AE

I never really knew much about the Hollywood blacklist, the Red Scare, and the House Un-American Activities Committee (fascist witch-hunt) of the 1940's & 1950's. I also never heard of this movie before but this was pretty interesting. 3/5ths of it was about the making of this movie and the lives & drama of the people involved in its making. The rest was a more over-arching story about the blacklist. Honestly, I wish I had just read a book about the black list because the story about the movie was not that enthralling.

I watched the movie halfway through reading the book because one chapter was just explaining the plot and I thought watching it myself might be better than having it completely spoiled. The movie was...fine. The movie's clever style of making the entire movie real-time with no time skips was really neat. Someone quoted in the book described this movie as “the favorite Western for people who hate Westerns.” Which I can definitely understand. But trying to discern this as an allegory for the Hollywood blacklist and HUAC is very much not obvious in 2021.

I'm not big on biographical books, and this was about half biography of men I did not find very interesting. So I'd say this wasn't my favorite book, but it wasn't bad. If you're interested in old Hollywood, Gary Cooper, Westerns, High Noon the movie, and/or the Hollywood blacklist, check it out. If you're JUST interested in learning more about the fascistic Hollywood blacklist and HUAC witch-hunt, probably check out another book about it.

None of us have even a remote understanding of the history of indigenous peoples because even the most undeniable horrors have been thoroughly whitewashed for the sake of maintaining the lie of American Exceptionalism. This book provides some understanding to the horrors that fell the people that lived on the land we're living on now, including the multiple genocides committed against them, starting with those committed by Columbus himself. They weren't the savages. We were.

Highly Recommended

This book truly is the sister of “How Europe Underdeveloped Africa” Reading one is a requirement after reading the other, as they susinctly match and compliment the themes and overarching tales of exploitation from, sometimes, the same corporations in both continents.

Slaves stolen from both Africa and Latin America worked on planting and harvesting mono-cultured cash crops on both continents to feed Europe and the US. The most powerful countries on earth will do anything to maintain their stranglehold on the world's resources. Invasion, genocide, crippling economic sanctions, whatever it takes.

“Like sugarcane, cacao means monoculture, the burning of forests, the dictatorship of international prices, and perpetual penury for the workers. The plantation owners, who live on the Rio de Janeiro beaches and are more businessmen than farmers, do not permit a single inch of land to be devoted to other crops. Their managers normally pay wages in kind—jerked beef, flour, beans; when paid in cash, the peasant receives the equivalent of a liter of beer for a whole day's work, and must work a day and a half to buy a can of powdered milk.”

When your country's entire economy is based on the export of a handful of crops or mined minerals, a national economic collapse is merely a matter of when, not if. The international corporations deliberately play these under-developed countries off eachother to drive down the prices of the raw materials. And when a bust comes, the rich move on and the poor get shafted. Just like everywhere else.

Anything they call “international aid” is simply more tools of controlling these underdeveloped nations. They don't give money to help. They give it because they've sucked up too much wealth and need to help balance things out so the exploited countries don't collapse. Because if that happens, the resources run dry.

This is a fantastic book that I encourage anyone interested in understanding South America, the history of global capitalism, and the history of US Imperialism. Also read “How Europe Underdeveloped Africa” immediately before or after reading this book.

This is one of my favorite books of the year. It is insanely fascinating and is partially a biography of my new favorite person: Major General Smedley Butler. A man who helped stop a fascist coup. A man who strongly spoke out against war, seeing it for what it is: state-backed capitalist rackets. Read this book just to hear some of the speeches from this man. Or at the very least just look up some of his quotes. He's amazing.

I've read enough books to be convinced that the CIA assassinated JFK as retribution for his refusal to conduct a full-on invasion of Cuba after the Bay of Pigs debacle and otherwise displeasing the powers that be. But I think it's not unreasonable to be skeptical of the conspiracy theory. There's not enough declassified evidence to satisfy the ardent supporters & maintainers of the status quo. Maybe when more is released, the history can be more thoroughly reevaluated that would prevent corporate media from being able to continually deny reality.

Comparably, the conspiracy to assassinate MLK by the FBI and Memphis Police Department is SO UNDENIABLY TRUE, that no rational person could possibly refute the MOUNTAIN of evidence. It is night and day.

