one person, possibly for four, but eight hundred thousand is impossible The numbers that we employ in such circumstances are cunning artificial limbs. They are like the cane a blind man uses; tapping the sidewalk keeps him from bumping into a wall, but no one will claim that with this cane he sees the whole richness of the world, or even the small fragment of it on his own street." "Games of this sort with statistics can rightly be called cheap. They may be meant as a reminder that we—who with the might of our industry poisoned the air, the soil, the seas, who turned jungles into deserts, who exterminated countless species of animals and plants that had lived for hundreds of millions of years, who reached other planets, and who altered even the albedo of the Earth, thereby revealing our presence to cosmic observers—could disappear so easily and without a trace." "There is something mechanical about this, inexorable, and animallike. How can one come to terms with an image of humanity copulating relentlessly through all the cataclysms that befall it, or that it has brought upon itself?" "Does this book truly show all of humanity? The statistical tables are a keyhole, and the reader, a Peeping Tom, spies on the huge naked body of humanity busy about its everyday affairs. But through a keyhole not everything can be seen at once." "It is as if someone were to try to measure the heat of passion with a thermometer, or to put, under the heading “Acts," both sex acts and acts of faith." "Dostoevsky feared in his Notes from Underground. Dostoevsky believed that we were threatened by scientifically proven determinism, which would toss the sovereignty of the individual—with its free will—onto the garbage heap when science became capable of predicting every decision and every emotion like the movements of a mechanical switch. He saw no alternative, no escape from the cruel predictability that would deprive us of our freedom, except madness His Underground Man was prepared to lose his mind, so that, released by madness, it would not succumb to triumphant determinism." "yet). This introduction claims an important role for One Human Minute and its imitators: to supply the complete truth. The original One Human Minute is supposed to be computerized, so that one can call it up on one's home computer But most people will prefer the volume on the shelf. And" "And so the book, styling itself "all books in one,” will increase the mass of printed paper In it you can find out how many trees fall per minute to saw and ax all over the world. Forests are turned into paper to make newspapers that call for the forests to be saved. But that piece of information is not in One Human Minute." The next set of citations are for the second book, the reverse military history of the 21st century. "From a military standpoint it was wasteful, because at ground zero all objects turned into flaming plasma, a gas of atoms stripped of their electron shells. At the site of the explosion, stones, trees, houses, metals, bridges, and human bodies vaporized, and concrete and sand were hurled into the stratosphere in a rising mushroom of flames." "The competition between old and new weapons was brief: massive, armored equipment could not withstand the attacks of the microarmies Just as germs invisibly invade an organism to kill it from within, so the nonliving, artificial microbes, following the tropisms built into them, penetrated the gun barrels, cartridge chambers, tank and plane engines. They corroded the metal catalytically, or, reaching the powder charges or fuel tanks, blew them up. What could even the bravest soldier, carrying grenades, a machine gun, a bazooka, or any other firearm, do against a nonliving, microscopic enemy? He would be like a doctor trying to fight the bacteria of cholera with a hammer or a revolver." An interesting metaphor for the asymmetrical warfare we see today, from guerrilla to cyber. "Every political party had its experts But the advisers of the different parties said completely different things With time, computer systems were brought in to help; too late, people realized they were becoming the mouthpieces of their computers. They thought they were the ones doing the reasoning, drawing independent conclusions based on data supplied by computer memory; but in fact they were operating with material preprocessed by the computer centers, and that material was determining human decisions." "Acid rain had been known in the twentieth century But now there were rains so corrosive that they destroyed roads, power lines, and factory roofs, and it was impossible to determine whether they were caused by pollution or by enemy sabotage. It was that way with everything. Livestock were stricken, but was the disease natural or artificial? The hurricane that ravaged the coast—was it a chance thing, or was it engineered by an invisible swarm of micrometeorological agents, each as small as a virus, covertly diverting ocean air masses? Was the drought natural—however murderous—or was it, too, caused by a skillful diversion of the rain clouds?" "Blurred, also, was the distinction between real and spurious hostilities In order to turn its people against another nation, a country would produce on its own territory “natural” catastrophes so obviously artificial that its citizens were bound to believe the charge that the enemy was responsible. When it came out that a certain large and wealthy nation, in offering aid to those that were underdeveloped and overpopulated, supplemented the provisions it sold (cheaply) of sago, wheat, corn, and potato flour with a drug that diminished sexual potency, the Third World became enraged. This was now an undercover, antinatural war." This last set of citations about from the third book about cosmological musings. "And there were hypotheses about the self-destructiveness of intelligence—such as von Höorner's, which connected the psychozoic "density" of the Universe with its barrenness, claiming that suicide threatened every civilization, as nuclear war was now threatening humanity. The organic evolution of life took billions of years, but its final, technological phase lasted barely a few dozen centuries. Other hypotheses pointed to the dangers that the twentieth century encountered even in the peaceful expansion of technology, whose side effects devastated the reproductive capacities of the biosphere." "He certainly did not conceive such devices in any concrete way; but we, reading his words today, not only know that they have come true but also expand their meaning with a multitude of details familiar to us, which only adds weight to his statements." That is literally what I just did with the previous citation. "It is even more difficult to foresee what will become of our system when it leaves the calm space that stretches between Perseus and Sagittarius, between the stellar clouds of the two galactic arms. Assuming that the difference between the speed of the Sun and the spiral equals one kilometer per second, we shall reach the next spiral in five hundred million years." "The key question in re-creating the history of the solar system and life on Earth is: Did something happen on the order of simple bottle-breaking, which could be put into statistics, or was it, instead, something like the football and the aquarium?" "Phenomena that are statistically calculable do not become statistically incalculable suddenly, at a well-defined boundary, but, rather, by degrees The scholar takes a position of cognitive optimism, that is, he assumes that the subjects he studies will yield to calculation It is nicest if they do so deterministically: the angle of incidence is equal to the angle of reflection, a body immersed in water loses exactly as much of its weight as the weight of the water it displaces, and so on It is not quite so nice if calculable probability has to substitute for certainty But it is not nice at all when absolutely nothing can be calculated" "Even in the tale of the bottle and the football there is no chaos. Every event, taken separately, obeys the laws of physics, and of deterministic physics, not quantum physics, because we can measure the force with which the child kicked the ball, the angle of impact between bottle and ball, the speed of both bodies at that instant, the path the bottle described when it bounced off the ball, and the speed with which it fell into the aquarium and filled with water Each step of the sequence, taken separately, is subject to mechanics and statistics, but the sequence itself is not (that is, one cannot establish how often a thing that has happened will happen)." "The initial states have to be brought into the theory from the outside It is obvious, however, that when some initial state must be achieved precisely by chance in order to produce the initial state of the next occurrence, also precisely defined, and so on, then a certainty that transcends the realm of probabilities becomes an unknown, about which nothing can be said except that "something very unusual took place.”" "To the question "How often does what happened with the Sun and the Earth happen in the Universe?" there is no answer yet, because we are not sure in which category of events to place the case." "This factor reduces the enigma of the initial state of the Universe to an argument ad hominem: if conditions had been very different, the question would not have arisen, since there would have been no one to ask it." "The similarity of my speculations to the theories that appeared later gives me courage to speculate further." "Faith as well as science endowed the visible world with properties that eliminated blind, incalculable chance as the author of all events. The war of good and evil present in all religions does not always end, in every faith, with the victory of good, but in every one it establishes a clear order of existence. The sacred as well as the profane rest on that universal order Thus, chance, the ultimate arbiter of existence, was not present in any of the beliefs of the past.* Science, too, long resisted acknowledging the creative and incalculable role of chance in the shaping of reality." "Culture exists and has always existed in order to make every accident, every kind of arbitrariness, appear in a benevolent or at least necessary light The common denominator of all cultures, the source of ritual, of all commandments, of every taboo, is this: for everything there is one and only one measure." "The huge clouds of dark, cold gases circling in the arms of galaxies are slowly undergoing fragmentation into parts as unpredictable as shattered glass The laws of Nature act not in spite of random events but through them. The statistical fury of the stars, a billion times aborting in order to give birth once to life, a life slain by a chance catastrophe in millions of its species in order to yield intelligence once—this is the rule, not the exception, in the Universe." "The history of science shows that each picture of the world, in turn, was thought to be the last; then it was revised, only to crumble eventually like the pattern of a broken mosaic, and the labor of putting it together was taken up anew by the next generation." "It may be that someday a deus ex machina will cope with these inhuman, overcomplicated measurements, inaccessible to our poor animal brains: an alienated, human-initiated machine intelligence—or, rather, the product, pretermechani-cal, of a human-launched evolution of synthetic mind. But here I overstep the twenty-first century into a darkness that no speculation can illumine." ]]> </content> </entry> <entry> <title type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Finders, Keepers by Stephen King (2015) (read in 2016]]> </title> <id>https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3290</id> <link href="https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3290"/> <updated>2016-11-20T21:10:02+01:00</updated> <author> <name type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Marco von Ballmoos]]> </name> <uri>https://earthli.com/users/marco</uri> </author> <summary type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA["Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is" ... ]]> </summary> <content type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Published by marco on 20. Nov 2016 21:10:02 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I've failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an interest in this book, then I'm happy for you." This is the sequel to Mr. Mercedes, reuniting the trio of detectives that formed at the end of that book: Holly, Jerome and Bill Hodges. They are a fun team to watch, typically interesting King characters. The story is good but feels a bit too well-oiled, especially if you've read a lot of Stephen King books. You know where it's going and how it's going to end. The bits of foreshadowing with Brady are eerie and quite well-done -- much more like his best of old. This story follows (yet another) avid fan (Morris) of a noir-mystery writer (think Roth and Updike with a bit of the reclusive Salinger) who feels betrayed by how his hero's character was made to end. He's such an avid fan that he breaks into the writer's home with two cohorts in order to rob him of supposedly large amounts of cash. He discovers a final novel with his hero in it, unpublished for decades. Enraged, he kills the writer for the multiple betrayals of this fictional hero, getting away with the crime and stashing the novel away where he can read it in peace. Before he can read a single page, though, he goes on a bender and rapes a girl. He is caught and sentenced to decades in prison. Fast-forward twenty years (or so) and Pete, a young guy in his last year of high school, discovers the book hidden in a trunk. He, too, is an avid fan of the writer and immediately recognizes the book for what it is. He also makes good use of the money stashed with the book to anonymously get his family through tough times. As you would expect, Morris is eventually paroled and comes looking for his book and his money, both of which are gone. He quickly ascertains what happened and pursues Pete. The detective trio are hot on his trail, trying to save Pete and solve the mystery. [Citations] Mr. Ricker is the inspiring English teacher. "I am required to teach certain antiquities I would rather not teach. I see the loss of enthusiasm in your eyes, and my soul groans. Yes! Groans! But I soldier on, because I know that much of what I teach is not stupid. Even some of the antiquities to which you feel you cannot relate now or ever will, have deep resonance that will eventually reveal itself. Shall I tell" ]]> </content> </entry> <entry> <title type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift (1726) (read in 2016)]]> </title> <id>https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3259</id> <link href="https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3259"/> <updated>2016-05-08T21:56:19+02:00</updated> <author> <name type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Marco von Ballmoos]]> </name> <uri>https://earthli.com/users/marco</uri> </author> <summary type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA["Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is" ... ]]> </summary> <content type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Published by marco on 8. May 2016 21:56:19 Updated by marco on 15. Jun 2016 09:14:30 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I've failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an interest in this book, then I'm happy for you." This tale follows the life of gentleman adventurer Gulliver along several ocean voyages, each of which ends in shipwreck. The first takes him to Lilliput, where he is much, much bigger than everyone else. He describes his nine months there as he quickly learns their language and ingratiates himself to the emperor. He returns home with adequate riches in the form of miniature livestock that he sells to finance the family he left behind. Soon after, he is on a boat again, stranding himself somewhere in the Pacific, on a large heretofore undiscovered continent in the Pacific Ocean called Brobdignag. On this continent, the residents are as much bigger than he as he was bigger than the Lilliputians. He tells of his rather mundane adventures there, but be assured that here, too, he befriends royalty and plants himself firmly at the top of the Brobdingnagian food-chain. He is swept off this continent by circumstance (and a bird) and is once again rescued on the open ocean. This most unfortunate of sailors is somehow taken up on another crew. This ship is attacked by pirates and Gulliver is stranded near idea. He is picked up by the flying island of Laputa, which is composed nearly entirely of adamant and has an adamant mechanism to guide its motion. After spending some time among the royalty there, he becomes bored and wants to visit the lands below, named Balnibarbi. Again, Gulliver is feted by all and invited everywhere important. In the great university of Lagado he finds the reason the country is so dilapidated: the entirety of the people's efforts have been perverted into non-rational and non-scientific pursuits that have no hope of accomplishing anything useful. There are only a few holdouts, whose homes and lands look normal and seem productive to Gulliver. A final side trip to Glubbdubdrib has him communing with the ghosts of all of the celebrities of the ages, thanks to the help of a great sorcerer. Gulliver again benefits from tremendous powers without any reason as to why he is singled out for the privilege. After once again returning home to his wife and children -- who must be teenagers by now -- he cannot stay put and takes advantage of an offer to captain his own vessel. This is a capital idea if you want to commit insurance fraud, as the vessel is almost certain to capsize or otherwise fail to reach its destination with Gulliver aboard. It turns out that, this time, Gulliver's crew is less than honorable and they hire criminals to replace expired members until he has no more control and they trap him in his cabin. After weeks, they resolve to rid themselves of him in a small dinghy. He of course fetches up on yet another previously undiscovered land, this one populated by Yahoos and Houyhnhnms. The Yahoos are life extremely vile humans with no civilizing characteristics. The Houyhnhnms are horses with pure rationality and no strife and perfect in every way. Gulliver, of course, lives with the Houyhnhnms, even though he looks just like a Yahoo, which they keep as work animals. He spends years with them, learning their language and their ways and resolving to never return to the debased culture whence he came. Alas, the Houyhnhnms decide to get rid of him because they cannot abide a Yahoo in their midst. He builds himself a canoe and -- lo and behold -- is rescued by a Portuguese ship. He is of two minds: he wants to be rescued, but he doesn't want to spend any time in the company of Yahoos. He doesn't even want to return to civilization, really. He abhors everything about his own kind and can no longer abide even the smell of them. This applies even to his family once he is returned to England, where he lives out the rest of his days as a recluse, unable to reintegrate with the Yahoos. [Citations] Swift pins his own ideas about the shortcomings of British culture on the frame of these fantastic tales. Here he points out that the legal system is somewhat unnecessarily focused only on the penalties rather than rewards. "And these people thought it a prodigious defect of policy among us, when I told them that our laws were enforced only by penalties, without any mention of reward.  It is upon this account that the image of Justice, in their courts of judicature, is formed with six eyes, two before, as many behind, and on each side one, to signify circumspection; with a bag of gold open in her right hand, and a sword sheathed in her left, to show she is more disposed to reward than to punish." This next part is also relatively advanced philosophical thinking about the burden imposed on a child by bringing it into the world. "[...] for which reason they will never allow that a child is under any obligation to his father for begetting him, or to his mother for bringing him into the world; which, considering the miseries of human life, was neither a benefit in itself, nor intended so by his parents, whose thoughts, in their love encounters, were otherwise employed." OK, so I can't tell if Swift is being sarcastic in the next citation. I'm hoping yes, but cannot assume that Swift had an advanced attitude toward suffrage and equal rights. "[...] for their maxim is, that among peoples of quality, a wife should be always a reasonable and agreeable companion, because she cannot always be young." With tongue planted firmly in cheek, Swift tells of how Gulliver is being unreasonable when he considers the emperor's punishment to be unfair. "That if his majesty, in consideration of your services, and pursuant to his own merciful disposition, would please to spare your life, and only give orders to put out both your eyes, he humbly conceived, that by this expedient justice might in some measure be satisfied, and all the world would applaud the lenity of the emperor, as well as the fair and generous proceedings of those who have the honour to be his counsellors.  That the loss of your eyes would be no impediment to your bodily strength, by which you might still be useful to his majesty; that blindness is an addition to courage, by concealing dangers from us; that the fear you had for your eyes, was the greatest difficulty in bringing over the enemy’s fleet, and it would be sufficient for you to see by the eyes of the ministers, since the greatest princes do no more." Jesus. Sarcastic much? "Yet, as to myself, I must confess, having never been designed for a courtier, either by my birth or education, I was so ill a judge of things, that I could not discover the lenity and favour of this sentence, but conceived it (perhaps erroneously) rather to be rigorous than gentle." Swift uses the Emperor's speech to express what are probably his own ideas about the debauched nature of English politics and law. “My little friend Grildrig, you have made a most admirable panegyric upon your country; you have clearly proved, that ignorance, idleness, and vice, are the proper ingredients for qualifying a legislator; that laws are best explained, interpreted, and applied, by those whose interest and abilities lie in perverting, confounding, and eluding them.  I observe among you some lines of an institution, which, in its original, might have been tolerable, but these half erased, and the rest wholly blurred and blotted by corruptions. I don't know how to interpret this passage. Is it a fabulous cautionary tale intended to keep people on the island? Is the author retelling or is he credulous? I feel that this is another tongue-in-cheek telling of how the lady is just too flighty to see how much better it is in Laputa, even though it totally sucks. "I was told that a great court lady, who had several children,—is married to the prime minister, the richest subject in the kingdom, a very graceful person, extremely fond of her, and lives in the finest palace of the island,—went down to Lagado on the pretence of health, there hid herself for several months, till the king sent a warrant to search for her; and she was found in an obscure eating-house all in rags, having pawned her clothes to maintain an old deformed footman, who beat her every day, and in whose company she was taken, much against her will.  And although her husband received her with all possible kindness, and without the least reproach, she soon after contrived to steal down again, with all her jewels, to the same gallant, and has not been heard of since." More sarcastic ideas of how to fix society. "Wit, valour, and politeness, were likewise proposed to be largely taxed, and collected in the same manner, by every person’s giving his own word for the quantum of what he possessed.  But as to honour, justice, wisdom, and learning, they should not be taxed at all; because they are qualifications of so singular a kind, that no man will either allow them in his neighbour or value them in himself. The women were proposed to be taxed according to their beauty and skill in dressing, wherein they had the same privilege with the men, to be determined by their own judgment.  But constancy, chastity, good sense, and good nature, were not rated, because they would not bear the charge of collecting." This next piece is about the immortals (struldbrugs) found in one of the civilizations. After Gulliver goes on at length about how awesome it would be to be immortal, the natives must regretfully inform him that, while a few citizens live forever, they go very seriously downhill once they hit eighty -- they just don't die. "At ninety, they lose their teeth and hair; they have at that age no distinction of taste, but eat and drink whatever they can get, without relish or appetite.  The diseases they were subject to still continue, without increasing or diminishing.  In talking, they forget the common appellation of things, and the names of persons, even of those who are their nearest friends and relations.  For the same reason, they never can amuse themselves with reading, because their memory will not serve to carry them from the beginning of a sentence to the end; and by this defect, they are deprived of the only entertainment whereof they might otherwise be capable." This next observation about how immortals would be unable to understand subsequent generations is quite prescient. This actually applies even to generations without a normal lifespan, especially with the increased rate of cultural change in the 20th and 21st centuries. "The language of this country being always upon the flux, the struldbrugs of one age do not understand those of another; neither are they able, after two hundred years, to hold any conversation (farther than by a few general words) with their neighbours the mortals; and thus they lie under the disadvantage of living like foreigners in their own country." On the final island, the horses are in charge of the humans. When Gulliver describes how humans and horses live together in his world, the horse ruler on the island nods sagely and comes to the conclusion that the horses rule in Gulliver's world as well (the same conclusion to which a dog would come when it heard how modern humans live with dogs -- the dogs are clearly in charge). "When I asserted that the Yahoos were the only governing animals in my country, which my master said was altogether past his conception, he desired to know, “whether we had Houyhnhnms among us, and what was their employment?”  I told him, “we had great numbers; that in summer they grazed in the fields, and in winter were kept in houses with hay and oats, where Yahoo servants were employed to rub their skins smooth, comb their manes, pick their feet, serve them with food, and make their beds.”  “I understand you well,” said my master: “it is now very plain, from all you have spoken, that whatever share of reason the Yahoos pretend to, the Houyhnhnms are your masters; I heartily wish our Yahoos would be so tractable.” " The reasons for war and strife that Swift lists are wholly and entirely unchanged even almost 300 years later (next two passages). "He asked me, “what were the usual causes or motives that made one country go to war with another?”  I answered “they were innumerable; but I should only mention a few of the chief.  Sometimes the ambition of princes, who never think they have land or people enough to govern; sometimes the corruption of ministers, who engage their master in a war, in order to stifle or divert the clamour of the subjects against their evil administration.  Difference in opinions has cost many millions of lives: for instance, whether flesh be bread, or bread be flesh; whether the juice of a certain berry be blood or wine; whether whistling be a vice or a virtue; whether it be better to kiss a post, or throw it into the fire; what is the best colour for a coat, whether black, white, red, or gray; and whether it should be long or short, narrow or wide, dirty or clean; with many more.  Neither are any wars so furious and bloody, or of so long a continuance, as those occasioned by difference in opinion, especially if it be in things indifferent." "“Sometimes the quarrel between two princes is to decide which of them shall dispossess a third of his dominions, where neither of them pretend to any right.  Sometimes one prince quarrels with another for fear the other should quarrel with him.  Sometimes a war is entered upon, because the enemy is too strong; and sometimes, because he is too weak.  Sometimes our neighbours want the things which we have, or have the things which we want, and we both fight, till they take ours, or give us theirs.  It is a very justifiable cause of a war, to invade a country after the people have been wasted by famine, destroyed by pestilence, or embroiled by factions among themselves.  It is justifiable to enter into war against our nearest ally, when one of his towns lies convenient for us, or a territory of land, that would render our dominions round and complete. " "For these reasons, the trade of a soldier is held the most honourable of all others; because a soldier is a Yahoo hired to kill, in cold blood, as many of his own species, who have never offended him, as possibly he can." Swift really doesn't like lawyers. This situation seems unchanged over 300 years, as well. "[...] there was a society of men among us, bred up from their youth in the art of proving, by words multiplied for the purpose, that white is black, and black is white, according as they are paid.  To this society all the rest of the people are slaves.  For example, if my neighbour has a mind to my cow, he has a lawyer to prove that he ought to have my cow from me.  I must then hire another to defend my right, it being against all rules of law that any man should be allowed to speak for himself.  Now, in this case, I, who am the right owner, lie under two great disadvantages: first, my lawyer, being practised almost from his cradle in defending falsehood, is quite out of his element when he would be an advocate for justice, which is an unnatural office he always attempts with great awkwardness, if not with ill-will.  The second disadvantage is, that my lawyer must proceed with great caution, or else he will be reprimanded by the judges, and abhorred by his brethren, as one that would lessen the practice of the law. " His description of precedent law is also quite entertaining. "It is a maxim among these lawyers that whatever has been done before, may legally be done again: and therefore they take special care to record all the decisions formerly made against common justice, and the general reason of mankind.  These, under the name of precedents, they produce as authorities to justify the most iniquitous opinions; and the judges never fail of directing accordingly." "It is likewise to be observed, that this society has a peculiar cant and jargon of their own, that no other mortal can understand, and wherein all their laws are written, which they take special care to multiply; whereby they have wholly confounded the very essence of truth and falsehood, of right and wrong; so that it will take thirty years to decide, whether the field left me by my ancestors for six generations belongs to me, or to a stranger three hundred miles off." Once lawyers are dispensed with, the way the global economy works is on the chopping block. Again, the critique of capitalism then continues to be very applicable today. "But, in order to feed the luxury and intemperance of the males, and the vanity of the females, we sent away the greatest part of our necessary things to other countries, whence, in return, we brought the materials of diseases, folly, and vice, to spend among ourselves.  Hence it follows of necessity, that vast numbers of our people are compelled to seek their livelihood by begging, robbing, stealing, cheating, pimping, flattering, suborning, forswearing, forging, gaming, lying, fawning, hectoring, voting, scribbling, star-gazing, poisoning, whoring, canting, libelling, freethinking, and the like occupations:” every one of which terms I was at much pains to make him understand. “That wine was not imported among us from foreign countries to supply the want of water or other drinks, but because it was a sort of liquid which made us merry by putting us out of our senses, diverted all melancholy thoughts, begat wild extravagant imaginations in the brain, raised our hopes and banished our fears, suspended every office of reason for a time, and deprived us of the use of our limbs, till we fell into a profound sleep; although it must be confessed, that we always awaked sick and dispirited; and that the use of this liquor filled us with diseases which made our lives uncomfortable and short." After lawyers and the economy, Swift ruthlessly attacks the peerage. "That a weak diseased body, a meagre countenance, and sallow complexion, are the true marks of noble blood; and a healthy robust appearance is so disgraceful in a man of quality, that the world concludes his real father to have been a groom or a coachman.  The imperfections of his mind run parallel with those of his body, being a composition of spleen, dullness, ignorance, caprice, sensuality, and pride. “Without the consent of this illustrious body, no law can be enacted, repealed, or altered: and these nobles have likewise the decision of all our possessions, without appeal." Methinks Swift really was an equal-rights advocate, as shown in the passage below. "[...] my master thought it monstrous in us, to give the females a different kind of education from the males, except in some articles of domestic management; whereby, as he truly observed, one half of our natives were good for nothing but bringing children into the world; and to trust the care of our children to such useless animals, he said, was yet a greater instance of brutality." That's human skin that he's using to cover his canoe. And that tallow is rendered human fat. "I finished a sort of Indian canoe, but much larger, covering it with the skins of Yahoos, well stitched together with hempen threads of my own making.  My sail was likewise composed of the skins of the same animal; but I made use of the youngest I could get, the older being too tough and thick; and I likewise provided myself with four paddles. " "[...] tried my canoe in a large pond, near my master’s house, and then corrected in it what was amiss; stopping all the chinks with Yahoos’ tallow, till I found it staunch, and able to bear me and my freight; and, when it was as complete as I could possibly make it, I had it drawn on a carriage very gently by Yahoos to the sea-side, under the conduct of the sorrel nag and another servant." Once Gulliver returns to his family, he still can't integrate into the world of what he now can longer help but think of as Yahoo society. "As soon as I entered the house, my wife took me in her arms, and kissed me; at which, having not been used to the touch of that odious animal for so many years, I fell into a swoon for almost an hour.  At the time I am writing, it is five years since my last return to England.  During the first year, I could not endure my wife or children in my presence; the very smell of them was intolerable; much less could I suffer them to eat in the same room.  To this hour they dare not presume to touch my bread, or drink out of the same cup, neither was I ever able to let one of them take me by the hand.  The first money I laid out was to buy two young stone-horses, which I keep in a good stable; and next to them, the groom is my greatest favourite, for I feel my spirits revived by the smell he contracts in the stable.  My horses understand me tolerably well; I converse with them at least four hours every day.  They are strangers to bridle or saddle; they live in great amity with me and friendship to each other." Swift has one arrow left in his quiver and reserves it for how the West runs its empires, in particular the British one. Again, 300 years later and the game plan is unchanged. "For instance, a crew of pirates are driven by a storm they know not whither; at length a boy discovers land from the topmast; they go on shore to rob and plunder, they see a harmless people, are entertained with kindness; they give the country a new name; they take formal possession of it for their king; they set up a rotten plank, or a stone, for a memorial; they murder two or three dozen of the natives, bring away a couple more, by force, for a sample; return home, and get their pardon.  Here commences a new dominion acquired with a title by divine right.  Ships are sent with the first opportunity; the natives driven out or destroyed; their princes tortured to discover their gold; a free license given to all acts of inhumanity and lust, the earth reeking with the blood of its inhabitants: and this execrable crew of butchers, employed in so pious an expedition, is a modern colony, sent to convert and civilize an idolatrous and barbarous people! But this description, I confess, does by no means affect the British nation, who may be an example to the whole world for their wisdom, care, and justice in planting colonies; their liberal endowments for the advancement of religion and learning; their choice of devout and able pastors to propagate Christianity; their caution in stocking their provinces with people of sober lives and conversations from this the mother kingdom; their strict regard to the distribution of justice, in supplying the civil administration through all their colonies with officers of the greatest abilities, utter strangers to corruption; and, to crown all, by sending the most vigilant and virtuous governors, who have no other views than the happiness of the people over whom they preside, and the honour of the king their master." "But as those countries which I have described do not appear to have any desire of being conquered and enslaved, murdered or driven out by colonies, nor abound either in gold, silver, sugar, or tobacco, I did humbly conceive, they were by no means proper objects of our zeal, our valour, or our interest." ]]> </content> </entry> <entry> <title type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[The Dead Mountaineer's Inn by Arkady & Boris Strugatsky (1970) (read in 2016)]]> </title> <id>https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3229</id> <link href="https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3229"/> <updated>2016-05-05T11:58:58+02:00</updated> <author> <name type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Marco von Ballmoos]]> </name> <uri>https://earthli.com/users/marco</uri> </author> <summary type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA["Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is" ... ]]> </summary> <content type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Published by marco on 5. May 2016 11:58:58 Updated by marco on 5. May 2016 11:59:25 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I've failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an interest in this book, then I'm happy for you." This is a whodunnit mystery starring Peter Glebsky as a Russian customs and counterfeit officer on vacation at a remote mountain cabin -- somewhere in the Alps -- with several other guests. He has traveled there alone and wishes to enjoy two weeks away from work. Classic setup. The other guests are all odd in their own way: the exceedingly rich Mr. Morse and his ravishing wife, the illusionist Mr. Du Barnstoker and his androgynous and near-constantly be-sunglassed nibling Brun, Mr. Simonet, a world-renowned physicist and accomplished mountain climber, Mr. Hinckus, an odd, little and quiet attorney, as well as Olaf Andvarafors, a giant of a man in both size and personality. As you can well imagine, bodies start to appear, alcohol is drunk in prodigious quantities, accusations are thrown, people disappear, odd clues are found and Glebsky is drawn ever farther from the peace and relaxation he'd sought. The Mafia becomes involved. Some of the guests turn out to be robots. This is a story of first contact. As with Roadside Picnic, this alien contact does not lead to any satisfying conclusion for anyone. It is depicted as confusing and fruitless as such things usually are (i.e. when two cultures collide, if only briefly). In the light of not being able know for sure anything about anything, Glebsky muses that one unsatisfying "truth" is as good as any other, so one might as well choose the most satisfying one. [Citations] "“Yes,” he said. “I know what you mean: the way a man carries himself is the most important thing, everything else is secondary. No doubt you’re right. Mr. Simone has provided me with an inexhaustible source of reflection on the glaring discrepancy between a man’s behavior when he’s relaxing, and the value for humankind of that same man when he’s at work.” “Huh,” I said. It was worse than the quirt." I was intrigued by the use of this phrase, as I'd only known the name from the NHL player. "Miraculously preserved, in spite of everything. It’s a Pavel Bure." Here Glebsky muses on what I have found to be a consistent Strugatsky theme: the bliss of ignorance. "What did I know about this apparatus? Only what Moses had told me. Yes, everything that Moses had said sounded true. And if it was just a very consistent picture of something whose truth was completely different? If I had only been unable to find the question that would have shattered this picture’s surface. (Emphasis added.)" Gelbsky muses on how we confabulate and teach others around us to do so, as well. "She says that even if I hadn’t made things so difficult for Moses and the rest of them, it would have still ended in a huge tragedy, because then the gangsters would have arrived at the inn and, most likely, killed all of us who were still there. All that is undoubtedly true. I myself have taught her to say these things, only by now she has forgotten that, and it seems to her that they are her own ideas. (Emphasis added.)" ]]> </content> </entry> <entry> <title type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Roadside Picnic by Boris & Arkady Strugatsky (1972) (read in 2016)]]> </title> <id>https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3230</id> <link href="https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3230"/> <updated>2016-05-05T11:11:58+02:00</updated> <author> <name type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Marco von Ballmoos]]> </name> <uri>https://earthli.com/users/marco</uri> </author> <summary type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA["Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is" ... ]]> </summary> <content type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Published by marco on 5. May 2016 11:11:58 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I've failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an interest in this book, then I'm happy for you." This is the book on which director Andrei Tarkovsky's Stalker was based. The world of the book has six Zones on it, areas tainted by the touch of alien contact. These areas have artifacts with fantastic properties but unknown use. The use to which humanity can put them may be incidental to their original purpose. For all intents and purposes, humanity has no chance of understanding what happened when the aliens visited -- the gulf is far too great. The aliens are much too advanced for humanity to even begin to empathize or understand them. We follow the story of Red Schuhart, a gifted stalker -- someone who enters the Zones to pilfer artifacts -- over several years, as he is hired and fired by a research company, as he goes to jail and is released to stalk again, as he tries to provide for his family, as he is trapped for his whole life in the whorl around the Zone in his town. The plot is different than the movie, though Red's final mission into the zone roughly matches up with the movie's plot: in the book, he seeks a wish-granting "golden sphere" whereas in the movie, it's a room. I love the Strugatsky brothers' style. It's very much cynical, with great characters, very much on a par with 60s and 70s-era science fiction in the the United States. This is a fantastic story and pairs extremely well with the film. [Citations] From the foreword by Ursula K. LeGuin: "The Strugatsky brothers were not blatant, and never (to my limited knowledge) directly critical of their government’s policies. What they did, which I found most admirable then and still do now, was to write as if they were indifferent to ideology—something many of us writers in the Western democracies had a hard time doing. They wrote as free men write." "And those toads hate you, they get no pleasure from arresting you, the bastards are scared to death that you might be contagious—they just want to shoot you down . . . And they are holding all the cards: go ahead and prove later that they killed you illegally." "He was simply waiting for a phone call while his visitor, Dr. Pillman, was lazily reprimanding him. Or imagining that he was reprimanding him. Or trying to convince himself that he was reprimanding him." "I like being praised. Especially by General Lemchen, in spite of himself. It’s funny, I wonder why we like being praised. There’s no money in it. Fame? How famous could we get? He became famous: now he’s known to three. Maybe four, if you count Bayliss. Aren’t humans absurd? I suppose we like praise for its own sake. The way children like ice cream. It’s an inferiority complex, that’s what it is. Praise assuages our insecurities. And ridiculously so. How could I rise in my own opinion?" “Listen, Valentine,” said Noonan, cutting a piece of meat and dipping it in the sauce. “How do you think it’s all going to end?” “What are you talking about?” “The Visit. Zones, stalkers, military-industrial complexes—the whole stinking mess. How could it all end?” For a long time, Valentine stared at him through his opaque black lenses. Then he lit up a cigarette and said, “For whom? Be more specific.” “Well, say, for humanity as a whole.” “That depends on our luck,” said Valentine. “We now know that for humanity as a whole, the Visit has largely passed without a trace. For humanity everything passes without a trace. Of course, it’s possible that by randomly pulling chestnuts out of this fire, we’ll eventually stumble on something that will make life on Earth completely unbearable. That would be bad luck. But you have to admit, that’s a danger humanity has always faced.” He waved away the cigarette smoke and smiled wryly. “You see, I’ve long since become unused to discussing humanity as a whole. Humanity as a whole is too stable a system, nothing upsets it.” (Emphasis added.) "But I have to warn you, Richard, that your question falls under the umbrella of a pseudoscience called xenology. Xenology is an unnatural mixture of science fiction and formal logic. At its core is a flawed assumption—that an alien race would be psychologically human.” “Why flawed?” asked Noonan. “Because biologists have already been burned attempting to apply human psychology to animals. Earth animals, I note.” “Just a second,” said Noonan. “That’s totally different. We’re talking about the psychology of intelligent beings.” “True. And that would be just fine, if we knew what intelligence was.” “And we don’t?” asked Noonan in surprise. “Believe it or not, we don’t. We usually proceed from a trivial definition: intelligence is the attribute of man that separates his activity from that of the animals. It’s a kind of attempt to distinguish the master from his dog, who seems to understand everything but can’t speak. However, this trivial definition does lead to wittier ones. They are based on depressing observations of the aforementioned human activity. For example: intelligence is the ability of a living creature to perform pointless or unnatural acts.” (Emphasis added.) "Well, how about the idea that humans, unlike animals, have an overpowering need for knowledge? I’ve read that somewhere.” “So have I,” said Valentine. “But the issue is that man, at least the average man, can easily overcome this need. In my opinion, the need doesn’t exist at all. There’s a need to understand, but that doesn’t require knowledge. The God hypothesis, for example, allows you to have an unparalleled understanding of absolutely everything while knowing absolutely nothing . . . Give a man a highly simplified model of the world and interpret every event on the basis of this simple model. This approach requires no knowledge. A few rote formulas, plus some so-called intuition, some so-called practical acumen, and some so-called common sense.” (Emphasis added.) This next citation is the story behind the theory of the alien visit from which the book takes its title: that the aliens are so far beyond humanity, so ineffable, that, where humanity tries to attribute cosmic significance to the Zones, they are really just the prosaic effluvia of a unremarkable event in the lives of the aliens that left them. "Imagine: a forest, a country road, a meadow. A car pulls off the road into the meadow and unloads young men, bottles, picnic baskets, girls, transistor radios, cameras . . . A fire is lit, tents are pitched, music is played. And in the morning they leave. The animals, birds, and insects that were watching the whole night in horror crawl out of their shelters. And what do they see? An oil spill, a gasoline puddle, old spark plugs and oil filters strewn about . . . Scattered rags, burntout bulbs, someone has dropped a monkey wrench. The wheels have tracked mud from some godforsaken swamp . . . and, of course, there are the remains of the campfire, apple cores, candy wrappers, tins, bottles, someone’s handkerchief, someone’s penknife, old ragged newspapers, coins, wilted flowers from another meadow . . .”" There are other theories, more generous to mankind, but not likely to be more true. "So-called serious xenologists try to justify interpretations that are much more respectable and flattering to human vanity. For example, that the Visit hasn’t happened yet, that the real Visit is yet to come. Some higher intelligence came to Earth and left us containers with samples of their material culture. They expect us to study these samples and make a technological leap, enabling us to send back a signal indicating we’re truly ready for contact. How’s that?” “That’s much better,” said Noonan. “I see that even among the scientists there are decent men.” “Or here’s another one. The Visit did take place, but it is by no means over. We’re actually in contact as we speak, we just don’t know it. The aliens are holed up in the Zones and are carefully studying us, simultaneously preparing us for the ‘time of cruel miracles.’” Valentine continues to describe what the Zones might mean, what it means for a civilization to be so much more advanced than ours. "A lab monkey presses a red button and gets a banana, presses a white button and gets an orange, but has no idea how to obtain bananas or oranges without buttons. Nor does it understand the relationship between buttons and oranges and bananas. Take, say, the spacells. We’ve learned to apply them. We’ve even discovered conditions under which they multiply by division. But we have yet to create a single spacell, have no idea how they work, and, as far as I can tell, won’t figure it out anytime soon." But humanity, even in its benighted blindness, can try to make something out of this contact. Perhaps humanity won't grasp even a tiny percentage of the glory, the science, the knowledge immanent to the devices in the Zones, but that tiny percentage may still offer insight, they may show the way to a path where we might, at some point in the far future, be able to learn how to glean more from the Zones. "“In short, the objects in this group are currently completely useless for human purposes, yet from a purely scientific point of view they have fundamental significance. These are miraculously received answers to questions we don’t yet know how to pose. The aforementioned Sir Isaac mightn’t have made sense of the microwave emitter, but he would have at any rate realized that such a thing was possible, and that would have had a very strong effect on his scientific worldview. I won’t get into details, but the existence of such objects as the magnetic traps, the K-twenty-three, and the white ring instantly disproved a number of recently thriving theories and gave rise to some entirely new ideas. (Emphasis added.)" The more you know, the greater the burden of knowing what you don't know. Long story short: ignorance is bliss. It always has been and always will be. "Scared, the eggheads. And maybe that’s how it should be. They should be even more scared than the rest of us ordinary folks put together. Because we merely don’t understand a thing, but they at least understand how much they don’t understand. They gaze into this bottomless pit and know that they will inevitably have to climb down—their hearts are racing, but they’ll have to do it—except they don’t know how or what awaits them at the bottom or, most important, whether they’ll be able to get back out. Meanwhile, we sinners look the other way, so to speak . . . Listen, maybe that’s how it should be? Let things take their course, and we’ll muddle through somehow. He was right about that: mankind’s most impressive achievement is that it has survived and intends to continue doing so. Still, I hope you go to hell, he told the aliens. You couldn’t have had your picnic somewhere else. On the moon, say. Or on Mars. You are just callous assholes like the rest of them, even if you have learned to curl up space. Had to have a picnic here, you see. A picnic. (Emphasis added.)" An insight into the pro-growth world, suffered in the Soviet Union as it was in the rest of the West. "Sometimes I ask myself, Why the hell are we always in such a whirl? For the money? But why in the world do we need money, if all we ever do is keep working?" And then there were just some very weird things that happened in the cities in and around the Zones: Schuhart's daughter was born, covered in hair. She is called Monkey. Her grandfather had died, but the Zone brought him back as a shuffling zombie. Sometimes the strangeness of it gets to be too much, even for hard-bitten and cynical residents like Noonan and Red. The emphasized section is a prescient and succinct description of how we continue to deal with far-removed tragedy to this day. "[...] the Monkey silently appeared by the table next to the old man and stood there for a while, putting her furry little paws on the table. Suddenly, in a completely childlike manner, she leaned against the corpse and put her head on his shoulder. And Noonan, continuing to chatter, looked at these two monstrous offspring of the Zone and thought, My Lord, what else do we need? What else has to be done to us, so it finally gets through? Is this really not enough? He knew that it wasn’t enough. He knew that billions and billions didn’t know a thing and didn’t want to know and, even if they did find out, would act horrified for ten minutes and immediately forget all about it. I’ll get wasted, he thought savagely. Screw Burbridge, screw Lemchen . . . Screw this star-crossed family. I’m getting wasted. (Emphasis added.)" This next section contains another cry out against the rat race, coming from the Soviet Union rather than the rest of the West. The Strugatsky's evince -- seemingly without trying -- a commonality among people trapped in a larger web, common to humanity in the 20th century, independent of proclaimed political ethos, capitalism or communism. "Some strange and very new sensation was slowly filling him. He realized that this sensation wasn’t actually new, that it had long been hiding somewhere inside him, but he only now became aware of it, and everything fell into place. And an idea, which had previously seemed like nonsense, like the insane ravings of a senile old man, turned out to be his sole hope and his sole meaning of life. It was only now that he’d understood—the one thing that he still had left, the one thing that had kept him afloat in recent months, was the hope for a miracle. He, the idiot, the dummy, had been spurning this hope, trampling on it, mocking it, drinking it away—because that’s what he was used to and because his whole life, ever since his childhood, he had never relied on anyone but himself. And ever since his childhood, this self-reliance had always been measured by the amount of money he managed to wrench, wrestle, and wring out of the surrounding indifferent chaos. That’s how it had always been, and that’s how it would have continued, if he hadn’t found himself in a hole from which no amount of money could rescue him, in which self-reliance was utterly pointless. And now this hope—no longer the hope but the certainty of a miracle—was filling him to the brim, and he was already amazed that he’d managed to live in such a bleak, cheerless gloom. (Emphasis added.)" There are several passages where a few words suffice to bring a scene to life -- it's easy to understand why Tarkovsky thought this book was such a good fit for his film-craft. "The floor of the valley was covered in a puke-green liquid, glistening greasily in the sun. A light steam was wafting off its surface, becoming thicker between the hills, and they already couldn’t see a thing thirty feet in front of them. And it reeked. God only knew what was rotting in that medley, but to Redrick it seemed that a hundred thousand smashed rotten eggs, poured over a hundred thousand spoiled fish heads and dead cats, couldn’t have reeked the way it reeked here." "With that he abruptly went quiet, as if a huge hand had forcefully shoved a gag into his mouth. And Redrick saw the transparent emptiness lurking in the shadow of the excavator bucket grab him, jerk him up into the air, and slowly, with an effort, twist him, the way a housewife wrings out the laundry. Redrick had the time to notice one of the dusty shoes fly off a twitching foot and soar high above the quarry." This next section is from the afterword by the author, in which he very eloquently discusses how ephemeral are the windmills against which we tilt. When you're down in the trenches, in the day-to-day, everything seems so important. Temporal distance has a way of fading out the unimportant and bringing other things into sharp focus. Hopefully the right things, the things that were such an intrinsic part of your day-to-day that perhaps you didn't even think to tilt against them at the time, distracted as you were by minutiae, but which you now realize would have been the proper targets of your ire and energy. "I was looking forward to using this afterword to tell the story of publishing the Picnic: naming once-hated names; jeering to my heart’s content at the cowards, idiots, informers, and scoundrels; astounding the reader with the absurdity, idiocy, and meanness of the world we’re all from; being ironic and instructive, deliberately objective and ruthless, benevolent and caustic all at once. "And now I’m sitting here, looking at these folders, and realizing that I’m hopelessly late and that no one needs me—not my irony, not my generosity, and not my burnt[-]out hatred. They have ceased to exist, those once-powerful organizations with almost unlimited right to allow and to hinder; they have ceased to exist and are forgotten to such an extent that it would be tedious and dull to explain to the present-day reader who is who, why it didn’t make sense to complain to the Department of Culture of the CC, why the only thing to do was to complain to the Department of Print and Propaganda, and who were Albert Andreevich Beliaev, Pyotr Nilovich Demichev, and Mikhail Vasilyevich Zimyanin—and these were the tigers and elephants of the Soviet ideological fauna, rulers of destinies, deciders of fates! Who remembers them today, and who cares about those of them who are still among the living? So then why bother with the small fry—the shrill crowd of petty bureaucrats of ideology, the countless ideological demons, who caused untold and immeasurable harm and whose vileness and meanness require (as they liked to write in the nineteenth century) a mightier, sharper, and more experienced pen than my own? I don’t even want to mention them here—let them be swallowed up by the past, like evil spirits, and disappear . . ." ]]> </content> </entry> <entry> <title type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Factotum by Charles Bukowski (1975) (read in 2015)]]> </title> <id>https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3157</id> <link href="https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3157"/> <updated>2016-04-27T22:55:13+02:00</updated> <author> <name type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Marco von Ballmoos]]> </name> <uri>https://earthli.com/users/marco</uri> </author> <summary type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA["Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is" ... ]]> </summary> <content type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Published by marco on 27. Apr 2016 22:55:13 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I've failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an interest in this book, then I'm happy for you." Henry Chinaski is a variously employed, alcoholic drifter living in America in the 1940s. He's been rejected from the draft, so he's left in a country that doesn't really want him for anything else, that was already suspicious of people who didn't yearn for the two-kids/white-picket-fence/steady-job dream. He's willing to work, but doesn't like to do the same thing for long, doesn't like authority, and likes to booze and whore and write. He continues to try to publish, but is continually rejected by the only publishing house he considers worthy. He gets involved with Laura and Jan at different times, who have varyingly detrimental effects on his life. [Citations] "The problem, as it was in those days during the war, was overtime. Those in control always preferred to overwork a few men continually, instead of hiring more people so everyone might work less. You gave the boss eight hours, and he always asked for more. He never sent you home after six hours, for example. You might have time to think." "The myth of the starving artist was a hoax. Once you realized that everything was a hoax you got wise and began to bleed and burn your fellow man. I’d build an empire upon the broken bodies and lives of helpless men, women, and children—" "It was true that I didn’t have much ambition, but there ought to be a place for people without ambition, I mean a better place than the one usually reserved. How in the hell could a man enjoy being awakened at 6:30 a.m. by an alarm clock, leap out of bed, dress, force-feed, shit, piss, brush teeth and hair, and fight traffic to get to a place where essentially you made lots of money for somebody else and were asked to be grateful for the opportunity to do so?" "I always started a job with the feeling that I’d soon quit or be fired, and this gave me a relaxed manner that was mistaken for intelligence or some secret power." ]]> </content> </entry> <entry> <title type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis (read in 2015)]]> </title> <id>https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3141</id> <link href="https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3141"/> <updated>2016-04-27T07:36:42+02:00</updated> <author> <name type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Marco von Ballmoos]]> </name> <uri>https://earthli.com/users/marco</uri> </author> <summary type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA["Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is" ... ]]> </summary> <content type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Published by marco on 27. Apr 2016 07:36:42 Updated by marco on 28. Apr 2016 07:18:50 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I've failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an interest in this book, then I'm happy for you." This book combines the stultifying mundanity of day-to-day drudgery of Confederacy of Dunces with the whining tone of Holden Caulfield from the Catcher in the Rye. The prose is a bit stiff for my tastes and Amis seems, to me, a bit overrated. The middle bits, which involve Dixon's quasi-dalliance with Christine, are more evocative. The book has that feeling of lifting slowly but seemingly inexorably from a quagmire of boredom, stretching, stretching, with what one feels might perhaps be interpreted as acceleration, a feeling that one would soon snap free of gummy strands that yet cling and tie one to the tedium. But alas this feeling is fleeting -- as you knew in your heart of cynical hearts that it probably would be -- as the gummy strands win more battles and eventually the war and you sink back into that tepid morass with nary a change for all that you saw when you briefly, if not soared, perhaps one could describe it generously as ... flew. It's as if Dixon is trapped in the miasma of Welch, as a prehistoric fly when first it steps in amber and the honeyed fluid hasn't quite seeped into every last receptor of its compound eye. This book documents the struggles of that fly. In fairness, the fly in this case doesn't struggle so much as complain that the vitrification process isn't going quickly enough and that the other flies should just go about their business and stop bothering it. The style and subject matter is, at times, quite strongly reminiscent of The Idiot or The Brothers Karamazov, but perhaps that is only because those books also dealt with idiotic families in quasi-boring situations that never come to any strong conclusions. The ending is a bit of a surprise, tying things up in a far neater bow than I'd have expected. Was this done because the author wanted his hero to semi-triumph? Or was it an ironic stab at books with happy endings? Is it a happy ending to see Dixon stumble further along the road to success? Was he the hero? Or was he just relatively less-insufferable, rising above the others by dint of their utter awfulness rather than any positive qualities of his own? All in all, it was an interesting read, but as for it being the finest comic novel of the 20th century: no. Not even among British authors. Just, no. [Citations] "Until then he must try to make Welch like him, and one way of doing that was, he supposed, to be present and conscious while Welch talked about concerts. But did Welch notice who else was there while he talked, and if he noticed did he remember, and if he remembered would it affect such thoughts as he had already?" 'What's this, Alrfred?' Dixon asked. 'A bender?' Beesley nodded without stopping drinking; then, lowering his glass at last, wiping his mouth on his sleeve, making a face, and referring to the quality of the beer by a monosyllable not in decent use, he said: 'I wasn't getting anywhere in there, so I came in here and came over here.' 'And you're getting somewhere over here, are you, Alfred?' Carol asked. 'On the tenth half, just about,' Beesley said. 'Bloody but unbowed, eh? That's the spirit. [...]' "This time he experienced nothing worse than a small rage at the thought of a little louse like that having a flat in London. Why hadn't he himself had parents whose money so far exceeded their sense as to install their son in London? The very thought it was a torment. If he'd had that chance, things would be very different for him now. For a moment, he thought he couldn't think what things; then he found he could conceive the things exactly, and exactly how they'd differ from the things he'd got, too." "A youthful waiter had approached, his footfalls silenced by the carpet, and was now shifting from one foot to the other close by, breathing through his mouth. Dixon thought he'd never seen a human frame radiating so much insolence without resource to speech, gesture, or any contortion of the features. This figure swung a silver tray in an attempt at careless grace, and was looking past Dixon at Christine. When Dixon said, 'Tea for two, please' the waiter smiled faintly at her, as if in lofty but sincere commiseration, then swung aside, allowing the tray to rebound from his kneecap as he walked off." ]]> </content> </entry> <entry> <title type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Books read in 2015]]> </title> <id>https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3127</id> <link href="https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3127"/> <updated>2016-04-20T08:28:56+02:00</updated> <author> <name type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Marco von Ballmoos]]> </name> <uri>https://earthli.com/users/marco</uri> </author> <summary type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Don Quixote (1605) by Miguel de Cervantes I liked part two even better than part one. Part II of the book starts with a discussion of the first part of the book, which in this second part has appeared as a publication already famous throughout Spain. Don Quixote and Sancho Panza discuss this book ... ]]> </summary> <content type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Published by marco on 20. Apr 2016 08:28:56 Updated by marco on 27. Apr 2016 22:54:57 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Don Quixote (1605) by Miguel de Cervantes I liked part two even better than part one. Part II of the book starts with a discussion of the first part of the book, which in this second part has appeared as a publication already famous throughout Spain. Don Quixote and Sancho Panza discuss this book with a bachelor who is very familiar with it, questioning and probing to determine that it reflects the truth…but not too much of the truth. This part is really very nicely written and the self-referential part as well as the oblique chastisement of Cervantes’s own detractors and critics is quite a master stroke. Cervantes packs this long book full of wonderful prose, never missing an opportunity for a small joke or pithy phrase (much as Sancho never misses an opportunity to utter a proverb). So many paragraphs are like exquisite sculptures, standing nearly on their own, and the careful reader is constantly rewarded. I've included "notes, citations and errata" <https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3035> in a separate post. A Feast for Crows (2005) by George R.R. Martin This is book four of the Song of Ice and Fire. Cersei descends into paranoid madness, reinstating a religious army, an act she would come to rue as it backfires spectacularly. Jaime and Brienne meet up again in the Riverlands, after Jaime had solved a few issues there. The Iron Islands feature much more prominently, with all of the Greyjoys -- Euron, Victarion, Aeron and Asha -- getting in on the action. In Dorne, intrigue abounds, with plot built on plot and the Red Viper's brother machinating to maintain the power balance with King's Landing and the upper South. Quentyn Martell has traveled East with his friends to try to join Dorne to the Targaryens through Daenerys. Arya arrives in Braavos and apprentices at the House of Black and White. Jon maintains a balance between Stannis's demands -- and those of Melisandre -- as well as arming to fight the Others from the North. Samwell travels with Gilly and Aemon around the periphery of the Seven Kingdoms by boat, to get to Old Town and train at the Citadel. I've included "notes, citations and errata" <https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3116> in a separate post. A Dance with Dragons (2011) by George R.R. Martin This is book five of the Song of Ice and Fire. Bran ends up in the lair of the Children of the Forest, far North of the Wall, with the three-eyed raven. Jon's fate is unknown, but things don't look too good. Arya's training continues. Tyrion is captured by Mormont and both of them near Meerreen. Quentyn's mission fails horribly, Victarion approaches Meereen, possessed of powers. Daenerys accepts her destiny and mounts Drogon. Stannis marches on the marshes first, rousts the Ironborn, captures Asha and then sinks into the snows before he can arrive at Winterfell, where he wants to roust the Boltons. Young Aegon Targaryen and John Connington land in Dorne and make their way north to attempt recapture of the Iron Throne. Cersei takes the walk of shame. I've included "notes, citations and errata" <https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3115> in a separate post. One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest (1962) by Ken Kesey This is the story of a the Big Chief and McMurphy and Nurse Ratched. The Big Chief is a long-time resident of the mental institution run by Head Nurse Ratched; McMurphy arrives as a transferee from a work camp who thinks he's going to have an easier ride in the home. This is true, at least at first. He is a breath of fresh air for the other inmates there, a force of nature, as it were. he chafes and takes liberties and cracks wise and runs card games and generally doesn't follow the rules. He tries to help free the others from their artificial, psychological fetters. He takes them on a fishing trip. He sneaks ladies and booze into the building late at night. He tries to help poor Billy. Ratched thwarts him every step of the way. The Big Chief narrates, grows and learns. McMurphy sacrifices the last of what he has in a futile act of revenge, though he is aware of what is happening. The Big Chief makes an actual escape. Really surprisingly well-written and deep. Recommended. I've included "notes, citations and errata" <https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3135> in a separate post. Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea (2013) by Mark Blyth This excellent book provides an approachable analysis of the recent history of the financial crisis that started in 2006, exploded in 2008 and is still being sorely felt by many in 2015. Blyth skewers the main idea for solving the crisis: austerity for the majority of the public. Why is austerity not the solution? He lists many reasons, but the main one is that it doesn't work. It has never worked. Accurate histories show that it doesn't work. Inaccurate studies claim that it might work. Worse, the crisis was caused by private machinations and profit-taking and the price is paid by the public -- who've already paid the price in the form of a severely impacted economy. The public pays twice for the mistakescrimes of the few, while the few take their profit, take no punishment and line themselves up for the next reaping. How do they get away with it? By selling the idea of austerity of all: if our economy tanked, then it must be our collective fault and we must all shoulder the blame and tighten our belts. The private losses are bailed out by the state and instantly transformed into a story of state profligacy. It's like a child who crashes his car, gets his father to buy him a new one, then mocks said father for not being able to pay the rent. Never mind that it is exactly these jackasses who aren't tightening their belts -- we can't police everyone, can we? Never mind that exactly those who aren't tightening their belts are actually the ones who caused the problems in the first place. With their crimes. Some will argue that what happened was perfectly legal -- but that is only because those who commit crimes at high levels are careful to ensure that the crimes they wish to commit are first made legal. This is an important book. Blyth cover the minutiae of recent history, covers the history of austerity over the last century, examines the writings and recommendations of oft-cited and great economists of the past -- Locke, Hume, Smith, Keynes, among others -- and looks at recent academic studies that are clearly if not deliberately fraudulent. He is a bit cagey about coming right out and accusing world leaders of collusion and corruption to serve their rich buddies and financial partners, but we can excuse an academic a bit of hedging. See below for my "less-generous analysis" <https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3136#less-generous-analysis> and "Blyth's possible solutions" <https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3136#idea-for-solution>. "When world leaders keen to legitimize the damage that they have already done to the lives of millions of their fellow citizens reach for examples such as these to vindicate their actions, applauding these countries for creating misery, it shows us one this above all. Austerity remains an ideology immune to facts and basic empirical refutation." I've included "notes, citations and errata" <https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3136> in a separate post. The Handmaid's Tale (1985) by Margaret Atwood The Handmaid's Tale is the story of a possible future America in which society has taken a rather hard, right turn into a dystopian, quasi-religious patriarchy -- more even that what exists today. In this world, women have no rights whatsoever. Some are used as drudges -- Marthas -- while others -- Aunts -- inculcate the new regime to the breeders -- Handmaids -- and, finally, there are the Wives. Among the men, the Commanders are at the top of the food chain -- they are married to Wives -- but also have a series of Handmaids. There are other men, high-ranking soldiers -- Angels -- as well as spies -- Eyes. The prose is poetic, evocative, metaphorical, at-times almost hallucinatory -- as if the mists of recollection have twisted certain parts of the remembered past. The ideas and chilling visions are just as likely to happen as they were in the 80s, when the book was written. There are good portions of the American population who would happily view the book as a guide to revolution, to creating a better version of America. At times reminiscent of Orwell's 1984. Highly recommended. I've included "notes, citations and errata" <https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3134> in a separate post. Lucky Jim (1953) by Kingsley Amis So far, it combines the stultifying mundanity of day-to-day drudgery of Confederacy of Dunces with the whining tone of Holden Caulfield from the Catcher in the Rye. The prose is a bit stiff for my tastes and Amis seems, to me, a bit overrated. The middle bits, which involve Dixon's quasi-dalliance with Christine, are more evocative. The book has that feeling of lifting slowly but seemingly inexorably from a quagmire of boredom, stretching, stretching, with what one feels might perhaps be interpreted as acceleration, a feeling that one would soon snap free of gummy strands that yet cling and tie one to the tedium. But alas this feeling is fleeting, as you knew in your heart of cynical hearts that it probably would be, as the gummy strands win more battles and eventually the war and you sink back into that tepid morass with nary a change for all that you saw when you briefly, if not soared, perhaps one could describe it generously as ... flew. It's as if Dixon is trapped in the miasma of Welch, as a prehistoric fly when first it steps in amber and the honeyed fluid hasn't quite seeped into every last receptor of its compound eye. This book documents the struggles of that fly. In fairness, the fly in this case doesn't struggle so much as complain that the vitrification process isn't going quickly enough and that the other flies should just go about their business and stop bothering it. The style and subject matter is, at times, quite strongly reminiscent of The Idiot or The Brothers Karamazov, but perhaps that is only because those books also dealt with idiotic families in quasi-boring situations that never come to any strong conclusions. The ending is a bit of a surprise, tying things up in a far neater bow than I'd have expected. Was this done to because the author wanted his hero to semi-triumph? Or was it an ironic stab at books with happy endings? Is it a happy ending to see Dixon stumble further along the road to success? Was he the hero? Or was he just relatively less-insufferable, rising above the others by dint of their utter awfulness rather than an positive qualities of his own? All in all, it was an interesting read, but as for it being the finest comic novel of the 20th century: no. Not even among British authors. Just, no. I've included "notes, citations and errata" <https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3141> in a separate post. Joyland (2013) by Stephen King You can tell this is a Stephen King book from a mile away. It's about a young man -- Devin, a writer -- who's been jilted by the love of his life. She's decided that it's time to see other people and he's not quite on board with that yet. So he takes a job several states away and spends a good deal of time mooning around over her. He makes a couple of good friends at this odd little amusement park called Joyland. They have a dog mascot that he's especially good at playing. After learning of a ghost in the haunted-house ride, Devin becomes nearly obsessed with the case and is convinced that he can release the ghost if he just finds the real killer. Along the way, he befriends a standoffish woman, Annie, through her son Mike, who's physically disabled but gifted in other ways. He is crucial to releasing the ghost because of his psychic powers. They finally discover the real killer hiding right under their noses. They all learn a lot about life, go their separate ways and nobody really lives happily ever after, but that's OK too. I've included "notes, citations and errata" <https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3149> in a separate post. And Another Thing... (2013) by Eoin Colfer This is the sixth in the increasingly inaccurately named trilogy, the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. This installment picks up where Adams left off in Mostly Harmless and reads a bit like Pratchett's Raising Steam in that absolutely everyone from the respective pantheon appears. The good news is that it's a pretty good story and the characters are handled well and feel natural. The dialogue is clever and the writing is funny. Good old Wowbagger the Infinitely Prolonged features prominently as well as the always interesting Trillian and Tricia McMillan. A planet built by the Magrathean Slartibartfast has been populated by people far too rich for their own good and they're petitioning for a God to rule their planet for them. Wowbagger and Thor both show up and lock horns. Even the Vogons, led by the implacable Prostetnic Jeltz and his son, who's not as enthusiastic as his father about eliminating humanity forever (finally closing the chapter on every possible extrusion in every possible multiverse). A fun romp and an installment that can stand proudly next to the others. I've included "notes, citations and errata" <https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3151> in a separate post. The Futurological Congress: From the Memoirs of Ijon Tichy (1971) by Stanislaw Lem This is a surrealist romp by the master of speculative non-hard science fiction, Stanislaw Lem. In this one, we meet the narrator Ijon Tichy, who is so wonderfully written and who is so convincing, that one quickly wonders whether the eponymous congress actually exists. It doesn't. The Congress takes place in Costa Rica, a convocation of the best and brightest minds that looks to tackle the problem of the future for the whole of planet Earth. In particular, they are to tackle the problem of population. Everything that follows may or may not have taken place, because of the copious amounts of mind-altering substances ingested both deliberately and accidentally by the author. I've included "notes, citations and errata" <https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3152> in a separate post. 23 Things They Don't Tell You about Capitalism (2012) by Ha-Joon Chang This is the second book I've read by Chang. The first was Kicking Away the Ladder, which discussed how the much-ballyhooed free-market practices forced on developing countries were not used by the first-world countries when they themselves were developing. This book kind of picks up where the other left off. Instead of viewing the obvious disparity between what the developed world says and what it does in a clinical manner, Chang uses a more class-based lens to examine how the rich manipulate the story to benefit themselves. A primary part of that story is the myth of capital-C Capitalism. I've included "notes, citations and errata" <https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3153> in a separate post. Factotum (1975) by Charles Bukowski Henry Chinaski is a variously employed, alcoholic drifter living in America in the 1940s. He's been rejected from the draft, so he's left in a country that doesn't really want him for anything else, that was already suspicious of people who didn't yearn for the two-kids/white-picket-fence/steady-job dream. He's willing to work, but doesn't like to do the same thing for long, doesn't like authority, and likes to booze and whore and write. He continues to try to publish, but is continually rejected by the only publishing house he considers worthy. He gets involved with Laura and Jan at different times, who have varyingly detrimental effects on his life. I've included "notes, citations and errata" <https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id= 3157> in a separate post. Cloud Atlas (2004) by David Mitchell This is a well-written and far-reaching book. All the more so considering the many narrators, voices and dialects used for the several distinct sections, each of which also took place at a different time in our past or future. It's written in several parts: the first five parts are from different narrators and each subsequent one picks up the story by somehow mentioning the writings of the previous narrator, however obliquely. Each piece builds on the previous one, laddering up through the years into a future where humanity is reduced to tribes on islands visited by leftover vestiges of more advanced but increasingly desperate humanity. With the middle part of 11, we retreat back through the narrators, in reverse order, until we arrive where we started, having perhaps learned something of humanity's reach and maybe something about souls. I've included "notes, citations and errata" <https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3155> in a separate post. Rant: The Oral Biography of Buster Casey (2008) by Chuck Palahniuk The story is told through one-line to one-page--long biographical snippets. The story goes from Buster's upbringing in a grindingly poor town, where his young mother teaches him to how to make Easter eggs with wax and boiled vegetable stock. He is an odd child, inuring himself to poison through repeated animal, insect and arachnid bits, collecting old paint cans from old folks, who don't realize they might be full of extremely valuable coins dating back to the mid-1800s, and following the foretellings of an old man who he met once and claimed to be his real father. He warps the local economy in a way that makes all the townspeople complicit in his scheme, he catches and beats rabies multiple times, all the while spreading it throughout the town, especially the girls who, oddly, can't get enough of him. He takes his ill-gotten gains to the city, where more of the world he inhabits is revealed, in the form of a stark subdivision between night and day shifts for humanity as a way of solving traffic woes, as well as a whole subculture of people organizing crash parties, in which they crash their cars into each other to feel what it's like to really live -- something that almost no-one knows now that one can "boost peaks" from others. That is, full-bore digital sensory capture is freely available and lulls the populace. And this is very much what it is intended to do, according to some of the later biographical participants -- to keep people from discovering that, if you crash your car just right, and you're in just the right theta-wave, meditative state, you will be transported to another place in time, where you can become your own progenitor and increase the power of your current self, until you reach a point where you can kill your own parents, terminate the loop by eliminating the beginning and live forever, suspended in a liminal state. Very much an Infinite-Jest vibe (even a bit of Pynchon at times). Some wicked cool concepts and intriguing thoughts in this one. Recommended. I've included "notes, citations and errata" <https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3156> in a separate post. Mind of My Mind (1977) by Octavia Butler This is book two of the Patternist series. The main character of the first part of the book is Doro, a 5000-year–old superbeing with enhanced mental powers. His primary power is the ability to force his way in to another being’s mind, eradicating that mind and replacing it with his own. Doro is beyond human, and views most of humanity as herd animals, for use as he pleases. He started a breeding program many millennia ago with another powerful woman, a shapeshifter and their progeny tend toward superpowers of the psychic kind. The star of this book is Mary, a distant descendant, who transitions successfully, but in so doing becomes almost more powerful than Doro himself, capable of contacting and leading a whole society of powerful minds. In effect, Doro has succeeded in his program, but his progeny is ready to leave him and his rapacious dog-eat-dog society behind. I've included "notes, citations and errata" <https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3158> in a separate post. Perdido Street Station (2001) by China Miéville This is the story of Isaac, a thaumaturge/scientist in New Crobuzon, a city described in incredible and sprawling detail by Miéville. He lives with girlfriend Lin, who's an artist. She creates sculptures using special materials that she chews with her mandibles behind her head. You guessed it, she's not human. She's kind of a combination fly/super-sexy woman. You're not allowed to talk about her like that, but that's the most succinct description. There's also Yagharek, an outcast member of a strict flying species, who commissions Issac to help him fly again -- his wings having been ripped from him by the expulsion ceremony. In his investigations, Issac discovers an iridescent caterpillar that turns into one of the most evil, multi-dimensional beings known to Crobuzon. He feeds it dreamshit, a drug made from the shit of the caterpillar's captive full-grown compatriots. This is a bad move. The creature escapes and frees its comrades. They all begin to prey on the populace of Crobuzon, sucking souls and psyches and just basically bringing the whole mood down. The creatures were deliberately kept by the military of New Crobuzon as a military weapon that is now out of control. Isaac discovers so-called "crisis energy", which is kind of analogous to harnessing the power of quantum foam, I guess. There's also an extra-dimensional spider called Weaver as well as a secretive Council that machinates throughout the city. The book was more intricate than that, but it was also about 800 pages long. Well-written but a bit over-detailed in places. I've included "notes, citations and errata" <https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3159> in a separate post. How to Live Safely in a Science-Fictional Universe (2011) by Charles Yu Charles Yu digs through baggage from his past in the guise of a real-life time-machine mechanic. The universe in which he lives is kind of a mix of our own plus all sorts of fictive universes. So, for example, Luke Skywalker is a character because, well, he's part of a popular science-fiction world. The novel addresses all sorts of interesting paradoxes, including loops and writing paradoxical warnings to oneself. He harks back to how his father invented the time machine, but failed to profit from it, instead trapping himself in a diorama/time-loop. It was a meandering, interesting and unique book that seemed to have a lot to do with Charles Yu personally, though that was perhaps just the auto-biographical feel. I've included "notes, citations and errata" <https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3177> in a separate post. Requiem for a Dream (1978) by Hubert Selby Jr. I'd already seen the movie and it was relatively faithful to the source material. The book is written in a rambling, near--stream-of-consciousness street patois with little punctuation and structure. The grammar is mostly OK, so you can get used to it, but it's a bit of a challenge at first. Not as much so as the middle chapter in Cloud Atlas but it might still be off-putting for some. tl;dr: Drugs are bad. More precisely, addiction is bad. This film is the story of a mother, her son, his girlfriend and their best friend. Nice, huh? Spoiler alert: the book ends with the mother strapped to a bed in a mental hospital, withdrawing from a severe amphetamine addiction, the son lies in a hospital, his left arm amputated because of a festering needle wound, the best friend is on a work gang in prison, suffering beatings and malnutrition and the girlfriend is curled up on her couch at home, cuddling her scag, earned by performing in a private sex show for her new pimp. The mother never quite recovered from the death of her husband and the son isn’t around enough to take care of her. She spends her days watching a self-help guru’s infomercial. She gets an invitation to the show but can’t fit into her dress. She resolves to lose weight by the time she gets her actual invitation. After a day spent trying it the old-fashioned way, she makes an appointment with a diet doctor and starts her downward spiral. The son and his friends are already well on their way, shucking and jiving for enough money to buy a stash for the night. They resolve to follow the junkie dream: they pool their cash and start selling instead of just using everything they have. This actually works OK for a while, but the friend is busted by the cops on a deal and the money they’ve saved is used for bail and nearly gone in one fell swoop. The son and his girlfriend predictably fight over the lack of drugs and he heads out with his friend to Florida to make a big score. She can’t wait that long and calls a dealer who wants women rather than money in exchange for drugs. I've included "notes, citations and errata" <https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3180> in a separate post. First As Tragedy, Then As Farce (2009) by Slavoj Žižek This is a philosophical/economic discussion of the 2008 financial crash from a wider angle, one that acknowledges the possibility that some of our most seemingly axiomatic notions must be reëxamined. In particular, the notion that capitalism has won -- Fukuyama's end of history -- and that humanity has found the final expression of itself. That the drive to consume is immanent, that the drive to amass long after one has more than enough is genetic. This book is not afraid to discuss various expressions of capital and capitalism and to shine a harsh light on the really-existing version that has slipped in in sheep's clothing. Step one: convince everyone that capitalism is good; remain vague about the definition. Step two: convince everyone that the system that benefits you the most is capitalism. Step three: profit. Criminalize that which you do not want to do; legalize that which you do, but only with tight strictures so that it applies to yourself. Privatize profit; socialize cost. This system is ridiculously short-lived. As the author says on page 90, "[…] even in the US, the bastion of economic liberalism, capitalism is having to re-invent socialism in order to save itself." Capitalism as practiced today is the greatest con game of all. It's an absolute cruel joke that so many fervently believe in it, while all the time getting screwed by it. It's feudalism dressed up with better marketing. I've included "notes, citations and errata" <https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3179> in a separate post. The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (1965) by Philip K. Dick This is one of Dick's trippiest works. He envisions a planet Earth in the future that is too hot to visit during daytime without special cooling gear. Humanity organizes itself to get off-planet. To combat the boring conditions in the colonies, there is a drug called CAN-D that, when taken by groups, allows a shared hallucination. The hallucination approaches reality when it can be anchored on real-life objects, so there is a thriving market for "layouts", which are basically intricate dollhouses. The colonists take the drug and subsume themselves into a shared hallucinatory life in the layout. The story centers on Palmer Eldritch, a heroic but exceedingly odd space traveler who'd been lost to a far-off solar system, but who has supposedly returned, Barney Mayerson, a precog who's been drafted as a colonist, Leo Bolero, his boss and owner of the major layout company. Palmer starts peddling CHEW-Z, an even-more powerful alternative to CAN-D that is capable of making people travel inter-dimensionally or hyper-spatially or just condensing time to a dot, so that an entire live can be lived in a so-called real-world instant. Things get really, really trippy with nested layers of reality, non-real layers of reality due to hallucination -- shared and individual, as well as complete overtaking of other people's bodies and personae. The precog makes things lively with predictions of assassination, but the intended target is unsure how to prevent an event for which the time-stream isn't even clear. More details in the "Wikipedia entry" <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Three_Stigmata_of_Palmer_Eldritch>. If that sounds good to you, then this book is highly recommended. I loved it. I've included "notes, citations and errata" <https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3178> in a separate post. Ark (2009) by Stephen Baxter At the end of Flood, the planet Earth had been covered in water, right up to the very top of Mt. Everest. The only life left on Earth was floating around on top of the seas, in various states of civilization. This story overlaps the events of Flood, showing preparations for saving humanity in other ways. The primary focus is on an ambitious space program -- Ark One -- that will launch a spaceship that is destined for another solar system, a decade of traveling distance away. Arks Two and Three are only hinted at, but also exist. The first part of the book follows the travails of the candidates for the Ark, until its final launch, which doesn't go according to plan, but the technology holds up. Several candidates who were pre-selected don't make it because they are replaced by children of rich and power people. Others are pushed off by members of the military who forced their way onboard at the last moment before launch. The Earth drowns. The Ark heads for nine years toward Earth II, but it proves to be far less attractive than originally hoped. Factions onboard have gotten more stratified and there are three main paths proposed: settle the planet below, continue onward for 30 more years, to another system, or go back to Earth. They end up doing all three, splitting into three parties, splitting the bolo of two ship bodies that provided gravity. The group that returns to Earth finds it completely flooded, but they make contact with survivors on the surface as well as in Ark Two, which is on the ocean floor. The group that went onward goes through many tribulations, finally arriving at the destination planet. It's better than Earth II, but troubles along the way lost them a shuttle, so they have to colonize with children to maximize genetic diversity. The colonists settle in, while the survivors on the orbit further. I've included "notes, citations and errata" <https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3181> in a separate post. Despair (1934; en/1965) by Vladimir Nabakov This is the story of an unreasonably vain Russian man Hermann who meets a homeless man Felix, whom Hermann is convinced is his doppelgänger. Hermann lives with his wife Lydia. He thinks her lovely, pudgy, stupid, but loves her very much. Her cousin Ardalion is also quite close to the family -- quite close to her, in ways luridly hinted at. Hermann is in despair with his life and wants to move on, so comes up with the plan to pay Felix to pretend to be him, but then he would kill Felix and allow the world to think Hermann dead. Hermann and Lydia would then abscond with the insurance money. Hermann, it turns out to no-one's surprise is a good deal less clever than he thought. Felix is absolutely not a doppelgänger for him, his plan for the perfect murder is an absolute shambles and Hermann, who escapes to France, is captured soon after. In Hermann's absence, Ardalion swoops in on Lydia. I've included "notes, citations and errata" <https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3182> in a separate post. Netherland: A Novel (2008) by Joseph O'Neill As with Despair by Nabakov, this is kind of a story of a sad man with delusions of grandeur. Because this is a modern novel, though, in Hans van den Broek's case, he is an immensely successful financial analyst living in London with his wife and son. They haven't a worry in the world as far as prosaic concerns, so we are free to focus on their ennui. Most of the novel is experienced as a series of flashbacks from narrator Hans, as he thinks about his life in New York City and about his relationship with the dynamic and mysterious Chuck Ramkissoon, an avid businessman with 1000 irons in the fire as well as the founder of the Staten Island cricket club. Chuck and the Cricket Club were the only thing that kept Hans going after 9/11 triggered a separation from his wife, who moved back to England with their son. We follow Hans through his memories as he tries to figure out who Chuck was and why his body was discovered handcuffed in the Gowanus river. As to this, we receive no satisfaction, but Hans does end up getting back together with his wife. There is little joy in this because they are both vaguely dissatisfied upper--middle-class people with a seemingly stunted penchant for joy. I've included "notes, citations and errata" <https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3183> in a separate post. Gone Girl: A Novel (2012) by Gillian Flynn This is the story of Amy, a woman financially privileged from birth, whose parents established their fortune with children's books about "Amazing Amy". Amy lives off of a trust fund established by her parents from this fortune. This all has left a mark on Amy. They all live in New York City, where she meets Nick. The book alternates between Amy and Nick's viewpoints, with Amy's entries describing an earnest young lady trying her best to deal with a moody man. Nick, on the other hand, describes himself in the same exact way. Various details that become relevant later are mentioned. They both lose their jobs in New York. Amy's parents, it turns out, are terrible financial managers and come to Amy, asking for the remainder of her trust fund so that they can pay their bills. With no income and no trust fund, the couple retreats to Nick's hometown, Missouri, where his sister and father still live. Nick opens a bar with his sister using the last of their money and they settle in, more or less, to life in the Midwest. On their tenth wedding anniversary, though, Amy is gone. There are signs of a struggle. The first half of the book turns out to have been an exceedingly unreliable telling of their lives and in the second half, we learn what really happened. It's quite a neat plot, so I'm not going to "ruin it for anyone" <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gone_Girl_(novel)>. I've included "notes, citations and errata" <https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3184> in a separate post. Mr. Mercedes (2008) by Stephen King This isn't one of King's best outings, but it was a fun read. It's obviously a Stephen King book from a mile away. You can see his craft in the characters, the pacing and the conclusion. It's the story of a retired police detective Hodges living a sad and lonely life in a small town. He receives a letter from Mr. Mercedes, taunting Hodges that he will never be able to catch him. Who is this Mr. Mercedes? He is the man who ran over several dozen people at a job fair. Hodges was in charge of the case, but wasn't able to solve it before retirement. Very soon in the novel, Mr. Mercedes is revealed to be a demented young man with delusions, who's now following Hodges as well as planning another strike. He's a typically psychotic mess of a King character. He lives with his alcoholic mother. Bits of his past are revealed throughout, forming a picture of a damaged person damaged further by life. Olivia Trelawney is the older woman from whom Mercedes borrowed a ... Mercedes. She kills herself soon after the attack, feeling guilty that she'd contributed, even unwittingly. In his investigation, Hodges meets her lovely sister Janey -- another typically powerful female character, well-written -- and they hit it off, investigating Mercedes together. Jerome, a young man who helps Hodges around the house, also forces his charming way into the investigation. Most of Janey and Olivia's relatives are exceedingly unpleasant, but Holly, though odd, is also of immense help. Together, they manage to thwart Mr. Mercedes's next attack. The Martian (2014) by Andy Weir This is the story of a mission to Mars, the Ares 3. They are only days into their several-week–long mission before a freak windstorm forces them to abandon and escape by the skin of their teeth back to the Hermes, in orbit around Mars. Unfortunately, the wind tore a satellite antenna from its mooring and propelled it directly through Mark Watney, tearing him away into the howling, sandy darkness of the Martian night. The crew is bereft, feeling survivor’s guilt. Watney, however, is not dead. He is left alone on the surface of Mars with a lot of technology at his disposal and food for a crew of six. Short-term survival is not a problem. It’s surviving long enough for a resupply mission that’s an issue. With the satellite antenna gone, he can’t even tell NASA that he survived. NASA notices that something is up when they see changes in the camp, so they know he’s alive. They keep this from the Hermes crew, at least at the beginning. Mark does all sort of neat stuff to survive, described in at-times excruciating detail but very well-written and entertaining nonetheless. The writing started off quite stilted, with very short sentences and about a sixth-grade reading level—if that. About 1/3 of the way through, though, it picked up steam and became quite funny as more characters were introduced. Even Mark’s somewhat flat witticisms become sharper and funnier. I saw the movie before reading the book, but that didn’t ruin anything for me—as psychologists say, anticipation is just as enjoyable as surprise. He locates and re-enables the Pathfinder in order to use it for communications. He farms potatoes. He re-enables the RTG as a heat source for long missions—like the one to the Area IV landing site on the other side of the planet. He makes it over there, the Hermes mission is extended to come pick him up, he takes the MAV from Ares IV to LMO (Low Mars Orbit) and they miraculously pick him up. I've included "notes, citations and errata" <https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3174> in a separate post. Blindness (1995) by Jose Saramago (translated to English by Giovanni Pontiero) The story is of a man who is suddenly struck blind, seeing only a wash of milky whiteness. Others soon follow, as it becomes clear that the blindness is caused by a communicable disease. Soon enough, everyone has it and the city is filled only with the blind, All, save one lady -- the doctor's wife, played by Julianne Moore -- who is unaffected by the blindness, but not by its horrific effects (she lives in a world of blind people). The effects are as you can imagine, if you were to think about it: a city filled only with the newly blind, fumbling about, looking for food, looking for shelter, for a place to urinate or defecate. Before everyone has succumbed, the government ruthlessly quarantines the initial afflicted in a mental asylum. Food is delivered sporadically but relatively regularly. The place becomes nearly unbearably filthy. As more and more people arrive, an element finally arrives that understands that societal rules no longer apply. They take all the food for themselves, rationing it out to the others in exchange for the last of their worldly possessions. When those run out, they naturally demand that the other wards send their women. After several days, the women volunteer for this horrific duty, even the doctor's wife. Afterwards, though, she's had enough and takes a pair of scissors she found to kill the ringleader, threatening the remaining pirates that she will kill more if they don't give up. Another woman, traumatized by the rapes, finds a lighter and sets the pirates' den on fire, taking them all out. At the same time, the doctor's wife takes her small group outside to ask the soldiers for help. They are gone. There is no authority remaining. All is chaos and anarchy, with only the blind to fill the power vacuum. The small group escapes back to the city, the doctor's wife the only witness to the utter horror of the place, overrun by people who can no longer take care of themselves. They survive better than most, with the doctor's wife's sight helping them find food that others have missed. They return to the doctor's home and settle in for a somewhat better existence than they had in quarantine, but one still bereft of true hope. And then, just as quickly as it left, their sight returns. The end. I've included "notes, citations and errata" <https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3200> in a separate post. Wyrd Sisters (Discworld Book 6) (1988) by Terry Pratchett This story is the Discworld take on Hamlet, more or less. It features Nanny Ogg, Grannie Weatherwax and Magret as the witches three. Duke Felmet of Lancre kills his cousin the King in order to take over the throne. The kingdom is not happy about this. By the kingdom, I mean not necessarily the people -- though they feel it too -- but the actual kingdom, the ground, the trees, the sky. The kingdom as a being is dissatisfied. The King's son Tomjon survives, to Felmet's chagrin and he bends his considerable powers to finding him. All to no avail, as the child is whisked off to Ankh Morpork with a troupe of traveling actors. He grows up to be a highly influential actor with an unparalleled power to mesmerize. His adoptive father owns the troupe, his best friend is the dwarf Hwel, an at-time very gifted playwright. Also in the mix is the suspiciously eloquent court Fool, who helps the witches wrest the kingdom from Felmet, which involves flying around the kingdom very quickly on a broom. I've included "notes, citations and errata" <https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id= 3198> in a separate post. Wool Omnibus (2011) by Hugh Howey Howey originally self-published this work on Amazon but at least the first part suffers much less from a strong editorial hand than other self-published works I've seen. He spins a good yarn [1], plucking ideas and moods from other genres to weave [2] his own interesting and thrilling murder mystery in a silo that houses an entire society in its 144 floors. The stratification becomes clear over the course of the stories, which were published serially over the course of more than year. The various power factions and policies are shown to create a working machine, but one that works for a very distinct and not-very-well-publicized purpose. The story starts with the death of the Silo's sheriff, as he is sent out for "cleaning" -- as his wife before him -- as punishment for heresy/thoughtcrime. Next we meet the Silo's Mayor, Jahns, an older woman nearing the end of her career, and her deputy Marnes, also in his sunset years. They seek out and find a new sheriff in Juliette, a very clever Mechanic from the lowest levels of the silo. This brings them into direct contact with Bernard, the power-mad head of IT (level 31). Bernard's "shadow" (apprentice) is Lukas, a young man with fewer scales on his eyes, who is smitten with Juliette and willing to help her find out more about what the Silo is really for, about how it was created. This, despite the trouble this causes him at work, where Bernard is grooming him for succession. Juliette is eventually banished to cleaning as well, but she uses her connections in Mechanical and Supply to ensure that the journey is not as fatal as usual. There are some editorial oddities [3] but overall the book is well-written. I've included "notes, citations and errata" <https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id= 3199> in a separate post. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] If you'll pardon the pun. [1] Again. [1] For example, he doesn't seem to know about the verb form "had been", instead using "were" everywhere and making the reader stumble and have to figure out from context that he'd intended the non-continuous past participle. At another point, he used "leeching" to indicate something leaking out insidiously but that's a brand-new meaning of that word and, again, caused a stumble. Even in his bits of code, he used single apostrophes for a unit of dimension (feet) but then all of the characters acted as if he'd written double apostrophes (inches). I wasted minutes trying to figure out if that were some hidden meaning I'd overlooked, but had to come to the conclusion that it was just a pretty grievous editorial oversight. ]]> </content> </entry> <entry> <title type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Wool by Hugh Howey (2011; read in 2015)]]> </title> <id>https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3199</id> <link href="https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3199"/> <updated>2016-04-20T08:27:54+02:00</updated> <author> <name type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Marco von Ballmoos]]> </name> <uri>https://earthli.com/users/marco</uri> </author> <summary type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA["Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is" ... ]]> </summary> <content type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Published by marco on 20. Apr 2016 08:27:54 Updated by marco on 27. Dec 2020 12:45:28 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I've failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an interest in this book, then I'm happy for you." Howey originally self-published this work on Amazon but at least the first part suffers much less from a strong editorial hand than other self-published works I've seen. He spins a good yarn [1], plucking ideas and moods from other genres to weave [2] his own interesting and thrilling murder mystery in a silo that houses an entire society in its 144 floors. The stratification becomes clear over the course of the stories, which were published serially over the course of more than year. The various power factions and policies are shown to create a working machine, but one that works for a very distinct and not-very-well-publicized purpose. The story starts with the death of the Silo's sheriff, as he is sent out for "cleaning" -- as his wife before him -- as punishment for heresy/thoughtcrime. Next we meet the Silo's Mayor, Jahns, an older woman nearing the end of her career, and her deputy Marnes, also in his sunset years. They seek out and find a new sheriff in Juliette, a very clever Mechanic from the lowest levels of the silo. This brings them into direct contact with Bernard, the power-mad head of IT (level 31). Bernard's "shadow" (apprentice) is Lukas, a young man with fewer scales on his eyes, who is smitten with Juliette and willing to help her find out more about what the Silo is really for, about how it was created. This, despite the trouble this causes him at work, where Bernard is grooming him for succession. Juliette is eventually banished to cleaning as well, but she uses her connections in Mechanical and Supply to ensure that the journey is not as fatal as usual. [Citations] "They nodded to the duo as they passed through the cafeteria and wished them a different sort of unspoken luck. Keep us going, their eyes said. Make it so my kids live as long as me. Don’t let it unravel, not just yet." That's everyone's fervent hope. "“That’s a pump,” he said. “Oil well. It’s how you read at night.”" How do they even have a word for night anymore? "Juliette felt inordinate pressure for everything to work. She was the one who had come up with the idea to do a refit. She calmed herself with reassurances that it was the right thing to do and that the worst that could happen now was that the holiday would be extended until they sorted out all the kinks. That was much better than a catastrophic failure years from now." I know that feeling. "she continued to make adjustments, zeroing out all the corrections that had built up over the years. They were starting from the ground up, none of the patches and fixes of old to disguise any new symptoms. A fresh start." "He wondered if McLain saw him as a brute, storming up here with delusions of justice. She was old enough to consider him young, he realized. Young and hot tempered, while he thought of himself as being old and wise." "Maybe it was the proximity of death talking, the reaper buffeting her clear helmet with sand and toxins. What did any of it matter, seeing how wide and full the world was? Her silo would probably go on. Other silos surely would." ]]> </content> </entry> <entry> <title type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Wyrd Sisters (Discworld Book 6) by Terry Pratchett (read in 2015)]]> </title> <id>https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3198</id> <link href="https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3198"/> <updated>2016-04-20T08:21:50+02:00</updated> <author> <name type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Marco von Ballmoos]]> </name> <uri>https://earthli.com/users/marco</uri> </author> <summary type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA["Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is" ... ]]> </summary> <content type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Published by marco on 20. Apr 2016 08:21:50 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I've failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an interest in this book, then I'm happy for you." This story is the Discworld take on Hamlet, more or less. It features Nanny Ogg, Grannie Weatherwax and Magret as the witches three. Duke Felmet of Lancre kills his cousin the King in order to take over the throne. The kingdom is not happy about this. By the kingdom, I mean not necessarily the people -- though they feel it too -- but the actual kingdom, the ground, the trees, the sky. The kingdom as a being is dissatisfied. The King's son Tomjon survives, to Felmet's chagrin and he bends his considerable powers to finding him. All to no avail, as the child is whisked off to Ankh Morpork with a troupe of traveling actors. He grows up to be a highly influential actor with an unparalleled power to mesmerize. His adoptive father owns the troupe, his best friend is the dwarf Hwel, an at-time very gifted playwright. Also in the mix is the suspiciously eloquent court Fool, who helps the witches wrest the kingdom from Felmet, which involves flying around the kingdom very quickly on a broom. [Citations] "Most people aren’t. They live their lives as a sort of temporal blur around the point where their body actually is—anticipating the future, or holding onto the past. They’re usually so busy thinking about what happens next that the only time they ever find out what is happening now is when they come to look back on it. Most people are like this. They learn how to fear because they can actually tell, down at the subconscious level, what is going to happen next. It’s already happening to them." "The Fool’s bells tinkled as he sorted through his cards. Without thinking, he said: “Oh, a sub-sect of the Turnwise Klatch philosophical system of Sumtin, noted for its simple austerity and the offer of personal tranquillity and wholeness achieved through meditation and breathing techniques; an interesting aspect is the asking of apparently nonsensical questions in order to widen the doors of perception.”" "“Oh, obvious,” said Granny. “I’ll grant you it’s obvious. Trouble is, just because things are obvious doesn’t mean they’re true.”" "“If I’d had to buy you, you wouldn’t be worth the price.”" "No, things like crowns had a troublesome effect on clever folk; it was best to leave all the reigning to the kind of people whose eyebrows met in the middle when they tried to think." "Kings and such are killing one another the whole time. Their kingdoms just make the best of it. How come this one takes offense all of a sudden?” “It’s been here a long time,” said Granny. “So’s everywhere,” said Nanny, and added, with the air of a lifetime student, “Everywhere’s been where it is ever since it was first put there. It’s called geography.”" "He stiffened. “You’re wondering whether I really would cut your throat,” panted Magrat. “I don’t know either. Think of the fun we could have together, finding out.”" "She’d thought him weak under a thin shell of strength, but it went a lot further than that. Somewhere deep inside his mind, somewhere beyond the event horizon of rationality, the sheer pressure of insanity had hammered his madness into something harder than diamond." "“You tell me history is what people are told?” said the duchess. The Fool looked around the throne room and found King Gruneberry the Good (906-967). “Was he?” he said, pointing. “Who knows, now? What was he good at? But he will be Gruneberry the Good until the end of the world.” The duke was leaning forward in his throne, his eyes gleaming. “I want to be a good ruler,” he said. “I want people to like me. I would like people to remember me fondly.”" Why? "“But that’s just people’s perception,” she said. “Isn’t it?” “Oh, yes,” said Granny, “of course it is. It all is. What difference does that make?”" "As she plunged down toward the forest roof in a long shallow dive she reflected that there was possibly something complimentary in the way Granny Weatherwax resolutely refused to consider other people’s problems. It implied that, in her considerable opinion, they were quite capable of sorting them out by themselves." "Somewhere in the middle of it Nanny Ogg floated, taking the occasional pull from a hip flask as a preventative against the chill. And thus it was that Granny, her hat and iron-gray hair dripping with moisture, her boots shedding lumps of ice, heard the distant and muffled sound of a voice enthusiastically explaining to the invisible sky that the hedgehog had less to worry over than just about any other mammal." "For the first time a flicker of doubt invaded Granny Weatherwax’s mind, puzzled to find itself in such unfamiliar surroundings." "Hwel looked unsteadily into his mug. Drunkenness had this to be said for it, it stopped the flow of inspirations." "Words were indeed insubstantial. They were as soft as water, but they were also as powerful as water and now they were rushing over the audience, eroding the levees of veracity, and carrying away the past." ]]> </content> </entry> <entry> <title type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[The Martian by Andy Weir (read in 2015)]]> </title> <id>https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3174</id> <link href="https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3174"/> <updated>2016-04-20T08:11:23+02:00</updated> <author> <name type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Marco von Ballmoos]]> </name> <uri>https://earthli.com/users/marco</uri> </author> <summary type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA["Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is" ... ]]> </summary> <content type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Published by marco on 20. Apr 2016 08:11:23 Updated by marco on 20. Apr 2016 08:20:11 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I've failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an interest in this book, then I'm happy for you." This is the story of a mission to Mars, the Ares 3. They are only days into their several-week--long mission before a freak windstorm forces them to abandon and escape by the skin of their teeth back to the Hermes, in orbit around Mars. Unfortunately, the wind tore a satellite antenna from its mooring and propelled it directly through Mark Watney, tearing him away into the howling, sandy darkness of the Martian night. The crew is bereft, feeling survivor's guilt. Watney, however, is not dead. He is left alone on the surface of Mars with a lot of technology at his disposal and food for a crew of six. Short-term survival is not a problem. It's surviving long enough for a resupply mission that's an issue. With the satellite antenna gone, he can't even tell NASA that he survived. NASA notices that something is up when they see changes in the camp, so they know he's alive. They keep this from the Hermes crew, at least at the beginning. Mark does all sort of neat stuff to survive, described in at-times excruciating detail but very well-written and entertaining nonetheless. The writing started off quite stilted, with very short sentences and about a sixth-grade reading level -- if that. About 1/3 of the way through, though, it picked up steam and became quite funny as more characters were introduced. Even Mark's somewhat flat witticisms become sharper and funnier. I saw the movie before reading the book, but that didn't ruin anything for me -- as psychologists say, anticipation is just as enjoyable as surprise. He locates and re-enables the Pathfinder in order to use it for communications. He farms potatoes. He re-enables the RTG as a heat source for long missions -- like the one to the Area IV landing site on the other side of the planet. He makes it over there, the Hermes mission is extended to come pick him up, he takes the MAV from Ares IV to LMO (Low Mars Orbit) and they miraculously pick him up. [Citations] In this next piece, I laughed out loud at the Chinese response, "My people have enjoyed working with your advance team," Guo Ming said. "The last month has been very interesting. Attaching an American Probe to a Chinese booster. I believe this is the first time it's ever been done." "It just goes to show," Teddy said,. "Love of science is universal across all cultures." Guo Ming nodded. "My people have especially commented on the work ethic of your man, Mitch Henderson. He is very dedicated." "He's a pain in the ass," Teddy said. Su Bin paused before translating but pressed on. Guo Ming laughed. "You can say that," he said. "I cannot." Where Weir deviates a bit from reality (I think) is that many of the officials from the Chinese Space Agency required translators, even though China has the most English-speaking residents of any country in the world. If pretty much anyone graduating university in China today speaks English fluently, then I would imagine that the space program of the near future there would be staffed 100% by people who speak English. The movie deviated even farther in order to alienate the Chinese: in the book, their command center is pretty much the same as that in Houston. In the movie, the Americans tell the Chinese that their stuff is way out of date and that they'll have to help them upgrade it. Kinda racist. No idea why they felt they had to do that. Didn't really gibe with the rest of the movie. "Mars is not Earth. It doesn't have a thick atmosphere to bend light and carry particles that reflect light around corners. It's damn near a vacuum here. Once the sun isn't visible, I'm in the dark. Phobos gives me some moonlight, but not enough to work with. Deimos is a little piece of crap that's no good to anyone." That is a spot-on description of my two rabbits, Pierre and Louis, respectively. [19:24] MAV: What took them so long to let us talk? [19:25] JOHANSSEN: The psych team was worried about personality conflicts. [19:25] MAV: What" Just 'cause you guys abandoned me on a godforsaken planet with no chance of survival? [19:26] JOHANSSEN: Funny. Don't make that kind of joke with Lewis. [19:27] MAV: Roger. So uh ... thanks for coming back to get me. [19:27] JOHANSSEN: It's the least we could do. How is the MAV retrofit going? [19:28] MAV: So far, so good. NASA put a lot of thought into the procedures. They work. That's not to say they're easy. I spent the last 3 days removing Hull Panel 19 and the front window. Even in Mars-g they're heavy motherfuckers. [19:29] JOHANSSEN: When we pick you up, I will make wild, passionate love to you. Prepare your body. [19:29] JOHANSSEN: I didn't type that! That was Martinez! I stepped away from the console for like 10 seconds! [19:29] MAV: I've really missed you guys. That's a pretty funny passage. However, Johanssen is the IT tech for the flight -- the super-hacker. Super-hackers do not leave their terminals without locking them. Ever. Still, funny. Another funny one that made it more-or-less verbatim into the movie. "Hey," Watney said over the radio, "I've got an idea." "Of course you do," Lewis said. "What do you got?" "I could find something sharp in here and poke a hole in the glove of my EVA suit. I could use the escaping air as a thruster and fly my way to you. The source of thrust would be on my arm, so I'd be able to direct it pretty easily." "How does he come up with this shit?" Martinez interjected. "Hmm," Lewis said. "Could you get forty-two meters per second that way?" "No idea," Watney said. "I can't see you having any control if you did that," Lewis said. "You'd be eyeballing the intercept and using a thrust vector you can barely control." "I admit it's fatally dangerous," Watney said. "But consider this: I'd get to fly around like Iron Man." "We'll keep working on ideas," Lewis said. "Iron Man, Commander. Iron Man." After the MAV made it into orbit, "Little remained of the canvas. Tatters floated along the edge of the hole it once covered. This granted Watney an unobstructed view of Mars from orbit. The red planet's crater-pocked surface stretched out seemingly forever, its thin atmosphere a slight blur along the edge. Only eighteen people in history had personally seen this view. ""Fuck you," he said to the planet below." The book tried to sell us on the power of the human spirit that makes billions pull together to save one guy. I think it's more like boredom with the humdrum uselessness of our daily lives. Saving a guy on another planet is a challenge that is just better than what you were doing before. It's not that you really want to save Mark Watney, but that you want to do something cool and no-one can fault you if you do something cool instead of what you're supposed to be doing when it's to save a famous man's life. ]]> </content> </entry> <entry> <title type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Gone Girl: A Novel by Gillian Flynn (read in 2015)]]> </title> <id>https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3184</id> <link href="https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3184"/> <updated>2016-04-20T07:39:20+02:00</updated> <author> <name type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Marco von Ballmoos]]> </name> <uri>https://earthli.com/users/marco</uri> </author> <summary type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA["Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is" ... ]]> </summary> <content type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Published by marco on 20. Apr 2016 07:39:20 Updated by marco on 20. Apr 2016 08:20:21 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I've failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an interest in this book, then I'm happy for you." This is the story of Amy, a woman financially privileged from birth, whose parents established their fortune with children's books about "Amazing Amy". Amy lives off of a trust fund established by her parents from this fortune. This all has left a mark on Amy. They all live in New York City, where she meets Nick. The book alternates between Amy and Nick's viewpoints, with Amy's entries describing an earnest young lady trying her best to deal with a moody man. Nick, on the other hand, describes himself in the same exact way. Various details that become relevant later are mentioned. They both lose their jobs in New York. Amy's parents, it turns out, are terrible financial managers and come to Amy, asking for the remainder of her trust fund so that they can pay their bills. With no income and no trust fund, the couple retreats to Nick's hometown, Missouri, where his sister and father still live. Nick opens a bar with his sister using the last of their money and they settle in, more or less, to life in the Midwest. On their tenth wedding anniversary, though, Amy is gone. There are signs of a struggle. The first half of the book turns out to have been an exceedingly unreliable telling of their lives and in the second half, we learn what really happened. It's quite a neat plot, so I'm not going to "ruin it for anyone" <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gone_Girl_(novel)>. [Citations] "He’s doing what you tell him to do because he doesn’t care enough to argue, I think. Your petty demands simply make him feel superior, or resentful, and someday he will fuck his pretty, young coworker who asks nothing of him, and you will actually be shocked. Give me a man with a little fight in him, a man who calls me on my bullshit. (But who also kind of likes my bullshit.) And yet: Don’t land me in one of those relationships where we’re always pecking at each other, disguising insults as jokes, rolling our eyes and “playfully” scrapping in front of our friends, hoping to lure them to our side of an argument they could not care less about. Those awful if only relationships: This marriage would be great if only … and you sense the if only list is a lot longer than either of them realizes. So I know I am right not to settle, but it doesn’t make me feel better as my friends pair off and I stay home on Friday night with a bottle of wine and make myself an extravagant meal and tell myself, This is perfect, as if I’m the one dating me. As I go to endless rounds of parties and bar nights, perfumed and sprayed and hopeful, rotating myself around the room like some dubious dessert." "I’ve gotten so retro, at one point I will probably use the word pocketbook, shuffling out the door in my swingy tweed coat, my lips painted red, on the way to the beauty parlor." "[...] always with autumn colors in the background, as if the school were based not in a town but in a month. October." "You are turning me into what I never have been and never wanted to be, a nag, because you are not living up to your end of a very basic compact. Don’t do that, it’s not okay to do." "Of course that’s what we have to do, and of course if he had presented the problem to me like I wasn’t his enemy, that’s what I would have said. But he came out of the door already treating me like a problem that needed to be dealt with. I was the bitter voice that needed to be squelched." "Do you remember when Insley and her dancing-monkey husband made us come over to admire their baby, and we did the obligatory visit to their strangely perfect, overflowered, overmuffined house for brunch and baby-meeting and they were so self-righteous and patronizing of our childless state, and meanwhile there was their hideous boy, covered in streaks of slobber and stewed carrots and maybe some feces—naked except for a frilly bib and a pair of knitted booties—" "The building was heavy-hot, almost fuzzy, like the inside of a mattress. Three of us had giant camping flashlights, the glow illuminating jarring images: It was suburbia, post-comet, post-zombie, post-humanity. A set of muddy shopping-cart tracks looped crazily along the white flooring. A raccoon chewed on a dog treat in the entry to a women’s bathroom, his eyes flashing like dimes." "My parents’ cherished heirloom looks ridiculous in the new house. But then all our New York stuff does. Our dignified elephant of a chesterfield with its matching baby ottoman sits in the living room looking stunned, as if it got sleep-darted in its natural environment and woke up in this strange new captivity, surrounded by faux-posh carpet and synthetic wood and unveined walls." "I have a mistress. Now is the part where I have to tell you I have a mistress and you stop liking me. If you liked me to begin with. I have a pretty, young, very young mistress, and her name is Andie. I know. It’s bad." Surprise surprise. And no, we didn't like you. "Go jabbed me in the sternum with two hard fingers. “Don’t you fucking pull that with me, Lance. ‘Oh, girls get so overexcited.’ That’s bullshit. You are in a really bad place, my friend. Get your head out of your ass and start helping me fix this.”" "For over a year now, I’ve smelled her twat on his fingertips as he slipped into bed next to me. I’ve watched him ogle himself in the mirror, grooming himself like a horny baboon for their dates. I’ve listened to his lies, lies, lies—from simplistic child’s fibs to elaborate Rube Goldbergian contraptions. I’ve tasted butterscotch on his dry-kiss lips, a cloying flavor that was never there before. I’ve felt the stubble on his cheeks that he knows I don’t like but apparently she does. I’ve suffered betrayal with all five senses. For over" "And then I’d picture him with her, in her stripper thong, letting him degrade her because she was pretending to be Cool Girl, she was pretending to love blow jobs and football and getting wasted. And I’d think, I am married to an imbecile. I’m married to a man who will always choose that, and when he gets bored with this dumb twat, he’ll just find another girl who is pretending to be that girl, and he’ll never have to do anything hard in his life. Resolve stiffened." "Americans like what is easy, and it’s easy to like pregnant women—they’re like ducklings or bunnies or dogs. Still, it baffles me that these self-righteous, self-enthralled waddlers get such special treatment. As if it’s so hard to spread your legs and let a man ejaculate between them. You know what is hard? Faking a pregnancy." "“You are a man,” I say. “You are an average, lazy, boring, cowardly, woman-fearing man. Without me, that’s what you would have kept on being, ad nauseam. But I made you into something. You were the best man you’ve ever been with me. And you know it. The only time in your life you’ve ever liked yourself was pretending to be someone I might like. Without me? You’re just your dad.”" "Me, Nick Dunne, the man who used to forget so many details, is now the guy who replays conversations to make sure I didn’t offend, to make sure I never hurt her feelings. I write down everything about her day, her likes and dislikes, in case she quizzes me. I am a great husband because I am very afraid she may kill me." ]]> </content> </entry> <entry> <title type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Netherland: A Novel by Joseph O'Neill (read in 2015)]]> </title> <id>https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3183</id> <link href="https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3183"/> <updated>2016-04-20T07:25:31+02:00</updated> <author> <name type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Marco von Ballmoos]]> </name> <uri>https://earthli.com/users/marco</uri> </author> <summary type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA["Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is" ... ]]> </summary> <content type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Published by marco on 20. Apr 2016 07:25:31 Updated by marco on 20. Apr 2016 07:40:53 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I've failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an interest in this book, then I'm happy for you." As with Despair by Nabakov, this is kind of a story of a sad man with delusions of grandeur. Because this is a modern novel, though, in Hans van den Broek's case, he is an immensely successful financial analyst living in London with his wife and son. They haven't a worry in the world as far as prosaic concerns, so we are free to focus on their ennui. Most of the novel is experienced as a series of flashbacks from narrator Hans, as he thinks about his life in New York City and about his relationship with the dynamic and mysterious Chuck Ramkissoon, an avid businessman with 1000 irons in the fire as well as the founder of the Staten Island cricket club. Chuck and the Cricket Club were the only thing that kept Hans going after 9/11 triggered a separation from his wife, who moved back to England with their son. We follow Hans through his memories as he tries to figure out who Chuck was and why his body was discovered handcuffed in the Gowanus river. As to this, we receive no satisfaction, but Hans does end up getting back together with his wife. There is little joy in this because they are both vaguely dissatisfied upper--middle-class people with seemingly a stunted penchant for joy. [Citations] "[...] the beauty of cricket played on a lawn of appropriate dimensions, where the white-clad ring of infielders, swanning figures on the vast oval, again and again converge in unison toward the batsman and again and again scatter back to their starting points, a repetition of pulmonary rhythm, as if the field breathed through its luminous visitors." "Also, the sheer variety of foodstuffs bothered him. “One night it’s Cantonese, then it’s Georgian, then it’s Indonesian, then Syrian. I mean, I think this shit is good baklava, but what the fuck do I know, really? How can I be sure?” Yet when he wrote, Vinay exuded bright certainty and expertise. As I repeatedly went forth with him and began to understand the ignorance and contradictions and language difficulties with which he contended, and the doubtful sources of his information and the seemingly bottomless history and darkness out of which the dishes of New York emerge, the deeper grew my suspicion that his work finally consisted of minting or perpetuating and in any event circulating misconceptions about his subject and in this way adding to the endless perplexity of the world." His readers take him at his word. he isn't lying. just wrong. When you see how he operates you know that in him trust is misplaced. It's like the difference in trust you have for software you wrote yourself and software you bought. "Chuck valued craftiness and indirection. He found the ordinary run of dealings between people boring and insufficiently advantageous to him at the deep level of strategy at which he liked to operate. He believed in owning the impetus of a situation, in keeping the other guy off balance, in proceeding by way of sidesteps." "was torn between a ridiculous loathing of this obdurate wintry ectoplasm and an equally ridiculous tenderness stimulated by a solid’s battle against the forces of liquefaction." I'm not really of huge fan of overt thesaurus writing, especially when it's this obvious. It's a fine line, though, I know. "was torn between a ridiculous loathing of this obdurate wintry ectoplasm and an equally ridiculous tenderness stimulated by a solid’s battle against the forces of liquefaction. Random mental commotions of this kind constantly agitated me during this period," "Each of her soothing utterances battered me more grievously than the last—as if I were traveling in a perverse ambulance whose function was to collect a healthy man and steadily damage him in readiness for the hospital at which a final and terrible injury would be inflicted." "could see what had happened. I had knocked him off his pedestal. I had called into question his exercise of the New Yorker’s ultimate privilege: of holding yourself out in a way that, back home, would be taken as a misrepresentation." Chuck kind of reminds me of some guys I've met, who brag about everything under the sun, but who actually have some facts to back up the bragging. "The exploit struck me, chewing mutton under the sun, as possessing a tantalizing metaphysical significance; and it isn’t an overstatement, I believe, to say that this train of thought, though of course inconclusive and soon reduced to nothing more than nostalgia for the adventure books of my childhood," "She half apologized one evening. “I’m sorry. I just find it oppressive being an economy. The nanny”—we’d hired an English-speaking Assamese woman to babysit for Jake for a few hours every morning—“the drivers, the waiters, the deck chair boys, all these people selling stuff on the beach…I mean, every stupid spending decision we make has a huge impact on their lives.”" "Oh yeah? I wanted to say. Get back to me when you’re grossing ten thousand dollars per working day, asshole." A gauche reminder that our hero has essentially zero problems compared to most. "Ronald McDonald drew back. Then he again came forward enormously, head first, turning in the draft so that his rigid beckoning arm swung round in a slow haymaker that scattered a mesmerized shoal of bystanders and ultimately connected with a fellow trying to film the debacle with a cell phone. That man fell to the ground, as did the police officer next to him who was trying to apprehend the fantastic yolk-yellow mitt with his bare hands, this last fall provoking a ducking young officer to draw his gun and point it at the amok Ronald McDonald, which led to a fresh burst of screams and panicky running and mass diving onto the asphalt and Eliza grabbing my arm." "[...] examining the shadow in the wine bottle and dispensing one half of the shadow into each of our glasses." "I am too tired to explain that I don’t agree—to say that, however much of a disappointment Chuck may have been at the end, there were many earlier moments when this was not the case and that I see no good reason why his best self-manifestations should not be the basis of one’s final judgment. We all disappoint, eventually." ]]> </content> </entry> <entry> <title type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Despair by Vladimir Nabokov (read in 2015)]]> </title> <id>https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3182</id> <link href="https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3182"/> <updated>2016-04-20T07:15:29+02:00</updated> <author> <name type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Marco von Ballmoos]]> </name> <uri>https://earthli.com/users/marco</uri> </author> <summary type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA["Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is" ... ]]> </summary> <content type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Published by marco on 20. Apr 2016 07:15:29 Updated by marco on 20. Apr 2016 07:28:57 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I've failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an interest in this book, then I'm happy for you." This is the story of an unreasonably vain Russian man Hermann who meets a homeless man Felix, whom Hermann is convinced is his doppelgänger. Hermann lives with his wife Lydia. He thinks her lovely, pudgy, stupid, but loves her very much. Her cousin Ardalion is also quite close to the family -- quite close to her, in ways luridly hinted at. Hermann is in despair with his life and wants to move on, so comes up with the plan to pay Felix to pretend to be him, but then he would kill Felix and allow the world to think Hermann dead. Hermann and Lydia would then abscond with the insurance money. Hermann, it turns out to no-one's surprise is a good deal less clever than he thought. Felix is absolutely not a doppelgänger for him, his plan for the perfect murder is an absolute shambles and Hermann, who escapes to France, is captured soon after. In Hermann's absence, Ardalion swoops in on Lydia. [Citations] "The ecstatic love of a young writer for the old writer he will be some day is ambition in its most laudable form. This love is not reciprocated by the older man in his larger library, for even if he does recall with regret a naked palate and a rheumless eye, he has nothing but an impatient shrug for the bungling apprentice of his youth." "These opinions of hers stand as stiff as statues in their niches." "Giving her a letter to post was equal to throwing it into the river, leaving the rest to the acumen of the stream and the recipient’s piscatorial leisure." "[...] and a very simple world it was, with the greatest complication in it amounting to a search for the telephone number which she had jotted down on one of the pages of a library book, borrowed by the very person whom she wished to ring up." "Thus we sat and I kept up my persuasive drone; I am a bad speaker, and the oration which I seem to render word by word did not flow with the lissom glide it has on paper. Indeed, it is not really possible to set down my incoherent speech, that tumble and jumble of words, the forlornness of subordinated clauses, which have lost their masters and strayed away, and all the superfluous gibber that gives words a support or a creep hole; but my mind worked so rhythmically and pursued its quarry at such a steady pace, that the impression now left me by the trend of my own words is anything but tangled or garbled. My object, however, was still out of reach. The fellow’s" "There is yet another reason why I cannot, nor wish to, believe in God: the fairy tale about him is not really mine, it belongs to strangers, to all men; it is soaked through by the evil-smelling effluvia of millions of other souls that have spun about a little under the sun and then burst; it swarms with primordial fears; there echoes in it a confused choir of numberless voices striving to drown one another; I hear in it the boom and pant of the organ, the roar of the orthodox deacon, the croon of the cantor, Negroes wailing, the flowing eloquency of the Protestant preacher, gongs, thunderclaps, spasms of epileptic women; I see shining through it the pallid pages of all philosophies like the foam of long-spent waves; it is foreign to me, and odious and absolutely useless." "If the deed is planned and performed correctly, then the force of creative art is such, that were the criminal to give himself up on the very next morning, none would believe him, the invention of art containing far more intrinsical truth than life’s reality." "all this was revealed by the fact that even the official definitions in the brief list of personal features did not quite correspond with the epithets in my own passport (left at home). A trifle to be sure, but a characteristic one." He thinks himself amazing in all ways, and his wife faithful, himself affluent and bright and successful. even his resemblance to Felix is invented and exaggerated. He even thinks his wife loves him enough to not run off with Ardalion and the insurance money. "Apart, alone, surrounded by cork oaks, stood a decent-looking hotel, the greater part still shuttered (the season beginning only in summer). A strong wind from Spain worried the chick fluff of the mimosas. In a pavilion, reminding one of a chapel, a spring of curative water gushed, and cobwebs hung in the corners of its ruby dark windows." "And I was unspeakably shocked by the tone of the thing: it was in fact so improper, so impossible in regard to me, that for a moment I even thought it might refer to a person bearing the same name as I; for such a tone is used when writing of some halfwit hacking to bits a whole family. I understand now. It was, I guess, a ruse on the part of the international police; a silly attempt to frighten and rattle me;" "expressed their surprise at my having hoped to deceive the world simply by dressing up in my clothes an individual who was not in the least like me. The imbecility and blatant unfairness of such reasoning are highly comic. The next logical step was to make me mentally deficient; they even went so far as to suppose I was not quite sane and certain persons knowing me confirmed this—that ass Orlovius among others (wonder who the others were), his story being that I used to write letters to myself (rather unexpected)." ]]> </content> </entry> <entry> <title type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Ark by Stephen Baxter (read in 2015)]]> </title> <id>https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3181</id> <link href="https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3181"/> <updated>2016-04-19T23:40:28+02:00</updated> <author> <name type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Marco von Ballmoos]]> </name> <uri>https://earthli.com/users/marco</uri> </author> <summary type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA["Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is" ... ]]> </summary> <content type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Published by marco on 19. Apr 2016 23:40:28 Updated by marco on 20. Apr 2016 08:20:40 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I've failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an interest in this book, then I'm happy for you." At the end of Flood, the planet Earth had been covered in water, right up to the very top of Mt. Everest. The only life left on Earth was floating around on top of the seas, in various states of civilization. This story overlaps the events of Flood, showing preparations for saving humanity in other ways. The primary focus is on an ambitious space program -- Ark One -- that will launch a spaceship that is destined for another solar system, a decade of traveling distance away. Arks Two and Three are only hinted at, but also exist. The first part of the book follows the travails of the candidates for the Ark, until its final launch, which doesn't go according to plan, but the technology holds up. Several candidates who were pre-selected don't make it because they are replaced by children of rich and power people. Others are pushed off by members of the military who forced their way onboard at the last moment before launch. The Earth drowns. The Ark heads for nine years toward Earth II, but it proves to be far less attractive than originally hoped. Factions onboard have gotten more stratified and there are three main paths proposed: settle the planet below, continue onward for 30 more years, to another system, or go back to Earth. They end up doing all three, splitting into three parties, splitting the bolo of two ship bodies that provided gravity. The group that returns to Earth finds it completely flooded, but they make contact with survivors on the surface as well as in Ark Two, which is on the ocean floor. The group that went onward goes through many tribulations, finally arriving at the destination planet. It's better than Earth II, but troubles along the way lost them a shuttle, so they have to colonize with children to maximize genetic diversity. The colonists settle in, while the survivors on the orbit further. [Citations] "“And if you can’t cope with that,” said the boy next to Kelly, twisting back, “you can go back to the kiddie schools and play with the plastic bricks. There’s always somebody ready to take your place.” He grinned. “Don Meisel. Who the hell are you?”" This feels like a clone of Ender's Game. "The government was considering sending troops into the Friedmanburgs, the troubled new cities on the Great Plains, where residents were protesting against exploitation by the rich who had bought up the land and funded much of the development in the first place." I think it's relatively safe to say where Baxter's politics lie: with Ms. Ayn Rand. "which was still remote from this place, and frightened of the waves of eye-dees for the dirt and disease and hunger they brought and the space they used up, and people were frightened of each other, for in the" He's pretty relentless on this line of "useless eye-dees". Didn't they find Liu among the refugees? "Holle frowned. “And though we might exclude religion, we can’t leave religiosity behind.”" "a school full of rich kjds -- only one of whom was chosen from the refugees -- and they're all dedicated and smart? Mr. Baxter, you are using a cudgel. Oh! And no religion, too? Do you need a minute alone?" "Holle recognized a lot of the faces around her, including the rich men and women of LaRei, some of them parents of Academy students themselves." See? "The air was already hot. The aircon was juddery, even here in the Capitol building. Everything was breaking down." This reminded me strongly of the meeting at NASA in Interstellar, though I'm not sure which would have inspired which. "But they lost control of the main entrance and there’s some kind of pitched battle going on around the old school group entrance. You wouldn’t believe it, that it’s come to this.” “That’s the flood for you,” Patrick said. “It reaches us all, in the end.”" Baxter is telling the woeful story of the rich and the greedy, ungrateful -- and happily faceless -- poor grasping at resources they didn't earn. "There were people everywhere, confronting lines of cops and National Guard troopers." Baxter doesn't see a need to provide a reason as to why these troops are so loyal. "“See that pillar of smoke over there?” Kenzie said harshly. “The State Capitol building burning to the ground. These people make me sick. They should be building fucking rafts. Not taking it out on the cops or smashing stuff up or screaming at a bunch of kids.”" Thirty percent into this book and still no sign of counterbalancing from the author. I'm losing hope that he's faking this viewpoint to make a point. "Holle didn’t even think about it. She hurled herself into the struggling mob." Good training, Holly! Ammirite? "[...] all that would actually hook these kids’ interest in something other than food and swimming games and each other’s pretty bodies. Thandie suspected Boris’s brain was dissolving like those of the rest of his generation." "But, Grace thought, all this planet-hunting and exponentiating scientific theorizing had nothing to do with the complex human reality unfolding within the shabby walls of the Ark." It's above as below: the majority live out their mean little lives, acting as support system for the individuals that drag the race forward. "“Odd matches. We’re supposedly fleeing from a flood, but Earth II was in a constellation called the River. Flood, river? To find our destination in the starscape you look for Orion—and yet we claim that we were launched from Earth by a drive also called Orion. Zane argues that these name matches are symptoms of a lazy design regime. Or maybe they are clues smuggled in by some dissident sim designer to help us figure out the truth of our situation.” “It’s just coincidence!” “No such thing as coincidence in Zane’s world. Only conspiracies. There’s more. To find where we’ve come from you look back at Opiuchus, the serpent-bearer. That part of the sky is blanked out, so you can’t see Sol, the home of man. But why the serpent-bearer? Zane has been into the archive and he found an account of Ouroboros, a myth of ancient Egypt, a serpent endlessly devouring its own tail. So, Zane says, what we see behind us isn’t any kind of warp cone but the mouth of Ouroboros, continually devouring our fake reality, just as a fresh reality is continually constructed ahead of us to give us the illusion of movement.”" "Magda pointed at Holle and screamed, “You left my baby to die! You left her to die! All you had to do was reach out—” She struggled, but Grace held on tightly. The strength went out of Magda, and she broke down into wretched sobbing. “I’ll never forgive you for saving me rather than her, Groundwater. Never.”" The problem with Baxter is that he never addresses the elephant in the room: why bother saving a humanity that so often ends in such stupidity? There is literally zero philosophy in this book and it's crying out for it. ]]> </content> </entry> <entry> <title type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch by Philip K. Dick (read in 2015)]]> </title> <id>https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3178</id> <link href="https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3178"/> <updated>2016-04-19T07:28:52+02:00</updated> <author> <name type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Marco von Ballmoos]]> </name> <uri>https://earthli.com/users/marco</uri> </author> <summary type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA["Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is" ... ]]> </summary> <content type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Published by marco on 19. Apr 2016 07:28:52 Updated by marco on 20. Apr 2016 08:20:53 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I've failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an interest in this book, then I'm happy for you." This is one of Dick's trippiest works. He envisions a planet Earth in the future that is too hot to visit during daytime without special cooling gear. Humanity organizes itself to get off-planet. To combat the boring conditions in the colonies, there is a drug called CAN-D that, when taken by groups, allows a shared hallucination. The hallucination approaches reality when it can be anchored on real-life objects, so there is a thriving market for "layouts", which are basically intricate dollhouses. The colonists take the drug and subsume themselves into a shared hallucinatory life in the layout. The story centers on Palmer Eldritch, a heroic but exceedingly odd space traveler who'd been lost to a far-off solar system, but who has supposedly returned, Barney Mayerson, a precog who's been drafted as a colonist, Leo Bolero, his boss and owner of the major layout company. Palmer starts peddling CHEW-Z, an even-more powerful alternative to CAN-D that is capable of making people travel inter-dimensionally or hyper-spatially or just condensing time to a dot, so that an entire live can be lived in a so-called real-world instant. Things get really, really trippy with nested layers of reality, non-real layers of reality due to hallucination -- shared and individual, as well as complete overtaking of other people's bodies and personae. The precog makes things lively with predictions of assassination, but the intended target is unsure how to prevent an event for which the time-stream isn't even clear. More details in the "Wikipedia entry" <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Three_Stigmata_of_Palmer_Eldritch>. If that sounds good to you, then this book is highly recommended. I loved it. [Citations] "The elevator arrived. The doors slid aside. Inside the elevator waited four men and two women, silently. All of them were Palmer Eldritch. Men and women alike: artificial arm, stainless steel teeth ... the gaunt, hollowed-out gray face with Jensen eyes." Reminiscent of agent smith in the matrix. "I've walked into and out of a million of them, these so-called 'translation' worlds; I've seen them all. And you know what they are? They're nothing. Like a captive white rat feeding electric impulses again and again to specific areas of his brain—it's disgusting." "I see," Barney Mayerson said. "You want to wind up in one of them, knowing this?" After a time Barney said, "Sure."" "Our opponent, something admittedly ugly and foreign that entered one of our race like an ailment during the long voyage between Terra and Prox ... and yet it knew much more than I did about the meaning of our finite lives, here; it saw in perspective. From its centuries of vacant drifting as it waited for some kind of life form to pass by which it could grab and become ... maybe that's the source of its knowledge: not experience but unending solitary brooding." "She walked back to him, her eyes dark and shaded, without light. "When you grabbed me, to take that bindle of Chew-Z; you know what I saw? I mean actually saw, not just believed." "An artificial hand. And a distortion of my jaw. And my eyes—" "Yes," she said tightly. "The mechanical, slitted eyes. What did it mean?" Barney said, "It meant that you were seeing into absolute reality. The essence beyond the mere appearance." In your terminology, he thought, what you saw is called—stigmata." ]]> </content> </entry> <entry> <title type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[First As Tragedy, Then As Farce by Slavoj Žižek (read in 2015)]]> </title> <id>https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3179</id> <link href="https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3179"/> <updated>2016-04-18T23:10:10+02:00</updated> <author> <name type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Marco von Ballmoos]]> </name> <uri>https://earthli.com/users/marco</uri> </author> <summary type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA["Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is" ... ]]> </summary> <content type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Published by marco on 18. Apr 2016 23:10:10 Updated by marco on 18. Apr 2016 23:10:43 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I've failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an interest in this book, then I'm happy for you." This is a philosophical/economic discussion of the 2008 financial crash from a wider angle, one that acknowledges the possibility that some of our most seemingly axiomatic notions must be reëxamined. In particular, the notion that capitalism has won -- Fukuyama's end of history -- and that humanity has found the final expression of itself. That the drive to consume is immanent, that the drive to amass long after one has more than enough is genetic. This book is not afraid to discuss various expressions of capital and capitalism and to shine a harsh light on the really-existing version that has slipped in in sheep's clothing. Step one: convince everyone that capitalism is good; remain vague about the definition. Step two: convince everyone that the system that benefits you the most is capitalism. Step three: profit. Criminalize that which you do not want to do; legalize that which you do, but only with tight strictures so that it applies to yourself. Privatize profit; socialize cost. This system is ridiculously short-lived. As the author says on page 90, "[…] even in the US, the bastion of economic liberalism, capitalism is having to re-invent socialism in order to save itself." Capitalism as practiced today is the greatest con game of all. It's an absolute cruel joke that so many fervently believe in it, while all the time getting screwed by it. It's feudalism dressed up with better marketing. [Citations] "If it believed in its own nature, would it try to hide that nature under the appearance of an alien nature and seek its salvation in hypocrisy and sophism? The modern ancien régime is rather merely the clown of a world order whose real heroes are dead. History is thorough and passes through many stages while bearing an ancient form to its grave. The last phase of a world-historical form is its comedy." "Long ago, John Maynard Keynes rendered this self-referentiality nicely when he compared the stock market to a silly competition in which the participants have to pick several pretty girls from a hundred photographs, the winner being the one who chooses girls closest to the average opinion: “It is not a case of choosing those which, to the best of one’s judgment, are really the prettiest, nor even those which average opinion genuinely thinks the prettiest. We have reached the third degree where we devote our intelligence to anticipating what average opinion expects the average opinion to be.”1 So, we are forced to choose without having at our disposal the knowledge that would enable a qualified choice, or, as John Gray put it: “We are forced to live as if we were free.”" "The way the market fundamentalists react to the destructive results of implementing their recipes is typical of utopian “totalitarians”: they blame all failure on the compromises of those who realized their schemes (there was still too much state intervention, etc.), and demand nothing less than an even more radical implementation of their doctrines." "The true problem lies elsewhere: namely; how to keep people’s faith in capitalism alive when the inexorable reality of a crisis has brutally crushed such dreams? Here enters the need for a “mature” realistic pragmatism: one should heroically resist dreams of perfection and happiness and accept bitter capitalist reality as the best (or the least bad) of all possible worlds." "Clearly, Greenspan’s error was not only and not simply one of overestimating the rationality of market agents—that is, their ability to resist the temptation of making wild speculative gains. What he forgot to include in the equation was the financial speculators’ quite rational expectation that the risks would be worth taking, since, in the event of a financial collapse, they could count on the state to cover their losses." "This, however, only makes the enigma even more impenetrable: how is this displacement possible? “Stupidity” and “ideological manipulation” are not adequate answers; that is to say, it is clearly not good enough to claim that the primitive lower classes have been so brainwashed by the ideological apparatus that they are not or are no longer able to identify their true interests." "In other words, the temptation to “morph” legitimate business into a pyramid scheme is part of the very nature of the capitalist circulation process. There is no exact point at which the Rubicon was crossed and the legitimate business morphed into an illegal scheme; the very dynamic of capitalism blurs the frontier between “legitimate” investment and “wild” speculation, because capitalist investment is, at its very core, a risky wager that a scheme will turn out to be profitable, an act of borrowing from the future. A sudden uncontrollable shift in circumstances can ruin a supposedly “safe” investment—this is what capitalist “risk” turns on. And, in “postmodern” capitalism, potentially ruinous speculation is raised to a much higher level than was even imaginable in earlier periods.22" ". The diagnostic that Lacan poses for the malaise of civilization is that knowledge has assumed ‘a disproportionate growth in relationship to the effects of power.’”45 In the fall of 2007, a public debate raged in the Czech Republic concerning the installation of US Army radars on Czech territory; although a large majority of the population (around 70 percent) was opposed to it, the government pushed on with the project. Government representatives rejected calls for a referendum, arguing that one does not make decisions about such sensitive national security matters merely by voting—they should be left to the military experts.46 If one follows this logic through to the end, one arrives at a strange result: what is there, then, left to vote about? Should not economic decisions, for example, be left to economic experts, and so on for all other realms?" "There is, however, a feature conspicuously missing from this series: namely, the injunction to choose when we lack the basic cognitive coordinates needed to make a rational choice. As Leonardo Padura puts it: “It is horrific not to know the past and yet be able to impact on the future”;48 being compelled to make decisions in a situation which remains opaque is our basic condition." "The first involves a false universality: the subject advocates freedom or equality, while being unaware of implicit qualifications which, in their very form, constrain its scope (the privileging of certain social strata: being rich, or male, or belonging to a certain culture, etc.). The second involves a false identification of both the nature of the antagonism and the enemy: class struggle is displaced, for instance, onto the struggle against the Jews, so that popular rage at being exploited is redirected away from capitalist relations as such and onto the “Jewish plot.”" "In the case of the “Jew” as the fascistic fetish, the interpretive demystification is much more difficult (thereby confirming the clinical insight that a fetishist cannot be undermined with an interpretation of the “meaning” of his fetish—fetishists feel satisfied in their fetishes, they experience no need to be rid of them). In practical political terms, this means that it is almost impossible to “enlighten” an exploited worker who blames “the Jews” for his misery—explaining to him how the “Jew” is the wrong enemy, promoted by his true enemy (the ruling class) in order to obscure the true struggle—and thus to direct his attention away from “Jews” and towards “capitalists." "One should unconditionally resist the temptation to “understand” Arab anti-Semitism (where we really encounter it) as a “natural” reaction to the sad plight of the Palestinians: there should be no “understanding” of the fact that in several Arab countries Hitler is still considered a hero by many, or of the fact that in their primary school textbooks all the traditional anti-Semitic myths are recycled, from the notorious forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion to the idea that Jews use the blood of Christian (or Arab) children for sacrificial purposes." "Liberals like to point out similarities between Left and Right “extremisms”: Hitler’s terror and death camps imitated Bolshevik terror and the Gulags; the Leninist form of the party is kept alive today in al-Qaeda—yes, but what does all this mean? It can also be read as an indication of how fascism literally replaces (takes the place of) Leftist revolution: its rise is the Left’s failure, but simultaneously a proof that there was a revolutionary potential, a dissatisfaction, which the Left was not able to mobilize. And does the same not hold for so-called “Islamo-Fascism”? Is the rise of radical Islamism not exactly correlative to the disappearance of the secular Left in Muslim countries?" "The ongoing financial meltdown demonstrates how difficult it is to disturb the thick undergrowth of utopian premises which determine our acts. As Alain Badiou succinctly put it: The ordinary citizen must “understand” that it is impossible to make up the shortfall in social security, but that it is imperative to stuff untold billions into the banks’ financial hole? We must somberly accept that no one imagines any longer that it’s possible to nationalize a factory hounded by competition, a factory employing thousands of workers, but that it is obvious to do so for a bank made penniless by speculation?" "Saving endangered species, saving the planet from global warming, saving AIDS patients and those dying for lack of funds for expensive treatments, saving the starving children . . . all this can wait a little bit. The call to “save the banks!” by contrast, is an unconditional imperative which must be met with immediate action. The panic was so absolute that a transnational and non-partisan unity was immediately established, all grudges between world leaders being momentarily forgotten in order to avert the catastrophe." "Having analyzed data from more than 20 states, the researchers from Cambridge and Yale established a clear correlation between loans made to these states by the IMF and the rise in cases of tuberculosis—once the loans stop, the TB epidemics recede. The explanation for this apparently weird correlation is simple: the condition for getting IMF loans is that the recipient state has to introduce “financial discipline,” i.e., reduce public spending; and the first victim of measures destined to reestablish “financial health” is health itself, in other words, spending on public health services. The space then opens up for Western humanitarians to bemoan the catastrophic condition of the medical services in these countries and to offer help in the form of charity." "seems clear that this is not a short-term issue which can be quickly overcome with the appropriate market regulation, but is rather the sign of a long-term problem impossible to solve by means of the market economy. Some apologists for the new world order point out that the lack of food is in itself an indicator of material progress, since people in the fast-developing Third World countries earn more and so can afford to eat more. The problem nonetheless is that this new demand for food pushes millions towards starvation in those countries lacking such fast economic growth." "The communist hypothesis remains the right hypothesis, as I have said, and I do not see any other. If this hypothesis should have to be abandoned, then it is not worth doing anything in the order of collective action. Without the perspective of communism, without this Idea, nothing in the historical and political future is of such a kind as to interest the philosopher. Each individual can pursue their private business, and we won’t mention it again. … But holding on to the Idea, the existence of the hypothesis, does not mean that its first form of presentation, focused on property and the state, must be maintained just as it is. In fact, what we are ascribed as a philosophical task, we could say even a duty, is to help a new modality of existence of the hypothesis to come into being. New in terms of the type of political experimentation to which this hypothesis could give rise." "A simple but pertinent question arises here: if liberal-democratic capitalism obviously works better than all known alternatives, if liberal-democratic capitalism is, if not the best, then at least the least worst form of society, why do we not simply resign ourselves to it in a mature way, even accept it wholeheartedly?" "The only true question today is: do we endorse the predominant naturalization of capitalism, or does today’s global capitalism contain antagonisms which are sufficiently strong to prevent its indefinite reproduction? There are four such antagonisms: the looming threat of an ecological catastrophe; the inappropriateness of the notion of private property in relation to so-called “intellectual property”; the socio-ethical implications of new techno-scientific developments (especially in biogenetics); and, last but not least, the creation of new forms of apartheid, new Walls and slums." "[...] even in the US, the bastion of economic liberalism, capitalism is having to re-invent socialism in order to save itself" "This is why, upon a closer look, it becomes clear that what Hugo Chávez has begun doing in Venezuela differs markedly from the standard liberal form of inclusion: Chávez is not including the excluded in a pre-existing liberal-democratic framework; he is, on the contrary, taking the “excluded” dwellers of favelas as his base and then reorganizing political space and political forms of organization so that the latter will “fit” the excluded. Pedantic and abstract as it may appear, this difference—between “bourgeois democracy” and “dictatorship of the proletariat”—is crucial." "As some social analysts and economists have suggested, the contemporary explosion of economic productivity confronts us with the ultimate case of this rule: the coming global economy will tend towards a state in which only 20 percent of the labor force are able to do all the necessary work, so that 80 percent of people will be basically irrelevant and of no use, thus potentially unemployed." "As this logic reaches its extreme, would it not be reasonable to bring it to its self-negation: is not a system which renders 80 percent of people irrelevant and useless itself irrelevant and of no use? Toni Negri once gave an interview to Le Monde" "As some social analysts and economists have suggested, the contemporary explosion of economic productivity confronts us with the ultimate case of this rule: the coming global economy will tend towards a state in which only 20 percent of the labor force are able to do all the necessary work, so that 80 percent of people will be basically irrelevant and of no use, thus potentially unemployed. As this logic reaches its extreme, would it not be reasonable to bring it to its self-negation: is not a system which renders 80 percent of people irrelevant and useless itself irrelevant and of no use?" "This led to sublime “communist” moments, like the one that occurred when French soldiers (sent by Napoleon to suppress the rebellion and restore slavery) approached the black army of (self-)liberated slaves. When they heard an initially indistinct murmur coming from the black crowd, the soldiers at first assumed it must be some kind of tribal war chant; but as they came closer, they realized that the Haitians were singing the Marseillaise, and they started to wonder out loud whether they were not fighting on the wrong side. Events such as these enact universality as a political category. In them, as Buck-Morss put it, “universal humanity is visible at the edges”:" "Whenever the West is attacked, its first reaction is not aggressive defense but self-probing: what did we do to deserve it? We are ultimately to be blamed for the evils of the world; Third World catastrophes and terrorist violence are merely reactions to our crimes. The positive form of the White Man’s Burden (his responsibility for civilizing the colonized barbarians) is thus merely replaced by its negative form (the burden of the white man’s guilt): if we can no longer be the benevolent masters of the Third World, we can at least be the privileged source of evil, patronizingly depriving others of responsibility for their fate (when a Third World country engages in terrible crimes, it is never fully its own responsibility, but always an after-effect of colonization: they are merely imitating" "Whenever the West is attacked, its first reaction is not aggressive defense but self-probing: what did we do to deserve it? We are ultimately to be blamed for the evils of the world; Third World catastrophes and terrorist violence are merely reactions to our crimes. The positive form of the White Man’s Burden (his responsibility for civilizing the colonized barbarians) is thus merely replaced by its negative form (the burden of the white man’s guilt): if we can no longer be the benevolent masters of the Third World, we can at least be the privileged source of evil, patronizingly depriving others of responsibility for their fate (when a Third World country engages in terrible crimes, it is never fully its own responsibility, but always an after-effect of colonization: they are merely imitating what their colonial masters used to do, and so on):" "One should remember here the programmatic words of Stokely Carmichael (the founder of Black Power): “We have to fight for the right to invent the terms which will allow us to define ourselves and to define our relations to society, and we have to fight that these terms will be accepted. This is the first need of a free people, and this is also the first right refused by every oppressor.”" "Here the series is terminated, simply because the enemy has now taken over the revolutionizing dynamic: one can no longer play the game of subverting the Order from the position of its “part of no-part,” since the Order already now entails its own permanent subversion. With the full deployment of capitalism, it is “normal” life itself which, in a certain manner, is “carnivalized,” with its constant reversals, crises, and reinventions, and it is the critique of capitalism, from a “stable” ethical position, which today more than ever appears as an exception." "In Public Opinion (1922), he wrote that a “governing class” must rise to face the challenge—he saw the public as Plato did, as a great beast or a bewildered herd, floundering in the “chaos of local opinions.”39 So the herd of citizens must be governed by “a specialized class whose interests reach beyond the locality”—this elite class is to act as a machinery of knowledge that circumvents the primary defect of democracy, the impossible ideal of the “omni-competent citizen.” This is indeed how our democracies function—and with our consent. There is no mystery in what Lippmann was saying, it is an obvious fact; the mystery is that, knowing this, we continue to play the game. We act as if we are free to choose, while silently not only accepting but even demanding that an invisible injunction (inscribed in the very form of our commitment to “free speech”) tells us what to do and to think. As Marx noted long ago, the secret is in the form itself." "When “immaterial work” (education, therapy, etc.) is celebrated as the kind of work which directly produces social relations, one should not forget what this means within a commodity economy: namely, that new domains, hitherto excluded from the market, are now commodified. When in trouble, we no longer talk to a friend but pay a psychiatrist or counselor to take care of the problem; children are increasingly cared for not by parents but by paid nurseries or child-minders, and so on. We are thus in the midst of a new process of the privatization of the social, of establishing new enclosures." "I have referred elsewhere to Jean-Pierre Dupuy’s claim that, if we are to confront adequately the threat of (social or environmental) catastrophe, we need to break out of this “historical” notion of temporality: we have to introduce a new notion of time. Dupuy calls this time the “time of a project,” of a closed circuit between the past and the future: the future is causally produced by our acts in the past, while the way we act is determined by our anticipation of the future and our reaction to this anticipation:" ]]> </content> </entry> <entry> <title type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Requiem for a Dream: A Novel by Hubert Selby Jr. (read in 2015)]]> </title> <id>https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3180</id> <link href="https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3180"/> <updated>2016-04-18T07:21:36+02:00</updated> <author> <name type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Marco von Ballmoos]]> </name> <uri>https://earthli.com/users/marco</uri> </author> <summary type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA["Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is" ... ]]> </summary> <content type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Published by marco on 18. Apr 2016 07:21:36 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I've failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an interest in this book, then I'm happy for you." I'd already seen the movie and it was relatively faithful to the source material. The book is written in a rambling, near--stream-of-consciousness street patois with little punctuation and structure. The grammar is mostly OK, so you can get used to it, but it's a bit of a challenge at first. Not as much so as the middle chapter in Cloud Atlas but it might still be off-putting for some. tl;dr: Drugs are bad. More precisely, addiction is bad. This film is the story of a mother, her son, his girlfriend and their best friend. Nice, huh? Spoiler alert: the book ends with the mother strapped to a bed in a mental hospital, withdrawing from a severe amphetamine addiction, the son lies in a hospital, his left arm amputated because of a festering needle wound, the best friend is on a work gang in prison, suffering beatings and malnutrition and the girlfriend is curled up on her couch at home, cuddling her scag, earned by performing in a private sex show for her new pimp. The mother never quite recovered from the death of her husband and the son isn’t around enough to take care of her. She spends her days watching a self-help guru’s infomercial. She gets an invitation to the show but can’t fit into her dress. She resolves to lose weight by the time she gets her actual invitation. After a day spent trying it the old-fashioned way, she makes an appointment with a diet doctor and starts her downward spiral. The son and his friends are already well on their way, shucking and jiving for enough money to buy a stash for the night. They resolve to follow the junkie dream: they pool their cash and start selling instead of just using everything they have. This actually works OK for a while, but the friend is busted by the cops on a deal and the money they’ve saved is used for bail and nearly gone in one fell swoop. The son and his girlfriend predictably fight over the lack of drugs and he heads out with his friend to Florida to make a big score. She can’t wait that long and calls a dealer who wants women rather than money in exchange for drugs. [Citations] I like "smiled loudly" as well as "leaned into the words". "She giggled and squirmed and soon they both tired and just leaned against the wall, smiling loudly." "Everyones eyes were half closed from the smoke and dope, and their faces kept twisting and grinning as they leaned into the words." "Sometimes. Sometimes it seems to stand still. Like youre in a bag and you cant get out and somebodys always telling you that it will get better with time and time just seems to stand still and laugh at you and your pain. … And then eventually it does break and its six months later. Like you just got your summer clothes out and then its Christmas and inbetween there are ten years of pain." "O man, ah dont even want to talk about work right now, not that ah ever am too hip on it, but right now ah just wants to think of Tyrone C. Love an how goooooood he feel." "She went back to that restaurant on the hill in Naples and sat there for endless hours for a week, looking at Vesuvius, Capri, the bay, the sky, trying, with the desperation of the dying, to reawaken those old feelings, trying with jewels of sparkling wine to rekindle the flame that half fired her imagination just a short lifetime ago, and though the wine sparkled in the sunlight, and the moonlight, the once blazing fire was extinguished and Marion finally succumbed to the stone coldness within her." "We would be watching the news and be seeing the cops beating people over the head with their clubs and my mother and father would claim it wasnt really happening or they were some sort of hippie degenerate commies. Thats the big thing with them. Everybodys a commie. Talk about freedom and human rights and youre a commie. All they want to talk about is the sacred right of the stockholder and how the police protect our property. … She took a deep breath, closed her eyes for a moment, then looked at Harry, You know, if I were to tell them about this theyd say it didnt happen, that I just made it up. She shook her head, It just amazes me how blind some people can be to the truth. Its right there in front of them and they dont see" "And the streets were getting tougher. All the neighborhood streets were filled with dope fiends, even in the snow and sleet, looking for something, anything. Every hallway was cluttered with sick faces with runny noses and bodies shivering with the cold and junk sickness, the cold cracking the marrow of their bones as they broke out in sweats from time to time." This is really relentlessly pessimistic.; Did Nancy Reagan have a hand in writing this? "Whatever chances they had to take they took automatically as their disease ordered and they obeyed, a small part of them wanting to try to resist, but that part shoved so far down that it was no more than an ancient dream from a previous life. Only the insatiable and insane need of the moment had any bearing on their lives, and it was that need that gave the orders." "Around the hole in Harrys arm a huge greenish white lump had formed with red streaks spreading out toward his shoulder and wrist. I can hardly move the son of a bitch. Im gonta have ta do somethin man." Harry loses an arm. Marion becomes a super gang-bangin' ho. It's a cautionary tale. Drugs are bad. Bit this is getting a bit heavy-handed. "She tried to smile and her face started to stretch in her wide-eyed grin as little bits of spittle dribbled down her chin. He signed his name to a piece of paper and handed it back to the man. She was committed to a State Mental Hospital." Drugs are bad? TV is bad? The man is bad? America is bad? "A couple of drunks fought over the toilet, one hanging his head in the bowl, puking, the other one puking all over him, the both of them eventually passing out and lying in their own and each others puke." Really? If Selby didn't have so much drug experience under his belt, I would accuse him of deliberately making this scene more gory in order to scare kids straight. "this guy told him if he would plead guilty to vagrancy that he would only have to serve a few weeks on the work gang. When you get out theyll give you a bus ticket back to New York. Where our money? Did you have any? Tyrone looked at him for a moment, blinking his eyes, trying to see him clearly, We had over a thousan dollars jim. Not according to this report. Tyrone stared for another moment then inwardly shrugged." ]]> </content> </entry> <entry> <title type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Hard to be a God by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky (read in 2016)]]> </title> <id>https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3226</id> <link href="https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3226"/> <updated>2016-04-17T23:25:58+02:00</updated> <author> <name type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Marco von Ballmoos]]> </name> <uri>https://earthli.com/users/marco</uri> </author> <summary type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA["Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is" ... ]]> </summary> <content type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Published by marco on 17. Apr 2016 23:25:58 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I've failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an interest in this book, then I'm happy for you." Since the movie followed the book so faithfully, I'll just include some of the text from my movie review. The story is of an Earth-like planet on which a similar evolutionary track was followed by a very human-like race, but they never experienced a Renaissance. Their buildings are of poor quality, their sanitation is a horror and their hygiene is non-existent. The filth is omnipresent. You can almost smell this movie. It’s incredible how absolutely everything is covered with mud, food remnants and shit. The fog and rain soak everything. Everything is of primitive construction, people shit and piss and blow their pus-running noses everywhere. They spit, they taste things, they scratch, they pick and they flick. Slaves have boards around their necks—almost everyone we see is a slave of some kind. People have eyes missing. Instead of a Renaissance, a Khmer Rouge-style revolution has occurred: all books and learning and instruments and advancement have been destroyed and their purveyors and inventors put to death. One form of execution we see is upending in a latrine. We follow the story of Don Rumata, an Earthman sent ostensibly to study these people but who has taken up as a God among them. We follow him from his “palace”, interacting with the various psychotic locals, to a local market (?) where he meets up with a group of other Earthlings. It is not hard to imagine that the people find him to be a God—he is so much cleaner than the others, with metal greaves and vambraces pretty much the only thing they see of him. Everything’s in a terrible state of disrepair and we see the only minds allowed to work involved in building new torture devices. The “bookworms” have all been hanged and left to rot on a gallows. The dialogue is also scattered, nonsensical, but enough sense can be distilled to follow a story. Everyone is near-mad, the actions unexplainable, the destruction they wreak on their environs chaotic. Random, wanton, childish. An unenlightened world of fools. It’s impossible to imagine how such a society survives, how it feeds itself, how it staves off disease. Every scene reflects their actions, implements and armor and chains and animals and fowl and bells pinned and tied and roped and chained everywhere, covered in filth and dripping water. The Strugatsky brothers certainly delivered a tour de force in this novel, a novel of science-fictional despair rather than triumph. Please see the "full movie review" <https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3212> for more detail. [Citations] This is from a conversation Rumata had with a colleague who's been there much longer than Rumata. He tells of being an anthropologist who's lost himself in the world he's studying. "All that was said about us. I’ve been here for fifteen years. My dear boy, I’ve even stopped having dreams about Earth. One day, rummaging through my papers, I found a picture of a woman and for a long time couldn’t figure out who she was. I occasionally realize with terror that I’ve long stopped being an employee of the Institute, that I’m now an exhibit in the Institute’s museum, the chief justice of a feudal mercantile republic, and that there’s a room in the museum in which I belong. That’s the worst thing—to lose yourself in the role. Inside each one of us, the noble bastard struggles with the communard. And everything around us helps the bastard, while the communard is all alone—the Earth is thousands and thousands of parsecs away.”" Rumata fears what will happen when tyranny rises over a people who are not yet ready to rise. "The dragon does have a heart. And we know where it is. And that’s the most frightening thing, my quiet, helpless friend. We know where it is, but we can’t destroy it without spilling the blood of thousands of frightened, hypnotized, blind people who know no doubts. And there are so many of them, hopelessly many—ignorant, isolated, embittered by perpetual thankless labor, downtrodden, not yet able to rise above the thought of an extra penny. And they cannot yet be taught, united, guided, saved from themselves. Far too early, centuries earlier than it should have, the gray muck has risen in Arkanar. It won’t meet with resistance, and all that’s left is to save those few there is still time to save." "Yes, they were right at the Institute. Then the inevitable. Bloody chaos in the country. The surfacing of Waga’s night army, ten thousand thugs excommunicated by every church—rapists, murderers, and sadists; hordes of copper-skinned barbarians descending from the mountains and destroying everything that moves, from newborns to the aged; huge crowds of peasants and townspeople, blind with terror, fleeing to the forests, mountains, and deserts; and your supporters—merry men, brave men!—ripping open each other’s bellies in a brutal struggle for power and for the right to control the machine gun after your inevitable violent death. And this absurd death—from a cup of wine served by your best friend, or from a crossbow bolt whistling toward your back from behind a curtain. And the horrified face of the one who will be sent from Earth to replace you, and who will find a country depopulated, drenched in blood, still burning, in which everything, everything, everything will need to be started over again." He faces the same struggle as all intelligent men, when faced with the rapacity of a lower culture, of a world filled with low men, interested only in short-term and very personal gain, without regard for principles or basic ethics. In such a world, any improvement you make is at best ephemeral, creating a vacuum into which something almost certainly worse will flood. This is not to argue for inaction, even the pyrrhic kind, but a warning against overestimating their predictability. If everything must be terrible, but in different ways, then why not roll the dice? More musing on futility by Don Rumata: "It’s hopeless, he thought. There’s no force strong enough to drag them out of their usual range of cares and ideas. You could give them everything. You could put them in the most modern spectroacoustic housing and teach them ionic procedures, and they’d still gather in the kitchen in the evening, playing cards and cackling about the neighbor whose wife wallops him. And there isn’t a better way for them to spend their time. In that sense, Don Condor is right: Reba is nothing, a tiny speck in comparison with the enormous influence of traditions, the rules of the herd—sanctified by centuries, unshakeable, tested, accessible to the dullest of the dull, freeing one from the necessity of thinking and wondering. And Don Reba probably wouldn’t even make it into a school curriculum." "Don Reba can’t be stupid enough to hope to force Budach to work for him. Or maybe he really is stupid. Maybe Don Reba is nothing more than a stupid, lucky schemer who doesn’t know what he wants himself, slyly making a fool of himself for all to see. It’s funny, I’ve been watching him for three years, and I still don’t understand what he is. Although if he’d been watching me, he wouldn’t understand either." "Nothing can help me now, he thought in horror. Because I sincerely hate and despise them. Not pity them, no—only hate and despise. I can justify the stupidity and brutality of the kid I just passed all I want— the social conditions, the appalling upbringing, anything at all—but I now clearly see that he’s my enemy, the enemy of all that I love, the enemy of my friends, the enemy of what I hold most sacred." "And there’s nothing that he wants to know, and there’s nothing he wants to think about." "He came here to love people, to help them unbend, see the sky. No, I’m a bad operative, he thought remorsefully. I’m a no-good historian. When exactly did I manage to fall into the swamp that Don Condor was talking about? Does a god have the right to feel anything other than pity?" "It was probably the fact that almost without exception, they were not yet humans in the modern sense of the world, but blanks, unfinished pieces, which only the bloody centuries of history could one day fashion into true men, proud and free. They were passive, greedy, and incredibly, fantastically selfish. Almost all of them had the psychology of slaves—slaves of religions, slaves of their own kind, slaves of their pathetic passions, slaves of avarice. And if the fates decreed for one of them to be born or become a master, he didn’t know what to do with his freedom. He would again hurry to become a slave—a slave of wealth, a slave of outlandish excesses, a slave of his slaves. The vast majority of them weren’t guilty of anything. They were too passive and too ignorant. Their slavery was the result of passivity and ignorance, and passivity and ignorance again and again breeds slavery." "But they were still people, the bearers of the spark of reason. And here and there in their midst, the fires of the incredibly distant and inevitable future would kindle and blaze up. They would kindle despite it all. Despite all their seeming unworthiness. Despite the oppression. Despite the fact that they were being trampled with boots. Despite the fact that no one in the world needed them, and that everyone in the world was against them. Despite the fact that at best, they could expect contemptuous, puzzled pity. They didn’t know that the future was on their side, that the future was impossible without them. They didn’t know that in a world belonging to the terrible ghosts of the past, they were the only manifestation of the future—that they were an enzyme, a vitamin in society’s organism." "The hell he’ll think of anything. It’s too early for him to think. And it seems so simple: ten thousand hammerers like that, in a rage, could crush anyone to a pulp. Except rage is what they don’t have yet. Only fear. Everyone for himself, only God for all." The next several citations exhibit the Strugatsky brothers' subversiveness against uncaring and unfeeling bureaucracy. "“No one has any privileges before the Order,” the official said in the same colorless voice. Don Keu huffed, turning livid, but took the hat off. The official ran a long yellow nail along the list. “Don Keu … Don Keu …” he muttered, “Don Keu … Royal Street, Building Twelve?” “Yes,” Don Keu said in an irritated bass voice. “Number four hundred eighty-five, Brother Tibak.” The heavyset Brother Tibak, who was sitting at the adjacent table, crimson from the stuffy air, searched through the papers, wiped the sweat off his bald head, stood up, and read out monotonously, “Number four hundred eighty-five, Don Keu. Royal, Twelve, for the defamation of the name of His Grace the Bishop of Arkanar Don Reba, which took place at the palace ball the year before last, shall receive three dozen lashes on his bared buttocks, and shall kiss His Grace’s boot.” Brother Tibak sat down. “Down that corridor,” said the official in a colorless voice, “the lashes on the right, the boot on the left. Next.” To Rumata’s" "“Don Pifa,” the official said, “take your symbol of purification.” He bent down, pulled an iron bracelet from a chest next to the chair, and handed it to noble Pifa. “Wear it on your left arm, produce it as soon as a soldier from the Order demands it. Next.”" "The official immediately pulled this sheet from underneath the lists and handed it to Rumata. “Through the yellow door, up to the second floor, room six, down the hall, go right then left,” he said. “Next.”" Next. The next few citations are how the brothers manage to make it seem like the Earthlings really are Gods, almost outsized and much more powerful than the Arkanarans. "Rumata rushed down two staircases, knocking the monks going the other way off their feet, laid himself a path through the crowd of graduates with his scabbards, and kicked open the door of the chamber, which was warping from the baron’s roars." "Rumata pulled his sword from its scabbard and struck the paper-covered table at which the official was sitting, cutting it in half." "[...] grabbed the chains that held the baron’s feet, and ripped them out of the wall with two jerks." "The baron knocked the top out with his fist, lifted the barrel, and turned it upside down over himself, throwing his head back. The stream of beer rushed toward his throat with a gurgle." "They came out of the chamber. Not a single person dared get in their way—the corridor kept emptying out for twenty paces in front of them." "Damn it, my friend, don’t you find that they have amazingly low ceilings? My head is all scratched up.”" Here, Rumata muses on how cleverly he was outmaneuvered by Reba. He even muses that he should name a new unit of feudal intrigue after him. "The king wouldn’t have even taken a pickle from his minister’s hands. So the scoundrel snuck in some charlatan to the king, promising him the title of healer for curing the king. And I understand why Reba was so thrilled when I exposed him in the king’s bedchamber: it’s hard to think of a more convenient way to sneak in the false Budach to the king. All the responsibility fell on Rumata of Estor, the Irukanian spy and conspirator. We’re babes in arms, he thought. The Institute should introduce a course dealing specifically with feudal intrigue. And proficiency should be measured in rebas. Better yet, in decirebas. Although even that’s too much." "The struggle against evil! But what is evil? Everyone is free to understand this in his own way. For us scholars, evil is in ignorance, but the church teaches that ignorance is a blessing and that all evil comes from knowledge. For the plowman evil is taxes and drought, and for the bread-seller droughts are good. For a slave, evil is a drunk and cruel master; for a craftsman, a greedy moneylender. So what is this evil against which we must struggle, Don Rumata?” He looked sadly at his listeners. “Evil is ineradicable. No man is able to decrease its quantity in the world. He can improve his own fate somewhat, but it is always at the expense of the fate of others. And there will always be kings, some more cruel and some less, and barons, some more violent and some less, and there will always be the ignorant masses, who admire their oppressors and loathe their liberators. And it’s all because a slave has a much better understanding of his master, however brutal, than his liberator, for each slave can easily imagine himself in his master’s place, but few can imagine themselves in the place of a selfless liberator. That’s how people are, Don Rumata, and that’s how our world is.”" "There’s much I don’t like in the world, much I would like to be different. But what can one do? Perfection looks different in the eyes of a higher power than in mine. There is no sense in a tree lamenting that it cannot move, though it would probably be glad to flee from the lumberjack’s ax.”" "Budach, crinkling his brow, pondered silently. Rumata waited. The melancholy sound of creaking wagons sounded outside the window again. Budach said quietly, “Then, Lord, wipe us off the face of the planet and create us anew in a more perfect form … Or, even better, leave us be and let us go our own way.” “My heart is full of pity,” Rumata said slowly. “I cannot do that.”" "“Sometimes I think,” said Arata, “that we’re all powerless. I’m the eternal rebel leader, and I know that my power comes from my extraordinary survivability. But this power doesn’t change my powerlessness. My victories magically turn into defeats. My friends in battle turn to enemies—the most courageous ones flee, the most loyal ones turn traitor or die. And I have nothing but my bare hands, and I can’t reach the gilded idols behind fortified walls with my bare hands.”" "Arata was clearly somehow superior to him— and not only to him but to all those who had come to this planet uninvited and who, full of helpless pity, watched the tumultuous bustling of its life from the rarefied heights of dry hypotheses and alien morality. And for the first time Rumata thought, There is no gain without a loss. We’re infinitely stronger than Arata in our kingdom of good and infinitely weaker than Arata in his kingdom of evil." "You still don’t know everything, thought Rumata. You still believe that you are the only one doomed to be defeated. You still don’t know how hopeless your cause itself is. You still don’t know that the enemy isn’t so much outside your soldiers as within them. You might still overthrow the Order—the wave of peasant rebellion will throw you onto the throne of Arkanar, you will level the castles of the noblemen, you’ll drown the barons in the Strait, and the insurgents will honor you as the great liberator. And you will be kind and wise—the only kind and wise person in your kingdom. And along the way, you will begin to give away land to your associates, and what will your associates do with land without serfs? And the wheel will start spinning the other direction. And you’ll be lucky if you manage to pass away before the new counts and barons emerge out of yesterday’s loyal fighters. That has already happened, my worthy Arata, both on Earth and on this planet." "(This was precisely the origin of the famous anecdote in which Nikita the Corn Man, staring at a certain ugly image in a frame, yells in a voice not his own, “And what’s this butt with ears?” And is answered with fear and trembling: “That’s a mirror, Nikita Sergeyevich.”)" "All mass media without exception immediately descended on abstraction and formalism in art, as if for the last ten years they had been preparing just for this, collecting materials and only waiting for permission to speak about this burning topic." Eerily and not at all surprisingly similar to how the US media operates. The following citations are from an eloquent and delightful afterward by Boris Strugatsky. "It was as if an ancient abscess had burst. Bad blood and pus overflowed from the newspaper pages. All those who during the years of the “thaw” had gone quiet (it seemed to us), who had flattened their ears and only looked around like hunted animals, as if waiting for the inconceivable, impossible, improbable retribution for the past; all these monstrous offspring of Stalinism and Beria-ism, who were up to the elbows in the blood of innocent victims, all these covert and overt informers, ideological operators and moronic do-gooders—they all instantly sprang out of their hiding places; they all turned out to be right on the spot, energetic, agile, able hyenas of the pen, alligators of the typewriter. Go to it!" "One could pick any of these versions or all of them at once. But one thing became, as they say, painfully clear. We shouldn’t have illusions. We shouldn’t have hopes for a brighter future. We were being governed by goons and enemies of culture. They will never be with us. They will always be against us. They will never let us say what we believe is right, because what they believe is right is something completely different. And if for us communism is a world of freedom and creativity, for them communism is a society where the people immediately and with pleasure perform all the prescriptions of the party and government." "It’s amazing that this novel went through all the hurdles of censorship without any particular difficulties. Either the liberalism of the then-leaders of the Young Guard played a role, or the careful maneuvers of our wonderful editor, Bela Grigorevna Klyueva, or maybe it was actually just that there was a certain retreat after the recent ideological hysteria— our enemies were catching their breath and complacently looking around the newly captured lands and beachheads." ]]> </content> </entry> <entry> <title type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe by Charles Yu (read in 2015)]]> </title> <id>https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3177</id> <link href="https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3177"/> <updated>2016-04-17T23:04:23+02:00</updated> <author> <name type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Marco von Ballmoos]]> </name> <uri>https://earthli.com/users/marco</uri> </author> <summary type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA["Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is" ... ]]> </summary> <content type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Published by marco on 17. Apr 2016 23:04:23 Updated by marco on 18. Apr 2016 06:57:28 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I've failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an interest in this book, then I'm happy for you." Charles Yu digs through baggage from his past in the guise of a real-life time-machine mechanic. The universe in which he lives is kind of a mix of our own plus all sorts of fictive universes. So, for example, Luke Skywalker is a character because, well, he's part of a popular science-fiction world. The novel addresses all sorts of interesting paradoxes, including loops and writing paradoxical warnings to oneself. He harks back to how his father invented the time machine, but failed to profit from it, instead trapping himself in a diorama/time-loop. It was a meandering, interesting and unique book that seemed to have a lot to do with Charles Yu personally, though that was perhaps just the auto-biographical feel. [Citations] "I’ve never been married. I never got married. The woman I didn’t marry is named Marie. Technically, she doesn’t exist. Just like Ed. Except that she does. A little paradox, you might think, but really, The Woman I Never Married is a perfectly valid ontological entity. Or class of entities. I suppose technically you could make the argument that every woman is The Woman I Never Married. So why not call her Marie, that was my thinking." "In order to qualify as a protagonist, a human must be able to demonstrate an attachment coefficient of at least 0.75. A coefficient of 1.00 or above is required in order to be a hero. Factors used in calculating the coefficient include ability to believe fervency of that belief humility willingness to look stupid willingness to have heart broken willingness to see U31 as nonboring or, better yet, to see it as interesting, and maybe even important, and despite its deeply defective nature possibly even worth saving Any inhabitant with a negative attachment coefficient (in which case it is referred to as a coefficient of ironic detachment) will be placed on probation pending review of the individual’s suitability for continued inclusion within the U31 diegetic space." "If you’re not careful, time will take away everything that ever hurt you, everything you have ever lost, and replace it with knowledge. Time is a machine: it will convert your pain into experience. Raw data will be compiled, will be translated into a more comprehensible language. The individual events of your life will be transmuted into another substance called memory and in the mechanism something will be lost and you will never be able to reverse it, you will never again have the original moment back in its uncategorized, preprocessed state. It will force you to move on and you will not have a choice in the matter." "Although technically SF, the look and feel of the world in these borderline neighborhoods is less thoroughly executed than elsewhere in the region, and outcomes of story lines can be more randomized, due to a comparatively weaker buffer from the effects of 31’s incomplete physics. As a result, the overall quality of experience for the residents of these striving areas is thinner, poorer, and less substantial than of those in the middle and upper regions, while at the same time, due to its mixed and random and unthemed nature, less satisfying than that of reality, which, although gritty, is, at least, internally consistent." "For food-gathering purposes, for outrunning the saber-toothed tiger, for jumping across jagged rocks in a rushing river, to care for our crying infant, we need to focus, we need to know what is going on now. That is to say, our physical ability to understand time has been honed by evolutionary pressures to select for traits useful for survival, in all aspects, and time perception is no exception or special case or even magical or mysterious case.” My father looks at me and smiles when he says this next part. “Which is where I started to have hope. If there is no absolute logical reason why we could not experience the past just like we experience the present, perhaps we can untrain, or perhaps retrain, ourselves to have such a capacity." ]]> </content> </entry> <entry> <title type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Perdido Street Station (New Crobuzon Book 1) by China Miéville (read in 2015)]]> </title> <id>https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3159</id> <link href="https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3159"/> <updated>2016-04-17T22:57:20+02:00</updated> <author> <name type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Marco von Ballmoos]]> </name> <uri>https://earthli.com/users/marco</uri> </author> <summary type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA["Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is" ... ]]> </summary> <content type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Published by marco on 17. Apr 2016 22:57:20 Updated by marco on 17. Apr 2016 22:57:30 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I've failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an interest in this book, then I'm happy for you." This is the story of Isaac, a thaumaturge/scientist in New Crobuzon, a city described in incredible and sprawling detail by Miéville. He lives with girlfriend Lin, who's an artist. She creates sculptures using special materials that she chews with her mandibles behind her head. You guessed it, she's not human. She's kind of a combination fly/super-sexy woman. You're not allowed to talk about her like that, but that's the most succinct description. There's also Yagharek, an outcast member of a strict flying species, who commissions Issac to help him fly again -- his wings having been ripped from him by the expulsion ceremony. In his investigations, Issac discovers an iridescent caterpillar that turns into one of the most evil, multi-dimensional beings known to Crobuzon. He feeds it dreamshit, a drug made from the shit of the caterpillar's captive full-grown compatriots. This is a bad move. The creature escapes and frees its comrades. They all begin to prey on the populace of Crobuzon, sucking souls and psyches and just basically bringing the whole mood down. The creatures were deliberately kept by the military of New Crobuzon as a military weapon that is now out of control. Isaac discovers so-called "crisis energy", which is kind of analogous to harnessing the power of quantum foam, I guess. There's also an extra-dimensional spider called Weaver as well as a secretive Council that machinates throughout the city. The book was more intricate than that, but it was also about 800 pages long. Well-written but a bit over-detailed in places. [Citations] "Guilt passed visibly over his face at his one-sided conversation, but Isaac could not help himself. He was utterly in the throes of a new project. Lin felt a familiar melancholy affection for him. Melancholy at his self-sufficiency in these moments of fascination; affection for his fervour and passion." "“The point is, Yag, that what you’ve got there is water behaving very much as it shouldn’t. Right? And that’s what you want. You want heavy stuff, this thing here, this body—” he poked Yagharek gently in the chest “—to fly. Are you with me? Let’s turn our minds to the ontological conundrum of persuading matter to break habits of aeons. We want to make elements misbehave. This isn’t a problem of advanced ornithology, it’s philosophy." "Lin’s broodma (who scorned a name as a decadent affectation) taught Lin and her broodsister that Insect Aspect was the lord of all creation, the all-powerful force that knew only hunger and thirst and rutting and satisfaction. He had shat out the universe after eating the void, in a mindless act of cosmic creation the purer and more brilliant for being devoid of motive or awareness. Lin and her broodsister were taught to worship Him with a terrified fervour, and to despise their self-awareness and their soft, chitinless