I often complain about books that lack a decent index. This one is not one of those.

The Blank Slate refers to the idea that we are, when we are born, a  tabula rasa (Latin for "clean slate"), with potential to become anything. It is a central tenet of most religions. Its pals are the  Noble Savage and the Ghost in the Machine. To philosophers, they are  known as empiricism, romanticism, and dualism. The three get along quite well. When one fails to capture an idea, the others can step in and save the day. Ensoulation, the moment when the soul enters the body, is wrapped up in it all too.  Popes and dictators like the Blank Slate, as does religion. Nobility does not like it since they are born into nobility, presumably because they know they are inherently noble.

Sociobilogy has become the Standard Social Science Model. Nature versus nurture is the debate.  On one side is the Blank Slate (we can become anything we want), and on the other is genetic determinism ("I yam what I yam", as Popeye would say). This creates issues. For example, any hint that our genetics dominates who we are might lead to justifiable racism. If the Blank Slate dominates, then racism is a cultural issue that can be addressed.

The answer throughout the book seems to be "It is shades of gray". You are not genetically fated, nor can you just shrug off your genetic heritage.

Here are five ideas that represent the "cognitive revolution".

1. The mental world can be, and generally is, grounded in the physical world.
2. The Blank Slate cannot be truly blank because blank slates cannot do anything. In other words, some things (abilities) are built in from the outset.
3. An infinite range of behavior can arise from a finite set of programs in the mind.
4. Universal mental mechanisms can underlie superficial variations across cultures.
5. The mind is a complex system of many interacting parts.

Many sociologists studied other cultures for years, trying to explain the apparent vast differences between them. Instead, they only proved that they are all fundamentally alike. In other words, Margaret Mead was full of shit. (Margaret Mead was a controversial anthropologist whose conclusions about primitive societies and how they functioned are largely dismissed today.)

The rest of the book analyzes human behavior from various points of view, always landing, I think, on a useful compromise between  the two extremes of analysis.

Three recent major discoveries that superficially support the Blank Slate have added to the demise of the Blank Slate. First, the human genome was mapped. It has a surprisingly small number of genes (34,000 or so). The small number lent credence to the idea that anything complex could not be baked in. It also opened the door for the soul (fewer genes means more room for the Ghost in the Machine). Second, computer models of neural networks have led to new ideas about cognition. And the third is neural plasticity, which suggested that the brain is like clay and can be remodeled as needed. Pinker refutes these interpretations.

One look at a new-born antelope that is up and running within minutes of its birth speaks volumes.  That creature was not born with a Blank Slate. The Blank Slate cannot be blank for it it is, it could do nothing.

Biologists like E. O. Wilson applied the ideas of Darwin and evolution to the Sociobiology of the human race and the shit hit the fan. Wilson was attacked for years with straw man arguments. The attackers claimed that Wilson's ideas justify Nazism and genocide. Their arguments are unscientific and stupid, even to a lay person like me.  Remarkably, Stephen J. Gould made some awful arguments against Sociobiology. People's reactions seemed more visceral than logical.

Needless to say, all this talk about evolution and brains processing information does not sit well with the "the church". Radical religion hates these ideas and fights them tooth and nail.

A note about ensoulation. The Roman Catholic Church has been very clear: the soul enters the body at conception. Period.  I have two close friends that are identical twins. Identical twins occur when a fertilized egg spontaneously splits, one to three days after conception.  This is a problem. Now we have two people and only one soul! This problem can happen in reverse as well (two souls, only one egg). The church's ideas are not consistent with scientific reality. It took 300 years for the church to recognize that Galileo was right. It will take longer than that before the church ditches the idea of souls. After all, if you do not have a soul, they cannot threaten you with going to hell.

It is December 13, 2022 as I write this. An article about an anti-abortion judge crossed my desk. It  is a good illustration of Blank Slate reasoning. Judge Kacsmaryk spoke about the sexual revolution in 2015. He said: "… sought public affirmation of the lie that the human person is autonomous blobs of Silly Putty unconstrained by nature or biology, and that marriage, sexuality, gender identity, and even the unborn child must yield to the erotic desires of the liberated state."  There is actually a chapter in Pinker's book called "Silly Putty"!

There is a lot of angst over human nature. The next chapters of the book devote themselves to four issues: If people are innately different, discrimination is justified; If people are innately immoral, there is no hope;  If people are simply a consequence of biology, then there is no free will; and; If people are just biological products, there is no meaning to life.

I have had a great deal of disdain for clinical psychology over the years. The McMartin Preschool trial, the most expensive trial in US history, is a testament to the damage that can be done by mucking about with things you do not understand. McMartin was about psychologists who accused teachers of pedophilia based on statements from eager-to-please, prompted children. Pinker seems to share my disdain. But, over the last few decades, it would seem clinical psychology has matured  and is now much more empirical in nature.