The author has spent decades conducting interviews and calling for new trials on this assassination. His investigation is incredibly thorough. Throughout it, he has been stymied by federal officials stalking him, bullying his witnesses, and refusing to cooperate in any way.

“Skeptics” often use the semantic satiation phrase “if it were a conspiracy, then hundreds of people would have to be in on it! Surely someone would have talked by now.” But what's clear is that people have talked! At least 70 different people have gone on the record in a court of law arguing that the official story about the assassination is false. These are people who were there at the day, who've overheard conversations by police, who spoke to witnesses that end up getting mysteriously killed, even people involved have admitted their involvement. It is truly baffling how thorough the author's investigation is.

In 1999, the author and the King family filed a Civil case against

70+ people have come forward to speak on the record in a civil trial in 1999 that proved James Earl Ray was an unwitting patsy and a conspiracy orchestrated by the FBI in cooperation with the Memphis Police Department and US Army Intelligence. Why didn't you ever hear about this trial?

“Some seventy witnesses and thirty days later, a jury took fifty-nine minutes to find for the King family and against Loyd Jowers and agents of the government of the United States, the state of Tennessee, and the city of Memphis. Jowers's liability was assessed at 30 percent, while the government's liability was put at 70 percent. The extraordinary array of verbal testimonial and documentary evidence is set out in detail in my second book An Act of State. Suffice it to say, the roles and link between the Mafia, the military, local law enforcement, and government officials became crystal clear.”

Where was the media for this trial?

“The media camera, like the media itself, would come and go. They were nearly always absent, with the notable and sole exception of local anchorman Wendell Stacey, who almost lost his job at the time over his insistence that he attend every day. He was eventually fired but won a wrongful dismissal action and was rehired.”

Truth to fucking power indeed.

The author not only thoroughly debunks the US government's official story with mountains of evidence, but even annihilates other authors who wrote books that reinforced the government's official story, pointing out all of the blatant ignoring of contrary evidence, distortion of the evidence they do use, and outright fabrication.

It is inherently dishonest and disingenuous to argue that we can support the official government story when information is still classified more than half a century later. No one in good conscience can argue the US is a “free democracy” when so much critical information about what the US Government does on its own soil to its own citizenry is hidden away for decades “for our protection.” That is, at its very core, bullshit.

While I DO NOT subscribe to a majority of conspiracy theories, I DO think that the current system of document classification, as well as the overt ties mainstream corporate media has with federal agencies, and the actual, undeniable, proven conspiracies conducted by the federal government (MK Ultra, COINTELPRO, Iran-Contra) give enough credibility to those who do not immediately accept the official stories provided by US government officials.

The US government has failed to provide its people with enough reason to trust their word. Though I think plenty of the conspiratorially minded take it too far. But that's not surprising given how much insane shit the US government has actually, demonstrably, undeniably done over the last 100 years.

The Jesse Jackson involvement was the most shocking revelation to me. I had no idea he was involved. It is clear as day that he wanted the fame and notoriety for himself, so he made a deal with the devil to get it. What did South Park say about him again?

Anyway...

The author goes in depth about how corporate media has continually stymied any substantive reporting on his decades-long investigation, cancelling his appearances, refusing to publish his books, refusing to report on the revelations, always either siding with the government's flimsy story or ignoring him outright.

“By 1967 the CIA was spending 1.5 billion dollars a year without any effective fiscal control over individual expenditures on operations. Covert domestic activities and operations were paid for by “unvouchered funds” (expenditures without purchase orders or receipts). As a result of the 1949 Central Intelligence Act, Director Helms had the authority to spend money “without regard to the provisions of law and regulations relating to the expenditure of government funds.” Helms's signature on any check, no matter how large, drawn on any CIA bank account, was deemed to be sufficient. Interagency cooperation, particularly with the army and/or the State Department, was frequently necessary and this was accomplished through the establishment of Special Operations Groups (SOG) created for particular projects or missions. SOG activity inside the United States against “Willie” (blacks and dissidents) was not publicized or known.”

