EH was a member of the upper crust. He was born in Germany, educated in the USA (at Harvard), and returned to Germany to cozy up to Hitler before the Beer Hall Putsch. He was drawn to his oratory style and like his political ideas. Germany was a mess at the time (in 1923, a beer cost 3 billion marks), and Hitler seemed like the way out. He is not all that smart, from what I could tell, but he played the piano the way Hitler liked, and he became Hitler's foreign press secretary. He was a Nazi, but not like the others, or so we are to believe. He was very close to Hitler until 1937, when he and his son fled just ahead of the bad guys. EH had mouthed off one too many times. His insights are self serving to a large extent, but there is no denying that he got to know Hitler and his moods quite well. He saw the politics spinning out of control after the Night of the Long Knives. He had this to say of Hitler: "He thought if you talked long enough and vehemently enough, repeated your arguments a dozen times in a dozen forms, there was no obstacle, human or technical, that could not be overcome." Shirer (author of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich) thought him a bit of a dim bulb. The writing is OK. The subject matter is interesting to me but, I suspect, few others.
0 Comments
I read, and did not read, this book. I whistled through a lot of it. I wanted to read about her transformation. Large segments of the book are about family life. But the rest, while still over long for my taste, was worth the price. So I did get to the end. This is a long read… more like 450 pages in a more leaded/slightly larger font type layout. Fair warning: the descriptions of female genital mutilation are not fun to read. The grandson of Van Goch was murdered in Holland. The note stabbed to his chest was addressed to the author. Her remarkable journey is an education in Islam, technology shock, politics, and foreign policy both for the reader and for Ali. She went from living in the sixth century -- with a dash of modernity like cell phones -- to full-on twenty-first century morality and technology. She even got elected to Dutch parliament in just a few short years. She ditched her pre-arranged husband, and claimed asylum in The Netherlands. Her father loved the idea of the marriage because it extended the tribal family and added power. He pretty much disowned his daughter over the issue. One cute example of culture shock: Ali encountered a Dutch cop who admonished her for riding a bike at night with no light. She was very afraid of cops. She was stunned when she got a minor lecture and a ticket for 35 guilders, which she paid though the mail. She was filled with wonder over how cleaver the Dutch were to avoid graft in that way. She also noted that, unlike Somalia, everything was finished. Not "finished" in the sense of "nice moldings", but finished in the sense of done. No half built and abandoned bridges or buildings. Her slow transformation from religious nut-case, through o cognitive dissonance, to atheist is quite interesting. I have read a lot of science fiction In my day. One plot line that comes up a lot of global war: civilization versus fanaticism. Ali feels that the major challenge of the next century may be dealing with exactly that. Her main message about Islam: it is not about peace; it is backward; and it treats women like shit. I was watching a documentary on earthquakes about 9 days ago, based in part on this book. I ordered the book and started reading two days later. I thought myself fairly knowledgeable on earthquakes, but I was wrong. Mostly because most of what we know we have found out in the last decade or two. The book is written as a sort of detective novel, leading up to its big conclusion. Many people of my age probably think that we are in a largely earthquake free zone. Geologists thought so too, but wondered why the Cascadia had not had a large quake when every other part of the ring of fire did. They rationalized that our rocks are slippery so stresses can be relieved regularly. After Sumatra and the 250,000 dead there, interest picked up in Cascadia. Could a Magnitude 9 quake be in our future too? In the olden days, lo, several decades ago in the sixties, plate tectonics was only just gaining acceptance. In the eighties, lasers were used to measure distances between points to see if the earth was moving. This was expensive and difficult. Then GPS came along. Geologists were not interested in GPS coordinates per se, they were interested in how far apart two rock-fixed points were. This was cheap and easy. Soon tons of data was pouring in and computer simulation started taking off. The other thing they did was to look for evidence of past quakes in multiple different ways. They found it. Spoiler alert… We are due. The Juan De Fuca Plate is now called the Cascadia Subduction Zone Fault and it has let rip every 400 years or so with a massive quake. The last was 400 years ago. If you live in the interior, you are laughing. If you live on the coast of Vancouver Island, you are fucked. Depending on the nature of the shaking, many buildings in Vancouver (esp brick and mortar "medium-rises") will collapse. In the worst case scenario, the entire west coast of North America from LA to Alaska may be hit hard. The expected tsunami would hit Crescent City like a hammer, and would probably do significant damage in Japan. It is a good story. The evidence of the turbidite cores, tree rings, oral histories, ghost forests etc all come together nicely. The upshot is that we should be spending more on earthquake preparedness and building reinforcement. One nice sub-story came from a ten year old British girl in Phuket who had been taught what to look for. She spotted the signs of an incoming tsunami. She convinced her parents and saved her family. Cascadia is Sumatra. The death toll will be lower, but the damage worse. The good news is that while earthquake prediction is still a dark art, predicting what tsunamis will do is becoming relatively easy. For example, next time, we will be able to tell the Sri Lankans to bug up (not out) even if they are on the lee side of the island… which actually got hit worse than the weather side did. You will have to read the book to find out why. In The God Con, I talk about Cardinal Pell. He was the guy behind the RCC payout list for abuse: $75,000 for oral, $150k for sodomy and so on.
