Book Reviews

**Wealthy Black Sheep ** Rich scions do more, even as they bicker. The Roosevelts helped their son through a breezy ascent in New York politics to become president, the Koch brothers adopted a neo-conservative economic ideology that helped create the Tea Party movement, and the Kennedys created a political dynasty. So it should be no surprise that the emblem of extremist Saudi ideology came from a wealthy scion, bickering with the rest of his family. ...

Fundamental Decision Making Error Your error is fundamental to the human psyche: you have allowed yourself to believe that others are mechanisms, static and solvable, whereas you are an agent. * Writing about fictional politics isn’t trivial. First an author must build out the raw events of reaction and counteraction building the plot from an omniscient viewpoint. But in a second step, the author must don a veil of ignorance, and place themselves within the viewpoint of a character, with incomplete information, irrational behavior, and uncertainty. At a third level removed, any time a character wants to plan for the reaction of others, such uncertainty needs to be accounted for to feel real. Otherwise, character interactions turn into an single player chess game where every move is known, planned for and predicted to absurd levels. ...

**Western civilization is built on a lie. ** Since the enlightenment, historians and philosophers draw a line from classical culture to modern western thought, bringing ancient prestige our current culture. Histories gloss over the inconveniently barbaric and fractured times between antiquity and renaissance. Yet after the ashes of the western Roman Empire had cooled, the dark ages were when modern western culture was born. Faith, not philosophy, was the candle in the dark that led the frail steps of civilization; the grip of this ideology was absolute. With political power crumbling into ever smaller fiefdoms and the concomitant collapse of trade, a religion that had already spread through the causeways of the now defunct Roman empire proved to be more than a match for any competing forces of civilization. Intellectual thought was subsumed into the theological realm, political power was subservient to papal authority, and every year revolved around religious holidays. Take for example Pope Gregory, who transformed the backwater Diocese of Rome into the church that stands to this day: ...

Review TBW.

** Vigorous Self-Congratulation ** America has accepted that destruction is the price of creation. * What created American prosperity? Capitalism in America brings a business-centric answer to this question that fits in the no-mans land between history and thesis. As Jin Xu of Empire of Silver would put it, Greenspan has a simple answer to a complex question. America was built on private enterprise and creative destruction. Much of the book is a celebration of economic growth and all the benefits capitalism has brought such a nation of entrepreneurs. Yet the narrative downplays the darker side of American capitalism to an astonishing degree: slavery is described in a jarring economic justification: * Slavery was in some ways a horrific response to a basic climactic fact: you could not get free labor to harvest intensive crops in the heat and humidity. * The suffering of generations from the externalities of capitalism are merely puzzling facts to be pondered by lesser economists. A combination of overcrowding and pollution helps to explain one of the most puzzling facts of the era: despite overall improvement of living standards, the average height of the native born american male declined by 2.5% from 1830 to 1890. * Perhaps without meaning to, Capitalism in America tells the story of a people and a country built on privilege. Even before independence, America was ahead in the race. Furthermore, since the country was new, the relative power of the business class was far in excess of the European societies which would-be Americans escaped. ...

** 46th book of 2021: On Wish-Fulfillment Station ** On Basilisk Station promises to take an exceedingly competent protagonist through harrowing circumstances and overwhelming odds to inevitable victory, and does just that. The prologue starts out revealing the dastardly plan of the nazis-in-space villains and the first few chapters show us that the protagonist’s civilization is essentially interwar England. Armed with little more than Chekov’s gun Honor has to save the day and prevent world war 2 a galactic war. ...

review TBR Caesar and Christ TBR

** 43rd book of 2021: ** Fugitive Telemetry takes place in-universe between Exit Strategy and Network Effect (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/3274092254) , making it effectively #4.5. As Wells’ plots increased complexity in Exit Strategy and Network effect, there were new facets to both Murderbot and the story that keep the boredom of repetition at bay. Without that added complexity, Fugitive telemetry feels like a rehash. The book starts with a body is found in Preservation Station, creating a murder mystery that Murderbot is far more capable than local station security to solve. But without other interesting characters to play off or threats that felt real, I found myself wishing I could go back to some reruns of Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon. It’s tough to avoid crime thriller tropes in the space of a novella and to quote Murderbot* what I did have were thousands of hours of category mystery media, so I had a lot of theoretical knowledge that was possibly anywhere from 60 to 70 percent inaccurate shit. *

** 42nd book of 2021: Equanimous Two Stars ** How to find stoic joy in reading a mediocre book? ** Negative visualization: ** imagine a world where one never had the opportunity to read this book…. wait that would make me happier. ** Accept the things you cannot change: ** Stoicism, like real estate, attracts writers of mediocre quality. Nothing I do will change that. ** Beware hedonic adaption: ** Just because we live in what may be the last golden age of literature does not mean every book is great! ...

** 41st book of 2021: Shallow Archeology ** What do the the last gasps of a civilization look like? One could argue that it resembles something like the Arab winter, with coups, civil war, broken families and rampant hate. Hessler came to Egypt from a long tour in China just as the Arab world seemed ready to change. Mubarak had stepped down, and free and fair elections were about to be held. ...