We know these people funded fascists in Europe and South America. We know these people orchestrated political assassinations across the globe. We know these people ran guns and drugs in order to get more unaccountable funding. And I'm expected to believe a word they say about “no involvement?” Gimme a break

“On June 16, 1978, while at the United Nations to talk with members and staff of the UN Special Assembly on Disarmament, [Daniel] Ellsberg [leaker of the pentagon papers] became quite friendly with [Brady] Tyson [then an aide to UN ambassador Andrew Young]. [...]
In the affidavit Ellsberg stated, “I asked Tyson whether he thought there had been a conspiracy and who he thought might have done it. He said very flatly to me, ‘We know there was a conspiracy and we know who did it.' ... I asked him who it was, if he would feel free to say, and he said again in a way that was very surprising to me in its lack of equivocation or reservation, ‘It was a group of off-duty and retired FBI officers working under the personal direction of J. Edgar Hoover.' He said further that this was a group working secretly and known to almost no one else in the FBI. This group Tyson said included ‘a sharpshooter,' who had actually done the shooting.””

Would you look at that, someone DID talk! Why would somebody with rock solid credibility, the guy who leaked the pentagon papers, not let this revelation become international news? The House Select Committee On Assassinations in the 1990's didn't seem to care. WEIRD. After the affidavit was brought to the committee's attention, the author and his cohorts addressed the media: “Abernathy, in his offhand manner, informed them that, yes, we had had a very productive meeting with the staff and leadership of the committee, we hoped that they would go on and complete their work, and we had given them certain information implicating the FBI in the killing of Dr. King. I was amazed that none of the press picked this up: there was virtually no response.” WEIRD.

“At this point, it appears entirely reasonable, in light of this sordid history, of disinformation with collaboration between mainstream media and the government, to conclude that the more we learn about contemporary publishing and news reporting in the United States, the more accurate does it appear was Carl Bernstein's conclusion in Rolling Stone in October 1977 about the extraordinary degree of influence and control over—and actual working presence in all aspects of print, audio, and visual media by the intelligence community and its assigned agents. The willingness of corporate media to collaborate and the consolidation of that collaboration has, for the most part, made it impossible for a free and independent press to operate in this Republic.”

The corporate media doesn't care about the truth. They are not there to speak truth to power. Quite the opposite, they're there to make you THINK they're speaking truth to power so you don't think critically beyond what they show you.

The author became the lawyer of James Earl Ray. He, along with the King family, wanted to have an actual trial for Ray. The corporate media doesn't want this because the US government doesn't want this. So...

“The media continually sought to undermine the strength of the family's commitment to a trial. Distortions abounded. Take the New York Times coverage on February 21 of our motion to test the alleged murder weapon. Drummond Ayres Jr. reported Mrs. King's testimony:

>Mrs. King, speaking after years of silence about Mr. Ray's legal maneuvering, took the stand this morning, and acknowledging the incongruity of her appearance on his behalf and behest, said, “We call for the trial that never happened.”

This was a gross distortion of what she actually said, which was: “We call for the trial that never happened.... If we fail to seize this fading opportunity for justice to be served, the tragedy will be compounded by the failure of the legal system.” Nowhere in her statement did she refer in any way to James being pressed to tell anything.”

Not only is the crime clear, but the cover-up was clear from the beginning. The crime scene was immediately tampered with when the bushes (where the real shooter was located) got cut down the MORNING AFTER the shooting. A taxi driver who saw the real shooter running from the scene was murdered. Witnesses were harassed to prevent them from coming forward.The author was being followed by the FBI while he was trying to meet with witnesses. “I would learn later from a mutual street acquaintance that an FBI contact was trying to locate where I was staying. Now, why would they be doing that?“ HUH. WEIRD.

I could go on, but I've said all I need to say and it would be beating a dead horse. Read this book if you want to know what really happened to MLK. Every single argument he makes is backed up with logic, reason, and mounds of evidence.

This book seemed right up my alley. An unabashed history of the first 60 years of the CIA, only citing direct documents and on-the-record interviews.

But then I noticed something strange in the book: It often times does not name the CIA's operations directly. It's truly baffling how much the author goes out of his way to NOT directly name the specific CIA operations he's covering.

Here's an example. Compare this direct quote...

“On Forrestal's orders, Wisner created networks of stay-behind agents–foreigners who would fight the Soviets on the opening days of World War III. The goal was to slow the advance of hundreds of thousands of the Red Army's troops in Western Europe. He wanted arms, ammunition, and explosives stockpiled in secret caches all over Europe and the Middle East, to blow up bridges, depots, and Arab oil fields in the face of a Soviet advance”

...to this Wikipedia opening paragraph.