I did not think he would ever leave the Vatican. But apparently Pell was too much, even for the RCC. The Pope threw him under the bus, and he is now going to face the music: 4,000 abuse allegations, and perhaps 7% of Australian priests are pedophiles. And the Vatican is not paying his legal fees! I did not think this would happen. In the past, the Pope has continued the tradition of protecting priests, regardless of how nasty they were. He will appear in court in Melbourne on Wednesday, the 26th. At least the Pope has sent the right message this time. Perhaps Pell will go to Oz (the prison, not the country), his Noodliness willing. Cofefe! Paleoanthropologists are, for the most part a bunch of dicks. Louis Leaky was arrogant. His son is the same, and Donald Johanson of Lucy fame is perhaps the biggest of them all. But there are exceptions, like the discovery of a huge cache of bones in South Africa a few years ago. This was an amazing find. Most paleontologists would keep the bones under wraps for years, and them let them out for brief periods to fatten their wallets or egos. But these discoverers cast every fossil they found and distributed them on demand. There bones went from unknown to the most studied in history in a few short years. There are several reasons for this: anything really rare is valuable and coveted and scientific glory goes to those who publish first (so it makes sense to keep your discovery to yourself until you have extracted every ounce of data from it). They are often in it for themselves first and science second. The history of paleoanthropology is full of "my back yard" prejudice. Englishmen argued that the first man must be English! Ha-rumph. That sort of thing. Anyway… to the book. The authors are more geo-chronologists than paleoanthropologists. Java Man (and Peking Man and a few others) were found more than a century ago, and many of the original fossils disappeared during the war, due in no small measure to the aforementioned hubris. The story follows the author's attempts to find and date hominid fossils. It is an interesting story with the usual all-to-human scientific intrigues. It was written in 2000, a mere 17 years ago, but since then much of the human tree has been re-written, or at least edited. The upshot of their findings was to place Java Man much recently in time than previously thought. This is always met with resistance (old == good, young == bad). The upshot of the book is too add evidence to the ever more complex tree of human life showing that many species of "human" may have been contemporaneous in more recent points in history than we ever thought. That is, go back 100,000 years and you might be able to bump into several types of Homo. Only one survived, of course. Once funny story: The group was fossil-hunting in Java. Bones fragment can be small and hard to find. The authors had in inspiration: pay the locals for bones… 10 cents each. But the law of unexpected consequences reared its head. The locals would try to sell the same bone over and over, such that it became cheaper to buy them, rather than to re-examine and reject them, again and again. That was not a big deal. But the LoUC has many heads and people the world over are smart. One skull cap is worth 10 cents. One skull cap and a hammer is worth two bucks. The locals would smash the more valuable fossils to extract more money. The good news is that the breaks were obvious and easy to fix with crazy glue. I recently read a book by the son Louis Alvarez (of dinosaur-killing comet fame). It was not terribly good and I did not forward my notes. But it had a great bibliography from which this book came. More dino-stuff to come, folks… In software development, we have the concept of a “development platform”. In the olden days (circa 1983), a development platform would usually mean either the IBM PC or the MacIntoch. Each platform would offer access to a certain market, and would provide certain development tools to the software developer.