A lot of data has been gathered,  much from studies of separated twins and separated siblings, that have lead to some conclusions that drive your average parent nuts, until they understand what the conclusions actually mean. The issue circles around the debate between genetics (nature) and nurture (child rearing). For example: Insanity is hereditary… you get it from your kids. (Pinker's book is not without humor.)

We are not all the same. Sex makes a big difference. It is generally true that males compete and females choose; males want quantity, females want quality. This is a natural outcome of evolution and the degree of investment each parent has in their offspring. Females are generally much more invested in their children than males, if for no other reason than the fact that sex takes minutes, but gestation takes nine months (for humans)… and that is often just the start.

The remaining chapters of the book focus on the impact of the Blank Slate on Art,  Politics, Gender, Violence and Children.

The chapter on Children was quite interesting. Using three rules and a lot of relatively new empirical data, some surprising conclusions can be reached.

The rules are:

1. All human behavioral traits are heritable.
2. The effect of being raised in the same family is smaller than that of the genes.
3. A substantial portion of the variations in complex human behavioral traits is not accounted for in genes or families. ​

Heritable traits become more so over time (e.g.: you get more like your parents as you get older).
That is surprising.

It is clear that the basic measurable traits of people are determined largely by their genes. Separated twins are remarkably similar to each other. Separated siblings less so, because they share less DNA. There is little a parent can do to change this. This does not mean that there is no such thing as "good parenting", just that good parenting is not going to turn a natural introvert into an extrovert.

This book was a long read, but worth it. It covers a lot of ground. This is hardly surprising since human nature is so complex.  The general sense I had was that Pinker's analyses always seems to land in about the same spot that my instincts would land me. Of course, he gets there through strong arguments.

The issues raised by human nature get a lot of people really riled up (IMHO… mostly religious nuts). So much so that they fight back with a barrage of straw man arguments that seem to never want to die. When you say "some", they hear "all", and have a fit. When you say "may", they hear "must", and have a fit.

You do not need to understand statistics and probabilities to understand Pinker's arguments.  You should have a reasonable understanding of what correlation coefficients (CCs) are and what they mean. The short version is this: Imagine you are watching two stocks. A CC of zero between the two stocks is saying that the stocks are unrelated. A CC of 1 is perfect correlation: When one stock goes up, so does the other, in lock step. A CC of -1 means when one stock goes up, the other goes down. Any other value means that sometimes one stock will go up and the other does not, with a certain probability.

My philosopher friend Dale Beyerstein has read the book and my comments. I have made some small changes to my essay based on them. I thought the following from him was worth including:

"Second, a substantive argument between you, me and Pinker: I think that religious types who blabber soul talk (no, they’re not Black!) are less are less driven by the blank slate hypothesis than Pinker  or you argue. Yes, many think they need the blank slate idea to say that you, as essentially a soul, can choose anything you want (innate parts of the brain won’t stop you). But the real driver is their need for the free will defence so they can blame us rather than God for evil. There’s nothing stopping them from a  “middle ground” position that holds that much of our behaviour is hard wired, but the important part of the soul that we use to choose right or wrong transcends the parts that are hard wired. In fact, many fire and brimstone preachers bang on and on about how we (our souls) must use our reason (in the soul) to transcend our bodily pleasures (sex!) that are so evil.  In other words, religious types have less need for the blank slate than ----- Studies (substitute ‘Women’s’, ‘Black’, ‘Fat’, &c.) people in universities."

​ 
Aside on Logical Fallacies

There are many, many logical fallacies (more than 100). You should learn to recognize some of the big ones. Google the "argument from ignorance"; the "straw man" (see below); and confirmation bias as a start. If you have more time, just Google "logical fallacies".

Straw man arguments are a common logical fallacy. Since I mentioned them in this text, here is an example of a straw man argument. 

You say "I believe in evolution."
Your opponent replies "So you think we descended from apes!"      

The opponent is making a straw man argument by attacking you for something  you did not say, nor even believe (the straw man). (We are not descended from apes. Mankind and apes share a common ancestor.) 

This book deals with the biggest questions of all about the biggest thing of them all… the entire universe of universes, or if you prefer: life, the universe and everything.
These write-ups are really just my notes on what I have read. In many cases, the concepts are so large that my notes cannot do them justice and you must read the original source. This just such a case. This book contains some very large, deep ideas that I do not really understand and my notes cannot adequately reflect.
This book's index is quite poor. A pet peeve of mine.



Some basics the book discusses:

• The Copernican Principle is that the Earth has no special place in the cosmos. By extension,  no observer has a special place in the universe. This means the universe is homogeneous and isotropic (the same everywhere and in every direction).
• The universe is expanding from the Big Bang.
• The universe is only about 5% baryons (normal matter). The remaining mass is dark: either dark matter or dark energy. 
• Dark matter interacts with gravity. Dark energy does not.
• The book refers to galaxies here as "small scale structures", so you need to think really big.
• The evidence for dark energy is definitive.
• The current consensus is that the universe is  5% normal stuff,  26% invisible stuff (dark matter) and 69% invisible energy (dark energy). This is known as the "lambda cold dark matter" model or LCDM.
• As the universe expands, matter and radiation dilute. The vacuum contains energy… dark energy. But dark energy does not dilute, meaning that as the universe increases in size, the amount of dark energy increases too… violating conservation of energy, and driving expansion!