“Operation Gladio was the codename for clandestine “stay-behind” operations of armed resistance that were organized by the Western Union (WU), and subsequently by NATO and the CIA,[1][2] in collaboration with several European intelligence agencies during the Cold War.[3] The operation was designed for a potential Warsaw Pact invasion and conquest of Europe.”

They're describing the exact same thing. And yet the word “Gladio” does not show up in Weiner's book.

Here's another example:

Compare this quote from the book....

“From his first days in power, Allen Dulles polished the public image of the CIA, cultivating America's most powerful publishers and broadcasters, charming senators and congressmen, courting newspaper columnists. [...] Dulles kept in close touch with the men who ran The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the nation's leading weekly magazines. He could pick up the phone and edit a breaking story, make sure an irritating foreign correspondent was yanked from the field, or hire the services of men such as Time's Berlin bureau chief and Newsweek's man in Tokyo.”

...to this quote from the book “Operation Gladio: The Unholy Alliance between the Vatican, the CIA, and the Mafia” by Paul L. Williams (2015)...

“Knowing the importance of issuing such false reports, the CIA, under Allen Dulles, initiated Operation Mockingbird in 1953. This operation involved recruiting leading journalists and editors to fabricate stories and create smoke screens in order to cast the Agency's agenda in a positive light. Among the news executives taking part were William Paley of the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS), Henry Luce of Time Inc., Arthur Hays Sulzberger of the New York Times, Barry Bingham Sr. of the Louisville Courier-Journal, and James Copley of Copley Press. Entire news organizations eventually became part of Mockingbird, including the American Broadcasting Company (ABC), the National Broadcasting Company (NBC), the Associated Press, United Press International, Reuters, Hearst Newspapers, Scripps Howard, Newsweek, the Mutual Broadcasting System, the Miami Herald, the Saturday Evening Post, and the New York Herald Tribune.”

And yet “Mockingbird” doesn't show up in the book either.

Notably neither does “Paperclip”, “Cyclone”, “Condor”, “Demagnetize”, or “Anvil”.

It does have “Nightingale”, “Mongoose”, “Chaos”, “Ultra” (instead of “MKUltra”) and “Phoenix” though. Google “Operation” and any of those words for a bit of light reading.

These are all code names for operations the CIA orchestrated within the time frame the book covers. He includes the actions covered in these operations but very obviously does NOT include a lot of the code name.

That shows me the author might be trying to obscure the actions of the CIA as much as he was trying to reveal them. Without this critical shorthand, it becomes far more difficult for the reader to conduct independent follow-up research or better directly recall the contents itself. The only reason I even noticed this issue is because this isnt my first book chronicling the misdeeds of the CIA. It's my...fourth? Fifth?

It is indefensible for the author to leave out this critical information.

The author doesn't cover the operations very thoroughly, focusing more on the office politics presidential fuckery over the last 60 years.
~