bodies." "The thing drew on the stored energy it had drawn from the dreamshit and powered its transformation. It self-organized. Its mutating form bubbled and welled up into strange dimensional rifts, oozing like oily sludge over the brim of the world into other planes and back again. It folded in on itself, shaping itself out of the protean sludge of its own base matter." "Infinitesimal jolts of energy burst through tiny, finely engineered steamhammers. In the centre of the brain was a box crammed with rank upon rank of minuscule on-off switches that puttered up and down at great and increasing speed. Each switch was a steam-powered synapse, pushing buttons and pulling levers in intensely complicated combinations." "The thing unfolded. The sense was of a blossoming. An expansion after being enclosed, like a man or woman standing and spreading their arms wide after huddling foetally, but multiplied and made vast. As if the thing’s indistinct limbs could bend a thousand times, so that it unhinged like a paper sculpture, standing and spreading arms or legs or tentacles or tails that opened and opened." "He could not see its shape. Only its dark, glistening skin and hands that clutched like a child’s. Cold shadows. Eyes that were not eyes. Organic folds and jags and twists like rats’ tails that shuddered and twitched as if newly dead. And those finger-long shards of colourless bone that shone white and parted and dripped and that were teeth . . ." "It was social. When it was born for the second time it was with a hunger for company. Its tongue unrolled and it tasted the gritty air for anything that was like itself. The thing shuddered. Faintly, so faintly, it could sense something in the east. It could taste frustration. Its wings trembled in empathy." Reminds me of venom, from the Spider-Man universe. "There was an enormous window that looked out directly at Perdido Street Station and the Spike, and a variety of speaking tubes, calculating engines and telescopic periscopes stashed in niches around the room, in obscure and oddly threatening poses." "From out of shadows cast by some unseen shapes, shadows that seemed stretched-out and taut, tethered from corner to corner of the square room, something stalked into view. Into existence. It bulked suddenly where there had been nothing. It stepped out from behind some fold in space. It picked its way forward, delicate on pointed feet, vast body bobbing, lifting multiple legs high. It looked down at Rudgutter and his fellows from a head that loomed colossally above them. A spider." "The crawling infinity of colours, the chaos of textures that went into each strand of that eternally complex tapestry . . . each one resonated under the step of the dancing mad god, vibrating and sending little echoes of bravery, or hunger, or architecture, or argument, or cabbage or murder or concrete across the æther. The weft of starlings’ motivations connected to the thick, sticky strand of a young thief’s laugh. The fibres stretched taut and glued themselves solidly to a third line, its silk made from the angles of seven flying buttresses to a cathedral roof. The plait disappeared into the enormity of possible spaces. Every intention, interaction, motivation, every colour, every body, every action and reaction, every piece of physical reality and the thoughts that it engendered, every connection made, every nuanced moment of history and potentiality, every toothache and flagstone, every emotion and birth and banknote, every possible thing ever is woven into that limitless, sprawling web. It is without beginning or end. It is complex to a degree that humbles the mind. It is a work of such beauty that my soul wept." "I could not close down my mind. It scrambled, unbidden, to remember what it had seen. But it could not contain it. I was left only with a sense of it all. I remember it now as a description. The weight of its immensity is no longer present in my head." "Each successive exudation charged the air to a higher pitch of excitement. The moths bared their gravestone teeth and bleated their sexual challenge to each other." Here I get a strong image of Giger's alien. "Pengefinchess’s history is one of selfishness and plunder, yet it is made by the telling into a valedictory for dead comrades. My history of selfishness and exile resists transmutation. It cannot but be a base story of base things. I am silent." "Whichever, the Council don’t care about killing off humans or any others, if it’s . . . useful. It’s got no empathy, no morals,” Isaac continued, pushing hard at a resistant piece of metal. “It’s just a . . . a calculating intelligence. Cost and benefit. It’s trying to . . . maximize itself. It’ll do whatever it has to—it’ll lie to us, it’ll kill—to increase its own power.”" ]]> </content> </entry> <entry> <title type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Rant: The Oral Biography of Buster Casey by Chuck Palahniuk (read in 2015)]]> </title> <id>https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3156</id> <link href="https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3156"/> <updated>2016-03-26T08:13:43+01:00</updated> <author> <name type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Marco von Ballmoos]]> </name> <uri>https://earthli.com/users/marco</uri> </author> <summary type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA["Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is" ... ]]> </summary> <content type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Published by marco on 26. Mar 2016 08:13:43 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I've failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an interest in this book, then I'm happy for you." The story is told through one-line to one-page--long biographical snippets. The story goes from Buster's upbringing in a grindingly poor town, where his young mother teaches him to how to make Easter eggs with wax and boiled vegetable stock. He is an odd child, inuring himself to poison through repeated animal, insect and arachnid bits, collecting old paint cans from old folks, who don't realize they might be full of extremely valuable coins dating back to the mid-1800s, and following the foretellings of an old man who he met once and claimed to be his real father. He warps the local economy in a way that makes all the townspeople complicit in his scheme, he catches and beats rabies multiple times, all the while spreading it throughout the town, especially the girls who, oddly, can't get enough of him. He takes his ill-gotten gains to the city, where more of the world he inhabits is revealed, in the form of a stark subdivision between night and day shifts for humanity as a way of solving traffic woes, as well as a whole subculture of people organizing crash parties, in which they crash their cars into each other to feel what it's like to really live -- something that almost no-one knows now that one can "boost peaks" from others. That is, full-bore digital sensory capture is freely available and lulls the populace. And this is very much what it is intended to do, according to some of the later biographical participants -- to keep people from discovering that, if you crash your car just right, and you're in just the right theta-wave, meditative state, you will be transported to another place in time, where you can become your own progenitor and increase the power of your current self, until you reach a point where you can kill your own parents, terminate the loop by eliminating the beginning and live forever, suspended in a liminal state. Very much an Infinite-Jest vibe (even a bit of Pynchon at times). Some wicked cool concepts and intriguing thoughts in this one. Recommended. [Citations] "Near as I recollect, Chet and Buddy didn’t start out slow eaters. I trained them that way. It got to be too much, baking a devil’s-food cake from scratch and watching Chet and Buddy wolf it down in three bites. Two of them hurrying to choke down one slice, then another, until the cake was nothing left but the dirty plate. Even while they’re inhaling my food, they’re talking plans about something next, or reading out of a catalogue, or hearing the news on the radio. Always living months into the future. Miles down the road." "Here’s a single girl’s secret—the reason you eat dinner with a man on a first date is so you know how he’s going to fuck you. A slob who gobbles down the meal, never looks at a bite, you know not to crawl into bed with that guy." "Eight hours every day, renting out copies of Little Becky’s Seaside Hunt for Shells. Everybody wanting the same mass-marketed crap. Saying it’s for their kid, but really it’s not. All these fat, middle-aged dumbshits just want something to kill time. Nothing dark and edgy or challenging. Nothing artsy. Just so long as it’s got a happy ending." "My point is, this seventy-two hours is coming out of someone’s life. This boost will replace something real a person might do, so it should be decent. Hell, it ought to be beyond decent. If some asswipe’s handing over his time, he should get the train trip sweetened by having the whole mess rewitnessed through a Playboy Bunny on heroin. Morphine at least. Watch those boring, bullshit mountains roll past while zonked on opiates and fondling your own set of love-a-luscious titties. You want to wish the old man a happy Father’s Day, that would be my gift suggestion." "Renting out copies of Little Becky’s Easter Egg Hunt to people who just want to get through another awful night, alone. These people, boring themselves to death." "From the Field Notes of Green Taylor Simms: Perpetuating Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny breaks ground for further socialization—including conformance to traffic laws which allow the maximum number of drivers to commingle on our roadways. In addition, insisting that the journey is always a means to some greater end, and the excitement and danger of the journey should be minimized. Perpetuating the fallacy that a journey itself is of little value." "Even the night Rant died, my automatic first thought was: Philip Glass’s Violin Concerto II, or Ravel’s Piano Concerto in G Major…?" "None of the engineers impacted with enough velocity to hurt their comrades, and none of the events was worse than paint scratches and sheetmetal body damage. Still, on video you see traffic immediately slow to a voyeuristic crawl. The infamous and bothersome rubberneck effect." Definite vibes of Infinite Jest. "Rant’s hand slides across the seat until his fingers touch mine. He lifts my hand to his face, his lips touching my knuckles, he sniffs, eyes closed, and says, “Wrong.” He says, “Yesterday, you had rolled-oat granola with maple sugar and pumpkin seeds, vanilla yogurt, and dried cranberries…” And of course he’s dead-on." There's also more than just a hint of Das Parfum, now that i think about it. "Neddy Nelson: You have any idea how bright the sun looks if you’ve been raised at night? Have you spent a hundred-something-thousand heartbeats wondering if you’re not already dying of rabies? Maybe you haven’t boosted in weeks, because you’re afraid you won’t be able to? You ever see friends you recognize get machine-gunned by police on real-time traffic cams? You ever found yourself trapped in a world where you’re everybody’s worst nightmare?" His wizardry lies in slowly and with tiny pieces accreting a story, a world, in which these words make sense. They mean something only now in the context of the rest of the book I'd already read. "a curfew officer named Daniel Hammish, age forty-seven, a nineteen-year veteran of curfew patrol, was making his evening sweep when he assaulted a passerby." That's a rather nice way of adding more context, temporal this time. "I mean, what if you found yourself a long time ago—by accident—and you met your own great-great-grandmother before it was wrong to date her? And what if she was a babe? And let’s say you two hooked up? And how about she has a baby who’d be both your daughter and your great-grandmother?" h/t to Up the Line by Robert Silverberg, which developed this concept into a major plot point three decades before this book came out. "How can you expect Historians to feel anything for the suffering of the rest of us? Do you cry when a flower wilts? When a carton of milk goes sour? Don’t you think they’ve seen so many people die that their sympathy or empathy or whatever is pretty much wore out?" "The Emergency Health Powers Act simply enables the federal government to suspend all state and local powers, seize property, and quarantine populations in order to effectively deal with any infectious agent." "Neddy Nelson: Doesn’t it scare you that the Emergency Health Powers Act now preempts all legal rights of the individual? Shot Dunyun: The way you lock up all your enemies without charging them with any crime, or providing lawyers, it’s called a quarantine. Doctors are the new judge and jury. Disease is the new weapon of mass destruction. Neddy Nelson: Why do you think every political radical gets “diagnosed” as rabid, then locked up until his inevitable death is announced? Don’t you see how this is legalized assassination?" "Wallace Boyer: Nothing says you have to believe this. Nothing says you have to even listen, but consider that plenty of smart, rich, powerful folks in history went to their graves swearing that the sun went around us. Also consider that someday, when you’re dead and rotted, kids with their baby teeth will sit in their time-geography class and laugh about how stupid you were." Or perhaps that there is only one time, shared by all, instead of individual manipulated loops and whorls. it's like the myth of the common economy now. We don't all share just one. It could turn out to be the same with time, once we make a breakthrough. (Made me think of how the main plot conceit of The Long Earth changed everything we know about "being on Earth".) "And Green said, “Who do you think invented this little game you enjoy so much?” He said, “Who do you think decides the field and flag and window, then sends the word out?” He said, “What do you suppose would happen to Party Crashing without me?”" "Wallace Boyer: If it helps, consider how people used to think the world was flat. Two-dimensional. They only believed in the part they could see, until somebody invented the ships and somebody brave sailed off to find the rest of the earth. Consider that Rant Casey is the Christopher Columbus of time travel." ]]> </content> </entry> <entry> <title type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Mind of My Mind (The Patternist Series, Book 2) by Octavia Butler (read in 2015)]]> </title> <id>https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3158</id> <link href="https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3158"/> <updated>2016-02-28T22:42:05+01:00</updated> <author> <name type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Marco von Ballmoos]]> </name> <uri>https://earthli.com/users/marco</uri> </author> <summary type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA["Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is" ... ]]> </summary> <content type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Published by marco on 28. Feb 2016 22:42:05 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I've failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an interest in this book, then I'm happy for you." This is book two of the Patternist series. The main character of the first part of the book is Doro, a 5000-year--old superbeing with enhanced mental powers. He is at least partially telepathic, though not so against other telepaths. But his primary power is the ability to force his way in to another being's mind, eradicating that mind and replacing it with his own. Doro is beyond human, superhuman, and views most of humanity as herd animals, for use as he pleases. He started a breeding program many millennia ago with another powerful woman, a shapeshifter and their progeny tend toward superpowers of the psychic kind. When we join them in the 20th century, the most successful of his offspring have herds of slaves tending to their every whim. The only hiccup to domination is that the transition from a person with potential to a being of great power is fraught with peril and must generally be midwifed by others who have survived the process. Doro lets them sink or swim but is aware of how much time and genetic material is lost with each failure. Another twist is that, while the most powerful are most likely to be able to help each other, they are also natural enemies who are bent on killing each other...usually. The star of this book is Mary, a distant descendant, who transitions successfully, but in so doing becomes almost more powerful than Doro himself, capable of contacting and leading a whole society of powerful minds. In effect, Doro has succeeded in his program, but his progeny is ready to leave him and his rapacious dog-eat-dog society behind. They don't need him, he's too dangerous, they've moved beyond him. He's not quite ready to let that happen, because he of course doesn't see it that way. Their confrontation is inevitable, as is the result. [Citations] "“We don’t harm people like the Dietrichs in any way. In fact they’re healthier and more comfortable now than they were before we found them. And the work they’re doing for us is work they enjoy.” “If they didn’t enjoy it, you’d change their minds for them.” “We might, but they wouldn’t be aware of it. They would be content.” The girl stared at her. “Do you think that makes it better?” “Not better. Kinder, in a frightening sort of way, I know. I’m not pretending that theirs is the best possible way of life, Page—although they think it is. They’re slaves and I wouldn’t trade places with them. But we, our kind, couldn’t exist long without them.” “Then maybe we shouldn’t exist! If our way is to enslave good people like the Dietrichs and let animals like my parents go free, the world would be better without us.”" "unrelated to highlight: story idea froma dream: what if you had a world of owners and slaves, like elysium or like these patternists, but, instead of alowing them to build up experience from day to day, you just time-machined them back each day (or whatever) so that they couldn't build up a revolution?" ]]> </content> </entry> <entry> <title type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Dust by Hugh Howey (2012; read in 2016)]]> </title> <id>https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3219</id> <link href="https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3219"/> <updated>2016-02-20T16:35:36+01:00</updated> <author> <name type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Marco von Ballmoos]]> </name> <uri>https://earthli.com/users/marco</uri> </author> <summary type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA["Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is" ... ]]> </summary> <content type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Published by marco on 20. Feb 2016 16:35:36 Updated by marco on 8. Dec 2023 21:09:14 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I've failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an interest in this book, then I'm happy for you." This novel picks up where Shift left off, with Juliette having returned to Silo 18. She's mayor, Lukas is head of IT, Donald is feeding Lukas and Juliette information in an effort to help them survive while Charlotte (Donald's sister) continues to launch drones, trying to fly far enough to see the world beyond the Silo zone. Juliette is mayor, but her people are not really behind her, because she brings tidings in which the populace is not interested. Don't change anything. Please. She does, though. Can't seem to stop picking that scab. So she digs to the other silo, goes outside to sample air, discovers things, talks to Donald and Charlene on the radio to find out more, to hear how they've pieced things together while not trusting and misinterpreting and stumbling toward some form of truth. Silo 18 follows 17's lead, 18 flees to 17, then flees the silo area for good, making good on what Donald and Charlene saw. After so much misery, hope. [Citations] This book, much more than first two, digs at least a bit deeper into the teleology -- insofar as it examines the grand scheme of Thurman and his crew -- as well as epistemology -- in that it puts every bit of "truth" obtained into question -- and, finally, eschatology -- because the truths all deal with Thurman's final solution -- as well as ontology -- in which our major players question, at least a little bit, what it all means and why they're there and why they should bother going on fighting for that next breath. "I’m afraid of being buried alive. I’m afraid of doing the wrong thing.” “Then do nothing,” she insisted. She nearly begged him right then to put a stop to this madness, to their isolation. They could go back to sleep and leave this to the machines and to the God-awful plans of others. “Let’s not do anything,” she pleaded. Her brother rose from his seat, squeezed her arm, and turned to leave. “That might be the worst thing,” he quietly said. Here, we hear Donald and his sister Charlotte go back and forth, trying to figure out what the best approach is. The situation looks hopeless, best just lie down and let it pass over you. Why struggle? Because that's what one does. Everything they do seems to make things worse -- e.g. the fall of silo 12 -- but not doing anything might be even worse than that, as Thurman and his cohort have no analogous qualms. "She saw those chapters to mean that tearing a world down was a simple affair; the gravity of human nature tugged willingly. It was the building up afterward that proved complex. It was what to replace injustice with that very few gave thought to. Always with the tearing down, she said, as if the scraps and ashes could be pieced back together." This is Juliette, essentially realizing that, duh, entropy, right? "And now she recalled how distant these meetings seemed while working in the depths of the silo. Often, she and her friends only heard what was being discussed and what rules were being passed after it had already happened. Not only was it a far climb, but most of them were too busy surviving the day-to-day to trudge anywhere for a discussion on tomorrows." This is an apt description of how our beneficent leaders get away with so much evil in our name. And, once they realize how easily they are allowed to rule by a distracted populace, well...they will quickly conclude that it's in their best interests to keep us distracted. "She wanted to calm these people down, to tell them she meant well, that she could fix this if they would just let her try." But if you know things no one else knows and they don't allow logic to rule their world, if you don't have enough evidence or they discount it or pretend some things never happened, then are you not viewed as a person espousing a religion? What, in net effect, is the difference? [image]People don't, in general, want new and better for everyone -- just yours truly. And Juliette wants to take them forward by changing everything. But they want everything to go back to the way it was. But don't they want to know the truth? No. Truth is a luxury. It is unnecessary when your only goal is survival, when you can't see the connection between knowledge and material improvement. And even if you can show the connection, by all means, hurry. Or you'll lose your audience, who you were trying to save, but who will fight you each step of the way, dragging you down into their quagmire of ignorance. "The only thing more impressive to Juliette than the depths of the conspiracy had been the speed and relief with which its mechanisms had crumbled within IT. The men and women of level thirty-four reminded her of the children of Silo 17, frightened and wide-eyed and desperate for some adult they could cling to and trust. This foray of hers to test the outside air was looked upon with suspicion and fear elsewhere in the silo, but in IT, where they had pretended to do this work for generations, the chance to truly investigate had been seized by many with wild abandon." "“It doesn’t bother me that I won’t be around one day,” Lukas said after a while. “I don’t stress about the fact that I wasn’t here a hundred years ago. I think death will be a lot like that. A hundred years from now my life will be just like it was a hundred years ago.”" That is the hope of the silo dwellers, because it has to be. For us, though, it's not the same is it? On Spaceship Earth? Or must we also dial back our expectations of growth, of constant expansion? Can we expand in our minds without expanding our physical demands on our surroundings? Or must we also expect/hope that things will be the same a century from now? "There was a rattle in Donald’s chest, a flapping of some loosely connected thing, an internal alarm that his condition was deteriorating – that he was getting worse. He forced himself to cough, as much as he hated to, as much as his diaphragm was sore from the effort, as much as his throat burned and muscles ached. He leaned forward in his chair and hacked until something deep inside him tore loose and skittered across his tongue, was spat into his square of fetid cloth." I just thought that passage was so visceral. "“Their fear doesn’t just color the world they see,” he said, his eyes wild. “They poison the world with it. It’s a toxin, this fear. They send their own out to clean, and that poisons the world!”" "Someone to save. The folly of man – the folly of the blasted silos he had helped to build – this assumption that things needed saving. They ought to have been left on their own, both people and the planet. Mankind had the right to go extinct. That’s what life did: it went extinct. It made room for the next in line. But individual men had often railed against the natural order. They had their illegally cloned children, their nano treatments, their spare parts, and their cryopods. Individual men like those who did this." Despite all of the pseudo-philosophical whitewashing, the best-laid and most lofty plans often boil down to me gettin' mine, Jack. This particular group had done it although they'd already had the world in the palm of their hands, but drove themselves so mad that they convinced themselves someone was coming to take it, so they destroyed it in order to save it. As the U.S. did to Vietnam et al. "She had been woken up by her brother into a nightmare, and yet she remembered the world from before, a world of blue skies and green grass. She had glimpsed that world with her drone. If she had been born into this, had never known anything else, would she want to be told? To be awoken? Would she want someone to tell her the truth?" Listen, I swear to you, I don’t know what you’re talking about. I … this will be hard for you to believe, maybe, but I remember when the world out there was very different. When we could live and breathe out there. And I think part of it can be like that again. Is like that right now. That’s what my brother wanted to tell you, that there’s hope out there.” A pause. A heavy breath. Charlotte’s arm was back to throbbing. “Hope.” Charlotte waited. The radio hissed at her like an angry breath forced through clenched teeth. “My home, my people, are dead and you would have me hope. I’ve seen the hope you dish out, the bright blue skies we pull down over our heads, the lie that makes the exiled do your bidding, clean for you. I’ve seen it, and thank God I knew to doubt it. It’s the intoxication of nirvana. That’s how you get us to endure this life. You promise us heaven, don’t you? But what do you know of our hell?” She was right. This Juliette was right. How could such a conversation as this take place? How did her brother manage it? It was alien races who somehow spoke the same tongue. It was gods and mortals. Charlotte was attempting to commune with ants, ants who worried about the twists of their warrens beneath the soil, not the layout of the wider land. She wouldn’t be able to get them to see [...] And here I don't think that Charlotte really considered herself a God in any sense. Just that the gap between experiences was too large to bridge. Of course Charlotte's silo was much more advanced than Juliette's -- by design. But Juliette, with her scientific/engineering bent, was arguably better equipped to live in and extend the technology of the world of Silo 1 than Charlotte, who was, at best, a cog in the machine and not very aware of how anything in her magical and more advanced world worked. “But it seems about right. Don’t it seem like a clock ticking down? Either the gods knew how much to stock away, or they don’t have plans for us past a certain date. Makes you feel like pig’s milk, don’t it? Anyhow, that’s how it seems to me.” Juliette turned and studied her albino friend, saw the way the green emergency lights gave him a sort of eerie glow. “Maybe,” Juliette said. “Gina may’ve been on to something.” Raph sniffed. “Yeah, but fuckit. We’ll be long dead before then.” He laughed at this, his voice echoing up and down the stairs, but the sentiment made Juliette sad. Not just that everyone she knew would be dead before that date ever happened, but that this knowledge made it easier to stomach an awful and morbid truth: Their days were counted. The idea of saving anything was folly, a life especially. No life had ever been truly saved, not in the history of mankind. They were merely prolonged. Everything comes to an end. "The nice man with the dark whiskers seemed to be arguing a point. The man in the white blanket just frowned and stood there. Now and then, one or both of them would glance at Elise, and she worried they were talking about her. Maybe they were talking about how to find Puppy." This is most likely meant to be endearing. the wide-eyed innocent. Are we all like that, though, regardless of how clever and attentive we think we are? Are we all wide-eyed naïfs when compared to those cleverer and better-informed than we are? Each of us has certain information and a certain intellect, each of us thinking we know what's going on. There are not only the different contexts of the child, Elise, the churchfolk, the mechs, each with their own agenda and view on things. but then there's also the other layer of how the reader is likely to interpret the situation based on their own unique context. So here we see Elise interpreting what's going on based on her own worldview, which is a seven-year--old's, consumed by her own needs -- her hunger and Puppy. They are likely discussing something weightier, like how not to die in the next 24 hours. The reader, on the other hand, might find it cute that Elise is worried about Puppy and is naive about the worries of the world (awww, the child makes it all worth it!) or might be annoyed with her because she's constantly distracting people from more worthwhile work. Or they might think she's doing everyone a favor -- whether she knows it or not -- by distracting them from the larger job of long-term survival -- which daunts and depresses with its impossibility -- and forcing them to focus on short-term tasks that can be achieved, but that lead nowhere. Is that better than nothing? Or are the constant distractions the reason why the long-term goal is impossible? "Darcy made sure the safety was off. He gripped the handle on the door and threw it up, then crouched down and aimed his flashlight and pistol into the gloom. He very nearly shot up someone’s bedroll. There was a rumpled pile of pillows and blankets that looked at first like a person sleeping. He saw more of the folders like the ones he’d helped gather from the conference room. This was probably where the man they’d snagged had been hiding. He’d have to show Brevard and get the place cleaned up. He couldn’t imagine living like that, like a rat. (Emphasis added.)" This is a nice ironic juxtaposition between a rat in a larger cage feeling pity for a rat in a smaller one. We in our expansive world can see how limited Darcy's own situation is, but could we understand how someone with a galactic view would find our being "trapped" on Earth to be confining as well? "The cryopods and shifts were exaggerated forms of sleep, he thought. What seemed unnatural was more a matter of degree than of kind. Cave bears hibernated for a season. Humans hibernated each night. Daytime was a shift, each one endured like a quantum of life, all the short-term planning leading up to another bout of darkness, little thought given to stringing those days into something useful, some chain of valuable pearls. Just another day to survive." "“The world isn’t gone,” Charlotte confirmed. “Just our piece of it.”" And good riddance to mankind, considering what a mess they've made of the planet. The planet is probably better off without him. "He hesitated, ran his hands across her words, remembering what he’d done. He had killed the one person trying to help him, the one person who loved him. The one person reaching out to these silos to help. All because of his own guilt and self-loathing for loving her back." Here Donald confabulates a past that never really happened that way, forgetting that Anna had manipulated him into that nightmarish situation in the first place, and did it for her own personal gain. When she later "saw the light", her motives were purer, but the interpretation above, while believable as a confabulation, is far too generous. "[...] the evidence already of vandalism and theft, the long stretches of wire and pipe gone missing, the scattering of stalk and leaf and soil from those hurrying away with stolen plants. She hoped to rise above the injustices strewn about her, to escape this last spasm of civility before chaos reigned. It was coming, she knew. But as high as she and Raph climbed, there were people throwing open doors to explore and loot, to claim territory, to yell down from landings some finding or shout up some question. In the depths of Mechanical, she had lamented how few had survived. And now it seemed like so many." This is the reward for believing in a higher purpose. Almost no-one else cares about your long-term goals, unless they happen to dovetail with their own short-term ones. "And her annoyance with the Planning Committee and Father Wendel’s congregation was misplaced, she thought. Had her mechanics not lashed out? Was she not lashing out right then? What was any group but a bunch of people? And what were people but animals as prone to fear as rats at the sound of boots?" “What do you think is going on in all those other silos right now?” Charlotte asked. “You dealt with them. Is it as bad there as it is here?” Donald considered this. “I don’t know. Some of them are happy enough, I suppose. They get married and have kids. They have jobs. They don’t know anything beyond their walls, so I guess they don’t have some of the stress about what’s out there that you and I feel. But I think they have something else that we don’t have, this deep feeling that something is wrong with how they’re living. Buried, you know. And we understand that, and it chokes us, but they just have this chronic anxiety, I think. I don’t know.” He shrugged. “I’ve seen men happy enough here to get through their shifts. I’ve watched others go mad. I used to … I used to play solitaire for hours on my computer upstairs, and that’s when my brain was truly off and I wasn’t miserable. But then, I wasn’t really alive, either.” But you know what I think? I think they knew that if a war broke out between all these invisible machines, that some pockets of people would survive here and there. So they built this. They made sure the destruction was complete so they could control it.” “They wanted to make sure the only pockets of people who survived were in their pockets,” Charlotte said. “Exactly. They weren’t trying to save the world – they were trying to save themselves. "How did they think they would ever contain all this? That something like this wouldn’t happen?” “I don’t know,” Donald said. “Maybe the kinds of people who try to shape the world feel like they’re smarter than chaos itself.”" "They reminded her why she was doing this, what she was fighting for, what was worth fighting for. A rage had built up inside of her, a single-minded pursuit of digging through the earth down below and digging for answers outside. And she had lost sight of this, these things worth saving. She had been too concerned with those who deserved to be damned. This anger melted as Elise clung to her neck and Solo’s beard scratched her face. Here was what was left, what they still had, and protecting it was more important than vengeance. That’s what Father Wendel had discovered. He had been reading the wrong passages in his book, passages of hate rather than hope. And Juliette had been just as blind. She had been prepared to rush off and leave everyone behind." Or...the short-term, the shortsighted goal eclipses the more real and more communally beneficial goal. Or was the suicide attack the selfish solution? "Juliette turned and gazed at the blank wallscreen. She wondered if it was all a dream. This was what happened to the dying soul; it scrambled for some perch, some stairway to cling to, some way not to fall. She had cleaned and died on that hill outside her silo. She had never loved Lukas at all. Never gotten to know him properly. This was a land of ghosts and fiction, events held together with all the vacant solidarity of dreams, all the nonsense of a drunken mind." "She passed through the spot where she’d hugged her brother, and any plan of escape wilted. She had little desire to carry on. Her brother was gone. The world was gone. Even if she lived to see green grass and eat one more MRE, cut her lip on one more can of water … why?" "She imagined the world they might build with time and resources, with no rules but what’s best and no one to pin down their dreams. “I think we’ll make it,” she finally said. “I think we can make any damn thing we like.”" And, in the end, despite everything else in the story, a message of hope. A bit contrived, at the very end. [Errata] None. ]]> </content> </entry> <entry> <title type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell (read in 2015)]]> </title> <id>https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3155</id> <link href="https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3155"/> <updated>2016-02-15T22:45:24+01:00</updated> <author> <name type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Marco von Ballmoos]]> </name> <uri>https://earthli.com/users/marco</uri> </author> <summary type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA["Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is" ... ]]> </summary> <content type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Published by marco on 15. Feb 2016 22:45:24 Updated by marco on 16. Feb 2016 07:40:14 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I've failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an interest in this book, then I'm happy for you." This is a well-written and far-reaching book. All the more so considering the many narrators, voices and dialects used for the several distinct sections, each of which also took place at a different time in our past or future. It's written in several parts: the first five parts are from different narrators and each subsequent one picks up the story by somehow mentioning the writings of the previous narrator, however obliquely. Each piece builds on the previous one, laddering up through the years into a future where humanity is reduced to tribes on islands visited by leftover vestiges of more advanced but increasingly desperate humanity. With the middle part of 11, we retreat back through the narrators, in reverse order, until we arrive where we started, having perhaps learned something of humanity's reach and maybe something about souls and reincarnation. The writing is top-notch and the stories intriguing and connected in oblique but interesting ways. This is a challenging book to read because of the spiced chronology and the telling of an overarching philosophy through six individual stories which, though connected, also would mostly stand on their own. Instead of summarizing further, I forward you to the "Wikipedia article" <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_Atlas_(novel)>. While accurate, I doubt that very much of it will make sense until after you've read the book. The citations mostly highlight my favorite bits of writing. I like Frobisher's narration the best of all of them, though Cavendish came a close second. Throughout Frobisher's bits are phantom suggestions of a haunting bit of music called The Cloud Atlas Sextet ... and the writing makes you positively desperate to actually hear it. The patois of Zachary in the middle segment was a work of dedication on both the part of the author and whoever had to edit it. [Citations] "Rather doubt her interest in the Frobishery’s memsahibs was genuine, but the woman likes to watch me talk, so I painted witty caricatures of my estranged clan for my hostess’s amusement. Made us all sound so gay, almost felt homesick." "At a prim and proper public garden named Minnewater Park, courting couples ambled arm in arm between willows, banksia roses, and chaperones. Blind, emaciated fiddler performed for coins. Now he could play. Requested “Bonsoir, Paris!” and he performed with such élan I pressed a crisp five-franc note into his hand. He removed his dark glasses, checked the watermark, invoked his pet saint’s name, gathered his coppers, and scarpered through the flower beds, laughing like a madcap. Whoever opined “Money can’t buy you happiness” obviously had far too much of the stuff." "dreamt of a … nightmarish café, brilliantly lit, but underground, with no way out. I’d been dead a long, long time. The waitresses all had the same face. The food was soap, the only drink was cups of lather. The music in the café was”—he wagged an exhausted finger at the MS—“this.”" "ever since a disciple of the Buddha preached on the spot centuries ago, every bandit king, tyrant, and monarch of that kingdom has enhanced it with marble towers, scented arboretums, gold-leafed domes, lavished murals on its vaulted ceilings, set emeralds into the eyes of its statuettes. When the temple finally equals its counterpart in the Pure Land, so the story goes, that day humanity shall have fulfilled its purpose, and Time itself shall come to an end. To men like Ayrs, it occurs to me, this temple is civilization. The masses, slaves, peasants, and foot soldiers exist in the cracks of its flagstones, ignorant even of their ignorance. Not so the great statesmen, scientists, artists, and most of all, the composers of the age, any age, who are civilization’s architects, masons, and priests. Ayrs sees our role is to make civilization ever more resplendent. My employer’s profoundest, or only, wish is to create a minaret that inheritors of Progress a thousand years from now will point to and say, “Look, there is Vyvyan Ayrs!” How vulgar, this hankering after immortality, how vain, how false. Composers are merely scribblers of cave paintings. One writes music because winter is eternal and because, if one didn’t, the wolves and blizzards would be at one’s throat all the sooner." Why create? For immortality? For riches? Or just because it's better than doing nothing? Because it staves off thoughts of ending it all? "Ayrs can’t see further than Eternal Recurrence, but Eva is due back in ten days, and that hawkeyed creature will sniff out a decomposing secret in a jiffy." Timothy Cavendish: "Sometimes the fluffy bunny of incredulity zooms round the bend so rapidly that the greyhound of language is left, agog, in the starting cage. A feisty stagger was needed to reach the next train before it left—only to find it had been canceled! But, “luckily,” the train before mine was so late that it still hadn’t departed. All the seats were taken, and I had to squeeze into a three-inch slot. I lost my balance when the train pulled away, but a human crumple zone buffered my fall. We stayed like that, half fallen. The Diagonal People." An Orison of Somni-451: "‘Unlimited power in the hands of limited people always leads to cruelty.’ ” Warlock-Williams looked at me as if I had spoken in tongues. “Solzhenitsyn.”" "You show xtraordinary erudition for an eighth-stratum, Archivist. I wonder if you encountered this dictum first spoken by a twentieth-century statesman: “An abyss cannot be crossed in two steps.”" "The Abbess nodded. If consumers found fulfillment at any meaningful level, she xtemporized, corpocracy would be finished. Thus, Media is keen to scorn colonies such as hers, comparing them to tapeworms; accusing them of stealing rainwater from WaterCorp, royalties from VegCorp patent holders, oxygen from Air-Corp. The Abbess feared that, should the day ever come when the Board decided they were a viable alternative to corpocratic ideology, “the ‘tapeworms’ will be renamed ‘terrorists,’ smart bombs will rain, and our tunnels flood with fire.”" Even in the future, Mitchell sees the same patterns repeated. The enemy is change, the unsatisfied and oppressed terrorists. "Purebloods played cards, ate noodles, smoked, worked at sonys, joked, engaged in ordinary life. How could they know what happened in the underbelly and just … sit there, indifferent? As if it were not living fabricants being processed but pickled sardines? Why did their consciences not scream for this obscenity to end?" This sounds like a well-argued plea for vegetarianism in our time. If it is inhumane to grow fabricants -- human simulacra -- for all sorts of purposes then why is it humane to grow animals for food? From the point of view of Timothy Cavendish. "logistics. That fancy electric lock on the gate, for example, I could take it apart blindfolded if I had the mind to, but what about a vehicle on the other side? Money? Boltholes? You see, without logistics, where are you? Belly-up is where, and in the back of Withers’s van five minutes later.” Mr. Meeks screwed up his gnomish features and ground out the only two coherent words he had retained: “I know! I know!” Before I could discern whether or not Ernie Blacksmith was warning me or sounding me out, Veronica came in through the interior door wearing a hat of ice-melting scarlet. I just stopped myself from bowing. “Good afternoon, Mrs. Costello.” “Mr. Cavendish, how pleasant. Wandering abroad in this biting cold?” “Scouting,” Ernie answered, “for his one-man escape committee.” “Oh, once you’ve been initiated into the Elderly, the world doesn’t want you back.” Veronica settled herself in a rattan chair and adjusted her hat just so. “We—" "“We—by whom I mean anyone over sixty—commit two offenses just by existing. One is Lack of Velocity. We drive too slowly, walk too slowly, talk too slowly. The world will do business with dictators, perverts, and drug barons of all stripes, but being slowed down it cannot abide. Our second offence is being Everyman’s memento mori. The world can only get comfy in shiny-eyed denial if we are out of sight.”" "That is more or less it. Middle age is flown, but it is attitude, not years, that condemns one to the ranks of the Undead, or else proffers salvation. In the domain of the young there dwells many an Undead soul. They rush about so, their inner putrefaction is concealed for a few decades, that is all." "Exposition: the workings of the actual past + the virtual past may be illustrated by an event well known to collective history, such as the sinking of the Titanic. The disaster as it actually occurred descends into obscurity as its eyewitnesses die off, documents perish + the wreck of the ship dissolves in its Atlantic grave. Yet a virtual sinking of the Titanic, created from reworked memories, papers, hearsay, fiction—in short, belief—grows ever “truer.” The actual past is brittle, ever-dimming + ever more problematic to access + reconstruct: in contrast, the virtual past is malleable, ever-brightening + ever more difficult to circumvent/expose as fraudulent. The present presses the virtual past into its own service, to lend credence to its mythologies + legitimacy to the imposition of will. Power seeks + is the right to “landscape” the virtual past. (He who pays the historian calls the tune)" Frobisher again (Part 2). I thought "ballooning" below was really, really visual. "Spent last night working on a rumbling ’cello allegro lit by explosive triplets. Silence punctuated by breakneck mousetraps. Remember the church clock chiming three A.M. “I heard an owl,” Huckleberry Finn says, “away off, who-whooing about somebody that was dead, and a whippowill and a dog crying about somebody that was going to die.” Always haunted me, that line. Next thing I know, Lucille was ballooning sheets of bright morning by the window." "“Another war is always coming, Robert. They are never properly extinguished. What sparks wars? The will to power, the backbone of human nature. The threat of violence, the fear of violence, or actual violence is the instrument of this dreadful will. You can see the will to power in bedrooms, kitchens, factories, unions, and the borders of states. Listen to this and remember it. The nation-state is merely human nature inflated to monstrous proportions. QED, nations are entities whose laws are written by violence. Thus it ever was, so ever shall it be. War, Robert, is one of humanity’s two eternal companions.”" "“Oh, diplomacy,” said M.D., in his element, “it mops up war’s spillages; legitimizes its outcomes; gives the strong state the means to impose its will on a weaker one, while saving its fleets and battalions for weightier opponents. Only professional diplomats, inveterate idiots, and women view diplomacy as a long-term substitute for war.”" "You know, having the roof over one’s head dependent upon the good offices of an employer is a loathsome way to live. Christ only knows how the serving classes stand it. Are the Frobishery domestics forever biting their tongues as I must? one wonders." "Reception a rarely manned nook under the stairs." This brings to mind the Sully Hôtel off of rue Saint Antione in Paris. They have their reception in exactly such an isolated, dark and largely empty nook. "Cowardice is nothing to do with it—suicide takes considerable courage. Japanese have the right idea. No, what’s selfish is to demand another to endure an intolerable existence, just to spare families, friends, and enemies a bit of soul-searching. The only selfishness lies in ruining strangers’ days by forcing ’em to witness a grotesqueness." "Pater’ll sigh, “It’s no Eroica, is it?” and stuff it into a drawer; but it’s an incomparable creation. Echoes of Scriabin’s White Mass, Stravinsky’s lost footprints, chromatics of the more lunar Debussy, but truth is I don’t know where it came from. Waking dream. Will never write anything one-hundredth as good. Wish I were being immodest, but I’m not. Cloud Atlas Sextet holds my life, is my life, now I’m a spent firework; but at least I’ve been a firework." Adam Ewing: Lovely, tight description, evocative. The scene springs to life in great detail from just a few words. "The Societies loomed larger & after three weeks of oceanic grays & blazing blues, our eyes rejoiced at the moss-drenched mountain faces, aglint with cataracts, daubed with cacophonous jungle. The Prophetess cleared fifteen fathoms, yet so clear was the water, iridescent corals were visible" "On the beach of Bethlehem Cove we fought & some of us fell. Had our pistols not won that first week’s battles, well, the Raiatea Mission should have remained a dream. But it was the will of the Lord that we light his beacon here & keep it burning. After a half year we could bring over our womenfolk from Tahiti. I regret the Native deaths, but once the Indians saw how God protects his flock, why, even the Spartans were begging us to send preachers.”" "Mrs. Wagstaff’s contempt for her young husband, if bottled, could have been vended as rat poison. “Mr. Ewing will think whatever Mr. Ewing will think. Then, tomorrow, he will leave on his handsome schooner, taking his thinkings with him. Unlike you & I, Mr. Wagstaff, who’ll die here. Soon, I pray God.” She turned to me. “My husband could not compleat his schooling, sir, so it is my sorry lot to explain the obvious, ten times a day.”" "Mrs. Horrox seized the rudder of conversation ere we ran onto reefs. “Your employers evince great faith in your talents, Mr. Ewing, to entrust you with business necessitating such a long & arduous voyage.” I replied that, yes, I was a senior enough notary to be entrusted with my present assignment, but a junior enough scrivener to be obligated to accept the same. Knowing clucks rewarded my humility." "Our own century shall witness humanity’s tribes fulfill those prophecies writ in their racial traits. The superior shall relegate the overpopulous savages to their natural numbers. Unpleasant scenes may ensue, but men of intellectual courage must not flinch." "Henry obliged. “Our weaponry was not dropped onto our laps one morning. It is not manna from Sinai’s skies. Since Agincourt, the White man has refined & evolved the gunpowder sciences until our modern armies may field muskets by the tens of thousands! ‘Aha!’ you will ask, yes, ‘But why us Aryans? Why not the Unipeds of Ur or the Mandrakes of Mauritius?’ Because, Preacher, of all the world’s races, our love—or rather our rapacity—for treasure, gold, spices & dominion, oh, most of all, sweet dominion, is the keenest, the hungriest, the most unscrupulous! This rapacity, yes, powers our Progress; for ends infernal or divine I know not. Nor do you know, sir. Nor do I overly care. I feel only gratitude that my Maker cast me on the winning side.”" "I ventured that Henry might practice a little reserve when disagreeing with our host. “Dearest Adam, I was practicing reserve, & more than a little! I longed to shout this at the old fool:—’Why tinker with the plain truth that we hurry the darker races to their graves in order to take their land & its riches? Wolves don’t sit in their caves, concocting crapulous theories of race to justify devouring a flock of sheep! “Intellectual courage”? True “intellectual courage” is to dispense with these fig leaves & admit all peoples are predatory, but White predators, with our deadly duet of disease dust & firearms, are examplars of predacity par excellence, & what of it?’" "As with cooks, doctors, notaries, clergymen, captains & kings, might evangelists also not be some good, some bad? Maybe the Indians of the Societies & the Chathams would be happiest “undiscovered,” but to say so is to cry for the moon. Should we not applaud Mr. Horrox’s & his brethren’s efforts to assist the Indian’s climb up “Civilization’s Ladder”? Is not ascent their sole salvation? I know not the answer, nor whence flew the surety of my younger years." "“joy shall be in heaven over one sinner that repenteth, more than over ninety & nine just persons, which need no repentance.”" "If we believe humanity is a ladder of tribes, a colosseum of confrontation, exploitation & bestiality, such a humanity is surely brought into being, & history’s Horroxes, Boerhaaves & Gooses shall prevail. You & I, the moneyed, the privileged, the fortunate, shall not fare so badly in this world, provided our luck holds. What of it if our consciences itch? Why undermine the dominance of our race, our gunships, our heritage & our legacy? Why fight the “natural” (oh, weaselly word!) order of things?" ]]> </content> </entry> <entry> <title type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[23 Things They Don't Tell You about Capitalism by Ha-Joon Chang]]> </title> <id>https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3153</id> <link href="https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3153"/> <updated>2016-02-14T18:07:03+01:00</updated> <author> <name type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Marco von Ballmoos]]> </name> <uri>https://earthli.com/users/marco</uri> </author> <summary type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA["Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is" ... ]]> </summary> <content type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Published by marco on 14. Feb 2016 18:07:03 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I've failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an interest in this book, then I'm happy for you." This is the second book I've read by Chang. The first was Kicking Away the Ladder, which discussed how the much-ballyhooed free-market practices forced on developing countries were not used by the first-world countries when they themselves were developing. This book kind of picks up where the other left off. Instead of viewing the obvious disparity between what the developed world says and what it does in a clinical manner, Chang uses a more class-based lens to examine how the rich manipulate the story to benefit themselves. A primary part of that story is the myth of capital-C Capitalism. His is a pragmatic and balanced take on what we for lack of a better word must call a global economy with a lot of useful insight and suggestions for how to break out of the vicious circle of servitude that most of us are in (all but the tippy top, of course, for whom the system works). This is absolutely a lovely companion book to Mark Blyth's Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea. The citations below give a better idea of what he's all about than I could possibly do by writing a summary. [Citations] "Human decisions, especially decisions by those who have the power to set the rules, make things happen in the way they happen, as I will explain. Even though no single decision-maker can be sure that her actions will always lead to the desired results, the decisions that have been made are not in some sense inevitable. We do not live in the best of all possible worlds. If different decisions had been taken, the world would have been a different place. Given this, we need to ask whether the decisions that the rich and the powerful take are based on sound reasoning and robust evidence." "Overcoming the myth that there is such a thing as an objectively defined ‘free market’ is the first step towards understanding capitalism." "All this does not mean that we need to take a relativist position and fail to criticize anyone because anything goes. We can (and I do) have a view on the acceptability of prevailing labour standards in China (or any other country, for that matter) and try to do something about it, without believing that those who have a different view are wrong in some absolute sense. Even though China cannot afford American wages or Swedish working conditions, it certainly can improve the wages and the working conditions of its workers." "Free-market economists may want you to believe that the correct boundaries of the market can be scientifically determined, but this is incorrect. If the boundaries of what you are studying cannot be scientifically determined, what you are doing is not a science." "Thus seen, opposing a new regulation is saying that the status quo, however unjust from some people’s point of view, should not be changed. Saying that an existing regulation should be abolished is saying that the domain of the market should be expanded, which means that those who have money should be given more power in that area, as the market is run on one-dollar-one-vote principle." "Warren Buffet, the famous financier, put this point beautifully, when he said in a television interview in 1995: ‘I personally think that society is responsible for a very significant percentage of what I’ve earned. If you stick me down in the middle of Bangladesh or Peru or someplace, you’ll find out how much this talent is going to produce in the wrong kind of soil. I will be struggling thirty years later. I work in a market system that happens to reward what I do very well – disproportionately well.’" "[...] world were full of the self-seeking individuals found in economics textbooks, it would grind to a halt because we would be spending most of our time cheating, trying to catch the cheaters, and punishing the caught." Dude, you just described the U.S. of A. "If we did that, people would feel that they are not trusted as moral agents and refuse to act in moral ways, making it necessary for us to spend a huge amount of resources monitoring, judging and punishing people. If we assume the worst about people, we will get the worst out of them." "Real interest rates of 8, 10 or 12 per cent mean that potential investors would not find non-financial investments attractive, as few such investments bring profit rates higher than 7 per cent.5 In this case, the only profitable investment is in high-risk, high-return financial assets. Even though financial investments can drive growth for a while, such growth cannot be sustained, as those investments have to be ultimately backed up by viable long-term investments in real sector activities, as so vividly shown by the 2008 financial crisis" "The dead presidents don’t talk. But if they could, they would tell Americans and the rest of the world how the policies that their successors promote today are the exact opposite of what they used in order to transform a second-rate agrarian economy dependent on slave labour into the world’s greatest industrial power." "For the same reason why we send our children to school rather than making them compete with adults in the labour market, developing countries need to protect and nurture their producers before they acquire the capabilities to compete in the world market unassisted. Second, in the earlier stages of development, markets do not function very well for various reasons – poor transport, poor flow of information, the small size of the market that makes manipulation by big actors easier, and so on." "For example, in the case of Britain, the share of manufacturing in total output, without counting the relative price effects (to use the jargon, in current prices), fell by over40 per cent between 1955 and 1990 (from 37 per cent to 21 per cent). However, when taking the relative price effects into account, the fall was only by just over 10 per cent (from 27 per cent to 24 per cent).3 In other words, the real demand effect – that is the demand effect after taking relative price changes into account – is small." "More importantly, the fact that the citizens of a country work longer than others in comparable countries does not necessarily mean that they like working longer hours. They may be compelled to work long hours, even if they actually want to take longer holidays. As I pointed out above, how long a person works is affected not only by his own preference regarding work – leisure balance but also by things such as welfare provision, protection of worker rights and union power. Individuals have to take these things as given, but nations have a choice over them. They can rewrite the labour laws, beef up the welfare state and effect other policy changes to make it less necessary for individuals to work long hours." "However, the trouble is that trickle down usually does not happen very much if left to the market. For example, once again according to the EPI, the top 10 per cent of the US population appropriated 91 per cent of income growth between 1989 and 2006, while the top 1 per cent took 59 per cent. In contrast, in countries with a strong welfare state it is a lot easier to spread the benefits of extra growth that follows upward income redistribution (if it happens) through taxes and transfers. Indeed, before taxes and transfers, income distribution is actually more unequal in Belgium and Germany than in the US, while in Sweden and the Netherlands it is more or less the same as in the US.3 In other words, we need the electric pump of the welfare state to make" "However, the trouble is that trickle down usually does not happen very much if left to the market. For example, once again according to the EPI, the top 10 per cent of the US population appropriated 91 per cent of income growth between 1989 and 2006, while the top 1 per cent took 59 per cent. In contrast, in countries with a strong welfare state it is a lot easier to spread the benefits of extra growth that follows upward income redistribution (if it happens) through taxes and transfers. Indeed, before taxes and transfers, income distribution is actually more unequal in Belgium and Germany than in the US, while in Sweden and the Netherlands it is more or less the same as in the US.3 In other words, we need the electric pump of the welfare state to make the water at the top trickle down in any significant quantity." "For example, in an economic downturn like today’s, the best way to boost the economy is to redistribute wealth downward, as poorer people tend to spend a higher proportion of their incomes. The economy-boosting effect of the extra billion dollar given to the lower-income households through increased welfare spending will be bigger than the same amount given to the rich through tax cuts. Moreover, if wages are not stuck at or below subsistence levels, additional income may encourage workers’ investment in education and health, which may raise their productivity and thus economic growth. In addition, greater income equality may promote social peace by reducing industrial strikes and crime, which may in turn encourage investment, as it reduces the danger of disruption to the production process and thus to the process of generating wealth." "The world is very complex and our ability to deal with it is severely limited. Therefore, we need to, and usually do, deliberately restrict our freedom of choice in order to reduce the complexity of problems we have to face. Often, government regulation works, especially in complex areas like the modern financial market, not because the government has superior knowledge but because it restricts choices and thus the complexity of the problems at hand, thereby reducing the possibility that things may go wrong." "Of course, few people would argue that markets are perfect. Even Milton Friedman admitted that there are instances in which markets fail. Pollution is a classic example. People ‘over-produce’ pollution because they are not paying for the costs of dealing with it. So what are optimal levels of pollution for individuals (or individual firms) add up to a sub-optimal level from the social point of view." "According to Simon, we try to be rational, but our ability to be so is severely limited. The world is too complex, Simon argued, for our limited intelligence to understand fully. This means that very often the main problem we face in making a good decision is not the lack of information but our limited capability to process that information – a point nicely illustrated by the fact that the celebrated advent of the internet age does not seem to have improved the quality of our decisions, judging by the mess we are in today." "The effects of a drug, and the human body’s reaction to it, are complex. So the drug needs to be tested rigorously before we can be sure that it has enough beneficial effects that clearly overwhelm the side-effects and allow it to be sold. There is nothing exceptional about proposing to ascertain the safety of financial products before they can be sold." "We teach our children those subjects because we believe that they will eventually enrich their lives and also make them good citizens. Even though this justification for educational spending is increasingly under attack in an age in which everything is supposed to justify its existence in terms of its contribution to productivity growth, it remains a very important – in my view, the most important – reason to invest in education." "But an influential Marxist school of thought argues that capitalists deliberately ‘de-skill’ their workers by using the most mechanized production technologies possible, even if they are not the most economical, in order to make the workers more easily replaceable and thus easier to control.7" "In many lines of work, what counts is general intelligence, discipline and the ability to organize oneself, rather than specialist knowledge, much of which you can, and have to, actually pick up on-the-job. So, even if what you learn in a university as a history major or a chemist may not be relevant to your work as a prospective manager in an insurance company or as a government official in the Department of Transport, the fact that you have graduated from a university tells your potential employers that you are likely to be smarter, more self-disciplined and better organized than those who have not." "The higher education system in these countries has become like a theatre in which some people decided to stand to get a better view, prompting others behind them to stand. Once enough people stand, everyone has to stand, which means that no one is getting a better view, while everyone has become more uncomfortable." "For example, firms often do not invest enough in training their workers. This is because they are worried about their workers being poached by other firms ‘free-riding’ on their training efforts. In such a situation, the government imposing a requirement for worker training on all firms could actually raise the quality of the labour force, thereby ultimately benefiting all firms." "But you don’t need to be a Marxist to see that regulations restricting freedom for individual firms may promote the collective interest of the entire business sector, not to speak of the nation as a whole. In other words, there are many regulations that are pro- rather than anti-business. Many regulations help preserve the common-pool resources that all firms share, while others help business by making firms do things that raise their collective productivity in the long run. Only when we recognize this will we be able to see that what matters is not the absolute amount of regulation, but the aims and contents of those regulations." "The Marxists may have been right in thinking that the development in productive forces, by increasing interdependence among different segments of capital, makes it more necessary to plan centrally. However, they failed to recognize that it also makes the economy more complex, making it more difficult to plan centrally." "What Marx predicted was that the ‘rational’ planning approach of the capitalist firms would eventually prove superior to the wasteful anarchy of the market and thus eventually be extended to the whole economy. To be sure, he criticized planning within the firm as despotism by capitalists, but he believed that, once private property was abolished and the capitalists eliminated, the rational elements of such despotism could be isolated and harnessed for the social good." "Your environment can make you give up certain things even without trying. For example, many academically talented British working-class children do not even try to go to universities because universities are ‘not for them’. This attitude is slowly changing, but I still remember seeing a BBC documentary in the late 1980s in which an old miner and his wife were criticizing one of their sons, who had gone to a university and become a teacher, as a ‘class traitor’. While it is silly to blame everything on the socio-economic environment, it is equally unacceptable to believe that people can achieve anything if they only ‘believe in themselves’ and try hard enough, as Hollywood movies love to tell you." "Few American steelworkers or British shipbuilding workers who joined their industries in the 1960s, or for that matter anyone else, could have predicted that by the early 1990s their industries would be virtually wiped out by Japanese and Korean competition. Is it really fair that these people have to suffer disproportionately and be consigned to the scrapheap of history?" "Yes, in theory, a shoeshine boy from a poor provincial town in Peru can go to Stanford and do a PhD, as the former Peruvian President Alejandro Toledo has done, but for one Toledo we have millions of Peruvian children who did not even make it to high school. Of course, we could argue that all those millions of poor Peruvian children are lazy good-for-nothings, since Mr Toledo has proven that they too could have gone to Stanford if they had tried hard enough. But I think it is much more plausible to say that Mr Toledo is the exception." "When some people have to run a 100 metre race with sandbags on their legs, the fact that no one is allowed to have a head start does not make the race fair. Equality of opportunity is absolutely necessary but not sufficient in building a genuinely fair and efficient society." "Of these, Portugal and Korea are the richest, with around $18,000 per capita income (in 2006), and Turkey the poorest, with per capita income of $5,400 (in 2006). The next poorest OECD member after Portugal and Korea is Greece, which has a per capita income over $24,000." "In contrast, China’s 2007 income more than doubles from $2,360 to $5,370 and India’s by nearly three times from $950 to $2,740, when calculated in PPP terms." "As a result, worker resistance to any industrial restructuring that involves job cuts is much greater in the US than in Europe. Most US workers are unable to put up an organized resistance, but those who can – unionized workers – will, understandably, do everything they can to preserve the current job distribution." "We can drive our cars fast only because we have brakes. If cars had no brakes, even the most skilful drivers would not dare to drive at more than 20–30 miles per hour for fear of fatal accidents. In the same way, people can accept the risk of unemployment and the need for occasional re-tooling of their skills more willingly when they know that those experiences are not going to destroy their lives. This is why a bigger government can make people more open to change and thus make the economy more dynamic." "However, the very liquidity of financial assets makes them potentially negative for the rest of the economy. Building a factory takes at least months, if not years, while accumulating the technological and organizational know-how needed to build a world-class company takes decades. In contrast, financial assets can be moved around and rearranged in minutes, if not seconds. This enormous gap has created huge problems, because finance capital is ‘impatient’ and seeks short-term gains" "But this understates it. Economists are not some innocent technicians who did a decent job within the narrow confines of their expertise until they were collectively wrong-footed by a once-in-a-century disaster that no one could have predicted. Over the last three decades, economists played an important role in creating the conditions of the 2008 crisis (and dozens of smaller financial crises that came before it since the early 1980s, such as the 1982 Third World debt crisis, the 1995 Mexican peso crisis, the 1997 Asian crisis and the 1998 Russian crisis) by providing theoretical justifications for financial deregulation and the unrestrained pursuit of short-term profits. More broadly, they advanced theories that justified the policies that have led to slower growth, higher inequality, heightened job insecurity and more frequent financial crises that have dogged the world in the last three decades (see Things 2, 6, 13 and 21)." "Moreover, they supplied arguments that insist that all those economic outcomes that many people find objectionable in this world – such as rising inequality (see Thing 13), sky-high executive salaries (see Thing 14) or extreme poverty in poor countries (see Thing 3) – are really inevitable, given (selfish and rational) human nature and the need to reward people according to their productive contributions." "So capitalism, yes, but we need to end our love affair with unrestrained free-market capitalism, which has served humanity so poorly, and install a better-regulated variety. What that variety would be depends on our goals, values and beliefs." "If we are really serious about preventing another crisis like the 2008 meltdown, we should simply ban complex financial instruments, unless they can be unambiguously shown to benefit society in the long run. This idea will be dismissed by some as outrageous. It’s not. We do that all the time with other products – think about the safety standards for food, drugs, automobiles and aeroplanes. What would result is an approval process whereby the impact of each new financial instrument, concocted by ‘rocket scientists’ within financial firms, is assessed in terms of risks and rewards to our system as a whole in the long run, and not just in terms of short-term profits for those firms." "Free-market ideology is built on the belief that people won’t do anything ‘good’ unless they are paid for it or punished for not doing it. This belief is then applied asymmetrically and reconceived as the view that rich people need to be motivated to work by further riches, while poor people must fear poverty for their motivation." ]]> </content> </entry> <entry> <title type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[The Futurological Congress: From the Memoirs of Ijon Tichy by Stanislaw Lem (read in 2015)]]> </title> <id>https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3152</id> <link href="https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3152"/> <updated>2016-02-14T17:50:42+01:00</updated> <author> <name type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Marco von Ballmoos]]> </name> <uri>https://earthli.com/users/marco</uri> </author> <summary type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA["Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is" ... ]]> </summary> <content type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Published by marco on 14. Feb 2016 17:50:42 Updated by marco on 14. Feb 2016 17:51:05 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I've failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an interest in this book, then I'm happy for you." This is a surrealist romp by the master of speculative non-hard science fiction, Stanislaw Lem. In this one, we meet the narrator Ijon Tichy, who is so wonderfully written and who is so convincing, that one quickly wonders whether the eponymous congress actually exists. It doesn't. The Congress takes place in Costa Rica, a convocation of the best and brightest minds that looks to tackle the problem of the future for the whole of planet Earth. In particular, they are to tackle the problem of population. Everything that follows may or may not have taken place, because of the copious amounts of mind-altering substances ingested both deliberately and accidentally by the author. There is possibly an attack by militants on the hotel. There are supposedly psychotropic drugs in the water. Who put them there? To what end? Tichy ends up in the sewer (or does he?) and wakes up several more times, each time believing simultaneously that he is both closer and farther from the "true" reality. We hear extravagant stories of psychotropic schemes put into place to both control and appease humanity, utopian dreams through chemistry. At this point, we wonder how he can even tell which is the real reality -- is it the one with which he's the most familiar? How does he even know when he was first dosed? When does real life begin? Is life with propaganda -- both mental and chemical -- real? Tichy lives seemingly long swathes of life only to discover that it all wasn't real, was all due to other, more sophisticated chemicals. Until he finally wakes up. And that's real. Right? It is now real reality (or so he thinks) with the world massively overpopulated and in the midst of an impending environmental disaster. Tichy tried to end it all, but ends up only waking from his fevered onion-skin--like dreams to the second day of the Congress. [Citations] "Publishers of Liberated Literature, and the Phillumenist" "Of course there were skeptics who said that the Association’s allotments must have been cut, since only that could account for such heroic frugality." "The next thing I knew, all the lights were out, and the telephone, no matter what number I dialed, kept connecting me with an automated recording of the story of Rapunzel. I tried to take the elevator down, but it too was out of order. The students were singing in chorus, shooting their guns in time to the music—in the other direction, I hoped. Such things happen even in the best hotels," This bit reminds me so much of Douglas Adams. But looking at the publication year, it seems to precede the Hitchhiker's Guide. "The original plan was to have this house of the future be mobile, by means of a powerful propeller, thereby making collective sightseeing excursions possible, but that was ruled out because, first of all, there would be 900 million houses to begin with and, secondly, all travel would be pointless. For even if a house had 1,000 exits and its occupants employed them all, they would never be able to leave the building; by the time the last was out, a whole new generation of occupants would have reached maturity inside. The Japanese were clearly delighted" "But Professor Dringenbaum went on with his lecture, which was fairly pessimistic in tone, for it maintained that the next phase of our civilization would be cannibalism. He cited several well-known American theoreticians, who had calculated that, if things on Earth continued at their present rate, in four hundred years humanity would represent a living sphere of bodies with a radius expanding at approximately the speed of light. But" "I turned on this desk unit, taking it for a radio. A swarm of glittering fleas came bursting out, covered me from head to foot, tickling everywhere, all over—until, screaming and waving my arms, I ran out into the hallway. It was an ordinary feely; by accident I had switched it on in the middle of Kitschekov’s Pruriginous Scherzo. I really don’t understand this new, tactual art form. Bil, Symington’s oldest son, told me that there are also obscene compositions. A pornographic, asemantic-asemiotic art, related to music! Ah, how inexhaustible is man’s inventiveness! Symington Jr. has promised to take me to a secret club. An orgy, or what? In any event I won’t touch the food. Or drink anything." "“We owe our liberation to chemistry,” he went on. “For all perception is but a change in the concentration of hydrogen ions on the surface of the brain cells. Seeing me, you actually experience a disturbance in the sodium-potassium equilibrium across your neuron membranes. So all we have to do is send a few well-chosen molecules down into those cortical mitochondria, activate the right neurohumoral-synaptic transmission effector sites, and your fondest dreams come true." "Everyone wants to commit a villainy without having to feel like a villain. Revenge provides a good excuse—but what did Joan of Arc ever do to to you? Is her only offense in being brighter, better? Then you are worse, crowbar or no. And that no one desires! We all would like to perpetrate the most despicable, vicious crimes, and yet remain noble throughout, wonderful! Simply magnificent! Who doesn’t want to be magnificent? It’s always that way. The worse they are, the more magnificence. The very impossibility of it whets the appetite. Our client isn’t satisfied with tormenting widows and orphans—he must bask in the glow of his own righteousness besides. A criminal himself (though, mind you, fully justified and exonerated), he has no wish to associate with criminals. But this, so far, is old hat, a tedious commonplace. No, you must give the client nothing less than sainthood, you must make of him a veritable angel, and in such a way, that he gratifies his lusts with the feeling that it is not only permitted, but actually his duty, a sort of sacred trust." "But how can I use a method to discredit that very method, if the method is discreditable?" "Hasn’t “Psychomatics” been promoting lately their strata pills, the multilaminars, which produce many-leveled fantasies? Suppose for example you want to be Napoleon at Marengo, but when the fighting is over you’re in no hurry to return to reality, so right there on the battlefield Marshal Ney or one of the Old Guard hands you another pill on a silver tray. It’s part of the hallucination too, but that doesn’t matter, for when you take it the gates to the next dream open before you, and so on ad libitum." "“That word means something different now. A futurologist makes profutes, prognoses, prophecies, while I deal exclusively with theory. This is a completely new field, unknown in our day. You might call it divination through linguistic derivation. Morphological forecasting! Projective etymology!”" "“Linguistic futurology investigates the future through the transformational possibilities of the language,” Trottelreiner explained. “I don’t understand.” “A man can control only what he comprehends, and comprehend only what he is able to put into words. The inexpressible therefore is unknowable. By examining future stages in the evolution of language we come to learn what discoveries, changes and social revolutions the language will be capable, some day, of reflecting.”" "“It isn’t a matter of what I think or don’t think, Tichy. We have simply used futurological linguistics to create a new cosmogony, another theory for future generations to consider. They may or may not take it seriously, but the fact remains that it is possible to articulate such a hypothesis!" Such absolutely wonderful bullshit. "By introducing properly prepared mascons to the brain, one can mask any object in the outside world behind a fictitious image—superimposed—and with such dexterity, that the psychemasconated subject cannot tell which of his perceptions have been altered, and which have not. If but for a single instant you could see this world of ours the way it really is—undoctored, unadulterated, uncensored—you would drop in your tracks!”" The Matrix copied from Mr. Lem as well, I suppose. "“This is up’n’at’m, one of the vigilanimides, a powerful countersomniac and antipsychem agent. A derivative of di-methylethylhexabutylpeptopeyotine." The red pill. "There are things, my boy, that everyone knows, and things that no one knows. Pharmacocracy has its open as well as its secret side; the first depends upon the second.”" "“Come again?” “Psychotroped, hallucinated. Why run nuclear tests if you have fungol gum?”" This is a vision of a world in which mankind cures all of its ills through pharmacology, fakery, hallucinogens and corruption. War is gone, man's most ecologically corrosive works remain done only in fiction. "It’s no longer necessary to call out the national guard—all you have to do is sprinkle the right mascon over the troubled area and the populace will see paratrooper units landing, marines charging, tanks—a real tank now costs about a million dollars, while a hallucinated one amounts to less than one-hundredth of a cent per person, or centispecter per spectator. A destroyer costs a dime." "yet there must exist some biological minimum—the bare necessities of life—which no fiction can ever replace. One has to live somewhere, after all, eat something, breathe something. Meanwhile actualysis robs us of one sphere of genuine activity after another." "yet there must exist some biological minimum—the bare necessities of life—which no fiction can ever replace. One has to live somewhere, after all, eat something, breathe something. Meanwhile actualysis robs us of one sphere of genuine activity after another. Besides which we are getting a frightening accumulation of side effects. And these require the use of dehallucinides, supermascons and fixators—with dubious success.” “What are they?” “The dehallucinides? A new series. They create the illusion that there is no illusion. At the present they’re given only to the mentally ill, but the number of people who suspect the authenticity of their surroundings is growing in leaps and bounds. The amnestives can do nothing against sursurmises or doubledoubts. For these are secondary fantasies, in other words twice removed. You don’t understand? Well, say someone imagines that he is only imagining that he doesn’t imagine—or the other way around." "“He says that my restorative, the one you’ve just been using, is not the genuine article. He writes, and I quote, ‘The Federal Bureau of Suggestion, Division of Psychemeering (that’s Psychemengineering), in order to divert the attention of the soothseers from many critical phenomena, is deliberately and maliciously supplying them with false counterhallucinatory agents containing neo-mascons.’” “It doesn’t make sense. The drug you gave me works, I experienced its effects myself. And anyway, what is a soothseer?” “A position of high social standing, which a few—including myself—have the honor and privilege to hold. Soothseeing is the right to take vigilanimides—for the purpose of determining how things are in reality. For someone has to know. That’s obvious, I think?” “Yes.” “And as for the drug, my friend’s guess is that it does indeed cancel out the influence of mascons of earlier vintage, mascons introduced some time ago, but doesn’t stop them all—particularly not the most recent. In which case this”—the Professor held up the flask—“would be no restorative at all, but a most treacherously devised mascon, a counterfeit countermeasure, a double reagent, or in other words a wolf in sheep’s clothing!”" Here I see echoes of the film They live (or vice versa, since this book predates that film by decades). And isn't this how we are today, but with propaganda and psychological manipulation, rather than direct chemical manipulation? To the point where no one knows what's real anymore unless it's in line of sight? "Much like the old trick where one would set up easily discovered hiding places for a thief—in the hopes that he’d be satisfied with his first find and not seek out the real, far more cleverly concealed treasure!”" But how do you, in the end, know that you have come to the end of the rainbow? Every step along the way is a lie. How can you ever be sure that what you see is real? This is really nicely written stuff, with contemporaries in Burroughs, Dick, perhaps even Derrida, etc. "Then, in the next ten years, transcepting would do away with crowds and congestion, the consequence of overpopulation. Channels of interbrain communication, whether by cable or radio, would make pointless all gatherings and get-togethers, excursions and journeys to attend conferences, and therefore all personal locomotion to whatever location, for every living being could avail itself of sensors and scanners situated over the whole expanse of human habitation, even to the farthermost planets." For more on this, see the book Diaspora by Greg Egan. "Their job was to see that everyone got his share of aerosol." In other words, the Matrix through direct chemistry and no digital component. "I looked, petrified, at the transformation taking place, realizing in a sudden shudder of premonition that now reality was sloughing off yet another layer—clearly, its falsification had begun so very long ago, that even the most powerful antidote could do no more than tear away successive veils, reaching the veils beneath but not the truth." How do you know in which direction it's going? Toward the more or less "real"? Perhaps we can ask Žižek what he thinks Lacan would say. ]]> </content> </entry> <entry> <title type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Shift by Hugh Howey (2011; read in 2016)]]> </title> <id>https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3218</id> <link href="https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3218"/> <updated>2016-02-14T16:23:33+01:00</updated> <author> <name type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Marco von Ballmoos]]> </name> <uri>https://earthli.com/users/marco</uri> </author> <summary type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA["Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is" ... ]]> </summary> <content type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Published by marco on 14. Feb 2016 16:23:33 Updated by marco on 27. Dec 2020 12:45:40 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I've failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an interest in this book, then I'm happy for you." This is the second book in the Silo series, after Wool. In the first book, we were introduced to the people of the Silo, which we would learn at the very end is Silo 18 of 50. This book runs prior and then parallel to Wool, filling in the detail as to how mankind ended up in silos. It is the story of Donald, a freshman senator and his mentor, Thurman, an experience senator, a war hero and probably the most powerful man in America, president included. It is about 30 years in our future and nanomachines are being used by the rich and powerful to prolong their lives and health. They're also being used by the military. And not just the American military -- which is the real problem, right? 'Cause if only Americans had them, the world would be safe. But I digress. So anyway, Donald is wrangled into working on a super-secret project as an architect -- which is the job he gave up to be a senator. His wife Helen is not super-happy about that, but she's even less happy about Donald possibly working closely with senator Thurman's daughter Anna, who's all kinds of still stuck on Donald from their days in college together. She's also all kinds of manipulative -- not quite Glenn Close-in-Fatal Attraction manipulative -- but still definite trouble. Of course Donald is a useless lump of XY chromosomes who constantly battles his libido, as expected. Instead of just waiting for the Iranians to attack America with nanomachines, Thurman arranges for America to attack the entire world as well as itself in order to ... get the upper hand? Force a situation that would not have happened if America hadn't done it first? Not sure what the logic is there, but I'm almost certain that (A) neither was Thurman and (B) American political thought could easily encompass this solution as the only moral and right thing to do. So, all that's left of humanity is underground, the world is gone and America -- the bits remaining in the 50 underground silos -- is totally safe from Iranian nanomachines. Because there is no America left -- I guess we showed them. Hoo-ah. Silo 1 is the only one that is aware of any of the other silos and is in charge of shepherding the other silos through the 500 years until the Earth's surface is once again habitable. Silo 1 has women and children, but only in deep-freeze. The silo is run by men who work in 6-month shifts, cryo-sleeping for years to decades in between. Again, nanomachines to the rescue for keeping the bodies healthy. The other silos have a "normal" mix of men, women and children, population restricted of course to accommodate the reduced living space. See the citations below for more detail. We learn how, over the centuries, various silos are lost -- either going "dark" mysteriously (silo 40 and others, which are suspected of having gone rogue, despite the best efforts of silo 1 to keep them brainwashed through drugs in the water) or being shut down by silo 1 when the population is deemed incorrigibly unsavable. These are collapsed onto themselves by exploding the outer concrete shell of the silo inward, crushing all inhabitants. An unfortunate but necessary measure as deemed by Silo 1 -- all things serve the plan, the Pact! In a separate thread, we learn how Solo -- whom Juliette the engineer of Silo 18 met when she traveled to Silo 17 in Wool -- grew up and survived 35 years in a silo alone. The book does a pretty good job of filling in detail and getting us right back to where we left the story in Wool. It feels fresh and it's interesting and now we know a lot more about the situation than we did with the relatively tightly focused story in book 1. At the end of the book, we are back in Silo 18 with Juliette and Lukas. Juliette's plan to dig her way back to Solo and the kids in Silo 17 lies before her. Donald's discovery that there is blue sky and green grass outside of the "silo zone" also tantalizes us with possibility. Is humanity really gone? Is the world really dead? Are the people suffering through life in the silos for absolutely nothing? Will Silo 1 lose its grip on the others? Was this grip always illusory? Will the madmen who perpetrated this grand waste of human endeavor win or lose? What does that even mean? What about Silo 40 and the other dark ones? Tune in next time for the finale in Dust. [Citations] Here we have Nick talking to his wife Helen about the possibility of the world coming to an end. "‘What would you do if you thought it all might end?’ he asked his wife. ‘What would you do?’ ‘If what? You mean us? Oh, you mean life. Honey, did someone pass away? Tell me what’s going on.’ ‘No, not someone. Everyone. Everything.’" I would do nothing. Maybe that's the book that I need to write: about the triumph of those who know there is nothing to save. To counterbalance this endless parade of unquestioning survival at all costs, without a thought as to what is being saved. "Donald was verging on the sad realization that humanity had been thrown to the brink of extinction by insane men in positions of power following one another, each thinking the others knew where they were going." Jesus, it's about time someone had this thought. As I wrote above, I've read through most of the Silo series and all of Seveneves and this is the first time someone actually comes out with a thought in the direction of asking whether a race of beings so clearly horrible as mankind is even worth saving. To what end? Another interesting bit is when they talk about the role of the Crow and the kind of society that works out here, on an entire planet, and inside more confined spaces. "‘Yes,’ Rodny said. ‘Why do you think we hate our fathers? It’s because she makes us hate them. Gives us ideas to break free from them. But this won’t make it better.’" Here's where it could get interesting. The people best suited to that world are unquestioning drones. no agitation. no uprising. Smooth sailing. But to what purpose? to pile up millennia? to win? Does that scale to our world as well? Why not? It's just as futile to try to change anything. We are trapped by our animal natures and the animals outnumber us vastly and are so easily swayed by those who bother to grasp for power. What's the point of agitating against those idiots? They will be believed by the masses and carried to power despite your protestations. Why fight over this shitheap? Why stick around? It's hard to come up with a good justification. The idea that what we consider to be an ideal society on planet Earth, with a predilection for freedom, free choice, etc. is probably not best for survival in much more restricted conditions...it's not necessarily a new one. Many others have made this argument and sought to apply it to general society, arguing that the sheep are to survive and like what they get while their betters organize things for survival. Even in Seveneves, we caught a taste of this in the discussion of the seven Eves as to which genetic characteristics would best serve mankind in space. Certainly not the heroic ones that were useful when there were frontiers to conquer. But if we breed out that which makes us individuals in order to increase survival, what have we actually helped survive? Is it still the same species? Is it still worth saving if it never achieves anything but survival? Or is the pace of advancement more stately and better for all, all around? These are not easy questions. "He picked up his glass of water, studied it awhile. Or did he know a Cam? Where did he know that name from? There were bits of his past shrouded and hidden from him. There were things like the mark on his neck and the scar on his stomach that he couldn’t remember coming to be. Everyone had their share of these things, parts of their bygone days they couldn’t recall, but Mission more than most. Like his birthday. It drove him crazy that he couldn’t remember when his birthday was. What was so hard about that?" This is a very nice coda to this section. The conceit being that it would take drugs in the water to make people forget. In point of fact, a well-managed media works just as well. "Donald was reminded how each silo had a mayor for shaking hands and keeping up appearances, just as the world of before had presidents who came and went. Meanwhile, it was the men in the shadows who wielded the true power, those whose terms had no limits. That this silo operated by the same deceit should not be surprising; it was the only way such men knew how to run anything." "You and I have spent much of our adult lives scheming to save the world. Several adult lives, in fact. That deed now done, I ponder a different question, one that I fear I cannot answer and that we were never brave nor bold enough to pose. And so I ask you now, dear friend: was this world worth saving to begin with? Were we worth saving? This endeavor was launched with that great assumption taken for granted. Now I ask myself for the first time." OMG finally Don asks the question outright. In this next conversation, between Donald, posing as Thurman and in charge of Silo 1, talking to Lukas, the shadow newly in charge of Silo 18, Donald helps the young man confirm his suspicions as to why the remnants of humanity are living in tin cans. 'I think it was something we saw coming.’ Donald was impressed. He had a feeling this young man knew the answer and simply wanted confirmation. ‘That’s one possibility,’ he agreed. ‘Consider this …’ He thought how best to phrase it. ‘What if I told you that there were only fifty silos in all the world, and that we are in this infinitely small corner of it?’ On the monitor, Donald could practically watch the young man think, his readings oscillating up and down like the brain’s version of a heartbeat. ‘I would say that we were the only ones …’ A wild spike on the monitor. ‘I’d say we were the only ones who knew.’ ‘Very good. And why might that be?’ Donald wished he had the jostling lines on the screen recorded. It was serene, watching another human being clutch after his vanishing sanity, his disappearing doubts. ‘It’s because … It’s not because we knew.’ There was a soft gasp on the other end of the line. ‘It’s because we did it.’ ‘Yes,’ Donald said. ‘And now you know.’ Not only are they living in tin cans, but they're being ruled over by the same men who made living in tin cans the only viable option for survival. Men whose philosophical vision is so limited that they can't envision anything more complex than providing the ability for humans -- read: Americans -- to continue to draw breath. Who can't imagine that a solution could be worse than the problem. "His legs were good. Stronger, even, than when he was younger. The hard things got easier the more you did them. It didn’t make it any more fun to do the hard things, though. Solo wished they would just be easy the first time." That about sums it up, I think. [Errata] "[...] unless Drexel had been careless again with which rail he tied it to." This should be "[...] unless Drexel had been careless again to which rail he'd tied it." "[...]limb to limb,[...]" This should be "[...]limb from limb,[...]". ]]> </content> </entry> <entry> <title type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[And Another Thing... (Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Book 6) by Eoin Colfer (read in 2015)]]> </title> <id>https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3151</id> <link href="https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3151"/> <updated>2016-02-09T22:49:04+01:00</updated> <author> <name type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Marco von Ballmoos]]> </name> <uri>https://earthli.com/users/marco</uri> </author> <summary type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA["Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is" ... ]]> </summary> <content type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Published by marco on 9. Feb 2016 22:49:04 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I've failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an interest in this book, then I'm happy for you." This is the sixth in the increasingly inaccurately named trilogy, the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. This installment picks up where Adams left off in Mostly Harmless and reads a bit like Pratchett's Raising Steam in that absolutely everyone from the respective pantheon appears. The good news is that it's a pretty good story and the characters are handled well and feel natural. The dialogue is clever and the writing is funny. Good old Wowbagger the Infinitely Prolonged features prominently as well as the always interesting Trillian and Tricia McMillan. A planet built by the Magrathean Slartibartfast has been populated by people far too rich for their own good and they're petitioning for a God to rule their planet for them. Wowbagger and Thor both show up and lock horns. Even the Vogons, led by the implacable Prostetnic Jeltz and his son, who's not as enthusiastic as his father about eliminating humanity forever (finally closing the chapter on every possible extrusion in every possible multiverse). A fun romp and an installment that can stand proudly next to the others. [Citations] "“Bugger,” muttered the old man as the final crumbs dissipated on his fingertips, then he sat back on a cushion in the room of sky that suddenly surrounded him. Someone would be coming soon, he was sure of it. From the dim caverns of his old memories, the names Ford and Prefect emerged like gray bats to associate themselves with the impending disaster." "The Cyphroles are tiny invertebrate free-swimming gastrozoa who absorb the hostile energy emitted by their predators and use it to power their own systems. This makes the predator angry and so the Cyphroles swim faster through the gas ocean. Sesefras Magna gas dragons have learned to approach the Cyphroles casually, whistling a little tune or pretending to search for a few coins they have mislaid. The Cyphroles always fall for these tricks, as nature gave them large energy filters and tiny bullshit detectors." This is a nice callback. It's one of the nicest lines from the original. [1] "“Humans think digital watches are pretty neat,” Ford murmured absently, then turned to face the three humans, who were busy doing their utmost to avoid being the least bit civil to each other." "Trillian actually wrung her fingers as the exchange escalated. She was so far in the red as regards good parenting credits that she had no idea where the high moral ground was. Even if she could occasionally glimpse it as a myopic hiker glimpses a mist-sodden hill at night, she had no idea who currently occupied it or how to scale its slopes, should she accidentally bump into them." Mr. Colfer is pulling the best lines from other works now. This one is from Blade Runner, delivered by the incomparable Rutger Hauer. "Wowbagger could not hold her eyes. “I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.”" And this is a nice citation illustrating Colfer's affinity and feel for the characters, Zaphod in this instance. "Hillman drummed his fingers on the table, something he hoped the waitress would notice and for God’s sake come and take his order. He stopped in mid-drum. “Well, we have no waitresses for a start. They’re all down on the beach colony with the personal trainers. And they took all the booze.” Zaphod reached for his boots. “Well, it’s been great chatting to you, Hillman. If you could just point me in the direction of this beach colony.”" "“Every new society has teething problems. You need to work through them with diplomacy and alcohol.”" And again, this time with Ford and Arthur. And, at the end, a callback to good old Marvin, who uttered the original line "Life? Don't talk to me about life." "“I guess X marks the spot,” said Ford, a hank of charred meat in his hand. He turned to the nearest cow. “Do you have any sauce? This is a little dry.” Arthur found that he was not as scandalized by this sort of behavior as he once had been. Repeated exposure to Ford Prefect’s rampant gourmandizing had eroded some of his behavioral notions. “I believe that someone mentioned wine,” he said, trying not to sound overly enthusiastic. Random scowled, although no one noticed as it was one of her two normal expressions, the other being a contemptuous curl of the lip. “That is disgusting,” she said, transitioning smoothly into expression number two. “You two are pigs.” “Pigs,” said the cow. “Don’t talk to me about pigs.”" "“Wasn’t it? I seem to recall you being linked to several starlets.” “That was just physical. Those females meant nothing to me.” This is historically the third worst thing to say to a female of any species. “They meant nothing? Why not?” Wowbagger spread his arms. “How could they? Even as we mated, they were growing old.” There’s number two. Trillian’s eyes flashed. “Growing old. We all grow old, Bowerick. Believe it or not, I’m growing old too.” Wowbagger realized that his lack of intimate communication over the years was doing wonders to increase his chances of dying alone in the very immediate future. “You may be growing old,” he said desperately, “but you have years left before you’re too old to reproduce.” And there’s number one. Badabingo. Green stick in the green hole." "Hyperspace cleared its throat and hawked out a Vogon bureaucruiser into the clear swath of satin space .01 parsecs beyond Nano’s thermosphere. Inside the Business End, three thousand members of the Bureaucratic Corps flopped out of their hypercradles and rubbed the belt dimples from their tummies." "If you worked on the outside, as a panel scraper or engine plunger, then it was possible to be driven blind or even mad by its sheer symmetrophobia. Most craft give a nod, however brief and unfriendly, toward beauty. Vogon ships did not nod toward beauty. They pulled on ski masks and mugged beauty in a dark alley. They spat in the eye of beauty and bludgeoned their way through the notions of aesthetics and aerodynamics. Vogon cruisers did not so much travel through space as defile it and toss it aside." "Ford appeared on the opposite side of the square and barged through the thrumming crowds, making good use of his sharp elbows. As he drew closer, Arthur recognized the look on his friend’s face. “I don’t believe it,” he said, hurling his ice cream to the ground. “Daddy!” said Random, shocked. “There’s a recycler just there.” Arthur was unrepentant. He stood and stamped on the carton. “It doesn’t matter because I have a feeling this planet is about to be destroyed. Isn’t that right, Ford?” Ford arrived huffing. He was a journalist and unaccustomed to physical exercise." "“Okay, Ford,” he said urgently. “What should we do?” The question seemed to puzzle the Betelgeusean. “Do?” “About the Vogons. How do we survive?” “Oh. Yes. That’s what I came here to tell you. Did you see me crossing the square? I was all charged up. Didn’t care who I knocked over.” “We saw you. Now, what do we do? Can we hitch?” Ford laughed. “Are you kidding? The Vogons won’t fall for that again. Even their shields have shields.” “So what then?” “We need to run, quite quickly, to the spaceport. There might still be time to board the Heart of Gold.” “I see something,” said Random, pointing skyward at what looked like a cluster of shooting stars heading their way, descending in synchronized loops through the atmosphere. “Or not,” said Ford. He plucked Random’s ice cream from her fist and licked it slowly, savoring every drop." "“So you actually thought your one client was dead?” “Of course not. You can’t kill a god. Even that guy who drove into the white hole is still alive, even if his parts are spread across several dimensions.” “What about that special bomb?” Zaphod snorted. “The QUEST? Who do you think sold that to the Vogons? I’m surprised it didn’t fall out of the sky. I put a lawnmower engine on that thing.” Left Brain was quiet for a moment, except for the clicking of spider-bots gathering condensation on the inner curve of his orb." -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- "Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the galaxy lies a small, unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this at a distance of roughly 92 million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue-green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea." ]]> </content> </entry> <entry> <title type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Blindness by José Saramago (read in 2015)]]> </title> <id>https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3200</id> <link href="https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3200"/> <updated>2016-02-08T22:41:48+01:00</updated> <author> <name type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Marco von Ballmoos]]> </name> <uri>https://earthli.com/users/marco</uri> </author> <summary type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA["Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is" ... ]]> </summary> <content type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Published by marco on 8. Feb 2016 22:41:48 Updated by marco on 8. Feb 2016 22:59:00 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I've failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an interest in this book, then I'm happy for you." The story is of a man who is suddenly struck blind, seeing only a wash of milky whiteness. Others soon follow, as it becomes clear that the blindness is caused by a communicable disease. Soon enough, everyone has it and the city is filled only with the blind, All, save one lady -- the doctor's wife, played by Julianne Moore -- who is unaffected by the blindness, but not by its horrific effects (she lives in a world of blind people). The effects are as you can imagine, if you were to think about it: a city filled only with the newly blind, fumbling about, looking for food, looking for shelter, for a place to urinate or defecate. Before everyone has succumbed, the government ruthlessly quarantines the initial afflicted in a mental asylum. Food is delivered sporadically but relatively regularly. The place becomes nearly unbearably filthy. As more and more people arrive, an element finally arrives that understands that societal rules no longer apply. They take all the food for themselves, rationing it out to the others in exchange for the last of their worldly possessions. When those run out, they naturally demand that the other wards send their women. After several days, the women volunteer for this horrific duty, even the doctor's wife. Afterwards, though, she's had enough and takes a pair of scissors she found to kill the ringleader, threatening the remaining pirates that she will kill more if they don't give up. Another woman, traumatized by the rapes, finds a lighter and sets the pirates' den on fire, taking them all out. At the same time, the doctor's wife takes her small group outside to ask the soldiers for help. They are gone. There is no authority remaining. All is chaos and anarchy, with only the blind to fill the power vacuum. The small group escapes back to the city, the doctor's wife the only witness to the utter horror of the place, overrun by people who can no longer take care of themselves. They survive better than most, with the doctor's wife's sight helping them find food that others have missed. They return to the doctor's home and settle in for a somewhat better existence than they had in quarantine, but one still bereft of true hope. And then, just as quickly as it left, their sight returns. The end. This is a decent enough book, written in a flowing style that is nearly punctuation- and paragraph-free. I enjoyed the concept more than the writing style. Considering some of the implications -- the filth of a blind world -- was pretty horrifying. It became clear that, while the blind can survive well in a world peopled by the non-blind, a world where everyone is blind quickly becomes unlivable and likely unsurvivable. How do you farm? How do you protect yourself from the elements? How do you construct shelter? And so on. [Citations] "These observations of a psychological nature, whose subtlety has no apparent relevance considering the extraordinary scale of the cataclysm which our narrative is struggling to relate, only serve to explain why all the blind internees were awake so early, some, as was said at the outset, were roused by the churning of their empty stomachs in need of food, others were dragged from their sleep by the nervous impatience of the early risers, who did not hesitate to make more noise than the inevitable and tolerable when people cohabit in barracks and wards." "I suppose we’ll all be contaminated, there cannot be a single person who has not been within sight of a blind man, If a blind man cannot see, I ask myself, how can he transmit this disease through his sight, General, this must be the most logical illness in the world, the eye that is blind transmits the blindness to the eye that sees, what could be simpler, We have a colonel here who believes the solution would be to shoot the blind as soon as they appear, Corpses instead of blind men would scarcely improve the situation, To be blind is not the same as being dead, Yes, but to be dead is to be blind, So there are going to be about two hundred of them, Yes, And what shall we do with the taxi-drivers, Put them inside as well. That same day, in the late afternoon, the Ministry of Defence contacted the Ministry of Health, Would you like to hear the latest news, that colonel we mentioned earlier has gone blind, It’ll be interesting to see what he thinks of that bright idea of his now, He already thought, he shot himself in the head, Now that’s what I call a consistent attitude, The army is always ready to set an example." ]]> </content> </entry> <entry> <title type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Joyland by Stephen King (read in 2015)]]> </title> <id>https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3149</id> <link href="https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3149"/> <updated>2016-02-08T22:35:53+01:00</updated> <author> <name type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Marco von Ballmoos]]> </name> <uri>https://earthli.com/users/marco</uri> </author> <summary type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA["Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is" ... ]]> </summary> <content type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Published by marco on 8. Feb 2016 22:35:53 Updated by marco on 8. Feb 2016 22:36:03 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I've failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an interest in this book, then I'm happy for you." You can tell this is a Stephen King book from a mile away. It's about a young man -- Devin, a writer -- who's been jilted by the love of his life. She's decided that it's time to see other people and he's not quite on board with that yet. So he takes a job several states away and spends a good deal of time mooning around over her. He makes a couple of good friends at this odd little amusement park called Joyland. They have a dog mascot that he's especially good at playing. After learning of a ghost in the haunted-house ride, Devin becomes nearly obsessed with the case and is convinced that he can release the ghost if he just finds the real killer. Along the way, he befriends a standoffish woman, Annie, through her son Mike, who's physically disabled but gifted in other ways. He is crucial to releasing the ghost because of his psychic powers. They finally discover the real killer hiding right under their noses. They all learn a lot about life, go their separate ways and nobody really lives happily ever after, but that's OK too. [Citations] "This is a badly broken world, full of wars and cruelty and senseless tragedy. Every human being who inhabits it is served his or her portion of unhappiness and wakeful nights. Those of you who don’t already know that will come to know it. Given such sad but undeniable facts of the human condition, you have been given a priceless gift this summer: you are here to sell fun. In exchange for the hard-earned dollars of your customers, you will parcel out happiness. Children will go home and dream of what they saw here and what they did here. I hope you will remember that when the work is hard, as it sometimes will be, or when people are rude, as they often will be, or when you feel your best efforts have gone unappreciated. This is a different world, one that has its own customs and its own language, which we simply call the Talk. You’ll begin learning it today. As you learn to talk the Talk, you’ll learn to walk the walk. I’m not going to explain that, because it can’t be explained; it can only be learned." "What’s carny-from-carny mean?” “Means you’re like old man Easterbrook. His father worked the carny circuit back in the Dust Bowl days, and his grandfather worked it back when they had a fake Indian show featuring Big Chief Yowlatcha.” “You got to be kidding!” Tom exclaimed, almost exultantly. Pop gave him a cool stare that settled Tom down—a thing not always easy to do. “Son, do you know what history is?” “Uh…stuff that happened in the past?” “Nope,” he said, tying on his canvas change-belt. “History is the collective and ancestral shit of the human race, a great big and ever-growin pile of crap. Right now we’re standin at the top of it, but pretty soon we’ll be buried under the doodoo of generations yet to come. That’s why your folks’ clothes look so funny in old photographs, to name but a single example. And, as someone who’s destined to be buried beneath the shit of your children and grandchildren, I think you should be just a leetle more forgiving." ]]> </content> </entry> <entry> <title type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Seveneves: A Novel by Neal Stephenson (read in 2016)]]> </title> <id>https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3213</id> <link href="https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3213"/> <updated>2016-02-02T22:08:48+01:00</updated> <author> <name type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Marco von Ballmoos]]> </name> <uri>https://earthli.com/users/marco</uri> </author> <summary type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA["Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is" ... ]]> </summary> <content type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Published by marco on 2. Feb 2016 22:08:48 Updated by marco on 30. Jul 2017 18:12:11 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I've failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an interest in this book, then I'm happy for you." This is another epic work [1] by Stephenson, spanning almost 900 pages and over 5000 years. He picks up some themes I've seen in other books and also includes a lot of his standard fascination for technological detail, weaponry in particular. This is the story of the eradication of life as we know it on the planet Earth. Something called The Agent enters the Moon from one side and exits from the other, shattering it into seven large pieces and innumerable smaller ones. The Agent is a deus ex machina -- at least for this first novel [2] -- and we cease thinking about its origins almost immediately to focus on the problems engendered by splitting the Moon. After an initial, short period of thinking that everything's going to be OK, Dr. Doob and other scientists around the world discover that the shards of the Moon will continue to slam into each other until they trigger a chain reaction of sorts that they call The Hard Rain. The White Sky will soon follow, ensuing from the Hard Rain setting the Earth's entire atmosphere on fire. It's time to scramble to save humanity, no questions asked. All issues of whether humanity is worth saving are left by the wayside without a single discussion. A pity. [3] The people currently on the ISS, to which an asteroid named Amalthea has in the meantime become attached, are informed that they will never return home. Instead, they are to prepare for an influx of settlers and colonists and materials rocketed up from Earth over the course of the two years that it is predicted to take for the Hard Rain to begin in earnest. Ivy (commander) and Dinah (roboticist and asteroid-miner) are friends on said station. Dinah's father, Rufus, is a miner and decides to bury himself and his family in the bowels of Alaska and wait out the 5,000--10,000 years of the Hard Rain there. [4] The combined genius of Earth comes up with a plan to extend the ISS to accommodate more inhabitants: the Cloud Ark. The Cloud Ark is a distributed system of pods, each of which should be as self-sufficient as possible. Why that? Because the orbit of the ISS is now filled with the chunks of the moon -- bolides -- that will create the Hard Rain. They also cause major problems for Izzy, as the ISS is soon christened. Though Earth can send centuries' worth of supplies -- "vitamins" in the parlance of space -- that are small and difficult to re-create in orbit, where they have little to no industrial capacity, and Izzy has a lot of raw materials from Amalthea (the already-captured asteroid), they have nowhere near the amount of volatiles that they'll need for decades worth of propulsion while they dodge and weave their way through the Hard Rain. Cue lots of orbital mechanics here. Some people in government know this, but pretend that it's not a problem in order to give people on the planet hope that humanity will survive the Hard Rain in orbit. At any rate, Sean Probst, the president of the mining company for which Dinah actually works and giver of zero fucks about diplomatically coddling humanity's dying hopes [5], shoots himself into orbit to address this situation. He will (almost) single-handedly pilot a ship beyond Earth's farthest LaGrange point in order to capture a comet, Ymir. This mission will take about two years, which coincides with the last contact with the surface of the Earth, give or take. During these two years, Izzy must be expanded considerably and with a considerably narrower safety margin than previously allowed. The first wave of construction workers comprises only Russians, and includes Tekla, a former Olympian and all-around bad-ass, who's saved from her malfunctioning self-contained habitat by Dinah and her robots. The architect for all of these habitats is Rhys Aitken, a guy who's fascinated by the power of chains, especially in space. This will factor in heavily 5000 years from now. The remaining governments on Earth try to make it an orderly emigration by choosing the people who will go by lottery or other means. Eventually, the Hard Rain comes, the President of the U.S., Julia (JBH) -- against all treaties that forbade premiers from saving themselves -- arrives at Izzy and causes no end of her trouble with her endlessly flapping mouth, the power of which is consistently and nearly unbelievably underestimated by the technocrats and astronauts. Camila, a young Muslim girl in love with Julia's charisma, gloms onto her immediately. The leadership of Izzy passes from Ivy to Markus Leuker, a bad-ass and hugely pragmatic Swiss pilot who Dinah starts sleeping with right away. When Ymir comes back into range -- and Dinah's been communicating with him by Morse Code because his radio's out -- they realize that they have to make a mission to Ymir in order to bring it in and dock it -- because everyone on Ymir died on the mission and Sean expired from cancer after he got it on its final approach. [6] They take a MRV to Ymir with Dinah, Markus, a Japanese guy and a Russian, Slava aboard as crew. They bring Ymir to Izzy, but only Dinah survives the trip, but the others all die heroically and performing sensible and necessary duties. All the while, Julia is agitating among the Arkie Community (which she immediately christens the AC) and gets them to break off from Izzy with a bunch of supplies and Arks in a two-pronged effort: (1) send some of them to Mars and (2) move some of them away from the centralized power of Izzy, claiming that they want to increase safety by distribution. In order to do this, they fuck up the bolide-detection system, the Parambulator, so no-one can react when the biggest bolide they've yet seen smashes into Izzy, disabling a bunch of it and tearing out 97% of the Human Genetic Archive, which was total bullshit anyway, at least according to the chief geneticist, Moira. The Arks leave, Izzy repairs itself with the remnants of Ymir and we never hear from the Mars mission again. We join Izzy three years later as she's about to dock with the Cleft, one of the largest remaining bits of the Moon, having made the Big Ride out of Earth's more dangerous and by-now ringed orbits. Most of the crew has died from cancer or suicide or accidents and there are only 30 people left aboard, among them Ivy, Dinah, Doc, Tekla, Moira, and Camila. Though Izzy has been trading sporadically with the Ark Swarm, they haven't heard from them in a while and have no idea in what shape they're actually in. At the same time as they are about to match speed with the remains of Moon and head for Cleft, the Ark Swarm contacts them and asks for assistance. Insanely and stupidly -- but importantly for the story -- they agree to prepare for docking if the Swarm can get themselves to where Izzy is. The captain of the Swarm Aïda tells them that she has only 11 survivors on board (of the nearly 1000 that left). They have resorted to cannibalism because they can't grow food anymore. Julia survives but is no longer in power -- we discover later that Aïda had a giant metal post put through her tongue, for which you can't really blame her at all. Aïda is the most human of them all and just wants to survive at all costs -- and also be in charge -- so she plans a coup when the Swarm arrives. The crew of Izzy, perhaps from exhaustion or the same naïveté that led them to not throw Julia out the airlock as soon as she arrived, only discovers this plot late in the game and suffers even more losses, but eventually defeats and captures Aïda. They reach the Cleft, Doc walks on the surface and then peacefully dies of cancer, leaving only 8 surviving women: Aïda, Julia, Camila, Moira, Ivy, Dinah, Tekla and the psychologist Luisa, who has passed menopause. They come to terms with one another and the "Seven Eves" re-found the human race. Fast-forward 5000 years and humanity is, once again, 3 billion strong. All but a million or so are in a giant ring of habitats around the Earth: the Belt. Each of the Eves has spawned her own and genetically distinct race. The Julians and Aïdans are together known as "Red" and the Teklans, Ivyns, Dinans, Moirans and Camites have banded together to form "Blue". The history of the last 5000 years is sketched in, but the book mostly concerns itself with the wonderful things they've invented. We join Kath Two as she glides up from the newly habitable surface of the Earth, which the Spacers have rehabilitated by dropping comets on it after the Hard Rain was over. This trip is described in incredible detail -- almost enough for you to be able to build your own self-propelled and space-capable glider. The Spacers have reintroduced species and the larger predators have just come back -- all resurrected from the remains of the genetic imprints stored in Moira's USB sticks. Kath Two is soon embroiled in a secretive mission with six others -- the members of a so-called "Seven" -- one representative of each race. The Dinan is Tyuratam Lake, the proprietor of a fancy throwback of a bar in the Cradle, which is a gigantic habitat located on what's left of Cleft. The Cradle sits at the end of a giant arm whose other end is counterweighted way out in space by a giant boulder. The Cradle can be let down anywhere on the equator to dock with the planet. The Ivyn is Doc, an ancient scientist, the Camite is Memmie, his assistant. The Teklan is Beled Tomov, the Aïdan is a Neander named Langobard and the Julian is named Ariane Casablancova. We learn about the different races, their different alliances, predilections and history. The Seven descend to the planet and quickly run into the Diggers, the survivors of Rufus Wainwright's bunker in Alaska (yes, they survived). They are represented by Sonar Taxlaw, a living encyclopedia named after the volume for which she is primarily responsible. This is what the Seven's mission was (only Doc knew): to determine whether there were other survivors and to make contact. The contact goes horribly awry, as Ariane -- again, typically and not surprisingly -- betrays everyone to bring the prize -- a digger woman -- home to the part of the belt controlled by Red. Blue, having botched the first contact with the Diggers, sets its sights on contacting the Pingers first. The Pingers are sub-oceanic survivors of humanity who lives in gigantic submerged habitats built in Earth's deepest trenches. These are the survivors of Cal Blankenship, Ivy's former fiancé, who was commander of U.S. navy submarine and presumably survived the Hard Rain. They use one of his last pictures to communicate with the Pinger emissary, who's physiognomy is considerably changed and whose sonic communication is considerably altered. In the meantime, Red makes nice with the Diggers, who are overawed by Red's fine grasp of public relations and marketing and managing of the story (all thanks to the Julians and the special subrace of Aïdans called Aretaics, who are well-versed in persuasion/bullshit). Red had already bungled their first contact with the Pingers by building their gigantic answer to the Cradle, called Gnomon, which is utterly gigantic and, unlike the Cradle, can swing north and south of the equator to the land-based locations available on the slice of the surface of the Earth to which Red has access. And there we leave humanity: Izzy managed to save humanity and offer a wellspring from which to grow again, Earth is habitable again, the Diggers survived, as did the Pingers. No-one knows about the Mars expedition (or at least nothing was said). They are presumably dead, as 99% of the Ark Swarm was. At the very end, we discover that there are currents and powers in Humanity -- both Red and Blue -- very interested in finding out who sent the Agent. [Citations] The following section exhibits, for me, the classic Neal Stephenson style, in which a relatively long and well-written sentence sums up the three proposed solutions for escaping the worst of the Hard Rain in orbit -- the "ocean liner", the "blind ox" and the "football player pushing a wheelbarrow". I left off the two preceding pages of detail for brevity, but just liked the way he expressed the chaotic and for-man nearly unpredictable complexity of picking the best solution. "Which of these analogies was closer to the truth boiled down to a statistical argument in which were braided together assumptions about the range and distribution of bolide sizes, the amount of variation in their trajectories, how well the long-range radars worked, and how good the algorithms were at sorting out all the different bogeys and deciding which ones were dangerous. Somewhere in the middle, between the ocean liner and the blind ox, was the football player pushing the wheelbarrow. It didn’t matter" This next bit describes an uplifting moment during the begin of the Hard Rain, when people still survived, resigned to their fates. People of musical bent, members of orchestras organized themselves to be playing on the deck of the Titanic, as it were. "After sampling all of them she locked her radio dial on Notre Dame, where they were holding the Vigil for the End of the World and would continue doing so until the cathedral fell down in ruins upon the performers’ heads and extinguished all life in the remains of the building. She couldn’t watch it, since video bandwidth was scarce, but she could imagine it well: the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France, its ranks swollen by the most prestigious musicians of the Francophone world, all dressed in white tie and tails, ball gowns and tiaras, performing in shifts around the clock, playing a few secular classics but emphasizing the sacred repertoire: masses and requiems. The music was marred by the occasional thud, which she took to be the sonic booms of incoming bolides. In most cases the musicians played right through. Sometimes a singer would skip a beat. An especially big boom produced screams and howls of dismay from the audience, blended with the clank and clatter of shattered stained glass raining to the cathedral’s stone floor. But for the most part the music played sweetly, until it didn’t. Then there was nothing. Paris is gone, she texted." The following is a Morse-code conversation between Dinah and Rufus (daughter and father) just as the Hard Rain was really picking up momentum. It would be their last conversation. It made me laugh -- Stephenson is quite good at snappy, heroic dialogue. Rufus: HOT ENOUGH TO BAKE TATERS ON HOOD OF THIS TRUCK Dinah: GO INSIDE DAD Rufus: NOT KIDDING ABOUT THERMAL EFFECTS. PAINT BUBBLING Dinah: I AM NOT KIDDING EITHER YOU HAVE TO GET INSIDE Rufus: GOT A SPACE BLANKET TO PROTECT ME WHEN I MAKE A RUN FOR IT Dinah: THEN FOR GODS SAKE USE IT DAD Rufus: AH BUT THEN I CAN’T CHEW THE RAG WITH YOU ANY LONGER DINAH Dinah: WHAT IF YOUR GAS TANK EXPLODES Rufus: HA HA WE DRAINED IT FOR GENERATOR FUEL. WAY AHEAD OF YOU KID Dinah: GOD U R A SMARTASS This next bit was I thought a bit too wishy-washy of Stephenson, unfair to Dinah. I would have thought that Dinah would know exactly how to feel about Julia: that she should be pushed out of an airlock. The woman was clearly a dangerous purely political animal from the get-go. But alas, future plot twists rested on her survival, so everybody had to be stupid about her. "Dinah had no precedents to tell her how she should feel toward the ex-president at a time like this. On the one hand, her behavior had been reprehensible. On the other, she had, within the last few hours, lost her husband, her daughter, her country, and her job." "Markus pointed out, “so no more chatter from now on, please. Slava—” and he broke into a string of bad Russian meaning something like I trade places with you now. Vyacheslav responded in equally bad German. Both men were perfectly fluent in English. But they made a private joke of butchering each other’s languages, ostensibly as part of a project to preserve Old Earth’s linguistic heritage." I just liked this idea that these guys would not just choose the easiest language to communicate in, not necessarily because they were bored, but because they just naturally squeeze as much challenge as possible out of everything. The next long passage is what I found to be a lovely description of the trickiness of orbital calculation when atmosphere and irregular shapes and surfaces were thrown into the mix. "As these things went, drag wasn’t that difficult to calculate. Its effect on their course could be estimated. But because the ice shard wasn’t a symmetrical body, coming in straight, it was also going to generate some lift. Not a lot of lift—nothing like an airplane wing—but some. If that lift got aimed in the wrong direction it would make Ymir veer downward, like a stricken airplane going into its death spiral. But if they aimed it up, it would ease their passage by pushing them away from the Earth into an altitude where air was thinner. They would lose the benefit of lift then and drift back downward, but as the air got thicker, the lift would resume and push them back up. They might skip off the atmosphere several times during the hectic half hour when they were slingshotting around the world. The results would have been difficult to predict even if Ymir had been a traditional vehicle with a fixed and regular shape. But the shard was irregular. They didn’t have time to measure it and to feed the data into an aerodynamics simulator, so they could only guess how much lift it was going to produce. And when its leading edge and its underside began to plow through the air—even though the air might be so thin as to be indistinguishable, for most purposes, from a vacuum—it was going to heat up. Steam would rise from it, producing some amount of upward thrust, and its shape would change. So even if they had been able to simulate the shard’s aerodynamics, its lift and its drag, those numbers would quickly have become wrong during its first encounter with the upper air. Compared with all of those complexities, the fact that Ymir would be flying backward while operating a damaged, experimental nuclear propulsion system at maximum power seemed like a mere detail." The next discussion is about Julia (JBR), the former President of the former United States, who is causing no end of trouble with agitation and foment of revolution in order to agglomerate power to herself. As Luisa points out, trying to find method in the madness is most likely futile. Luisa's statement (emphasized) is an apt description of the power-hungry of most political structures. "Luisa just sat there in her listening shrink mode. “It would be easier,” Doob said, “if I could figure out what the hell she wanted.” “You’re assuming,” Luisa said, “that she has a plan. I doubt that she does. She is driven to seek power. She finds some way to do that and then backfills a rationalization for it afterward.” Doob pulled his tablet closer and started trying to find Tav’s blog. “To what extent do you imagine she really is reporting facts about the AC? As opposed to creating the reality she describes?” Doob asked. “What’s the difference?” Luisa asked." Slava again, being a cool, hardcore, improvising Russian astronaut. "A man in a space suit was visible on the outside of Ymir, “walking” toward the stern by using a pair of Grabbs as mobile anchor points. This had to be Vyacheslav. His feet had sprouted thick white whiskers. It took Dinah a few moments to make sense of the image: he had zip-tied each foot to the back of a Grabb, and the “whiskers” were the protruding ends of the zip ties. It was the kind of improvisation that would have made old-school NASA engineers turn over in their graves, had the Hard Rain not eliminated that possibility. But in the last two years, and particularly the last two weeks, this kind of hillbilly engineering had become routine." Telka. Another cool, Russian astronaut. Also more background on the disease called Julia. "“Problem is solved,” Tekla said. She was fluent in English and was perfectly capable of saying “The problem is solved,” but sometimes dropped the article for effect. Anglophones found this mysterious and impressive. It was also an implicit statement of Russian pride. The language of the Cloud Ark, by default, was English. That was never going to change. But the dialect was going to evolve over time, and Russians could bend it in their direction by finding ways to inject their grammar and vocabulary into everyday speech. “Burn is complete,” she went on. “But the ship is still tumbling out of control!” said the American boy who so fancied his own intelligence. “Slow tumble,” Tekla said. “Not problem. Plenty of time to fix now that perigee is raised.” “Fix it how?! Markus demolished three of the external thruster packages by ramming them! Who does that? Anyway, there are only two of them left. It is a basic reality of physics that you can’t control a three-axis tumble using only two thrusters!” “Thank you for explaining basic reality,” Tekla said. “Tumble can be eliminated by making scarfed nozzle.” This silenced them for a few moments. One of Julia’s followers—Jianyu, a Chinese Arkie, very passionate about going to Mars—looked like he understood it. Tekla nodded in his direction. “This man will explain later. My time here is limited.” “Yes, Tekla, and we do appreciate that you’ve been able to make time for us at all,” Julia said. Tekla wanted to slap her so much that her hand actually twitched. The sentence Julia had just spoken, had it been delivered in a different tone, might have actually meant what it said. Instead of which, it meant I am being callously ignored and it’s about time someone important came out to talk to me. Tekla had an almost physical sense of how that mentality was radiating outward from Julia to infect the other Arkies." Tekla, again being very bad-ass with an innovative out-of-the-box-thinking solution that wouldn't have occurred to any of the others. "All eyes were on Aïda. She would not look back at them. She was, at bottom, very shy. “Whatever,” she mumbled. “She needs to see your vote,” Ivy said. “Really? You mean that I could single-handedly destroy the entire human race, simply by not putting my thumb up in the next seven minutes?” Tekla pulled a folding knife from a pocket on her coverall and flicked the blade open. She kept it low, down in her lap, and pretended to clean a fingernail with it. “Either that,” Tekla said, “or population of human race suddenly goes from eight to seven, and we have unanimous decision.”" And Dinah. Not Russian, but very cool...and offering an insight about soft, squishy, manipulative power. "Really—she now understood—what had prompted her to slam the table and get up and storm out of the Banana a few minutes ago had not been Aïda at all. Aïda was provocative, yes. But more infuriating had been a slow burn that had started with Camila, and her remarks about aggression. Remarks that Dinah now saw as aimed not so much at Dinah as at Markus. She wished she could grab Camila by the scruff of the neck and sit her down in front of a display and make her watch the way Markus had spent the last minutes of his life. Markus was a hero. It seemed to Dinah that Camila wanted to strip humanity of its heroes. She’d couched what she’d said in terms of aggression. But by doing so, Camila was just being aggressive in a different way—a passive-aggressive way that Dinah, raised as she’d been raised, couldn’t help seeing as sneaky. More destructive, in the end, than the overt kind of aggression." Stephenson once again describing what it's like inside the mind of an enlightened scientist, the struggle between enjoying something viscerally and understanding how that feeling came about. "She hesitated to lower the helmet over her face. This would be her last opportunity for a while to breathe the fresh air of New Earth. The scientist in her was at odds with a deeper layer, common to all human races, that wanted to see beauty and purpose in the “natural” world. She knew perfectly well what Doc—or just about any other Ivyn—would say to her, if he could read her mind. The water in that lake below you is there because we crashed comet cores into the dead Earth until it stayed wet. The air you’re breathing was manufactured by organisms we genetically engineered and sprayed all over the wet planet, then killed once they had accomplished their task. And the sharp scent you like so much comes from vegetation that, for many years, existed only as a string of binary digits stored on a thumb drive on a string around the neck of your Eve. None of which changed the fact that she liked it." These next few citations are more passages that I found especially nicely written, mostly describing some facet of technology 5000 years in the future. This one's about a digital acoustic array. "She could hear the wind. A phrase that didn’t really do justice to the soundscape now being rendered by the array of miniature speakers. “The canid smelled the forest” was a completely different sentence from “The man smelled the forest,” not because the words had different meanings, but because the canid’s olfactory apparatus was infinitely superior to that of the man. In a loosely analogous way, the real-time, three-dimensional sonic portrait of the wind generated by the glider’s onboard systems and rendered by the helmet’s speakers was as far beyond what she could sense with unaided ears as the canid’s scenting of the forest was beyond the man’s." This one's about the Eye. "She was now “looking” at an enhanced view of the universe from their current location, which was just inside, but rapidly approaching, the habitat ring. The ring was spinning past them. It was a little like being on the inside of a carousel watching the horses wheel by, except that instead of horses, these were space habitats as much as thirty kilometers across, and they were moving at three thousand meters per second. The task was to shoot between two of them without getting hit. By the standards of orbital mechanics it was no great feat, but it looked shockingly dangerous, and as such it was great fun to watch. As Kath Two looked straight ahead, the habitats seemed to be whizzing across their path like the teeth of a buzz saw. But through an apparent miracle the flivver found a gap between two of them." This one explains why some technology has lagged behind. "The end result, for a young woman in a bookstall above a tube station on the Great Chain, was that she was dwelling in habitats, and being moved around by machines, far beyond the capabilities of Old Earth. She was being served and looked after by robots that were smarter and more robust than their ancestors—the Grabbs and so on that Eve Dinah had programmed on Izzy. And yet the information storage capacity of her tablet, and its ability to connect, were still limited enough that it made sense for her to download books over a cable while that was easy, and to make room for them in the tablet’s storage chips by deleting things she had already read." Also, its not like humanity's capabilities and knowledge of manufacturing is collected in a Wiki. Most of the high-tech stuff is private. There are patents, but they are missing several orders of magnitude of detail on exactly how to mass-produce this stuff. Not only did they make a cultural decision to keep certain abilities grounded in humanity or not as enhanced as much, but they wouldn't have necessarily been able to easily reproduce everything that "old" humanity had discovered. "After that it had all been oral history for about a thousand years, since there had been no paper to write on and no ink to write on it with. Memory devices were scarce and jury-rigged. Every single chip had been used for critical functions such as robots and life support." Can't waste precious non-reproducible tech on frippery. "The carbon cables that held Cradle suspended above Earth’s atmosphere some thirty-six thousand kilometers below diverged here and ran taut through long sheltered passageways all the way to the other end of the Eye, where they came together again and emerged to connect with the Big Rock beyond." The Eye is 160km across! More stuff about the Eye below. "Inward of that were the sixteen orifices where the tether’s primary cables were routed into the frame of the Eye. Each of those cables, though it looked solid from a distance, was actually made of sixteen more cables, and so on and so forth down to a few fractal iterations. All of these ran parallel between the Eye and Cradle. Webbing them together was a network of smaller diagonal tendons, arranged so that if one cable broke, neighboring ones would take the force until a robot could be sent out to repair it. Cables broke all the time, because they’d been hit by bolides or simply because they had “aged out,” and so if you squinted your eyes and looked closely enough at the tether, you could see that it was alive with robots. Some of these were the size of buildings, and clambered up and down the largest cables simply to act as mother ships for swarms of smaller robots that would actually effect the repairs. This had been going on, to a greater or lesser extent, for many centuries." On to the Cradle. "At the time Kath Two and the other passengers arrived, Cradle was dangling two thousand meters above the waters of the Atlantic Ocean, being dragged due west toward where the equator cut across the reshaped coastline of South America. This movement reflected the fact that, thirty-six thousand kilometers above it, the Eye was traversing the habitat ring westward, or CASFON (Clockwise As Seen From Over the North pole). Being nothing more than a weight on the end of a long string, Cradle always followed the movements of the Eye. The city’s dome was open, with its baffles raised to reduce the windblast." "Here and there one might stumble across a museum display in which a few dozen or even a few hundred types of ambots had been rendered inert and mounted to a wall with explanatory plaques beneath them explaining in what millennium they had been invented," There is an emphasis on physicality that is at odds with today's trends of digitalization. No reproduction if VR? In 5000 years? "The Dinan looked to be about forty years old. The scars on his face had been there for a long time. “One of those,” she said, nodding at a nearby tap handle adorned with a handwritten label identifying it as cider." Scars? Why? They can't fix it? Why hand-written notes? On paper? Stephenson seems to be striving for a relatable physicality/relatability that is just not plausible. "If history was any guide, those best at violence might end up ruling over everyone else. Aïda was not about to see her children dominated by the sons and daughters of Tekla." OMG Who cares? Honestly: is the rest of the world so utterly unable to consider the philosophy of wondering why the fuck you should care? There are seven of you left to resurrect humanity. How could anyone possible still care about budging in line or care about whose kin would be left? Not even a single word of consideration that no-one would care? Only Dinah's little stunt with the bomb deviated from this single-mindedness, but she too succumbed to wanting to beat Aïda, in the end. Cradle docking...and how humdrum something so fantastic quickly becomes. Pretty much like we complain about how terrible air travel is when it's just fucking amazing that you can shoot back and forth between continents in less than a day. "A few politicians and generals, who had leaned back from their breakfasts to observe the docking and admire the profile of Cayambe Volcano, bent forward again, picked up their forks, and resumed their conversations. Cradle had just become the largest city on New Earth, and was scheduled to remain so for twenty-four hours." Tyuratam is clearly going to be one of Stephenson's favorites -- the all-rounder. "He had advanced, in other words, to higher levels of mental activity while always doing enough of the floor mopping and glass polishing to remain in physical contact with the business of the bar and in human contact with the staff." "It didn’t really matter that these people were making all sorts of wrong assumptions about how his mind and his body were changing. What mattered to them, he had finally come to realize, was that they believed such things to be true. It was more important to them to believe it than it was for him to explain the facts of the situation, and so he had decided to let them think what they thought and to try to find constructive ways to use it." "Airplanes were expensive, even more so than they had been on Old Earth. They were too large to manufacture in the ring and transport down to the surface and so they, and other large productions such as arks and ships, had to be built in factories on the surface. Typically these lay on the outskirts of Cradle sockets. In any case, planes had to be babied, given that high-capacity turbofan engines were extraordinarily difficult to make." It's nice to see Stephenson acknowledging how deep our production chain is in the 20th and 21 centuries -- and how difficult it would be to reproduce it, even with thousands of years. The focus would have to be the same, and humans would be spending millennia in space, where requirements are different, not a lot of space, . much harsher safety requirements, less focus on pure science and leisure. When you spend the half the time trying to keep bags of meat compartmentalized to avoid large losses and the other half in providing the food, water and air that was otherwise available for free, you can see how it might take a lot longer to building giant airplanes. "The habitats had been only a few kilometers away on Cleft. In fact, nearly all settlement had been confined to Cleft until early in the Second Millennium, when the industrial base had developed to the point where other rocks could be colonized. Many more such communities had been depicted in fictional entertainments than had actually existed. This didn’t matter, though. As the almost totally factitious and romanticized Old West had been to American culture of the twentieth century, so those yarns were to the people of the habitat ring. So in the rare cases when actual settlements of that type were constructed de novo, as here, they tended to be built so as to meet the expectations of people who their whole lives had been watching fiction serials about their Second Millennium precursors." "After a minute of sizing them up, the older Digger stomped forward a couple of paces and spoke in the pre-Zero English that all Spacers knew from the Epic: “Cowards who ran away, you are trespassing on a world that is no longer yours to call home. Begone.”" This is justifiable from the Digger's point of view, right? He sees only that he and his tribe have, against all reasonable odds, survived 5000 years underground, more or less sane (i.e. able to continue a tool-using society) and didn't "abandon" the soil. From the point of view of the Spacers, it's an ungrateful stance, as it fails to acknowledge the Spacer's efforts in terraforming Earth so that they can all be on the surface in the first place. The Diggers technically abandoned the surface as well, just as much as the Spacers. Neither abandoned Earth, as such. Arguably, the Spacers did much more to preserve humanity than the Diggers, which lost much more of history. The Hard Rain was over in 5000 years. Who know how many millions of years it would have taken to replicate the achievements of a couple centuries' worth of dedicated terraforming. The Diggers weren't capable to doing anything about their situation until the Spacers "saved" them. It's unlikely that the Diggers will see it that way, though. "In other words, the Diggers were, as a whole, reacting much as any other group of humans might have done. Which was interesting and important data in and of itself, since much might have changed during five thousand years in the mines." Despite the debt that the Diggers obviously owe the Spacers for having freed them from the underground prison much earlier than would have naturally been possible, we wonder how forthright the Spacers will be in collecting on this debt. Will the Diggers be treated like the Native Americans were by the Europeans? I.e. eliminated as useless, backwoods dross? Or forced to integrate? Or be left to reservations on the surface? [Errata] No errata detected. No shit. Not a single one. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] I've read and enjoyed all of his previous tomes: all three books of The Baroque Cycle, The Cryptonomicon, Anathem, Reamde [1] The ending came up so quickly, and after such a lush level of detail and building of the world 5000 years in the future, that it's hard to imagine that Stephenson doesn't have anything left to say. That said, an outline of a story arc (which he almost certainly has) is not a book and he still has to get up the steam to write it. [1] After having also gotten in Hugh Howey's Wool series, which, while an interesting read, also suffers from a dearth of deeper analysis about the end of humanity, I think maybe I've finally found a topic I can claim for my own book. [1] I don't mean by this that Rufus is stupid enough to believe he'll live to 10,000 years old but that he wants his progeny to survive the Hard Rain. I assume he just expects to live out his remaining normal life span. [1] Even if said coddling would prevent them all from tearing other apart in a final orgy of senseless destruction just before they are well and truly destroyed by the Hard Rain. Sean Probst gives zero fucks bout that, too. Sean Probst cares about not being stupid of facile in pretending that a solution will work when it will clearly not, especially when Sean Probst can make it work. He's a fun character, actually. [1] Utterly cementing his reputation as a giver-of-zero-fucks bad-ass whose only aim is to just get the damned mission done right, said mission being giving humans in space a fighting chance by first providing Amalthea for iron (through his company, prior to the Agent) and then by providing Ymir for volatiles. Humanity is now well and truly sorted. You're welcome, humanity. Mic-drop. Probst out. ]]> </content> </entry> <entry> <title type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Books read in 2014]]> </title> <id>https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3068</id> <link href="https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3068"/> <updated>2015-05-17T17:32:51+02:00</updated> <author> <name type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Marco von Ballmoos]]> </name> <uri>https://earthli.com/users/marco</uri> </author> <summary type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[The Name of the Rose (1983/en) by Umberto Eco This book is about a series of murders in an abbey in 12th-century Italy. A battle rages between opposed forces within the church, with some siding with the Pope and others not. The schism approaches, inquisitional troops roam the land. A very ... ]]> </summary> <content type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Published by marco on 17. May 2015 17:32:51 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ The Name of the Rose (1983/en) by Umberto Eco This book is about a series of murders in an abbey in 12th-century Italy. A battle rages between opposed forces within the church, with some siding with the Pope and others not. The schism approaches, inquisitional troops roam the land. A very well-educated and modern monk, William of Baskerville, arrives at the abbey with his novice Melk in tow, to whom he is imparting not only wisdom but the kind of inquisitive mind that will be capable of acquiring such on its own at some point. The story is told from Melk's point of view as an autobiography ostensibly written many decades later. They arrive in time for the first in a series of murders and investigate it, as far as they are allowed. Intrigues abound, books -- the lifeblood of the abbey -- are pored over, characters are introduced. There is the brutish but sly Salvatore, the crooked Remigio and many others who contribute information as well as layers of intrigue. The abbey's magnificent and labyrinthine library is the centerpiece, with its star-shaped architecture, many rooms, hidden hallways and cryptic signs. As with Foucault's Pendulum, Eco proves himself the master of a genre with which most are only familiar through the pale shadow that is Dan Brown. Eco’s research is legendary, if you can get past the pomposity, which is generally quite easy. I've included "notes, citations and errata" <https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3046> in a separate post. Reamde (2011) by Neal Stephenson The sweeping, all-encompassing nature of the plot reminded me strongly of the Baroque Cycle (also by Stephenson). His attention to detail in some cases was at times tedious, but his dialogue and character development are top-notch. There are plenty of cool heroes here, with only a handful of them belonging to the 1%, unlike so much other escapist fiction these days. The Cryptonomicon took us to Southeast Asia with hackers and programmers and dealt with ultra-secret code-crackers, chip-manufacturing plants and groups of people connected by tenuous though significant strands over decades. This book also takes us to Southeast Asia and to many other places besides, with a good part of it taking place in the Pacific Northwest, on both sides of the U.S./Canadian border. In the detailed notes, I try to summarize what I remember having happened in this book because it was quite literally one of the wildest rides I’ve read, with what would have been ludicrous coincidences from many other authors. Detailed in Stephenson’s style, however, the story arc remained cohesive throughout over 1000 pages. Spoilers abound in the summary below, so proceed with caution. I've included "notes, citations and errata" <https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=2949> in a separate post. Let’s Explore Diabetes with Owls (2013) by David Sedaris This is another collection of essays about Sedaris's life in France and now England and his quirky/crazy family, all told in his inimitable style. He covers topics from child-rearing tips (he has no children of his own) to his former lifestyle as a young, avant-garde artist to his one-man attack on the litter of England, where he'd moved after living in Normandy [1], to commentary on modern life, particularly the egocentricity of it all, not without noting the irony of an author who can't seem to write about anything but himself. I've included "notes, citations and errata" <https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3048> in a separate post. I Never Promised You a Rose Garden (1964) by Joanne Greenberg This is the story of one woman's struggle with mental illness/schizophrenia in a mental institution in the U.S. in the late 50s/early 60s. It is semi-autobiographical and contains what felt like authentic and insightful descriptions of what mental illness feels like. Well-written and evocative examples abound in the citations included below. There are several instances where she writes that her senses just shut down. She sees in only two dimensions; she can barely hear anything; she sees only shades of gray and often through a pinhole, a keyhole, a slit. She cannot feel anything. She burns her flesh and doesn’t feel the pain. She eats but does not taste and does not remember having eaten. She tells of watching other patients in this catatonia, being struck by other wild patients and not reacting at all. They only blink slowly. This is a communication failure between one without senses and one with a private language. It’s utterly fascinating when thought of in these terms. It’s also a metaphor for how the so-called normal people interact with one another, making the same mistakes but less overtly and less catastrophically poorly. On a class, caste or national level, the catastrophic miscommunication is the same. I've included "notes, citations and errata" <https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=2893> in a separate post. The Brothers Karamazov (1880) by Fyodor Dostoyevsky Like Tolstoy’s novels, this was published in series in a magazine of the time called The Messenger. There isn’t much of an encompassing story arc -- at least not when compared to more modern authors, like Stephenson (above) or Martin (below) -- so it’s hard to call it a novel as such. It felt more like a collection of short stories and novellas that included the same cast of characters. The first part is a long introduction to the debauched family of the Karamazovs and the other locals whom they’ve drawn into their tawdry orbit. At the center of the first act is the patriarch Fyodor, who argumentatively fences with his three sons, Ivan, Dmitri (Mitya) and Alexander (Alyosha). There is a fourth (possible) son in the person of Smerdyakov. A subsequent longer section is a sermon by Ivan, as told to Alyosha. This was the most interesting part of the book. It is also the most famous part, for which many seem to excuse the other 95% of relatively mediocre material. With modern literature—that is, written during my time or near to it, say mid-20th century and onward—I can usually determine the intended tone of the writing. Is the author espousing his own views through a character? Or is the author espousing views he does not support through that character? If a character is ludicrous and pompous and just out-and-out wrong-headed, I can laugh along, knowing that the author intended to parody opposing worldviews. However, with Dostoyevsky (and, to a lesser degree, with Tolstoy), while I know what I think of the characters and their views, I am often unsure of what the author intended. I feel like the guy who laughs out loud at a sad movie because he doesn’t realize that the director was being dead-serious. This doesn’t interfere with my enjoyment of the writing—such as it is—but it certainly makes it more difficult to slog through long conversations between what I consider to be fools discussing utter foolishness when I don’t know whether the author is in on the joke. In net effect, I feel that I can read more of the exact same writing when I know it’s a parody than when I feel that the author intended to convey what he or she considers to be deep truths. It may reflect poorly on me, I suppose. Perhaps something is lost in translation or there is too great a distance between the culture that created the literature. I feel that my enjoyment of this type of great literature is too superficial. I see sparks where I feel that I am in on the joke, where I appreciate a bit of cleverness or phrase, but I am saddled with doubt that I am enjoying the right thing. On the other hand, I don’t want to be told by experts how I’m supposed to enjoy the book. I would like to be able to enjoy the ins and outs without help but, short of becoming a fluent reader of Russian and possibly more of an expert on a culture and mindset that lies over a century in the past, this will not be possible. That is, I can enjoy other good works on a much deeper level that I can these great works of art. That’s OK, though. I just wish that people would hedge their recommendation that “everyone should read these” to acknowledge that the level of enjoyment, satisfaction and understanding will vary greatly. While this is always the case, it is all the more likely when the original language and culture of the author of the work stands in such stark contrast to that of the reader. I've included "notes, citations and errata" <https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=2984> in a separate post. The Idiot (1869) by Fyodor Dostoyevsky The idiot is the tale of a Russian expatriate named Prince Lef Muishin who returns to Russia from having lived in Switzerland. He was sent to Switzerland in order to cure his chronic epilepsy, which rendered him stupefied and nearly speechless -- for all intents and purposes an idiot. He returns penniless but quickly ingratiates himself to a noble family, which agrees to take him in, if only for a while. The cast of characters surrounding him is wild and foolish and, as in so many other Russian novels, utterly and completely useless. There is almost no indication of where money comes from—it might just as well grow on trees. The others consider the prince an idiot, but he evinces deeper philosophical thinking than the rest of them put together and is much more eloquent, to boot. I assumed that to be part of the irony intended by the author (see mydiscussion of such assumptions above, in my notes on The Brothers Karamazov). The plot is very bare, but consists of sketches, almost like theater pieces, that feels much more like The Brothers Karamazov than his earlier work Crime and Punishment. Dostoyevsky doesn't waste many words on descriptions of places or people (at least in this novel; see my notes on Crime and Punishment below for a different story). Places have names, women are beautiful and men are distinguished. Occasionally someone is said to have a mustache but this level of descriptiveness seems to exhaust the author and it generally ends there. As in The Brothers Karamazov, the characters ricochet from joy to abject misery within seconds, constantly shouting and rejoicing as if they are capable of feeling only exaggerated emotions. People fall in love in minutes. It’s kind of crazy, really, and sometimes hard to understand how something that reads so much like a Mexican telenovella script can be called some of the world’s best literature. There is almost no metaphor or simile in The Idiot (in contrast to The Brothers Karamazov, which had a bit more philosophizing, particularly by Ivan). I've included "notes, citations and errata" <https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=2991> in a separate post. Crime and Punishment (1866) by Fyodor Dostoyevsky Crime and Punishment is different from Dostoyevsky's later novels -- significantly so. Here the descriptions of the environment, the characters and the situations are visceral and wonderfully done. The misery is heartrending but at least it doesn’t feel plastic and fake. There are descriptions on a par with the masters of the form, Tolstoy or Twain, whose depictions of nature were absolutely lovely and evoked comparably visceral emotion. His descriptions of despair and suffering and entrapment-by-life are unparalleled. The situations he posits seem unreal though they were likely all too real for all too many. The past tense is inappropriate here, for even in the modern day, in the most modern of countries, the cruelty of Dostoyevsky’s reality is played out day after sorrowful, miserable day with no hope or end in sight, other than through the sweet, sweet release of death. The scene with the horse pulling the overloaded carriage (see notes below for citations) is noteworthy because of the depths of human depravity it shows, the utter disregard for another creature’s suffering. A similar "scene with an old, old whale" <https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3011#poor-old-whale> in Moby Dick would remind me of this one. The scene is presumably a metaphor for the way in which the less fortunate are misused and mistreated and depleted by those above them, even if only a very little bit above them. Even if they themselves aren’t all so fortunate, all the more reason to dump on those less capable of defending themselves, all the more reason to make others suffer as they themselves are made to suffer by those above them. Or maybe it’s a cautionary tale of drunkenness; it's hard to tell. The false palliatives of religion are next on the chopping block, with its purveyors offering advice that is completely at odds with the common logic of life. Especially and exactly for those who suffer the most, that have the least to thank a supposedly benevolent but also mysterious and uncaring God. I've included "notes, citations and errata" <https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3076> in a separate post. Age of Ultron (2013) This is the comic-book series on which the upcoming Avengers movie is based. It was a bit woodenly written, but what the hell, I'd just finished three Dostoyevsky novels: what did I expect? The artwork wasn't really my style and the story was about time-travel, in an effort to stop Ultron. See the Wikipedia article for a full summary. It passed the time. Superior Spider-Man (2013) This is the series of Spider-Man comics that followed Doctor Octavius's physical death, during which he imposed his psyche and memories -- his entire mind -- into the brain of Peter Parker. This pushes Peter's mind to the background and Octavius takes over as Spider-Man. People notice as he finally starts to take charge in a way that Peter never did. Despite Peter's quite advanced intellect, he never quite had the willpower of Doc Ock, and never achieved nearly as much as when Ock is in the driver's seat. Doc employs his penchant for technological devices to enhance Spider-Man's reach and power and becomes a tyrant over New York -- although it's admitted that he's doing quite a good job of crime-fighting. All in all, a decent comic series. The Team-Up editions include some lovely, lovely work by Joe Madureira. Moby-Dick; or, The Whale (1851) by Herman Melville The impression I got of this work when I tried reading it as a teenager caused me to avoid reading it as an adult, until now. This is a pity because it is, for the most part, a wonderfully written and action-packed tale that puts you remarkably into the heart of a dangerous profession like whaling with a vividness I didn’t think possible. Not only that, but there are nuggets of wonderfully written wisdom strewn liberally throughout. The descriptions of the action are as visceral as Tolstoy’s. "Few are the foreheads which like Shakespeare’s or Melancthon’s rise so high, and descend so low, that the eyes themselves seem clear, eternal, tideless mountain lakes; and all above them in the forehead’s wrinkles, you seem to track the antlered thoughts descending there to drink, as the Highland hunters track the snow prints of the deer." Highly recommended. Loved it. I've included "notes, citations and errata" <https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3011> in a separate post. Dracula (1897) by Bram Stoker This book charges out of the gate and is quite enthralling—no pun intended—in a very modern way. Unfortunately, after the whole merry band of characters is introduced and expertly knit together, the book bogs down in professions of fealty and undying love and respect and myriad other forms of swearing undying and lifelong allegiance to one another. There is also the not easily overlooked heavily misogynistic aspect of the novel. The ladies Lucy and Mina are introduced as very clever and very capable...for ladies, that is. These females make the most of their paucity of gray matter with which the good Lord blessed them and all others of their ilk, those ill-fated bearers of only one, solitary type of chromosome. Stoker makes sure to let the inadequacy of the female thinking capacity be extensively explained by the women themselves, which seems to be the only thing at which the feeble intellect of a woman is capable of excelling. They are not the only ones who suffer thusly. Dracula is also not considered very clever and possessed of only a child brain. The group of gentlemen was perhaps revolutionary at the time, but is now somewhat trite: a doctor in charge of an insane asylum (Dr. Seward); a Renaissance man, well-learned in all manner of arcane minutiae who also happens to be well-acquainted with the dark corners of the occult, Dr. Van Helsing; a brave, competent and not unwealthy Texan in the form of Quincey Morris; a Lord Gondalming (Arthur Holmwood) who throws money and influence about; and, finally, Jonathan Harker, a lawyer who just happened to have come into a magnificent inheritance. The two ladies are, of course, more beautiful than anything this side of the angels. Not much tension there. It's kind of like reading Stieg Larsson. Read the first half, it's quite good. The second half drags tremendously. I've included "notes, citations and errata" <https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3021> in a separate post. Raising Steam (2014) by Terry Pratchett The latest -- and likely last [2] -- of the DiscWorld books feels a bit like a last hurrah. Pratchett's style is at times reminiscent of his old self, but is for at least half of the book much more stilted and preachier than was his wont. Still, the flight smooths out after a bit and it's entertaining enough. There is no tension, as such, since you know that no-one important is going to die. All of the characters fulfill the roles that you expect them to. There are goblins and golems and gargoyles and gnomes as well as dwarves, vampires, igors, trolls and zombies. Humans are there too, of course. I also read Snuff at around the same time and preferred that by a wide margin. I've included "notes, citations and errata" <https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3086> in a separate post. Don Quixote (1605) by Miguel de Cervantes I read the first half of this wonderful classic in 2014; the second half followed in 2015. This is a consistently wonderfully written -- and translated -- classic that deserves to be one. Does it sometimes get repetitive? Is it, at times, a pastiche of whatever Cervantes happened to be writing about? Does it feel amazingly modern, considering it was written in the late 16th and early 17 centuries? Yes to all. I don't know to whom I could recommend reading a gigantic classic text of this kind, but if you at all think it might be for you, you shouldn't be disappointed. I've included "notes, citations and errata" <https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3035> in a separate post. Spider-Man: Ends of the Earth (2012) This story pits Spider-Man against Doctor Octopus. Octopus is dying but he has gathered the Sinister Six and equipped them with a lot of technology that makes them much more dangerous. Spider-Man is not really Spider-Man anymore, not like the Spider-Man of the 20th century. He has a high-tech job, all the money he needs, he's an Avenger, he no longer has a worry in the world. He's changed. He wears high-tech armor, he flies around with rocket boots, he's more like Iron Man than Spider-Man. In the first six books, he shot his webs once. The dialogue is flat, stilted and pathetic. Most of it reads like jingoistic propaganda -- Sabra fights for Israel! Kangaroo fights for Australia! Union Jack for the U.K.! This is much worse than I remember. It's about on par with the writing in the Civil War series: no nuance and just Libertarian or black/white/good/bad claptrap. For example: Sabra says at one point, "I'm not sure accepting this job counts as "smart." But if it will save Israelis, I accept it." When she is shot in the head by something names "Crossbones", he is described as a "Brutal Assassin [who] enjoys sandwiches." Then there's Union Jack, who says that "[p]art of the reason I ride this old Triumph motorbike [is that it's] British workmanship from way back when we had workmanship." This is just before he's attacked by someone called "Slaymaster MK II". What the hell is that? That's a stupid hero name, a name for the Unreal games, a name for the Pokemon generation. And the cast of shitty characters just keeps on coming: GoGo Tomago, Everwraith, it's just awful. This is just lazy writing. It's not funny or piquant, as Spider-Man used to be. Mysterio and Chameleon are the only ones with anything approaching humorous banter. Not recommended. The Long Earth (2013) by Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter This is the story of a near-future Earth where alternate universes are just a “step” away. Each is a complete Earth, most of which are almost entirely unpopulated. Some people can step with a gadget, others without one and others can't step at all, remaining "trapped" on the mainline Earth. The story introduces this situation, provides some examples and then sends Joshua -- a natural stepper -- on an adventure far up the long line of Earths, accompanied by an AI named Lobsang. As usual, Baxter's parts are technologically solid, but immediately recognizable for his wooden characterizations. Similarly, Pratchett's style shines through in a few lovely, though shorter, chapters. It was good fun; recommended. I've included "notes, citations and errata" <https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3087> in a separate post. Snuff (2012) by Terry Pratchett The vampires, the dwarves and the trolls of Discworld all had their liberation stories. This is the story of how the goblins of Discworld came to be accepted into society. The goblins show their penchant for creation and technology and are taken up in the clacks network. Vimes is on vacation at his wife's ancestral home, of which he is technically the Lord. He of course has nothing in common with the self-styled aristocrats who are horrible, horrible racists and scheming bastards, trading in goblin slaves. This would all be worked out in the end in a rollicking Discworld story worthy of standing with Pratchett's best. Recommended. I've included "notes, citations and errata" <https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3088> in a separate post. Game of Thrones (1996) by George R.R. Martin This is book one of the Song of Ice and Fire. Oh my goodness, where to begin? I'm not sure that there's any point in summarizing a plot or in listing characters. This is a very tightly and well-written novel with a lot of lovely description, interesting characters, dozens of locations and storylines, all expertly interweaved and laid out by Mr. Martin. This first novel sets things up quite nicely, staying well-paced and interesting while introducing many of the characters that will accompany us through the next 5000 pages (so far -- two more books to go). The span and breadth of his vision are breathtaking -- as is the execution. Martin’s writing style is perfectly suited to this genre. Though I’d heard that some of his prose was a bit long-winded, focused too much on loving and languorous descriptions of food, I found it to be quite tightly written and easy reading. In fairness, I read this book after having read a lot of nineteenth-century literature, so perhaps I was better prepared than most. Summary: Ned Stark is in King's Landing, but not for long. Robb Stark starts to raise the North. Jon is on the Wall, Daenarys gives birth a few times. I've included "notes, citations and errata" <https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3036> in a separate post. Clash of Kings (1999) by George R.R. Martin This is book two of the Song of Ice and Fire. It continues the story begun in Game of Thrones. It takes us up to the Battle of Blackwater Bay, Jon's foray into the North as a ranger and Daenarys's departure from Qarth. Watchmen (1986--1987) by Alan Moore These comic books are about the history of a troupe of self-nominated heroes from the 1930s up until the present-day of the late 1980s, when the world is threatened by nuclear conflict. In that, author Alan Moore crafted a world that only slightly diverged from reality. That is, it was close enough to be familiar and not require any explanation, but divergent enough to be fascinating. Part-time narrator and uncompromising literalist Rorschach stole the show, unable to understand how the solution to the world’s greatest problem could be rooted in an even bigger lie. Recommended. I've included "notes, citations and errata" <https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3082> in a separate post. A Storm of Swords (2000) by George R.R. Martin This is book three of the Song of Ice and Fire. This one takes us up to the Red Wedding, follows Arya and her adventures with Beric Dondarrion as well as The Hound, finds Tyrion naming the Red Viper as his champion against The Mountain, and sees us through to his bloody escape. Jon rises in the ranks at the Wall (quite far) and Daenerys conquers in the East, stopping in Meereen to rule for a time. I've included "notes, citations and errata" <https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3084> in a separate post. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] Sedaris would eventually have part of the highway named after him for efforts spanning several years. [1] Yep. It was his last. RIP Sir Terry. ]]> </content> </entry> <entry> <title type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea by Mark Blyth (read in 2015)]]> </title> <id>https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3136</id> <link href="https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3136"/> <updated>2015-05-17T11:33:03+02:00</updated> <author> <name type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Marco von Ballmoos]]> </name> <uri>https://earthli.com/users/marco</uri> </author> <summary type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA["Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is" ... ]]> </summary> <content type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Published by marco on 17. May 2015 11:33:03 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I've failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an interest in this book, then I'm happy for you." This excellent book provides an approachable analysis of the recent history of the financial crisis that started in 2006, exploded in 2008 and is still being sorely felt by many in 2015. Blyth skewers the main idea for solving the crisis: austerity for the majority of the public. Why is austerity not the solution? He lists many reasons, but the main one is that it doesn't work. It has never worked. Accurate histories show that it doesn't work. Inaccurate studies claim that it might work. Worse, the crisis was caused by private machinations and profit-taking and the price is paid by the public -- who've already paid the price in the form of a severely impacted economy. The public pays twice for the mistakescrimes of the few, while the few take their profit, take no punishment and line themselves up for the next reaping. How do they get away with it? By selling the idea of austerity of all: if our economy tanked, then it must be our collective fault and we must all shoulder the blame and tighten our belts. The private losses are bailed out by the state and instantly transformed into a story of state profligacy. It's like a child who crashes his car, gets his father to buy him a new one, then mocks said father for not being able to pay the rent. Never mind that it is exactly these jackasses who aren't tightening their belts -- we can't police everyone, can we? Never mind that exactly those who aren't tightening their belts are actually the ones who caused the problems in the first place. With their crimes. Some will argue that what happened was perfectly legal -- but that is only because those who commit crimes at high levels are careful to ensure that the crimes they wish to commit are first made legal. This is an important book. Blyth cover the minutiae of recent history, covers the history of austerity over the last century, examines the writings and recommendations of oft-cited and great economists of the past -- Locke, Hume, Smith, Keynes, among others -- and looks at recent academic studies that are clearly if not deliberately fraudulent. He is a bit cagey about coming right out and accusing world leaders of collusion and corruption to serve their rich buddies and financial partners, but we can excuse an academic a bit of hedging. See below for my "less-generous analysis" <#less-generous-analysis> and "Blyth's possible solutions" <#idea-for-solution>. "When world leaders keen to legitimize the damage that they have already done to the lives of millions of their fellow citizens reach for examples such as these to vindicate their actions, applauding these countries for creating misery, it shows us one this above all. Austerity remains an ideology immune to facts and basic empirical refutation." [Citations] "What changed was of course the global financial crisis of 2007--2008 that rumbles along in a new form today. The cost of bailing, recapitalizing, and otherwise saving the global banking system has been, depending on , as we shall see later, how you count it, between 3 and 13 trillion dollars. Most of that has ended up on the balance sheets of governments as they absorb the costs of the bust, which is why we mistakenly call this a sovereign debt crisis when in fact it is a transmuted and well-camouflaged banking crisis." "This is, as we shall see over the next two chapters, why all of Europe needs to be austere, because each national state's balance sheet has to act as a shock absorber for the entire system. Having already bailed out the banks, we have to make sure that there is room on the public balance sheet to backstop them. That's why we have austerity. It's still all about saving the banks." Or, more precisely: having already used up an entire buffer to save the banks, we have to cut corners everywhere else in order to build up enough of a buffer to be able to save them again when the time comes, which it certainly will. That is, it's not about saving the banks (present tense) but about being able to save the banks again (future, not subjunctive tense, because it's certainly going to happen). "There is no crisis of sovereign debt caused b sovereigns' spending unless you take account of actual spending and continuing liabilities caused by the rupture of national banking systems. What begins as a banking crisis ends with a banking crisis, even it if goes through the states' accounts. But there is a politics of making it appear to be the states' fault such that those who made the bust don't have to pay for it. Austerity is not just the price of saving the banks. It's the price that the banks want someone else to pay." "Since there are usually more debtors than creditors at any given time, and since creditors are by definition people with money to lend, democracy has, according to some, an inflationary bias. The politics of cutting inflation therefore take of [sic] the form of restoring the "real" value of money by pushing the inflation rate down through "independent" (from the rest of us) central banks. Creditors win, debtors lose. One can argue about the balance of benefits, but it's still a class-specific tax." "In essence, democracy, and the redistributions it makes possible, is a form of asset insurance for the rich, and yet, through austerity, we find that those with the most assets are skipping on the insurance payments." "We have spent too much" those at the top say, rather blithely ignoring the fact that this "spending" was the cost of saving their assets with the public purse. Meanwhile, those at the bottom are being told to "tighten their belts" by people who are wearing massively larger pants and who show little interest in contributing to the cleanup. "You can blame regulators for being lax or negligent and politicians for caving to banking interests all you like, but this was a quintessentially private-sector crisis, and it was precisely how you get a multi-billion-dollar financial panic out of a bunch of defaulting mortgages. But it was not yet sufficient to cause a global crisis. To get there, you have to understand how the structure of these mortgage securities combined with unbacked insurance policies called "credit default swaps" (CDSs) [1] to produce a "correlation bomb" that spread the repo [2] market crisis into the global banking system. Again, this had nothing to do with states and their supposedly profligate spending habits and everything to do with weaknesses internal to the private sector." "With a decade of house-price increases telling everyone that house prices only go up, and with these new mortgage derivatives seemingly eliminating a correlation problem that was deemed small to being with and was now insurable with a CDS, you could almost being to believe that you had what bankers call a "free option": an asset with zero downside and a potentially unlimited upside, and one that is rated AAA by the ratings agencies. The fact that many investment funds are legally required to hold a specific proportion of their assets as AAA securities pumped demand still further." "Repo runs can start it, and derivatives can amplify it, but to be truly blindsided by a crisis of this magnitude you need to have a theory of risk that denies that catastrophic events can happen in the first place, and then leave it entirely to the self-interested private sector to manage that risk. Unfortunately, almost the entire global financial system worked with just such a theory of risk management." The last sentence here betrays a writing style -- and thinking style -- that presumes innocence in the face of a tremendous amount of evidence to the contrary. Blyth is not a prosecutor and has no obligation to avoid the obvious hypothesis that the entire financial system did exactly this because it allowed them to capitalize on massive short-term gains while letting the rest of the world clean up the mess. His formulation leaves the door open to them just having fooled themselves into thinking that a good thing could last forever. They didn't fool themselves. They knew it was bullshit. But if they could convince everyone else that it wasn't bullshit, they could get away with some massive short-terms gains before the whole game blew up, they pulled up stakes and got the hell out of dodge. A classic con, no more, no less. Just at a global scale. "Like the proverbial drunk looking for his keys only under the lamppost, we are drawn to see the "normal" distributions in decidedly nonnormal worlds because that is where we find the light." "The flaw in the logic was once again the expectation that the whole cannot be different from its component parts, that the denial of fallacies of composition haunts us once again. The neoclassical insistence on grounding everything in the micro suggested that if you make the parts safe (individual banks armed with the right risk models), then you make the whole (banking system) safe. But it turned out that the whole was quite different from the sum of its parts because the interaction of the parts produced outcomes miles away from the expectation of the instruction sheet, a sheet that was quite wrong about the world in the first place." "I hope this demonstrates that any narrative that locates wasteful spending by governments prior to 2007 as the cause of the crsis is more than just simply wrong; it is disingenuous and partisan. In fact, average OECD debt before the crisis was doing down, not up. What happened was banks promised growth, delivered losses, passed the cost on to the state, and then the state got the blame for generating the debt, and the crisis, in the first place, which of course, must be paid for by expenditure cuts. The banks may have made the losses, but the citizenry will pay for them. This is a pattern we see repeatedly in the crisis." "Maybe the $13 trillion coast to date was a price worth paying? Perhaps. But only if the costs had been shared according to both ability to pay and responsibility for the bust, but they were not. "As we shall see in the next chapter, what was a private-sector banking crisis was rechristened by political and financial elites as a crisis of sovereign state in a matter of months. [...] Europe usually sits to the left of the United states politically, but it was acting far to its right economically by mid-2010." "The ideal policy back in 2009 would have cost around 50 billion euros. It would have required either the ECB, or Germany as its major creditor, to buy the secondary-market Greek debt that was subject to near-term rollover risk, bury it somewhere deep in its balance sheet, and walk away. Why didn't they do so? One answer lies in German politics. There was a regional election coming up in Germany, and it was politically easier to blame the Greeks for being feckless than it was to explain to the German public that the ECB needed to bail them out for reasons of systemic risk. [3] The other answer lies in the ECB statutes that forbid one country to bail out another for fear of generating moral hazard." "Fearing financial Armageddon, the Irish government issued a blanket guarantee for the entire banking system's liabilities, and that 400 percent of assets as GDP on the private sector's balance sheet very suddenly became the Irish public's problem." "Ireland and Spain were quintessential private-sector-housing-cum-banking crises, governed by states more fiscally prudent than Germany, where the risks were socialized while the profits were privatized. In all cases, private-sector weaknesses ended up creating public-sector liabilities that European publics now have to pay for with austerity programs that make the situation worse rather than better. The fiscal crisis in all these countries was the consequence of the financial crisis washing up on their shores, not its cause. To say it is the cause is to deliberately, and politically, confuse cause and effect." "Just as in 2008, these banks were borrowing overnight to fund loans over much longer periods." "recall that in the United States in 2008, the collateral being posted for repo borrowing began to lose value. As such, the firms involved had to post more collateral to borrow the same amount of money, or they ran out of liquidity real fast, which is what happened to the US banking system. The same thing began to happen in Europe. While mortgage-backed securities, the collateral of choice for US borrowers in the US repo markets, were AAA-rated, for European borrowers in London the collateral of choice was AAA-rated European sovereign debt. Just as US borrowers needed a substitute for T-bills and turned to AAA mortgage bonds, so European borrowers had too-few nice, safe German bonds to pledge as collateral since the core banks were busy dumping them for periphery debt. So they began to pledge the periphery debt they had purchased en masse, which was, after all, rated almost the same, an policy that was turbocharged by a EC directive that "established that the bonds of Eurozone sovereigns would be treated equally in repo transactions" in order to build more liquid European markets. By 2008, PIIGS debt was collateralizing 25 percent of all European repo transactions. You can begin to see the problem." From a hypothetical letter to the Voting Public: "The entire economy is in recession, people are paying back their debts, and no one is borrowing. This causes prices to fall, thus making the banks even more impaired and economy ever more sclerotic. This is literally nothing we can do about this. We need to keep the banks solvent or they collapse, and they are so big and interconnected that even one of them going down could blow up the whole system. As awful as austerity is, it's nothing compared to a general collapse of the financial system, really. "So we can't inflate and pass the cost on to savers, we can't devalue and pass the cost on to foreigners, and we can't default without killing ourselves, so we need to deflate, for as long as it takes to get the balance sheets of these banks into some kind of sustainable shape. This is why we can't let anyone out of the euro. If the Greeks, for example, left the euro,we might be able to weather i, since most banks have managed to sell on their Greek assets. But you can't sell on Italy. There's too much of it. The contagion risk would destroy everyone's banks. So the only policy tool we have to stabilize the system is for everyone to deflate against Germany, which is a really hard thing to do even in the best of times. it's horrible, but there it is. Your unemployment will save the banks, and in the process save the sovereigns who cannot save the banks themselves, and thus save the euro. We, the political classes of Europe, would like to thank you for your sacrifice." "It turns out that cross-border borrowing in euros is, when bond markets reflect true risk premiums, just like borrowing in a foreign currency, with the result that banks increasingly want to match local loans with local assets. Although there is no exchange-rate risk to cover, if your sovereign's yields go up and your parent economy deflates, then your ability to pay back your loans declines as if you were making payments in a depreciating currency." "There was of course a worry that some states may not follow the rules, so more rules were put in place. But there was never much attention paid to the possibility that private actors, such as banks, would behave badly. Yet this is exactly what happened, and the EU is still blaming sovereigns, tying them down with new rules, and insisting that this will solve the problem. We can but think again about the old adage that drinks only look for their keys under the lamppost because that's where the light is." "However, as Karl Polanyi noted at the end of World War II, there is nothing natural about markets. Turning people into wage laborers, securing the private ownership of land, even inventing capital and preserving its monetary form are all deeply political projects that involve courts, regulation, enforcement, bureaucracy, and all the rest. Indeed, gaining control of the state by the merchant class was a defining feature of early capitalism." "As Locke argued, "whatsoever then he removes out of eh state [of] nature...[and] mixed his labor with...[he] thereby makes it his property." Now, you might think that other folks at the time would object to someone taking possession of the common land this way. But Locke insists that, "the taking of this or that part [of land] does not depend on the express consent of all the commoners" because "there was still enough [for all] and as good left." "Having dispatched the problem of distribution by assuming infinite abundance, Locke maintains that the only real argument against private property is the issue of spoilage, that more is taken than can be used, which God would not like. Luckily, then, time and habits have given us a device called money that allows us to get over the problem of spoilage because we can store money and swap it for consumables at any given time." I'm assuming that Blyth's tongue was planted firmly in his cheek when writing the last sentence. "For Hume, merchants are the catalyst for trade and the creators of wealth. They are, according to Hume, "one of the most useful races of men, who serve as agents between ...parts of the state." As a consequence, "it is necessary, and reasonable, that a considerable part of the commodities and labor [produced] should belong to the merchant, to whom, in great measure, they are owing." While "lawyers and physicians beget no industry," only merchants can "encrease industry, and by also increasing frugality, give a great command of that industry to particular members of society." Those "particular members of society" would, of course, be Hume and those like him: the merchant classes." "For [Adam] Smith, the act of saving drives investment, not consumption. Why? Because the wealth of the nation is its total income. Take what is used for the reproduction of labor (wages) out of this income, and what is left is profit. Profits are then reinvested in the economy via merchants' savings, which are lent out to the productive members of society (other merchants) to invest. Today we call this supply-side economics. Investment both drives consumption and makes consumption possible -- not the other way around. Because of this "the greater part of it [income] will naturally be destined for the employment of industry." Underlying this worldview is a particularly Scottish psychology that is worth unpacking because it suggests why the idea of austerity has such moral force, even today." "Most interestingly, [Smith] is disarmingly honest concerning the political effects of capitalism, noting that "wherever there is property there is great inequality," such that " the acquisition of valuable and extensive property...necessarily requires the establishment of civil government." A civil government that, " in so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defense of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all."" "First, [Keynes] showed that although any worker can accept a wage cut to price himself into employment, if all workers did this, it would in the aggregate lower consumption and prices, and thus increase the real wage (the wage-minus-price effects), leaving the worker who "adjusted" poorer and just as unemployed. Second, he showed that under conditions of uncertainty about the future, it is irrational for any investor to invest rather than sit on cash, with the result that if investors look to each other for signals about what to do, they all sit on cash and no one will invest. Thus we bring about, by out collective self-interested actions, the very depression we are individually trying to avoid." "In this world spending, and with it debt, especially by the government, becomes good policy. Individual saving as a virtue, in contrast, falls to the paradox of thrift: if we all save (the very definition of austerity), we all fail together as the economy shrinks form want of demand." "Most importantly for Schumpeter, this scale-shift takes a cultural toll. Whereas in the past "the rugged individualism of Galileo was the individualism of the rising capitalist class", today, technology and bureaucracy have together removed the possibilities for such individuals to thrive. As he laments, "the capitalist process rationalizes behavior and ideas and by doing so chases from our minds...metaphysical belief" such that "economic progress becomes depersonalized and automatized." When large firms take over production it is not the entrepreneur's income that is replaced. After all, he gets shares in these new conglomerates. Rather, his social function is made redundant, "the stock exchange [being] a poor substitute for the holy grail" This may lead to a material progress, to more consumption and all that Keynes thinks important, but it is for Schumpeter a morally empty future. It is also one that invites jealousy from the lower orders who, led on by classes of functionless left-leaning intellectual who resent capitalism, have become accustomed to ever-rising standards of living and can no longer accept the dislocations of the market. Thus, the disorder of the previous decades is little more than the inability of the spoiled masses to accept necessary adjustments." "If Schumpeter reminds you of Ayn Rand's character John Galt, he should: he's cut from the same conservative cloth. And, as in Galt's long speech at the end of Atlas Shrugged, what started as a robust defense of economic liberalism ends up being a weak retreat from it. With the Keynesian view ascendant, conservatives like Schumpeter had a choice: admit that they were wrong (or at least accommodate themselves to the new ideas that seemed to fit the facts better than the old ones) or find something else to talk about. Schumpeter chose the latter path, and so he spoke about the death of saving, the end of family virtue, and the triumph of bureaucracy." "Especially when parliaments get involved, elements of the administrative order can be captured by the most powerful members of the transactional order, hence the fear of cartels and private power." "In the case of Greece and Italy, if that meant deposing a few democratically elected governments, then so be it. "[...] The basic objection made by late-developing states, such as the countries of East Asia, to the Washington Consensus/Anglo-American idea "liberalize and then growth follows" was twofold. First, this understanding mistakes the outcomes of growth, stable public finances, low inflation, cost competitiveness, and so on, for the causes of growth. second, the liberal path to growth only makes sense if you are an early developer, since you have no competitors -- pace the United Kingdom in the eighteenth century and the United States in the nineteenth century. Yet in the contemporary world, development is almost always state led." Blyth references Ha-Joon Chang's Kicking Away the Ladder in a footnote, but it seems to me that he either mis-stated or at least failed to emphasize the full point. He got the first half right: liberalization of an economy before it is on at least somewhat equal footing with potential competitors or trade partners is a fool's game that benefits only those competitors or trade partners. The second point that Chang made was that neither Britain nor the US did this either during their own buildup. In fact, they were both highly protectionist, despite there being no real competition, as Blyth notes. Chang would go on to show that every economy considered great today started off extremely protectionist and gradually dropped trade barriers and increased liberalization only after it knew it would be the primary beneficiary of such policies. "Suitably incentivized, entrepreneurs hire more people and buy more materials, which pushes up prices and wages. This produces a classic short-run monetary stimulus effect that beings to show up in rising prices, particularly asset prices, which encourages still more borrowing. The underlying economy, however, has not changed. There is simply more money chasing fewer goods: an inflation. Realizing their error, banks now stand to make losses, so they do everything they can to not realize those losses. They extend more credit, lower interest rates further, and generally kick the can down the road." "Companies may be sitting on piles of ash and not investing, but the recession is no, as Keynes would have you believe, the capitalists' fault. Rather, investors are quite reasonably covering the risk of backdoor expropriation by the state through inflation or devaluation. The fear of the state taking away your property -- the original liberal nightmare -- rears its head once more. Instead, "public opinion is perfectly right to see the crisis...as the consequence of the policy of the banks" Consequently, the sum of the Austrian view is that we should have let the banks fail and the restart the system." "One of America's Great Depression-era monetary economists, Irving Fisher, analyzed how, much to his dismay, depressions do not in fact "right themselves" owing to a phenomenon called debt inflation. Simply put, as the economy deflates, debts increase as incomes shrink, making it harder to pay off debt the more the economy craters. This, in turn, causes consumption to shrink, which in the aggregate pulls the economy down further and makes the debt to be paid back all the greater." "It's a great instruction sheet -- so long as you are indeed the late-developing, high-savings, high-technology, and export-driven economy in question. If you are not, as the periphery of the Eurozone is finding out, then it's a one-way ticket to permanent austerity." "As a consequence, policy making should be delegated away from democratically elected politicians to independent conservative central bankers who will dish out the bad medicine when required because their jobs do not depend upon pleasing constituents -- except, perhaps, their constituents in the financial sector who benefit from ultralow inflation [...] "[...] "Their evidentiary basis, however, was another matter entirely. The fact that these theories rest upon incredibly narrow operational premises and have scant evidence going for them is beside the point. That they are highly effective policy rhetorics that only narrow the menu of choice for governments is what matters." "Similarly, the notion that unemployment is voluntary is, in the context of the current self-inflicted wound in Europe, downright offensive. Real workers must pay bills and feed families from jobs that have fixed hours and fixed wage rates. The idea that workers "trade off" labor against leisure by figuring out the real wage rate and then slacking off or going on an indefinite unpaid leave is the type of thinking that leads us to see the Great Depression as a giant, unexpected, and astonishingly long unpaid vacation for millions of people: original, yes; helpful no. "Public choice theory, like any universal gizmo, has not only helped revolutionize the institutional relationship between voters, politicians, and bankers in democratic societies, it has become, as Daniel Dennett said about evolution in Darwin's Dangerous Idea, the "universal acid" that eats away everything it touches by turning everything into a principal-agent/rent-seeking problem." "What Karl Polanyi once said about the failed ideas of an earlier era also rings true in this instance: by the standards of the IMF, the Washington Consensus's "spectacular failure...did not destroy its authority at all. Indeed, its partial eclipse may have even strengthened its hold since it enabled its defenders to argue that the incomplete application of its principles was the reason for every and any difficulty laid to its charge." Once again, when it comes to austerity, mere facts seldom get in the way of a good ideology. And a good ideology, in the absence of supporting facts, can always supply a few good models to generate those facts when needed." "Alesina and Ardagna being by noting that the ballooning of debts and deficits across the OECD is due in large part to the "bailout[s] of various types in the financial sector." However, about this they "have nothing to say". What they do have to say is that regardless of how we got into this mess, the only way out is through cutting the state." "Austerity's continuing application may well result in the eventual breakup of the Eurozone and have political repercussions that the weak institutions of the EU are unlikely to withstand." "As Fred Block put it with justified irony, "The American contribution to...the problem was to lend Germany huge sums of capital, which were then used to finance reparations payments." If you think this sounds a little like continually giving the European periphery loans that those countries can never hope to pay back because of their already high debt burdens, again, you would not be completely wrong." "Given the relatively large size of the US domestic economy, increasing domestic demand was bound to have a significant effect. Second, as a consequence, the net effect of Roosevelt's policies was to increase government spending and debt while bringing unemployment down to 17 percent by 1936. No good dead goes unpunished, of course, and this turnaround in the economy by late 1936 created demands for a return to balanced budgets, sound finance, and America's second round of austerity in 1937." "So when Churchill put Britain back on gold in 1925, the domestic economy was quite deliberately going to be squeezed so that the value of sterling and, not coincidentally, the profits of finance, would be maintained." "The currency depreciation that getting off gold facilitated helped restore exports, but with the Treasury view of the economy still dominant, Britain continued to stagnate with endemic high unemployment until rearmament, the crudest form of stimulus, created the conditions for recovery. Inflation, the great fear of the rentier class, never appeared. Never once did austerity help." "In Vienna in 2009, and long before any Greek or Irish bailout, an agreement was signed between the Western banks, the troika (EU-IMF-EC), and Romania, Hungary, and Latvia that committed Western European banks to keeping their funds in their Eastern European banks if these governments committed to austerity to stabilize local banks' balance sheets. The Vienna agreement prevented the liquidity crunch from spreading to the rest of the REBLLS, so long as the same balance-sheet guarantee (austerity) was applied elsewhere -- and it was. Once again, it was all about saving the banks, and the bill for doing so, in the form of austerity, high interest rates, unemployment, and the rest, was dumped once again on the public sector balance sheet of the states concerned." "Let's stop for a moment and take this all in. A set of patently unsustainable and unstable economies financed by foreign credit bubbles blew up, quite predictably, the minute there was a shock to these economies. These countries are now supposed to be the role models for the rest of the world to follow? Spain is in bad shape, certainly, but is it really supposed to hollow out its economy entirely and live off more foreign borrowed money? Is Italy supposed to abandon its competitive export sector and sell of its banks? That would be what "following the example of the REBLLs" actually means. In fact, these so-called "models" are little more than the worst features of Ireland, Spain, and Greece combined, with no compensatory airbags, a sideline in divide-and-rule ethnic politics, and a libertarian instruction sheet." "When world leaders keen to legitimize the damage that they have already done to the lives of millions of their fellow citizens reach for examples such as these to vindicate their actions, applauding these countries for creating misery, it shows us one this above all. Austerity remains an ideology immune to facts and basic empirical refutation." "Part of what follows is a conjecture -- the business model of investment banking may be dying. If so, all the money we spent and have lost in recession was wasted on a system that may be in terminal decline anyway." "[...] deprived of fuel for the asset cycle, all those wonderful paper assets that can be based off these booms -- commodity ETFs, interest rate swaps, CDOs and CDSs -- to name but a few -- will cease to be the great money machine that they have been to date. Having pumped and dumped every asset class on the planet, finance may have exhausted its own growth model. The banks' business model for the past twenty-five years may be dying. If so, saving it in the bust is merely, and most expensively, prolonging the agony." But, most importantly, the purveyors of the dying business model are able to escape any negative effects of its death. Instead, those that never benefited from it in the first place will bear the cost of its funeral. The bankers have a win-win. They win while the public is still willing to be fleeced by the game, and they win when the public buys the next con: that the banks must be bailed or it will be worse for everyone. "Meanwhile, what growth there is seems to be on the retail rather than the investment banking side. But retail depends more directly on the real economy, which is shrinking because of austerity. In sum, we may have impoverished a few million people to save an industry of dubious social utility that is now on its last legs." I would strike "dubious" here. "Irish debt to GDP was 32 percent in 2007. Today it stands at 108.2 percent after three years of austerity. Indeed, if the cost of NAMA is added to the national accounts, Ireland's debt-to-GDP ratio would rival that of Greece. Ireland bailed its banks, and then banked on an export-led recovery without a devaluation that was based upon phantom exports that create very few jobs and that are only made possible by tax dodging. Apparently this is Greece's role model." NAMA is the National Asset Management Agency, which was formed to manage the debt burden of 4x GDP taken on by the Irish government when it agreed to bail out its banks for 100 cents on the dollar. The tax dodgers to which Blyth refers are American high-tech companies -- primarily Google and Apple -- that expatriate their profits in order to avoid paying US taxes. "So we are talking taxes, which no one likes. But since I found out that in 2010 I paid more in taxes than the General Electric Corporation -- really, I did, and so did you -- I'm willing to give financial repression a chance. Yes, it will greatly