At this point, the book lays out a cosmic timeline beginning from a very hot and dense start 13.7 billion years ago, till now. Time starts in the Planck Era: from 10 to the -43 seconds to 10 to the -32 seconds. It goes on from there to 6 billion years ago when matter became less dense than energy and cosmic growth stopped decelerating and started accelerating. Which brings us to today.

It is very hard to summarize a book that deals largely in abstract ideas, but here goes.

• The universe is homogeneous and isotropic.
• The further out in space we look, the further back in time we see.
• The observable universe is finite in every direction,
• Things outside the observable universe are moving away from us faster than the speed of light.
• At about 300,000 years after the big bang, the universe became transparent. Prior to that time, we can see nothing but fog.
• The universe is about 13.7 BYO but it has a radius of about 40 BLY, because space has been expanding as well.
• Close examination of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB)  has yielded many insights into our universe's  history.
• A mystery is why the universe is geometrically flat to within 0,02 percent.  This is called the Flatness Problem.
• Space is expanding. The vacuum has energy. So as space expands, energy is created, and conservation of energy is violated!
• Inflation is the term used to describe the initial exponential increases in the volume of space. The doubling time of the universe, the time it takes for the scale of the universe to double (also called the Hubble Time), right now, is about 10 billion years. 
• The Higgs field is just the thing required to support inflation. That field was recently discovered.

The book goes on to describe how the effects of dark matter and dark energy  combine to explain the dynamic (i.e.: changing over time) nature of the universe. A good discussion of "symmetry breaking" is used to explain many of the ideas of physics. Symmetry breaking is the source of many physical arguments.  Imagine a sombrero with a marble on top. A tiny nudge will cause the marble to roll from its high energy point of instability and symmetry to a lower energy state of stability on the sombrero brim. Now the ball is free to move around on the brim. That is a broken symmetry, changing the new applicable laws of physics.

Another interesting idea about time is discussed. We see an infinite future, but a finite past. This is asymmetric. But if you use a logarithmic clock, time appears infinite in both directions.  

The descriptions of the many universe hypothesis is fun and intriguing, but as the author points out, these ideas are not scientific in that they are unfalsifiable.

The title of the book comes from Giordano Bruno who said, shortly before he was burned to death for heresy: "God is infinite so his universe must be too… He is glorified not in one, but in countless suns, not a single earth , a single world, but in a thousand thousand, I say an infinity of  worlds."

No discussion of the universe and how it came about is complete without mentioning the anthropic principle. One way to look at the multiverse is as a beer with many bubbles. Each bubble is a universe, possibly with its own physics laws. The multiverse, as implied by inflation, also addresses the fine tuning argument (the idea that the universe was made just for us, or vice versa).

In its simplest form, the anthropic principle is basically a tautology. The universe is what it is because we are here to observe it. I.e.: the universe implies us, and we imply the universe that made us.

There are three main objections to the anthropic principle. 1) It is not scientific because we are cut off from the other bubbles. 2) The anthropic principle does not say what parameters in each universe can change, and which cannot. 3) The idea is based on a narrow interpretation of "life"    

This book is very recent so it should represent our best ideas of how it all came to be. These are literally the largest ideas that the human mind has ever contemplated. Five thousand years ago, somebody speculated that we were super-duper special, and that we, and everything we see, was all created for us by a benevolent god. That idea is forgivable and a load of rubbish. As we have grown in knowledge, our specialness has all but disappeared. I find it utterly remarkable that we live in a time when we can ask these types questions  and actually get answers. Of course, most of those answers are negatives, often in the form of "close, but no cigar". The good news it that we are getting new data every day (e.g.: the James Webb telescope, CERN, LIGO, COBE, Chandra etc)), , and these data underscore our ignorance and drive us forward.          

This a graphic novel. I have some interest in WWII, The story is about the Jewish Holocaust in Poland. The Jews are mice, the NAZIss cats. It is an interesting and engrossing tale of the horrors that the Jews suffered in NAZI Poland, and the lengths that the few who survived had to go just to get stay alive.
​

As I write this in September 2022, this book was banned in several high schools in the USA.

This is another book that cannot be summarized. It is long, uses a small font, and is information dense.  Since human history and war cannot be separated, you can view this book as a history of humanity through the lens of war.

The book opens and closes with Clausewitz. Clausewitz was a well known theorist about war and he argued famously that war was an extension of politics by other means. This book disagrees.

Keegan points out early that wars are often fought over religious issues, and that Muhammad, unlike Christ, was a man of violence who preached jihad. Islam is divided over two caliphs (successors to Muhammad). They disagree on who is in charge and the basic aims of Islam, which is often religion at knifepoint.   