Another disappointment was his take on the Kennedy assasination. Since the book is from 2007, it doesn't include the recently released reports that directly shows that Lee Harvey Oswald was an asset of the CIA. Maybe he'll release a 2nd version?

~~~~

But it wasn't all bad.
What the book shows is the insane ineptitude of the CIA since its inception. They wanted to be a spy org, then before even getting that off the ground, pivoted to focus on a covert psy-ops, funding fascists, and destabilizing countries they know very little about.

The US government would have better standing in the world if the CIA did nothing but spy and all the money for funding ops was lit on fire. Less people (on both sides) would be dead and the world would be a more peaceful place.

The actions of the CIA from its inception to present has been nothing but shabby, incompetent, and counter-productive. It's not rugged geniuses trying to stop a catastrophe, it's shmucks airdropping gold and guns to literal Nazis or trying to get people in trouble with the law to flip them into becoming spies or it's people moving heroin from A to B. That's what the CIA does. They fund fascists, give bad intelligence resulting in the bombing of civilians, fail to predict any major world event or catastrophe; basically the author showed there's nothing of value here.

Or they send spies into hostile countries, who immediately get captured or killed. And if they get captured, they're forced to call in saying everything's fine so the CIA'll airdrop supplies, literally funding the enemy.

That's if they're not actually funding extremist groups that turn around and attack the US. #OperationCycloneResultedIn911

The biggest takeaway from this book is that the argument “the CIA should be abolished” is far less extreme and far more reasonable a take than I originally believed. The org has been on life support for decades. It's been ripped apart and put back together so many times; each president has used and abused it. Mind you, I don't feel bad for how sad they feel because they, ya know, didn't predict 9/11 or were blamed for Iran-Contra or whatever, fuck em. But every section ends with how the agency is in shambles, then it moves on to another decade, and again ends with how the agency is in shambles. Just close up shop, boys. It's over.

The CIA cannot succeed in its assigned tasks because there are not enough people that are knowledgeable enough AND willing to actually work there. It's no wonder they're now trying to pivot with “woke CIA” ads.

I would recommend this book to anyone who thinks the USA is a good country who doesn't do bad things, or thinks the CIA is an overall positive organization that isn't incompetent and evil.
If you've already lost your rose-tinted glasses over the USA and CIA, then there are better books.

The Social Security Act of 1935, the Wagner Act of 1935, the GI Bill of 1944, and other New Deal & Fair Deal legislation were all implemented not by a central federal government, but by local governments. Some of these bills intentionally left out protections for specific jobs that were primarily being done by black people (farm workers & maids, specifically) As such, these bills were intentionally implemented to “maintain the racial order” of Jim Crow. It was affirmative action for the benefit of white people.

These bills led to the greatest transference of wealth to the working class in US history and created the “middle class” as we colloquially understand it. However, the overwhelming majority of black people were left out of this transference. This has COMPOUNDED over the generations. Many white families can draw a direct line from these bills to their current material conditions. This has led to a widening of the racial wealth gap.

The purpose of Affirmative Action as implemented today is to rectify the federally mandated historical injustices of the Jim Crow era. It is used to right particular past wrongs. “Properly tailored and bounded in time, they can help transcend, once and for all, not only the practice of racism but its enduring legacies.”
I think every person reading this can agree with me in saying that we should craft our society where affirmative action is not necessary to achieve economic equality among races, but we have not achieved that ideal world. We could do it in a generation. We could eliminate poverty for all and have a much more egalitarian society. But that would require a lot more work than past generations were willing to push for. I hope you will join me in trying to achieve that ideal society.

This book chronicles, in a matter-of-fact way, the history of these programs and how they were INTENTIONALLY crafted to prevent racial equality. It provides the necessary historical context to understand why affirmative action is still needed today. It fits in well as a bridge between “The Souls of Black Folk” (1903) by W.E.B. Du Bois, which further elaborates on the failure of reconstruction, and “How to be an Anti-Racist” (2019) by Ibram X. Kendi, which elaborates on how to craft a more egalitarian society.

I would highly recommend this book to anyone who wants to understand the history of race in the US and the history of affirmative action.

Wow. This book goes HARD. I first got a better understanding about the true evils of Christopher Columbus after reading “Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies” by Jared Diamond (1997), “A People's History of the United States” (2004 edition) by Howard Zinn, “An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States” by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz (2014), and “Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong “ by James W. Loewen (2008). All fantastic books I would highly recommend.
