BOOK REVIEW - FIVE STARS
Berliners were a divided lot, the idle
rich were totally oblivious to the world collapsing around them and
the under privileged were priced out of everything by run away
inflation that would cost Germany and the world dearly under the
thousand year Third Rich that only lasted twelve years.
Excerpts:
Six weeks into 1919, Kessler noted: “I
was hauled off by acquaintances to a place where you can dance until
dawn. There are hundreds like it in Berlin now. The best description
of this second phase of the revolution...is “dancing on a volcano”
Greater Berlin had fewer than 100,000
inhabitants. The rises in population were due less to births than to
migration, as people came to the industrial centre from the land to
seek better work. There is an old saying that most true Berliners
actually come from Silesia, but city records show that the majority
then came from the province of Brandenburg. By 1925, the total
population of Greater Berlin had reached four million.
Inflation run away destabilized
confidence in anything government
The day of Rathena’s murder, the
mark stood at 300 to the dollar. By 6 July the rate was 450. The
middle classes, those who had savings, trembled. Patriotic, though
misguided, investment in War Loans during the First World War had
cost many families their futures. Now, what remained seemed
threatened with being wiped out along with any faith in received
values, ethical, material or moral. By the middle of January 1923 the
mark stood at 10,000 against the dollar; by the end of the month,
50,000. At this point the State Bank intervened and forced the rate
down, but it could not stem the tide for long. By May the mark was
down again, to 70,000 to the dollar: by the end of June it was
150,000. By August the dollar stood at 1 million marks, and the banks
were issuing 46 billion marks a day. By the end of September, the
rate had risen to 160 million. The Ullstein newspaper presses were
commandeered to print money. The figures on banknotes were
overprinted as million mark notes became billion mark notes. Currency
in circulation rose to 44 trillion marks. The government was accused
of deliberately allowing inflation to skyrocket in order to avoid
repaying foreign debts and reparations at par value.
Anyone who hadn’t left by 1933, he
said, was de facto a Nazi.
While offering all the attractions of
the earlier youth movements, these Nazi organizations also
indoctrinated children and turned them against rebellious or
controversial parents.
BOOK REVIEW - FIVE STARS
A turning point in history marked by
wars, changing political alliances with greedy go for the jugular
power grabs.
One of the very best history oriented
books. This is about real people radically changing the world.
Excerpts:
Regler saw his duty as maintaining the
morale of the troops and working with the civilian population. In
1938 he would boast of saving priceless paintings from destruction
and transporting women and children to safety from villages where
battles were raging. He was most likely sincere when he said that it
was up to the commissars “to halt the cruelties . . . on both
sides.” It felt good to be waging the good fight again: for him the
winds of “heroic Spain” were blowing away the “stink of
Moscow.” He watched “the good Russia” come onto the scene, but
worried that “the diabolical Russia” might not be far behind.
Alexander Orlov, the NKVD chief who
ran the secret war in Spain for Stalin and made time to entertain
Hemingway. National Archives, College Park. Orlov may have gone on to
facilitate Hemingway’s visit to Alfambra, the town where he spent
the four days in the fall of 1937 with communist guerrillas. They in
turn allowed him to witness the attack on the Nationalist train that
would drive the plot of his novel For Whom the Bell Tolls.
August 1949, the Soviet Union tested
its first atomic bomb and overturned America’s monopoly on
super-weapons. A few months later, mainland China fell to the
communists. Mao and Chou were now in charge, and Chiang had to make
do with ruling the offshore island of Taiwan. In 1950 Stalinist North
Korea invaded noncommunist South Korea, starting a war that would
last into 1953. At home, the Red Scare intensified when Senator
Joseph R. McCarthy of Wisconsin launched a witch hunt for communists
that made HUAC’s work seem careful and professional.
Castro already knew how to charm a
crowd, and spoke a “clumsy but clear” language some called
“fidelenglish.” While in the United States, he literally reached
out to anyone who came near him and calmly answered most questions
put to him. Staying away from anti-imperialist rhetoric, he adeptly
sidestepped questions about communists in his movement. During a
speech from the bandstand in Central Park, Castro was eloquent but
vague about his core political values: humanism and democracy. The
only discordant notes came when he met with officials like Vice
President Richard Nixon, who lectured him about the dangers of
communism.
BOOK REVIEW - FIVE STARS
Swedish neutrality during WWII was not
100% and changed with political ups and downs.