When guns were introduced to the battle field, many thought them unworthy of a soldier. In fact, Japan was so appalled at the idea that a common man could get a gun and kill man of high stature that they banned guns outright in order to perpetuate their close quarter combat military society. That all changed when the US sailed a gun ship into Tokyo harbor.

Throughout history, war and technology moved hand in hand. With each new weapon came new tactics and new goals.

The history of war is the history of empires and peoples… and there have been a lot of them through the ages. I had never heard of many of them, such as the Yanomamo of Peru: they were called  "the fierce people"  and were known for stylistic forms of ritual combat.

War as we know it started with the invention of the bow and arrow (man's deadliest innovation to date) . The bow is a simple machine used to store muscle energy as mechanical energy and quickly  release it. The bow was a true stand-off weapon...  a game changer. Later, the composite bow was invented.  These bows shot arrows further and faster, were much smaller than their predecessors, and could be wielded easily from horseback. .  

The first written history of war comes from Sumerians wall reliefs. Sumer was the land between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers around 5,000 years ago.

The next innovation was the chariot. One may wonder why the Egyptians et al did not ride horses into battle. Horses have changed a lot due to selective breeding.   Five thousand years ago, horses were small. They were well muscled in the rear but could not carry much weight on their forelimbs. This meant that a rider had to sit way back on the horse, making control difficult. But horses were good at pulling things, like a chariot. Later in history, the chariot was abandoned for the mounted  cavalry soldier.

Fortifications are discussed at some length. Fiction has made much of siege engines  vs. fortifications. In reality, fortifications nearly always won out in a siege... until the age of gunpowder.

Much is made of the clash between the nomadic horse peoples of the steppe (e.g. Mongols) and the settlers and farmers of cities and towns. There really was no way for them to coexist as they both competed for the same resources.

Another group of well known raiders, the Vikings, used ships rather than horses.

The book also goes into depth on armies: how they are formed, manned, fed, organized etc. Armies are built in many ways: through enslavement, conscription, and through volunteers who are rewarded in some way, such as citizenship. Rome was built that way and Rome had the first body of professional fighting officers in history. 

The introduction of iron was another game changer. Iron was strong, but very heavy, so most armor remained made of bronze. Cannons of bronze were supplanted by larger cannons of iron.  Gunpowder allowed iron shots to fly horizontally which allowed cannons to undermine  defensive fortifications. Siege engine shots were lobbed and generally dealt ineffective glancing blows. 

There is so much information in this book that it is best used as a reference work. Subsequent chapters discuss logistics and supplies and, of course, the modern wars that shaped our world: The US Civil War, the French Revolution, WWI and WWII, the introduction of nuclear weapons, and so on.

​Most Canadians have never heard of Ortona, much less the Battle of Ortona (December, 1943). It was a relatively small operation compared to other primarily Canadian battles such as Hong Kong, Juno Beach on D-Day, the Battle of the Scheldt (12,000 casualties), and Dieppe. But Ortona was a costly Canadian battle for its size. Canada lost at the Battle of Hong Kong, and Dieppe. It won at the Scheldt, and took Juno Beach with only a few casualties. And it won at Ortona. That the German's would lose was a forgone conclusion, but they would make Canada pay dearly over  three bloody weeks.

Ortona is a small town  at just about the same latitude as Rome, on the east cost of Italy. The east coast of Italy is very rugged and Ortona is the Italy's only deep water port on that coast… hence its strategic importance. Even so, the port was tiny and only capable of handling one or two ships at a time. Port or no port, Ortona had to be taken as the allies moved north up the Italian boot.

As mentioned, Ortona was an almost all Canuck operation. An Indian division was there as well. The Seaforth Highlanders, one of the divisions that fought at Ortona, was raised largely from southern British Columbia.

The book has a glossary which was helpful. For example, I had to look up "PPCLI" several times before I memorized its meaning, Specifically the Princess Patricia Canadian Light Infantry (obvious, right?). 

The fighting around Ortona was savage. Canadians were asked to attack dug in positions over and over.  Creeping barrages helped when they did not land on friendly troops. Mud was everywhere. It bogged down tanks and made progress on foot exhausting. On the up side, if a mortar shell lands in the mud, it detonates late and the troops were largely protected from shrapnel. Mortars killed more soldiers on both sides than any other weapon.  

Germans fought dirty. On several occasions, German soldiers would surrender under a white flag, only to drop the flag and attack using hidden weapons when the time was right. They booby trapped everything as they withdrew. The combat pros knew the things to avoid, but green troops might pick up a souvenir luger that was attached to a bomb.

Fun fact: One young lieutenant named Farley Mowat shows up in the story of Ortona.

This book is a about a battle. The battle raged back and forth, often over the same patch of ground. The book details all these movements, but it also consists of short, often personal, stories about soldiers of all ranks. In many cases, their stories end in death. For example, it was most difficult to read about  a short passage about a squad of reinforcements arriving on scene.  The town of Ortona was largely in Canadian hands, but the Germans were fighting as they retreated and they knew the ranges to every point in town. Green, undertrained  replacement troops were not unusual in battles that chewed through people at such a huge rate. A green officer lead a troop of about twenty fresh soldiers into Ortona. He marched them straight down a main street in parade fashion towards the Canadian front! The Germans dropped a motor round directly on the new squad, killing half of them. None of the fatally injured had ever  seen combat.