So I already knew he was a bad dude. But because it's Indigenous Peoples Day weekend, I figured I'd read a short book just about him. But this book...this book cranks it to 11 at the jump. It does not hold its punches against Columbus, the church, colonialists, capitalists, anyone. It's awesome. Reading through the author's Wikipedia page and watching some videos of interviews with him, it's no wonder he'd write something this unabashedly provocative. He was an amazing professor and historian that tried to right the wrongs of the US's Eurocentric historical understanding.
Christopher Columbus was a bad guy. He personally participated in the genocides of countless people on two different continents. Don't take my word for it. You can read his own journal to see how ruthlessly evil he was. He didn't discover shit. You cannot discover places where people already exist. Furthermore, he didn't know he “discovered” a new place, AND he wasn't the first European to show up. He destroyed more cultures than he helped create.
What he did do was spearhead (and personally participate in) the genocides of the natives of North America and the genocides of native Africans. He was ruthless and cruel. He set into motion the beginnings of capitalism, commodifying human beings and slaughtering those who disobey.
I'll be checking out some more stuff by this author and some books he recommended in his interviews and in this book. His call for Pan-Africanism is really interesting and a subject I know disappointingly little about.
Highly recommended to anyone who wants to actually understand this history of the founding of the USA and not the whitewashed bullshit they teach in school.

This book covers the buildup before WW1, to its end and some post-WW1 scuffles and ends around 1923, focusing entirely on the Middle East.

This is also the longest audiobook I've ever gotten through, so this review is gonna be a doozie. I made lots of highlights in my ebook copy so I wouldn't forget my thoughts. I have attempted to compile the most interesting factoids along with my thoughts in a mildly cohesive narrative. Half of this review is quotes from the book because it's so insane that I don't think anyone would believe me otherwise.

In order to understand the modern Middle East, you must understand how Europe (mostly Britain) carved up the Ottoman Empire after winning WW1. To put it simply, the people who had control of the collapsed Ottoman Empire (France and Britain) had little to no understanding of the regions they had been tasked with carving up. The people who actually lived there did not have input on the decisions made. Their hubris has sent a century-long shockwave through the region that has no sign of getting resolved for the next century or more.

Miscellaneous
• Even before WW1 started, Europe was already conducting corporate colonialism over Ottoman means of production. An empire being colonized. Who would a thunk it? “Europeans also shared in the control of what is at the heart of a political entity: its finances. Because the Porte had defaulted on a public debt of more than a thousand million dollars in 1875, the Sultan was obliged to issue a decree in 1881 that placed administration of the Ottoman public debt in European hands.”
• The German Empire probably could have won WW1 if they hadn't goaded the US Empire into war against them.
• In both WW1 and WW2, the British, French, and Americans were on the same side as Russia. This is really funny since they always hated the Russians and it was just circumstantial “enemy of my enemy” sort of allies. The more things change, etc.
• Any time they mentioned Ibn Saud or Wahhabism, my ears perked up. Watch the documentary “Bitter Lake” (2015) by Adam Curtis to learn why. The Brit's recognized his fanatical faction back then. They supported him, he garnered too much power, they sent their puppets against him and lost. Who knows how different the world might be if European empires stopped the Saudis & Wahhabism from ruling Arabia? More buildings in NYC maybe?
• TE Lawerence, AKA: “Lawrence of Arabia” was apparently a bit of an over-exaggerator. That and British bigotry resulted in the legend of Lawrence expanding well-beyond reality: “Lawrence possessed many virtues but honesty was not among them; he passed off his fantasies as the truth. [...] Lawrence's arrival with the news from Aqaba completed his nine months' transformation into a military hero. Auda abu Tayi, sheikh of the eastern Howeitat, who had in fact won the victory, did not have a name that tripped easily off the tongues of British officers. Instead they said, as historians did later, that ‘Lawrence took Aqaba.'”

White & Christian Supremacy
• The European empires were simply white supremacists & Christian supremacists who believed their form of rule is the only acceptable form and believe they had a divine right to control the Arabic-speaking peoples because “they were incapable of genuine independence” and “the Arabs can't govern themselves”. It's just “the white man's burden - European edition”.
• The European empires didn't care about self-determination. And the Arabs “did not want to be ruled by Christians or Europeans”. Who can blame them?
• Europe's white supremacy blinded them so much that they couldn't even fathom the idea of simply asking the Arabic people what they want. This was recommended by Woodrow Wilson and resulted in the DOA King-Crane Commission. A valiant effort but the European Empires would never let their subjects decide their own fates.

Anti-Semitism
• The most bizarre fact I learned was that pretty much every single person in charge in Europe at the time was extremely anti-Semitic and genuinely believed in a covert global Jewish cabal, so much so that many tried to get said cabal on their side to help win the war. The anti-Zionists were anti-Semitic. The pro-Zionists were anti-Semitic. Everyone in every country.
• This anti-Semitic conspiratorial mindset even resulted in Europeans believing that the Bolshevik revolution in Russia was actually “secret agents called into existence by Germans doing the work of Jews who were devoted to the vengeful destruction of Russia.” Insane.