limit my opportunities to buy and trade exotic derivatives and engage in international financial arbitrage games, but you know what? I'm willing to give it up. After thirty years of all the gains and all the tax guts going to the people you who brought us the bubble, payback is coming. Not because of Occupy Wall Street and not because of my personal preferences, but because it's so much easier and more effective to do than it is to enforce self-defeating austerity that it's bound to happen." I'm afraid that while I share Blyth's sentiment, I don't share his confidence in the inevitability of repression, which is tax on captive bondholders. Under repression, bondholders are forced to hold on to their investments even when the interest rates are no longer satisfactory (or something very much like that). Essentially, it's a way of slowing down the hopping-around of the investor class and making them bear at least some of the brunt of downturns rather than letting their capital skip around willy-nilly, pulling in only positive results everywhere while letting someone else -- read: the public -- bear the costs. The concept is similar to the brake that would be exacted by a transaction tax -- which would make hopping directly expensive -- but people have been talking about something like that for four decades and the powers-that-be have so far mostly avoided it (except for some countries in Europe, which have it, and the EU as a whole, which is, at least, discussing....or was). -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- "If anything, it's the absence of the state in the repo markets that's worth commenting upon, since the absence of the state's guarantee of insurance explains the system's vulnerability to a bank run." "A CDS is called a swap but is actually quite different from most swaps. It was called a swap mostly to avoid regulations that would kick in it it were named what it really is, an insurance contract. Insurance requires reserves to be set aside, but swaps don't, which was a huge part of their problem." "[...] if everyone tries to become fully diversified, then, paradoxically, they will end up buying more or less the same assets, and using the same hedges to cover their exposures, which is what had happened by 2006. Their individual portfolios may be diversified even if the sum of those portfolios is not. This is why so-called systemic risk, which is in part the risk you cannot diversify, never really goes away." ]]> </content> </entry> <entry> <title type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood (read in 2015)]]> </title> <id>https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3134</id> <link href="https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3134"/> <updated>2015-05-17T11:04:43+02:00</updated> <author> <name type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Marco von Ballmoos]]> </name> <uri>https://earthli.com/users/marco</uri> </author> <summary type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA["Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is" ... ]]> </summary> <content type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Published by marco on 17. May 2015 11:04:43 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I've failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an interest in this book, then I'm happy for you." The Handmaid's Tale is the story of a possible future America in which society has taken a rather hard, right turn into a dystopian, quasi-religious patriarchy -- much more extreme even than what exists today. [1] In this world, women have no rights whatsoever. Some are used as drudges -- Marthas -- while others -- Aunts -- inculcate the new regime to the breeders -- Handmaids -- and, finally, there are the Wives. Among the men, the Commanders are at the top of the food chain -- they are married to Wives -- but also have a series of Handmaids. There are other men, high-ranking soldiers -- Angels -- as well as spies -- Eyes. The prose is poetic, evocative, metaphorical, at-times almost hallucinatory -- as if the mists of recollection have twisted certain parts of the remembered past. The ideas and chilling visions are just as likely to happen as they were in the 80s, when the book was written. There are good portions of the American population who would happily view the book as a guide to revolution, to creating a better version of America. At times reminiscent of Orwell's 1984. Highly recommended. [Citations] With such a strict regime in place, there is, of course, the necessity of keeping potential uprisings under control. The following passage is reminiscent of U.S. or Israeli justification for civilian deaths in their respective occupied territories. "Last week they shot a woman, right about here. She was a Martha. She was fumbling in her robe, for her pass, and they thought she was hunting for a bomb. They thought we was a man in disguise. There have been such incidents." The following passage depicts the main character's [2] thoughts about what the seriously under-serviced and over-brainwashed soldiers think when they see women. Instead of gratification, they think of the terror that would be visited on them, with only the carrot of very distantly eventual satisfaction in a dim, barely to-be-hoped-for future. "But more likely they don't think in terms of clothing discarded on the lawn. If they think of a kiss, they must then think immediately of the floodlights going on, the rifle shots. They think instead of doing their duty and of promotion to the Angels, and of being allowed possibly to marry, and then, if they are able to gain enough power and live to be old enough, of being allotted a Handmaid of their own." The Aunts are in charge of indoctrination. Here, Lydia smugly teaches the women that the two freedoms she names are equal: as if a freedom conferred on you by another is any kind of freedom at all. "There is more than one kind of freedom, said Aunt Lydia. Freedom to and freedom from. In the days of anarchy, it was freedom to. Now you are being given freedom from. Don't underrate it." This next citation is about doctors who performed abortions -- this part rings the truest for parts of America today. "These men, we've been told, are like war criminals. It's no excuse that what they did was legal at the time: their crimes are retroactive. They have committed atrocities, and must be made into examples, for the rest. Though this is hardly needed. No woman in her right mind, these days, would seek to prevent a birth, should she be so lucky as to conceive." In this passage, we are offered a glimpse into a past where the patriarchal situation depicted in the book was initiated by revolutions in which the primarily women burned unacceptable books and magazines and other supposedly oppressive materials. Thirty years after the writing of this book and the SJW movement is rushing in this direction, as if thought-suppression has ever amounted to anything good. "The woman handed me one of the magazines. It had a pretty woman on it, with no clothes on, hanging from the ceiling by a chain wound around her hands. I looked at it with interest. It didn't frighten me. I thought she was swinging, like Tarzan from a vine, on the TV. "Don't let her see it, said my mother. Here, she said to me, toss it in, quick. "I threw the magazine into the flames. It riffled open in the wind of its burning; big flakes of paper came loose, sailed into the air, still on fire, parts of women's bodies, turning to black ash, in the air, before my eyes." The Wife for whom Offred works is named Serena Joy, a former TV star who became a spokesperson for the male "revolution" quite early on. Here her depicted hypocrisy is typical of any politician: good for me but not for thee. "Her speeches were about the sanctity of the home, about how women should stay home. Serena Joy didn't do this herself, she made speeches instead, but she presented this failure of hers as a sacrifice she was making for the good of all. "Around that time, someone tried to shoot her and missed; [...] Someone else planted a bomb in her care but it went off too early. Though some people said she's put the bomb in her own car, for sympathy. (Emphasis added.)" The roots of the patriarchy are deep -- coming from today's society, there isn't that far to go. The following passages shows "truths" that are indoctrinated into the women by the Aunts in the first case, or by 18th-century painters in the second. "I almost gasp: he'd said a forbidden word. Sterile. There is no such thing as a sterile man any more, not officially. There are only women who are fruitful and women who are barren, that's the law." "I remember walking in art galleries, through the nineteenth century: the obsession they had then with harems. Dozens of paintings of harems, fat women lolling on divans, turbans on their heads or velvet caps, being fanned with peacock tails, a eunuch in the backgrounds standing guard. Studies of sedentary flesh, painted by men who'd never been there. These pictures were supposed to be erotic, and I thought they were, at the time; but I see now what they were really about. They were paintings about suspended animations; about waiting, about objects not in use. They were paintings about boredom. "But maybe boredom is erotic, when women do it, for men." This next passage reminded me of the passages about Emmanuel Goldstein in 1984. The stories about smuggling are very similar to those from that book, or even the myriad stories of terrorists sneaking back and forth across the oh-so-porous U.S. border. The Lackawanna Five or the Liberty City Seven come to mind. "They show us only victories, never defeats. Who wants bad news? "Possibly [the rebel captive i]s an actor. "The anchorman comes on now. His manner is kindly, fatherly; he gazes out at us from the screen, looking, with his tan and his white hair and candid eyes, wise wrinkles around them, like everybody's ideal grandfather. What he's telling us, his level smile implies, is for our own good. Everything will be all right soon. I promise. There will be peace. You must trust. Your must go to sleep, like good children. "He tells us what we long to believe. He's very convincing. "I struggle against him. He's like an old movie star, I tell myself, with false teeth and a face job. at the same time I sway towards him, like one hypnotized. If only it were true. If only I could believe. "Now he's telling us that an underground espionage ring has been cracked, by a team of Eyes, working with an inside informant. The ring has been smuggling precious national resources over the border into Canada." In this first paragraph, Atwood twists a common aphorism by subtly adjusting the pronouns. In the next few paragraphs, Aunt Lydia explains how she will help a whole gender forget that it ever had equal rights -- and that this will somehow be better for everyone. "Not every Commander has a Handmaid: some of their Wives have children. From each, says the slogan, according to her ability; to each according to his needs. We recited that, three times, after dessert. It was from the Bible, or so they said. St. Paul again, in Acts. "You are a transitional generation, said Aunt Lydia. It is the hardest for you. We know the sacrifices you are being expected to make. It is hard when men revile you. For the ones who come after you, it will be easier. They will accept their duties with willing hearts. "She did not say: Because they will have no memories, of any other way. "She said: Because they won't want things they can't have." This next segment exhibits Atwood's lovely writing style, this time describing what it would be like living in such a repressive and seemingly utterly joyless society. "The willow is in full plumage and is no help, with its insinuating whispers. Rendezvous, it says, terraces; the sibilants run up my spine, a shiver as if in fever. The summer dress rustles against the flesh of my thighs, the grass grows underfoot, at the edges of my eyes there are movements, in the branches; feathers, flittings, grace notes, tree into bird, metamorphosis run wild. Goddesses are possible now and the air suffuses with desire. Even the bricks of the house are softening, becoming tractile; if I leaned against them they'd be warm and yielding. It's amazing what denial can do. Did the sight of my ankle make him lightheaded, faint, at the checkpoint yesterday, when I dropped my pass and let him pick it up for me? No handkerchief, no fan, I use what's handy. "Winter is not so dangerous. I need hardness, cold rigidity; not this heaviness, as if I'm a melon on a stem, this liquid ripeness. (Emphasis added.)" And here, further on, we have Selena Joy interacting with Offred. Selena wants a child -- badly. She is convinced that her Commander will not be able to impregnate Offred, so she wants her to sleep with Nick, the help. In exchange for taking this risk, she offers to get a picture of the child that was stolen from Offred when she was kidnapped into servitude. This is twisted nearly beyond comprehension: Joy is seemingly unaware of the depravity of the cruel power that she exerts over Offred -- she just benefits from it as if it's her birthright. She leans forward. "Maybe I could get something for your," she says. Because I have been good. "Something you want," she adds, wheedling almost. "What's that?" I say. I can't think of anything I truly want that she'd be likely or able to give me. "A picture," she says, as if offering me some juvenile treat, an ice cream, a trip to the zoo. I look up at her again, puzzled. "Of her," she says. "Your little girl. But only maybe." And, finally, the Commander opens up to Offred, literally begging her to put a female stamp of approval on all that men have done for women, in the form of the highly patriarchal society in which the Commander has ended up basically owning Offred. Again, this is bizarre, twisted and hard to wrap your head around. He couches the societal transformation as a necessary rescue for men, because they were suffering so badly in the previous, slightly less-rigid patriarchy. This passage -- as with so many others in this book -- could stand alone as a one-page short story. "You know what [men] were complaining about the most? Inability to feel. Men were turning off on sex, even. They were turning off on marriage. "Do they feel now? I say. "Yes, he says, looking at me. They do. He stands up, comes around the desk to the chair where I'm sitting. He puts his hands on my shoulders, from behind. I can't see him. "I like to know what you think, his voice says, from behind me. "I don't think a lot, I say lightly. What he wants is intimacy, but I can't give him that. "There's hardly any point in my thinking, is there? I say. What I think doesn't matter. "Which is the only reason he can tell me things. "Come now, he says, pressing a little with his hands. I'm interested in your opinion. You're intelligent enough, you must have an opinion. "About what? I say. "What we've done, he says. How things have worked out. "I hold myself very still. I try to empty my mind. I think about the sky, at night, when there's no moon. I have no opinion, I say. "He sighs, relaxes his hands, but leaves them on my shoulders. He knows what I think, all right. "You can't make an omelette without breaking eggs, is what he says. We thought we could do better. "Better? I say, in a small voice. How can he think this is better? "Better never means better for everyone, he says. It always means worse, for some. (Emphasis added.)" The commander continues in this vein, calling on capital-N Nature for justification for the less-fair but super-awesome society of Gilead. "It means you can't cheat Nature," he says. "Nature demands variety, for men. It stands to reason, it's part of the procreational strategy. It's Nature's plan." I don't say anything, so he goes on. "Women know that instinctively. Why did they buy so many different clothes, in the old days? To trick the men into thinking they were several different women. A new one each day." He say this as if he believes it, but he says many things that way. Maybe he believes it, maybe he doesn't, or maybe he does both at the same time. Impossible to tell what he believes. "So now that we don't have different clothes," I say, "you merely have different women." This is irony, but he doesn't acknowledge it. "It solves a lot of problems," he says, without a twitch. (Emphasis added.) The epilogue is of a discussion in the even-further future, where society has once again regained its senses and Gilead is just a long-past and bizarre blip on the bumpy road to the here-and-now. "We held out no hope of tracing the narrator herself directly. It was clear from internal evidence that she was among the first wave of women recruited for reproductive purposes and allotted to those who both required such services and could lay claim to them through their position in the elite. The regime created an instant pool of such women by the simple tactic of declaring all second marriages and non-marital liaisons adulterous, arresting the female partners, and, on the grounds that they were morally unfit, confiscating the children they already had, who were adopted by childless couples of the upper echelons who were eager for progeny by any means. (in the middle period, this policy was extended to cover all marriages not contracted within the state church.) Men highly placed in the regime were thus able to pick and choose among women who had demonstrated their reproductive fitness by having produced one or more healthy children, a desirable characteristic in an age of plummeting Caucasian birth rates, a phenomenon observable not only in Gilead but in most northern Caucasian societies of the time." This clinical summary is much more palatable than the autobiography that preceded it. It is easy to view past massive injustices in this light -- Atwood juxtaposes the scientific attitude of the historians to the story that preceded it, in which the horror of having subjugated an entire gender was palpable. Without context, we easily consume stories of unspeakable atrocity in the past. Perhaps that is the only way to do so, and be able to move forward with any hope that we won't just repeat ourselves. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] While some may argue that the U.S. is hardly a religious society, that is just not true. It's just...well-masked...but there are rules about who is allowed to succeed and who is not. Can you imagine a Jewish or Muslim president? How about an atheist? While some of us can imagine this, there is no way that it could happen in anything approaching the near future. Religion plays a big role in women's lives -- the "debate" about abortion is only a debate in the U.S. and other theocracies -- or in the moral strictures about self-control and drug use or the vindictive use of jail as punishment. The list goes on and on. The U.S. is a religious society, through and through, though it masks itself with the sheen of quasi-democracy and lip service to freedom for all. [1] She is unnamed, except as "Offred", which is the possessive "of" followed by the name of the Commander to which she's currently assigned as a broodmare ]]> </content> </entry> <entry> <title type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey (read in 2015)]]> </title> <id>https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3135</id> <link href="https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3135"/> <updated>2015-05-17T10:44:05+02:00</updated> <author> <name type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Marco von Ballmoos]]> </name> <uri>https://earthli.com/users/marco</uri> </author> <summary type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA["Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is" ... ]]> </summary> <content type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Published by marco on 17. May 2015 10:44:05 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I've failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an interest in this book, then I'm happy for you." This is the story of Big Chief and McMurphy and Nurse Ratched. The Big Chief is a long-time resident of the mental institution run by Head Nurse Ratched; McMurphy arrives as a transferee from a work camp who thinks he's going to have an easier ride in the home. This is true, at least at first. He is a breath of fresh air for the other inmates there, a force of nature, as it were. He chafes and takes liberties and cracks wise and runs card games and generally doesn't follow the rules. He tries to help free the others from their artificial, psychological fetters. He takes them on a fishing trip. He sneaks ladies and booze into the building late at night. He tries to help poor Billy. Ratched thwarts him every step of the way. The Big Chief narrates, grows and learns. McMurphy sacrifices the last of what he has in a futile act of revenge, though he is aware of what is happening. The Big Chief makes an actual escape. Surprisingly well-written -- I didn't expect such poetic prose from Kesey -- and deep. Recommended. [Citations] On the subject of poetic prose, here's our first look at the resident intellectual, Harding. "Harding is a flat, nervous man with a face that sometimes makes you think you seen him in the movies, like it's a face too pretty to just be a guy on the street. He's got wide, thin shoulders and he curves them in around his chest when he's trying to hide inside himself. He's got hands so long and white and dainty I think they carved each other out of soap, and sometimes they get loose and glide around in front of him free as two white birds until he noticed them and traps them between his knees; it bothers him that he's got pretty hands." How do we know that Harding is an intellectual? Well, just listen to how he talks, all highfalutin' and such. Here he laments a supposed matriarchy, which while true for him, is a fiction he is capable of maintaining only because of his own personal situation. He is oppressed by his wife, who he is too weak to look at on eye-level and, after voluntarily committing himself, finds himself subject to the rule of Nurse Ratched. This does not a matriarchy make, though. It's a nicely written speech, but the content is a bit amiss, whether because of Harding's misconceptions or the author's, I'm not sure. It smacks of the terror a man has every time women start to exert just a little bit of control, that little bit not even close to commensurate with the proportion of society that they comprise. "Ah, I believe my friend is catching on, fellow rabbits. Tell me, Mr. McMurphy, how does one go about showing a woman who's boss, I mean other than laughing at her? How does he show her who's king of the mountain? A man like you should be able to tell us that. You don't slap her around, do you? No, then she calls the law. You don't lose your temper and shout at her; she'll win by a trying to placate her big ol' angry boy: 'Is us wittle man getting fussy? Ahhhhh?' Have you ever tried to keep up a noble and angry front in the face of such consolation? So you see, my friend, it is somewhat as you stated: man has but one truly effective weapon against the juggernaut of modern matriarchy, but it certainly is not laughter. One weapon, and with every passing year in this hip, motivationally researched society, more and more people are discovering how to render that weapon useless and conquer those who have hitherto been the conquerors -- " "Lord, Harding, but you do come on," McMurphy says. " -- and do you think, for acclaimed pychopathic powers, that you could effectively use your weapon against our champion? Do you think you could use it against Miss Ratched, McMurphy? Ever?" The next passage is a nice reminder of what life is like for those for whom life streams along much too quickly to really and truly grasp. While we, possessed as many of us are with more-than-adequate intellect, sometimes feel overwhelmed and tired by the demands of the quotidian, how do you think it feels for poor old Pete and his friends? "There's old Pete, face like a searchlight. He's fifty yards off to my left, but I can see him plain as though there wasn't any fog at all. Or maybe he's up right close and real small, I can't be sure. He tells me once about how tired he is, and just his saying it makes me see his whole life on the railroad, see him working to figure out how to read a watch, breaking a sweat while he tries to get the right button in the right hole of his railroad overalls, doing his absolute damnedest to keep up with a job that comes so easy to the others they can sit back in a chair padded with cardboard and read mystery stories and girlie books. Not that he ever really figured to keep up -- he knew from the start he couldn't do that -- but he had to try to keep up, just to keep them in sight. So for forty years he was able to live, if not right in the world of men, at least on the edge of it." And here, Kesey writes of the revolution's great enemy: the enervation of constant struggle leading to apathy, to caginess, to pacing oneself. The white-hot nova of revolution realizes it's going to expend itself uselessly on a small corner of the beast and pulls back...back into itself, to reconsider, to bide its time, to be in it for the long haul. It's quite possibly the right thing to do -- after all, why sacrifice the best, most experienced troops in a gesture? -- but no war was ever won without sacrifice. "But me, I know why. I heard him talk to the lifeguard. He's finally getting cagey, is all. The way Papa finally did when he came to realize that he couldn't beat that group from town who wanted the government to put in the dam because of the money and the work it would bring, and because it would get rid of the village: Let that tribe of fish Injuns take their sink and their two hundred thousand dollars the government is paying them and go some place else with it! Papa had done the smart thing signing the papers; there wasn't anything to gain by bucking it. The government would of got it anyhow, sooner or later; this way the tribe would get paid good. It was the smart thing. McMurphy was doing the smart thing. I would see that. He was giving in because it was the smartest thing to do, not because of any of these other reasons the Acutes were making up. He didn't say so, but I knew and I told myself it was the smart thing to do. i told myself that over and over: It's safe. Like hiding. it's the smart thing to do nobody could say and different. I know what he's doing." This is a scene from the fishing trip, a tumult of activity told in long, clause-filled sentences that quickly resolve the scene with a remarkably sharp clarity. Again, the chief examines this force of nature that names itself McMurphy, analyzes his ways of dealing with the deadly grasp that society places at their throats. He deals with it by laughing in its face, by deliberately not acknowledging its power, and to hell with the consequences, because nothing could be worse than submission to this soft, cozening domination by something lesser. "This scramble of action holds for a space, a second there on the sea -- the men yammering and struggling and cussing and trying to tend their poles while watching the girl; the bleeding, crashing battle between Scanlon and my fish at everybody's feet; the lines all tangled and shooting every which way with the doctor's glasses-on-a-string tangled and dangling from one line ten feet off the back of the boat, fish striking at the flash of the lens, and the girl cussing for all she's worth and looking now at her bare breasts, one white and one smarting red -- and George takes his eye off where he's going and runs the boat into that log and kills the engine. "While McMurphy laughs. Rocking farther and farther backward against the cabin top, spreading his laugh out across the water -- laughing at the girl, at the guys, at George, at me sucking my bleeding thumb, at the captain back at the pier and the bicycle rider and the service-station guys and the give thousand houses and the Big Nurse and all of it. Because he knows you have to laugh at the things that hurt you just to keep yourself in balance, just to keep the world from running you plumb crazy. He knows there's a painful side; he knows my thumb smarts and his girl field has a bruised breast and the doctor is losing his glasses, but he won't let the pain blot out the humor no more'n he'll let the humor blot out the pain." And, finally, McMurphy's nova comes at last, with his denouement serving as cradle for the Chief's rebirth. "I looked at McMurphy out of the corner of my eye, trying not to be obvious about it. He was in his chair in the corner, resting a second before he came out for the next round -- in a long line of next rounds. The thing he was fighting, you couldn't whip it for good. All you could do was keep on whipping it, till you couldn't come out any more and somebody else had to take your place." And, after Billy Bibbitt was discovered in the doctor's office with his throat cut by his own hand, not because of what McMurphy had helped him do -- eat, drink, lay with a whore, be merry -- but because of the guilt that Ratched had instantly instilled upon him for having partaken. "She walked straight to McMurphy. "“He cut his throat,” she said. She waited, hoping he would say something. He wouldn’t look up. “He opened the doctor’s desk and found some instruments and cut his throat. The poor miserable, misunderstood boy killed himself. He’s there now, in the doctor’s chair, with his throat cut.” "She waited again. But he still wouldn’t look up. "“First Charles Cheswick and now William Bibbit! I hope you’re finally satisfied. Playing with human lives—gambling with human lives—as if you thought yourself to be a God!” "She turned and walked into the Nurses’ Station and closed the door behind her, leaving a shrill, killing-cold sound ringing in the tubes of light over our heads. "First I had a quick thought to try to stop him, talk him into taking what he’d already won and let her have the last round, but another, bigger thought wiped the first thought away completely. I suddenly realized with a crystal certainty that neither I nor any of the half-score of us could stop him. [...] "We couldn’t stop him because we were the ones making him do it. It wasn’t the nurse that was forcing him, it was our need that was making him push himself slowly up from sitting, his big hands driving down on the leather chair arms, pushing him up, rising and standing like one of those moving-picture zombies, obeying orders beamed at him from forty masters. It was us that had been making him go on for weeks, keeping him standing long after his feet and legs had given out, weeks of making him wink and grin and laugh and go on with his act long after his humor had been parched dry between two electrodes. "We made him stand and hitch up his black shorts like they were horsehide chaps, and push back his cap with one finger like it was a ten-gallon Stetson, slow, mechanical gestures—and when he walked across the floor you could hear the iron in his bare heels ring sparks out of the tile. "Only at the last—after he’d smashed through that glass door, her face swinging around, with terror forever ruining any other look she might ever try to use again, screaming when he grabbed for her and ripped her uniform all the way down the front, screaming again when the two nippled circles started from her chest and swelled out and out, bigger than anybody had ever even imagined, warm and pink in the light—only at the last, after the officials realized that the three black boys weren’t going to do anything but stand and watch and they would have to beat him off without their help, doctors and supervisors and nurses prying those heavy red fingers out of the white flesh of her throat as if they were her neck bones, jerking him backward off of her with a loud heave of breath, only then did he show any sign that he might be anything other than a sane, willful, dogged man performing a hard duty that finally just had to be done, like it or not. "He gave a cry. At the last, falling backward, his face appearing to us for a second upside down before he was smothered on the floor by a pile of white uniforms, he let himself cry out: "A sound of cornered-animal fear and hate and surrender and defiance, that if you ever trailed coon or cougar or lynx is like the last sound the treed and shot and falling animal makes as the dogs get him, when he finally doesn’t care any more about anything but himself and his dying. (Emphasis added.)" The Big Chief realizes that McMurphy wasn't a nova of his own at all, but rather a vessel, a lens, through which the remaining power of the other inmates was focused. He knew what he was there for, he regretted the lost years of a possible future that would never come, but knew that he'd had more life than all of the others put together and was willing to sacrifice himself if only they would just. Wake. Up. ]]> </content> </entry> <entry> <title type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[A Dance with Dragons by George R.R. Martin (Read in 2015)]]> </title> <id>https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3115</id> <link href="https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3115"/> <updated>2015-03-29T20:22:21+02:00</updated> <author> <name type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Marco von Ballmoos]]> </name> <uri>https://earthli.com/users/marco</uri> </author> <summary type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA["Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is" ... ]]> </summary> <content type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Published by marco on 29. Mar 2015 20:22:21 Updated by marco on 17. May 2015 00:30:20 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I've failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an interest in this book, then I'm happy for you." This is book five of the Song of Ice and Fire. Bran ends up in the lair of the Children of the Forest, far North of the Wall, with the three-eyed raven. Jon's fate is unknown, but things don't look too good. Arya's training continues. Tyrion is captured by Mormont and both of them near Meerreen. Quentyn's mission fails horribly, Victarion approaches Meereen, possessed of powers. Daenerys accepts her destiny and mounts Drogon. Stannis marches on the marshes first, rousts the Ironborn, captures Asha and then sinks into the snows before he can arrive at Winterfell, where he wants to roust the Boltons. Young Aegon Targaryen and John Connington land in Dorne and make their way north to attempt recapture of the Iron Throne. Cersei takes the walk of shame. [Citations] Some of the characters are almost shockingly small-minded. Daenarys bears unhealable grudges against traitors who betrayed her family decades or even centuries ago. And in the next passage, Davos's fealty to Stannis is so strong that he thinks the following of his old friend Salladhor Saan, "I knew the day would come, Davos told himself. I was fond of the old rogue, but never so great a fool as to trust him." He should just as well think this of Stannis, who is at least as deluded, terrifying and cruel as anyone else in the book. He does nothing for himself, but for what he calls justice. This next passage serves to illustrate just how good a writer Martin is, how deliciously he brings you into the moment. Here we see Reek in his dark cell, snacking at long last. "The rat squealed as he bit into it, squirming wildly in his hands, frantic to escape. The belly was the softest part. He tore at the sweet meat, the warm blood running over his lips. It was so good that it brought tears to his eyes. His belly rumbled and he swallowed. By the third bite the rat had ceased to struggle, and he was feeling almost content. "[...] "He crouched down in a corner of his cell, clutching his prize under his chin. Blood ran from the corners of his mouth as he nibbled at the rat with what remained of his teeth, trying to bolt down as much of the warm flesh as he could before the cell was opened. The meat was stringy, but so rich he thought he might be sick. He chewed and swallowed, picking small bones from the holes in his gums where teeth had been yanked out. It hurt to chew, but he was so hungry he could not stop." As good as some of the descriptions are, he is equally adept at dialogue. Here he mixes thoughts (in italics) with spoken words to create a full picture of the conversation from the point of view of Daenerys. She was no stranger to the overblown courtesies of Qarth. “If you are drunk, blame the wine.” “No wine is half so intoxicating as your beauty. My manse has seemed as empty as a tomb since Daenerys departed, and all the pleasures of the Queen of Cities have been as ashes in my mouth. Why did you abandon me?” I was hounded from your city in fear for my life. “It was time. Qarth wished me gone.” “Who? The Pureborn? They have water in their veins. The Spicers? There are curds between their ears. And the Undying are all dead. You should have taken me to husband. I am almost certain that I asked you for your hand. Begged you, even.” “Only half a hundred times,” Dany teased. “You gave up too easily, my lord. For I must marry, all agree.” “A khaleesi must have a khal,” said Irri, as she filled the queen’s cup once again. “This is known.” “Shall I ask again?” wondered Xaro. “No, I know that smile. It is a cruel queen who dices with men’s hearts. Humble merchants like myself are no more than stones beneath your jeweled sandals.” A single tear ran slowly down his pale white cheek. "[...]Do you know how Unsullied are made and trained?” “Cruelly, I have no doubt. When a smith makes a sword, he thrusts the blade into the fire, beats on it with a hammer, then plunges it into iced water to temper the steel. If you would savor the sweet taste of the fruit, you must water the tree.” “This tree has been watered with blood.” “How else, to grow a soldier? Your Radiance enjoyed my dancers. Would it surprise you to know that they are slaves, bred and trained in Yunkai? They have been dancing since they were old enough to walk. How else to achieve such perfection?” He took a swallow of his wine. “They are expert in all the erotic arts as well. I had thought to make Your Grace a gift of them.” “By all means.” Dany was unsurprised. “I shall free them.” That made him wince. “And what would they do with freedom? As well give a fish a suit of mail. They were made to dance.” “Made by who? Their masters? Perhaps your dancers would sooner build or bake or farm. Have you asked them?” “Perhaps your elephants would sooner be nightingales. Instead of sweet song, Meereen’s nights would be filled with thunderous trumpetings, and your trees would shatter beneath the weight of great grey birds.” Xaro sighed. “Daenerys, my delight, beneath that sweet young breast beats a tender heart … but take counsel from an older, wiser head. Things are not always as they seem. Much that may seem evil can be good. [...]” [...] the Queen of Cities rests upon the backs of slaves. Ask yourself, if all men must grub in the dirt for food, how shall any man lift his eyes to contemplate the stars? If each of us must break his back to build a hovel, who shall raise the temples to glorify the gods? For some men to be great, others must be enslaved.” "A wooden keep could be seen beside the water, rotted and overgrown. Slender spires took form above it, some of them snapped off like broken spears. Roofless towers appeared and disappeared, thrusting blindly upward. Halls and galleries drifted past: graceful buttresses, delicate arches, fluted columns, terraces and bowers. All ruined, all desolate, all fallen. The grey moss grew thickly here, covering the fallen stones in great mounds and bearding all the towers. Black vines crept in and out of windows, through doors and over archways, up the sides of high stone walls." Brutal: "From time to time some wench escapes and lives to tell the tale. Most are less fortunate. When Ramsay catches them he rapes them, flays them, feeds their corpses to his dogs, and brings their skins back to the Dreadfort as trophies. If they have given him good sport, he slits their throats before he skins them. Elsewise, t’other way around.”" Is this a deliberate pun? "Brown Ben Plumm was puzzled. “Who is Eroeh?” “A girl I thought I’d saved from rape and torment. All I did was make it worse for her in the end. And all I did in Astapor was make ten thousand Eroehs.”" "Tyrion had never seen a bigger moon. Monstrous, swollen, it looked as if it had swallowed the sun and woken with a fever. Its twin, floating on the sea beyond the ship, shimmered red with every wave." This is exactly how people accustomed to snow talk to those unaccustomed. The following was uttered after it had only been snowing for a week and a half straight and a mere six or seven feet of snow lay on the ground. "Ned’s girl,” echoed Big Bucket Wull. “And we should have had her and the castle both if you prancing southron jackanapes didn’t piss your satin breeches at a little snow." More northern bravado: "That seemed to amuse the northman. “I want to live forever in a land where summer lasts a thousand years. I want a castle in the clouds where I can look down over the world. I want to be six-and-twenty again. When I was six-and-twenty I could fight all day and fuck all night. What men want does not matter. “Winter is almost upon us, boy. And winter is death. I would sooner my men die fighting for the Ned’s little girl than alone and hungry in the snow, weeping tears that freeze upon their cheeks. No one sings songs of men who die like that. As for me, I am old. This will be my last winter. Let me bathe in Bolton blood before I die. I want to feel it spatter across my face when my axe bites deep into a Bolton skull. I want to lick it off my lips and die with the taste of it on my tongue.”" And, then, from even farther north, is Tormund Giantsbane, another wonderful talker. "Half-brothers, born o’ different mothers. Alfyn’s member was a wee thing, even smaller than yours, but he was never shy with where he stuck it. Had a son in every village, that one. (Emphasis added.)" And then, "The wildling gave him a shrewd look. “Aye, I might have. And you crows might decide to close that gate. A few fighters on t’other side, well, that way the gate stays open, don’t it?” He grinned. “I bought your bloody horse, Jon Snow. Don’t mean that we can’t count his teeth. Now don’t you go thinking me and mine don’t trust you. We trust you just as much as you trust us.” He snorted. (Emphasis added.)" And finally, "I know,” said Jon Snow. Tormund turned back. “You know nothing. You killed a dead man, aye, I heard. Mance killed a hundred. A man can fight the dead, but when their masters come, when the white mists rise up … how do you fight a mist, crow? Shadows with teeth … air so cold it hurts to breathe, like a knife inside your chest … you do not know, you cannot know … can your sword cut cold?" ]]> </content> </entry> <entry> <title type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[A Feast for Crows by George R.R. Martin (Read in 2015)]]> </title> <id>https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3116</id> <link href="https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3116"/> <updated>2015-03-29T20:22:00+02:00</updated> <author> <name type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Marco von Ballmoos]]> </name> <uri>https://earthli.com/users/marco</uri> </author> <summary type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA["Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is" ... ]]> </summary> <content type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Published by marco on 29. Mar 2015 20:22:00 Updated by marco on 17. May 2015 10:17:53 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I've failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an interest in this book, then I'm happy for you." This is book four of the Song of Ice and Fire. Cersei descends into paranoid madness, reinstating a religious army, an act she would come to rue as it backfires spectacularly. Jaime and Brienne meet up again in the Riverlands, after Jaime had solved a few issues there. The Iron Islands feature much more prominently, with all of the Greyjoys -- Euron, Victarion, Aeron and Asha -- getting in on the action. In Dorne, intrigue abounds, with plot built on plot and the Red Viper's brother machinating to maintain the power balance with King's Landing and the upper South. Quentyn Martell has traveled East with his friends to try to join Dorne to the Targaryens through Daenerys. Arya arrives in Braavos and apprentices at the House of Black and White. Jon maintains a balance between Stannis's demands -- and those of Melisandre -- as well as arming to fight the Others from the North. Samwell travels with Gilly and Aemon around the periphery of the Seven Kingdoms by boat, to get to Old Town and train at the Citadel. [Citations] Cersei descends into paranoid madness. Here she encounters the new High Septon. "Lord Tywin had given him that crown to replace the one that was lost when the mob killed the previous High Septon. They had pulled the fat fool from his litter and torn him apart, the day Myrcella sailed for Dorne. That one was a great glutton, and biddable. This one … This High Septon was of Tyrion’s making, Cersei recalled suddenly. It was a disquieting thought. The old man’s spotted hand looked like a chicken claw as it poked from a sleeve encrusted with golden scrollwork and small crystals. Cersei knelt on the wet marble and kissed his fingers, and bid Tommen to do the same. What does he know of me? How much did the dwarf tell him? The High Septon smiled as he escorted her into the sept. But was it a threatening smile full of unspoken knowledge, or just some vacuous twitch of an old man’s [...]" "To both our queens!" he chirruped. “To the young queen and the old!”" That's lovely: he doesn't refer to the new queen and the old, so the intended mean is to call Cersei old rather than former. More evocative writing on Martin's part, an excellent use of metaphor: "His desire was as deep and boundless as the sea, but when the tide receded, the rocks of shame and guilt thrust up as sharp as ever. Sometimes the waves would cover them, but they remained beneath the waters, hard and black and slimy." Or here, where the master of the multi-faced God in Braavos tells Arya of the history of his temple: "The tale of our beginnings. If you would be one of us, you had best know who we are and how we came to be. Men may whisper of the Faceless Men of Braavos, but we are older than the Secret City. Before the Titan rose, before the Unmasking of Uthero, before the Founding, we were. We have flowered in Braavos amongst these northern fogs, but we first took root in Valyria, amongst the wretched slaves who toiled in the deep mines beneath the Fourteen Flames that lit the Freehold’s nights of old." Or this lovely passage on the futility of war and causes and justice from the view of a simple soldier. This was presented as an explanation for how formerly honorable soldiers and men could sink to such depths. "They see the lord who led them there cut down, and some other lord shouts that they are his now. They take a wound, and when that’s still half-healed they take another. There is never enough to eat, their shoes fall to pieces from the marching, their clothes are torn and rotting, and half of them are shitting in their breeches from drinking bad water. “If they want new boots or a warmer cloak or maybe a rusted iron halfhelm, they need to take them from a corpse, and before long they are stealing from the living too, from the smallfolk whose lands they’re fighting in, men very like the men they used to be. They slaughter their sheep and steal their chickens, and from there it’s just a short step to carrying off their daughters too. And one day they look around and realize all their friends and kin are gone, that they are fighting beside strangers beneath a banner that they hardly recognize. They don’t know where they are or how to get back home and the lord they’re fighting for does not know their names, yet here he comes, shouting for them to form up, to make a line with their spears and scythes and sharpened hoes, to stand their ground. And the knights come down on them, faceless men clad all in steel, and the iron thunder of their charge seems to fill the world … “And the man breaks." "The lady of the castle was a Lannister by marriage, a plump toddler who had been wed to his cousin Tyrek before she was a year old." We recoil from this notion on instinct, calling arranged marriages barbaric. But are they really worse than the modern singles scene? It's as if we seize on this issue because it offends our sense of direct freedom but sit back satisfied that we've thrown everyone together into a system that is quite probably equally barbaric, but whose barbarity is hidden behind complexity and randomness, and therefore somehow better. "“Plant,” said Jaime, “and pray for one last harvest.” It was not a hopeful answer, but it was the only one he had." The man who'd asked had been hoping for a better answer than that. It's not that he's grasping for handouts from his betters, but that he has invested in their society, accepted his station below them and expected something back. When this arrangement tells him to fuck off, it loses him forever. If society -- e.g. the lions of Lannister -- cannot protect him from the wolves (in a metaphor, perhaps banks and insurance companies), then what good is it? The citizen is not lazy or ungrateful for turning his back. This part resonated in particular because I was watching Treme at the same time and noticed parallels between how the high and might lords of Westeros treated their smallfolk and how the government of New Orleans treated (treats?) its citizens. They all act as if the hierarchy is God-given and cannot be changed by anything. Those on top are just as fooled as those below, failing to note the precarity of the situation. ]]> </content> </entry> <entry> <title type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Watchmen by Alan Moore (1986--1987) (Read in 2014)]]> </title> <id>https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3082</id> <link href="https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3082"/> <updated>2015-03-29T20:01:56+02:00</updated> <author> <name type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Marco von Ballmoos]]> </name> <uri>https://earthli.com/users/marco</uri> </author> <summary type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA["Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is" ... ]]> </summary> <content type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Published by marco on 29. Mar 2015 20:01:56 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I've failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an interest in this book, then I'm happy for you." [Citations] "Other bury their heads between the swollen teats of indulgence and gratification, piglets squirming beneath a sow for shelter ... but there is no shelter...and the future is bearing down like an express train." "Heard joke once: "Man goes to doctor. Says he's depressed. Says life seems harsh and cruel. Says he feels all alone in a threatening world. Where what lies ahead is vague and uncertain. "Doctor says "Treatment is simple. Great clown Pagliacci is in town tonight. Go and see him. That should pick you up." "Man bursts into tears. Says, "but, doctor...I am Pagliacci."" "For those of us who delight in such things, the twentieth century has, in it's unfolding, presented mankind with an array of behavioural paradoxes and moral conundrums hitherto unimagined and perhaps unimaginable. Science, traditional enemy of mysticism and religion, has taken on a growing understanding that the model of the universe suggested by quantum physics differs very little from the universe that Taoists and other mystics have existed in for centuries. Large numbers of young people, raised in rigidly structured and industrially oriented cultures, violently reject industrialism and seek instead some modified version of the agricultural lifestyle that their forebears debatedly enjoyed... Children starve while boots costing many thousand dollars leave their mark upon the surface of the moon. We have labored long to build a heaven, only to find it populated with horrors. "It is the oldest ironies that are still the most satisfying: man, when preparing for bloody war, will orate loudly and most eloquently in the name of peace. This dichotomy is not an invention of the twentieth century, yet it is this century that the most striking examples of the phenomena have appeared. Never before has man pursued global harmony more vocally while amassing stockpiles of weapons so devastating in their effect. The second world war - we were told - was The War To End Wars. The development of the atomic bomb is the Weapon to End Wars. "And yet the wars continue. Currently, no nation on this planet is not involved in some form of warmed struggle, if not against its neighbors then against internal forces. Furthermore, as ever-escalating amounts of money are poured into the pursuit of the specific weapon or conflict that will bring lasting peace, the drain on our economies creates a run-down urban landscape where crime flourishes and people are concerned less with national securitz than with the simple personal security needed to stop at the store late at night for a quart of milk without getting mugged. The places we struggled so viciously to keep safe are becoming increasingly dangerous." "[...] God was not there. The cold, suffocating dark goes on forever, and we are alone. Live our lives, lacking anything better to do. Devise reason later. Born from oblivion; bear children, hell-bound as ourselves; go into oblvion. Existence is random. No pattern save what we imagine after staring at it for too long. No meaning save what we choose to impose." "Why do we argue? Life's fragile, a successful virus clinging to a speck of mud, suspended in endless nothing." ]]> </content> </entry> <entry> <title type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[A Storm of Swords by George R.R. Martin (Read in 2014)]]> </title> <id>https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3084</id> <link href="https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3084"/> <updated>2015-03-29T19:38:51+02:00</updated> <author> <name type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Marco von Ballmoos]]> </name> <uri>https://earthli.com/users/marco</uri> </author> <summary type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA["Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is" ... ]]> </summary> <content type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Published by marco on 29. Mar 2015 19:38:51 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I've failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an interest in this book, then I'm happy for you." [Citations] "There was no higher honor than to receive your knighthood from the Prince of Dragonstone." "Tell me, then -- when he touched a man on the shoulder with his sword, what did he say? 'Go forth and kill the weak'? Or 'Go forth and defend them'? At the Trident, those brave men Viserys spoke of died beneath dragon banners -- did they give their lives because they believed in Rhaegar's cause, or because they had been bought and paid for?" Dany turned to Mormont, crossed her arms, and waited for an answer. "My queen," the big man said slowly, "all you say is true. But Rhaegar lost on the Trident. He lost the battle, he lost the war, he lost the kingdom, and he lost his life. His blood swirled downriver with the rubies from his breastplate, and Robert the Usurper rode over his corpse to steal the Iron Throne. Rhaegar fought valiantly, Rhaegar fought nobly, Rhaegar fought honorably. And Rhaegar died." "The Nightfort had figured in some of Old Nan’s scariest stories. It was here that Night’s King had reigned, before his name was wiped from the memory of man. This was where the Rat Cook had served the Andal king his prince-and-bacon pie, where the seventy-nine sentinels stood their watch, where brave young Danny Flint had been raped and murdered. This was the castle where King Sherrit had called down his curse on the Andals of old, where the ’prentice boys had faced the thing that came in the night, where blind Symeon Star-Eyes had seen the hellhounds fighting. Mad Axe had once walked these yards and climbed these towers, butchering his brothers in the dark." "Joffrey brought Widow’s Wail down in a savage two-handed slice, onto the book that Tyrion had given him. The heavy leather cover parted at a stroke. “Sharp! I told you, I am no stranger to Valyrian steel.” It took him half a dozen further cuts to hack the thick tome apart, and the boy was breathless by the time he was done. Sansa could feel her husband struggling with his fury as Ser Osmund Kettleblack shouted, “I pray you never turn that wicked edge on me, sire.” “See that you never give me cause, ser.” Joffrey flicked a chunk of Lives of Four Kings off the table at swordpoint, then slid Widow’s Wail back into its scabbard. “Your Grace,” Ser Garlan Tyrell said. “Perhaps you did not know. In all of Westeros there were but four copies of that book illuminated in Kaeth’s own hand.” “Now there are three.” Joffrey undid his old swordbelt to don his new one. “You and Lady Sansa owe me a better present, Uncle Imp. This one is all chopped to pieces.”" "Maester Aemon his blindness. Noye and his men had been waiting within, behind a gate of heavy iron bars like the two Pyp had just unlocked. The two crossbows had gotten off a dozen quarrels as the giant struggled toward them. Then the spearmen must have come to the fore, stabbing through the bars. Still the giant found the strength to reach through, twist the head off Spotted Pate, seize the iron gate, and wrench the bars apart. Links of broken chain lay strewn across the floor. One giant. All this was the work of one giant. “Are they all dead?” Maester Aemon asked softly. “Yes. Donal was the last.” Noye’s sword was sunk deep in the giant’s throat, halfway to the hilt. The armorer had always seemed such a big man to Jon, but locked in the giant’s massive arms he looked almost like a child. “The giant crushed his spine. I don’t know who died first.” He took the lantern and moved forward for a better look. “Mag.” I am the last of the giants. He could feel the sadness there, but he had no time for sadness. “It was Mag the Mighty. The king of the giants.”" "“I am no lord, sire. You came because we sent for you, I hope. Though I could not say why you took so long about it.” Surprisingly, Stannis smiled at that. “You’re bold enough to be a Stark. Yes, I should have come sooner. If not for my Hand, I might not have come at all. Lord Seaworth is a man of humble birth, but he reminded me of my duty, when all I could think of was my rights. I had the cart before the horse, Davos said. I was trying to win the throne to save the kingdom, when I should have been trying to save the kingdom to win the throne.” Stannis pointed north. “There is where I’ll find the foe that I was born to fight.” “His name may not be spoken,” Melisandre added softly. “He is the God of Night and Terror, Jon Snow, and these shapes in the snow are his creatures.”" ]]> </content> </entry> <entry> <title type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[A Game of Thrones by George R.R. Martin (Read in 2014)]]> </title> <id>https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3036</id> <link href="https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3036"/> <updated>2015-03-29T19:36:08+02:00</updated> <author> <name type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Marco von Ballmoos]]> </name> <uri>https://earthli.com/users/marco</uri> </author> <summary type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA["Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is" ... ]]> </summary> <content type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Published by marco on 29. Mar 2015 19:36:08 Updated by marco on 29. Mar 2015 19:39:37 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I've failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an interest in this book, then I'm happy for you." [Citations] Apologies if there are transcription errors. I had to type it out all citations longhand. [1] This is the first in the epic A Song of Ice and Fire. It spans hundreds of characters and dozens of tribes and lands and civilizations. The span and breadth of it are breathtaking as is the execution. Martin's writing style is perfectly suited to this genre. Though I'd heard that some of his prose was a bit long-winded, focused too much on loving and languorous descriptions of food, I found it to be quite tightly written and easy reading. In fairness, I read this book after having read a lot of nineteenth-century literature, so perhaps I was better prepared than most. Choice passages: "'Oh, my sweet summer child,' Old Nan said quietly, 'what do you knows of fear? Fear is for the winter, my little lord, when the snows fall a hundred feet deep and the ice wind comes howling out of the north. Fear is for the long night, when the sun hides its face for years at a time, and little children are born and live and die all in darkness while the direwolves grow gaunt and hungry, and the white walkers move through the woods.'" And then there's Varys, who is wonderfully eloquent and comes at everything sidewise: "Ned had to know the rest. 'Who gave him the poison?' "'Some dear sweet friend who often shared meat and mead with him, no doubt. Oh but which one? There were may such. Lord Arryn was a kindly, trusting man.' The eunuch sighed. 'There was one boy. All he was, he owed to Jon Arryn, but when the widow fled to the Eyrie with her household, he stayed in King's Landing and prospered. It always gladdens my heart to see the young rise in the world.' The whip was in his voice again, every word a stroke. 'He must have cut a gallant figure in the tourney, him in his bright new armor, with those crescent moons on his cloak. A pity he died so untimely, before you could talk to him ...'" Vary is very carefully telling Ned who he thinks poisoned the previous Hand. He is also subtly telling him that whoever put him up to the poisoning also had him taken care of afterward, at the tourney, in order to cover their own tracks. It had already been noted that the knight's gorget was improperly tied (likely not an accident but again a small favor paid for with Lannister gold) and Sandor Clegane (the Hound) had also already noted that his brother Gregor (the Mountain) had killed the other knight on purpose, him having been unlikely not to notice a loosely tied gorget, especially when his mistress the Queen had likely let him know to look for it. Here's another example from later in the book: "[Ned speaking]'Your own ends. What ends are those, Lord Varys?' "'Peace,' Varys replied without hesitation. 'If there was one soul in King's Landing who was truly desperate to keep Robert Baratheon alive, it was me.' He signed. 'For fifteen years I protected him from his enemies, but I could not protect him from his friends. What strange fit of madness led you to tell the queen that you had learned the truth of Joffrey's birth?; "'The madness of mercy,' Ned admitted. "'Ah,' said Varys. 'To be sure. You are an honest and honorable man, Lord Eddard. Ofttimes I forget that. I have met so few of them in my life.' He glanced around the cell. 'When I see what honesty and honor have won you, I understand why.'" With Ned's admission, we see him for noble but possibly foolish, possibly stupid, but almost certainly naive person he is. How could he think that Cersei needed mercy? That she wouldn't use it to her own ends? It is to Varys's credit that he even kept talking to a man so unschooled in, well, in human nature. That Ned could so completely misread the queen and underestimate her is what I see as Martin's way of saying that this is a book about women, rather than men. Though there are many whores and serving wenches in this book, the strong women are very strong -- Catlin Stark, Danaerys Targaryan, Cersei Lannister. Ned is strong and just and loyal and noble, but his stupidity and utter failure to be able to read people and his inability to even suspect motives and goals that he himself could never have did untold damage. He was easily manipulated and thrown by the wayside by people ostensibly his inferior in every way -- except for the ability to take an opportunity when it presents itself. And Cersei's behavior can be interpreted as strength -- she knows it's a man's world but she basically enslaves her son so that she can rule from behind the throne -- or weakness -- she babies her son almost as much as Lady Lysa Arryn of the Eyrie, ruining a potentially great man. Melisandre is also quite powerful and holds sway over a king. The classic scrappy and self-reliant character is Arya; the cripple is Bran. "The Western Market was a great square of beaten earth surrounded by warrens of mud-baked brick, animal pens, whitewashed drinking halls. Hummocks rose from the ground like the backs of great suberranean beasts breaking the surface, yawning black mouths leading down to cool and cavernou storerooms below. The interior of the square was a maze of stalls and crookback aisles, shaded by awnings of woven grass." This is just a sample passage, but the scenery and locations are all described in this exquisite detail, with quite a light touch and flair for simile and metaphor. Another one struck me from the end of the book, where a few words sufficed to put you there, in the woods, in the market, on the battlefield. Not to get too hyperbolic, but Martin's descriptions of troop movements, battles and the sheer confusion of war are easily the equal of Tolstoy's from War and Peace. I was impressed with Tolstoy's ability to evoke a scene vividly but am equally impressed by Martin's similar ability -- I never felt lost and only occasionally consulted the map to straighten myself out on a point of geography. To be clear, Tolstoy's battles were almost universally portrayed as pointless and wasteful of human life and endeavor, whereas Martin allows himself the conceit that war can accomplish worthwhile deeds. One was a historian; the other is a fantasist. It's a matter of taste and what for some is lovely, descriptive writing is, for others, boring and superfluous detail. The balance is hard to get right and 5% one way or another can lead to ruinous and embarrassing passages rather than praiseworthy prose. Your mileage may vary, but I quite like it, is what I'm trying to say. "The woods were full of whispers. "Moonlight winked on the tumbling waters of the stream below as it wound its rocky way along the floor of the valley. Beneath the trees, warhorses whickered softly and pawed at the moist, leafy ground, while men made nervous jests in hushed voices. Now and again, she heard the chink of spears, the faint metallic slither of chain mail, but even those sounds were muffled." And Martin's feel for dialogue and roguish, fun characters is a welcome relief from all of the gallant tedium of the Tolkien books. Don't get me wrong, I really, really liked reading those. I've read them twice, in fact. No one would ever, ever, ever accuse Tolkien of being funny, though. Those books are unbroken tedium, whether fleeing from the shadow, mourning past woes or those to come or sitting through solemn and deep ceremonies. Nobody ever really got blasted or laid. Here is a conversation between Bronn (a sellsword and one of the best characters) and Tyrion Lannister (another of the great characters). In this passage, Martin fills in more tantalizing detail about how awesome Bronn is while Tyrion questions him about the whore he'd procured for him. "Bronn was seated cross-legged under a chestnut tree, near where they'd tied the horses. He was honing the edge of his sword, wide awake; the sellsword did not seem to sleep like other men. 'Where did you find her?' Tyrion asked him as he pissed. "'I took her from a knight. The man was loath to give her up, but your name changed his thinking somewhat...that, and my dirk at his throat.' "'Splendid,' Tyrion said dryly, shaking off the last drops. 'I seem to recall saying find me a whore, not make me an enemy.' "'The pretty ones were all claimed,' Bronn said. 'I'll be pleased to take her back if you'd prefer a toothless drab.' "Tyrion limped closer to where he sat. 'My lord father would call that insolence, and send you to the mines for impertinence.' "'Good for me you're not your father,' Bronn repied. 'I saw one with boils all over her nose. Would you like her?' "'What, and break your heart?' Tyrion shot back. 'I shall keep Shae. Did you perchance note the name of this knight you took her from? I'd rather not have him beside me in the battle.' "Bronn rose, cat-quick and cat-graceful, turnin his sword in his hand. 'You'll have me beside you in the battle, dwarf.' "Tyrion nodded. The night air was warm on his bare skin. 'See that I survive this battle, and you can name your reward.' "Bronn tossed the longsword from his right hand to his left, and tried a cut. 'Who'd want to kill the likes of you?' "'My lord father, for one. He's put me in the van[guard].' "'I'd do the same. A small man with a big shield. You'll give the archers fits.' "'I find you oddly cheering,' Tyrion said. 'I must be mad.' "Bronn sheathed his sword. 'Beyond a doubt.'" From this passage alone, you realize what a great job they've done with the casting and scripting for the TV show. I read all of Tyrion's dialogue in Peter Dinklage's voice. And Jerome Flynn's Bronn is indelibly burned into my brain. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] While the modern age saw fit to allow me to borrow books from a library halfway around the world and whisk them to my electronic book for a period of fourteen days, before the bits once again evaporated into the aether -- no small stress that, to be sure, especially with an 800-page tome -- it did not see fit to provide the content to me in a format from which I was deemed worthy of being able to copy content that I found interesting. Presumably, this is to prevent wholesale copying of copyrighted good, but this is, quite frankly, a ridiculous situation to in which to find ourselves in the year of 2014. Here we sit, atop a pile of information and accumulated wisdom, culture and knowledge -- all potentially available at a moment's notice -- and the paramount purpose is preëmptively assume that all consumers of this content are going to criminally benefit themselves, leaving the true generators of content to starve, despite their glorious contributions to humanity. The gods know our typing and spelling skills have only gotten worse -- why make us waste so much time? ]]> </content> </entry> <entry> <title type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Snuff by Terry Pratchett (Read in 2014)]]> </title> <id>https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3088</id> <link href="https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3088"/> <updated>2015-03-29T19:34:53+02:00</updated> <author> <name type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Marco von Ballmoos]]> </name> <uri>https://earthli.com/users/marco</uri> </author> <summary type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA["Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is" ... ]]> </summary> <content type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Published by marco on 29. Mar 2015 19:34:53 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I've failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an interest in this book, then I'm happy for you." [Citations] "‘In short, Drumknott, a certain amount of harmless banditry amongst the lower classes is to be smiled upon if not actively encouraged, for the health of the city, but what should we do when the highborn and wealthy take to crime? Indeed, if a poor man will spend a year in prison for stealing out of hunger, how high would the gallows need to be to hang the rich man who breaks the law out of greed?’" "Lady Sybil examined a sherry bottle and topped up her glass. ‘Surely you don’t think that the blacksmith really had the right to fight you for this house?’ Sam wished that he could drink, right now. ‘No, of course not. I mean, there wouldn’t be an end to it. People have been winning and losing on the old roulette wheel of fate for thousands of years. I know that, but you know that I think that if you’re going to stop the wheel then you have to spare some thought for the poor buggers who’re sitting on zero.’" It's all well and good to end violent takeover but that suggestion always comes from those who've just won. "A copper should always be willing to learn, and Vimes had learned from Lord Vetinari that you should never react to any comment or situation until you had decided exactly what you were going to do. This had the dual attraction of preventing you from saying or doing the wrong thing while at the same time making other people extremely nervous." "But he didn’t have to give the man anything, and in those days a whole half-dollar was probably more money than the old man could imagine! Once Sybil, in one of their very infrequent arguments, had surprised him by blurting out, ‘Well, Sam, my family got its start in life, its grub stake if you like, by piracy. You should like that, Sam! Good honest manual labour! And look what it led to! The trouble with you, Sam Vimes, is that you’re determined to be your very own class enemy.’" This changes nothing about a situation in which some have so much and others so little. Why are some given the opportunity to exhibit largesse by distributing crumbs, an act which does not negatively impact them. and why must all the others hope for largesse? "You apply one law for the poor and none for the rich, my dear, because the poor are such a nuisance." "Vimes turned a corner and there were the goblins. He was glad that young Feeney couldn’t see them. Strictly speaking, Vimes wished he couldn’t see them either. There must have been a hundred of them, many of them holding weapons. They were crude weapons, to be sure, but a flint axe hitting your head does not need a degree in physics." "Vimes stared at the rugged face that only a mother could tolerate and perhaps love, searching for any sign of anger or grief. There was just a sense of sorrow and hopeless resignation at the fact that the world was as it was and always would be and there was nothing that could be done. The goblin was a sigh on legs. In dejection he looked up at Vimes and said, ‘They used to send hungry dogs into the cave, Mister Po-leess-maan. Those were good days; we ate well.’" "Oh dear, you of all people must recognize a substition when you’re possessed by it? It’s the opposite of a superstition: it’s real even if you don’t believe in it." ]]> </content> </entry> <entry> <title type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[The Long Earth by Terry Pratchett & Stephen Baxter (Read in 2014)]]> </title> <id>https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3087</id> <link href="https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3087"/> <updated>2015-03-29T19:32:53+02:00</updated> <author> <name type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Marco von Ballmoos]]> </name> <uri>https://earthli.com/users/marco</uri> </author> <summary type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA["Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is" ... ]]> </summary> <content type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Published by marco on 29. Mar 2015 19:32:53 Updated by marco on 23. Mar 2025 21:45:54 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I've failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an interest in this book, then I'm happy for you." This is the story of a near-future Earth where alternate universes are just a “step” away. Each is a complete Earth, most of which are almost entirely unpopulated. Some people can step with a gadget, others without one and others can’t step at all, remaining “trapped” on the mainline Earth. The story introduces this situation, provides some examples and then sends Joshua—a natural stepper—on an adventure far up the long line of Earths, accompanied by an AI named Lobsang. As usual, Baxter’s parts are technologically solid, but immediately recognizable for his wooden characterizations. Similarly, Pratchett’s style shines through in a few lovely, though shorter, chapters. It was good fun; recommended. [Citations] "Joshua, always remember, you have not travelled back in time, or forward. You have travelled far across the contingency tree of the possible, on a planet where dramatic but quasi-random extinction events periodically obliterate much of the family of life, leaving room for evolutionary innovation. On each Earth, however, the outcomes will differ, by a little or a lot…" "I am giving mankind the key to endless worlds. An end to scarcity and, may we hope, war. And perhaps a new meaning to life. I leave the exploration of all these worlds to your generation, my dear, though personally I think you will fuck it up royally." "They resent the Long Earth and those who travel it, and all that this great opening-up has brought. And those who are losing money, in the new order of things. There are always plenty of those…’" "The French, for example, declared that all the French footprints were available for colonization by anybody who wanted to be French, and was prepared to accept a carefully put together document which outlined what being French meant. It was a brave idea, slightly let down by the fact that despite a nationwide debate it appeared that no two Frenchmen could agree exactly on what being French did mean. Although another school of thought held that arguing about what made you French was part of what made you French." "Modesty is only arrogance by stealth." "As an engineer I find it all hard to believe. But as a Buddhist, I accept there are more ways to think about the universe than one can imagine.’ ‘I sincerely hope we are not going to start talking religion,’ said Sally sharply. ‘Open your mind, Sally. It’s only another framework for understanding the universe, just another tool.’ ‘So what does that make Joshua?’ she snapped back. ‘The chosen one?’" ]]> </content> </entry> <entry> <title type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Raising Steam by Terry Pratchett (Read in 2014)]]> </title> <id>https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3086</id> <link href="https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3086"/> <updated>2015-03-29T19:30:16+02:00</updated> <author> <name type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Marco von Ballmoos]]> </name> <uri>https://earthli.com/users/marco</uri> </author> <summary type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA["Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is" ... ]]> </summary> <content type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Published by marco on 29. Mar 2015 19:30:16 Updated by marco on 29. Mar 2015 19:33:11 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I've failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an interest in this book, then I'm happy for you." [Citations] "He thought, what would happen if goblins learned everything about humans and did everything the human way because they thought it was better than the goblin way? How long would it be before they were no longer goblins and left behind everything that was goblin, even their pots? The pots were lovely, he’d bought several for his mum. Goblins took pots seriously now, they sparkled, even at night, but what happens next? Will goblins really stop taking an interest in their pots and will humans learn the serious, valuable and difficult and almost magical skill of pot-making? Or will goblins become, well, just another kind of human? And which would be better? And then he thought, maybe a policeman should stop thinking about all this because, after all, there was no crime, nothing was wrong … and yet in a subtle way, there was. Something was being stolen from the world without anybody noticing or caring." ]]> </content> </entry> <entry> <title type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Dracula by Bram Stoker (Read in 2014)]]> </title> <id>https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3021</id> <link href="https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3021"/> <updated>2015-03-29T19:29:15+02:00</updated> <author> <name type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Marco von Ballmoos]]> </name> <uri>https://earthli.com/users/marco</uri> </author> <summary type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA["Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is" ... ]]> </summary> <content type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Published by marco on 29. Mar 2015 19:29:15 Updated by marco on 29. Mar 2015 19:33:23 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I've failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an interest in this book, then I'm happy for you." [Notes] This book charges out of the gate and is quite enthralling -- no pun intended -- in a very modern way. Unfortunately, after the whole merry band of characters is introduced and expertly knit together, the book bogs down in professions of fealty and undying love and respect and myriad other forms of swearing undying and lifelong allegiance to one another. There is also the not easily overlooked heavily misogynistic aspect of the novel. The ladies Lucy and Mina are introduced as very clever and very capable, for ladies. That is, the females make the most of their the paucity of gray matter with which the good Lord blessed them. Stoker makes sure to let the inadequacy of the female thinking capacity be extensively explained by the women of his novel themselves. They are not the only ones who suffer thusly. Dracula is, as well, not considered very clever and possessed of only a child brain. The group of gentlemen was perhaps revolutionary at the time, but is now somewhat trite: a doctor in charge of an insane asylum (Dr. Seward), a Renaissance man, well-learned in all manner of arcane minutiae who also happens to be well-acquainted with the dark corners of the occult, Dr. Van Helsing, a brave, competent and not unwealthy Texan in the form of Quincey Morris, a Lord Gondalming (Arthur Holmwood) who throws money and influence about and, finally, Jonathan Harker, a lawyer who just happened to have come into a magnificent inheritance. The two ladies are, of course, more beautiful than anything this side of the angels. I liked quite a few passages in this book, but almost nothing of the second half wherein the hunt for Dracula mostly takes place. The hunters are, for the sake of the story, sometimes almost inordinately stupid and unobservant, so that Dracula continues to get the upper hand much longer than he should. But this lack of putting quite obvious clues together -- or perhaps more charitably, forgetfulness -- would go on to become a staple of the modern Western genre that Stoker would help found. Part of the tediousness of the book lies not in the tale itself or in the characters but in the voices used to tell it. Some of the passages are challengingly written in very coarse dialect but are sufficiently pregnable to be utterly rewarding and enjoyable. I speak of many of the minor characters interrogated by our merry band in their pursuit of Dracula. On the other hand, the eminently readable but grammatically horrifying prose of Van Helsing left me completely cold. Endless pages torn from his journal written in what I must assume is how Stoker thought an at-times flustered Dutch master of the occult would write or speak. Almost equally tedious were the long passages by the women -- and less occasionally by the men -- thanking God over and over for the chance to be good and to survive in order to be able to more capably serve both Him and man. Or their men. Or whatever. [Citations:] I can't imagine how this passage must have read in an England utterly steeped in its Victorain prudishness. It's quite well-written and holds up surprisingly well. "All three had brilliant white teeth that shone like pearls against the ruby of their voluptuous lips. There was something about them that made me uneasy, some longing and at the same time some deadly fear. I felt in my heart a wicked, burning desire that they would kiss me with those red lips. It is not good to note this down, lest some day it should meet Mina's eyes and cause her pain, but it is the truth. They whispered together, and then they all three laughed, such a silvery, musical laugh, but as hard as though the sound never could have come through the softness of human lips. It was like the intolerable, tingling sweetness of water-glasses when played on by a cunning hand. The fair girl shook her head coquettishly, and the other two urged her on. "One said, "Go on! You are first, and we shall follow. Yours is the right to begin." "The other added, "He is young and strong. There are kisses for us all." "I lay quiet, looking out from under my eyelashes in an agony of delightful anticipation. The fair girl advanced and bent over me till I could feel “the movement of her breath upon me. Sweet it was in one sense, honey-sweet, and sent the same tingling through the nerves as her voice, but with a bitter underlying the sweet, a bitter offensiveness, as one smells in blood. "I was afraid to raise my eyelids, but looked out and saw perfectly under the lashes. The girl went on her knees, and bent over me, simply gloating. There was a deliberate voluptuousness which was both thrilling and repulsive, and as she arched her neck she actually licked her lips like an animal, till I could see in the moonlight the moisture shining on the scarlet lips and on the red tongue as it lapped the white sharp teeth. Lower and lower went her head as the lips went below the range of my mouth and chin and seemed to fasten on my throat. Then she paused, and I could hear the churning sound of her tongue as it licked her teeth and lips, and I could feel the hot breath on my neck. Then the skin of my throat began to tingle as one's flesh does when the hand that is to tickle it approaches nearer, nearer “. I could feel the soft, shivering touch of the lips on the super-sensitive skin of my throat, and the hard dents of two sharp teeth, just touching and pausing there. I closed my eyes in languorous ecstasy and waited, waited with beating heart." Or this eerie scene in which Harker confronts the Count for the first time. "Then I stopped and looked at the Count. There was a mocking smile on the bloated face which seemed to drive me mad. This was the being I was helping to transfer to London, where, perhaps, for centuries to come he might, amongst its teeming millions, satiate his lust for blood, and create a new and ever-widening circle of semi-demons to batten on the helpless. "The very thought drove me mad. A terrible desire came upon me to rid the world of such a monster. There was no lethal weapon at hand, but I seized a shovel which the workmen had been using to fill the cases, and lifting it high, struck, with the edge downward, at the hateful face. But as I did so the head turned, and the eyes fell upon me, with all their blaze of basilisk horror. The sight seemed to paralyze me, and the shovel turned in my hand and glanced from the face, merely making a deep gash above the forehead. The shovel fell from my hand across the box, and as I pulled it away the flange of the blade caught the edge of the lid which fell over again “, and hid the horrid thing from my sight. The last glimpse I had was of the bloated face, blood-stained and fixed with a grin of malice which would have held its own in the nethermost hell." "“White, wet clouds, which swept by in ghostly fashion, so dank and damp and cold that it needed but little effort of imagination to think that the spirits of those lost at sea were touching their living brethren with the clammy hands of death, and many a one shuddered as the wreaths of sea-mist swept by. "At times the mist cleared, and the sea for some distance could be seen in the glare of the lightning, which came thick and fast, followed by such peals of thunder that the whole sky overhead seemed trembling under the shock of the footsteps of the storm. "Some of the scenes thus revealed were of immeasurable grandeur and of absorbing interest. The sea, running mountains high, threw skywards with each wave mighty masses of white foam, which the tempest seemed to snatch at and whirl away into space. Here and there a fishing boat, with a rag of sail, running madly for shelter before the blast, now and again the white wings of a storm-tossed seabird. On the summit of the East Cliff the new searchlight was ready for experiment, but had not yet been tried. The officers in charge of “it got it into working order, and in the pauses of onrushing mist swept with it the surface of the sea. Once or twice its service was most effective, as when a fishing boat, with gunwale under water, rushed into the harbour, able, by the guidance of the sheltering light, to avoid the danger of dashing against the piers. As each boat achieved the safety of the port there was a shout of joy from the mass of people on the shore, a shout which for a moment seemed to cleave the gale and was then swept away in its rush." A lovely sign-off for a letter, asking for haste: "Pray do not take us as exceeding the bounds of business courtesy in pressing you in all ways to use the utmost expedition." Or this bit: "“He went to the door and opened it, a most unnecessary proceeding it seemed to me. I have always thought that a wild animal never looks so well as when some obstacle of pronounced durability is between us. A personal experience has intensified rather than diminished that idea." More horror: "[...] far down the avenue of yews we saw a white figure advance, a dim white figure, which held something dark at its breast. The figure stopped, and at the moment a ray of moonlight fell upon the masses of driving clouds, and showed in startling prominence a dark-haired woman, dressed in the cerements of the grave. We could not see the face, for it was bent down over what we saw to be a fair-haired child. There was a pause and a sharp little cry, such as a child gives in sleep, or a dog as it lies before the fire and dreams. [...] as we looked the white figure moved forwards again. It was now near enough for us to see clearly, and the moonlight still held. My own heart grew cold as ice, and I could hear the gasp of Arthur, as we recognized the features of Lucy Westenra. Lucy Westenra, but yet how changed. The sweetness was turned to adamantine, heartless cruelty, and the purity to voluptuous wantonness. "[...] By the concentrated light that fell on Lucy's face we could see that the lips were crimson with fresh blood, and that the stream had trickled over her chin and stained the purity of her lawn death-robe." [Errata] When I read books that I downloaded from "Gutenberg Project" <https://www.gutenberg.org>, I like to be helpful and provide corrections where I can. They have a very friendly and responsive errata-submission system. Title: Dracula, by Bram Stoker May 9, 2008 [EBook #345] File: pg345.epub Page 99: she demurred at first‐I know why, old man‐she finally consented Replace "‐” with an un-escaped entity; at first-I know why, old man-she ]]> </content> </entry> <entry> <title type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Moby Dick; or, The Whale by Herman Melville (Read in 2014)]]> </title> <id>https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3011</id> <link href="https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3011"/> <updated>2015-03-29T19:26:56+02:00</updated> <author> <name type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Marco von Ballmoos]]> </name> <uri>https://earthli.com/users/marco</uri> </author> <summary type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA["Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is" ... ]]> </summary> <content type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Published by marco on 29. Mar 2015 19:26:56 Updated by marco on 17. May 2015 17:19:06 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I've failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an interest in this book, then I'm happy for you." [Notes] The impression I got of this work when I tried reading it as a teenager caused me to avoid reading it as an adult, until now. This is a pity because it is, for the most part, a wonderfully written and action-packed tale that puts you remarkably into the heart of a dangerous profession like whaling with a vividness I didn't think possible. The descriptions of the action are as visceral as Tolstoy's. [Citations] "What of it, if some old hunks of a sea-captain orders me to get a broom and sweep down the decks? What does that indignity amount to, weighed, I mean, in the scales of the New Testament? Do you think the archangel Gabriel thinks anything the less of me, because I promptly and respectfully obey that old hunks in that particular instance? Who ain't a slave? Tell me that. Well, then, however the old sea-captains may order me about—however they may thump and punch me about, I have the satisfaction of knowing that it is all right; that everybody else is one way or other served in much the same way—either in a physical or metaphysical point of view, that is; and so the universal thump is passed round, and all hands should rub each other's shoulder-blades, and be content." "Gaining the more open water, the bracing breeze waxed fresh; the little Moss tossed the quick foam from her bows, as a young colt his snortings. How I snuffed that Tartar air!—how I spurned that turnpike earth!—that common highway all over dented with the marks of slavish heels and hoofs; and turned me to admire the magnanimity of the sea which will permit no records." "She was a thing of trophies. A cannibal of a craft, tricking herself forth in the chased bones of her enemies. All round, her unpanelled, open bulwarks were garnished like one continuous jaw, with the long sharp teeth of the sperm whale, inserted there for pins, to fasten her old hempen thews and tendons to. Those thews ran not through base blocks of land wood, but deftly travelled over sheaves of sea-ivory. Scorning a turnstile wheel at her reverend helm, she sported there a tiller; and that tiller was in one mass, curiously carved from the long narrow lower jaw of her hereditary foe." "Know ye now, Bulkington? Glimpses do ye seem to see of that mortally intolerable truth; that all deep, earnest thinking is but the intrepid effort of the soul to keep the open independence of her sea; while the wildest winds of heaven and earth conspire to cast her on the treacherous, slavish shore?" "He lived in the world, as the last of the Grisly Bears lived in settled Missouri. And as when Spring and Summer had departed, that wild Logan of the woods, burying himself in the hollow of a tree, lived out the winter there, sucking his own paws; so, in his inclement, howling old age, Ahab's soul, shut up in the caved trunk of his body, there fed upon the sullen paws of its gloom!" "D'ye mark him, Flask?" whispered Stubb; "the chick that's in him pecks the shell. 'Twill soon be out." "Judge, then, to what pitches of inflamed, distracted fury the minds of his more desperate hunters were impelled, when amid the chips of chewed boats, and the sinking limbs of torn comrades, they swam out of the white curds of the whale's direful wrath into the serene, exasperating sunlight, that smiled on, as if at a birth or a bridal." "Human madness is oftentimes a cunning and most feline thing. When you think it fled, it may have but become transfigured into some still subtler form. Ahab's full lunacy subsided not, but deepeningly contracted; like the unabated Hudson, when that noble Northman flows narrowly, but unfathomably through the Highland gorge. But, as in his narrow-flowing monomania, not one jot of Ahab's broad madness had been left behind; so in that broad madness, not one jot of his great natural intellect had perished. That before living agent, now became the living instrument. If such a furious trope may stand, his special lunacy stormed his general sanity, and carried it, and turned all its concentred cannon upon its own mad mark; so that far from having lost his strength, Ahab, to that one end, did now possess a thousand fold more potency than ever he had sanely brought to bear upon any one reasonable object." "And when we consider that other theory of the natural philosophers, that all other earthly hues—every stately or lovely emblazoning—the sweet tinges of sunset skies and woods; yea, and the gilded velvets of butterflies, and the butterfly cheeks of young girls; all these are but subtile deceits, not actually inherent in substances, but only laid on from without; so that all deified Nature absolutely paints like the harlot, whose allurements cover nothing but the charnel-house within; and when we proceed further, and consider that the mystical cosmetic which produces every one of her hues, the great principle of light, for ever remains white or colourless in itself, and if operating without medium upon matter, would touch all objects, even tulips and roses, with its own blank tinge—pondering all this, the palsied universe lies before us a leper; and like wilful travellers in Lapland, who refuse to wear coloured and colouring glasses upon their eyes, so the wretched infidel gazes himself blind at the monumental white shroud that wraps all the prospect around him. And of all these things the Albino whale was the symbol." "Therefore, the tormented spirit that glared out of bodily eyes, when what seemed Ahab rushed from his room, was for the time but a vacated thing, a formless somnambulistic being, a ray of living light, to be sure, but without an object to colour, and therefore a blankness in itself. God help thee, old man, thy thoughts have created a creature in thee; and he whose intense thinking thus makes him a Prometheus; a vulture feeds upon that heart for ever; that vulture the very creature he creates." "Those tiger yellow creatures of his seemed all steel and whalebone; like five trip-hammers they rose and fell with regular strokes of strength, which periodically started the boat along the water like a horizontal burst boiler out of a Mississippi steamer. As for Fedallah, who was seen pulling the harpooneer oar, he had thrown aside his black jacket, and displayed his naked chest with the whole part of his body above the gunwale, clearly cut against the alternating depressions of the watery horizon; while at the other end of the boat Ahab, with one arm, like a fencer's, thrown half backward into the air, as if to counterbalance any tendency to trip; [...]" "Only the infidel sharks in the audacious seas may give ear to such words, when, with tornado brow, and eyes of red murder, and foam-glued lips, Ahab leaped after his prey." "[...] those insulated, immemorial, unalterable countries, which even in these modern days still preserve much of the ghostly aboriginalness of earth's primal generations, when the memory of the first man was a distinct recollection, and all men his descendants, unknowing whence he came, eyed each other as real phantoms, and asked of the sun and the moon why they were created and to what end; when though, according to Genesis, the angels indeed consorted with the daughters of men, the devils also, add the uncanonical Rabbins, indulged in mundane amours." "Few or no words were spoken; and the silent ship, as if manned by painted sailors in wax, day after day tore on through all the swift madness and gladness of the demoniac waves. By night the same muteness of humanity before the shrieks of the ocean prevailed; still in silence the men swung in the bowlines; still wordless Ahab stood up to the blast. Even when wearied nature seemed demanding repose he would not seek that repose in his hammock." "[...] this craft was bleached like the skeleton of a stranded walrus. All down her sides, this spectral appearance was traced with long channels of reddened rust, while all her spars and her rigging were like the thick branches of trees furred over with hoar-frost. Only her lower sails were set. A wild sight it was to see her long-bearded look-outs at those three mast-heads. They seemed clad in the skins of beasts, so torn and bepatched the raiment that had survived nearly four years of cruising. Standing in iron hoops nailed to the mast, they swayed and swung over a fathomless sea; [...]" "Of all divers, thou hast dived the deepest. That head upon which the upper sun now gleams, has moved amid this world's foundations. Where unrecorded names and navies rust, and untold hopes and anchors rot; where in her murderous hold this frigate earth is ballasted with bones of millions of the drowned; there, in that awful water-land, there was thy most familiar home." "Few are the foreheads which like Shakespeare's or Melancthon's rise so high, and descend so low, that the eyes themselves seem clear, eternal, tideless mountain lakes; and all above them in the forehead's wrinkles, you seem to track the antlered thoughts descending there to drink, as the Highland hunters track the snow prints of the deer." "I tell ye what it is, men"—cried Stubb to his crew—"it's against my religion to get mad; but I'd like to eat that villainous Yarman—Pull—won't ye? Are ye going to let that rascal beat ye? Do ye love brandy? A hogshead of brandy, then, to the best man. Come, why don't some of ye burst a blood-vessel? Who's that been dropping an anchor overboard—we don't budge an inch—we're becalmed. Halloo, here's grass growing in the boat's bottom—and by the Lord, the mast there's budding. This won't do, boys. Look at that Yarman! The short and long of it is, men, will ye spit fire or not?" "But the monster's run was a brief one. Giving a sudden gasp, he tumultuously sounded. With a grating rush, the three lines flew round the loggerheads with such a force as to gouge deep grooves in them; while so fearful were the harpooneers that this rapid sounding would soon exhaust the lines, that using all their dexterous might, they caught repeated smoking turns with the rope to hold on; till at last—owing to the perpendicular strain from the lead-lined chocks of the boats, whence the three ropes went straight down into the blue—the gunwales of the bows were almost even with the water, while the three sterns tilted high in the air." "As the three boats lay there on that gently rolling sea, gazing down into its eternal blue noon; and as not a single groan or cry of any sort, nay, not so much as a ripple or a bubble came up from its depths; what landsman would have thought, that beneath all that silence and placidity, the utmost monster of the seas was writhing and wrenching in agony! Not eight inches of perpendicular rope were visible at the bows. Seems it credible that by three such thin threads the great Leviathan was suspended like the big weight to an eight day clock." "As the boats now more closely surrounded him, the whole upper part of his form, with much of it that is ordinarily submerged, was plainly revealed. His eyes, or rather the places where his eyes had been, were beheld. As strange misgrown masses gather in the knot-holes of the noblest oaks when prostrate, so from the points which the whale's eyes had once occupied, now protruded blind bulbs, horribly pitiable to see. But pity there was none. For all his old age, and his one arm, and his blind eyes, he must die the death and be murdered, in order to light the gay bridals and other merry-makings of men, and also to illuminate the solemn churches that preach unconditional inoffensiveness by all to all. Still rolling in his blood, at last he partially disclosed a strangely discoloured bunch or protuberance, the size of a bushel, low down on the flank. "A nice spot," cried Flask; "just let me prick him there once." "Avast!" cried Starbuck, "there's no need of that!" "But humane Starbuck was too late. At the instant of the dart an ulcerous jet shot from this cruel wound, and goaded by it into more “than sufferable anguish, the whale now spouting thick blood, with swift fury blindly darted at the craft, bespattering them and their glorying crews all over with showers of gore, capsizing Flask's boat and marring the bows. It was his death stroke. For, by this time, so spent was he by loss of blood, that he helplessly rolled away from the wreck he had made; lay panting on his side, impotently flapped with his stumped fin, then over and over slowly revolved like a waning world; turned up the white secrets of his belly; lay like a log, and died. It was most piteous, that last expiring spout. As when by unseen hands the water is gradually drawn off from some mighty fountain, and with half-stifled melancholy gurglings the spray-column lowers and lowers to the ground—so the last long dying spout of the whale." "Let us, then, look at this matter, along with some interesting items contingent. Every one knows that by the peculiar cunning of their gills, the finny tribes in general breathe the air which at all times is combined with the element in which they swim; hence, a herring or a cod might live a century, and never once raise its head above the surface. But owing to his marked internal structure which gives him regular lungs, like a human being's, the whale can only live by inhaling the disengaged air in the open atmosphere. Wherefore the necessity for his periodical visits to the upper world. But he cannot in any degree breathe through his mouth, for, in his ordinary attitude, the Sperm Whale's mouth is buried at least eight feet beneath the surface; and what is still more, his windpipe has no connexion with his mouth." "And how nobly it raises our conceit of the mighty, misty monster, to behold him solemnly sailing through a calm tropical sea; his vast, mild head overhung by a canopy of vapour, engendered by his incommunicable contemplations, and that vapour—as you will sometimes see it—glorified by a rainbow, as if Heaven itself had put its seal upon his thoughts. For, d'ye see, rainbows do not visit the clear air; they only irradiate vapour. And so, through all the thick mists of the dim doubts in my mind, divine intuitions now and then shoot, enkindling my fog with a heavenly ray. And for this I thank God; for all have doubts; many deny; but doubts or denials, few along with them, have intuitions. Doubts of all things earthly, and intuitions of some things heavenly; this combination makes neither believer nor infidel, but makes a man who regards them both with equal eye." "As they narrated to each other their unholy adventures, their tales of terror told in words of mirth; as their uncivilized laughter forked upwards out of them, like the flames from the furnace; as to and fro, in their front, the harpooneers wildly gesticulated with their huge pronged forks and dippers; as the wind howled on, and the sea leaped, and the ship groaned and dived, and yet steadfastly shot her red hell further and further into the blackness of the sea and the night, and scornfully champed the white bone in her mouth, and viciously spat round her on all sides; then the rushing Pequod, freighted with savages, and laden with fire, and burning a corpse, and plunging into that blackness of darkness, seemed the material counterpart of her monomaniac commander's soul." "But as the last whelmings intermixingly poured themselves over the sunken head of the Indian at the mainmast, leaving a few inches of the erect spar yet visible, together with long streaming yards of the flag, which calmly undulated, with ironical coincidings, over the destroying billows they almost touched;—at that instant, a red arm and a hammer hovered backwardly uplifted in the open air, in the act of nailing the flag faster and yet faster to the subsiding spar. A sky-hawk that tauntingly had followed the main-truck downwards from its natural home among the stars, pecking at the flag, and incommoding Tashtego there; this bird now chanced to intercept its broad fluttering wing between the hammer and the wood; and simultaneously feeling that etherial thrill, the submerged savage beneath, in his death-gasp, kept his hammer frozen there; and so the bird of heaven, with archangelic shrieks, and his imperial beak thrust upwards, and his whole captive form folded in the flag of Ahab, went down with his ship, which, like Satan, would not sink to hell till she had dragged a living part of heaven along with her, and helmeted herself with it. "Now small fowls flew screaming over the yet yawning gulf; a “sullen white surf beat against its steep sides; then all collapsed, and the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago." Here Melville makes the apologists argument that whales aren't going extinct, but rather, that they are just going somewhere else, where we can't see them anymore. "Nor, considered aright, does it seem any argument in favour of the gradual extinction of the Sperm Whale, for example, that in former years (the latter part of the last century, say) these Leviathans, in small pods, were encountered much oftener than at present, and, in consequence, the voyages were not so prolonged, and were also much more remunerative. Because, as has been elsewhere noticed, those whales, influenced by some views to safety, now swim the seas in immense caravans, so that to a large degree the scattered solitaries, yokes, and pods, and schools of other days are now aggregated into vast but widely separated, unfrequent armies. That is all. And equally fallacious seems the conceit, that because the so-called whale-bone whales no longer haunt many grounds in former years abounding with them, hence that species also is declining. For they are only being driven from promontory to cape; and if one coast is no longer enlivened with their jets, then, be sure, some other and remoter strand has been very recently startled by the unfamiliar spectacle." The scene on pages 451--453, where Ahab barters and japes with Perth the blacksmith to have him forge the steel pike that will affix Moby Dick once and for all is long, but wonderfully written. It starts with Ahab telling a riddle and ends by tempering the barbed monstrosity in blood. Or there's this homage to the craftsman (as opposed to the tinkerer, the cobbler, the hacker), "I don't like this cobbling sort of business—I don't like it at all; it's undignified; it's not my place. Let tinkers' brats do tinkerings; we are their betters. I like to take in hand none but clean, virgin, fair-and-square mathematical jobs, something that regularly begins at the beginning, and is at the middle when midway, and comes to an end at the conclusion; not a cobbler's job, that's at an end in the middle, and at the beginning at the end." "Slowly crossing the deck from the scuttle, Ahab leaned over the side and watched how his shadow in the water sank and sank to his gaze, the more and the more that he strove to pierce the profundity. But the lovely aromas in that enchanted air did at last seem to dispel, for a moment, the cankerous thing in his soul. That glad, happy air, that winsome sky, did at last stroke and caress him; the step-mother world, so long cruel—forbidding—now threw affectionate arms round his stubborn neck, and did seem to joyously sob over him, as if over one, that however wilful and erring, she could yet find it in her heart to save and to bless. From beneath his slouched hat Ahab dropped a tear into the sea; nor did all the Pacific contain such wealth as that one wee drop." "What is it, what nameless, inscrutable, unearthly thing is it; what cozening, hidden lord and master, and cruel, remorseless emperor commands me; that against all natural lovings and longings, I so keep pushing, and crowding, and jamming myself on all the time; recklessly making me ready to do what in my own proper, natural heart, I durst not so much as dare? Is Ahab, Ahab? Is it I, God, or who, that lifts this arm? But if the great sun move not of himself; but is as an errand-boy in heaven; nor one single star can revolve, but by some invisible power; how then can this one small heart beat; this one small brain think thoughts; unless God does that beating, does that thinking, does that living, and not I. By heaven, man, we are turned round and round in this world, like yonder windlass, and Fate is the handspike. And all the time, lo! that smiling sky, and this unsounded sea! Look! see yon Albicore! who put it into him to chase and fang that flying-fish? Where do murderers go, man! Who's to doom, when the judge himself is dragged to the bar?" "But suddenly as he peered down and down into its depths, he profoundly saw a white living spot no bigger than a white weasel, with wonderful celerity uprising, and magnifying as it rose, till it turned, and then there were plainly revealed two long crooked rows of white, glistening teeth, floating up from the undiscoverable bottom. It was Moby Dick's open mouth and scrolled jaw; his vast, shadowed bulk still half blending with the blue of the sea. The glittering mouth yawned beneath the boat like an open-doored marble tomb [...]" And, again, Ahab describes his powerlessness before Fate, this time to Stubb, "Starbuck, of late I've felt strangely moved to thee; ever since that hour we both saw—thou know'st what, in one another's eyes. But in this matter of the whale, be the front of thy face to me as the palm of this hand—a lipless, unfeatured blank. Ahab is for ever Ahab, man. This whole act's immutably decreed. 