In another brief anecdote, a new under-trained  green soldier arrived at the front and was given several type 36 hand grenades. The type 36 is the classic American "pineapple" hand grenade that you see in the movies all the time. He had to ask his sergeant what they were!     

The details of the battle are not important, but the sacrifices made by our fellow Canadians are. A typical day in the battle would consist of waking up at the crack of dawn in a cold, wet, fox hole. That would be followed by  cold rations. Most days would have some action.... Perhaps an attempt to take or re-take some small house to be used as an HQ. A counter-attack would follow. If you were not fighting Germans, you were fighting mud, and getting sniped at, as you tried to move equipment and personnel about the battlefield. Artillery, machine guns and mortars were both side's weapons of choice. If you were lucky, you got a shrapnel wound that would have you moved to the rear, or even home. If you were not lucky, and you did not fall victim to battle fatigue (PTSD today), you might get shot and die in some filthy ditch. If you died on a road used by tanks, your body would likely be crushed until it was unrecognizable.  

By the end of the 1943, Ortona was in Canadian hands. 2,300 casualties; 500 killed.

Another book with no index! This really annoys me. For a book like this, just indexing the proper names of people and places would take all of  a day, and would help a lot. The book has a lengthy table of contents which  makes up for it  a little. Masha Gessen is a Russian born, gay, trans, activist and critic of Putin.

This book should be taken seriously, but I feel that for many, it will be seen as a testament to the bleeding obvious… namely that Trump, Putin, dictators, and dictator wanna-bes around the world, are all taking their cues from the same playbook. This book tries to illustrate this fact.

The book consists of 22 short, roughly chronological, chapters. It is a very fast read.

For those that have followed Trump history, this book is an analysis of Trump sins… sins that seemingly go on forever and are never challenged.

• Betsy DeVos committed fraud and was not competent to do her job.
• Scott Pruitt ran the EPA into the ground.
• Tom Price ran Health and Human Services and tried to kill the ACA.
• Jeff Sessions was an AG who hated civil rights.
• Andrew Puzder was up for Labor and was opposed to laborer rights.
• Ben Carson ran HUD. He was completely incompetent. He was once asked about REOs (Real Estate Owned, a common term in this domain). He thought they were talking about Oreos. 
• Rick Perry, who promised to kill the Department of Energy, got to run the DoE. He did not know it administered nuclear material!

Betsy DeVos, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, Rex Tillerson, Mick Mulvaney, Jared Kushner, Ryan Zinke, Scott Pruitt, Tom Price,  and David Shulkin were separately accused of stealing millions for themselves.

Trump ran the most corrupt administration in US history... by far. He surrounded himself with crooks, yes-men, and people who have a loose grip on their principles. When those people compromised themselves  just once, they were Trump property.

When Erdogan thugs beat up American protestors at the White House, Trump and the White House did nothing. Professional courtesy perhaps?       

Kavanaugh was put on the Supreme Court in the closest vote ever (51 to 50), despite credible sexual assault accusations from Blasey Ford. Eighty-three complaints were filed against Kavanaugh during the hearing. All were subsequently dismissed! Why? Because it was too late. He was now out of reach on the Supreme Court!

Certainly one way to get power is hire an AG who is in the bag. Trump got that with Barr. Barr, like Trump, lied all the time, but as always, without consequence.

Language has taken a beating under Trumpism. Everything is either "terrific" or "treason".  Trump whined endlessly about "witch hunts" while he was in power, without realizing that witch hunts are only conducted by those in power.

"Fake news" is an oxymoron. Is it fake, or news? It cannot be both. Trump and Putin use the same tactic: accuse the accuser of doing the same crime. They are the very fountain from which "fake news" springs.

Gessen points out the similarities between Trumpism and Post Modernism (PM). Few people know what PM is, in part because it is hard to define. The BC Skeptics, of which I was a part, held a meeting at SFU where the topic  was Post Modernism. The presenter read a passage from a PM magazine. The text was on an overhead projector (remember those?) so the entire audience could read it and study it. Some of the smartest people I know were in that room and no one could offer up a clue as to what it meant. PM basically says that all past events are just stories, and stories are entirely subjective. There are no facts, just stories. PM got punked one day. Alan Sokal wrote an essay for publication in the largest PM magazine of the day. It was published. Then the author admitted he had merely written a paper in the style of PM and that was utterly devoid of insight. He deliberately contradicted himself several times. In other words, it was gibberish, but it was published gibberish. PM seemed to me to disappear (it just fell off my radar), but my philosopher friend Dale Beyerstein assures me it is alive and well. 