Revelations of little known political
happenings are the theme of the book, and I found it interesting and
informative.
Excerpts:
Swedish neutrality was not accepted by
all it citizens. There were, in addition to those who politically
opposed the government’s policy, thousands more who decided to
voluntarily participate in the war. Indeed, thousands of volunteers
perpetuated the legacy of those who fought in the First World War,
Finnish Civil War, Estonian War of independence and Spanish Civil
War.
The war turned in the Allies’ favor
in 1943. It was in August of that year that German leave trains were
denied passage over Swedish territory. Swedish governmental support
for the Western Allies commenced not long afterwards when secret
espionage and sabotage bases were permitted to be established along
the shared border with Norway.
Sweden had trade agreements with both
Germany and the Western Allies during the war. Supplying, amongst
other raw materials, immense quantities of ball-bearings and iron
ore,
It is a common misconception of
post-war literature to hold the Division up as an example of a
Pre-NATO pan-European division fighting communism. The fact is that
throughout its almost five-year service primarily consisted of German
personnel. For example, its total complement consisted of
approximately 1,500 foreign volunteers and 18,000 ethnic Germans in
summer 1941.
Mikhail Gorbachev was present too,
clinging to office as president of the Soviet Union and general
secretary of the Communist Party. One month later, Gorbachev survived
in office only because Yeltsin climbed onto a tank in Moscow and
faced down an attempted army-KGB coup. By December 1991, Gorbachev
was gone. The Central Committee of the Communist Party was dissolved.
Ukraine, Belarus, Kazakhstan, the Baltic states, and other former
Soviet republics had proclaimed their independence. In relative
peace, seventy-four years of Communist rule in Russia had come to an
end.
BOOK REVIEW - FIVE STARS
Humorous, cynical, satirical, brutally
honest, and truly memorable.
Even if you aren't Scandinavian as I
am, I am sure you will find this informative and revealing book one
of the best entertainingly humorous and educationally informative
reads you are likely to find.
Excerpts:
How come you have no idea where
Aalborg or Trondheim actually are? Why can no one you know speak
Swedish or “get by” in Norwegian? Name the Danish foreign
minister. Or Norway’s most popular comedian. Or a Finnish person.
Any Finnish person.
“
If you had to be reborn anywhere in
the world as a person with average talents and income, you would want
to be a Viking,” proclaimed British news weekly The Economist, ever
so slightly backhandedly, in a special Nordic-themed edition. But
where were the discussions about Nordic totalitarianism and how
uptight the Swedes are; about how the Norwegians have been corrupted
by their oil wealth to the point where they can’t even be bothered
to peel their own bananas (really: we’ll get to that later); how
the Finns are self-medicating themselves into oblivion; how the Danes
are in denial about their debt, their vanishing work ethic, and their
place in the world; and how the Icelanders are, essentially, feral?
Swedes will likely cut foreigners some
slack in the footwear department, but there is one golden rule that
you will not be forgiven for breaking: be on time. You should not be
too early, no one appreciates that, but equally you should absolutely
never arrive later than five minutes after the time you were invited.
In Sweden, the concept of fashionably late” is akin to “fashionably
flatulent.”
Alfred Nobel made his fortune by
inventing dynamite, initially for the mining industry, but later for
the munitions used to slaughter thousands in the Crimean War, and
countless millions thereafter. And yet, somehow, one idle day while
drawing up his will in his retirement home on the Italian Riviera,
Nobel felt his life’s bloodstained legacy warranted, of all things,
a peace prize in his name, it is akin to King Herod sponsoring a
beautiful-baby competition, or a demolition man handing out
architecture prizes.
I can think of many American states in
which it would probably be quite an uncomfortable experience to
declare yourself an atheist, for example, or gay, or to be married
yet choose not to have children, or to be unmarried and have
children, or to have an abortion, or to raise your children as
Muslims. Less significantly, but still limiting, I don’t imagine it
would be easy being vegetarian in Texas, for instance, or a wine buff
in Salt Lake City, come to that. And don’t even think of coming out
as socialist anywhere! In Scandinavia you can be all of these things
and no one will bat an eye (as long as you wait and cross on green).
BOOK REVIEW - FIVE STARS
America’s clandestine warfare and
the person who hyped it.
Provocative and gripping revelations
are stacked together in this monumental fast moving true story that
reads like a fairy tail. A must read book worthy of more than five
stars.