'Twas rehearsed by thee and me a billion years before this ocean rolled. Fool! I am the Fates' lieutenant; I act under orders. Look thou, underling! that thou obeyest mine.—Stand round me, men. Ye see an old man cut down to the stump; leaning on a shivered lance; propped up on a lonely foot. 'Tis Ahab—his body's part; but Ahab's soul's a centipede, that moves upon a hundred legs. I feel strained, half stranded, as ropes that tow dismasted frigates in a gale; and I may look so. But ere I break, yell hear me crack; and till ye hear THAT, know that Ahab's hawser tows his purpose yet." And, finally, the money quote. "Towards thee I roll, thou all-destroying but unconquering whale; to the last I grapple with thee; from hell's heart I stab at thee; for hate's sake I spit my last breath at thee. Sink all coffins and all hearses to one common pool! and since neither can be mine, let me then tow to pieces, while still chasing thee, though tied to thee, thou damned whale! THUS, I give up the spear!" [Errata] When I read books that I downloaded from "Gutenberg Project" <https://www.gutenberg.org>, I like to be helpful and provide corrections where I can. They have a very friendly and responsive errata-submission system. Title: Moby Dick; or, The Whale, by Herman Melville May 9, 2008 [EBook #2701] File: pg2701.epub Page 182-183: right-mindedness in Starbuck, the invunerable jollity of indifference Add an “l” to “invunerable”; the invu[l]nerable jollity of ]]> </content> </entry> <entry> <title type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky (Read in 2014)]]> </title> <id>https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3076</id> <link href="https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3076"/> <updated>2015-03-29T19:23:21+02:00</updated> <author> <name type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Marco von Ballmoos]]> </name> <uri>https://earthli.com/users/marco</uri> </author> <summary type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA["Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is" ... ]]> </summary> <content type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Published by marco on 29. Mar 2015 19:23:21 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I've failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an interest in this book, then I'm happy for you." [Citations] Sonia is the daughter of Marmeladov, a drunkard and civil servant who can't keep his job and turns a blind eye when his entire household is supported by his eldest daughter's prostitution. He even manages to find a way to be at peace with taking money from her for his drink. "Hurrah for Sonia! What a mine they've dug there! And they're making the most of it! Ye, they are making the most of it! They've wept over it and grown used to it. Man grows used to everything, the scoundrel!" Dostoyevsky's descriptions of despair and suffering and entrapment-by-life are unparalleled. The situations he posits seem unreal though they were likely all too real for all too many. The past tense is inappropriate here, for even in the modern day, in the most modern of countries, the cruelty of Dostoyevsky's reality is played out day after sorrowful, miserable day with no hope or end in sight, other than through the sweet, sweet release of death. "It shall not be? But what are you going to do to prevent it? You'll forbid it? And what right have you? What can you promise them on your side to give you such a right? Your whole life, your whole future, you will devote to them when you have finished your studies and obtained a post? Yes, we have heard all that before, and that's all words, but now? And what are you doing now? You are living upon them. They borrow on their hundred roubles pension. They borrow from the Svidrigaïlovs. How are you going to save them from Svidrigaïlovs, from Afanasy Ivanovitch Vahrushin, oh, future millionaire Zeus who would arrange their lives for them? In another ten years? In another ten years, mother will be blind with knitting shawls, maybbe with weeping too. She will be worn to a shadow with fasting [...]" This next scene is noteworthy because of the depths of human depravity it shows, the utter disregard for another creature's suffering. A similar scene with an old, old whale in Moby Dick would remind me of this one. Presumably, the scene is a metaphor for the way in which the less fortunate are misused and mistreated and depleted by those above them, even if only a very little bit above them. Even if they themselves aren't all so fortunate, all the more reason to dump on those less capable of defending themselves, all the more reason to make others suffer as they themselves are made to suffer by those above them. Or maybe it's a cautionary tale of dunkenness; hard to tell. "Near the entrance of the tavern stood a cart, but a strange cart. It was one of those big carts usually drawn by heavy cart-horses and laden with casks or other heavy goods. "[...] "But now, strange to say, in the shafts of such a cart he saw a thin little sorrel beast, on of those peasants' nags which had often seen straining their utmost under a heavy load of wood or hay, especially when the wheels were stuck in the mud or in a rut. And the peasants would beat them so cruelly, sometimes even about the nose and eyes [...] All of a sudden there was a great uproar of shouting, singing and the balalaika, and from the tavern a number of big and very drunken peasants came out, [¨...] ""Get in, get in!" shouted one of them, a young thick-necked peasant with a fleshy face red as a carrot. "I'll take you all, get in!" ""Take us all with a beast like that!" ""Why, Mikolka, are you crazy to put a nag like that in such a cart?" ""And this mare is twenty if she is a day, mates!" " Get in. I'll take you all," Mikolka shouted again, leaping first into the cart, seizing the reins and standing straight up in front. "The bay has bone with Marvey," he shouted fom the car -- "and this brute, mates is just breaking my heart. I feels as if I could kill her. She's just eating her head off. Get in, I tell you! I'll make her gallop! She'll gallop!" and he picked up the whip, perparing himself with relish to flogthe little mare. "[...] "They all clambered into Mikolk's cart, laughing and making jokes. Six men got in and there was still room for more. They hauled in a fat, rosy-cheeked woman. [...] Two young fellows in the cart were just getting whips ready to help Mikolka. with the cry of "now," the mare tugged with all her might, but far from galloping, could scarcely move forward; she struggled with her legs, gasping and shinking from the blows of the three whips which were showered upon her like hail. [...] Mikolka flew into a rage and furiously thrashed the mare, as though he supposed she really could gallop." When members of the crowd expressed dismay and offered condemnation, Mikolka responded, "Don't meddle! It's my property, I'll do what I choose. Get in, more of you! Get in, all of you! I will have her go at a gallop! "All at once laughter broke into a roar and covered everything: the mare, roused by the shower of blows, began feebly kicking. Even the old man [who'd initially voiced concern] could not help smiling. To think of a wretched little beast like that trying to kick! "Two lads in the crowd snatched up whips and ran to the mare to beat her about the ribs. [...] ""Hit her in the face, in the eyes, in the eyes," cried Mikolka. "[...The mare] was almost at last gasp, but began kicking once more. ""I'll teach you to kick," Mikolka shouted ferociously. He threw down the whip, bent forward and picked up from the bottom of the cart a long, thick shaft, he took hold of one end with both hands and with an effort brandished it over the mare. ""He'll crush her," was shouted round him. "He'll kill her!" ""It's my property," shouted Mikolka and brought the shaft down with a swinging blow. There was a sound of a heavy thud. ""Thrash her, thrash her! Why have you stopped?" shouted voices in the crowd. "And Mikolka swung the shaft a second time and it fell a second time on the spine of the luckless mare. She sank back on her haunches, but lurched forward and tugged forward with all her force, tugged first on one side and then on the other, trying to move the cart. But the six whips were attacking her in all directions, and the shaft was raised again and fell up her a third time, then a fourth, with heavy measured blows. Mikolka was in a fury that he could not kill her at one blow. ""She's a tough one," was shouted in the crowd. "[...] ""Fetch an axe to her! Finish her off," shouted a third. ""i'll show you! Stand off," Mikolka screamed frantically; he threw down the shaft, stooped down in the car and picked up an iron crowbar. "Look out," he shouted, and with all his might he dealt a stunning blow at the poor mare. The blow fell; the mare staggered, sank back, tried to pull, but the bar fell again with a swinging blow on her back and shell on the ground like a log. ""Finish her off," shouted Mikolka and he leapt beside himself, out of the cart. Several young men, also flushed with drink, seized anything they could come across -- whips, sticks, poles, and ran to the dying mare. Mikolka stood on one side and began dealing random blows with the crowbar. The mare stretched out her head, drew a long breath and died. "" At this point, it's seeming more and more like Dostoyevsky is comparing the horse to serfs, which until very recently had been the property and chattel of the nobility. Still a sore topic, clearly. This next quote interests me only in that it further cements the terrible reputation that the German language has among almost all writers of note. "as soon as you came in, I saw how you could help me; to begin with, I am weak in spelling and secondly, I am sometimes utterly adrift in German, so that I make it up as I go along for the most part. The only comfort is, that it's bound to be a change for the better. Though who can tell, maybe it's sometimes for the worse. [...]" And this is a condemnation of "science" but likely insofar as it is manipulated by capitalism. "science now tells us, love yourself before all men, for everything in the world rests on self-interest. You love yourself and manage your own affairs properly and your coat remains whole. Economic truth adds that the better private affairs are organised in society -- the more whole coats, so to say -- the firmer are its foundations and the better is the common welfare organised too. Therefore, in acquiring wealth solely and exclusively for myself, I am scquiring, so to speak, for all, and helping to bring to pass my neighbour's getting a little more than a torn coat; and that not from private, personal liberality, but as a consequence of the gernal advance. The ida is simple, but unhappily it has been a long time reaching us, being hindered by idealism and sentimentality. And yet it would seem to want very little wit to perceive it..." The false palliatives of religion are next on the chopping block, with its advice that is so at odds with the common logic of life, especially and exactly those lives that suffer the most, that have the least to thank a supposedly benevolent but also mysterious and uncaring God for. "God is merciful; look to the Most High for succour," the priest began. ""Ach! He is merciful, but not to us." ""That's a sin, a sin, madam," observed the priest, shaking his head. ""And isn't that sin?" cried Katerina ivanovna, pointing to the dying man. ""Perhaps those who have involuntarily caused the accident will agree to compensate you, at least for the losse of his earnings." ""You don't understand!" cried Katerina Ivanovna angrily waving her hand. "And why should they compensate me? Why, he was drunk and threw himself under the horses! What earnings? He brought us in nothing but misery. He drink everything away, the drunkard! He robbed us to get drink, he wasted their lives and mine for drink! And thank God he's dying! One less to keep! ""You must forgive in the hour of death, that's a sin, madam, such feelings are a great sin."" "here you have the end of the world, an anchorage, a quiet haven, the navel of the earth, the three fishes that are the foundation of the world, the essence of pancakes, of savoury fish-pies, of the evening samovar, of soft sighs and warm shawls, and hot stoves to sleep on -- as snug as though you were dead, and yet you're alive -- the advantages of both at once!" The theory of the sacrificing one for the benefit of the privileged, the "special". "I maintain that if the discoveries of Kepler and Newton could not have been made known except by sacrificing the lives of one, a dozen, a hundred, or more men, Newton would have had the right, would indeed have been duty bound... to eliminate the dozen or the hundred men for the sake of making his discoveries known to the whole of humanity. But it does not follow from that that Newton had a right to murder poeple right and left and to steal every day in the market. then, I remember, I maintain in my article that all... well, legislators and leaders of men, such as Lycurgus, Solon, Mahomet, Napoleon, and so on, were all without exception criminals, from the very fact that, making a new law, they transgressed the ancient one, handed down from their ancestors and held sacred by the people, and they ddi not stop short at bloodshed either, if that bloodshed -- often of innocent persons fighting vravely in defence of ancient law -- were of use to their cause. It's remarkable, in fact, that the majority, indeed, of these benefactors and leaders of humanity were guilty of terrible carnage. In short, I maintain that all great men or even men a little out of the common, that is to say capable of giving some new word, must from their very nature be criminals -- more or less, of course. Otherwise, it's hard for them to get out of the common rut." "The first category, generally speaking, are men conservative in temperament and law-abiding; they live under control and love to be controlled. to my thinking it is their duty to be controlled, because that's their vocation, and there is nothing humiliating in it for them. The second category all transgress the law; they are destoryers or disposed to destruction according to their capacities. The crimes of these men are of course relative and varied; for the most part they seek in very varied ways the destruction of the present for the sake of the better. But if such a one is forced for the sake of his idea to step over a corpse or wade through blood, he can, I maintain, find within himself, in his conscience, a sanction for wading through blood -- that depends on the idea and its dimensions, not that." "The vast mass of mankind is mere material, and only exists in order by some great effort, by some mysterious process, by means of some crossing of races and stocks, to bring into the world at last perhaps one man out of a thousand with a spark of independence. One in aten thousand perhaps -- I speak roughly, approximately -- is born with some independence, and with still greater independence one in a hundred thousand. The man of genius is one of millions, and the great geniuses, the crown of humanity, appear on earth perhaps one in many thousand millions." "And you don't suppose that I went into it headlong like a fool? I went into it like a wise man, and that ws just my destruction. And you mustn't suppose that I didn't know, for instance, that if I began to question myself whether I had the right to gain power -- I certainly hadn't the right -- or that if I asked myself whether a human being is a louse it proved that it wasn't so for me, though it might be for a man who would go straight to his goal without asking questions. ... If I worried myself all those days, wondering whether Napoleon would have done it or not, I felt clearly of course that I wasn't Napoleon. I had to endure all the agony of that battle of ideas, Sonia, and I longed to throw it off: I wanted to murder withou casuistry, to murder for my own sake, for myself alon!" "Crime? What crime?" he cried in sudden fury. "That I killed a vile noxious insect, an old pawnbroker woman, of use to no one!... Killing her was atonement for forty sins. She was sucking the life out of poor peole. Was that crime? I am not hinking of it and I am no thinking of expiating it, and why are you all rubbing it in on all sides? 'A crime! a crime!'" "Ah, it's not picturesque, not aesthetically attractive! I fail to understand why bombarding peole by regular siege is more honourable. The fear of appearances is the first symptom of impotence. I've never, never recognised this more clearly than now, and I am further than ever from seeing that what I did was a crime. I've never, never been stronger and more convinced than now." [Errata] When I read books that I downloaded from "Gutenberg Project" <https://www.gutenberg.org>, I like to be helpful and provide corrections where I can. They have a very friendly and responsive errata-submission system. Title: Crime and Punishment, by Fyodor Dostoyevsky Translated by Constance Garnett March 28, 2006 [EBook #2554] File: pg2554.epub Page 94: And where did you go, my I ask? Change "my" to "may"; And where did you go, [may] I ask? Page 100-100: with a girl, probably her daughter wearing a hat, and carrying a parasol. Add a comma after "daughter"; probably her daughter, wearing a hat Page 174-175: Avdotya Romanovna was remarkably good looking Add a hyphen between "good" and "looking"; remarkably good-looking Page 218: would indeed have been duty bound Add a hyphen between "duty" and "bound"; have been duty-bound Page 251-252: our meeting was disregarded solely at my instance Replace "instance" with "insistence"; at my [insistence] Page 258-259: Then he says is he going to be married and has already fixed on the girl Switch "is" and "he"; Then he says he is going to be married Page 259-260: to borrow it from him and pay him six per cent Remove the space between "per" and "cent"; pay him six percent Page 311: That's because you are of incapable of getting away from prejudices. Remove "of" before "incapable"; you are incapable of getting away Page 415-416: It would be interesting to know who stay here? "stay" should be in the past tense; to know who stay[ed] here? ]]> </content> </entry> <entry> <title type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoyevsky (Read in 2014)]]> </title> <id>https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=2991</id> <link href="https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=2991"/> <updated>2015-03-29T19:21:30+02:00</updated> <author> <name type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Marco von Ballmoos]]> </name> <uri>https://earthli.com/users/marco</uri> </author> <summary type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA["Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is" ... ]]> </summary> <content type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Published by marco on 29. Mar 2015 19:21:30 Updated by marco on 7. Feb 2026 08:17:42 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I've failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an interest in this book, then I'm happy for you." [Notes] The idiot is the tale of a Russian ex-patriate named Prince Lef Muishin who returns to Russia from having lived in Switzerland. He was sent to Switzerland in order to cure his chronis epilepsy, which rendered him stupefied and nearly speechless, for all intents and purposes an idiot. He returns penniless but quickly ingratiates himself to a noble family, which agrees to take him in, if only for a while. The cast of characters surrounding him is wild and foolish and, as in so many other Russian novels, utterly and completely useless. There is almost no indication of where money comes from -- it might as well just grow on trees. The others consider the prince an idiot, but he is evinces deeper philosophical thinking than the rest of them put together and is much more eloquent, to boot. The plot is very bare, but consists of sketches, almost like theater pieces, that feels much more like the "Brothers Karamazov" <https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=2984> than his earlier work, "Crime and Punishment" <https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3076>. Dostoyevsky doesn't waste many words on descriptions of places or people. Places have names, women are beautiful and men are distinguished, but not much else. Occasionally someone is said to have a mustache but that's about where the descriptiveness ends. As in Karamazov, the characters ricochet from joy to abject misery within seconds, always shouting and rejoicing as if there were only exaggerated emotions. People fall in love in minutes. It's kind of crazy, really, and sometimes hard to understand how something that reads so much like a Mexican telenovella script can be called some of the world's best literature. There is almost no metaphor or simile in Karamazov or The Idiot. Crime and Punishment is different. Significantly so. Here the descriptions of the environment, the characters and the situations are visceral and wonderfully done. The misery is heartrending but at least it doesn't feel plastic and fake. There are descriptions on a par with the master of the form, Tolstoy or Twain, whose depictions of nature were absolutely lovely and similarly evoked emotion. [image]As "#1074; Le Roman à Crybaby" by David Malki <http://wondermark.com/1k74/> put it, "These poor people, shoehorned by society into leading lives where they are unable to be anything but annoying." [Citations] On the entitlement of nobility and idleness: "The fact was, Totski was at that time a man of fifty years of age: his position was solid and respectable; his place in society had long been firmly fixed upon safe foundations; he loved himself, his personal comforts, and his position better than all the world, as every respectable gentleman should!" "Let's all go to my boudoir," she dais, "and they shall bring some coffee in there. That's the room where we all assemble and busy ourselves as we like best," she explained. "Alexandra, my eldest, here plays the piano, or reads or sews; Adelaida paints landscapes and portraits (bu never finishes any); and Aglaya sits and does nothing. I don't work too much, either." This kind of reminds me of Sansa's thoughts in the "Storm of Swords", the Song of Ice and Fire series being also largely concerned with the lives of nobility. "This woman, this human being, lived to a great age. She had children, a husband and family, friends and relations; her household was busy and cheerful; she was surrounded by smiling faces; and then suddenly they are gone, and she is left alone like a solitary fly... like a fly, cursed with the burden of her age. At last, God calls her to Himself. At sunset, on a lovely summer's evening, my little old woman passes away -- a thought, you will notice, which offers much food for reflection -- and behold! Instead of tears and prayers to start her on her last journey, she has insults and jeers from a young ensign, who stands before her, with his hands in his pockets, making a terrible row about a soup tureen!" When the Prince is the only voice of moral reason in a conversation, he is chided by those supposedly holding the moral high ground, the non-noble revolutionists. "Prince, you are not only simple, but your simplicity is almost past the limit," said Lebedeff's nephew, with a sarcastic smile." In a country of the blind, the one-eyed man is supposedly king, but it seems that the two-eyed man is an idiot. In this next scene, a young man of the left has been offered financial recompense as remuneration for a perceived slight. His friend tells him the way of the world. "Accept, Antip," whispered the boxer eagerly, leaning past the back of Hippolyte's chair to give his friend this piece of advice. "Take it for the present; we can see about more later on." A brutal slash at the supposedly honorable left, who are just as grasping as those they seek to unseat, though they couch their actions in flowery paeans to the nobility of man. These are the kind of people who will never change anything fundamental. Their main problem with the status quo is not how the status quo works or how undignifying it is for everyone involved, but that they are not on top. Once they are on top, they will lean back and enjoy all of the spoils they once derided, when those selfsame spoils were being wrested from their hands rather than being pushed into them. This next part reminded me a bit of a part of the Brothers Karamazov, where Dmitri also had stolen money and wasted half of it, sparing the other half up painstakingly because, once he'd paid that half back, the crimes could still be forgiven, though money had been stolen and a lot of it spent. As long as half was nobly returned, it would be OK and the error could be forgiven. "Of course, there is a difference between a hundred roubles and two hundred and fifty, but in this case the principle is the main point, and that a hundred and fifty roubles are missing is only a side issue." "Why did you come here tonight so insolently? 'Give us our rights, but don't dare to speak in our presence. Show us every mark of deepest respect, while we treat you like the scum of the earth.' The miscreants have written a tissue of calumny in their article, and these are the men who seek for truth, and do battle for the right! 'We do not beseech, we demand, you will get no thanks from us, because you will be acting to satisfy your own conscience!' What morality!" The classic plaint against "the system" -- commonly capitalism, or the peculiarly single-minded variant we employ -- in which it is pointed out to those benefiting that their comfort rests atop a heap of bones and suffering. "Not railways, properly speaking, presumptuous youth, but the general tendency of which railways may be considered as the outward expression and symbol. We hurry and push and hustle, for the good of humanity! 'The world is becoming too noisy, too commercial!' groans some solitary thinker. 'Undoubtedly it is, but the noise of waggons bearing bread to starving humanity is of more value than tranquility of soul.' replies another triumphantly, and passes on with an air of pride. As for me, I don't believe in these waggons brining bread to humanity. For, founded on no moral principle, these may well, even in the act of carrying bread to humanity, coldly exclude a considerable portion of humanity from enjoying it; that has been seen more than once." Hippolyte describes why suicide is not immoral, but a way of exerting control where there is otherwise none. "And finally, nature has so limited my capacity for work or activity of any kind, in allotting me but three weeks of time, that suicide is about the only thing left that I can begin and end in the time of my own free will. "Perhaps then I am anxious to take advantage of my last chance of doing something for myself. A protest is sometimes no small thing." An old and eloquent formulation of "ignorance is bliss" and its complement, "knowledge is suffering". I have a lovely cartoon that posits a corollary to the oft-misattributed maxim that "those who do not know or remember history are doomed to repeat it". It reads "Those who do know history are doomed to watch others repeat it." I would paraphrase it as: "Those who do know history are doomed to stand by powerless which the ignorant and more powerful go about the business of repeating it." "Of such people there are countless numbers in this world -- far more even than appear. They can be divided into two classes as all men can -- that is, those of limited intellect, and those who are much cleverer. The former of these classes is the happier. "to a commonplace man of limited intellect, for instance, nothing is simpler than to imagine himself an original character, and to revel in that belief without the slightest misgiving. "Many of our young women have thought fit to cut their hair short, pun on blue spectacles, and call themselves Nihilists. By doing this they have been able to persuade themselves, without further trouble, that they have acquired new convictions of their own. some men have but felt some little qualm of kindness towards their fellow-men, and the fact has been quite enough to persuade them that they stand alone in the van of enlightenment and that no-one has such humanitarian feelings as they. Others have but to read an idea of somebody else's, and they can immediately assimilate it and believe that it was a child of their own brain. The "impudence of ignorance," if I may use the expression, is developed to a wonderful extent in such cases; -- unlikely as it appears, it is met with at every turn." The hipster/poseur is an ancient character class, it seems. And, in the same breath, putting the lie to the youthful belief that they are inventing everything and that they are no only the first to suffer in the particular fasion in which they are suffering but also that the solution they come up with is unique in history. In all likelihood, it is not. One cannot spend ten minutes thinking about a thing and think to outstrip all of human history, ingenuity and knowledge. If you think you're being clever, you are most likely being clever in a restricted field, you have have found a local maximum that looks like a molehill from the heights achieved by others who have hoed that particular row for much, much longer. In the field of philosophy, that row was hoed millenia before you were even born. Do not let this prevent you from enjoying your feeling of genius. That you came up with the thought on your own is encouraging and merits further effort. You have, however, only contributed to your own personal growth and not yet added a stone to the cairn of human knowledge. [Errata] When I read books that I downloaded from "Gutenberg Project" <https://www.gutenberg.org>, I like to be helpful and provide corrections where I can. They have a very friendly and responsive errata-submission system. Page 282: There I we don't often get that sort of letter; and yet Remove "There I" before "we" Page 289: The fact was that in the crowd, not far from where lie was sitting Change "lie" to "he"; not far from where [he] was sitting Page 293: "What I don't you know about it yet? He doesn't know -- imagine that!" Remove the "I" Page 297-298: "he was only aware that she was sitting by, him and talking to him, and" Remove the comma after "by"; that she was sitting by him and talking Page 337: The man's face seemed tome to be refined and even pleasant. Change "tome" to "to" and "me"; The man's face seemed to me to be Page 403: "He's a little screw," cried the general: "he drills holes my heart [...]" Add "in" after "holes"; he drills holes [in] my heart Page 411--412: He would take up a hook from the table and open it Change "hook" to "book"; He would take up a [book] from the table Page 433: bought with his money, instead of Schiosser's History. Change "Schiosser's" to "Schlosser's" Page 464: We must let out Christ shine forth upon the Western nations, Change "out" to "our"; We must let [our] Christ shine Page 467: it seemed to be uncertain whether or no to topple over on to the head Change "no" to "not"; whether or no[t] to topple over Page 510: he whipped up the horses, and they were oft. Change "oft" to "off"; and they were [off]. Page 527: infatuations and adventures, that they did hot care to talk of them, Change "hot" to "not"; that they did [not] care to talk of them, ]]> </content> </entry> <entry> <title type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1880) (Read in 2014)]]> </title> <id>https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=2984</id> <link href="https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=2984"/> <updated>2015-03-29T18:30:57+02:00</updated> <author> <name type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Marco von Ballmoos]]> </name> <uri>https://earthli.com/users/marco</uri> </author> <summary type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA["Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is" ... ]]> </summary> <content type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Published by marco on 29. Mar 2015 18:30:57 Updated by marco on 22. Jan 2021 23:48:00 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I've failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an interest in this book, then I'm happy for you." Like Tolstoy's novels, this was published as a serial in a magazine of the time called The Messenger. There isn't an encompassing story arc, so it's hard to call it a novel as such. It felt more like a collection of short stories and novellas that included the same cast of characters. The first part is a long introduction to the debauched family of the Karamazovs and the other locals who they've drawn into their tawdry orbit. At the center of the first act is the patriarch Fyodor, who argumentatively fences with his three sons, Ivan, Dmitri (Mitya) and Alexander (Alyosha). There is a fourth (possible) son in the person of Smerdyakov. A subsequent longer section is a long sermon by Ivan, as told to Alyosha. This was the most interesting part of the book thus far. The life story of Father Zossima follows. This is the spiritual father of Alyosha, who is pledging to be a monk and values this elder above all others. Kolya is a young narrator in book 5 (?) who is remarkably full of himself, as clever young man of that age typically are. his narrative voice is also a prime example of what I consider to be the main problem with reading 19th-century Russian literature that is heralded the world over as top-one-hundred if not top-ten of all time. With modern literature -- that is, written during my time or near to it, say mid-20th century and onward -- I can usually determine the intended tone of the writing. Is the author espousing his own views through a character? Or is the author espousing views he does not support through that character? If a character is ludicrous and pompous and just out-and-out wrong-headed, I can laugh along, knowing that the author intended to parody opposing worldviews. However, with Dostoyevsky (and, to a lesser degree, with Tolstoy), while I know what I think of the characters and their views, I am often unsure of what the author intended. I feel like the guy who laughs out loud at a sad movie because he doesn't realize that the director was being dead-serious. This doesn't interfere with my enjoyment of the writing -- such as it is -- but it certainly makes it more difficult to slog through long conversations between what I consider to be fools discussing utter foolishness when I don't know whether the author is in on the joke. In net effect, I feel that I can read more of the exact same writing when I know it's a parody than when I feel that the author intended to convey what he or she considers to be deep truths. It may reflect poorly on me, I suppose. Perhaps something is lost in translation or there is too great a distance between the culture that created the literature. I feel that my enjoyment of this type of great literature is too superficial. I see sparks where I feel that I am in on the joke, where I appreciate a bit of cleverness that or phrase, but I am saddled with doubt that I am enjoying the right thing. On the other hand, I don't want to be told by experts how I'm supposed to enjoy the book. I would like to be able to enjoy the ins and outs without help but, short of becoming an fluent reader of Russian and possibly more of an expert on a culture and mindset that lies over a century in the past, this will not be possible. That is, I can enjoy other good works on a much deeper level that I can these great works of art. That's OK, though. I just wish that people would hedge their recommendation that "everyone should read these" to acknowledge that the level of enjoyment, satisfaction and understanding will vary greatly. While this is always the case, it is all the more likely when the original language and culture of the author of the work stands in such stark contrast to that of the reader. The trial. The trial. It was a farce, with either Dostoyevsky or his translator Constance Gardner constantly using the word "evidence" when "hearsay" would have been much much more accurate. [Citations] I like this bit of drunken logic, "The monks in the monastery probably believe that there's a ceiling in hell, for instance. Now I'm ready to believe in hell, but without a ceiling. It make it more refined, more Lutheran that is. And, after all, what does it matter whether it has a ceiling or hasn't? But, do you know, there's a damnable question involved in it? If there's no ceiling there can be no hooks, and if there are no hooks it all breaks down, which is unlikely again, for then there would be none to drag me down to hell, and if they don't drag me down what justice is there in the world? If faudrait les inventer, those hooks, on purpose for me alone, for, if you only knew, Alyosha, what a blackguard I am." "I have a longing for life, and I go on living in spite of logic. Though I may not believe in the order of the universe, yet I love the sticky little leaves as they open in spring. I love the blue sky, I love some people whom one loves you know sometimes without knowing why. I love some great deeds done by men, though I've long ceased perhaps to have faith in them, yet from old habit one's heart prizes them. Here they have brought the soup for you, eat it, it will do you good. It's first-rate soup, they know how to make it here. I want to travel in Europe, Alyosha, I shall set off from here. And yet I know that I am only going to a graveyard, but it's a most precious graveyard, that's what it is! Precious are the dead that life there, every stone over them speaks of such burning life in the past, of such passionate faith in their work, their truth, their struggle and their science, that I know I shall fall on the ground and kiss those stones and weep over them: though I'm convinced in my heart that it's long been nothing but a graveyard. And I shall not weep from despair, but simply because I shall be happy in my tears, I shall steep my soul in my emotion. I love the sticky leaves in spring, the blue sky -- that's all it is. It's not a matter of intellect or logic, it's loving with one's inside, with one's stomach. One loves the first strength of one's youth. Do you understand anything of my tirade, Alyosha?" Ivan laughed suddenly." Quoting Patton Oswalt: "I'm glad you like a book." "Fathers and teachers, forgive me and don't be angry, that like a little child I've been babbling of what you knew long ago, and can teach me a hundred times more skillfully. I only speak from rapture and forgive my tears, for I love the Bible." "The jealous man can forgive extraordinarily quickly (though, of course, after a violent scene), and he is able to forgive infidelity almost conclusively proved, the very kisses and embraces he has seen, if only he can somehow be convinced that is has all been "for the last time," and that his rival will vanish from that day forward, will depart to the ends of the earth, or that he himself will carry her away somewhere, where that dreaded rival will not get neaer her. Of course the reconciliation is only for an hour. For, even if the rival did disappear next day, he would invent another one and would be jealous of him. And one might wonder what there was in a love that had to be so watched over, what a love could be worth that needed such strenuous guarding. But that the jealous will never understand. And yet among them are men of noble hearts. It is remarkable, too, that those very men of noble hearts, standing hidden in some cupboard, listening and spying, never feel the strings of conscience at that moment, anyway, though they understand clearly enough with their "noble hearts" the shameful depths to which they have voluntarily sunk." In this next piece, I can't tell if she's serious or crazy or taking the piss and, if so, whether she does that deliberately and maliciously. The old woman is proposing to loan Dmitri money in the form of the idea of telling him to go find gold mines and mine them. Subsequent passages indicate that Dmitri took this suggestion seriously but discarded it because of its being too much work. "The money is as good as in your pocket, not three thousand, but three million, Dmitri Fyodorovitch, in less than no time. I'll make you a present of the idea: you shall find gold-mines, make millions, return and become a leading man, and wake us up and lead us to better things." Kolya and his mother, in a classic relationship: "He was extremely vain. He knew how to make even his mother give way to him; he was almost despotic in his control of her. She gave way to him, oh, she had given way to him for years. The one thought unendurable to her was that her boy had no great love for her. She was always fancying that Kolya was "unfeeling" to her, and at times, dissolving into hysterical tears, she used to reproach him with his coldness. The boy disliked this, and the more demonstrations of feeling were demanded of him the more he seemed intentionally to avoid them. Yet it was not intentional on his part but instinctive -- it was his character. His mother was mistaken; he was very fond of her. He only disliked "sheepish sentimentality", as he expressed it in his schoolboy language." "Habit is the greatest motive-power." The captain is extremely poor and the doctor appears at his home to advise him on his ailing son. The doctor recommends experts in Paris, to which the captain responds, "Doctor, doctor! But you see!" the captain flung wide his hands again despairingly, indicating the bare wooden walls of the passage." The captain is ashamed to directly address his poverty but appeals instead for the doctor to adjust his diagnosis and recommendation to something appropriate to the circumstances. The doctor responds quite coldly, "Well, that's not my business," grinned the doctor. "I have only told you the answer of medical science to your question as to possible treatment. As for the rest, to my regret -- " While his answer is most likely correct, it is cold and ignores the duty of the a doctor to provide at least a modicum of comfort. If there's nothing to be done, there is no point in mentioning all of the things that could be done were more money available. In honestly, the experts in Paris probably couldn't do anything either but suck money from the patient's father's pockets. But the world and its solutions are for the rich. The cruelty lies in the doctor reminding the captain of that in the depths of his pathos. "Brother, these last two months I've found in myself a new man. A new man has risen up in me. He was hidden in me, but would never have come to the surface, if it hadn't been for this blow from heaven. I am afraid! And what do I care if I spend twenty years in the mines, breaking ore with a hammer? I am not a bit afraid of that -- it's something else I am afraid of now: that that new man may leave me. Even there, in the mines, under-ground, I may find a human heart in another convict and murderer by my side, and I may make friends with him, for even there one may live and love and suffer. One may thaw and revive a frozen heart in that convict, one may wait upon him for years, and at last bring up from the dark depths a lofty soul, a feeling, suffering creature: one may bring forth an angel, a create a hero! There are so many of them, hundreds of them, and we are all to blame for them." "That was quite right what you taught me, for you talked a lot to me about that. For if there's no everlasting God, there's no such thing as virtue, and there's no need of it. You were right there. So that's how I looked at it." "He had unmistakably been, at some time, in good and fashionable society, had once had good connections, had possibly preserved them indeed, but, after a gay youth, becoming gradually impoverished on the abolition of serfdom, he had sunk into the position of a poor relation of the best class, wandering from one good old friend to another and received by them for his companionable and accommodating disposition and as being, after all, a gentleman who could be asked to sit down with any one, though, of course, not in a place of honor. Such gentlemen of accommodating temper and dependent position, who can tell a story, take a hand at cards, and who have a distinct aversion for any duties that may be forced upon them, are usually solitary creatures, either bachelors or widowers." "What would become of an ax in space? Quelle idée! If it were to fall to any distance, it would being, I think, flying round the earth without knowing why, like a satellite. The astronomers would calculate the rising and the setting of the ax, Gatzuk would put it in his calendar, that's all." And this is possibly the inspiration for the most-famous utterance of Marvin the paranoid android. "Philosophy, indeed, when all my right side is numb and I am moaning and groaning. I've tried all the medical faculty: they can diagnose beautifully, they have the whole of your disease at their finger-tips, but they've no idea how to cure you." "<Why, you keep thinking of our present earth! But our present earth may have been repeated a billion times. Why, it's become extinct, been frozen; cracked, broken into bits, disintegrated into its elements, again 'the water above the firmament,' then again a comet, again a sun, again from the sun it becomes earth -- and the same sequence may have been repeated endlessly and exactly the same to every detail, most unseemly and insufferably tedious -- " "in his opinion the prisoner was now, and had been all along, in a perfectly normal condition, and, although he certainly must have been in a nervous and exceedingly excited state before his arrest, this might have been due to several perfectly obvious causes, jealousy, anger, continual drunkenness, and so on. (Emphasis added.)" "At the first temptation -- for instance, to entertain the woman with whom he had already squandered half the money -- he would have unpicked his little bag and have taken out some hundred roubles, for why should he have taken back precisely half the money, that is, fifteen hundred roubles? Why not fourteen hundred? He could just as well have said then that he was not a thief, because he brought back fourteen hundred roubles. Then another time he would have unpicked it again and taken out another hundred, and then a third, and then a fourth, and before the end of the month he would have taken the last note but one, feeling that if he took back only a hundred it would answer the purpose, for a thief would have stolen it all. And then he would have looked at this last note, and have said to himself, 'It's really not worth while to give back one hundred; let's spend that, too!' That's how the real Dmitri Karamazov, as we know him, would have behaved. One cannot imagine anything more incongruous with the actual fact than this legend of the little bag." "By some pre-temporal assignment, which I have never been able to figure out, I am appointed ‘to negate,’ whereas I am sincerely kind and totally unable to negate. No, they say, go and negate, without negation there can be no criticism, and what sort of journal has no ‘criticism section.’ Without criticism, there would be nothing but ‘Hosannahs.’ But Hosannahs alone are not enough for life, it is necessary that this “Hosannah’ pass through the crucible of doubt, and so on, in the same vein. I don’t meddle with any of that, by the way, I didn’t create it, and I can’t answer for it. So they chose themselves a scapegoat, they made me write for the criticism section, and life came about. We understand this comedy: I, for instance, demand simply and directly that I be destroyed. No, they say, live! Because without you there would be nothing. If everything on Earth were sensible, nothing would happen. Without you, there would be no events, and there must be events. And so, I serve, grudgingly, for the sake of events, and I do the unreasonable on orders. People take this whole comedy for something serious, despite all their undeniable intelligence. That is their tragedy." [Errata] When I read books that I downloaded from "Gutenberg Project" <https://www.gutenberg.org>, I like to be helpful and provide corrections where I can. They have a very friendly and responsive errata-submission system. Page 24: J'ai bu l'ombre d'un cocher qui avec l'ombre d'une brosse frottait replace "bu" with "vu"; J'ai [vu] l'ombre d'un cocher qui avec Page 564--565: What a girl I am! Blurring things out! Replace "Blurring" with "Blurting"; What a girl I am! Blurting things out! Page 700-701 fifteen hundred roubles? why not fourteen hundred? Capitalize "why"; [W]hy not fourteen hundred? ]]> </content> </entry> <entry> <title type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[I Never Promised You a Rose Garden by Joanne Greenberg (Read in 2014)]]> </title> <id>https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=2893</id> <link href="https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=2893"/> <updated>2015-03-29T18:22:07+02:00</updated> <author> <name type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[(withheld)]]> </name> </author> <summary type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA["Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is" ... ]]> </summary> <content type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Published by root on 29. Mar 2015 18:22:07 Updated by root on 29. Mar 2015 18:24:01 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I've failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an interest in this book, then I'm happy for you." On page 173: In other places, we've seen tantrums/fits of others, as seen by Deborah. In this case, we are party to a tantrum as experienced from within, as inspired by Deborah's rich inner life. She explains how her erratic, senseless hand motions are actually a private language, as are her babblings. To us, it is all just insanity; to her, it is structured and logical. On page 175: Here, again, are more examples, of words and gestures that have meaning to those who understand them. Is there a difference between an insane person and someone who agitatedly speaks a private language -- or a language not shared by his or her audience? There are several instances where she writes that her senses just shut down. She sees in only two dimensions; she can barely hear anything; she sees only shades of gray and often through a pinhole, a keyhole, a slit. She cannot feel anything. She burns her flesh and doesn't feel the pain. She eats but does not taste and does not remember having eaten. She tells of watching other patients in this catatonia, being struck by other wild patients and not reacting at all. They only blink slowly. This is a communication failure between one without senses and one with a private language. It's utterly fascinating when thought of in these terms. It's also a metaphor for how the so-called normal people interact with one another, making the same mistakes but less overtly and less catastrophically poorly. On a class, caste or national level, the catastrophic miscommunication is the same. [Citations] "'You are not so stupid and neither am I,' Furii said earnestly, trying to speak across the widening space. 'There are many secrets to come and you know it. You are not parting with food that sustained you -- all the secrets and the secret powers -- and no other nourishment has yet appeared to replace it. This is the hardest time of all, harder than even your sickness was before you came here. At least that had a meaning for you, as awful as the meaning was sometimes. You will have to trust me enough to take on faith that the new food, when it comes, will be richer." " She believed that she and a certain few others were not of the same nganon as the rest of Earth's people. At first Deborah had thought that it was only she who was set apart from human kind, but others of the un-dead on D ward seemed to be tainted as she was. All of her life, herself and all her possessions had been imbued with her essence, the poisonous nganon. She had never lent her clothes or books or pencils, or let anyone touch any of her things, and she had often borrowed or stolen from other children at school or camp, delighting, until their stolen nganon wore off them, in the health and purity and grace of the possessions." "Deborah looked from the god and saw Carla still crying. It was part of the Deceit, it seemed, to believe that one knew the code, that after years of suffering to find a way to outguess it, the final step gave way and there was the old chaos, anarchy, and laughter." "Perhaps it might be the one about seeing -- that even when seeing every line and plane and color of a thing, if there was no meaning, the sight was irrelevant and one was just as well blind; that perhaps even the famous third dimension is only meaning, the gift which translates a bunch of planes into a box or a madonna or a Dr. Halle with antiseptic bottle." "'What?' Dr. Halle turned. Deborah looked at him in horror. Her words to Yr had pierced the barriers of the earth's hearing. The clamor from the Collect built higher until it was an overwhelming roar and the gray vision went red. Without warning the full PUnishment fell like an executioner's hand and the testimony of light, space, time, gravity, and the five senses became meaningless. Heat froze and light hurled tactile stabbing rays. She had no sense of where her body was; there was no up or down, no location or distance, no chain of cause and effect..." "When the lawgivers of D ward discovered that its patients were not so safe as they had thought, they swept the ward up and down with reforms to widen still further the distance between themselves and the patients. The fork that had been introduced on "D" a year before was now rescinded. The Age of Metal gave way to the Age of Wood and fire prevailed only within the precincts of the nursing station, the modern era. In the [P]leistocene beyond, Pithecanthropus erectus shambled and muttered gibberish, ate with its fingers, and wet on the floor." "'Recreat,' Deborah said. 'Recreat xangoran, temr e xangoranan. Naza e fango xangoranan. Inai dum. Agaei dum.' (Remember me. Remember me in anger, frear me in bitter anger. Hear-draze my teeth in bitterest anger. The signal glance drops. The Game' -- Agaei mena the tearing of flesh with teeth as torture -- 'is over.')" "'No.' She tried to tell Furii, but the walls began bleeding and sweating, and the ceiling developed a large tumor which began to separate itself from its surface. "'Can you hear me?' Furii asked. "Deborah tried to say what she felt, but she could only gesture the Yri gesture for insanity: flattened hands thrust toward one another but unable to meet. " "In the bathroom: 'Blau -- are you in there?' "'Here is cutucu.' (The second degree of being hidden.) As she struggled to translate, finding it almost impossible to span the light years of distance between herself and them, the confusion of tongues only alienated her further." "The volcano's fear-rage would still come and throw her against a wall with the force of its eruption, or send her running down the hall until she was stopped by a closed door or a wall. She was in pack every day, sometimes twice, and once tightened in, she would let the fight explode and overcome her as violently as it would. Yet ... yet they were all kinder, all the nurses and attendants, joking even, and giving little gifts of themselves." "'Well, we'll give it a try.' She saw in his face that the burns were worse than he had remembered. When he was through, he said, 'I tried to go easy. I hope it didn't hurt too much.' "'Don't worry,' Deborah said, and rose the tremendous distance from the falling Anterrabae to be capable of a smile. 'Someday, maybe it will.'" "All Deborah heard were the sounds of her own gasps of exhaustion as she climbed an Everest that was to everyone else an easy and a level plain." "She yearned to play with all the toys of the earth, while Yr and the world's darker parts fought it out inside her. To Earth's usages and people she felt she could never come, but to the material things there was new access and freedom and great reward. A new patient asked her what she was, meaning her religion, and she found herself answering, 'A Newtonian.'" "[...] Deborah began to feel the mood was less about Carmen's suicide than an argument between the cynicism that was in each of them and the blind, small longing to fight." "It was B ward's nerve; a desperate hope that the false 'fine-fine' might see them through if only they acted long enough and tried to make it be the truth. Was it as frightening a clutching at convention on the outside?" "One day, coming from an exhausting session with Furii, Deborah saw a knot of people in the hall, and coming closer she saw that they were writhing, slow motion, like creatures under water. At the center of the knot, all but hidden by it, was Miss Coral. Because Deborah's loyalty had not shifted with her commitment to the world, she had to choke back a guffaw. The bed-flinging genius of fulcrum, weight, and thrust was at it again! Deborah wondered how she had gotten off the ward. She was standing almost still in the middle of the melee, taking on five attendants by drawing them into battle with each other. Her rant was a low mutter, like an engine, full of long sibilances and obscenity. Deborah passed by and tossed a 'Hell, Miss coral,' more for the attendants than for the lady herself. Miss Coral removed her concentration from her war and smiled to Deborah." "[In the courthouse building] she found others takign their high-school educations at one gulp -- a group of hard-handed day laborers who sweated and grunted over their papers as if they were blocks of grnite. She was surprised and then humbled that they, too, though not prisoners or insane, had somehow missed beats in the rhythm of the world, and now were sharers with her in this necessary thing." "On the field the boys were running with the late-afternoon magic of their ten-foot shadows. They seemed so young and strong and golden in the late sun. It had taken afll of her capacities, every drop of her will, to come as far as they had come laughing and easy. The wall between them was still there and it would always be there. She could see through it now, to where the world offered its immense beauty, but she would burn away all her strength just staying alive." "She looked again at the faces on the ward. Her presence was making them struggle with Maybes. Suddenly she realized that she was a Doris Rivera, a living symbol of hope and failure and the terror they all felt of their own resiliency and hers, reeling punch-drunk from beating after beating, yet, at the secret bell, up again for more." ]]> </content> </entry> <entry> <title type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls by David Sedaris (Read in 2014)]]> </title> <id>https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3048</id> <link href="https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3048"/> <updated>2015-03-29T18:20:13+02:00</updated> <author> <name type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[(withheld)]]> </name> </author> <summary type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA["Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is" ... ]]> </summary> <content type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Published by root on 29. Mar 2015 18:20:13 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I've failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an interest in this book, then I'm happy for you." [Citations] "No!" screams McKinley or Madison, Kennedy or Lincoln or beet-faced baby Reagan. Looking on, I always want to intervene. "Listen," I'd like to say, "I'm not a parent myself, but I think the best solution at this point is to slap that child across the face. It won't stop its crying, but at least now it'll be doing it for a good reason. "The people I hung out with in my early twenties were middle class and, at least to our minds, artistic. We'd all turned our backs on privilege, but comfortably, the way you can when you still have access to it. No one wanted to call home asking for money, but we all knew that in a punch our parents would come through for us. It was this, more than race, that set apart from Delicia, for how could someone on the bottom rung of the ladder not be outraged by the unfairness of it all?" "[...] It doesn't take many people to muck up a roadside. A devoted handful can do the trick. One of the things I find repeatedly is a plastic Diet Coke bottle containing a meticulously folded Mars bar wrapper. I imagine this is someone's after-work snack and that by putting the wrapper inside the empty bottle, the person feels he's done his bit. And though he has turned two pieces of trash into one, until he learns to keep it in his car, I don't think he's entitled to pat himself on the back. Who are you? I wondered the first and third and fifth time I cam across one of these stuffed bottles. Do you think about the four hundred years it will take for this to decompose, or is this as inconsequential to you as flushing a toilet?" "It's not lost on me that I'm so busy recording life, I don't have time to really live it. I've become like one of those people I hate, the sort who go to the museum and, instead of looking at the magnificent Brueghel, take a picture of it, reducing it from art to proof. It's not "Look what Brueghel did, painted this masterpieces" but "Look what I did, went to Rotterdam and stood in front of a Brueghel painting!"" ]]> </content> </entry> <entry> <title type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Reamde by Neal Stephenson (Read in 2014)]]> </title> <id>https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=2949</id> <link href="https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=2949"/> <updated>2015-03-29T18:18:56+02:00</updated> <author> <name type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[(withheld)]]> </name> </author> <summary type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA["Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is" ... ]]> </summary> <content type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Published by root on 29. Mar 2015 18:18:56 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I've failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an interest in this book, then I'm happy for you." [Notes] * The forces of good and evil were arbitrary. The forces of Brightness and the Earth-tones line up remarkably well with Devin and the Don, respectively * The game of T'Rain gets its style from World of Warcraft, but it's economy from EVE Online, although it takes it a few steps further. The sweeping, all-encompassing nature of the plot reminded me strongly of the Baroque Cycle (also by Stephenson). His attention to detail in some cases was at times tedious, but his dialogue and character development are top-notch. There are plenty of cool heroes here, with only a handful of them belonging to the 1%, unlike so many other escapist fiction these days. The Cryptonomicon took us to Southeast Asia with hackers and programmers and dealt with ultra-secret code-crackers, chip-manufacturing plants and groups of people connected by tenuous though strands over decades. This book also takes us to Southeast Asia but many other places besides, with a good part of it taking place in the Pacific Northwest, on both sides of the U.S./Canadian border. I'm going to try to summarize what I remember having happened in this book because it was quite literally one of the wildest rides I've read, with what would have been ludicrous coincidences detailed in Stephenson's style. Spoilers abound, so proceed with caution. The story introduces the linchpin character, Richard Forthrast at a shooting range at his annual family reunion. Richard is older, unmarried and has a tremendous amount of living behind him. He also happens to own much of and still run a gigantic Blizzard-like company that manages an online world called T'Rain, which is similar to but in many ways superior to World of Warcraft. At the reunion, he is reintroduced to his adoptive niece Zula, who is accompanied by her somewhat socially inept but technically talented hacker-boyfriend, Peter. These two would visit Richard later at his chalet/board-bum resort north of the border in Canada. Richard purchased the place as his base of operations when he used to run a successful pot-smuggling operation from Canada into the US, using a passage that he'd discovered through the mountains. Peter meets an enigmatic man named Wallace at the chalet, a meeting observed with diffident suspicion by Richard and Zula. Zula is, at this point, working for Richard on terrain-generation algorithms, designed to make the online world of T'Rain more realistic and firmly anchored in a believable physical reality. They part ways, with Richard staying in Canada and Peter and Zula heading back to Seattle. Wallace follows them, showing up at Peter's apartment, demanding to know what's going on with his data. It turns out that the USB stick that Peter used to transfer the credit-card numbers he sold to Wallace was infected with the Reamde virus. It's a cryptolocker virus that has locked up not only the credit-card numbers but also a lot of other data that Wallace was keeping for a bunch of Russian mobsters, headed by Ivanov and his chief of security, Sokolov. The writer of the virus added a twist to the payment mechanism: the only way to pay off the ransom and unlock the data is to enter the world of T'Rain and deposit an amount of in-game gold at a prearranged location. Zula, an amateur at the game, along with Wallace, a seasoned regular, try for an entire all-nighter to deposit what amounts to only a thousand dollars but are unable to do so because of a tremendous number of other players who are laying siege to the Torgai foothils where thousands of victims of the Reamde virus are all trying to deposit their ransoms. There are bands of players paid by the writers of the virus to protect depositors and roving bands of bandits trying to steal a tremendous amount of gold on the hoof. Zula used her pull at T'Rain HQ to find out where the hackers and originators of the virus are located. It turns out that they are in Xiamen in the People's Republic of China. Ivanov takes the reins and decides to fly his crew as well as Peter and Zula in a private jet to China after a brief stopover in Russia where they are joined by a Hungarian hacker named Csongor. Wallace is not invited along and is dispatched. The Russians, the Hungarian, the American and the Eritrean/American set up shop in a half-built office building in downtown Xiamen and are confronted with the immensity and density of the Chinese city. There is a saying that if you are told of an Indian or Chinese city whose name you've never heard, there are good odds that the city has a larger population than New York or Los Angeles. Stephenson spends a good deal of time driving this impression home, but in a good way. The hackers, Zula and Solokov canvass the neighborhoods, using local Internet cafés to try to pinpoint the nest of hackers responsible for Reamde by their IP address. They are eventually successful and meet up with Yuxia, a local Hakka villager working in the big city who happens to own a van. The Russians enter the building with their hostages in tow and through more detection discover that the hacker nest must be on either the fourth or fifth floor. Deep breath. Here's where things get really crazy. On the fourth floor are the Reamde hackers. On the fifth floor is a nest of Islamist terrorists led by the Welsh Abdallah Jones, reknowned and hunted worldwide for many destructive acts of terror. He and his crew are planning an attack in or near Xiamen. In the building across the way is Olivia, an MI6 agent hot on his tail and gathering information about this next strike. She is a well-trained but is more about electronic espionage than hand-to-hand combat and weapons. She will have to learn fast. Zula does not know this, but feels that sending Spetznaz soldiers into the nest of Chinese hackers is decidedly disproportionate to their crimes and sends the soldiers to the fifth floor instead. At this point, all hell breaks loose: most of the Russians and Islamists are killed in a shootout, killed either by Solokov, who is an amazing survivor or Jones, who is a ruthless and efficient survivor as well. The hackers scuttle out of the windows like cockroaches, introducing us to their leader, Marlon. The firefight sets off the truly enormous amount of explosives that the Islamists had created, blowing off the entire top of the building and dropping much of it into the street. The explosion tears off the part of the floor where Olivia had set up camp and disables her entire operation and her temporarily unconscious. And the others? Sokolov shimmies across cables to Olivia's building and briefly meets her there, plucking her purse from the trash. Peter is killed in the stairway by Ivanov. Jones kills Ivanov and kidnaps Zula. Csongor, Marlon and Yuxia somehow meet and escape in Yuxia's van. Sokolov uses his awesome spy resources to get clothes and cash and makes his way to Olivia, who he is convinced is his only way out of the country in which he finds himself without an entry visa or passport. Zula is taken by Jones to the airport where they hijack Ivanov's jet and head off for Canada, hiding beneath another jet to stay off the radar. Olivia ends up arranging for her departure, taking Sokolov with her. They split up when he is shunted off to a boat arranged by MI6, where he is ambushed. Olivia heads to the Philippines to try to find Jones. There she meets a CIA agent named Seamus, who is another cool Stephenson character. After an operation that fails to find Jones, she's pulled off the case and heads back to England. Csongor, Marlon and Yuxia tail Zula and Jones to the docks but can't rescue her and they end up hijacking a boat and heading for the open sea. They cross the sea on wind power and wind up in the Philippines, where they are robbed of the rest of Ivanov's money but still have enough cash to get to a hotel and an Internet café. It is here that Marlon starts his mission in T'Rain to start gathering the millions of dollars in ransom that his exceedingly powerful character -- Reamde -- has stashed all over the Torgai foothills. Stephenson does a lovely job describing the game world, how Marlon gathers his compatriots and Csongor starts a new character in T'Rain -- he's never played before -- and helps Marlon by finding a broker/priest to handle his huge transaction. Richard, meanwhile, has not been idle and has been feverishly searching for Zula. Olivia has flown to Seattle to pursue a hunch that Jones flew to Canada with his stolen plane and has met up with Richard to compare notes. Another thread that runs through the novel is a war that has cropped up in the game world, between the forces of Brightness and the Earthtone coalition. These roughly line up with the two main authors of the history and narrative of T'Rain. One is a Cambridge Don (double D) who is roughly analogous to J.R.R. Tolkien or George R.R. Martin, living in his own castle and being very literary and erudite. The other is nicknamed Skeletor and lives in the Midwest, churning out a tremendous amount of pulp content with less regard for continuity or canon. This part, while exceedingly interesting, has a lot less to do with the main action part of the plot. Once Richard and his chief of technology discover what's going on, he pulls out his for all intents and purposes indestructible character Egdod to kick some ass and take some names. He sends an asteroid down with an ancient spell, a spell that has been used just once before, but Seamus shows up at the same Internet café, joins the game with his powerful character and gets Marlon to trust him so that he can "pull" him out of danger. Egdod manages to squash a lot of terrain and characters, but misses Reamde, amazingly enough. But then, just as Marlon arrives with his gemstones, having fought his way to the main trading floor and found a priest to make his transfer, it turns out that the priest is controlled by an administrator, who lets Egdod know that Reamde has been located. Egdod shows up like an Old Testament God and plucks Csongor and Marlon out of the market and gives them an ultimatum: they tell him what happened to Zula; Marlon gets to keep his cash. That's kind of the end of act 2. Jones and Zula were traveling around Canada in a fortified RV, joined by many of his cell members located in Canada and the U.S. Zula tells Jones about Richard in order to save her life, thinking that Jones will ransom her off to her rich uncle. However, Jones is more interested in Richard's well-publicized knowledge of ways of sneaking into the States. So the Islamist wagon train heads off to Richard's chalet/compound in British Columbia. They catch Richard in his chalet just as he's caught Marlon and kidnap him, heading off over the border with the first party of terrorists. The others are left behind with Zula. At the same time, Zula makes her long-planned escape and meets up with Chet, Richard's business partner, who rescues her on his motorcycle before being critically wounded. They press onward on the route that Chet knows quite well too, chasing after Jones and Richard. Olivia has in the meantime met back up with Sokolov, who has sneaked into the U.S. (of course) and they are headed to Richard's brother Jake's isolationist/gun-nut compound in northern Idaho just south of the border where Richard's secret passage pops into the U.S. Seamus gets a military flight to take Marlon, Csongor and Yuxia into the U.S. as well and they also drift northward, working on the same hunch that Jones and Zula will be crossing the border in that area. Yuxia and Seamus hire a helicopter to reconnoiter the area, leaving Marlon and Csongor behind in an SUV. When Yuxia and Seamus don't return quickly enough, Marlon and Csongor head toward Jake's compound as well, although they get there by tailing suspicious Islamists rather than heading there on purpose. Richard escapes as well, Chet blows up a very dangerous sniper with a claymore suicide-bomb, Zula meets up with Richard and Sokolov and Olivia save the say, gathering in Zula into their party. There is a gigantic mêlée at Jake's compound and in the surrounding woods with Jones finally getting his just desserts and everybody else pulling through. The epilogue shows Sokolov and Olivia in England and everyone else at the next family reunion or joining in via video call. And they all lived happily ever after. [Citations] "Factory workers watching widgets stream off the assembly line, inspecting them for defects, out to be able to metaphrase their work into something was more neuron[-]grabbing, such as flying up a river valley on a winged steed, gazing into its limpid waters at the rocks strewn up its channel, looking for the one that contained traces of some magical ore." This seems to be the crux, the reason, he wrote this book. its a potentially revolutionary idea. "A shadow appeared in one of them: the silhouette of a man. He vaulted over the windowsill, performed a shoulder roll, and alighted on the office floor in a low crouch. In the same movements he unslung a Kalashnikov from his shoulder and brought it up ready to fire." "And so," Jones concluded, "things are about to get ubly. Not that they were pretty to begin with. But, during the journey, you might wish to consider how you can keep them from really getting out of hand. I would suggest an end to pluck, or spunk, or whatever label you like to attach to the sort of behavior you were showing back on that pier, and a decisive turn toward Islam: which means submission. Just a thought." "There's vodka in the bar," The spy Olivia said that in Russian. Sokolov guessed now, from her accent and from her freewheeling approach to dispensation of alcoholic beverages, that she was British. "Thank you, but I am a Russian of somewhat unusual habits and will not be taking this opportunity to get drunk." She was a little slow to take that sentence in, but she got the git of it. Her Russian was, perhaps, slightly better than his English. They would have to switch back and forth and watch each other's faces. I am going to take every opportunity I can find," she responded, and went over to the bar -- really just a cabinet with a few bottles in it -- and took out a bottle of Jack Daniel's. "You should not become heavily intoxicated," he said, "since further action may be required soon." The look she gave him made it evident that she was at some pains to avoid laughing in his face. Where had he gone wrong? By assuming that she would trust him. It was a logical assumption. If the spy Olivia were more experienced, she should know right away that trusting him was the correct move. She could trust him because he was completely fucked and he needed her -- a Chinese-looking person who could pass for a local -- to help him. Why then no trust? Because he had crashed though her office window at a particularly difficult moment and aimed an assault rifle at her and then broken into her apartment, probably. "How did you get in here?" she asked. "Plan D," he said in English. "And what is Plan D?" "The fourth plan I attempted. It took me all afternoon." He could have explained it, but it was idiotic to be discussing things in the past when they needed to discuss the future. "So those characters should get placed on some kind of watch list. Whenever they log in, we track them. Watch what they're doing. Check their IP addresses. Are they still in Xiamen? Or moving around? Do they have coconspirators in other places?" Interesting. the police need a search warrant, but the proprietors do not. The data is not protected there. Your rights in meatspace do not transfer to cyberspace. "Well, until we can prove that there's no connection between them and Zula's disappearance, corporate policy has to change, " Richard said." Then corporate policy was always a whim, not a legal requirement, so it can be bent for personal reasons. "...and then sneak out and get to an MC without being ripped off," Richard concluded. In the back of his mind, he was worrying about how he was going to explain this to John -- definitely not a T'Rain kind of guy. "Which could actually be difficult to pull off, if the Torgai falls under the control people who know what they're doing. I mean, with that kind of money at stake, there would be plenty of financial incentive to set up a heavy security cordon." "A Weirding Ward costs about one gold piece per linear meter," C-plus said, referring to a type of invisible force-field barrier that could be erected by sufficiently powerful sorcerers. "Cheaper if you harvest the Filamentous Cobwebs yourself," Richard retorted, referring to the primary ingredient needed to cast a Weirding Ward. "Not as easy as you make it sound, given that the Caves of Ut'tharn just go placed under a Ban of Execration," countered Corvallis, referring, respectively, to the best place to gather Filamentous Cobwebs and a powerful priestly spell.. "The American national security apparatus is very large and unfathomably complex," was all that Uncle Meng would say. " It has many departments and subunits that, one supposes, would not survive a top-to-bottom overhaul. This feeds on itself as individual actors, despairing of ever being able to make sense of it all, create their own little ad hoc bits that become institutionalized as money flows toward them. Those who are good at playing the political game are drawn inward to Washington. Those who are not end up sitting in hotel lobbies in places like Manila, waiting for people like you." He looked Olivia straight in the eye and said, in a mild but direct tone of voice, "Do you want to fuck?" She must have looked a little surprised. "Sorry to be so blunt," he went on, "but surviving one of these things always makes me incredibly horny. This, and going to funerals. Those are the triggers for me. So I just thought I would ask. I feel like I could rip off a great one just now. Tip-top. So I'm just checking. Just on the off chance you might be in the mood for something, you know, totally hot and meaningless." Olivia could well imagine it: the mischievous grin spreading across her lips, scampering back to the guest cabin, crowding into the shower, and getting banged senseless by this hormonally enraged man-child. "Um, I sor of am actually," Olivia said earnestly, "but I think it's a temptation I can resist for now." Feeling that this required more explanation, she added, "I was specifically told not to, actually." He looked impressed. "Really!" "Yeah." "Someone actually bothered to issue you an order forbidding coitus with me." "Yeah. More I think directed at me and my reputation than yours." He looked crestfallen. "But I'm sure yours is amazing! Your reputation, that is." [...] "We had to land some distance away and go in on foot and surprise them." "'Surprise' being, I guess, quite a mild term for how you approached these blokes." "It's an incomplete term. They were definitely surprised." Seamus had removed all the little screws he could find. He paused, looking at the laptop, still all together in one piece. "Jones has been known to booby-trap these things and then leave them lying around," he said. "But this one was not left lying around. It was being used when we entered the hut." He popped the back off. Olivia couldn't help flinching. But there were no lumps of plastique inside. Here Olivia discusses Abdullah Jones with Seamus. "For a man who doesn't want to die, he puts himself in some quite dodgy situations," she pointed out. "Oh, I think he's conflicted," Seamus said. "Someday he's going to be a martyr. Someday. This is what he keeps telling himself. Then he looks around himself, at the wack jobs and goat fuckers he has to work with, and he sees how much more he has to offer the movement by staying alive. Putting his expertise to work, his languages, his ability to blend in. And so the day of martyrdom keeps getting postponed." "Convenient for him, that." Seamus grinned and shrugged. "I actually don't know whether the mani s a coward, or really trying to use his skills in the most productive way by staying alive. "Huge geometric reshapings of mountainsides that she guessed must be mining projects. Canyons lined with marble the colors of honey and blood. Spindly steel-wheeled irrigation systems poised at the edge of barren cleared fields, like sprinters at the starting line, waiting for the season to being. Mountains marching in queues from directly overhead to the horizon, one after another, as if to say, We have more where these came from. Deciduous trees budding out on the mountains' lower slopes, engulfing the lone dark spikes of conifers in a foaming, cresting wave of light green. Above that, the mountains' upper slopes jumping asymptotically into curling cornices of fluffy white clouds, as opaque as cotton balls. Sometimes the clouds parted, giving glimpses of places higher up, the trees dusted as if the fog were condensing and freezing on them, just letting her know that they were only scurrying around on an insignificant low tier, and that above them were stacked many additional layers of greater complexity and structure and drama, both sunlit and weather lashed." The description starts off quite strong, evoking recognition in those of us who have seen what he's describing and know it to be just as he describes. But, at around the sentence starting with the word "Sometimes", you feel that he could just lay off already and go find an editor. We get it already. The mountains are impossibly big and remote. Brevity would be appreciated here and has been done better by other authors -- I'm thinking of Silverberg or Zelazny, who could also evoke that feeling of I-know-just-what-you're-describing but with far more concision. Plus, weather-lashed has a hyphen. Another example follows in this much shorter citation, "The coastline was fractally scalloped, consisting of shallow bays, miles wide, themselves indented with smaller indentations." This is just redundant. I don't know if the editor just gave up and didn't bother reading the book or if he or she was expressly forbidden from tossing this overly garrulous and pedantic style. It would have sung more as "The coastline was miles of fractally scalloped bays." Despite his occasional garrulousness, Stephenson is wonder storyteller. And he hides short stories in his books, each carefully crafted vignette worth all the dry patches. It's like Terry Gilliam said about good movies, that many of the great ones have only a few really good bits but those bits make the slog worth it. I've found that a similar maxim applies to some books considered to be classics (I'm looking at you, The Brothers Karamazov). Here's part of a little story he included about how a hacker of computers can use his skills anywhere to learn and improve. "The Skipper had never been on a boat, other than passenger ferries, until the day the adventure had begun. Nonetheless he had, during the first critical forty-eight hours, acquired a command of basic sailing principles with a speed and fluency that had struck the Engineer as being almost supernatural. Much like a teenager who starts playing a new video game without bothering to open the manual, he tried things and observed the results, abandoning whatever didn't work and moving aggressively to exploit small successes. A profusion of ideas spewed forth from his mind. There was no such thing as a bad idea, apparently. But, perhaps more important, there was no such thing as a good idea either, until it had been tried and coolly evaluated. It was clear how he had become the leader of a sort of gang back home: not by asserting his leadership but by being so relentless in his production, evaluation, and exploitation of ideas that his friends had been left with no choice but to form up in his wake." Of course, this only works to a certain local maximum in real life. A learning process like this allows one to quickly become skilled in something but will almost never lead to mastery. Starting off learning tried and true techniques from masters allows you to skip a lot of trial and error that otherwise wastes precious time. It will take you a lot longer to get where you're going on your own than on the shoulders of giants. "She was, he realized, very beautiful, like a madonna in a church. When she was awake, her energy and the force of her personality shone through her face and made it difficult to know anything about what she really looked like, somewhat in the way that you couldn't see the glass envelope of a lightbulb when it was turned on." A lovely simile but again overdoing it, no? How about "what she really looked like, like the glass envelope of a lightbulb." His style kind of whipsaws between run-on and confusing to concise and evocative. Stephenson would do well to learn something about sentence length from William Gibson or his editor. "Hilltops had been denuded of trees in some kind of draconian logging campaign and left covered with a khaki-colored pelt of low vegetation gashed with eroded gullies that had stained the formerly white beaches below them with shit-colored muck. A point came when they could no longer remember the last time they had been unable to see any buildings along the shore, and then they rounded a small headland, a beat-up prominence of brown rock shaped like a clenched fist, and came in view of a town of some size: a crescent-shaped beach, still several miles ahead of them, lined with buildings as much as eight stories high, which they gaped at as if they were lifelong jungle dwellers, and, nearer to hand, the usual agglomeration of smaller habitations and makeshift open-air markets along the waterfront, interrupted in the middle by a big pier reaching out into the sea and connected by hinged spans of diamond-tread stell to a facility on the short that was obviously a ferry terminal." Phew. That was two sentences. The first one was three long clauses but it felt short next to the monster that followed it. Cervantes is blushing. But then he manages to illustrate the culture clash between Csongor, who is Hungaria and Yuxia, Chinese, after he tells her of his three-person nuclear family who almost never see one another. "Yuxia seemed taken aback that any family could be so small and poorly organized." "[...] an Afghan whom Zula had last seen perched on the top of the RV with a sniper rifle and a pair of binoculars. [...] if ever there was a man cut out for a long trek down the length of a mountain range in hostile territory, it was Jahandar. To the point where Zula had some difficulty in imagining how they had smuggled him this deep into a Western democracy. They must have drugged him, packed him in to a crate, shipped him over by air freight direct from Tora BOra, and kept him pent up on a mountaintop until now. Everything about his appearance -- the hat, the beard, the glare, the battle scars -- should have got him arrested on sight in any municipality west of the Caspian Sea." "She had just betrayed her own uncle. He was now in the power of men who would certainly kill him as soon as he was no longer useful." Here Stephenson plays with interesting juxtapositions of a character's power (Richard's "Egdod" character) versus his relative powerlessness in a real-life situation. Marlon is similar in that he has a lot of power and money in T'Rain but struggles to convert it to money and thus power in the real world. The currency of T'Rain seems arbitrary but Stephenson uses it to shine a harsh light on the bizarreness that we accept in our own money exchanges. Are they even so different if we discard our predilection for the known quantity? "It would all work out fine if Sokolov could merely relate the story to the people Ivanov had betrayed. "Not that Sokolov had any certainty of being forgiven. There were no guarantees. But this way he had a decent chance. Whereas if he sneaked around and tried to avoid them, they would surely take not of his lack of courtesy and approach him in a more suspicious frame of mind." Stephenson is also pretty good a "guy banter". Here we read how Seamus asked his friend Stan for help. "Seamus asked Stan whether it wouldn't be too much of a challenge to his intellectual faculties to track down the provenance of a certain instant message, and wondered whether Stan was too much of a pussy to get it done discreetly, without setting the whole counterterrorism network alight. "[...] "Why yes, Seamus responded, if it wouldn't interrupt Stan's busy schedule of watching gay bondage pornography videos on the taxpayer-provided high-speed Internet connection, he would very much like to know whether a certain young lady had bought any airplane tickets of rented any cars in Washington or British Columbia of late. "A few minutes later came an email assuring Seamus that the lap dancer in question had indeed left an electronic trail a mile wide and that Seamus might be able to make use of the following data in tracking her down and getting his stolen kidney back: she had flown from Vancouver to Seattle this morning and rented a navy blue Chevy Trailblazer. "Seamus sent a polite note back reminding Stan to zip his fly when finished and promising to buy him a drink during Stan's next visit to Zamboanga, supposing that Stan had the testicular fortitude to come within a thousand miles of such a challenging locale." It's probably funnier in context, I guess. I liked it enough to highlight and can remember cackling at it when I was reading it but it's not as funny now. YMMV. You'll notice, however, that Stephenson's hatred of hyphens endures. "In the middle of the gridiron was a man-sized door. This had clearly been locked and vandalized, chained and vandalized, welded shut and vandalized, so many times as to threaten the integrity of the entire structure. Now it stood slightly ajar and Zula's flashlight, shining through the grid, revealed that the graffiti and trash on its opposite side were only a little less prevalent." I attached a note "Moria" to this citation, but am no longer sure what I was getting at. "It was thirty miles as the crow flew, longer on the roads they'd be taking. There were no buses, they could make it before nightfall if they set a decent pace. "Olivia now understood what Sokolov meant by We are wasting time. He was saying, I could do this ride in two hours. With you, pumping away on your little girl-bike, it will take four." Nope. Fifty probably sixty kilometers with hills on mountain bikes? With equipment on their backs? Even a machine like Sokolov isn't doing that in two hours. Stephenson usually does meticulous research, but this estimate is considerably off. A non-experienced cyclist wouldn't be able to hold a pace like that. "Two Chinese and a Hungarian, just basically parachuted into CONUS with no paperwork whatsoever." The Hungarian is legit, he has a visa." "Two Chinese then." "Yeah." "Given that Chinese illegals are being shipped into the Port of Seattle by the containerload, it seems like it would hardly make a dent. "That's the spirit!" Seamus had said. "And these are not your baseline economic migrants. They're going to be running major corporations inside of a fortnight." "Not without green cards." "I think I'm going to marry the girl. That would take care of her status." Freddie had turned to look at him incredulously. "Does she know this?" "She has no idea. Just a feeling." "A feeling on your part." "Halfway there. Pretty respectable progress." "She found it odd that she was considered to be on a first-name basis with this family." That makes her the shittiest spy ever because even the barest of research or familiarity with American culture would reveal that Americans are on a first-name basis with everybody. They act like last names don't even exist once you start talking to them. "[...] by the time they had gone inside, sat down around the table, held hands to say Grace, and tucked into a simple but generous and nutritionally balanced dinner." Who talks like that? Stephenson evinces a love of guns and possibly also preppers in this book. What is it with the prepper's obsession to prove that they are all dining so super-good away from civilization? The sentence jumped out at me as one I'd read in a true prepper's book a few years back. It reminded me of that pedantic style that lovingly describes and counts up ammunition as well as provides mind-numbing detail about how food is prepared as if to prove that the author knows how to feed himself when the shit goes down. And don't you think he doesn't. "She got to a point where she simply could not run anymore, so she permitted herself to drop into a brisk walk while she drank more water -- [...]" That point comes pretty quickly unless you're really well-trained, even if you're being chased by jihadis. And Zula had just spent weeks trapped in an RV with no mobility and poor nutrition. Plus, she's at altitude in the Canadian rockies and she lives in Seattle. "Inside Sokolov's pack was a smaller bag, just a thin nylon stuff sack, made to hold a wadded-up sleeping bag. Once Sokolov had found a convenient place to lie prone on the top of the rock, he pulled this out by its drawstring and set it down onthe rock. It clattered. It was full, she realized of hard heavy objects with corners. Once he had finished assembling the rifle, Sokolov zipped the bag's drawstring open and dumped it out on the rock. It contained half a dozen curved plastic boxes: ammunition clips for the rifle. From their weight it was obvious that they were loaded." What the fuck is that? Is he trying to build suspense? Are we supposed to be seeing this through Zula's naive eyes? Oh, yeah, they're not naive eyes. Her whole family is into guns and she just spent weeks trapped in a trailer with jihadis. She knows what a fucking clip looks like. She is not surprised that Sokolov has a bunch of them. Neither are we. This is just another example of frightfully overwording something that could have been done in just a couple of words. Where is Stephenson's editor? Are they being paid by the word? For example, "Sokolov took up a prone position on the rock, dumping a bunch of clips out of a stuff sack near to hand." "All this effort, all these risks taken and damages sustained, had achieved one thing for him, which was that he had killed exactly one of his numerous foes. "Now, had he been a seventeen-year--old, he'd have harbored foolish and unrealistic expectations of what could really be achieved in a situation such as this one, and he'd have believed that the payoff for all that work and risk and pain ought to have been greater than bagging one enemy. Driven by that misconception, he would have been slower to abandon the log cabin, slower to give up on the hope of shooting the man who had hidden behind the outhouse. He would have adopted a combative stance toward the main group of jihadists who had come running back to the camp. As a result, they would have surrounded him and killed him. All because he was young and imbued with an unrealistic sense of what the world owed him. "On the other hand, had he been a few years older than he really was, or not in such good physical condition, then all the running and diving and exposure to the elements would have felt much more expensive to him. Unsustainable. Disheartening. And those emotions would have led to his making decisions every bit as fatal, in the end, as those of the hypothetical seventeen-year--old. "So, as loath as he was to be self-congratulatory, he saw evidence to support the conclusion that he was at precisely the rich age and level of physical conditioning to be undertaking this mission. "Which, viewed superficially, seemed like a favorable judgment. But with a bit more consideration -- and, as he hid beneath the tree and listened to the jihadists beating the bushes, he did have a few minutes to think about it -- it was really somewhat troubling, since it implied that all the operations he had participated in during his career before today had been undertaken by a foolish boy, in over his head and surviving by dumb luck. Whereas any operations he might carry out in the future would be ill-advised excursions by a man who was over the hill, past his prime. "He really needed to get out of this line of work." On the one hand, this is neatly philosophical and thoughtful section but on the other it smacks of the same obsessive pedantry that makes Stephenson describe food and ammunition in such excruciating detail. Again, a lovely thought, a lovely idea conjured up by an introspective soldier of uncommon skill, but formulated in an overwrought, almost clinical way. "This was a shoot-out. Nothing could be simpler. But he was making it too complicated by trying to use his wits to work the angles, figure out some clever way to doge around the essential nature of what was happening, to get through to the other side without getting hurt. His opponent, of course, simply didn't give a shat what happened to him and was probably a dead man anyway -- which gave Jones an advantage that Richard could match [1] only by adopting the same attitude. It was an attitude that had come naturally to him as a young man, taking down the grizzly bear with the slug gun and doing any number of other things that later seemed ill-advised. Wealth and success had changed him; he now looked back on all such adventures with fastidious horror. But he had to revert to that mind-set now or else Jones would simply kill him." [1] An advantage is not matched but rather neutralized. "They were greeted with the sight of Sokolov, dressed in a bathrobe, drinking a cup of coffee and reading a book through a pair of half-glasses that made him seem oddly professor-like. This elicited a cheer from the group in Iowa. He lifted up his coffee mug and tipped it toward them, then took a sip." This is a pretty cheesy thing to do to a character like Sokolov, giving him the Bruckheimer/Bay treatment. [Errata] Page 147: Will it last? Because they had making money before, when the story of the world had actually made sense. Add “been” between “had” and “making”; they had [been] making money before Page 173: And even though he did not play the game himself, professing to find the very ideal “frightful” Change “ideal” to “idea”; professing to find the very [idea] “frightful” Page 326: glad of an opportunity to lie down and stop moving, even if she were wet and cold. Change “were” to “was”; even if she [was] wet and cold. Page 504: So the main thrust of the investigation, as far you’re concerned, is the SNAG, Add “as” after “far”; as far [as] you’re concerned Page 590: He was movingly awkwardly because of the Crocs Replace “movingly” with “moving”; he was [moving] awkwardly Page 646: They only way to get past it was this arduous traversal Replace “They” with “The”; [The] only way to get past it was Page 697: apparently he head heard John’s clothes rustling Replace “head” with “had”; apparently he [had] heard ]]> </content> </entry> <entry> <title type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco (read in 2014)]]> </title> <id>https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3046</id> <link href="https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3046"/> <updated>2015-03-29T18:15:35+02:00</updated> <author> <name type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[(withheld)]]> </name> </author> <summary type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA["Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is" ... ]]> </summary> <content type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Published by root on 29. Mar 2015 18:15:35 Updated by root on 29. Mar 2015 18:15:46 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I've failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an interest in this book, then I'm happy for you." [Citations] Eco's research is legendary, if you can get past the pomposity, "[...] but then, in 1970, in Buenos Aires, as I was browsing among the shelves of a little antiquarian bookseller on Corrientes, not far from the more illustrious Patio del Tango of that great street, I cam upon the Castilian version of a little work by Milo Temesvar, On the Use of Mirrors in the Game of Chess. It was an Italian translation of the original, which, now impossible to find, was in Georgian (Tbilisi, 1934) [...]" "Excluded as they were from the flock, all of them were ready to hear, or to produce, every sermon that, harking back to the word of Christ, would condemn the behavior of the dogs and the shepherds and would promise punishment one day. The powerful always realized this. The recovery of the outcasts demanded reduction of the privileges of the powerful, so the excluded who became aware of their exclusion had to be branded as heretics, whatever their doctrine. And for their part, blinded by their exclusion, they were not really interested in any doctrine. This is the illusion of heresy. Everyone is heretical, everyone is orthodox. The faith a movement proclaims doesn't count: what counts is the hope it offers. All heresies are the banner of a reality, an exclusion. Scratch the heresy and you will find the leper. Every battle against heresy wants only this: to keep the leper as he is." "The science Bacon spoke of rests unquestionably on these propositions. You understand, Adso, I must believe that my proposition works, because I learned it by experience; but to believe it I must assume there are universal laws. Yet I cannot speak of them, because the very concept that universal laws and an established order exist would imply that God is their prisoner, whereas God is something absolutely free, so that if He wanted, with a single act of His will He could make the world different." [...] Because the girl didn't go with him for love, but for a pack of scraps. Certainly she is a girl from the village who, perhaps not for the first time, grants her favors to some lustful monk out of hunger and receives as recompense something for her and her family to eat." "A harlot!" I said, horrified. Eco shows how quick the monks are to blame the woman, although she is clearly the party of whom advantage was taken. "I arrived at Jorge pursuing the plan of a perverse and rational mind, and there was no plan, or, rather, Jorge himself was overcome by his own initial design and there began a sequence of causes, and concauses, and of cause contradicting one another, which proceeded on their own, creating relations that did not stem from any plan. Where is all my wisdom, then? I behaved stubbornly, pursuing a semblance of order, when I should have known well that there is no order in the universe." "What you say is very fine, Adso, and I thank you.The order that our mind imagines is like a net, or like a ladder, built to attain something. But afterward you must throw the ladder away, because you discover that, even if it was useful, it was meaningless. Er muoz gelichesame die leieter abewerfen, so er an ir ufgestigen.... Is that how you say it? "[...] "I dared, for the first and last time in my life, to express a theological conclusion: "But how can a necessary begin exist totally polluted with the possible? What difference is there, then, between God and primigenial chaos? Isn't affirming God's absolute omnipotence and His absolute freedom with regard to His own choices tantamount to demonstrating that God does not exist?" ]]> </content> </entry> <entry> <title type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes (read in 2014--2015)]]> </title> <id>https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3035</id> <link href="https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3035"/> <updated>2015-03-29T17:56:16+02:00</updated> <author> <name type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Marco von Ballmoos]]> </name> <uri>https://earthli.com/users/marco</uri> </author> <summary type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA["Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is" ... ]]> </summary> <content type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Published by root on 29. Mar 2015 17:56:16 Updated by marco on 23. May 2015 12:14:44 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I've failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an interest in this book, then I'm happy for you." [Citations] Cervantes starts off with a swipe at the apologia, a standard practice at the time in which the author excused himself for wasting the time of the reader with his drivel. It was generally an affair with two meanings, but seldom honest. Here is that for Don Quixote: "For, how could you expect me not to feel uneasy about what that ancient lawgiver they call the Public will say when it sees me, after slumbering so many years in the silence of oblivion, coming out now with all my years upon my back, and with a book as dry as a rush, devoid of invention, meagre in style, poor in thoughts, wholly wanting in learning and wisdom, without quotations in the margin or annotations at the end, after the fashion of other books I see, which, though all fables and profanity, are so full of maxims from Aristotle, and Plato, and the whole herd of philosophers, that they fill the readers with amazement and convince them that the authors are men of learning, erudition, and eloquence. And then, when they quote the Holy Scriptures!—anyone would say they are St. Thomases or other doctors of the Church, observing as they do a decorum so ingenious that in one sentence they describe a distracted lover and in the next deliver a devout little sermon that it is a pleasure and a treat to hear and read. Of all this there will be nothing in my book, for “I have nothing to quote in the margin or to note at the end, and still less do I know what authors I follow in it, to place them at the beginning, as all do, under the letters A, B, C, beginning with Aristotle and ending with Xenophon, or Zoilus, or Zeuxis, though one was a slanderer and the other a painter. Also my book must do without sonnets at the beginning, at least sonnets whose authors are dukes, marquises, counts, bishops, ladies, or famous poets. Though if I were to ask two or three obliging friends, I know they would give me them, and such as the productions of those that have the highest reputation in our Spain could not equal. "In short, my friend," I continued, "I am determined that Senor Don Quixote shall remain buried in the archives of his own La Mancha until Heaven provide some one to garnish him with all those things he stands in need of; because I find myself, through my shallowness and want of learning, unequal to supplying them, and because I am by nature shy and careless about hunting for authors to say what I myself can say without them. Hence the cogitation and abstraction you found me in, and reason enough, what you have heard from me." Soon after, Cervantes pokes at how the utterly mundane is transformed into the etherial by historians, "Thus setting out, our new-fledged adventurer paced along, talking to himself and saying, "Who knows but that in time to come, when the veracious history of my famous deeds is made known, the sage who writes it, when he has to set forth my first sally in the early morning, will do it after this fashion? 