Case in point: Who can forget Kelly Anne Conway and her "alternate facts"? PM statements are designed to sound deep and contemplative, when, in reality, they are shallow and rambling. A typical PM essay is basically just word salad, and if that doesn't remind you of virtually every Trump speech, you haven't been paying attention. This is not to say that Trump uses PM on purpose. He is not that smart. But his speeches, especially when he goes off script, are little more than rambling, aimless, self-contradictory examples of verbal diarrhea. 

Trump even lies about the weather. The one thing in the world most people can agree upon is the weather, and Trump lies about it. Trump lied about the weather at his inauguration, saying it did not rain. Thousands of open umbrellas beg to differ.  He also lied about the path of a storm, which he had changed with a Sharpie. He did not lie about a suggestion to use a nuke to stop a hurricane. He was just too stupid to know how stupid what he just said really was.

On his road to becoming a despot, Trump referred to the press as "the enemy of the people". Stalin would be proud. The press does have  some accountability in all this. In their zeal to appear neutral, they are automatically taking sides… namely, the autocrats side. Autocrats want language to be so loose that nothing that anyone says can be called a lie. This is very close to the George Costanza defense: "If you believe it when you say it, is it still a lie?" The answer to this must be "yes".

In addition to the Hitler-esque Big Lie, another major authoritarian tactic is to separate "us" from "them". Recall the Jewish threat to NAZI Germany and  the "caravans" that were going to destroy America? The people at the Mexican border come every year, like the tide, for their own reasons. One of those reasons is the international legal right to apply for asylum. Trump treated them all like animals, and literally called them that too. To be fair, both sides use language that can divide us when they speak  of African Americans, or Muslim Americans, or even women. Unfortunately, this use of language is fuel for the fires on both sides. The only way to defeat this prejudice in America is to always emphasize, first and foremost, that all American citizens are equally American.    

I am a student of World War Two and the parallels between Hitler and Trump are very scary. It seems that he got more Hitler-ish every year he was in power. Gessen argues that all of these changes are signs of encroaching authoritarianism. The US likes to think of itself as the world's greatest democracy. Americans crow about rights and freedoms constantly while members of one party secretly try to restrict the rights and freedoms of their fellow citizens, all while knowingly allowing a criminally stupid pathological liar to be their president.

It can happen again.

​My main frustration with this book is that it has a lot of players and no index! There is no excuse for the lack of an index in today's world. As it is, for example, if you had forgotten who "Vladimir" is in the book,  you had to read-back in the book to find a mention that defines him. This can be very frustrating when some players are referred to by both their first and last names alone.

This is the sequel to Red Notice, Browder's excellent book on a subject that has had a huge influence on international politics… namely the Magnitsky Act. This law, now adopted by more than 34 countries, including Canada, allows countries to seize the assets of international criminals and the sponsors of terrorism. Putin is the big fish in that pond, and he is worried. Much of his wealth resides outside Russia.

The book starts well before the book Red Notice was published and could be characterized as  a diary of Browder's experiences as he published the book and  pushed the Magnitsky Act around the world...  And, of course, Putin's attempts to get him.  

If you have not read Red Notice, you should do so before you read this book. Spoiler alert:  if you have not read it but plan to, stop reading this now!

Browder set up a investment company in Russia which made millions. Putin stole the company and 230 million dollars, accused Browder of stealing that very same money, threw Browder's lawyer Sergei Magnitsky in jail, and tortured him to death.  Browder created the Magnitsky Act to punish Russia and has made it his life's work. Putin wants him dead.

The book  reads like a Hitchcock movie script (think The Man Who Knew too Much, or North by Northwest). The innocent victim (Browder) goes to a lawyer to get help fight to the Russians. The lawyer's name is John Moscow (really!). He digs into Browder's case and helps him. But months later, he was working for Putin! John Moscow used his inside knowledge to harass Browder in an attempt to get him onto Russian soil. This is against all legal tenets but it took many court appearances to get the western courts to eject  Moscow from the case.  One lesson of this story is that the law, designed to protect the innocent, can be turned into a deadly weapon in the wrong hands. Moscow is a perfect example of what everyone hates: a crooked lawyer.

The story goes on, at times almost comically, in its cloak and dagger clichés. The clichés turn out to be real. Another minor observation: the Russians (i.e. Putin) like to poison people, but they are really not very good at it. Quite a few have survived being poisoned, including a player in this story. Putin should stick to straight up assassinations, like Boris Nemtsov who was shot eight times right outside the Kremlin. A mystery truck had pulled up and stopped, blocking the surveillance camera's view. That story also figures in this James Bond plot.

The original 232 million dollars had exploded into 232 billion, much of which went through Danske Bank. As a person of Danish descent, this was disturbing to me, but the Danes wasted no time in busting the bad guys when this crime came to light.

I have nothing but admiration for Browder. He leads the life of a fugitive while fighting for a just cause. 

The madness of Putin does not stop with Bill Browder. Now he is waging a war he cannot win in Ukraine.