Excerpts:
Government wasted money. The poverty
program didn’t solve poverty; it might have made it worse. The
billions spent in Vietnam had backfired. Washington Post cartoonist
Herb Block loved to draw Caspar Weinberger walking around with a
thousand-dollar toilet seat around his neck. And everyone knew that
the CIA screwed up everything it did.
Israel’s complicated relationship
with Iran how the Mossad had “had half of the mullahs on its
payroll” before the revolution. But mainly he factored in why
Israel would want to be building up Khomeini. The answer was simple:
Israel’s most dangerous enemy was Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, and
right then Iraq looked as if it might be on the verge of winning its
war with Iran. What better way for Israel to do in its enemy and
rebuild its alliance with Iran than to get the United States to
finance it? That was enough to call into question Israel’s motives,
but ultimately what enraged Avrakotos was the vision that Oliver
North and the others had of a group of Iranian moderates just waiting
to deal honorably with the Great Satan.
The United States roused may well have
inspired an entire generation of militant young Muslims to believe
that the moment is theirs. To call these final pages an epilogue is
probably a misnomer. Epilogues indicate that the story has been
wrapped up, the chapter finished. This one, sadly, is far from over.
BOOK REVIEW - FIVE STARS
A look at America’s plunge into
radical, fanatical lynch mob mentality.
This must read history book opens up
an eye opening visage of just how close to the surface extremism
waits to strangle liberty for all. Americans can be sold anything,
even a war. The book holds and reveals numerous unflattering aspects
of a nation that has the attention span of a gnat.
Excerpts:
Temperance advocates were eager to
demonstrate that dry law could work nationally, and they used the
national capital as a proving ground. The problem was that
Washingtonians didn’t want to go dry and never would go dry.
Prohibition came early to Washington. It started on November 1, 1917,
more than two years before the nation officially went dry and ended
on March 1, 1934.
Thanks to legions of German
immigrants, beer became the nation’s most popular alcoholic
beverage after the Civil War. Washington was no different. The city
had a thriving brewing culture, and local breweries struggled to keep
up with insatiable demand. With hot and humid summers, lager beer was
just the ticket to take the edge off the season. In 1916, district
residents drank 7.2 million gallons of beer and 1.6 million gallons
of whiskey, wine and other spirits. Beer was so prevalent that
temperance advocates took to calling Washington the “Sodom of
Suds.” Their victory in prohibition meant the loss of a vibrant
brewing culture.
“
Looking back on it all, the
striking thing about prohibition was that so many people could have
been so utterly wrong.” The temperance movement seriously misjudged
how deeply ingrained drinking was to American culture or how
paramount drinking was to Washington society. Discredited and
unpopular, the temperance movement went virtually extinct, leaving
only the ugly Temperance Fountain as a monument.
BOOK REVIEW - FIVE STARS
In print for fifteen years and more
pertinent than ever.
This author has something imperative
to say that MUST NOT be dismissed!
Excerpts:
Some idea of the power greenhouse
gases have to influence temperature can be gained by examining other
planets. The atmosphere of Venus is 98 percent CO2, and its surface
temperature is 891°F. Should CO2 ever reach even 1 percent of
Earth’s atmosphere, it would “all other things being equal”
bring the surface temperature of the planet to boiling point.
Were it not for plants and algae, we
would soon run out of oxygen and suffocate in CO2. Through
photosynthesis (the process whereby plants create sugars using
sunlight and water), plants take our waste CO2 and use it to make
their own energy, in the process creating a waste stream of oxygen.
It’s a neat and self-sustaining cycle that forms the basis of life
on Earth. The volume of carbon circulating around our planet is
enormous. Around a trillion tons of carbon are tied up in living
things, while the amount buried underground is far, far greater. And
for every molecule of CO2 in the atmosphere, there are fifty in the
oceans.
Peabody Energy, the world’s largest
coal producer) led a campaign, informed apparently by his personal
beliefs, that the earth’s atmosphere “is deficient in carbon
dioxide” and that producing more would herald an age of eternal
summer. In a move rather like the CEO of an arms manufacturer arguing
that a nuclear war would be good for the planet, Western Fuels wanted
to lead the charge in creating a world with atmospheric CO2 of around
1,000 parts per million.
A ten-year, peer-reviewed study by the
IPCC commissioned by Bush senior and studies by the National Academy
of Sciences, the National Ocean and Atmospheric Administration, and
NASA. September 2002 the White House released the Environment
Protection Agency’s annual report with the entire section dealing
with climate change deleted.