Today, the word “platform” is still in use, but its meaning has morphed. Some development platforms are “virtual machines”. You develop for non-existent machine, and the platform provides a way to convert from the virtual machine apps to an actual machine. The best example today would be game development platforms. Platforms create “paradigms”, or ways of approaching a problem, on which their various development tools hang. Tools are software to do things like 3-D modeling or moving objects over virtual landscapes. Once your game (to continue with that analogy) is done, the platform allows you implement it easily for the target real machines: hand held, PC, X-Box, Sega etc. As I said before, the platform dictates the audience, and the tools it provides represent the paradigm to approaching the problem. If you are a con artist, you have several platforms to choose from. Health and health care is a fertile ground for scams and is a good example of a con game development platform. Others are financial world (stock market, pyramid schemes etc) and, of course, religion. Nobody understands everything about these complex ideas, so it is easy for the con man to hide in the weeds. Organized religion is a perfect development platform for the con. The development tools are the tools of religion the world over… an invisible buddy that watches over you all the time, messes with your life, and threatens you with eternal damnation. You can say the most ridiculous things and get away with it when you wrap them in the tools of the platform (e.g.: god moves in mysterious ways; god tells us what is moral and what is not). The virtual machine is the religious world view. The development platform is the virtual religious world view at the top and its specific implementation platforms (Catholicism, Islam, Judaism etc) below it, and the actual target real machines are you, me, and your kids… but mostly your kids. And like most games today, they involve in-application purchases and lots of them. That is, if you want to play the game, you must pay. Game development platforms often are tightly held, meaning only certain tools are available for use and they are controlled by the platform star chamber. Think “kosher”. Other platforms are more open to input and modification. At the end of the day, development platforms are created to make money, whether we are talking games or religion. Blood in the Water; Heather Ann Thompson; 2017; Pantheon Books; 571 pgs, a lot of notes, index16/7/2017 I recently read Prisoner's of Isolation which focused on solitary confinement in the Canadian penal system. Canada's practices were, as I described, barbaric. There is some light at the end of the tunnel for Canada. This book is a much broader indictment of the US penal system, and specifically Attica. Canada was bad. The US was and is far, far worse. Attica is a name familiar to anyone of my generation. I was a teen when it happened, and I must admit I did not pay much attention. Attica is a town and a prison in upstate New Your. On Sept 9, 1971, after months of simmering issues, the shit hit the fan. The prisoners took over, controlled the yard, and had many CO (correction officers) hostages. In the process, a CO was killed. After that, the cons took responsibility for the hostages and protected them. Rumors fostered by the state spread: castrations, torture, slit throats and such. The COs and the SPs (State Police) smelled blood. A few days later, the state (lead by the warden and the state head of corrections) let to dogs loose. What followed was chaos, torture and barbarity. Many cons and several hostage COs were killed, all by other COs. No attempts were made to match bullets to guns, guns to COs, or do any of that police professionalism stuff. Bigotry was a major issue. Most of the prison population was non-white. Guard training was an issue: they had none. General cowboy attitudes, tough on crime types, and the general view that COs walked on water and cons were animals did the rest. These were jail towns and they hired any moron who could tote a gun from the local populace to do a "professional" job. The top names in law were embroiled in a 40 year long cover up of crimes. The state was utterly heartless to everyone involved, including the families of injured or killed COs. The state refused to pay the salaries of the hostage COs because they were "off the clock". The state lost evidence, or denied it existed, or claimed privilege, or said it existed but it was unimportant throughout it all. The state even sent "support cheques" to widows, knowing that if they were cashed, they would, under NY state law, constitute an acceptance of compensation… i.e.: take this pittance which you desperately need, but if you do, you can never, ever sue. IOW: the state conned its own citizens. You would think things would have gotten better, but not in the US of A. Some precedents were set, some rules changed, and some people made whole (ish). But mostly, the US doubled down, prison populations soared, , conditions got worse, for profit prisons made it worse still, and it is worse than ever now. This is a long but gripping read. There are real heroes, real bad guys (most of whom died before the law could ever catch up to them), and lots of victims. The worst thing about it, though, is just how trivial it is for politicians to completely derail the justice system whenever they want and use it as a cudgel. I read, and did not read, this book. I whistled through a lot of it. I wanted to read about her transformation. Large segments of the book are about family life. But the rest, while still over long for my taste, was worth the price. So I did get to the end. This is a long read… more like 450 pages in a more leaded/slightly larger font type layout. Fair warning: the descriptions of female genital mutilation are not fun to read.
The grandson of Van Goch was murdered in Holland. The note stabbed to his chest was addressed to the author. Her remarkable journey is an education in Islam, technology shock, politics, and foreign policy both for the reader and for Ali. She went from living in the sixth century -- with a dash of modernity like cell phones -- to full-on twenty-first century morality and technology. She even got elected to Dutch parliament in just a few short years. She ditched her pre-arranged husband, and claimed asylum in The Netherlands. Her father loved the idea of the marriage because it extended the tribal family and added power. He pretty much disowned his daughter over the issue. One cute example of culture shock: Ali encountered a Dutch cop who admonished her for riding a bike at night with no light. She was very afraid of cops. She was stunned when she got a minor lecture and a ticket for 35 guilders, which she paid though the mail. She was filled with wonder over how cleaver the Dutch were to avoid graft in that way. She also noted that, unlike Somalia, everything was finished. Not "finished" in the sense of "nice moldings", but finished in the sense of done. No half built and abandoned bridges or buildings. Her slow transformation from religious nut-case, through o cognitive dissonance, to atheist is quite interesting. I have read a lot of science fiction In my day. One plot line that comes up a lot of global war: civilization versus fanaticism. Ali feels that the major challenge of the next century may be dealing with exactly that. Her main message about Islam: it is not about peace; it is backward; and it treats women like shit. |
AuthorLee Moller is a life-long skeptic and atheist and the author of The God Con. Archives
January 2024
Categories
All
|