Another book about the first major defeat for the German Army of WWII. It is often called the turning point of the war. I would suggest that the war was lost in late 1941, when Hitler declared war on the US two days after Pearl Harbor, and the German Army was halted one hundred miles from Moscow.

There are a lot of good books about this battle, and this is one of them.

I will not summarize this book overmuch as I have already discussed the battle in other book notes.
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Four million men invaded Russia. The German's were famous for their  armored Blitzkrieg (lightning war), but they still used more than 600,000 horses! Oddly, had this not been the case, the battle of Stalingrad might have ended a little sooner. When you run out of ammo, you cannot eat your tank.  Every German horse at Stalingrad ultimately became soup.

Stalin disowned his own son because he was captured by the Germans, which made him a traitor.

The Russian railroad tracks were a wider gage than the rest of Europe. The tracks had to be narrowed or the goods transferred to a new train. This was very costly for the Germans.

One German (Reichel), against orders, took a copy of the battle plan with him on a recon flight. He was shot down, and the Russians got the full skinny on what the Germans had planned. Stalin was too paranoid to take it seriously.

Both Stalin and Hitler loved to issue "Not one step back" orders. To Stalin's credit, he was smarter than Hitler. It took some doing, but Stalin finally realized that allowing an army to retreat could save the army. Not so for Adolph. His stubbornness  got the entire 6th Army killed or captured.

During the harsh battle, one Russian was shot in the hand. He bandaged it and went to report that he had been wounded. He was taken out and shot. Why? Because he had obviously shot himself and had bandaged the wound to cover up his misdeed! Another  Russian was captured, escaped and returned  to his unit, only to be shot as a deserter.

During the summer, Hitler was told that the Soviets were producing 1,200 tanks a month. Hitler was outraged, in that he knew the sub-human Russians were not capable of those production levels, In fact, they are producing 2,200 a month. In 1942, Russian aircraft production almost doubled.

Hitler famously promoted General Paulus to Field Marshal in the hopes that this would cause him to kill himself, rather then be taken prisoner. He did not kill himself. Hitler had actually created four new Field Marshals, including Paulus, as a publicity stunt to distract from the disaster that was Stalingrad.

The last German broadcast from Berlin was a faked message from Stalingrad. It was heard in Stalingrad and outraged the those few soldiers who still cared.

We are watching a terrible conflict unfold in Ukraine. People are suffering and dying needlessly. And as awful as all that is, it is nothing compared to the hell on Earth that was the Battle of Stalingrad. About 10,000 civilians survived the battle. 

​I have very little to say about this book. It is a concise summary of our current understanding of human evolution, from the first words and stone tools to our modern tribal, warring, world. It is only 128 small pages long and summarizing a summary does not leave much but the title.

When was fire tamed? How did we become bipedal? These and many other questions are answered, although not always with great accuracy. That is to say, there is still much to learn. The evolution of humanity is complex. There was a lot of interbreeding which just makes things more complex.

Short though this book is, each paragraph contains something profound to think about.   

The Battle of the Atlantic (BoA) spanned almost the entire war, making it the longest war battle (any war) by a considerable margin. I found this book very informative, at least as far as ASW (Anti-Submarine Warfare) is concerned, and it has a large number of excellent photos, some only rarely ever seen.

The battle was a classic example of move versus counter move,  and technology versus counter technology. Britain won the technology wars with the aid of the USA. But in my mind, the real heroes of the war were the Canadians.

Because the BoA lasted so long, it is hard to sum up neatly, or even find a specific turning point.

If you saw the movie Greyhound w/Tom Hanks, you should try to forget it. While the ASW was pretty authentic, the idea of a American rookie destroyer captain leading three British escorts in herding a convoy across the Atlantic only one month after the US entered the war is a non-starter. The screenplay was written by Tom Hanks, and he succumbed to the lure of making the war all about the Americans. Admiral King ran the entire US Navy. He did not like the Brits and dismissed any and all of its sub hunting experience as twaddle. The British had been fighting the BoA for well over a year at that time. They had developed standards of practice that proved very effective. The US would enter the BoA in earnest after they started getting their own ships sunk off American waters.

A much better, hard to find,  movie about Canada and sub chasing is called Corvette 225 with Randolph Scott.  It was a US production, but was very accurate in its depictions of Canada's role. In the BoA, the heroes were Canada (in part because we did more than our fair share) Britain, and the US… in that order.

The Canadian Flower Class Corvette was a major player on the BoA. It was a small, single screw, sub chaser that played a large role. You would not want to be on one. Canadian destroyer crews used to joke that Corvette crews should receive submariner pay since its Corvette's forecastles spent so much time under water. Later versions enlarged and redesigned the forecastle to ease this problem.

Later, twin screw versions of the Corvette were built and dubbed Frigates.

The major technologies for the allies at play in the battle were:

Huff Duff (HF/DF or High Frequency Direction Finding):
Huff-Duff detected radio signals and calculated bearings and ranges. The Germans did not believe that the Brits could put radio direction equipment on a boat as it would be too bulky. This error in judgment would cost them.