Bush administration “desperately
wanted to burn more coal... . Coal is our friend,” and that to do
so they would scuttle Clean Air and Clean Water Act requirements. In
this the administration has been as good as its word, for, as Shea
quipped, it may be some time before the industry has another
president like “Bush or Attila the Hun.”
The greatest damage was done by the
Global Climate Coalition, an industry lobby group founded in 1989 by
fifty oil, gas, coal, auto, and chemical corporations. During the
eleven years of its existence the organization gave $60 million in
political donations and spent millions more on propaganda. The stated
purpose of the Global Climate Coalition was to “cast doubt on the
theory of global warming.”
Some industries that oppose action on
climate change use tactics reminiscent of those of asbestos and
tobacco companies, who by constantly challenging and clouding the
outcomes of research into the link between their products and cancer,
succeeded in buying themselves a few more decades of fat profits.
Asbestos and cigarettes can kill
individuals, but CO2 emissions threaten our planet.
BOOK REVIEW - FIVE STARS
The Industrial Revolution beginning
around 1800 began with steam power fueled by coal.1900 began the
second century of the Industrial Revolution, electricity powering by
coal, hydro, petroleum, and ultimately wind and solar.
American corporate power was quick to
step into this war of the “Electric Currents.” Thomas Edison and
his technology of DC (direct current) would stop at nothing to
dominate the industry where Westinghouse and Tesla’s new and
experimental AC (alternating current) was the only feasible solution.
American business giants battled to
dominate and control a world wide technology of the Empires of Light
and power distribution.
This is a real history making story,
well done, fascinating and fast moving.
Excerpts:
1888, Thomas Edison was no longer
content to vent his rancor with secret attacks. Using the vehicle of
the Edison Electric Light Company, he lashed out publicly, issuing
what surely stands as Americ’s longest and most splenetic howl of
corporate outrage. The eighty-four-page Edison diatribe, jacketed in
angry scarlet and emblazoned with the title WARNING!, served as the
official public salvo in one of the most unusual and caustic battles
in American corporate history. Edison, with his DC system, was making
his first open attack against Westinghouse and AC in the War of the
Electric Currents.
Assumed that the electrical future was
securely his, with all its glory and potential for riches, suddenly
saw the famously tough, reckless, and industrially wealthy
Westinghouse boldly swooping in from Pittsburgh to steal away his
hard-earned prize. Edison would not sit back quietly and let what he
saw as a dangerous system imperil not just his company, but the whole
marvelous field of electricity.
Englishman H. G. Wells, science
fiction writer turned social observer: These dynamos and turbines of
the Niagara Falls Power Company impressed me far more profoundly than
the Cave of the Winds; are indeed, to my mind, greater and more
beautiful than accidental eddying of air beside a downpour. They are
will made visible, thought translated into easy and commanding
things. They are clean, noiseless, starkly powerful. All the clatter
and tumult of the early age of machinery is past and gone here; there
is no smoke, no coal grit, no dirt at all. The wheel pit into which
one descends has an almost cloistered quiet about its softly humming
turbines. These are altogether noble masses of machinery, huge black
slumbering monsters, great sleeping tops that engineer irresistible
forces in their sleep”. A man goes to and fro quietly in the long,
clean hall of the dynamos. There is no clangor, no racket”. All
these great things are as silent, as wonderfully made, as the heart
in a living body, and stouter and stronger than that”. I fell into
a daydream of the coming power of men, and how that power may be used
by them.”
Tesla and his helpers turned out all
the necessary components for three complete AC systems, single-phase
alternating current, two-phase, and three-phase. He designed and
built copper and iron models for each system, a dynamo (without the
commutator!)
Decades ahead of his time
BOOK REVIEW - FIVE STARS
Jesse Ventura stood up and blew the
whistle on gross governmental disregard for any ethical behavior in
the land of the victim be damned where they have the very best
politicians that money can buy.
The book is a classic eye opener, not
to be taken lightly
.
Excerpts:
2010, the Obama Justice Department
cited the so-called “state secrets doctrine” in successfully
getting a federal judge to throw out a lawsuit on “extraordinary
rendition” (a phrase that really means we send suspected terrorists
to other countries to get held and tortured
WikiLeaks is exposing our government
officials for the frauds that they are. They also show us how
governments work together to lie to their citizens when they are
waging war.