'Scarce had the rubicund Apollo spread o'er the face of the broad spacious earth the golden threads of his bright hair, scarce had the little birds of painted plumage attuned their notes to hail with dulcet and mellifluous harmony the coming of the rosy Dawn, that, deserting the soft couch of her jealous spouse, was appearing to mortals at the gates and balconies of the Manchegan horizon, when the renowned knight Don Quixote of La Mancha, quitting the lazy down, mounted his celebrated steed Rocinante and began to traverse the ancient and famous Campo de Montiel;'" which in fact he was actually traversing. "Happy the age, happy the time," he continued, "in which shall be made known my deeds of fame, worthy to be moulded in brass, carved in marble, limned in pictures, for a memorial for ever. “And thou, O sage magician, whoever thou art, to whom it shall fall to be the chronicler of this wondrous history, forget not, I entreat thee, my good Rocinante, the constant companion of my ways and wanderings." Presently he broke out again, as if he were love-stricken in earnest, "O Princess Dulcinea, lady of this captive heart, a grievous wrong hast thou done me to drive me forth with scorn, and with inexorable obduracy banish me from the presence of thy beauty. O lady, deign to hold in remembrance this heart, thy vassal, that thus in anguish pines for love of thee." This next quote plumbs the depths of Quixote's derangement, with his quite honest belief that a potion that he learned how to mix from one of his books on chivalry will allow him to be pasted back together like a cartoon character. "What vial and what balsam is that?" said Sancho Panza. ""It is a balsam," answered Don Quixote, "the receipt of which I have in my memory, with which one need have no fear of death, or dread dying of any wound; and so when I make it and give it to thee thou hast nothing to do when in some battle thou seest they have cut me in half through the middle of the body—as is wont to happen frequently,—but neatly and with great nicety, ere the blood congeal, to place that portion of the body which shall have fallen to the ground upon the other half which remains in the saddle, taking care to fit it on evenly and exactly. Then thou shalt give me to drink but two drops of the balsam I have mentioned, and thou shalt see me become sounder than an apple. " This next citation reminds me very much of Mark Twain, who had a very similarly sarcastic style. "Don Quixote's [bed] consisted simply of four rough boards on two not very even trestles, a mattress, that for thinness might have passed for a quilt, full of pellets which, were they not seen through the rents to be wool, would to the touch have seemed pebbles in hardness, two sheets made of buckler leather, and a coverlet the threads of which anyone that chose might have counted without missing one in the reckoning." And here we have a description of a woman foiling an attack from one man while describing how she was unable to foil a similar attack at a later date. "[...] my worthy servant, until then so faithful and trusty when he found me in this lonely spot, moved more by his own villainy than by my beauty, sought to take advantage of the opportunity which these solitudes seemed to present him, and with little shame and less fear of God and respect for me, began to make overtures to me; and finding that I replied to the effrontery of his proposals with justly severe language, he laid aside the entreaties which he had employed at first, and began to use violence. "But just Heaven, that seldom fails to watch over and aid good intentions, so aided mine that with my slight strength and with little exertion I pushed him over a precipice, where I left him, whether dead or alive I know not [...] "I met a herdsman who engaged me as his servant at a place in the heart of this Sierra, and all this time I have been serving him as herd, striving to keep always afield to hide these locks which have now unexpectedly betrayed me. But all my care and pains were unavailing, for my master made the discovery that I was not a man, and harboured the same base designs as my servant; and as fortune does not always supply a remedy in cases of difficulty, and I had no precipice or ravine at hand down which to fling the master and cure his passion, as I had in the servant's case, I thought it a lesser evil to leave him and again conceal myself among these crags, than make trial of my strength and argument with him." ""But what most of all made me hold my hand and even abandon all idea of finishing it was an argument I put to myself taken from the plays that are acted now-a-days, which was in this wise: if those that are now in vogue, as well those that are pure invention as those founded on history, are, all or most of them, downright nonsense and things that have neither head nor tail, and yet the public listens to them with delight, and regards and cries them up as perfection when they are so far from it; and if the authors who write them, and the players who act them, say that this is what they must be, for the public wants this and will have nothing else; and that those that go by rule and work out a plot according to the laws of art will only find some half-dozen intelligent people to understand them, while all the rest remain blind to the merit of their composition; and that for themselves it is better to get bread from the many than praise from the few; then my book will fare the same way [...]" "For myself, I can only say that when I read them, so long as I do not stop to think that they are all lies and frivolity, they give me a certain amount of pleasure; but when I come to consider what they are, I fling the very best of them at the wall, and would fling it into the fire if there were one at hand, as richly deserving such punishment as cheats and impostors out of the range of ordinary toleration, and as founders of new sects and modes of life, and teachers that lead the ignorant public to believe and accept as truth all the folly they contain." Here we see Cervantes's hatred for this kind of pap. Part II of the book starts with a discussion of the first part of the book, which in this second part has appeared as a publication already famous throughout Spain. Don Quixote and Sancho Panza discuss this book with a bachelor who is very familiar with it, questioning and probing to determine that it reflects the truth...but not too much of the truth. This part is really very nicely written and the self-referential part as well as the oblique chastisement of Cervantes's own detractors and critics is quite a master stroke. [1] Cervantes packs this long book full of wonderful prose, never missing an opportunity for a small joke or pithy phrase (much as Sancho never misses an opportunity to utter a proverb). So many paragraphs are like exquisite sculptures, standing nearly on their own, and the careful reader is constantly rewarded, as in the emphasized part below. "[...] Let each look to himself and not try to make out white black, and black white; for each of us is as God made him, aye, and often worse. (Emphasis added.)" Or in this next citation, again from Panza, about how those least in need of it have money thrown at them, "As soon as I have the government," said Sancho, "I will send for him by post, and I will send thee money, of which I shall have no lack, for there is never any want of people to lend it to governors when they have not got it; [...]" Or this one, again by Sancho, which appear to be a nicety but is a backhanded compliment if I've ever read one. The sting is in the tail. The books are positively filled with this type of sly backhandedness. "My lady the duchess kisses thy hands a thousand times; do thou make a return with two thousand, for as my master says, nothing costs less or is cheaper than civility. (Emphasis added.)" "And thou, highest perfection of excellence that can be desired, utmost limit of grace in human shape, sole relief of this afflicted heart that adores thee, though the malign enchanter that persecutes me has brought clouds and cataracts on my eyes, and to them, and them only, transformed thy unparagoned beauty and changed thy features into those of a poor peasant girl, if so be he has not at the same time changed mine into those of some monster to render them loathsome in thy sight, refuse not to look upon me with tenderness and love; seeing in this submission that I make on my knees to thy transformed beauty the humility with which my soul adores thee." Sancho lied about Dulcinea, covering up his subterfuge by claiming that Quixote could only see an ugly peasant girl because of enchantments. And here Sancho Panza doubles down on his lie about Dulcinea, showing what a brilliant, confident and, above all, unabashed liar he is, "[...] and if it be that it is only from your worship she is hidden, the misfortune will be more yours than hers; but so long as the lady Dulcinea is well and happy, we on our part will make the best of it, and get on as well as we can, seeking our adventures, and leaving Time to take his own course; for he is the best physician for these and greater ailments." And Dulcinea's non-existence in no way prevents Quixote from lamenting the loss of her fictitious honor through his own inability to resist the bought-and-paid-for wiles of a few young damsels hired by the duke and duchess to prolong their prank. Here Quixote is disconsolate because he will be unable to resist the temptations of virgins and will therefore sully the pure love he has for a woman he has never met nor knows. He weeps for her lost honor, the status of which is not only entirely fictitious but also would be well within his power to preserve. "O that I should be such an unlucky knight that no damsel can set eyes on me but falls in love with me! O that the peerless Dulcinea should be so unfortunate that they cannot let her enjoy my incomparable constancy in peace! What would ye with her, ye queens? Why do ye persecute her, ye empresses? Why ye pursue her, ye virgins of from fourteen to fifteen?" The exactness of his dialogue is a pleasure: "Thirty thousand volumes of my history have been printed, and it is on the high-road to be printed thirty thousand thousands of times, if heaven does not put a stop to it. In short, to sum up all in a few words, or in a single one, I may tell you I am Don Quixote of La Mancha, otherwise called 'The Knight of the Rueful Countenance;' for though self-praise is degrading, I must perforce sound my own sometimes, that is to say, when there is no one at hand to do it for me. So that, gentle sir, neither this horse, nor this lance, nor this shield, nor this squire, nor all these arms put together, nor the sallowness of my countenance, nor my gaunt leanness, will henceforth astonish you, now that you know who I am and what profession I follow." And here: "[...] there is no mode of life more restless or anxious than ours. What led me into it was a certain thirst for vengeance, which is strong enough to disturb the quietest hearts. I am by nature tender-hearted and kindly, but, as I said, the desire to revenge myself for a wrong that was done me so overturns all my better impulses that I keep on in this way of life in spite of what conscience tells me; and as one depth calls to another, and one sin to another sin, revenges have linked themselves together, and I have taken upon myself not only my own but those of others: it pleases God, however, that, though I see myself in this maze of entanglements, I do not lose all hope of escaping from it and reaching a safe port." Quixote holds forth on the validity of various scholastics and poetry: "But your son, senor, I suspect, is not prejudiced against Spanish poetry, but against those poets who are mere Spanish verse writers, without any knowledge of other languages or sciences to adorn and give life and vigour to their natural inspiration; and yet even in this he may be wrong; for, according to a true belief, a poet is born one;" When Quixote confronts lions and demands to fight them, the gentleman in charge of them chides him with, "[...] valour that trenches upon temerity savours rather of madness than of courage;" At another point, Quixote himself holds forth on discretion being the better part of valor (Douglas Adams took it further, writing that "[...] cowardice is the better part of discretion, [and Zaphod] valiantly hid himself in a closet"). "He does not fly who retires," returned Don Quixote; "for I would have thee know, Sancho, that the valour which is not based upon a foundation of prudence is called rashness, and the exploits of the rash man are to be attributed rather to good fortune than to courage; and so I own that I retired, but not that I fled; and therein I have followed the example of many valiant men who have reserved themselves for better times;" And here we have yet more evidence that part two of this book is a clever story of the telling of the translation of the telling of the story of Don Quixote. "Here the author's outburst came to an end, and he proceeded to take up the thread of his story, saying that the keeper, seeing that Don Quixote had taken up his position, and that it was impossible for him to avoid letting out the male without incurring the enmity of the fiery and daring knight, flung open the doors of the first cage, containing, as has been said, the lion, which was now seen to be of enormous size, and grim and hideous mien." The reader is eased back in from the supposedly high-flung and needlessly hyperbolic prose of the original author to the at least somewhat more staid and descriptive and sensible prose of the current translator. "I, then, as it has fallen to my lot to be a member of knight-errantry, cannot avoid attempting all that to me seems to come within the sphere of my duties; thus it was my bounden duty to attack those lions that I just now attacked, although I knew it to be the height of rashness; for I know well what valour is, that it is a virtue that occupies a place between two vicious extremes, cowardice and temerity; but it will be a lesser evil for him who is valiant to rise till he reaches the point of rashness, than to sink until he reaches the point of cowardice; for, as it is easier for the prodigal than for the miser to become generous, so it is easier for a rash man to prove truly valiant than for a coward to rise to true valour; and believe me, Senor Don Diego, in attempting adventures it is better to lose by a card too many than by a card too few; for to hear it said, 'such a knight is rash and daring,' sounds better than 'such a knight is timid and cowardly.'" And in this much longer passage, the author writes how the original Moorish author lamented at having to write such a boring story, a form of apologia but with ironic tongue firmly in cheek. "It is stated, they say, in the true original of this history, that when Cide Hamete came to write this chapter, his interpreter did not translate it as he wrote it—that is, as a kind of complaint the Moor made against himself for having taken in hand a story so dry and of so little variety as this of Don Quixote, for he found himself forced to speak perpetually of him and Sancho, without venturing to indulge in digressions and episodes more serious and more interesting. He said, too, that to go on, mind, hand, pen always restricted to writing upon one single subject, and speaking through the mouths of a few characters, was intolerable drudgery, the result of which was never equal to the author's labour, and that to avoid this he had in the First Part availed himself of the device of novels, like "The Ill-advised Curiosity," and "The Captive Captain," which stand, as it were, apart from the story; the others are given there being incidents which occurred to Don Quixote himself and could not be omitted. He also thought, he says, that many, engrossed by the interest attaching to the exploits of Don Quixote, would take none in the novels, and pass them over hastily or impatiently without noticing the elegance and art of their composition, which would be very manifest were they published by themselves and not as mere adjuncts to the crazes of Don Quixote or the simplicities of Sancho." Again, much later in the book, we meet Roque, who is so polite and good-looking that people are almost pleased to be robbed by him, thanking him for whatever small courtesy he offers: "Profuse and hearty were the expressions of gratitude with which the captains thanked Roque for his courtesy and generosity; for such they regarded his leaving them their own money. Senora Dona Guiomar de Quinones wanted to throw herself out of the coach to kiss the feet and hands of the great Roque, but he would not suffer it on any account; so far from that, he begged her pardon for the wrong he had done her under pressure of the inexorable necessities of his unfortunate calling." Here is an example of Don Quixote's frustration with Sancho's seemingly inadvertent but at-times seemingly deliberate misuse of words. "What art thou driving at, Sancho? curses on thee!" said Don Quixote; "for when thou takest to stringing proverbs and sayings together, no one can understand thee but Judas himself, and I wish he had thee. Tell me, thou animal, what dost thou know about nails or wheels, or anything else?" "Oh, if you don't understand me," replied Sancho, "it is no wonder my words are taken for nonsense; but no matter; I understand myself, and I know I have not said anything very foolish in what I have said; only your worship, senor, is always gravelling at everything I say, nay, everything I do." "Cavilling, not gravelling," said Don Quixote, "thou prevaricator of honest language, God confound thee!" This misuse of words, especially those a bit off the beaten path, is common among people today as well. With an ear more attuned to it, I've recently heard someone use "diligent" when they meant "vigilant" or "colonoscopy bag" instead of "colostomy bag". Don Quixote has a bit of a love/hate relationship with Sancho, as evidenced by this next citation. Note the emphasis. "God guide thee, Sancho, and govern thee in thy government, and deliver me from the misgiving I have that thou wilt turn the whole island upside down, a thing I might easily prevent by explaining to the duke what thou art and telling him that all that fat little person of thine is nothing else but a sack full of proverbs and sauciness. (Emphasis added.)" And here Sancho expresses his doubt at the gravity of Basilio's condition, "For one so badly wounded," observed Sancho at this point, "this young man has a great deal to say; they should make him leave off billing and cooing, and attend to his soul; for to my thinking he has it more on his tongue than at his teeth." And here is a typically long, though lovely formulation of a now-common proverb "all is fair in love and war". "[...] right to take vengeance for wrongs that love may do to us: remember love and war are the same thing, and as in war it is allowable and common to make use of wiles and stratagems to overcome the enemy, so in the contests and rivalries of love the tricks and devices employed to attain the desired end are justifiable, provided they be not to the discredit or dishonour of the loved object." This next part is delivered by Don Quixote later, when Sancho is about to become a governor and is in dire need of guidance in his personal hygiene. It translates, roughly, to "long nails is nasty." ""With regard to the mode in which thou shouldst govern thy person and thy house, Sancho, the first charge I have to give thee is to be clean, and to cut thy nails, not letting them grow as some do, whose ignorance makes them fancy that long nails are an ornament to their hands, as if those excrescences they neglect to cut were nails, and not the talons of a lizard-catching kestrel—a filthy and unnatural abuse." Or this quote of Don Quixote, who in this case -- and many others, throughout the book -- epitomizes the know-it-all who has read much but experienced nothing. Here he is acknowledging this but plowing on nonetheless, as he is about to expound at length on marriage, because the world should not be deprived of wisdom such as his, "[...] myself am not married, nor, so far, has it ever entered my thoughts to be so; nevertheless I would venture to give advice to anyone who might ask it, as to the mode in which he should seek a wife such as he would be content to marry. [...] If you take a good woman into your house it will be an easy matter to keep her good, and even to make her still better; but if you take a bad one you will find it hard work to mend her, for it is no very easy matter to pass from one extreme to another. I do not say it is impossible, but I look upon it as difficult." And here we meet another man on the road, one who is arguably worse than Quixote or Panza in his locution: a man who shows all signs of being the precursor or sixteenth-century equivalent of the online, conspiracy-theorist know-it-all. "Another book I have which I call 'The Supplement to Polydore Vergil,' which treats of the invention of things, and is a work of great erudition and research, for I establish and elucidate elegantly some things of great importance which Polydore omitted to mention. He forgot to tell us who was the first man in the world that had a cold in his head, and who was the first to try salivation for the French disease, but I give it accurately set forth, and quote more than five-and-twenty authors in proof of it, so you may perceive I have laboured to good purpose and that the book will be of service to the whole world." The sarcasm of the author shines through thickly nearly everywhere, as evidenced in the emphasized bit in the following citation. "Thou hast said more than thou art aware of, Sancho," said Don Quixote; "for there are some who weary themselves out in learning and proving things that, after they are known and proved, are not worth a farthing to the understanding or memory." In this and other pleasant conversation the day went by, [...](Emphasis added.)" Or in this (emphasized) comment by Sancho Panza, responding to the guide's request that Quixote be on the lookout for strangeness, even if it's hard to detect. "[...] said the guide, "I beg of you, Senor Don Quixote, to observe carefully and examine with a hundred eyes everything that is within there; perhaps there may be some things for me to put into my book of 'Transformations.'" "The drum is in hands that will know how to beat it well enough," said Sancho Panza. (Emphasis added.)" There's this brilliant bit wherein Quixote makes up a word, for once, then corrects Panza when he misquotes it, chiding him for not knowing Latin. "As Sancho said this, he tied the beasts, leaving them to the care and protection of the enchanters with sorrow enough in his heart. Don Quixote bade him not be uneasy about deserting the animals, "for he who would carry themselves over such longinquous roads and regions would take care to feed them." ""I don't understand that logiquous," said Sancho, "nor have I ever heard the word all the days of my life." ""Longinquous," replied Don Quixote, "means far off; but it is no wonder thou dost not understand it, for thou art not bound to know Latin, like some who pretend to know it and don't." And here is Don Quixote, waxing once again very eloquently and loquaciously, in effect saying "step off, you don't know what you're talking about.". "The place I am in, the presence in which I stand, and the respect I have and always have had for the profession to which your worship belongs, hold and bind the hands of my just indignation; and as well for these reasons as because I know, as everyone knows, that a gownsman's weapon is the same as a woman's, the tongue, I will with mine engage in equal combat with your worship, from whom one might have expected good advice instead of foul abuse. Pious, well-meant reproof requires a different demeanour and arguments of another sort; at any rate, to have reproved me in public, and so roughly, exceeds the bounds of proper reproof, for that comes better with gentleness than with rudeness; and it is not seemly to call the sinner roundly blockhead and booby, without knowing anything of the sin that is reproved." And poor Sancho has still not given up on his dreams. It's so hard to tell whether he really believes this, while at the same knowing of Quixote's utter madness. He would not be the first nor the last to harbor such cognitive dissonance. "[...] neither will he be in any want of empires to rule, or I of islands to govern." And again, I cannot honestly tell how many layers of sarcasm there are here: is it the (purported) original translator, the author or Sancho who is here being sarcastic? Does Sancho really think this? Or is he thinking what a dolt Quixote is for not having noticed that the devil cannot be the devil he claims? "If you were the devil, as you say and as your appearance indicates," said the duke, "you would have known the said knight Don Quixote of La Mancha, for you have him here before you. "By God and upon my conscience," said the devil, "I never observed it, for my mind is occupied with so many different things that I was forgetting the main thing I came about. "This demon must be an honest fellow and a good Christian," said Sancho; "for if he wasn't he wouldn't swear by God and his conscience; I feel sure now there must be good souls even in hell itself." And here we see effusive praise showered upon Quixote by the duke, despite the duke knowing that it's lies. Quixote may believe it, but he knows in part of his heart that it is not true. But his doubts are quickly washed away with this type of obsequy. It's as if saying it more makes it all the more true, that the praise calls forth the immanent prowess. This seems to be the whole point of this second part: starting as a joke, but these people are all contributing to making the utter fantasy of the first half become nearly real -- at least for Quixote and Panza -- and once it's real, their mockery will be hollow because of their own actions. It's quite complex and rich, actually. "I say so, because your excellence has been barely six days in this castle, and already the unhappy and the afflicted come in quest of you from lands far distant and remote, and not in coaches or on dromedaries, but on foot and fasting, confident that in that mighty arm they will find a cure for their sorrows and troubles; thanks to your great achievements, which are circulated all over the known earth." To this high praise, Quixote, whose doubts in his own prowess have been dispelled by such effusiveness, responds thusly, "[...] those suffering any extraordinary affliction or sorrow, in extreme cases and unusual misfortunes do not go to look for a remedy to the houses of jurists or village sacristans, or to the knight who has never attempted to pass the bounds of his own town, or to the indolent courtier who only seeks for news to repeat and talk of, instead of striving to do deeds and exploits for others to relate and record. Relief in distress, help in need, protection for damsels, consolation for widows, are to be found in no sort of persons better than in knights-errant;" Sancho is told the same, in no uncertain terms, by his majordomo, once he becomes governor. See emphasis. "There is so much in what your worship says, senor governor," said the majordomo, "that I am filled with wonder when I see a man like your worship, entirely without learning (for I believe you have none at all), say such things, and so full of sound maxims and sage remarks, very different from what was expected of your worship's intelligence by those who sent us or by us who came here. Every day we see something new in this world; jokes become realities, and the jokers find the tables turned upon them." And almost every chapter ends with an enticement to read the next. This example is from the end of chapter XXXVII but is typical of the style and is likely an inside joke as well. "[...] and here the author brought this short chapter to an end and began the next, following up the same adventure, which is one of the most notable in the history." Once again, it is difficult to know at this distance whether I am viewing the following passage as ironic simply because it passes through my more modern and liberal interpretive lens, or whether Cervantes really meant to poke fun at those who truly thought that a Moor would know only of "charity, humility, faith, obedience, and poverty" because "Christians" had told him of them. "Although a Moor, I know well enough from the intercourse I have had with Christians that holiness consists in charity, humility, faith, obedience, and poverty; but for all that, I say he must have a great deal of godliness who can find any satisfaction in being poor; unless, indeed, it be the kind of poverty one of their greatest saints refers to, saying, 'possess all things as though ye possessed them not;'" Or this passage about poor gentlemen who pretend to greater wealth than they have, just to protect their so-called honor. I can only imagine that he mocks them, "Poor gentleman of good family! always cockering up his honour, dining miserably and in secret, and making a hypocrite of the toothpick with which he sallies out into the street after eating nothing to oblige him to use it! Poor fellow, I say, with his nervous honour, fancying they perceive a league off the patch on his shoe, the sweat-stains on his hat, the shabbiness of his cloak, and the hunger of his stomach!" Again, with the backhanded compliment: there are but two of these women and "seldom" means that one of them did it at least once. "I always had a suspicion that gentleman had a passion for my daughter," said Ricote; "but as I felt sure of my Ricota's virtue it gave me no uneasiness to know that he loved her; for thou must have heard it said, Sancho, that the Morisco women seldom or never engage in amours with the old Christians; and my daughter, who I fancy thought more of being a Christian than of lovemaking, would not trouble herself about the attentions of this heir. (Emphasis added.)" And again, from Sancho: "Enemies attacked us by night and put us in a great quandary, but the people of the island say they came off safe and victorious by the might of my arm; and may God give them as much health as there's truth in what they say. (Emphasis added.)" Even this late in the game, you still can't tell whether Sancho is kidding or not, although we know he is aware of his own deception in the case of Dulcinea. "Oh, senor," said Sancho, "those scoundrels are well used to changing whatever concerns my master from one thing into another. A knight that he overcame some time back, called the Knight of the Mirrors, they turned into the shape of the bachelor Samson Carrasco of our town and a great friend of ours; and my lady Dulcinea del Toboso they have turned into a common country wench; so I suspect this lacquey will have to live and die a lacquey all the days of his life." Sancho lays down a scathing comment. "But I can't imagine what it is that this damsel saw in your worship that could have conquered and captivated her so. What gallant figure was it, what bold bearing, what sprightly grace, what comeliness of feature, which of these things by itself, or what all together, could have made her fall in love with you? For indeed and in truth many a time I stop to look at your worship from the sole of your foot to the topmost hair of your head, and I see more to frighten one than to make one fall in love; moreover I have heard say that beauty is the first and main thing that excites love, and as your worship has none at all, I don't know what the poor creature fell in love with." And here we see how relentless and single-minded Don Quixote is. Despite his having achieved his goal of becoming a famous knight-errant -- and this despite his utter ineptitude -- he still needs more. He still needs to disenchant his precious Dulcinea, whom he has still never officially met. Sancho will come out ahead and he does manipulate Quixote, but he is eminently manipulable because his madness makes him so selfish. As so many, he thinks he acts in the interests of everyone else, but his action are far from altruistic. Dulcinea's enchantment, for example, must be lifted so that the beauty of the object of his love is restored, not for her sake, but for his. "Sancho, if thou wilt do for me what I am going to tell thee my ease of mind would be more assured and my heaviness of heart not so great; and it is this; to go aside a little while I am sleeping in accordance with thy advice, and, making bare thy carcase to the air, to give thyself three or four hundred lashes with Rocinante's reins, on account of the three thousand and odd thou art to give thyself for the disenchantment of Dulcinea; for it is a great pity that the poor lady should be left enchanted through thy carelessness and negligence." Sancho would eventually concede to at least pretend to administer the lashes. Quixote would be convinced that the lashes had been delivered by Sancho upon himself; instead, the lashes served to flay the bark off of several trees over the course of a few nights. Sancho's back remained untouched, a condition that didn't raise any suspicion in Quixote. Not only that, but Sancho also convinced Quixote to pay him -- quite handsomely -- for the lashes that he never administered. And, in the end, Dulcinea's enchantment was, mysteriously, never lifted. The enchantment that Sancho had himself invented out of whole cloth, but which Quixote's madness made nearly inevitable. Near the end of the book, Cervantes writes what for all the world feels like the precursor to the "Cheese Shop" skit by Monty Python. To this the landlord replied that his mouth should be the measure; he had only to ask what he would; for that inn was provided with the birds of the air and the fowls of the earth and the fish of the sea. "There's no need of all that," said Sancho; "if they'll roast us a couple of chickens we'll be satisfied, for my master is delicate and eats little, and I'm not over and above gluttonous." The landlord replied he had no chickens, for the kites had stolen them. "Well then," said Sancho, "let senor landlord tell them to roast a pullet, so that it is a tender one." "Pullet! My father!" said the landlord; "indeed and in truth it's only yesterday I sent over fifty to the city to sell; but saving pullets ask what you will." "In that case," said Sancho, "you will not be without veal or kid." "Just now," said the landlord, "there's none in the house, for it's all finished; but next week there will be enough and to spare." "Much good that does us," said Sancho; "I'll lay a bet that all these short-comings are going to wind up in plenty of bacon and eggs." "By God," said the landlord, "my guest's wits must be precious dull; I tell him I have neither pullets nor hens, and he wants me to have eggs! Talk of other dainties, if you please, and don't ask for hens again." "Body o' me!" said Sancho, "let's settle the matter; say at once what you have got, and let us have no more words about it." "The landlord replied he had no chickens, for the kites had stolen them." sounds a lot like "The cat's eaten it.". Cervantes shows a mastery of description in some places, as here, near the end of the second part. It is hoped that Terry Gilliam will be able to make much of such passages, when he finally manages to put this story to film. "The dawn made way for the sun that with a face broader than a buckler began to rise slowly above the low line of the horizon; Don Quixote and Sancho gazed all round them; they beheld the sea, a sight until then unseen by them; it struck them as exceedingly spacious and broad, much more so than the lakes of Ruidera which they had seen in La Mancha. They saw the galleys along the beach, which, lowering their awnings, displayed themselves decked with streamers and pennons that trembled in the breeze and kissed and swept the water, while on board the bugles, trumpets, and clarions were sounding and filling the air far and near with melodious warlike notes." In the end, the world preferred Quixote as a madman. "O senor," said Don Antonio, "may God forgive you the wrong you have done the whole world in trying to bring the most amusing madman in it back to his senses. Do you not see, senor, that the gain by Don Quixote's sanity can never equal the enjoyment his crazes give?" And here Sancho steers the conversation about to focus on relieving him of any burdens. "Your worship is right," said Sancho; "for, as sensible people hold, 'the fault of the ass must not be laid on the pack-saddle;' and, as in this affair the fault is your worship's, punish yourself and don't let your anger break out against the already battered and bloody armour, or the meekness of Rocinante, or the tenderness of my feet, trying to make them travel more than is reasonable. (Emphasis added.)" One last time, Quixote tries to dissuade Panza from his excessively proverbial manner of speech. "A truce to thy proverbs, Sancho," exclaimed Don Quixote; "any one of those thou hast uttered would suffice to explain thy meaning; many a time have I recommended thee not to be so lavish with proverbs and to exercise some moderation in delivering them; but it seems to me it is only 'preaching in the desert;' 'my mother beats me and I go on with my tricks." "It seems to me," said Sancho, "that your worship is like the common saying, 'Said the frying-pan to the kettle, Get away, blackbreech.' You chide me for uttering proverbs, and you string them in couples yourself." "Observe, Sancho," replied Don Quixote, "I bring in proverbs to the purpose, and when I quote them they fit like a ring to the finger; thou bringest them in by the head and shoulders, in such a way that thou dost drag them in, rather than introduce them;" Despite all evidence, despite all appearances, despite all that has happened, one thing remains fixed in Quixote's mind: he is a knight of unparalleled fighting strength and skill. "Don Quixote turned to Sancho and said, "If I could make use of my weapons, and my promise had not tied my hands, I would count this host that comes against us but cakes and fancy bread;" The expression "as last year's clouds" came up quite a few times and I quite like it. "There, senor! there are the omens broken and destroyed, and they have no more to do with our affairs, to my thinking, fool as I am, than with last year's clouds; [...]" In the end, Don Quixote must convince his friends that the madman of the past year is gone. But though they started off feeling sorry for him, then mocking him, they seemed to have genuinely liked him better as the mad knight-errant. "Sirs, not so fast," said Don Quixote, "'in last year's nests there are no birds this year.' I was mad, now I am in my senses; I was Don Quixote of La Mancha, I am now, as I said, Alonso Quixano the Good; and may my repentance and sincerity restore me to the esteem you used to have for me; and now let Master Notary proceed." [Errata] When I read books that I downloaded from "Gutenberg Project" <https://www.gutenberg.org>, I like to be helpful and provide corrections where I can. They have a very friendly and responsive errata-submission system. Title: Don Quixote, by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra Translated by John Ormsby January 27, 2004 [EBook #966] File: pg996.epub, pg996.mobi Page 148-149: that verily and truly be believed his last hour had come change “be” to “he”; and truly [he] believed his last hour Page 150-151: seeing that the ceiling was somewhat lower what they required for their work add “than” between “lower” and “what"; somewhat lower [than] what they Page 168-169: in this our iron age to revive revive in it the age of gold remove the duplicated “revive” Page 282: but I implore you, señor, not not to be so revengeful in the future remove the duplicated “not” Page 288-289: they shall give me a portion portion of the kingdom remove the duplicated “portion” Page 305: for even if the issue he as thou wouldst have it change “he” to “be”; if the issue [be] as thou Page 331-332: led home by the hand him who had been the utter add “of” between “hand” and “him”; by the hand [of] him Page 338: without missing Camilla from his side, rose cager to learn what Leonela change “cager" to “eager” Page 354: and approaching her who by her dress seemed to be a Moor he her down from saddle in his arms. this sentence is quite confused. I don't know the original, but a better structure in the original style would be: who by her dress seemed to be a Moor, he [took] her down from [the] saddle [into] his arms. Page 408--409: To enable her to vent over it the great passion passion which has brought her remove the duplicated “passion” Pos. 6934: which I won from him in air war, and made myself master of by legitimate and lawful possession. change “air” to “fair”; which I won from him in [f]air war Pos. 6977: but the one who above all was at his wits’ end, was the barber basin, there before his very eyes, had been turned add “whose” between “barber” and “basin”; was at his wits’ end, was the barber [whose] basin, there before his very eyes Pos. 7150: entered the room where he was asleep, taking his his rest after the past frays, and advancing to remove duplicated “his”; taking his rest after the past frays Pos. 7603: so let the country come, and God he with you, and let us change “he” to “be”; so let the country come, and God [b]e with you, Pos. 7761: Now, noble company, ye shall see how important it is that there should be knights in the world professing the of knight-errantry; word missing between “the” and “of”; world professing the […] of knight-errantry; Pos. 7783: cried out to his assailant not to strike him again, for he was poor enchanted knight, add “a” between “was” and “poor”; for he was [a] poor enchanted knight, Pos. 8233: it was whispered that he was over quarrelsome, and of his brother that he was lachrymose. add a hyphen between “over” and “quarrelsome”; it was whispered that he was over[-]quarrelsome Pos. 8471-8472: Let her he 'my lady,' and never mind what happens." change "he" to "be"; Let her [be] 'my lady,' and never mind what happens." Pos. 8586: and the whole herd (if I may such a word to them) add "apply" between "may" and "such"; (if I may [apply] such a word to them) Pos. 8651: to be paid monthly while I am in your service, and that the same he paid me out of your estate; change "he" to "be"; and that the same [be] paid me out of your estate Pos. 8996-8997: that side on which she has the one on her ace; change "ace" to "face"; on which she has the one on her [face] Pos. 9494: in whatever shape he may have been, I have victorious over my enemy." add "been" between "have" and "victorious"; I have [been] victorious over my enemy. Pos. 9538: and was waiting him to confirm it by something further; add "for" between "waiting" and "him"; and was waiting [for] him to confirm it Pos. 9882: and a couple of pairs of-ribbed stockings remove the hyphen between "of" and "ribbed"; and a couple of pairs of ribbed stockings Pos. 10492: to whom do you mean dedicate them? add "to" between "mean" and "dedicate"; to whom do you mean [to] dedicate them? Pos. 11128: but however I may be, allen or raised up change "allen" to "fallen"; but however I may be, [f]allen or raised up Pos. 11517: Let Sancho he of good cheer change "he" to "be"; Let Sancho [b]e of good cheer Pos. 11740: socks-not that wear any—to coax me? add "I" between "that" and "wear"; not that [I] wear any Pos. 12216: and then ran to embrace Don Quixote with-open arms remove the hyphen between "with" and "open"; embrace Don Quixote with open arms Pos. 12296: take care that the dignity of the office they hold he accompanied by change "he" to "be"; office they hold [be] accompanied by Pos. 12445: with a gaban of tawny watered camlet over all change "gaban" to "gabán"; with a gabán of tawny watered camlet Pos. 12471: "Well, well, Senor Don Quixote," said the duchess, is nearly supper-time, and the duke is is probably waiting change ", is" to ""it is" and remove the duplicate "is"; "Well, well, Senor Don Quixote," said the duchess, ["it ]is nearly supper-time, and the duke is probably waiting Pos. 12734: But what I am of opinion the governor should cat now in order to preserve and fortify his health replace "cat" with "eat"; the governor should [e]at now in order to Pos. 12939: Nor was the apprehension an idle one; one; for leaving the duenna remove duplicate "one;"; an idle one; for leaving the duenna Pos. 13325-13326: and I have chosen youth for a son-in-law add "the" between "chosen" and "youth"; and I have chosen [the] youth Pos. 13516-13517: than be subject to the misery of a meddling doctor who me with hunger add a verb between "who" and "me"; doctor who [tortures?] me with hunger Pos. 13564: who bas frenchified thee replace "bas" with "has"; who [h]as frenchified thee Pos. 13771: The first person to enter the-field and the lists remove the hyphen between "the" and "field"; to enter the field Pos. 14001: And now the gave was started replace "gave" with "game"; And now the ga[m]e was started Pos. 14104: heard his own name be started to his feet and replace "be" with "he"; heard his own name [h]e started to his feet Pos. 14457: somewhat free in playing tricks for harmless diversion sake add "'s" after "diversion"; for harmless diversion['s] sake Pos. 14767: thither the viceroy himself returned, cager to ascertain who this Knight replace "cager" with "eager"; [e]ager to ascertain who this Knight Pos. 14969: Alheli and alfaqui are seen to be Arabic, as well by the al at the beginning as by the they end with add "i" between "the" and "they"; as by the [i] they end with Pos. 15081--15082: and seeing painted with devils he put it add "it" between "seeing" and "painted"; and seeing [it] painted with devils Pos. 15325--15327: "I don't know what bad luck it is of mine," argument to my mind; however, I mean to mend said Sancho, "but I can't utter a word without a proverb that is not as good as an argument to my mind; however, I mean to mend if I can;" remove "argument to my mind; however, I mean to mend " between "mine" and "said"; "I don't know what bad luck it is of mine," said Sancho, "but I can't utter a word without a proverb that is not as good as an argument to my mind; however, I mean to mend if I can;" Pos. 15336: "In what direction your worship bound, gentle sir?" add "is" between "direction" and "your"; "In what direction [is] your worship bound Pos. 15469: For-whether it was of the dejection remove the hyphen between "For" and "whether"; For whether it was of Pos. 15510: as soon as the preamble of the had been set add "will" or "testament" between "the" and "had"; preamble of the [will] had been set [Style issues] Since I couldn't find the source text, I couldn't determine whether the occasional omission of the preposition "to" between the verb "happen" and the following word was a stylistic one. I suspected it might be, so I collected those errata (and related ones) into this separate pile. Pos. 8819-8820 where something happened them that may fairly be called something. add "to" between "happened" and "them"; where something happened [to] them Pos. 9758-9759: OF WHAT HAPPENED DON QUIXOTE add "to" between "HAPPENED" and "DON"; WHAT HAPPENED [TO] DON QUIXOTE Pos. 9936-9937: spectacles that make copper seem gold, poverty wealth, and blear eyes pearls." change "blear" to "bleary" or "bleared"; and blear[y] eyes pearls. Pos. 10099: she is no way squeamish, add "in" between "is" and "no"; she is [in] no way squeamish Pos. 10652: I would ask senor ape what will happen me in the peregrination add "to" between "happen" and "me"; what will happen [to] me in the Pos. 10675: ask his ape whether what happened your worship in the cave add "to" between "happened" and "your"; what happened [to] your worship Pos. 10890: but this master of mine is a tologian replace "tologian" with "theologian"; but this master of mine is a [theologian] Pos. 11109: could happen me that could add "to" between "happen" and "me"; could happen [to] me that could Pos. 11125-11126: has happened me in meeting add "to" between "happened" and "me"; has happened [to] me in meeting Pos. 11178: more for authority and custom sake than add "'s" after "custom"; more for authority and custom['s] sake than Pos. 11400: almost everything that happens me transcends the ordinary add "to" between "happens" and "me"; everything that happens [to] me Pos. 11583: to sell it the first opportunity. add "at" between "it" and "the"; to sell it [at] the first opportunity. Pos. 11805: and I am no way behind him. add "in" between "am" and "no"; and I am [in] no way behind him. Pos. 12556: who were not in the secret, and add "on" between "in" and "the"; who were not in [on] the secret Pos. 12945: HAPPENED SANCHO IN MAKING THE Add "TO" between "HAPPENED" and "SANCHO"; HAPPENED [TO] SANCHO Pos. 12991: speaking him fairly and civilly asked add "to" between "speaking" and "him"; speaking [to] him fairly and civilly Pos. 13040: those who were in the secret of the jokes add "on" between "in" and "the"; who were in [on] the secret Pos. 13215-13216: and that I have heard the said Sancho Panza bears himself change "the said" to "it said that"; I have heard it said that Sancho -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] For a deeper analysis of this, see the interesting post "Making Shit Up" by J.E.H. Smith <http://www.jehsmith.com/1/2015/05/making-shit-up.html>. "To which genre of writing [poetry or history] is Don Quixote supposed to belong, now? The answer seems inseparable from the question of the work's authorship, and of its actual subject. The possibility is briefly considered, more than once, that Sancho Panza is the real hero of the novel, a possibility that is of course mocked and dismissed by Don Quixote himself, who claims that it would violate the most basic rules governing the knights-errant literature to place the squire at the center of the tale, rather than to have him subordinate to his knight. But there is of course very little in the novel that does respect these rules, and in this respect the suggestion and the refutation go together as a sort of affirmation. "[...] "Cervantes's invention of the Cide, and his characters' coming to self-consciousness as the inventions of Cide, is a particularly complex variation on the sort of meditation on truth and falsehood, and on poetry and history, that seems to have served as a metafictional accompaniment to many important prose works from the ancient to the early modern periods. "[...] "One genre that appears to preserve, and to be sustained by, the same problematic charge that makes Don Quixote a masterpiece is the genre that is sometimes called 'parafiction', the genre of pseudocumentary, of the fake encyclopedia entry, perfected by Borges and evoked in the literary work of Calvino, Bolaño, of Luigi Serafini with his separatist universe encyclopedized in the Codex Seraphinianum, of all the tongue-in-cheek footnotes and pseudo-critical apparatus of the various postmoderns, who seem, in their way, to in fact be returning to a premodern preoccupation with the moral and metaphysical problem of presenting as true what is in fact false, a concern that was only temporarily hidden by the canonization and nationalization of the novel as recently as the 19th century." ]]> </content> </entry> <entry> <title type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Foucault's Pendulum by Umberto Eco (Dec. 2009)]]> </title> <id>https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=2269</id> <link href="https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=2269"/> <updated>2015-02-22T23:00:57+01:00</updated> <author> <name type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Marco von Ballmoos]]> </name> <uri>https://earthli.com/users/marco</uri> </author> <summary type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA["This article is more a compendium of notes I took while reading this book. It includes citations I found interesting or enlightening of particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation. In others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these" ... ]]> </summary> <content type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Published by marco on 22. Feb 2015 23:00:57 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ "This article is more a compendium of notes I took while reading this book. It includes citations I found interesting or enlightening of particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation. In others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I've failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an interest in this book, then I'm happy for you." [Notes] How do you know you're right? Why do conviction and depth of analysis seem to be inversely proportional? Diotallevi is a Hebrew scholar so he noted that the Hebrew characters in some of the "diabolical" tracts were incorrect or made no sense. But the people who wrote those tracts were absolutely convinced that they did and that they supported their own theories (whatever those may be). Who's right? Is Diotallevi clearly right because he's the scholar in a discipline that's accepted today or is he the deluded one and the misuser of Hebrew is the one who found the deeper truth? When they visit Aglié for the first time, he is rambling along in what must be assumed is an erudite fashion when he mentions that Diotellevi seems to be intrigued by the Hebrew characters on one of the books in his (Aglié's) library. Has Diotallevi found another bastardization of Hebrew? Is Aglié full of shit? Is he, like all the others he derides, simply weaving gossamer towers of reality that don't, in fact, exist? The book makes you realize how many people are misled by conspiracy, but makes you wonder which people those are, actually. Or is everyone misled into thinking that their worldview is coherent? Feedback from reality seems to be the only true arbiter in this case. 1. Pity suckers deluded by false chains of reasoning 2. Realize that you yourself might also be such a sucker 3. Desperately examine everything you believe for provability, veracity, corroboratability 4. Reassure yourself that all is good 5. Resolve to be vigilant 6. Everyone does this, to one degree or another 7. Given that, is it still possible to disprove others? Yes. [Citations] These were transcribed by hand from a paperback. Please excuse transcription errors. "In those halcyon days I believed that the source of enigma was stupidity. Then the other evening in the periscope I decided that the most terrible enigmas are those that mask themselves as madness. But now I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth." "'O basta là,' Belbo said. Only another child of Piedmont could have understood the spirit in which this expression of polite amazement was uttered. No equivalent in any other language or dialect (dis donc, are you kidding?) can convey the apathy, the fatalism with which it expresses the firm conviction that the person to whom it is addressed is, irreparably, the product of a bumbling creator." Kind of disagree here ... "get the f$#@k outta heah" also pretty much nails it. How the Bible came to be: "Now that you mention it, let's see. Matthew, Mark, Luke and John are a bunch of practical jokers who meet somewhere and decide to have a contest. They invent a character, agree on a few basic facts, and then each one is free to take it and run with it. At the end, they'll see who's done the best job. The four stories are picked up by some friends who act as critics: Matthew is fairly realistic, but insists on that Messiah business too much; Mark isn't bad, just a little sloppy; Luke is elegant, no denying that; and John takes the philosophy a little too far. Actually, though, the books have an appeal, they circulate, and when the four realize what's happening, it's too late. Paul has already met Jesus on the road to Damascus, Pliny begins his investigation ordered by the worried emperor, and a legion of apocryphal writers pretends also to know plenty. ...Toi, apocyphe lecteur, mon semblable, mon frère. It all goes to Peter's head; he takes himself seriously. John threatens to tell the truth, Peter and Paul have him chained up on the island of Patmos. Soon the poor man is seeing things: Help, there are locusts all over my bed, make those trumpets stop, where's all this blood coming from? The others say he's drunk, or maybe it's arteriosclerosis. ...Who knows, maybe it really happened that way." On the nature of conspiracy theorists: "'Exactly,' Garamond said, missing the reference. 'It's a gold mine, all right. I realized that these people will gobble up anything that's hermetic, as you put it, anything that says the opposite of what they read in their books at school. [...]'" "From the birth of Project Hermes until that day, I had enjoyed myself heedlessly at the expense of many people. Now, They were preparing to present the bill. I was as much of a bee as the ones we wanted to attract; and, like them, I was being quickly lured to a flower, though I didn't yet know what that flower was." A meta-conspiracy that leaves your mind in tatters as the onion skins fall away to reveal...nothing but paradox. "My answer: There exists a secret society with branches throughout the world, and its plot is to spread the rumor that a universal plot exists. [...] I'm not joking. Come and read the manuscripts that turn up at Manutius. But if you want a more down-to-earth explanation, it's like the story of the man with a bad stammer who complains that the radio station wouldn't hire him as an announcer because he didn't carry a party card. We always have to blame our failures on somebody else, and dictatorships always need an external enemy to bind their followers together. As the man said, for every complex problem there's a simple solution, and it's wrong. (Emphasis added.)" "You were right. Any fact becomes important when it's connected to another. The connection changes the perspective; it leads you to think that every detail of the world, ever voice, every word written or spoken has more than its literal meaning, that it tells us of a Secret. The rule is simple: Suspect, only suspect. You can read subtexts even in a traffic sign that says 'No littering.'" "The first duty of a good spy is to denounce as spies those whom he has infiltrated." On succumbing to adultery: "Vision, be mine; for just one instant crown with pleasure a life spent in the hard service of a jealous divinity, assuage with one lubricious embrace the eternity of flame to which your sight now plunges me. I beseech you, brush my face with your lips, you Antinea, you Mary Magdalene, you whom I have desired in the presence of saints dazed in ecstasy, whom I have coveted during my hypocritical worship of virginity. O Lady, fair art thou as the sun, white as the moon; lo I deny both God and the saints, and the Roman pontiff himself -- no, more, I deny Loyola and the criminal vow that binds me to my Society. A kiss, one kiss, then let me die!" "Imagine a Viennese prankster, to amuse his friends, invented the whole business of the id and Oedipus, and made up dreams he had never dreamed and little Hanses he had never met...And what happened? Millions of people were out there, all ready and waiting to become neurotic in earnest. And thousands more ready to make money treating them." "Your plan isn't poetic; it's grotesque. People don't get the idea of going back to burn Troy just because they read Homer. With Homer, the burning of Troy became something that it never was and never will be, and yet the Iliad endures, full of meaning, because it's all clear, limpid. Your Rosicrucian manifestoes are neither clear nor limpid; they're mud, hot air, and promises. This is why so many people have tried to make them come true, each finding in them what he wants to find. In Homer there's no secret, but your plan is full of secrets, full of contradictions. For that reason you could find thousands of insecure people read to identify with it. Throw the whole thing out. Homer wasn't faking, but you three [Causaubon, Belbo and Diotallevi] have been faking. Beware of faking: people will believe you. People believe those who sell lotions that make lost hair grow back. They sense instinctively that the salesman is putting together truths that don't go together, that he's not being logical, that he's not speaking in good faith. But they've been told that God is mysterious, unfathomable, so to them incoherence is the closest thing to God. The far-fetched is the closest thing to a miracle." "If you feel guilty, you invent a plot, many plots. And to counter them, you have to organize your own plot. But the more you invent enemy plots, to exonerate your lack of understanding, the more you fall in love with them, and you pattern your own on their model. Which is what happened to when the Jesuits and Baconians, Paulicians and neo-Templars each complained of the other's plan. Diotallevi's remark was: 'Of course, you attribute to the others what you're doing yourself, and since what you're doing yourself is hateful, the other become hateful. But since the other, as a rule, would like to do the same hateful thing that you're doing, they collaborate with you, hinting that -- yes -- what you attribute to them is actually what they have always desired. God blinds those he wishes to destroy; you just have to lend Him a helping hand.'" ]]> </content> </entry> <entry> <title type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Rushdie on adaptation and Slumdog Millionaire]]> </title> <id>https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=2110</id> <link href="https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=2110"/> <updated>2015-02-22T22:35:33+01:00</updated> <author> <name type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Marco von Ballmoos]]> </name> <uri>https://earthli.com/users/marco</uri> </author> <summary type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA["A fine pickle" by Salman Rushdie <http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/feb/28/salman-rushdie-novels-film-adaptations> "In an interview conducted at the Telluride film festival last autumn, Boyle, when asked why he had chosen a project so different from his usual material, answered that he had never been to India and knew nothing about it, so he thought this project was a great opportunity. Listening" ... ]]> </summary> <content type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Published by marco on 22. Feb 2015 22:35:33 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ "A fine pickle" by Salman Rushdie <http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/feb/28/salman-rushdie-novels-film-adaptations> "In an interview conducted at the Telluride film festival last autumn, Boyle, when asked why he had chosen a project so different from his usual material, answered that he had never been to India and knew nothing about it, so he thought this project was a great opportunity. Listening to him, I imagined an Indian film director making a movie about New York low-life and saying that he had done so because he knew nothing about New York and had indeed never been there. He would have been torn limb from limb by critical opinion. But for a first world director to say that about the third world is considered praiseworthy, an indication of his artistic daring. The double standards of post-colonial attitudes have not yet wholly faded away." ]]> </content> </entry> <entry> <title type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Books read in 2013]]> </title> <id>https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=2775</id> <link href="https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=2775"/> <updated>2014-01-05T01:00:24+01:00</updated> <author> <name type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Marco von Ballmoos]]> </name> <uri>https://earthli.com/users/marco</uri> </author> <summary type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[ 1. "11/22/63 (2011)" <#11-22-63> 2. "Billionaires and Bandits (2012)" <#Billionaires> 3. "Uniqueness and Reference Immutability for Safe Parallelism (Extended Version) (2012)" <#Uniqueness> 4. "Talk to the Hand (2005)" <#Talk> 5. "The Half-made World (2010)" <#half-made> 6. "Die Stadt am Ende der Zeit (2008) (de)" <#Stadt> 7. "The Alchemist (1992) (en/original in Portuguese in 1988)" <#Alchemist> 8. "The Great Gatsby" <#Gatsby> ... ]]> </summary> <content type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Published by marco on 5. Jan 2014 01:00:24 Updated by marco on 16. Dec 2025 09:05:53 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ 1. "11/22/63 (2011)" <#11-22-63> 2. "Billionaires and Bandits (2012)" <#Billionaires> 3. "Uniqueness and Reference Immutability for Safe Parallelism (Extended Version) (2012)" <#Uniqueness> 4. "Talk to the Hand (2005)" <#Talk> 5. "The Half-made World (2010)" <#half-made> 6. "Die Stadt am Ende der Zeit (2008) (de)" <#Stadt> 7. "The Alchemist (1992) (en/original in Portuguese in 1988)" <#Alchemist> 8. "The Great Gatsby (1926)" <#Gatsby> 9. "The Next 100 Years (2009)" <#next> 10. "Common Sense (1776)" <#Common> 11. "We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962)" <#Castle> 12. "Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls (2013)" <#Owls> 13. "The Rise of Ransom City (2013)" <#Ransom> 14. "Flood (2008)" <#Flood> 15. "Main Street (1920)" <#Main> 16. "Doctor Sleep (2013)" <#Doctor> 11/22/63 (2011) by Stephen King King takes on the legends surrounding the assassination of John F. Kennedy in the context of his first time-travel story. In typical King fashion, time travel is made much more difficult than in other stories. Paradox is dispensed with by assigning malevolent intent to capital-T Time itself. Time has an agenda of its own -- maintaining the one true time-line. A young teacher befriends the owner of a diner, who has been diving into the past to get inexpensive and delicious meat for years. This seems to be a very mundane use of a time machine and King obviously dresses it up much more than that -- he's very good at what he does -- but that's how it starts. The diner owner gets cancer and wants to pass on the gift of the utterly unexplained time-tunnel. Along with it, he wants also to pass on his obsession with traveling back in time to (A) prove that Lee Harvey Oswald was the one who killed JFK and (B) stop him from doing so. The time machine works very...slowly. It only goes back to a single point of time. So you can't affect anything in the past before that point and, in order to affect anything after that point, you have to wait. That is, you live in the past and make your changes as the opportunity arises in real-time. You have the advantage of knowing what's going to happen but the disadvantage that history is working against you to maintain the integrity of what has already been. You can't look at this device too closely or it all falls apart logically, but that actually doesn't matter. King makes time itself into the monster of the story. That, along with the frailty, pettiness and utter banality of man, the complete unpredictability of things and the utter hopelessness of trying to outsmart coincidence. Overall, I liked both the story and King's very restrictive take on time travel. Recommended. Billionaires and Bandits (2012) by Greg Palast This is a very important book by one of America's best journalists. He's worked for the BBC for over a decade because he can't find a steady job in the American media. The book is about U.S. presidential elections, from 2000--2012. It has an introduction by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. who's worked with Palast for years on election fraud. As an added bonus, the book includes a bunch of cartoons by Ted Rall. To catch Palast's latest missives, he's recently become an (ir)regular correspondent for the "This is Hell!" <http://www.thisishell.com/> radio show on WNUR. Palast's style is ordinarily quite bombastic -- in the classic, muckraker style -- but his facts, research and journalism are quite solid. In this book, I felt he was even more reserved and serious than usual, lending gravitas to his treatment of this very serious subject. U.S. elections are soaked in money and fraud and the U.S. is really only a democracy in name, with voter purges and vote-blocking the norm for the "wrong" kind of people. Highly recommended. Uniqueness and Reference Immutability for Safe Parallelism (Extended Version) (2012) by Colin S. Gordon, Matthew J. Parkinson, Jared Parsons, Aleks Bromfield, Joe Duffy See "A provably safe parallel language extension for C#" <https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=2784> for a detailed write-up. Talk to the Hand (2005) by Lynne Truss Sub-titled as "The Utter Bloody Rudeness of Everyday Life (or six good reasons to stay home and bolt the door)", this book is in almost no way related to her first book Eats, shoots and leaves. The book is well-written, moderately funny and addresses most of the typical aspects of modern rudeness (e.g. cell phones, insularity, privacy in public, etc.) with a certain degree of nuance if not always a tremendous amount of originality. A fun, short read that will have some swinging their triumphant fists in the air as Ms. Truss lays waste to all the rudeness of modern life. The Half-made World (2010) by Felix Gilman The authors of the site "Crooked Timber" <http://crookedtimber.org/> recommended this book unequivocally. It's a fantasy/western novel set in a half-made world, which means that the further west one goes, the less-made the world is. The laws of physics apply less, events are less predictable and the war between the Guns and the Line blurs. The Guns are soldiers in possession of haunted/possessed unerring guns whose owners live in inter-dimensional lodges and provide their hosts with healing powers. They represent chaos, they hardly ever hold territory but still they fight for control over the lands of the line. The agents of the Line are sullen little homunculi who are both pale and dark at the same time. They overwhelm with numbers and technology, the gigantic train engines that are their evil masters providing them with power and smoke- and noise-belching engines of destruction and conquering. The eastern lands are more civilized and resemble olden Europe. It is from this part of the world that Lysvet starts her journey and eventually meets up with Gun John Creedmore, a wonderful character. It's definitely unique for a fantasy novel, possessing almost none of the standard fantasy elements (swords, wizards, etc.) I liked it very much, enough to read the follow-up novel (see below). Die Stadt am Ende der Zeit (2008) (de) by Greg Bear Though there are hard science-fiction elements as in so many of Greg Bear's books, the scope and breadth of this one is over such an extensive sweep of history -- hundreds of billions of years -- that the technology becomes indistinguishable from magic. It has just as many fantasy and horror elements as SF ones. Though there is some theorizing -- he binds in quantum theory, the idea of the observer, number theory and information theory -- the story is much more a horror/fantasy novel in the vein of Clive Barker, or perhaps Stephen King. Instead of a universe that expands to heat death, he posits one where the intelligent races manage to extend the universe's life beyond its initially prophesied death, a period of near-stasis called the trillenium (because it lasts hundreds of billions of years). As you can expect with such extents of time, humans become all-but-immortal, some of them transforming themselves into virtual matter or, for all practical purposes, pure thought. This novel heads in the same direction as the novels of Greg Egan, like Schild's Ladder or Diaspora. With so much history -- and so much time -- the memory of it all can't be stored, it can't be remembered. Much is forgotten, much is learned, and then the age-old forces of the universe come into play. There are names for them, abstractions taken from ancient mythical pantheons -- mainly Greek and Indian. Brahma, responsible for creation, is sleeping during the trillenium; Mnemosyne, responsible for weaving the past to the present, is despondent and neglects her duties. Her alter-ego, the Chalk Princess, consumes souls for her master, the Typhon, master of the Chaos. At the end of billions of years, the Chaos takes over, burning away the universe that mankind has known, building gigantic slag heaps of civilizations, with chunks of time and space thrown together into mind-bending patterns. The men of the future -- Polybiblios, the Librarian, in particular -- hatch a plan to save the universe, or at least to control how the universe will be born and how the intelligence and knowledge of the previous one can make its way to the next. Glaucous and Whitlow are hunters of the possessors of the stones, summing machines that can control world lines and steer the universe onto the right path. There are four stones and three shepherds of them -- Daniel, Ginny and Jack -- who use their special powers to jump between worldlines and seek out the one with the best chance of succeeding. In the end, there are two lines left. Ginny and Jack are somehow bound to their counterparts, Tiadba and Jebrassy, respectively, who are fabricated beings of the "old kind" who live in the Kalpa -- the city at the end of time. They were created to journey into the Chaos to try to reach a long-sundered city, Nataraja, where they will find Sangmer and Ishanaxade. As the universe comes to a close, the Chaos eats up pieces of the past, making it as it had never happened. The remaining world-lines and histories collapse together, filling the space. At the end, the city at the end of time collides with 21st-century Seattle, bringing Ginny, Jack, Daniel and Glaucous to the Chaos that surrounds the Kalba -- and closer to Jebrassy (who is accompanied by an Epitome/copy of (parts of) the Librarian as well as his teacher Ghentun) and Tiadba (who is the leader of a group of other marchers, seekers of the lost city). The earthlings make their way, under the protection of their summing stones, to the center of the Chaos -- insofar as distance and time have any meaning at all. As the end nears, as the decision-point comes closer, the Typhon, in his desperation, shrinks the Chaos further, funneling all the participants to Nataraja. As the universe is crushed/falls apart, memory and the past disappear -- remembering becomes a way of fighting the Chaos (as books, which are stored memories, patterns, non-irrational data, do). And then there is Bidewell, and Ellen and her book-club members. And the books and the libraries and the information and number theory. How to distinguish between describable and indescribable? Between possible and impossible? How to remember so much history, so many interactions of particles? Does everything come only from a single Big Bang? Or is matter and energy created constantly, feeding a hungry universe aching to live beyond a few billions of years? And then there are the cats, navigating the Chaos. All of these elements seem to be myths that Bear has invented or integrated in order to put a familiar face on what are the extraordinary and ineffable forces that drive the universe, all the more so at its beginning or end. The birth and rebirth of universes, the interplay of forces at play under ephemeral rules -- such as those of the picoseconds after the Big Bang -- are represented as people and Gods and love and other more prosaic incarnations more easily understood and described than particles and energies. This ebb and flow over trillenia is represented as Sangmer being cast out from Mnemosyne/Ishanaxade and, while she weaves the history and memory of the universe, he makes his pilgrim's journey, alone, to return to her at the end, where they can be together for a few, comparably short, moments, until the whole cycle begins again. The cats killing the king of Chaos Typhon is also clearly a metaphor of some kind, for some otherwise-incomprehensible process of early creation or dissolution. In many ways, this story reminded me of other creation stories, like Tolkien's story of the four Ages, where Typhon is Melkor, the silent ones are the orcs, twisted caricatures of the true creations of Brahma/Ilúvatar. As you can probably tell, it's a difficult book to describe. The scope is sweeping, the language is evocative (e.g. the Watchers from the Valley of the Dead Gods witness the end of creation) and the execution is mostly pretty captivating, though it got a bit repetitive at times. This is natural in a story that explores so much new territory and tries to describe time and space when it's all twisted up by unimaginable powers, by humans who have evolved to nearly unimaginable places. Marvel Universe vs. The Avengers/Wolverine/The Punisher (2012) These are basically zombie storylines, in which everyone and everything -- except for a select few -- turns into a zombie and thirsts for blood. The Hulk, in particular, is a formidable zombie, if you can imagine such a thing. Much fun is had by all and the storytelling is a bit uneven. Spoiler alert: the Punisher wins in the end, because he's awesome. Old Man Logan (2008--2009) This is a set of comic books set 50 years in the future, at a time when all super-villains had banded together to eliminate super-heroes. Obviously, Wolverine stars as "Old Man Logan" and he reluctantly gets dragged back into business of being a super-hero after the Hulk clan wipes out his family. The story wasn't all too inspiring, but it had its moments. Civil War (2006--2007) In which Tony Stark proves once again that there is nothing so self-righteous and self-assured as a dry drunk. The most annoying thing is the immensely prominent role played in this series by Tony Stark/Iron Man and the degree to which technology solves absolutely everything. Comics these days rely on technology as a deus ex machina whenever they need it. And I don't know if I just never noticed, but holy crap are comic books chatty these days. They explain everything in some of the books. Some are still ok, showing rather than telling, but some are utterly pedantic in the amount of reading they (try to) make you do. The business angle, with Richards and Stark benefiting massively from the war is nicely done, though. Also cool is how Captain America is happy to use The Punisher until Castle kills some super-villains that Cap wanted to use, after which Cap acts all surprised and kicks him to the curb. The end was kind of disappointing, with a whimper rather than a bang, with Reed Richards appearing as orders of magnitude smarter than anyone else in the world. It got me thinking a bit that it would be impossible for someone of lesser intelligence or experience to be able to properly determine whether he's actually right or whether he's just deluded and hoodwinked. And that, maybe, that's the situation in which the strongly religious find themselves in. They ask for proof, it is provided, but it doesn't fit their logic -- it isn't rational according to them -- so they reject it. Are they right or wrong to do so? Are we in the same position when a much more intelligent being tells us that psychohistory has foretold that the horrific, fascist and unjust way he is proposing is the best? When we answer that it is impossible to predict such a thing with any degree of accuracy, he shakes his head because he knows that it is possible. But is he deluded? Fooled as so many have been before him? Or are we ignorant, not believing the voice of science and reason because it is beyond our comprehension? To what degree are we obligated to follow reason that we don't understand? Is there any way out of the trap of the Philosopher Kings? Comics, at least those from Marvel, are too technocratic for my tastes, nor do they put much effort into consistency or moderation. There are all too many characters with omnipotence or omniscience although they still fight like boxers. The books extol the glories of the super-rich, super-intelligent, super-strong, super-handsome -- yuck. It's fun for a bit, but too much, too cloying, too easy. Technology surrounds the world in a warm cocoon, obviating any need to understand society or humanity. It's the American dream, I guess. Oh, yeah, and America's pretty much in charge of everything in these books, so that was pretty imaginative. The Alchemist (1992) (en/original in Portuguese in 1988) by Paulo Coelho Touted as an international bestseller, I'd never heard of it or him, but it's pretty short and I didn't read far enough into the blurb on the back to learn that it is supposedly "a transforming novel about the essential wisdom of listening to our hearts, leaning to read the omens strewn along life's path and above all following our dreams." My mistake. That's a bit optimistic, I would say. Granted, the book is about all of those things -- literally and constantly, as I'll show with some citations below -- but you don't really learn them, as such. Here are some samples from a conversation between the eponymist and the wandering boy, Santiago, from pages 135--136 Boy: My heart is a traitor, it doesn't want me to go on. Alchemist: That makes sense. Naturally, it's afraid that, in pursuing your dream, you might lose everything you've won. Boy: Well, then, why should I listen to my heart? Alchemist: Because you will never again be able to keep it quiet. Even if you pretend not to have heard what it tells you, it will always be there inside you, repeating to you what you're thinking about life and about the world. Boy: You mean I should listen, even if it's treasonous? Alchemist: [...] You will never be able to escape from your heart. So it's better to listen to what it has to say. The boy continued to listen to his heart as they crossed the desert. [...] Boy: Even though I complain sometimes, it's because I'm the heart of a person, and people's hearts are that way. That's from one page. Sweet Christ, it reads like the first 50 pages of Dianetics that I managed to slog through before I decided that life was just too damned short. We're not finished. There's more. From pages 138--139 (yeah, that's right, just two pages later): Boy: Why don't people's hearts tell them to continue to follow their dreams? Alchemist: Because that's what makes a heart suffer most, and hearts don't like to suffer. From then on, the boy understood his heart. He asked it, please, never to stop speaking to him. [...] That night, he told all of this to the alchemist. And the alchemist understood that the boy's heart had returned to the Soul of the World. [...] Boy: Is that the one thing I still needed to know? Alchemist: No. What you still need to know is this: before a dream is realized, the Soul of the World tests everything that was learned along the way [...] Heavy-handed and saccharine doesn't even begin to cover it. I have no idea where the metaphor ends and the literalism begins. I'm not even going to bother checking how many months this thing spent on Oprah's best-seller list. Avoid this book. The Great Gatsby (1926) by F. Scott Fitzgerald I read this story for the second time and it really is very well-written -- in a way that you rarely find these days anymore. Since most people have probably seen the movie by now (I didn't, so I have no idea whether it followed the book or not). I collected a few quotes that appealed to me. I like this one because the book was written almost 100 years ago and the American passion for superficial freedom while rejoicing in shackles was already well-established by then. "There was nothing to look at from under the tree except Gatsby's enormous house, so I stared at it, like Kant at his church steeple, for half an hour. A brewer had built it early in the 'period' craze, a decade before, and there was a story that he'd agreed to pay five years' taxes on all the neighbouring cottages if the owners would have their roofs thatched with straw. Perhaps their refusal took the heat out of his plan to Found a Family -- he went into immediate decline. His children sold his house with the black wreath still on the door. Americans, while willing, even eager, to be serfs, have always been obstinate about being peasantry. (Emphasis added.)" This next one expresses the idea of the subjectivity of reality very nicely and the effort and energy we put in to maintaining our illusions. "Or perhaps I had merely grown used to it, grown to accept West Egg as a world complete in itself, with its own standards and its own great figures, second to nothing because it had no consciousness of being so, and now I was looking at it again, through Daisy's eyes. It is invariably saddening to look through new eyes at things upon which you have expended your own powers of adjustment." This is a very nice exchange between two people who are only partially of Daisy's world. This book is about class, as so many books are, and it's about class that would come crashing down just four years later. It is, 90 years later about a class that has always existed in America and that has grown more and more powerful, so powerful that even a crash couldn't topple them this time. Like a hurricane, they just absorbed the power of the 2008 crash and became more powerful. "[Daisy]'s got an indiscreet voice,' I remarked. 'It's full of --' I hesitated. "'Her voice is full of money,' [Gatsby] said suddenly. "That was it. I'd never understood before. It was full of money -- that was the inexhaustible charm that rose and fell in it, the jingle of it, the cymbals' song of it..." This is a nicely painted scene of a person gaining reassurance from the presence of another person. Just beautifully written, it stands alone, even separated from the original text. I like the last line even better than the very famous final sentence of the book. "Thirty -- the promise of a decade of loneliness, a thinning list of single men to know, a thinning brief-case of enthusiasm, thinning hair. But there was Jordan beside me, who, unlike Daisy, was too wise ever to carry well-forgotten dreams from age to age. As we passed over the dark bridge her wan face fell lazily against my coat's shoulder and the formidable stroke of thirty died away with the reassuring pressure of her hand. "So we drove on toward death through the cooling twilight. (Emphasis added.)" Another beautiful comment on the masters of the world with which we are still saddled. The story evokes the same careless disgust with the old, moneyed classes, the nobility, as Anna Karenina. Gatsby is Vronsky and Daisy Anna. "I couldn't forgive [Tom] or like him, but I saw that what he had done was, to him, entirely justified. It was all very careless and confused. They were careless people, Tom and Daisy -- they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made... "I shook hands with him; it seemed silly not to, for I felt suddenly as though I were talking to a child." The book is at once a paean to American exceptionalism and an indictment of the rapacity and unnatural hard-heartedness of the American way of life. "And as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors' eyes -- a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby's house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder." Just lovely. An eminently readable American classic. The Next 100 Years (2009) by George Friedman See "The Next 100 Years (2009) by George Friedman" <https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=2840> for a detailed write-up. Common Sense (1776) by Thomas Paine This is one of the foundational documents of the American revolution and at least the first several of its 55 pages are extremely well-written and express a savage wit. Imagine my delight when this book started off with the following paragraph, a sentiment that has stood the test of time, for it succinctly describes the human condition. "Perhaps the sentiments contained in the following pages, are not YET sufficiently fashionable to procure them general favour; a long habit of not thinking a thing WRONG, gives it a superficial appearance of being RIGHT, and raises at first a formidable outcry in defense of custom. But the tumult soon subsides. Time makes more converts than reason." A little while later there he eloquently expresses why we must have a government, even though we'd rather do without one. "Society in every state is a blessing, but government even in its best state is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one; for when we suffer, or are exposed to the same miseries BY A GOVERNMENT, which we might expect in a country WITHOUT GOVERNMENT, our calamity is heightened by reflecting that we furnish the means by which we suffer. [...] For were the impulses of conscience clear, uniform, and irresistibly obeyed, man would need no other lawgiver; but that not being the case, he finds it necessary to surrender up a part of his property to furnish means for the protection of the rest; and this he is induced to do by the same prudence which in every other case advises him out of two evils to choose the least." And in the following quote lies the rub, for freedom and security have easy and thus facile definitions but are, in truth, almost infinitely malleable. "Here then is the origin and rise of government; namely, a mode rendered necessary by the inability of moral virtue to govern the world; here too is the design and end of government, viz. freedom and security." If Thomas Paine were alive today, he would probably hate the strict constructionists (e.g. Scalia) who love him so very much. Here is is his take on the English constitution; he would likely feel the same way about the now-ancient American one. "[...] I offer a few remarks on the so much boasted constitution of England. That it was noble for the dark and slavish times in which it was erected, is granted. When the world was overrun with tyranny the least remove therefrom was a glorious rescue. But that it is imperfect, subject to convulsions, and incapable of producing what it seems to promise, is easily demonstrated." Here are more specifics about the English constitution, comments that apply equally well to the American government today. "Absolute governments (tho' the disgrace of human nature) have this advantage with them, that they are simple; if the people suffer, they know the head from which their suffering springs, know likewise the remedy, and are not bewildered by a variety of causes and cures. But the constitution of England is so exceedingly complex, that the nation may suffer for years together without being able to discover in which part the fault lies; some will say in one and some in another, and every political physician will advise a different medicine." This two-hundred-year old summary of monarchy cannot be improved on. It applies equally well to non-monarchies, to elected representatives of a republic, for example. "There is something exceedingly ridiculous in the composition of monarchy; it first excludes a man from the means of information, yet empowers him to act in cases where the highest judgment is required. The state of a king shuts him from the world, yet the business of a king requires him to know it thoroughly; [...]" Things get a bit thinner after this, with only a few more items of interest. Unlike his modern-day proponents, he didn't care about the debt. "The debt we may contract doth not deserve our regard, if the work be but accomplished. No nation ought to be without a debt. A national debt is a national bond; and when it bears no interest, is in no case a grievance." Here's the self-sufficiency argument, when it was still true. However, this kind of resource-independence equals no trade and no sympathy, which echoes the policies of today. "No country on the globe is so happily situated, or so internally capable of raising a fleet as America. Tar, timber, iron, and cordage are her natural produce. We need go abroad for nothing." And here, we have an argument for hard cash and building a navy. I wonder if modern-day throwbacks like George Friedman (author of The Next Hundred Years) are fans of Thomas Paine? "Let us build; if we want them not, we can sell; and by that means replace our paper currency with ready gold and silver. "[...] "The Terrible privateer, Captain Death, stood the hottest engagement of any ship last war, yet had not twenty sailors on board, though her complement of men was upwards of two hundred. A few able and social sailors will soon instruct a sufficient number of active landmen in the common work of a ship." We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962) by Shirley Jackson A strange little story about two girls ostracized by their village for being members of a strange family. Once their parents die, they get even stranger but life continues. Jackson is a superlative author -- she's most famous for having written The Lottery -- and has a very eerie sensibility I find mesmerizing. Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls (2013) by David Sedaris Another collection of witty tales by the closest thing America has to a wit like Mark Twain. Sedaris doesn't have deal with matters quite as weighty as those dealt with by Twain, but his stories are still lots of fun. I read a bunch of this book out loud to Kath. The Rise of Ransom City (2013) by Felix Gilman This sequel to the The Half-made World continues the story of the West through the autobiography of inventor Harry Ransom. John Creedmore and Liv make an appearance, but don't star in this one. It's still quite entertaining reading a story in the lush and interesting world of the Guns and the Line. The article "Stories Behind Stories" by Henry <http://crookedtimber.org/2013/05/10/stories-behind-stories/> had some interesting ideas on the book. "It’s a wonderful deflationary moment – and is the moment at which the reader realizes that there’s another story, around which the imaginary world could be pivoted like an axis, to reveal an entirely different understanding of what has been going on over the course of the two books." And isn't that how all of life is? With each ego picturing itself as the center of a story, when far greater things are afoot? From the smaller context, it appears much differently, and which is more important or more correct is a matter of perspective, in all but the most provable of matters. "I contend that this shouldn’t be read as a statement that the Folk are alien in some deep sense, but rather, a statement of epistemological and cultural modesty. That all that a white British emigre can plausibly claim to represent or truly understand, are those bits of the culture closely related to the one that he himself grew up in. To talk on behalf of the other is to take liberties that he isn’t entitled to take – so all he can do is to acknowledge that they are genuinely different, that they have their own story, and that it is not only a valid one, but plausibly a better and more important one than the stories that he can tell." Flood (2008) by Stephen Baxter This is a hard science-fiction novel about the effects of massive flooding of the Earth's surface, up to hundreds, if not thousands of meters. Baxter is in his element in a well-researched and utterly plausible novel about flooding, inundation, refugees and the precipitous shrinking of landmass and condensation of mankind to the high ground. Do not read this novel for any subtle philosophical treatise on the necessity of going on or any such deeper insight, as the book is entirely bereft of such topics. Also, do not expect any subtlety in characterizations or dialogue, as that is also not Baxter's strong suit. His characters are not subtle and it was impossible for me to find a hero anywhere in the book, littered as it was with military types and libertarians. As usual, Baxter also focuses inordinately on the survival of his cadre of characters, dragging them ever onward as his narrators with one deus ex machina after another. As mentioned earlier, the utterly shallow philosophies of all involved prevent any of the real soul-searching that would likely follow such a cataclysmic event. Instead, characters are focused laser-like on saving utterly useless and sponging family members and wasting resources, while pretending that nothing has changed. In fact, it's like so many other books in the escapist genre, in that it essentially follows the lives of ersatz royalty, around whom the world inexplicably revolves. Where things fall apart is when these people aren't even especially admirable or interesting in any way and we are expected to root for them, well, because the author clearly would like us to. The end-goal of the main plotline in the book is help one young lady survive, but she's utterly unremarkable in every way, almost devoid of personality. Why should we care? Because the scheming now-old ladies in the book -- royalty themselves -- have chosen this as their goal, morally abhorrent as it is to prefer the survival of one over the well-being of many? Once you realize that these are his devices, you can settle back and enjoy the splendor of his world in ruin, which he really does depict well. He's quite gifted as far as that goes. If you're a fan of disaster novels and hard sci-fi, then this one is still highly recommended, despite the at times aggravating plot & characters. Main Street (1920) by Sinclair Lewis A well-told tale of late 19th-/early 20th-century, small-town, American life as seen through the eyes of the narrator, a well-educated young woman with her own job, her own life and most decidedly her own views. While the people of the town of Gopher Prairie unquestioningly accept and further promulgate the tenets that underpinned American society at that time, Carol rebels and tries to change the town she deems ugly. Though her distaste for the town begins with its appearance, it is quickly transferred metaphorically to many of its inhabitants. I found myself wondering to what degree Carol's stranger-in-a-strange-land story would resonate with people of other generations. This is an older book, but the writing and themes seemed, at times, quite modern, almost timeless. Doctor Sleep (2013) by Stephen King King returns to the world of The Shining with this novel about Daniel Torrance, the gifted young boy who emerged from the ashes of the Overlook Hotel with a shattered mother, an incinerated father and a closet full of ghosts and psychic trauma. We return to his life thread to find him as an itinerant alcoholic who has just hit bottom. King's powers of description and mastery of the language are on full display here. Though the story is not 100% unique -- he's written over 50 books about the evil that lurks at the thin places between this world and the chaos that lies just beyond -- but the characters are at once surprisingly fresh and comfortingly familiar. As a long-time King reader, I got the impression that I was watching a concert by a favorite rock band or perhaps a conductor of an orchestra who's still at the top of his game and is -- seemingly without effort -- capable of delivering exactly the experience I was seeking. I felt like I was reading the best Stephen King book I'd read in years; it was that deeply satisfying. I have no idea whether this is objectively true or whether my opinion will change over time, but that is the experience I had both while and shortly after reading Doctor Sleep. If I have any complaints, it's that perhaps a bit too much of King's basic niceness shines through (if you'll pardon the expression) in his heroes. Dan seems to accept all sorts of abuse with a zen-like calm. Whereas this imparts a certain wisdom to his character, it also made him seem, at times, a bit too much of a goody-goody pushover. There were times when he could have put others in their place without losing much in return. The story follows Dan as he pieces together a life in New Hampshire, where he gets to know a young girl who shares his gift. In a separate story line, we also learn of a traveling band of ancient ... creatures who also have an interest in people like Dan and his new friend. These story lines careen toward one another inexorably until they meet in a spectacular finale, which also satisfyingly ties up a few other loose ends. Highly recommended. ]]> </content> </entry> <entry> <title type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[The Next 100 Years (2009) by George Friedman]]> </title> <id>https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=2840</id> <link href="https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=2840"/> <updated>2013-08-11T21:31:56+02:00</updated> <author> <name type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Marco von Ballmoos]]> </name> <uri>https://earthli.com/users/marco</uri> </author> <summary type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA["I was recently given the book The Next 100 Years (2009) by George Friedman by a friend. After the first few dozen pages, I'd made so many quizzical notes that I had to look up the author, because I'd never heard of him. It turns out that he's "the founder, chief intelligence officer, financial"" ... ]]> </summary> <content type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Published by marco on 11. Aug 2013 21:31:56 Updated by marco on 4. Feb 2016 17:53:18 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ "I was recently given the book The Next 100 Years (2009) by George Friedman by a friend. After the first few dozen pages, I'd made so many quizzical notes that I had to look up the author, because I'd never heard of him. It turns out that he's "the founder, chief intelligence officer, financial overseer, and CEO of the private intelligence corporation STRATFOR, a global intelligence company founded in 1996", according to "Wikipedia" <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Friedman>. That helped set the context for the book a bit better." There seems to be something about the having last name "Friedman" that leads someone to think that he is an authority on absolutely everything under the sun. [1] Not only that, but he sees no need to delve into the works of other authorities in the field before holding forth and tying everything in to a holistic "this is the way the world works" predictive scheme that kowtows to the way he wants the world to work. This involves, of course, ignoring a lot of history and a lot of science, research and philosophy to the say nothing of basic logic and rational reasoning. The book is not very long for such a portentous title, weighing in at 273 lightweight pages. Large parts of the early chapters are filled with somewhat superficial regurgitations of U.S. textbook history that reads as if it was written by high-school junior trying desperately to copy something from Wikipedia without getting caught for plagiarism. I wondered while reading it whether Friedman had managed to write any other books because it seemed as if he'd thrown in a reference to everything he'd ever heard of or learned into this book. And it still didn't crack 300 pages. When he does extemporize, Friedman isn't shy about holding forth on the topic of a woman's "traditional" role in society as well as what all of the world's major religions would like that role to be. These bold assertions serve as the base for a prediction that world population will actually drop. This treatment leads then seamlessly into interpretations on what Osama bin Laden really meant in his writings and then lurches into a lesson on how computers work, starting with "[t]he computer is based on binary logic" and quickly working his way into describing ASCII encodings. This, all without a single footnote or reference to any scholarly works or sources for any of his statistics. Is it possible that the human population will stabilize and perhaps even go down in the next 100 years? Sure it is, but not before it goes up to about 8 billion people and, more importantly, not before many of these people will want the same lifestyle that George Friedman himself, as the founder and CEO of Stratfor, has, complete with the extra energy and resource demands. All of this was not discussed at all, leaving his discussion purely in the realm of superficial and largely non-interesting speculation. He lets his readers assume that this population reduction will be good for humanity when, in all likelihood, it will either not happen or will happen as a result of catastrophic die-back. As with many predictive books, you can read it one way or you can read it another. Turkey will rise to the level of a world power...or it won't. Russia will fall...unless it gains power first or loses it more slowly. Or whatever. The point is: the author will have been right. The only very consistently correct -- in this author's humble opinion -- prediction is that the U.S. will continue to be savage -- barbaric, in his words -- brutally unfair, pressing for every advantage with no thought for any principle other than "he who dies with the most toys wins". Friedman constantly treats the U.S. as an "it" looking out for itself without a thought for what its citizens may be able to bring about. He does this for all countries, and he has a sole emphasis on history as created by state actors: terrorism isn't mentioned as an influence at all (at least not in the first 170 pages). Not only that, but climate change also has no influence on world policy for the first 30 or 40 years, either. Energy seems to be in great supply as well, with no explanation given (other than space-based microwave cannons, which themselves would have required only a minor up-front energy and materials investment, as hand-waved away by Friedman). Instead of that, he places an inordinate amount of emphasis on not just military power, but specifically maritime military power. Oh, and "develop[ing] significant capabilities in space" is something that many nations will do (Poland, Turkey, Japan, etc.) even though it's something that the up-and-coming power United States (according to Friedman) is incapable of doing right now (U.S. astronauts currently fly out of Kazakhstan). And, I feel that this must repeated: though he claims that his "book is not meant to be a celebration of the United States", it is. It just is. Actions by the U.S. turns out to be advantages where the same actions by opponents are deadly missteps. America seems to win, no matter what. The world-spanning war he envisions is also just ludicrous. His hypothetical military actions are ubiquitous, strangely antiquated but also surgically clean, with large swaths of territory changing hands with almost no casualties. Several times, he pauses to remind us that he's "laying out logically" a very plausible future, but he's really just talking out of his ass. He copy/pasted a bunch of 20th-century history together, took his preconceived notions of how the world works and should continue to work and had at it, no footnotes, no references, no data. Nothing. It is people, in general, that are missing from Friedman's book. There is no discussion of living conditions, advancements in social or human-centered technology, nothing about poverty, health care ... nothing. His thoughts about the future are centered on military states. In the late 2060s, when "America presides over a golden age of stability", one can only presume that, not only are the people of the world kept on a short leash by the newly rebuilt Battlestars (the aforementioned microwave cannons -- I am not kidding), but even the people of the U.S. are probably not doing so great (as e.g. now with stock market soaring but many people not working, underwater on homes, in prison or otherwise dying of poverty). Not recommended. [Notes] I jotted down a few notes while I was skimming/reading the book. * Page 24: He seems utterly oblivious to irony when he says that China will fall because of a class divide engendered by people on the coast doing better than those in the middle of the country (hint: he might as well be describing the U.S. -- why does it work for them?) * Page 26: common sense is for pussies. Cool, no wonder there are no footnotes. * Page 29: what about perestroika? What about Tuchman's many examples in her excellent March to Folly? * Page 31: How was the twentieth century a wholly European century, with only the last decade belonging to the U.S.? The U.S. owned a majority of the world in 1945 already. The U.S. is ascending only now? Really? * Page 33: And there is it: global warming is an irrational fear. And, prediction of America's downfall was wrong once (in the 70s), ergo future similar predictions are also wrong. Q.E.D. * Page 35: the biggest industry requires a lot of imported oil, but if that's gone, what happens to that industry? And how long will that soil remain arable? Aren't there a lot of problems already? How the hell is Alaska considered uninhabitable, but he says nothing about somewhere like Montana? * Page 64: "overdramatize?" I imagine he refers to the wailing about lost American lives. Considering the amount of damage done to the rest of world per lost American soldier, it is absolutely correct to characterize our histrionics as overly dramatic. However, millions have been killed in these actions that he just dismisses, to say nothing of the lost opportunity costs of trillions of dollars wasted on "confusing" the rest of the world and preventing it from getting organized. What a bizarre theory: it explains why it always looks like the U.S. is fucking up royally ... it's all part of the plan. * Page 67: Christ, that's deft (or daft?), turning the U.S. inability to win a war in any real sense into a string of "actual" victories by claiming that the intent was only ever to destabilize. And the myth that the entire Muslim world wants to establish a Caliphate is just taken as established, credible fact. * Page 96: At the same time -- on the same page -- he exhorts us to "expect the unexpected" but also that "this is not the most likely" outcome. What the hell? * Page 97: Iran is at fault for the U.S. obsession with it, of course. Iran will be perceived as being "prematurely aggressive" and will have rightfully earned the baleful wrath of the U.S. * Page 101: He constantly discusses population and labor force as seemingly purely fungible resources; he never mentions education, training or skill sets * Page 130: Here he's unduly harsh on the paranoia of the Russians: they quite reasonably think in terms of having been constantly under threat or attack over the last 100 years. Look at the current European attitude toward them, which crosses the line into racism, even at the State level. * Page 132: His analysis is based heavily on what feels like decades-old military strategy and tactics (e.g. focus on naval forces), ignoring -- or not mentioning nearly as much -- the much more prevalent economic strangulation and colonization. Already today, we have drones, cyber warfare, nuclear weapons (which he dismisses as not usable; why?) as well as all sorts of asymmetrical terrorist and guerrilla tactics. All of this is not discussed, favoring missile porn about hyper-rockets that travel at 10 times the speed of sound * Page 138: His ideas about the mobility of labor have no basis in reality. He makes it sound like blue-collar labor forces just jump around, optimizing their incomes by location. There is no reason to believe that this will become easier (even were immigration restrictions reduced as per the mysterious "population bust" he posits). * Page 145: Once again, he waves his hands and makes history happen with utterly unexplained forces * Page 146: He casually mentions 401ks as a saving vehicle when, for many people, those had been literally decimated just a year before his book's publication. He also ignores the massive financialization of the U.S. economy, treating it instead as a GDP comprised primarily of industry and exports. * Page 147: lots of bla, bla, but essentially boils down to very generously explaining how a large part of the U.S. economy (the financial part, at least) is based almost purely on fraud. He used far more words to get there, but I'm sure he also has many, many friends that he is trying to avoid offending. * Page 149: Here he talks about Social Security as if he's the first one to think about the baby boomers and as if the SSA has no actuarial division that perhaps anticipated it (i.e. he thinks we have to raise the retirement age, of course). Despite all of these problems, though, the U.S. will still easily come out on top in the world standings in the next century. * Page 152: Here he posits a population slump in OECD countries, engendering a situation in which "immigrants will certainly comparison-shop". This would be a sea change indeed, but there is no factual argument made for this coming about, other than reverse population pressure. And, even given that, the vacuum of U.S. desire for labor doesn't making moving to another country any easier, really. * page 162--166: Purely old-school militarism with no mention made of the potential for nuclear war or other less conventional attacks. Just armies moving back and forth as they always have done. * Page 167: "[...] intensification of the crisis of confidence that has undermined France and Germany since World War I." Really? Wasn't Germany just brimming with confidence somewhere in the middle there? Does anyone else recall something like that? * Page 172: Is this some neocon fantasy? Instead of being on the rise and riding a resource boom, Russia disappears on its own? Again? Why does the U.S. get to ride a resource boom, but not Russia? Why does China implode due to class divides but not the U.S.? No reasons given, other than it makes the prediction more palatable to Stratfor's customers. * Page 173: So, wait a minute, just a few pages ago, the U.S. had unparalleled economic and military power over the world, but still allows Japan to develop into a James-Bond--villain--like power? Methinks he's just getting a hard-on describing the awesome military hardware they will all have. * Page 174: It's weird, because as the world develops, he keeps reaching back to the 20th century for patterns, envisioning ever-expanding, classic empires which would seem to require much more military personnel and energy. He makes no attempt to describe how this will all transpire and how energy budgets will work; instead, he just asserts that it will (work). And one large empire is threatening to break up (the EU) -- what is the justification for believing that any other country would want to expand to more territory and leave itself even more exposed? There's more confusion here because, once the Turks have expanded far northward, they can then magically "tell the U.S. [what] to do"? And Iraq will be "torn apart by traditional internal conflicts" but this is more historical work than prediction, no? And he predicts that Iraq will somehow build up into something useful in 30 years but will then fall apart again because "Russia withdraws support"? Wouldn't decades of U.S. sanctions and war be more to blame here? Or are we just going to look ahead and forget that all happened? * Page 175: "Force Israel into an accommodation." Did he write that with a straight face? This has barely happened in the last 60 years and, with its major ally in nigh-unimaginable ascendancy (Friedman's prediction), it isn't likely to happen in the future either. * Page 185: I call them "Battlestars, for no other reason than that it's a cool name." Yep, definitely getting a hard-on over military hardware. * Page 186: Why would the "Japanese be alarmed by Battlestars"? Following current trends in U.S. education and technical expertise, wouldn't the Japanese most likely have designed and built them? And would these plans not have been available online since pretty much the project inception? Or does the Internet no longer exist? Or perhaps Wikileaks gave up and went home?At any rate, The Japanese would have presumably kept a Battlestar for themselves. Or are we still assuming that, as in the 1960s, only Americans can build technology? * Page 189: "U.S. intelligence, of course, will pick up the diplomatic discussions [...]" because, in forty years, we still won't be using encryption for anything so that the eavesdropping infrastructure continues to work just as well as it does today. * Page 190: Apparently, he's going to ride the "only Americans can design and build technology" horse until it dies out from under him. * Page 192: It's really getting a bit infuriating how he's so understanding that the U.S. considers any minuscule or barely potential threat to its hegemony as life-threatening and an "offensive maneuver". * Page 200: bla, bla, bla, more war porn ... moon bases! Moving on... * Page 203: "As we have seen, nuclear weapons are more frightening before they are used than after [...]" I'm not even sure how to respond to that. Is he sure about that? Japan has been pretty quiet, no? They used to be quite dedicated militarists and are now quite dedicated pacifists. They invented an entire film genre with plots dedicated almost solely to working through the angst engendered by Hiroshima and Nagasaki. That seems like a spectacularly insensitive and wildly inaccurate thing to write. * Page 229: The massive, world-spanning war will cost only 50,000 lives in all. Naturally, collateral, second-order and third-order effects of such a war are not counted toward the body count. If people starve to death because a death ray wipes out their crops or power centers or clean water, that's their own fault, and is naturally not attributed to the war. The scenario he depicts would require so much energy; where does it all come from? It feels like Michael Bay helped him write that chapter. * Page 233: Here he once again takes up those 50-year cycles of American history. He explained how American history can be roughly aligned -- very roughly, because you can only use the official history and must ignore other significant events that don't line up so well -- in 50-year blocks. He does not explain why this pattern is inescapable. * Page 235--238: More tech porn, listing historical technologies and throwing in every technology he can think of. I'm not sure what the purpose here was, though. Perhaps just padding to fill out the book a bit more. * Page 245: Here he has a good 3-item list that describes how technology is developed (hint: the first step is publicly funded research at universities and grant programs, the second is publicly funded military development and the last step is private industry making money off it, for free). Nothing new to see here. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] The other example of this foolishness is also its paragon: pundit Thomas Friedman of the New York Times and of The World is Flat fame. ]]> </content> </entry> <entry> <title type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Books read in 2012]]> </title> <id>https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=2607</id> <link href="https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=2607"/> <updated>2013-01-14T22:34:57+01:00</updated> <author> <name type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Marco von Ballmoos]]> </name> <uri>https://earthli.com/users/marco</uri> </author> <summary type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Firstborn (2007) by Arthur C. Clarke & Stephen Baxter This is the final installment in the Time Odyssey trilogy (although the end of the book is quite a cliffhanger that indicates that Baxter is considering soldiering on on his own). The book incorporates almost every hard-science theme you can ... ]]> </summary> <content type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Published by marco on 14. Jan 2013 22:34:57 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Firstborn (2007) by Arthur C. Clarke & Stephen Baxter This is the final installment in the Time Odyssey trilogy (although the end of the book is quite a cliffhanger that indicates that Baxter is considering soldiering on on his own). The book incorporates almost every hard-science theme you can imagine, flitting from topic to topic and seeming to hurry through the story. It's quite inconsistent in the way that they kept shuttling people all over the solar system when that's obviously such a costly operation. Instead of gelling nicely (as with the subsequent Blindsight, reviewed below), it comes off as a clumsy way of stringing Deus Ex Machinae together in order to bring the book to its conclusion. The story is good, but the storytelling is less than stellar (no pun intended). [1] Blindsight (2006) by Peter Watts A novel ostensibly in the hard-science science-fiction genre, but with a lot of wholly believable extrapolation and written very, very nicely in a terse form that evokes much more than it says (similar to William Gibson). The story is one of a first encounter with an alien civilization for an Earth 50 years in the future. The rendezvous is far outside the Oort cloud and involves a group of highly-specialized and evolved geniuses, among them a captain who is a vampire (it's OK, it's actually pretty cool and well-explained). The alien being(s) turn(s) out to be quite alien and communication is not a simple affair. Lots of great dialogue, great scenery, great technology and discussions of interesting scientific, psychological, linguistic and philosophical principles. It's got everything but the kitchen sink in it, but it works. Highly recommended. zero history (2010) by William Gibson Another story involving Hollis, Milgrim and Bigend, Gibson swerves even further into his obsession with branding (especially micro-branding) and the world of the very rich (none of the characters wants for anything really) and the way in which it interfaces with large-scale military, governmental and corporate organizations. It takes place in the modern-day (the teens of the 21st century) and Gibson's style still manages to convey just how outlandishly amazing and cool so much of the technology we have is. It's cool-hunting but done by cool characters in cool settings with very cool, terse dialogue and descriptions. Lovingly written and edited. The title alludes to an individual with no electronic history, no footprint in the digital world (Milgrim, in this case, whose drug habit pushed him off the grid for a decade). Highly recommended for fans of Gibson. Anna Karenina (1877) by Leo Tolstoy A story of late nineteenth-century Russian aristocracy, interwoven with excursions into the philosophy of class, the divine and gender politics. The title character is hardly endearing, with a sense of entitlement shared by all of her class. They engender their own suffering, though their lives are absurdly easy by any standard. They suffer from first-world problems and complain about and are tortured endlessly by them. None of the characters has a visible source of income -- save perhaps Levin, who lives in the country on an inherited estate and ostensibly farms it. The others are all almost consistently useless parasites and much of this is laid out descriptively in the book, leaving the reader to do the legwork in assuming that Tolstoy finds this sort of behavior and segmentation of society reprehensible (it's not clear, actually). Unclear as well is the attitude toward science, especially when contrasted with religion. Religion runs deep among the nobility, but the younger generations have pretenses of knowing better, Levin (who seems to be the closest in philosophy to the author) included. Dead Aid: Why aid is not working and how there is a better way for Africa (2009) by Dambisa Moyo That the foreword is written by Niall Ferguson is already enough to raise suspicion. Said foreword is filled with effusive praise for a book that “prescribes…strong medicine” that reflects an “African view of Africa’s economic problems”. But Moyo's experience includes a stint at the World Bank, a Masters from Harvard, a Doctorate from Oxford and eight years with Goldman Sachs, all difficult to reconcile with an African experience. When Ms. Moyo was on the Colbert Report two years ago, she was underwhelming in her ability to defend or explain her thesis and the contents of the book bear out this lack of depth. It seems much more likely that she is feted because she’s young, pretty enough and is willing to say just what old white males want to say, but don’t dare to: namely, that Africa should suck it up and get on with generating the economic growth that its surfeit of resources and cheap labor have long promised. Not recommended. Patriots: A novel of survival in the coming collapse (1990-2009) by James Wesley, Rawles A novel about "Enders" -- über-Patriots with mad military skills, a strong predilection for the Bible, a clear notion of male/female hierarchy and a mentality that never left the early 20th-century. Add a buttload of guns and ammo -- oh, sweet Lord, the ammo -- and you've got a recipe for a Galt's Gulch full of able-bodied people fending off hordes of moochers who can't care for themselves. The economy collapses because of hyper-inflation, which is a standard Tea-party bugaboo, but the scenario is completely laughable and could never happen. Not that financial collapse is not possible, but not like that. The author seemed quite taken with his own erudition, which from his point-of-view is probably galaxy-spanning rather than objectively severely limited and crude. The government is, of course, evil. The enders seem to be positively delighted that civilization crumbled -- because they never really needed it anyway. People are slaughtered in this novel, but only really bad guys. Like terrorist/child-molesters (I'm not kidding). There's not a lot of room for subtlety. Good to read one of these, but it's hard to recommend to others other than for anthropological purposes. Up the Line (1969) by Robert Silverberg A wonderful time-travel book in the grand tradition, with lots of sex. The title refers to the expression used in the future for going into the past; going "Down the line" moves you to the future relative to your current time. The book clearly shows the year in which it was written, as there is a whole lot of free lovin' going on in the future. Time travel has become commonplace enough that there are guided tours of the past's greatest moments. Tour groups resemble those that travel only through space (well, they travel through time as well, but rather at the same speed as everyone else and in the same direction, which is boring). The hero of the book becomes a tour guide in and around Constantinople and throughout the first millennium after Christ. Both the time-travel implications -- can you meet yourself? What about loops? What if you sleep with an ancestor? How do you keep the continuum clean? What does that even mean? Are there multiple strands? Infinite strands? -- and the history and culture of the various time periods are expertly presented. Pulcheria is a great character, especially after her foot-waggling fall. A fun and intriguing read; recommended. Roadmarks (1979) by Roger Zelazny Another time-travel novel, also masterfully told. In this world, time is a road built by an ancient race of dragons (sounds cheesy, but the way it's described renders it unutterably cool). There are on- and off-ramps that certain members of diverse civilizations and races can access. Histories and futures that are more "likely" are well-kept whereas those that are less so become overgrown and ever-more-difficult to find. The story is of a gruff, ageless mercenary-type called Red Dorakeen who travels up and down the road, seeking a nebulous goal, accompanied by a portable, talking computer in the form of a book. He is beset by enemies unleashed on him by an arch-enemy who used to be a close friend. Supporting characters like the Marquis de Sade, Hitler and a couple of truly inspired assassins -- the monk Timyin Tin is particularly cool -- round out the cast. A fun and intriguing read; recommended. Full Dark, No Stars (2009--2010) by Stephen King Four novellas, each dealing with marriage and male/female relationships in one way or another. One is a story of madness and desperate poverty in a marriage gone stale. What goes around comes around and ghosts are restless. Another is a fabulous story of revenge by a woman wronged, as only King can, replete with superhuman feats convincingly told. Then there is a deal-with-the-devil story but with a remorseless character instead of an eventually repentant one, happily screwing everyone around him as he gets just what he wants. And, finally, there is the story of a wife who slowly discovers that the man she married is not the man she thought he was. A discovery made innocently leads her to unravel her last decades with him and question everything. Recommended for anyone, but highly recommended for fans. Loser Liberalism (2012) by Dean Baker A concise, expertly-written and highly accessible novel describing the basics of macro-economics on a global level but primarily as it pertains to the U.S. The current economy is described in detail as well as the history that led to where we are now, including the repeal of various safeguards and the various crashes and recessions. Baker has been fighting the good fight for decades now and is not short of solutions, many of which are straightforward and easily implemented, if we would only stop worshiping wealth. Highly recommended for anyone. War and Peace (1869) by Leo Tolstoy Where does one start in describing a 1300-page novel that follows 1220 pages of intricate detail of the lives of Russian nobles woven with step-by-step descriptions of 19th-century warfare with 80 pages of dense philosophy? The book tells the story of the invasion of Russia by Napoleon through the eyes of several noble families, the members of which undergo their own trials and tribulations. The characters are almost all unbelievably shallow, though one suspects deliberately so. I couldn't tell you that I'd liked any of them. Pierre, Natasha, Nicholas Rostov, Andrew Oblonsky, Dolokhov, Denisov, Sonya, Boris, Julie, Mary, Helen, the list goes on. They all lived idle lives, lamenting their lack of purpose or reveling in their indolence. The main thrust of the novel is that war is useless and that the people to whom history ascribes greatness can be proven to have had nothing to do with the situations for which they have found themselves famous. History is not guided; it simply happens. Hard to recommend because of its sheer length, but Tolstoy is a master of prose and the translation I read was really, really good (I imagine). The Damage Done (1998) by Warren Fellows The subtitle summarizes the book: Twelve years of hell in a Bangkok prison. Fellows freely admits that the first quarter-century of his life was sordid though not particularly so. He drifted into a life of minor crime, grafting and grifting in a minor way until he became a drug courier. He led a relatively charmed life for a few years (it's hard to tell how many) and then was busted in Thailand with a suitcase full of heroin. He was sent to a horrific Thai prison staffed by horrific sadists and endured there for over three years. The punishment far exceeds anything that can be considered civilized: no privacy, incredible overcrowding, disease, malnutrition, beatings and torture, isolation, darkness and, ironically, drugs and drugs and drugs to escape the everyday. It's amazing that anyone could survive so long (most don't). Once convicted, he eventually ended up in an even more notoriously horrific prison -- Bang Kwang or "Big Tiger" -- for nine more years. Somewhat unevenly written, but the well-written parts are poetry and really evoke feelings of horror. Let the following passages serve as examples: "The difficulty in telling this story -- my whole story, in fact -- is that there is no way for me to communicate duration of time to you. It may have taken a minute for you to have read of my position in this punishment cell, but I was in this position for a whole month. How do I convey that to you? There are no markers with which I can measure. The only way for you to come close to experiencing this is to read the previous paragraph over and over, every minute of every day, for a whole month. But nobody could do that without going mad with frustration." "I was walking down the road to the front gate, that same road that I had walked up so many years ago. I saw that nothing had changed. There were the lush gardens and the flies and the stench of the sewage and the rubbish tip. It was as if nothing had happened at all. Bang Kwang was a vacuum in which time came to a stop, while the rest of the world drifted on by. I turned and looked back at Big Tiger and it was alive. This was a living thing." Me Talk Pretty One Day (2000) by David Sedaris Easily the best collection I've read from Mr. Sedaris. Hilarious from start to finish and I found myself laughing out loud at several points and annoyed/entertained my friends by reading aloud largely context-free passages and then braying like a donkey. It's hard to pick a favorite, but while the times-on-hard-drugs stories were incredibly good, it was the moving-to-France ones that really hit home -- See you again yesterday, the eponymous Me Talk Pretty One Day and Jesus Shaves ("He nice, the Jesus.") and Picka Pocketoni are all good. His stories about his family, though, those are just out of this world: You Can't Kill the Rooster and I'll Eat What He's Wearing are too bizarre to be true -- although I suspect that there is more than a kernel of truth to many of his stories. It doesn't matter, the mantle of America's modern-day Mark Twain rests firmly on this man's shoulders. The Hundred Foot Journey (2008) by Richard C. Morais A book about an Indian family that moves from Bombay to England to France. The first two parts are quite evocatively written, about Mumbai and the French Jura, respectively. The prose is at times a bit heavy-handed with its metaphor, but the author sticks to his idea of comparing lovely things in nature to lovely food and mostly makes it work. It's in the third -- and longest -- part that he lost my attention, when his hero goes to Paris and, seemingly without pathos, effort, muss, fuss or doubt, climbs to the top of the food world. The author's politics also figure much more heavily here and it feels almost as if he was faking his empathy for the simpler, more natural first chapters. The hero ends up running a €350-per-person restaurant and is still portrayed as unfairly beleaguered by an overly restrictive and regulated French socialist state, eager to squeeze every centime it can from the hard-working upper classes. There is a lengthy and largely uninformed diatribe on French worker relations (chapter 17) that portray an upside-down world in which the workers hold their employers for ransom. [2] With his mask off, he in no way differs from the Rand Pauls of the world, happy to draw broad conclusions in favor of disbanding the government based on cherry-picked anecdotes. At any rate, it felt quite out of place, as did the ever-more-extravagant settings, menus and detailed descriptions of food items, wines and appliances. The further I read, the more it felt like Dan Brown -- also known for pointing out things like the brand of a refrigerator -- or Stieg Larsson, whose characters are also singularly successful millionaires, attractive, with women throwing themselves at their feet. Even his previously somewhat charming food-as-metaphor started to unravel disastrously, when his "sommelier [...] had the inspired idea to twin the partridge with the 1996 Côtes du Rhône Cuvée Romaine, a robust red redolent of dogs panting and on point in the lushness of a summer hunt." Not only pretentious nearly beyond all imagining, but also almost certainly not aware of what redolent means. Recommendation? Read only the first two parts and leave off the end. Also, he's missing a hyphen in the book's title. The Road (2006) by Cormac McCarthy Bleakness. Despair. A gray, ashy road winding into dimly lit mists. The overcast horizon lying just over the next hill reveals listlessly churning clouds, heavy with rain. Repeat for hundreds of pages. I forgot to put in a bookmark after about 40 pages and it took me a few minutes to find my place again because each chapter looked just like the one before and after it. The story is of a man and his son fighting their hungry, bored, weak and hopeless way through a post-apocalyptic America. The disaster is presented as fact, with no time wasted on explanations. It's a tone poem of sorts, repeatedly describing the same scene in various ways to hammer home the bleakness. If you've seen the movie, you'll realize that the almost unbearably annoying kid in the movie nailed his role. The kid in the book is arguably worse. Spoiler alert: my theory is that the kid doesn't even exist, that he's a figment of the man's imagination, a sign of his madness. Innocents Abroad (1869) by Mark Twain The narrator takes a steamship journey across the Atlantic from America to the Old World, jaunting from the Canary Islands to Gibraltar to Paris, Italy, Greece, Turkey and then a long jaunt through the Middle East. Twain is at his snarky best with tongue firmly in cheek as he describes the splendors of Europe through the lens of a jaded, modern man -- and taking into account the tourist-trap nature of many of these locations, even in the 1800s. There are descriptive passages that are so evocatively written that it takes your breath away -- you'll read them two or three times. The man was truly an utter master of the written (English) word. In an attempt to loosely describe the tone of the journal/travelogue, I list the following, several main themes that cropped up now and again: * The beauty of the Middle East is enjoyed more in reflection than live. This is primarily due to two reasons: 1. The people of the Middle East are, on the whole, quite poor and beg almost incessantly for "bucksheesh". Their din drives out all thought, philosophical contemplation and enjoyment. 2. The landscape of the Middle East is far from inspiring and gains appeal only through association with historical figures and events, many of them fabricated. * Despite these shortcomings, most travelers to the Middle East -- indeed any place that, in reality, is not what it's cracked up to be -- will, in retrospect, pluck those shining moments from a desert of desolate, wasted time and come to the conclusion that they not only enjoyed their trip, but that it was a rapturous epiphany. Those travelers without the imagination to do so themselves will gladly begin early by parroting the rapturous ravings of others (usually Tour-Guide authors) while they are still there, resulting in them rather incongruously depicting a barren desert as a lush paradise in the rush to complete their their future readers' brainwashing. * The pilgrims along on his journey were all inveterate thieves, smashing "specimens" from every relic, wall, building and monument that they encountered. * There were a hell of a lot of quarantines in those days. In almost every port they landed, the ship was quarantined and they had to smuggle themselves ashore in order to enjoy the sights. * Billiards tables anywhere but America are in a horrible state of affairs, including the cues. * Lake Tahoe is the most beautiful place on Earth and nothing compares. TypeScript Language Specification (2012) by Microsoft Typescript is a statically typed overlay language for Javascript. The primary purpose of the language is to bring some order to the chaos that is Javascript development. Typescript does not have a runtime; it is intended that Javascript be generated from it, in a process amply and precisely described throughout the specification. The transformation is, for the most part, elegant and concise and reflects the kind of Javascript that a seasoned and disciplined developer would write. Typescript achieves these results with a much more concise, readable, maintainable, expressive and powerful language. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] Arthur C. Clarke has died since the book's publication. This bodes ill for the series, as it's my suspicion that Baxter is responsible for the more heavy-handed and simplistic philosophical underpinnings; he's a good hard-science author, but his attitude toward the humanities is a bit too clinical and dismissive for my tastes. [1] Morais is a former columnist and editor for Forbes magazine and has what one might call an enormous soft spot for the 1%. The pity is that he hid it so well in the first parts and needn't have ruined an otherwise fun book with his uninformed -- or incorrectly informed -- ideology. [1] Not only because I could sympathize with his experience in that regard, but also because I read the book while on a long weekend in a French town very much like the one in Normandy where his Hugh has a home. ]]> </content> </entry> <entry> <title type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Bad Erotica for the Masses]]> </title> <id>https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=2673</id> <link href="https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=2673"/> <updated>2012-07-15T17:03:37+02:00</updated> <author> <name type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Marco von Ballmoos]]> </name> <uri>https://earthli.com/users/marco</uri> </author> <summary type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[If scooping information from the madly bubbling froth of the U.S. media lies at all within your purview, you will no doubt have heard of the latest rage in American literature, called 50 Shades of Grey. A modicum of research reveals that the epithet literature is a good deal more generous a term... ]]> </summary> <content type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Published by marco on 15. Jul 2012 17:03:37 Updated by marco on 16. Jul 2012 19:28:56 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ If scooping information from the madly bubbling froth of the U.S. media lies at all within your purview, you will no doubt have heard of the latest rage in American literature, called 50 Shades of Grey. A modicum of research reveals that the epithet literature is a good deal more generous a term than the referenced work earns. It's more commonly called "Mommy Porn" [1] which seems to be the designator that U.S. culture is going to use to indicate that reading poorly written soft-core pornography is now considered less than reprehensible. In this, the U.S. lags a good part of the rest of the world; the pity is that the popular demand to which it capitulated is for such low-quality erotica rather than some of the more renowned works of the tradition. [2] Readers of these trashier variants -- heretofore known as "bodice-rippers" -- had become accustomed to being careful about with whom they shared their tastes. The advent of e-books were an absolute Godsend as it allowed them to read what they liked without hiding the cover from their nosy neighbors or their co-commuters. The U.S. is notoriously prudish and it's hard tell whether this celebration of what is essentially trashy erotica is indicative of a general trend or just a well-orchestrated marketing campaign. Trashiness has always been accepted, but the acceptable degree of sexual content never came close to matching that for violence. Where a film that depicts hundreds of people being mowed down could garner a rating that allowed 13-year--olds to watch it without supervision, it could not contain even a split-second of female nipple on screen without being doomed to an R-rating. But an analysis of the societal piety of the U.S. is a discussion for another day. The question is: is the book bad? Yeah, it sounds pretty bad. One review in particular -- "Fifty Shades (#1)" by Katrina Lumsden <http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/340987215> -- summarizes the two lead characters as follows: "Ana is just a giant mess of a human being. She's insecure to the point of it being laughable [...] and a complete ditz. [...] Christian is a misogynistic, self-loathing, abusive piece of shit. [...] Most of the time he's serious, brooding, and threatening. How charming." And why is the lead male character (Christian) worth supplicating to? Why, because he's rich and good-looking and, because of the genre, well-hung. So, this is yet another book that -- perhaps unwittingly? -- has a member of the lower echelons idolizing the rich and letting them get away with almost anything because of that feature. You would think that America would be less likely to be taken with a book about a rich guy subordinating a woman just because he can. And why, when people tend to like books starring characters with whom they identify, do so many people identify with a ditz with serious self-esteem issues? Or are they just enjoying watching an idiot get her comeuppance -- for being an idiot? Is this perhaps evidence of cruelty more than identification or sympathy? Are they voyeuristically experiencing what a great -- and well-equipped -- lover she thinks Christian is, or are they laughing at her for thinking she, who started the book as a virgin, could even be in a position to judge either quality? If you've seen a few pages, you may be reminded of the clumsy writing associated with the Twilight novels. The article "Master of the Universe versus Fifty Shades by E.L James Comparison" <http://dearauthor.com/features/industry-news/master-of-the-universe-versus-fifty-shades-by-e-l-james-comparison/> makes a strong case for the book being a barely modified rehash of some extended Twilight fan-fiction written by James herself between 2009 and 2011. You can't plagiarize yourself, of course, but the point is that it was bad enough that the country was taken by storm by the execrable writing of Stephanie Meyer, but now it's dropped a level further by being swept away by a search/replace update of a fan-fiction based on the same series. The important thing is that the submissive female lead-role made it unscathed. The publisher and author claim that 50 Shades is completely original; a comparison of the two works using "Turnitin" <http://turnitin.com> -- a self-styled "global leader in plagiarism prevention and online grading" -- showed that the works are 89% similar, with many pages differing only by the names of the characters. And all of Hollywood is jostling to participate in a movie based on the book. I wonder who's jostling more? Actresses dying to play yet another submissive, ditzy lead? Maybe Katie Holmes now that she's not so busy with Scientology? Or actors dying to play the rich misogynist? Michael Douglas has the right pedigree -- it's the role he played in Basic Instinct, Fatal Attraction and others -- but he's gotten a bit long in the tooth. Rumor has it that Angelina Jolie is looking to direct it which doesn't quite jell with the strength of some of her more recent films -- Changeling, A Mighty Heart and In the Land of Blood and Honey spring to mind -- and makes you wonder whether she's even read the book or is just riding the tide of popular opinion. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] Am I the only one who sees this as a more-than-oblique reference to the far-more-ubiquitous "Kiddie Porn"? Is that really the connection the publisher wishes to draw? Somehow I doubt it. [1] As a tale of a woman who willingly submitted to the submissive role in a dom/sub relationship, it sounds like a pale shadow of "L'Histoire d'O" <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Story_of_O> (Story of O), which was published in 1954. ]]> </content> </entry> <entry> <title type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Books read in 2011]]> </title> <id>https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=2459</id> <link href="https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=2459"/> <updated>2012-01-01T12:41:11+01:00</updated> <author> <name type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Marco von Ballmoos]]> </name> <uri>https://earthli.com/users/marco</uri> </author> <summary type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[ 1. "Tell Me No Lies: Investigative Journalism that Changed the World (2005)" <#Tell> 2. "The Sirens of Titan (1959)" <#Sirens> 3. "Die Welle (de) (1981)" <#Welle> 4. "Covering Islam (1981)" <#Covering> 5. "Holidays on Ice (1997)" <#Holidays> 6. "L'étranger (fr) (1942)" <#Etranger> 7. "The Liar (1991)" <#Liar> 8. "Identity and Violence (2006)" <#Identity> 9. "The Prince (1513)" <#Prince> 10. "Oil! (1927)" <#Oil> 11. "Summer Crossing (1950)" <#Summer> 12. "Picasso at" <#Picasso> ... ]]> </summary> <content type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Published by marco on 1. Jan 2012 12:41:11 Updated by marco on 15. Dec 2025 21:36:33 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ 1. "Tell Me No Lies: Investigative Journalism that Changed the World (2005)" <#Tell> 2. "The Sirens of Titan (1959)" <#Sirens> 3. "Die Welle (de) (1981)" <#Welle> 4. "Covering Islam (1981)" <#Covering> 5. "Holidays on Ice (1997)" <#Holidays> 6. "L'étranger (fr) (1942)" <#Etranger> 7. "The Liar (1991)" <#Liar> 8. "Identity and Violence (2006)" <#Identity> 9. "The Prince (1513)" <#Prince> 10. "Oil! (1927)" <#Oil> 11. "Summer Crossing (1950)" <#Summer> 12. "Picasso at the Lapin Agile (1993)" <#Picasso> 13. "The Stars' Tennis Balls (2000)" <#Stars> 14. "Unseen Academicals (2009)" <#Unseen> 15. "The Enchantress of Florence (2008)" <#Enchatress> 16. "Just After Sunset (2008)" <#Just> 17. "Profits Over People (1999)" <#Profits> 18. "Die Zeit-Maschine (1895) (de)" <#Zeit> 19. "Against the Day (2006)" <#Against> 20. "Complete Prose (1992)" <#Complete> 21. "Giftzwerge -- Wenn der Nachbar zum Feind wird (1992)" <#Giftzwerge> 22. "Left for Dead -- My Journey Home From Everest (2001)" <#Left> 23. "Plunder and Blunder (2009)" <#Plunder> 24. "War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning (2002)" <#War> 25. "The Great God Pan (1890)" <#Pan> 26. "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2005)" <#Dragon> 27. "9-11 (2001, 2002)" <#9-11> 28. "In Defense of Lost Causes (2008, 2009)" <#Defense> 29. "Shopgirl (2000)" <#Shopgirl> 30. "The Power of Love: My Experience in a U.S. Immigration Jail" <#Power> 31. "No Logo (2000/2002)" <#Logo> 32. "Homage To Catalonia (1952)" <#Homage> 33. "Bad Samaritans -- The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism (2008)" <#Bad> 34. "A Perfect Crime (1998)" <#Perfect> 35. "The Innocent Man (2006)" <#Innocent> Tell Me No Lies: Investigative Journalism that Changed the World (2005) by John Pilger This book contains the best -- or most legendary -- articles from the best journalists of the 20th century. They range from Martha Gellhorn's reports on Dachau to Pilger's own reports from the Killing Fields to Fisk's peerless reporting from Iraq in the early 21st century. It's highly recommended for anyone who cares about history -- and getting their news from people who got it right when it was happening. The Sirens of Titan (1959) by Kurt Vonnegut Vonnegut's second novel, this book is typical of his style: concise yet descriptive, and using science fiction as a backdrop against which to display his philosophy. Also, it was utterly bereft of semicolons. There are also the subtle -- and not-so-subtle -- barbs against religion and anti-humanists as well. The book is essentially about luck and about the luck of being born in the right place and at the right time and how sometimes that which appears to be luck is actually machination at a completely unknowable higher level and how, though the true meaning of a particular life may perhaps not be very meaningful to the person living it, it has a meaning that is in a grand scheme that, well, also doesn't seem very meaningful because it's also a part of an even grander scheme. So it goes. Die Welle (de) (1981) by Morton Rhue This is a story of an American high school teacher who decides to teach his class about Nazism in a peculiar way: by letting them relive it. His students had nothing but contempt for the Germans who simply stood by while the Third Reich perpetrated its crimes against humanity. When offered a part in a similar regime, nearly all of them jumped in with both feet and took part in a new party, called "The Wave". The translation was pretty awful [1] and at times completely ignored what was clearly idiomatic in the original English, but it was worth it for the finale. Covering Islam (1981) by Edward W. Said One could never accuse Said of failing to provide enough detail for or providing enough formulations of his arguments. As in Orientalism, Said explores what it means to have the culture in power rely for its reconnaissance on other cultures entirely on persons who are themselves either nearly utterly unfamiliar with or so overburdened with preconceptions about said cultures as to render anything they have to say as, if not meaningless, without any rational or scientific usefulness. It's a marvelously crafted book, but let the prior sentence serve as an example of the kind of elaborate -- if well-constructed -- prose through which you'll have to wade if you give this book its due. Holidays on Ice (1997) by David Sedaris A fun collection of essays by a wickedly funny and sarcastic American writer. These are all about the the Christmas holiday season and the slim volume is actually just the right size (any more at once would have been too much). I also read a few essays from his longer book of essays, Naked, but had had enough of Sedaris for one weekend. Funny but weird stories written in either an auto- or semi-autobiographical vein about an odd man (or boy, depending on chronology) who thinks he's normal and the rest of the world is off. L'étranger (fr) (1942) by Albert Camus Since George Bush was, apparently, able to read it in English, I tackled it in French. It's not very long and spends most of the first two-thirds describing the life of a middle-class wage-slave in Algeria who spends his weekends on the beach, going to movies and sleeping with girls. His life nearly utterly lacks meaning. His mother dies at the very beginning, which would factor into his trial at the end. The reason he is on trial is nearly overwhelmingly trivial and senseless, though he seems to take it just as in stride as everything else in his life. He bobs along on the stream of consciousness, not paddling very much. The style reminded me at times of Hemingway -- the brief phrasing and wording as well as rather cold narration of weighty events -- and of Achebe at others -- probably just the scenic descriptions and names. The Liar (1991) by Stephen Fry An absolutely masterful command of the English language; a marvelous grasp of comedic timing; a natural-born storyteller's addiction to detail and prevarication. For anyone who ever liked anything that Douglas Adams ever wrote and wished he'd written more, there's Stephen Fry. I would say the same of Terry Pratchett, though Fry's style is nearly utterly unlike Pratchett's. Be prepared to learn new words and new things about life in an all-boys school in England. Through anti-hero and don, Donald Trefusis, Fry makes an absolutely eloquent plea for the rescue of the English language from the clutches of the banal. Identity and Violence (2006) by Amartya Sen I approached my first book by this Nobel-Prize winner with enthusiasm and was quickly disappointed by the writing style and, quite frankly, the repetitive and somewhat obvious content. It was a bit of a crashing to Earth after the anticipation of reading something by "one of the world's great thinkers" (as indicated on the cover). His prose is unnecessarily tangled (contrasted with that of Edward Said, who employed necessarily tangled prose), it is mind-numbingly repetitive and exceedingly conciliatory to the ruling class, of which I think he seems to think he is not a part, but to which he quite clearly -- at least in part -- belongs. Again and again, his language and formulations give nations and the powerful the benefit of the doubt that the predations they visit upon their subjects and the unfairness of the world they rule is purely due to one unfortunate accident after another. The Prince (1513) by Niccolò Machiavelli I read the translation from the original Italian by Harvey C. Mansfield. It's a relatively compact how-to guide to ruling people and their countries for fun and profit. Mostly profit. The information is laid out in a no-nonsense, some would say ruthless, way. It kind of reminded me of The Art of War by Sun Tzu. Though we can today read it and nod in agreement, we have to also remember that it was written in the early 1500s, so all of those ideas were fresh at the time. Oil! (1927) by Upton Sinclair A fascinating look at early 20th-century America where the oil business serves as a backdrop to a story about the simultaneous rise of plutocracy and plummet of the working class. The book is narrated from the point of view of the son of an oil-man, an oil-man who starts off with some sympathy for his common man but, over the years, sheds it as he ends his days fleeing from a government his business swindled. The rampant anti-Bolshevik, anti-Communist and anti-Socialist attitude in America at the time is frightening with the law cracking down on dissenters with impunity. Almost 100 years later, the enemies have changed but the rhetoric has a familiar ring. As does the stark class disparity and self-aggrandizing reasoning of the few who arrogate the wealth of the nation to themselves -- for the good of the people and the nation, of course. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose. Summer Crossing (1950) by Truman Capote The story of a rich family's daughter who didn't want to travel with her family by boat to Paris. She chooses instead to stay behind in her New York apartment slumming it with the lower classes. Quite nicely written in places but the story of a spoiled rich girl trying to ruin the life she'd gotten on a silver platter didn't grab me much. That she perhaps wanted something different than comfort and wealth, that she wanted love and something real instead of what she had is a possible interpretation. A story of the idle rich; those who envy them will see this book one way; those who hate them will see it another. Picasso at the Lapin Agile (1993) by Steve Martin An interesting little play by Mr. Martin (yes, that Steve Martin) in which Einstein plays a starring role, as does Picasso. Lots of interesting wordplay as well as the requisite worldly bartender of the Lapin Agile who seems somehow smarter than anyone else. The Stars' Tennis Balls (2000) by Stephen Fry Another fun, fun book by Mr. Fry (I'd just read The Liar a few months back) that stars Ned, a schoolboy whose life is turned upside down by the cruelty of other schoolboys. Lots of intimation of rampant homosexuality in the British school system. The plot? Think Count of Monte Cristo with almost no deviation, but that's a good thing because Fry, as I mentioned above, is a helluva entertaining writer. Unseen Academicals (2009) by Terry Pratchett This is the first book from Discworld after Pratchett's announcement that he has Alzheimer's. The affliction is not yet evident as the book stands up well to the rest of the Discworld corpus. It's the story of racism and demonization of the other, embodied in the unprepossessing Mr. Nutt. There's also a good deal about a sport that vaguely resembles football in there. Vimes is not present, but Vetinari plays a supporting role. The wizards are there in their bumbling glory, with Archchancellor Ridley being innocently sly as usual. The fearless Glenda is a strong new character who more than easily carries much of the book. The Enchantress of Florence (2008) by Salman Rushdie An amazing story -- or series of tales, all entwined -- told by a master storyteller. A traveler skilled in many arts lands in the court of a great king and strikes up a friendship on the basis of a shaky relation from the deep past. Wonderful characters and attention to historical detail that weaves with fantastical elements. A completely unexpected ending. A great novel for anyone looking to get acquainted with the writing of Rushdie. Just After Sunset (2008) by Stephen King A collection of short stories by King, all of which had been published in various magazines over the years. Harvey's Dream is wonderfully told, as is The Things They Left Behind, a uniquely Kingsian take on the survivors of 9--11. N is a tour-de-force that plays with one of King's favorite themes: the thinness of the wall between reality and the raving, gibbering madness that lies just beyond. Mute is a tale with a classic twist, told well. A Very Tight Place is also right up King's alley, with the tale of a nearly inconceivable situation and human endurance and perseverance. Profits Over People (1999) by Noam Chomsky A great book about the late 80s and early 90s in America, which is all you need to know about the plutocracy of the naughts of the 21th century. A great way of getting into Chomsky and a great way of seeing the roots of the kleptocracy under which America suffers today. Die Zeit-Maschine (1895) (de) by H.G. Wells Who knew that this book was about class struggle? The Eloi are the degraded rich who become sheep for the ravaging Morlocks, who are the cannibalistic descendants of the working classes. Less science fiction and more social commentary. I read it in German. Against the Day (2006) by Thomas Pynchon As with Gravity's Rainbow, it took a while to get into it, but then there was no stopping. A fascinating cast of characters from the wild west in the last 19th century to the Europe of the early 20th. Entwined with a story of alternate worlds, time slippages, alternate histories, mathematics and competing theories that break out in war. Tesla makes mysterious appearances, as do other notables of the time. More satisfying than Gravity's Rainbow -- deeper somehow. It's probably only recommendable to fans of Pynchon or anyone willing to read a complex, 1000-page novel of semi-historical fiction. Complete Prose (1992) by Woody Allen A series of bizarre stories, many of which are composed almost purely of surrealistic non-sequiturs. Some of the longer stories are quite good, with The Whore of Mensa, Death Knocks, Gossage-Vardebedian Papers and Retribution grabbing my attention in one way or another. Giftzwerge -- Wenn der Nachbar zum Feind wird (1992) von Thomas Bergmann Some of the stories of neighbors fighting are decent, but the book got a bit repetitive in the end. All of the stories are from the German civil court system, which seems absolutely inundated with people who are completely unable to talk to one another or compromise in any way. I assume that this is not unique to Germany, though. Left for Dead -- My Journey Home From Everest (2001) by Beck Weathers & Stephen J. Michaud An awful book about an awful man, awfully written. The family is insufferable, has enough money and connections to make all of their problems go away and yet still manage to fill an entire book with whining, self-loathing and self-pity. Some of the mountain stuff is OK, but it only makes you want to avoid climbers and high-altitude climbing if at all possible. Plunder and Blunder (2009) by Dean Baker A masterful and concise treatment of the state of the financial world, national governance, corruption and a map of the current oligarchy. A perfect overview for those interested in knowing why things are so broken and how to fix them. Pulls no punches. Baker, as I've said many times, is a national treasure. Well-paired with Chomsky's Profits over People (reviewed above). War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning (2002) by Chris Hedges A plaintive disparagement of war in all its forms from a journalist who's been seduced and horrified by it. Hedges considers war as a drug to which all of mankind is addicted. Some of the book is smooth and well-edited philosophy whereas other parts seems to be cobbled from impressions gathered at various points in his career and documented in various essays, so there isn't one, smooth ethical thread guiding the whole affair. Instead, some parts are written with the voice of a man still deep in the grips of his addiction -- when he cheers the intervention in 1998 -- and other parts represent a more clear-eyed condemnation of any war, so-called humanitarian or otherwise. The Great God Pan (1890) by Arthur Machen Recommended by Stephen King as the inspiration for his story, N, in the collection, After Sunset. Though King raved about it, I found his paean to it, N, much more to my liking. Machen's version didn't elicit as much horror of the unknown as King's but that may be due to its age (over 100 years old) and the style, which goes on even more than King. Worth reading for the ambitious use of flashbacks and discontinuous plotting. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2005) by Stieg Larsson First off: much, much better than Dan Brown, so people's tastes seem to be improving. The style, while not bad, is still quite dry and clearly journalistic with its obsessive depiction of inconsequential detail, so it's still not even close to the effortless style of a Rushdie, for example. Similar to Brown, the plot is quite interesting and draws one further, though Larsson manages to make every revelation anti-climactic somehow (this may be due to his being a particularly heavy-handed foreshadower). In what is undoubtedly typical of such escapist fiction, everyone is rich, sexy, brilliant, successful and healthy (except for some throwaway characters or where unhealthiness is relevant to the plot). No one is boring. Oh, and the book may as well have been titled "Deus Ex Machina Deluxe". Despite all that, it was a fun read for the genre. 9-11 (2001, 2002) by Noam Chomsky A short compendium of interviews with Chomsky from throughout the year after the 9--11 attacks. A highly condensed primer to the historical and ideological background to those attacks as well as the U.S. response. An excellent introductory book for anyone new to Chomsky. In Defense of Lost Causes (2008, 2009) by Slavoj Žižek This is a long, dense and at times nearly impossible-to-read-or-decipher treatise on the state of philosophy, the state of intellectualism, the state of economics and the state of morality. Whatever your attitude toward Žižek, you can deny neither his intelligence nor his immense depth of research. He sees connections everywhere and is at times infuriatingly difficult to follow, though I fear that this is more the reader's shortcoming than his. His shortcoming is that he is, at times, a poor author, devolving to a style of delivery that is common to the lofty aeries of high philosophy and that is nearly impossible to decipher if one does not spend years steeped in the same jargon. The book is a very timely read as it predicts and supports the Occupy Wall Street protests with a plethora of historical and modern philosophical underpinning. Over 500 pages of dense philosophy is not for the faint of heart, but it was worth it. Shopgirl (2000) by Steve Martin An elegantly crafted novella about a young woman living on her own in LA. It is a novel about ennui, medically-induced stability, LA culture, the arts scene and, tangentially, about love as a man thinks a woman sees it. It is quite consistently sad, though there are a few fleeting high points. The impression one gets is of a land where the sun shines all the time and no one is truly happy. The Power of Love: My Experience in a U.S. Immigration Jail by Ana Amalia Guzmán Molina A somewhat unevenly translated story [2] of a family caught in U.S. immigration hell for a year and a half. The story takes place in 1999-2000, so it was before even the greater depredations of the Bush administration post-9--11 or the even greater ones (as recently reported) of the Obama administration. Overcrowding, inhumane treatment, insufficient nutrition, a near-total lack of medical care: if the U.S. jails are the worst in the first world, the U.S. immigration jails are the worst of those. The facts are interesting, but they are delivered through a miasma of Christian proselytizing that is a bit difficult to swallow at times. No Logo (2000/2002) by Naomi Klein Klein describes the state of branding, transnational corporations and privatized globalization of society in the late 90s, mostly from a Canadian and an American perspective. It's very well-written and eminently readable considering its content and serves as yet another reminder [3] that the economic problems facing the world are neither new nor were they unpredictable. That the class divide continues to grow is not an accident, but a logical conclusion of policy and planning. The book covers the decline of industry in North America (although Mexico, as part of the third world has acquired some industry) as well as the shape of industry and production in the EPZs (Export Processing Zones) run by the same corporations that are bending first-world society to its own ends, with branding and advertising as a primary weapon. An excellent read that portends the Occupy movement at least as much as Žižek's In Defense of Lost Causes. Homage To Catalonia (1952) by George Orwell Orwell's diary of his time serving in the Catalonian Army fighting Franco's fascist forces in Spain during the late 30s. Orwell traveled with his wife to Spain to report on the conflict and was so taken with the cause that he joined up immediately. Life at the front is miserable and almost completely futile, with no progress made by either side. Orwell punctuates the account with chapters analyzing the journalistic coverage of the war at the time and contrasting it with his own experience. The laziness of the media and its tendency to simply propagandize that which the ruling class in its home nation wants it to is nothing new or unique to our time. Orwell is a passionate defender of the truth whose prose isn't dated and still reads very well today. Bad Samaritans -- The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism (2008) by Ha-Joon Chang This book addresses the same issue as one of his previous books, Kicking Away the Ladder, but Mr. Chang's literary style has improved by leaps and bounds since the relatively dry and academic treatment in that book. The book lays out irrefutable evidence that neoliberal economics is not only wrong, but a deliberate sham promulgated by con-men bent on power and money. That's not Chang's conclusion, it's mine; he wasn't willing to go that far because he's an academic, but it's clear. The first-world countries used massive protectionism to get where they are -- as they should have -- and are now trying to keep the other countries down with specious arguments that belie their own histories (i.e. they "kick away the ladder"). Another extremely readable and interesting book, especially considering the subject matter. A Perfect Crime (1998) by Peter Abrahams This book prominently features an endorsement by Stephen King, who praises Abrahams's writing. Thankfully, this turns out to be true. The story is quite good and not horribly predictable and the writing was pretty tight. The story is basically of what happens when a marital affair is discovered by a husband who is overwhelmed by his own brilliance. He gets involved with a criminal who is similarly hobbled. Both are quite deluded. The Innocent Man (2006) by John Grisham Grisham ventures into non-fiction in a book that one gets the feeling he was compelled to write: his anger at the injustice, incompetence and lack of empathy of the U.S. justice system, from cops to DAs to judges, is palpable. The story centers on several capital cases in Oklahoma. Evidence is circumstantial at best, confessions are laughable and extorted under extreme duress, legal procedure is ignored, defense is lazy and incompetent, the media is oblivious and bloodthirsty, as are the jurors. Men whose lives were already shitty spend dozens of years of their lives in hellholes that pass for prisons, losing their sanity and their health, if not their ties to to their families and communities. And, when the mistake is finally acknowledged through the selfless efforts of the few remaining defenders of justice, the man walks free with no apology, no job, no training, no compensation for lost years and life, nothing but further ostracization from the community. The book can be a bit repetitive, but the subject matter is riveting and worth everyone's time. It's good to see someone of Grisham's influence taking such a strong stance. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] The novel was originally in English, but I was loaned a German copy to read. I have a feeling that the original was also simply atrocious prose. [1] The original, El Poder del Amor is in Spanish and is included in the copy I had. My Spanish isn't great, but good enough to determine that the English version lacked a certain amount of idiomatic flair found in the original. [1] Along with Profits over People by Noam Chomsky and Plunder and Blunder by Dean Baker. ]]> </content> </entry> <entry> <title type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Movies Without Reviews]]> </title> <id>https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=2503</id> <link href="https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=2503"/> <updated>2011-03-19T16:20:19+01:00</updated> <author> <name type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Marco von Ballmoos]]> </name> <uri>https://earthli.com/users/marco</uri> </author> <summary type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[I've been keeping track of the movies I watched for a couple of years now, but have only recently been adding mini-reviews [1] to each so I can remember (A) what it was about and (B) whether I liked it. Since I'm no longer maintaining the old text file in which I kept this list, I'm dumping the list... ]]> </summary> <content type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Published by marco on 19. Mar 2011 16:20:19 Updated by marco on 21. Feb 2016 12:27:42 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ I've been keeping track of the movies I watched for a couple of years now, but have only recently been adding mini-reviews [1] to each so I can remember (A) what it was about and (B) whether I liked it. Since I'm no longer maintaining the old text file in which I kept this list, I'm dumping the list here. [2008 (or so)] 1. Monster (2003) -- "8/10" <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0340855/> 2. The Good Shepherd (2006) -- "7/10" <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0343737/> 3. Breach (2007) -- "7/10" <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0401997/> 4. Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (2007) -- "7/10" <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0408236/> 5. Eastern Promises (2007) -- "9/10" <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0765443/> 6. Fearless (2006) -- "8/10" <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0446059/> 7. Pan's Labyrinth (2006) -- "8/10" <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0457430/> 8. Idiocracy (2006) -- "8/10" <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0387808/> 9. The Fountain (2006) -- "8/10" <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0414993/> 10. Babel (2006) -- "6/10" <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0449467/> 11. Shooter (2007) -- "8/10" <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0822854/> 12. The Machinist (2004) -- "8/10" <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0361862/> 13. Jarhead (2005) -- "7/10" <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0418763/> 14. Good night ,and Good Luck (2005) -- "9/10" <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0433383/> 15. Equilibrium (2002) -- "9/10" <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0238380/> 16. Music and Lyrics (2007) -- "6/10" <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0758766/> 17. Zodiac (2007) -- "9/10" <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0443706/> 18. A Scanner Darkly (2006) -- "8/10" <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0405296/> 19. The Last King of Scotland (2006) -- "8/10" <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0455590/> 20. Death Proof (2007) -- "7/10" <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1028528/> 21. Children of Men (2006) -- "8/10" <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0206634/> 22. The Prestige (2006) -- "10/10" <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0482571/> 23. John Rambo (2008) -- "7/10" <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0462499/> 24. Next (2007) -- "5/10" <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0435705/> 25. Keeping Mum (2005) -- "7/10" <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0444653/> 26. Brokeback Mountain (2005) -- "8/10" <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0388795/> 27. Cop Land (1997) -- "8/10" <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0118887/> 28. Das Leben der Anderen (2006) -- "9/10" <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0405094/> 29. Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008) -- "4/10" <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0367882/> 30. The Dark Knight (2008) -- "9/10" <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0468569/> 31. Superman Returns (2006) -- "5/10" <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0348150/> 32. 300 (2006) -- "5/10" <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0416449/> 33. Hancock (2008) -- "7/10" <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0448157/> 34. The Mummy: Tomb Of The Dragon Emperor (2008) -- "6/10" <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0859163/> 35. Rescue Dawn (2006) -- "9/10" <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0462504/> 36. Iron Man (2008) -- "8/10" <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0371746/> [2009] 1. Princess Bride (1987) -- "9/10" <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0093779/> 2. Mamma Mia! (2008) -- "6/10" <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0795421/> 3. Monster's Ball (2001) -- "6/10" <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0285742/> 4. Stranger than Fiction (2006) -- "8/10" <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0420223/> 5. Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby -- "7/10" <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0415306/> 6. Sicko (2007) -- "7/10" <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0386032/> 7. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (2007) -- "7/10" <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0373889/> 8. I Love You, Man (2009) -- "7/10" <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1155056/> 9. The Darjeeling Limited (2007) -- "8/10" <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0838221/> 10. Quantum of Solace (2008) -- "6/10" <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0830515/> 11. Angels & Demons (2009) -- "4/10" <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0808151/> 12. Gran Torino (2008) -- "9/10" <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1205489/> 13. Control (2004) -- "8/10" <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0374584/> 14. Rocky Balboa (2006) -- "7/10" <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0479143/> 15. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (2009) -- "7/10" <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0417741/> 16. X-Men Origins: Wolverine (2009) -- "7/10" <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0458525/> 17. Whatever Works (2009) -- "8/10" <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1178663/> 18. Miller's Crossing (1990) -- "9/10" <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0100150/> 19. Battle Royale (2000) -- "4/10" <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0266308/> 20. 2012 (2009) -- "5/10" <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1190080/> 21. Blades of Glory (2007) -- "6/10" <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0445934/> 22. 2046 (2004) -- "8/10" <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0212712/> 23. I Am Legend (2007) -- "6/10" <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0480249/> 24. Blood Simple (1984) -- "8/10" <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0086979/> 25. Shaun of the Dead (2004) -- "7/10" <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0365748/> 26. The Hangover (2009) -- "7/10" <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1119646/> 27. Reservoir Dogs (1992) -- "8/10" <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0105236/> 28. The Host (2005) -- "5/10" <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0468492/> 29. The Pervert's Guide to Cinema (2006) -- "9/10" <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0828154/> 30. Extract (2009) -- "6/10" <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1225822/> 31. Up (2009) -- "6/10" <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1049413/> 32. Star Trek (2009) -- "9/10" <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0796366/> [2010] 1. In Debt We Trust: American Before the Bubble Bursts (2006) -- "8/10" <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0829429/> 2. Food, Inc. (2008) -- "9/10" <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1286537/> 3. G.I. Joe - Rise of the Cobra (2009) -- "4/10" <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1046173/> 4. Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (2009) -- "4/10" <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1055369/> 5. Watchmen (2009) -- "9/10" <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0409459/> 6. Why We Fight (2005) -- "8/10" <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0436971/> 7. Bronson (2008) -- "7/10" <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1172570/> 8. Collapse (2009) -- "8/10" <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1503769/> 9. I.O.U.S.A. (2008) -- "8/10" <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0963807/> 10. Iraq for Sale: The War Profiteers (2006) -- "7/10" <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0815181/> 11. Standard Operating Procedure (2008) -- "8/10" <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0896866/> 12. War, Inc. (2008) -- "6/10" <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0884224/> 13. Zizek! (2005) -- "8/10" <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0478338/> 14. Public Enemies (2009) -- "4/10" <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1152836/> 15. Wall-E (2008) -- "8/10" <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0910970/> 16. The Reader (2008) -- "8/10" <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0976051/> 17. Drag Me to Hell (2009) -- "6/10" <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1127180/> 18. Die Schweizermacher (1978) -- "9/10" <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0078212/> 19. West Side Story (1961) -- "6/10" <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0055614/> 20. Sixteen Candles (1984) -- "7/10" <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0088128/> 21. Pretty in Pink (1986) -- "6/10" <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0091790/> 22. Logorama (2009) -- "7/10" <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1563725/> 23. An Inconvenient Truth (2006) -- "8/10" <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0497116/> 24. In the Loop (2009) -- "7/10" <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1226774/> 25. Footloose (1984) -- "6/10" <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0087277/> 26. The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) -- "9/10" <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0050212/> 27. Rendition (2007) -- "7/10" <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0804522/> 28. Chicago (2002) -- "8/10" <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0299658/> 29. Ghost Rider (2007) -- "5/10" <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0259324/> 30. Hitman (2007) -- "6/10" <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0465494/> 31. The Wizard of Oz (1939) -- "6/10" <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0032138/> 32. Casablanca (1942) -- "9/10" <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0034583/> 33. Sunshine Cleaning (2008) -- "7/10" <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0862846/> 34. 3:10 to Yuma (2007) -- "7/10" <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0381849/> 35. No Country for Old Men (2007) -- "9/10" <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0477348/> 36. Hurt Locker (2009) -- "5/10" <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0887912/> 37. Lakeview Terrace (2008) -- "4/10" <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0947802/> 38. Precious (2009) -- "9/10" <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0929632/> 39. Ghost World (2001) -- "7/10" <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0162346/> 40. Man Push Cart (2005) -- "8/10" <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0464105/> 41. Slumdog Millionaire (2008) -- "5/10" <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1010048/> 42. Synecdoche, New York (2008) -- "9/10" <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0383028/> 43. Youth in Revolt (2009) -- "7/10" <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0403702/> 44. Julie & Julia (2009) -- "6/10" <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1135503/> 45. The Men Who Stare at Goats -- "6/10" <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1234548/> 46. Alice in Wonderland -- "6/10" <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1014759/> 47. Death at a Funeral (2007) -- "7/10" <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0795368/> 48. Land of the Lost (2009) -- "6/10" <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0457400/> 49. All About Steve (2009) -- "6/10" <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0881891/> 50. Der Baader Meinhof Komplex (2008) -- "7/10" <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0765432/> 51. The X Files: I Want to Believe (2008) -- "6/10" <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0443701/> 52. Iron Man 2 (2010) -- "7/10" <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1228705/> 53. Sherlock Holmes -- "8/10" <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0988045/> 54. This is It (2009) -- "6/10" <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1477715/> 55. Hunger (2008) -- "8/10" <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0986233/> 56. Wanted (2008) -- "5/10" <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0493464/> The rest of the movies for 2010 and 2011 are listed in * "Capsule Movie Reviews Vol.2011.1" <https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=2460> * "Capsule Movie Reviews Vol.2011.2" <https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=2462> * "Capsule Movie Reviews Vol.2011.3" <https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=2476> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] See the links at the end of the article, just above. ]]> </content> </entry> <entry> <title type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Books read in 2010]]> </title> <id>https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=2324</id> <link href="https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=2324"/> <updated>2011-01-01T21:30:17+01:00</updated> <author> <name type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Marco von Ballmoos]]> </name> <uri>https://earthli.com/users/marco</uri> </author> <summary type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[ 1. Foucault's Pendulum (1988) (second half) -- Umberto Eco 2. The Great War of Civilization (2005) -- Robert Fisk (second half) 3. Naked Pictures of Famous People (1998) -- Jon Stewart 4. The Drought (1965) -- JG Ballard 5. Drowned World (1962) -- JG Ballard 6. Spook Country (2007) -- William Gibson 7. Free Lunch ... ]]> </summary> <content type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Published by marco on 1. Jan 2011 21:30:17 Updated by marco on 15. Feb 2011 16:57:10 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ 1. Foucault's Pendulum (1988) (second half) -- Umberto Eco 2. The Great War of Civilization (2005) -- Robert Fisk (second half) 3. Naked Pictures of Famous People (1998) -- Jon Stewart 4. The Drought (1965) -- JG Ballard 5. Drowned World (1962) -- JG Ballard 6. Spook Country (2007) -- William Gibson 7. Free Lunch (2007) -- David Cay Johnston 8. Stardust (1999) -- Neil Gaiman 9. Heat (2006) -- George Monbiot 10. Unbowed (2006) -- Wangari Maathai 11. Grieche sucht Griechin/Mister X macht Ferien/Zeitungswesen in der Steinzeit (1949-1978) -- Friedrich Dürrenmatt (de) 12. Der Dativ ist dem Genitiv sein Tod (2006) -- Bastian Sick (de) 13. Wie sollen wir leben? (1993) -- Peter Singer (de) 14. Under the Dome (2009) -- Stephen King 15. Witches Abroad (1991) -- Terry Pratchett 16. Midnight's Children (1981) -- Salman Rushdie 17. Freedom from Want (2005) -- George Kent 18. Violence (2008) -- Slavoj Žižek 19. Future - Four Novellas (2000) -- Petter F. Hamilton, Stephen Baxter, Paul McAuley, Ian McDonald 20. Der Tod in Venedig (1966) -- Thomas Mann (de) 21. Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (1994) -- John Berendt 22. The Great Derangement (2008) -- Matt Taibbi 23. Inherent Vice (2009) -- Thomas Pynchon 24. Anathem (2008) -- Neal Stephenson 25. The Satanic Verses (1988) -- Salman Rushdie 26. The Jungle (1906) -- Upton Sinclair 27. The Stuff of Thought: Language as Window into Human Nature (2007) -- Steven Pinker 28. Introducing HTML5 (2010) -- Bruce Lawson & Remy Sharp ]]> </content> </entry> <entry> <title type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Struggling through the Lost Symbol]]> </title> <id>https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=2455</id> <link href="https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=2455"/> <updated>2011-01-01T14:24:11+01:00</updated> <author> <name type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Marco von Ballmoos]]> </name> <uri>https://earthli.com/users/marco</uri> </author> <summary type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[It was the start of the long week between Christmas and New Year's Eve and it was time to start a new book. A quick scan of the book shelf revealed many interesting candidates, but most of those were a bit more challenging than a week of this kind warranted. But look who's hiding on one of the... ]]> </summary> <content type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Published by marco on 1. Jan 2011 14:24:11 Updated by marco on 21. Apr 2011 07:04:34 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ It was the start of the long week between Christmas and New Year's Eve and it was time to start a new book. A quick scan of the book shelf revealed many interesting candidates, but most of those were a bit more challenging than a week of this kind warranted. But look who's hiding on one of the shelves: good ol' Dan Brown. This copy of The Lost Symbol had been obtained from the local Salvation Army secondhand shop for only a couple of bucks. I'd gotten Brown's two other books in the same way, but had to settle for translations in German. Those were pretty fun and I admit I kind of enjoyed the stories, even when they got kind of crazy. It's what escapist entertainment is for, no? Now it was time to try Mr. Brown "in his own words", as it were. So, let's crack the book and get started; it should be a quick read: readers with far less nimble minds than mine [1] have torn through Brown books in a weekend, so it should be an exciting romp. "The secret is how to die. Since the beginning of time, the secret had always been how to die. The thirty-four-year-old inititate gazed down at the human skull cradled in his palms. The skull was hollow, like a bowl, filled with bloodred wine." Wait, "like a bowl"? That's it? You added three extra words and two commas to explicate with that scintillating simile? Of course it's like a bowl; you just said it was a hollow skull. And why does it matter exactly how old the initiate is? Maybe eventually it will matter, but do we really need to know that detail in one of the first sentences in the book? And bloodred is not a word. It looks stupid like that. Yeesh. That's only the first few sentences. This isn't nearly as relaxing as anticipated and now I'm beginning to see that a tendency to lexical analysis is going to prove to be an impediment when reading Mr. Brown. Let us, despite misgivings, press on. We don't feel like getting up for a return trip to the book shelf. "Outside the main entrance, two seventeen-ton sphinxes guarded the bronze doors. (Emphasis added)" I'm not going to be shipping them across the country, Dan, I don't need to know exactly how heavy they are. "This room was a perfect square. And cavernous." That those two "sentences" [2] -- right at the beginning of the book -- survived what had to have been a relatively rigorous editing process says quite a bit about the state of the publishing industry. Did anyone really edit this thing? Anyone beside Mr. Brown's children, who clearly helped with the plot and much of the dialogue? This feels like The Phantom Menace all over again. "The ceiling soared an astonishing one hundred feet overhead [where else would a ceiling be? -ed.], supported by monolithic columns of green granite. A tiered gallery of dark Russian walnut seats [Are these "dark, Russian, walnut seats" or "dark, Russian-walnut seats" or what? -ed.] with hand-tooled pigskin encircled the room. A thirty-three-foot-tall throne dominated the western wall, with a concealed pipe organ opposite it. The walls were a kaleidoscope of ancient symbols...Egyptian, Hebraic, astronomical, alchemical, and others yet unknown." Oooh. A surfeit of nearly incomprehensible detail culminating in an "everything but the kitchen" sink approach to indicating just how mysterious and ancient and in-fucking-effable the symbols were. What are "alchemical" symbols? Or "astronomical" ones? Were there cosmological equations on the wall? Why not mention that the long-sought TOE or GUT was on the wall somewhere in a language nearly lost to the mists of time? [3] Still, pretty impressive room, no? Thirty-three-foot-tall throne and all, with a pipe organ, symbols every-fucking-where and probably a to-scale orrery of the inner Solar System that went unmentioned due to its comparative mundanity. Mr. Brown throws in an "expansive oculus [round window. -ed.] in the ceiling that [illuminates] the room's most startling feature". Whoa, there's more? Isn't the throne enough? Wouldn't that just blow you away? Nope, that's nothing compared to the "enormous altar [what -- couldn't you find out its exact weight? -ed.] hewn from a solid block of Belgian black marble [Well, at least he managed to find out where it's from. -ed.]..." Steady as she goes; perhaps one can get accustomed to the superlative, hyperbolic style laced with near-autistic levels of detail. "The initiate let his gaze climb the distinguished white-robed figure standing before him. The Supreme Worshipful Master." Aw, hell no. First off, do we have to subside into the passive voice so often and unflinchingly and seemingly without complaint? Letting your gaze climb someone is a form much more appropriate for bodice-rippers than novels about ancient mysteries. But maybe I'm assuming too little about the direction this encounter is going to take. So, does this master earn his name? You bet your ass he does: "The man, in his late fifties, was an American icon, well loved [sic] [4], robust, and incalculably wealthy. His once-dark hair was turning silver, and his famous visage reflected a lifetime of power and vigorous intellect." We get it. We got it just from the name. He's better in every way than you and I could ever hope to be. If you've ever gone S.C.U.B.A diving, he's a solo cave-diver; if you wrote an article, he's written dozens of books; his mastery of the arts of love are legendary and puts yours in the shade. He's the bestest in every way, like James Bond, squared. And WTF is a vigorous intellect? Is it the kind you better damned well not possess in order to get more than four pages into a Dan Brown novel without poking yourself in the eye in self-defense? Stop being such an ass and just read the book. Fine. It's only the prologue, so finish up the remaining paragraphs -- which are chock-full of foreshadowing designed to "hook" you for the remaining 500 pages [5] -- and get to chapter one. "The Otis elevator climbing the south pillar of the Eiffel Tower [...]" Why do I care which company made the elevator? Oh, to hell with it. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] Don't care. It's true. [1] The first is a sentence, albeit a very simple one. The second is two words followed by a full stop masquerading as a sentence to unenlightened readers. [1] Save for the last two members of identical septuplet sisters who speak this ancient language, but who have never met due to the fastidious machinations of a cabal who are like the Illuminati, but way more mysterious and in-fucking-effable. Oh, and the sisters are totally hot and have had white hair from birth and wicked gray eyes, so you might think that they kind of look like the two zombie guys from the second Matrix flick, which they kind of do, I guess, but they're way, way, way hotter. Trust me. Smokin'. [1] The attitude toward hyphens is pretty scattershot throughout. [1] Which are, by the way, divided into 133 chapters. Really? Is that to help you feel like you're making your way through the book more quickly? Are the chapters little rewards for faithful readers? ]]> </content> </entry> <entry> <title type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Notes on Der Dativ ist dem Genitiv sein Tod by Bastian Sick]]> </title> <id>https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=2372</id> <link href="https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=2372"/> <updated>2010-05-09T00:16:13+02:00</updated> <author> <name type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Marco von Ballmoos]]> </name> <uri>https://earthli.com/users/marco</uri> </author> <summary type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[In an effort to continue improving my German, I read the book mentioned in the title, which is a rollicking guide to the finicky nuance of the German language. A few years back, I read Eat, Shoots and Leaves by Lynne Truss, which effects a similar service for the English language. Another... ]]> </summary> <content type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Published by marco on 9. May 2010 00:16:13 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ In an effort to continue improving my German, I read the book mentioned in the title, which is a rollicking guide to the finicky nuance of the German language. A few years back, I read Eat, Shoots and Leaves by Lynne Truss, which effects a similar service for the English language. Another absolutely wonderful essay on the issue of usage and grammar is Tense Present: Democracy, English, and the wars over usage by David Foster Wallace (a few citations of which are documented on "earthli News" <https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=2294>), which not only provides solid usage advice for what he (DFW) calls SWE (Standard Written English) but also a scintillating philosophical underpinning to a theory of dialect. The German book above does something similar, with excursions into the nether regions of German grammar, in which certain parts of the country completely disdain the Accusative case whereas others ignore the Dative and pretty much the whole colloquial mass has decided to leave the Genetive well enough alone. Sick -- as Wallace before him -- acknowledges that people can't be expected to get everything right when German -- with its three genders, gender-specific declensions, multiple cases, verbs that have a single declension, verbs that can be in one of two declensions and verbs that decline differently depending on object type (human or object?) and time of day (that's an exaggeration, but students of German know what I mean). Throw into the mix the fact that German actually has at least two official versions -- old and new grammar, though only new grammar should really be used at this point, having been issued initially in 1996 -- and there is definitely a tendency for native German speakers and writers to feel like they can do what they please -- because it's got to be correct somewhere. But, just because it's difficult doesn't mean that getting it wrong is somehow acceptable. It may be colloquially accepted and common practice even in news organs that should know better, but it's still wrong. Wrong in this case being not grammatically correct by the official definition, which is all that is really salient when discussing a written language [1]. And, though some grammatical rules seem designed just to separate native speakers from those less fortunate, many rules are there to not only impart clarity, but to impart a lyrical quality that defines the language, that makes the language what it is, that makes the language "sound" right to a native speaker. [Reading Finickily [2]] Once you get to this level of language finickiness, though, you start to read everything through the lens of an editor. A recent example for this author was the home page of the "JediChurch -- Jedi Religion and Jedi Faith" <http://www.jedichurch.org/>. The few small paragraphs describing the Jedi religion are fraught with poor phrasing and grammatical errors, enough so that they act as nigh-insurmountable speed bumps to a snoot (to borrow a term from DFW) [3]. For example, the initial paragraph: "The Jedi Church believes that there is one all powerful force that binds all things in the universe together. The Jedi religion is something innate inside everyone of us, the Jedi Church believes that our sense of morality is innate. So quiet your mind and listen to the force within you!" First off, "all-powerful" is missing a hyphen. Secondly -- and more egregiously -- "binding" things "together" is redundant: it's sufficient to say that they are bound. Also, if you're addressing "all things", you don't have to specify "in the universe" because that's redundant too. It would be far more succinct to write "one all-powerful force that binds all things." Furthermore, when something is "innate", it's already clear that it's "inside": that's what innate means. Also, "everyone" is an object, the sought-for construction in this case is "every one". The "something" can be omitted because it's substituting a subject from which the sentence has not yet switched ("Jedi religion", which immediately precedes it). The phrase "of us" is, sadly, also redundant, having already been sufficiently included in "every one". But, instead of switching back to "everyone", let's retain "all of us", which is warmer and more apropos to a religion. So, let's rewrite the second sentence as "The Jedi religion is innate to all of us." Notice how we ended the sentence right there instead of retaining the purely nonsensical comma, placed in the original in what seems to have been a mad effort to continue the sentence despite its having so clearly been completed. It is here that a semicolon would (possibly) have been appropriate. I imagine that this was a Jedi trick played in order to keep us from noticing that the word "Jedi" and "innate" were used twice in rapid succession. After reading that far, I decided that the Jedi religion was not for me. Writing isn't easy, and writing without an editor is even harder [4]. The Jedi home page smacks of a person who has too little practice succintly and clearly expressing himself [5] in written form. Many people in this situation tend to use a manner of expression that they consider above their station in order to sound more sophisticated. And that insecurity is often the source of the slightly skewed use and redundant phrasing evident in passages like the one cited above. And perhaps also in this essay [6]. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] Granted that there are texts written completely in local dialects and other texts that include dialogue in dialects, which also have their own rules to which a writer must adhere, but here the author defers to the DFW essay mentioned at the beginning of this article because he said all that there needs to be said on the subject of dialects and their place and said it much better, to boot. [1] A snoot is a person extremely -- and perhaps excessively and obsessively, as well -- concerned with proper grammar and punctuation. [1] The author freely admits to countless errors in his own texts, including the one above, due to tiredness, lack of interest or simply too many Martinis. [1] Or herself, of course, though the author will happily make the assumption that a web page about a religion from a science fiction universe was written by a guy. The word that should not -- under any circumstances -- appear here is themselves -- as in "smacks of a person [...] clearly expressing themselves" -- because that is mixing singular & plural. And grammatically incorrect is worse than politically incorrect, in this author's humble opinion. Upon re-reading the sentence, the author noticed that he had actually initially written "smacks of a person that [...]", which is incorrect because a person is a who, but, if you've read this far, you clearly get the point that writing is a discipline that demands constant -- if not hyper -- vigilance. [1] The author is fully aware that this is an unusual adverb form and that the word "finicky" appears, to the casual observer, an inordinate number of times in this text. [1] To put into prose what the reader is perhaps, at this point, thinking. See definition of snoot above. ]]> </content> </entry> <entry> <title type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Citations from Heat by George Monbiot]]> </title> <id>https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=2349</id> <link href="https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=2349"/> <updated>2010-03-21T14:13:08+01:00</updated> <author> <name type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Marco von Ballmoos]]> </name> <uri>https://earthli.com/users/marco</uri> </author> <summary type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[[image]Heat is a very accessible book on the state of the world's climate, energy and heating needs today and going into the future. The author sets himself the task of coming up with a plan for our planet that is economically, socially and climatologically viable. His express goal is to keep convenience... ]]> </summary> <content type="text" xml:lang="en-us"> <![CDATA[Published by marco on 21. Mar 2010 14:13:08 Updated by marco on 4. Feb 2025 19:07:47 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ [image]Heat is a very accessible book on the state of the world's climate, energy and heating needs today and going into the future. The author sets himself the task of coming up with a plan for our planet that is economically, socially and climatologically viable. His express goal is to keep convenience and freedom as much like it is now as possible while reducing CO2 emissions by 90% across the board -- domestic usage, air travel, industrial, transports, construction and so on. He will not altogether succeed, but his studies do show that much of the lifestyle to which we in the rich world have become accustomed is based on a profligate waste of what has heretofore been extremely cheap energy. More precisely, the energy we use is vastly undervalued and underpriced and usually heavily subsidized. The more micro-level of his studies are based on the UK and its culture and economy, but the results apply broadly to other countries, particularly Europe and the U.S. if not so well to the considerably different spread of energy use in China and India. What follows are citations I found interesting enough to mark as I was reading. They are not meant to paint a picture, but are more interesting or just well-written nuggets of information culled from the book. [Amazing Electricity] For instance, the following paragraph illustrates a process that most of us take for granted. The proposals of many so-called environmentalists to replace a country's electricity grid with micro-turbines are made not only hopelessly, but laughably naive by not considering how the current system works and the level of service that it provides. Any replacement system will have to provide the same level of service or will have to wait until straits are much more dire. "What this means is that the electricity companies must study the behaviour of their customers, chart their historical use of electricity, anticipate public holidays and national events, read the weather forecasts and the television schedules and study the ratings, and watch the penalty shoot-outs in order to determine when the entire country will lever its collective backside off the sofa." And the electricity companies do this within minutes. They may not be the most efficient or the cheapest, but the level of service they provide is amazing -- and all the more amazing in that we never think about it at all. I've lived in Switzerland for over seven years and can only recall one power outage, which lasted less than a second. [Even Smarter Networks] The system can be improved, though, with modern technology assisting devices to be much smarter about their own consumption. The devices can make decisions on their own or they could communicate with one another right over the same lines from which they draw their power. "An open standard protocol [should] be developed and published to allow information about the instantaneous price of electricity to be broadcast through the electricity supply system. Much of the electromagnetic frequency spectrum would be available for this purpose without interfering with the principal power supply function, much as a telephone line can simultaneously provide voice and broadband Internet service." A colleague of mine has Powerline, which uses exactly this kind of technology to allow home networks to run over the power lines running throughout a home instead of having to lay down dedicated cables or using a wireless network. [Cars and Subsidies] Most western society also deliberately encourages the wrong behavior. That is, those on the right might be sick to no end of the platitudes spouted by politicians about the environment. Because of this, they may feel that the government is left-leaning and poised to whisk away freedoms right out from under their libertarian feet. However, with politicians -- with anyone, in fact -- its important to remember that whom they pay is more important than what they say. For example, in England, subsidies are far heavier in support of automobiles than public transportation. "One of the reasons for this can be found in the paper [The British government] published in 2005. The graphs there show that though gross domestic product has risen by 60 per cent since 1986, the cost of driving has fallen. The government expects the two lines to keep diverging to 2025 and beyond. While bus and coach fares have risen in real terms by 66 per cent since 1975, and train tickets by 70 per cent, the cost of owning and running a car has fallen by 11 per cent." Those using public transportation are seeing their costs rising far beyond any possible cost-of-living increase, which clearly actively discourages use of such. However, auto commuters have seen their costs drop, despite everything else having gotten more expensive. There is no way to imagine this happening without massive subsidies, likely mostly hidden, but nonetheless real. It's not a great stretch of the imagination to suppose that things are much the same in the States. "The speed and acceleration of our cars is a form of profligacy at which all future generations will goggle." Nicely put. So not only has car ownership gotten cheaper, but cars have become more and more powerful -- ridiculously overpowered for all practical purposes. [Food] Monbiot also takes care to very clearly and open-eyed address the sheer immorality of living our "profligate" lifestyles, which will very consequently lead to droughts in countries of which we have scarcely heard, and of multitudes of deaths of people that we would never have met. Out of sight, out of mind for most (this author included, difficult as it is to admit). "People who own cars -- by definition -- have more money than people at risk of starvation: their demand is 'effective', while the groans of the starving are not. In a contest between cars and people, the care would win. Something rather like this is happening already. Though 800 million people are permanently malnourished, the global increase in crop production is being used mostly to feed animals: the number of livestock on earth has quintupled since 1950. The reason is that those who buy meat and dairy products have more purchasing power than those who only buy subsistence crops." The world is raising more food than ever, but "wasting" it on feeding other food that ends up costing far more energy than is necessary. Meat is a unbelievable luxury to which most of us have become incredibly accustomed -- but the costs are astronomical. [Flying] As with the automotive subsidies, the UK has no trouble talking out of both sides of its mouth vis-à-vis air travel. For example, they promise that increased air travel can somehow be reconciled with relatively aggresive carbon cuts. "The new runways [the British government] is planning 'would permit around 470 million passengers by 2030'. "You might wonder how the British government reconciles this projection with its commitment to cut carbon emissions by 60 per cent by 2050. The answer is that it doesn't have to. As the Department for Transport cheerfully admits, "International flights from the UK do not currently count in the national inventories of greenhouse gas emissions as there is no international agreement yet on ways of allocating such emissions. "This is a remarkable evasion. It is true that there is 'no international agreement yet'. But a child could see that you simply divide the emissions by half. The country from which passengers depart or in which they arrive accepts 50 per cent of the responsibility." Aha! So that's how they do it! Air travel can be increased because, without an "international agreement" on parcelling out blame for the CO2 it generates, that CO2 can be ignored. *POOF* It just no longer exists. The planet, of course, will not ignore the CO2 as easily as self-interested politicians, who seem to have the morals and reasoning ability of four-year-olds. Flying is a luxury taken for granted by those of us in the first world. I live in Switzerland, separated from a good part of my family, which lives in the States. That personal air travel (for the most part) cannot be reconciled with the massive drops in CO2 required by the climate affects me directly. It's hard to feel sorry for myself as it's not like I'm starving, dehydrating or drowning as so many others are. But Monbiot puts it so well, let's let him say it: "Perhaps the most intractable cause of global warming is 'love miles': the distance you must to travel [sic] to visit friends and partners and relatives on the other side of the planet. The world could be destroyed by love." "A wealthy society's split incentives are shared by its government. As Tony Blair remarked, 'there is a mismatch in timing between the environmental and electoral impact.' By the time the decisions he has made come home to roost, he will have been out of office for years. If a government allows the growth of air travel to continue, for example, the effects are delayed, diffuse and hard to blame on any one source. If, by contrast, it restricts or reverses the growth in flights, the effects are immediately attributable to its actions. Everyone knows who is responsible if we may no longer fly to Thailand." "So I offer you no comfort in this chapter. A 90 per cent cut in carbon emissions means the end of distant foreign holidays, unless you are prepared to take a long time getting there. It means that business meetings must take place over the Internet or by means of video conferences. It means that trans-continental journeys must be made by train -- and even then not by the fastest trains -- or coach. It means that journeys around the world must be reserved for visiting the people you love, and that they will require both slow travel and the saving up of carbon rations. It means the end of shopping trips to New York, parties in Ibiza, second homes in Tuscany and, most painfully for me, political meetings in Porto Alegre -- unless you believe that these activities are worth the sacrifice of the biosphere and the lives of the poor. But I urge you to remember that these privations affect a tiny proportion of the world's people. The reason they seem so harsh is that this tiny proportion almost certainly includes you. (Emphasis added.)" The sentences I emphasized sum up the moral argument in a nutshell. It's really hard to argue your way around them. [It's not me, it's you] Even after having written the book, Monbiot still found it hard to imagine how exactly all of these dire predictions would affect his own life. "Similarly, when considering what might happen to people in my own country or in other parts of the rich world -- in which the human impacts of global warming will be delayed both by our more forgiving climate and by the money we can spend on our protection -- I have found the likely effects easy to catalogue but almost impossible to imagine. I can understand, intellectually, that 'life' in this country might not be the same in thirty years' time as it is today; that if climate change goes unchecked it could in fact be profoundly and catastrophically different. But somehow I have been unable to turn this knowledge into a recognition that my own life will alter. Like everyone who has been insulated from death, I have projected the future as repeated instance of the present. The world might change, but I will not." [] Hey, here's an idea! How about we do absolutely nothing and wait for the problem to go away by itself? "It could well be true that petroleum will peak within the next 10 years; it could also be true that it will take 30. If this is the case and if we have placed our faith in the decline of oil supplies while simultaneously failing to do anything to prevent it (not, I am afraid to say, an unlikely proposition), we could find ourselves facing catastrophic climate change and an unprecedented global depression. (Emphasis added)" The decline of oil will most certainly not be a fun time on this planet. There will be resource wars and nearly unimaginable transgressions against nature as the last dregs of petroleum are wrenched from the earth and bombarded with noxious chemicals to refine it. As Monbiot points out, the less dependent we are on such processes, the more we mitigate the effects of the inevitable economic privations that will come from a large, jarring and unplanned-for transition. [On Carbon Indulgences] So here's a nice explanation of why these indulgences are complete and utter bullshit. Again, the emphasis is mine, but it's the reason that proponents of such practices are guilty of hand-waving flim-flammery (yeah, I'm kinda looking at you, Al Gore, though your film was quite good). "Planting trees in one place might kill trees elsewhere, as they could dry up a river which was feeding a forest downstream. By taking up land which might otherwise have been used to grow crops, it could drive local people to fell forests elsewhere in order to feed themselves. Your trees might die before they reach maturity, especially as their growing conditions change with global warming. Timber poachers could fell them; a forest fire could fry them. In other words, in flying to New York we can be sure that carbon dioxide has been released. In paying to plant trees, we cannot be sure that it will be absorbed. (Emphasis added.)" [Waiting for a Miracle] In the end, Monbiot acknowledges that we are mostly still hoping for a miracle technological fix. But the preceding 215 pages showed that there are no miracles that will come quickly enough to save us. It is only pragmatic reduction, restriction and reorientation that will save us from ourselves. "But if those governments that have expressed a commitment to stopping climate change have found their efforts frustrated, it is partly because they wanted them to be frustrated. They know that inside their electors is a small but insistent voice asking them both to try and to fail. They know that if they had the misfortune to succeed, our lives would have to change. They know that we can contemplate a transformation of anyone's existence but our own." The problem with climate change is that those that are causing the problem are those least incentivized to do anything about it. It's easy to imagine that the coming climate change will be a total game-changer. It may not be the undoing of mankind, but it will drastically reorganize things -- one must at least become familiar with the word "dystopia" to discuss the future, I think. ]]> </content> </entry> </feed>