ASDIC (aka Sonar):
This technology improved with every passing year. Active sonar used the infamous "ping"; passive listened for screw noises.

RADAR  (10cm and 3cm wavelengths):
Radar at sea was a huge advantage. The shorter the wave length of the radar signal the better. It is a basic law of physics that you cannot see anything that is smaller than the wave length of the light  being used. Radar is a kind of light. If you want to see a periscope, 10cm radar would catch it. If you want to see a sub snorkel, you need shorter wave lengths. Radar equipped airplanes would sink more submarines than any other mode of attack.
  
Leigh Lights:
Once an airplane, often a  Sunderland flying boat, saw a sub with radar at night, it would sneak up on sub until they were almost on top of it, then turn on their very bright Leigh Light mounted under the plane flooding the sub in light, and then drop contact bombs. This meant that German subs were vulnerable when running on the surface, even at night. Running on the surface was required to recharge the sub's batteries.

Air Dropped Acoustic Torpedoes:
Of course, a sub chaser cannot launch an acoustic torpedo against a submarine because the ship itself is too noisy, as are the other convoy ships. But an airplane can, which they did to great effect. A typical scenario would be: A Sunderland or Liberator spots a sub radar during the day; it attacks; the sub spots it and dives; the airplane swoops in and drops its torpedo; which chases the sub into the deep and kills it.

Hedgehog and Other Contact Munitions:
The hedgehog was a  large number of forward launched, small, fast sinking, contact bombs. A depth charge is a large explosive which can sink a sub from 20 feet away. The hedgehog was a small contact bomb. If it hit the sub, it would hole the pressure hull, and kill the sub.

SQUID:
SQUID was a single powerful shallow water, forward launched, depth charge that was slaved to the ASDIC signal of the sub. At just the right time (as calculated by a mechanical computer), as the sub chaser  bore down on its target, the SQUID would be fired at the diving sub and explode at a depth based on the ASDIC signal. They were  very effective.

Shallow Water Depth Charges:
Aircraft had no use for the heavy ship borne depth charges designed to sink a submarine at depth. What they needed was shallow water depth charges that could be dropped on a diving sub. They arrived later in the war.

Code Breaking:
Alan Turing and his code breakers cracked the German naval enigma machine codes. The Germans famously added a fourth rotor to the enigma machine, and Bletchley Park went silent for a year. After that, they were back in the cat bird seat, often cracking German intercepts before the Germans could. That is, they knew where German subs were better than the Germans. The code breakers of Bletchley Park saved thousands of lives and millions of tons of shipping.

The major technologies for the Germans at play in the battle were:

Subs, and Lots of Them:
Compared to a ship, or especially a loaded ship, submarines were cheap. The Germans produced hundreds of Type VIIs (smaller, inshore subs); Types IXs (larger ocean going subs, the German mainstay); milchkuhne ("milk-cow") resupply-at-sea subs; and Type XXIs (equipped with larger batteries and the snorkel). U-boats were literally numbered on their coming towers (the index of this book, under "U" for U-Boat, is very long with entries like U-751, U-752 etc)), and at the wars end, 1,162 had been built!

The Snorkel:
The snorkel is just what it sounds like. Subs burned diesel and diesels need air. Some Type IXs were retrofitted with snorkels. The war ended in early May, yet in March, 1945, German industry still managed to pound out 100 type XXI subs! But it was too little, too late.  

Metox:
Metox was a detector that warned subs if they were being scanned by radar. It could detect 10cm radar, but not 3cm until well into the BoA.

GNAT (German Navy Acoustic Torpedo):
When the first such torpedo was fired, it was plain to the people on the target ship that the torpedo was following the ships screw/engine noises. Within days, the Americans create a towable noise maker that  defeated the torpedoes. Unfortunately, the US noise maker would shake itself to pieces very quickly. A Canadian design was adopted that worked perfectly.  

Decent Torpedoes:
At the start of the BoA, German's were using magnetic exploders which proved to be very unreliable. They switched to contact exploders, which reduced their kill rate dramatically. Why? When a torpedo with a magnetic exploder passes under a ship, it explodes breaking the ship's back. Many  ships required two direct hits with contact torpedoes to go down. 

The submarine war was the least survivable of German services. All the major sub aces of the war were killed at sea, remarkably the three most famous  in just one month. Sixty three percent of submariners never returned home, making it the least survivable service on either side.
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On the surface for the allies was the  Canadian, Johnny Walker, and many others. Walker fought through most of the war and racked up more sub kills than another other skipper. He developed many of the allies' ASW  tactics. He died before the war ended of natural causes.

The BoA was never really winnable for the Germans. Ultimately, American industrial might would have saved the day. As it was, the Americans were late in, and the BoA was characterized by moves and counter moves. The Germans were slow to adopt new technologies. The Canadians and British quickly adopted radar, HuffDuff, ASDIC, sonar, and  the first true computer at Bletchley, called  Colossus,  for code breaking.