“
First Amendment speech and press
rights may also be subordinated to the overriding need to wage war
successfully.”
Call something “terrorism,” the
Constitution and the Bill of Rights can be made null and void? All
they’ve got to do is say the word and they can put you under
surveillance without a warrant. To me, this smacks of an attack on
the foundations of democracy that plays right into the hands of
terrorists. It also sets a precedent for the kinds of tactics we went
on to see at Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, and elsewhere.
BOOK REVIEW - FIVE STARS
Profound beyond the limit and
ingeniously eye opening.
This book is a scholarly trip through
an electrically charged revolutionary century of innovative
developments, political turmoil, war mongering psychopathy, corporate
power supremacy, out of control climate calamity, and the greatest
economic disparity since the three hundred years of the Russian Czar.
Excerpts:
A journey through the twentieth
century can seem like an epic quest. The gallant adventurers who
embark on it first wrestle with three giants, known by the single
names of Einstein, Freud and Joyce. They must pass through the forest
of quantum indeterminacy and the castle of conceptual art. They avoid
the gorgons of Jean-Paul Sartre and Ayn Rand whose glance can turn
them to stone, emotionally if not physically, and they must solve the
riddles of the Sphinxes of Carl Jung and Timothy Leary. Then things
get difficult. The final challenge is to somehow make it through the
swamp of postmodernism. It is not, if we are honest, an appealing
journey.
The twenty-first century is not going
to make any sense at all seen through nineteenth-century eyes.
A century is an arbitrary time period.
Historians talk about the long nineteenth century (1789-1914) or the
short twentieth century (1914-91), because these periods contain
clear beginnings and endings. But for our purposes “the twentieth
century” will do fine, because we’re taking a journey from when
things stopped making sense to where we are now.
Ideology beat science
Even Margaret Thatcher had to amend
her views after it became clear how much they offended her political
allies. While her 1980 talks displayed clear scientific understanding
of the situation, her 2003 book, Statecraft, fell back on the
political talking points that cause climate scientists to bang their
heads on their desks in despair. Curbing climate change was a front
for a political viewpoint that she disagreed with, and for that
reason no efforts to curb climate change should be made. Ideology
beat science. Individualism beat environmentalism. So carbon
continued to be emitted, topsoil continued to decrease and the ice
sheets on the poles continued to melt. The debt which funded the
consumer activity that caused all this continued to grow. As a
result, the window when runaway climate change could have been
prevented now appears to have closed.
W. C. Fields was the putative author
of “I'd rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal
lobotomy.”
BOOK REVIEW
The Bill of Rights Primer: A Citizen's
Guidebook to the American Bill of Rights by Les Adams, Akhil Amar
FIVE STARS - A historical document clearly
explained with it’s impact clarified.
This fascinating book will
take you back to the ore-industrialization years and the nearly
impossible War of Independence, the Civil War, women's rights,
prohibition, and the political powers that continually attack to bend
it.
Excerpts:
One of the ironies of history that
this thoroughly reprehensible monster played an instrumental role in
the foundation of English constitutional government from which a
number of the American concepts of freedom embodied in our Bill of
Rights were to be drawn. You see, King John happened to be the most
notable participant in an event that many historians regard as being
one of the most important in the entire history of the western world.
The signing of Magna Carta by King
John
(the Declaration of Independence, the
Constitution of the United States, and its accompanying Bill of
Rights) as one of the most important writings in the history of the
American republic.
This is a book written not for lawyers
and judges but for ordinary citizens who care about their
Constitution and their rights.
As great as men like Madison and
Jefferson were, they lived and died as slaveholders, and their Bill
of Rights was tainted by its quiet complicity with the original sin
of slavery.
Thomas Paine, (1737-1809).
Anglo-American political philosopher who enjoyed active and
influential political careers in England, France, and the United
States. After the publication of his Rights of Man (1791-2), a
powerful condemnation of Edward Burke’s Reflections Upon the French
Revolution, Paine was indicted by the British government for treason.
In the United States, he was an associate of major figures in the
American Revolution, including Benjamin Franklin, George Washington,
and Thomas Jefferson. His best known writings were: The American
Crisis (1776-83), a series of pamphlets; and Common Sense (1776), in
which Paine argued that common sense surely led to the conclusion
that the American Colonies should become independent of Great
Britain. This little pamphlet, which sold over 500,000 copies (an
extraordinary figure for that time), was one of the most influential
political documents in American history.