• The Catholics thought that Zionism and Bolshevism were a part of the same Jewish world conspiracy “seeking the destruction of the Christian world”.
• The anti-Semitic conspiracy theory about “Jewish domination” stemmed from a piece of propaganda called “The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion,” which was first published in 1903 but didn't garner popularity in Europe until 1920. It “purported to be a record of meetings held by Jews and Freemasons at the end of the nineteenth century in which they plotted to overthrow capitalism and Christianity and to establish a world state under their joint rule.” Powerful people in Britain and France genuinely believed this propaganda was true.
• However, the protocols were a forgery concocted by the Czarist Russia's secret police, who plagiarized them from a satire on Napoleon III. So that's fun. Now I know more about the phony globalist Jewish conspiracy theory than I ever did before.

Zionism, Palestine, & Britain
• Zionism became popular amongst Christians in part because of “a powerful evangelical movement within the Church of England that aimed at bringing the Jews back to Palestine, converting them to Christianity, and hastening the Second Coming.” This is especially funny since one of the most powerful pro-Zionist movements in the US today are the conservative evangelicals who believe the same thing.
• The British Empire spearheaded the Zionist movement under the guise of wanting a homeland for a historically oppressed people. They claimed it was “Biblical prophecy to restore the Jews to Zion.” This was a smokescreen.
• The real reason was because of the strategic importance of Palestine to the British Empire. It was a key link on the land route to India. Keeping control of lands between the Mediterranean and India was their primary drive during and after WW1.
• “Palestine gave Britain the land road from Egypt to India and brought together the empires of Africa and Asia. [...] With the addition of Palestine and Mesopotamia [Iraq], the Cape Town to Suez stretch could be linked up with the stretch of territory that ran through British-controlled Persia [Iran] and the Indian Empire to Burma, Malaya, and the two great Dominions in the Pacific—Australia and New Zealand. As of 1917, Palestine was the key missing link that could join together the parts of the British Empire so that they would form a continuous chain from the Atlantic to the middle of the Pacific.”
• The zionists knew their plans to colonize Palestine would result in a geopolitical nightmare even back in 1918. But empires are gonna empire and colonizers are gonna colonize. And here we are over 100 years later with the matter no closer to being solved. Britain is the reason why Israel exists. Britain, and to a far lesser extent France, are the causes of the century-long strife in the entire region.
• “[Aaron Aaronsohn's] work tended to show that, without displacing any of the 600,000 or so inhabitants of western Palestine, millions more could be settled on land made rich and fertile by scientific agriculture.” Jim's at camera [Narrator: that's not what happened]

Jordan & Palestine
• Apparently Palestine also included the country of Jordan, and because the Brits were selling off the Middle East, Churchill inadvertently cleaved the country apart and created a wholly new nation. Insane.
• “The recurring suggestion that Palestine be partitioned between Arabs and Jews ran up against the problem that 75 percent of the country had already been given to an Arab dynasty that was not Palestinian. The newly created province of Transjordan, later to become the independent state of Jordan, gradually drifted into existence as an entity separate from the rest of Palestine; indeed, today it is often forgotten that Jordan was ever part of Palestine.”
• This has been deemed illegal by many folks in the region and overall deemed a dick move by Churchill.

The US Empire
• The US Empire's involvement in WW1 is the most interesting. Woodrow Wilson is undeniably a white supremacist. But he was publicly an anti-imperialist. His fourteen points, while noble, weren't followed through because of Wilson's mediocre negotiating skills and having a stroke. The Allied empires did whatever they could to scoop up more colonies without sparking the US's ire. Or even better, they sicked the US after a former ally for being too colonialist.
• “Lloyd George's Middle Eastern strategy was to direct the Americans' anti-imperialist ire against the claims presented by Italy and France, distracting the President from areas in which he might make difficulties for Britain. Maurice Hankey, British Secretary to the Peace Conference, recorded in his diary even before the conference convened that Lloyd George ‘means to try and get President Wilson into German East Africa in order to ride him off Palestine.'”
• I wish this book had thrown in a sentence or two about how the “staunchly anti-imperialist” Woodrow Wilson refused to meet with Ho Chi Mihn, who was at the Versailles peace talks to lobby for the liberation of Vietnam from French Colonizers. We all know what happened after that....
• The US Empire's failure to back up Wilson's Fourteen Points resulted in Britain and France having complete control over the Middle East's fate.
• After Wilson left office, we got a good modern colonialist in W.G. Harding who didn't give a damn about self-governance and used the power of the state to protect corporate oil interests. Where have I heard that before?

No Honor Among Thieves
• The Brits really won WW1. They won it flat out. They won and did everything they could to secure that imperial land route, including stabbing the French in the back. They were all trying to stab each-other in the back and gobble up the plunder for themselves:
• “The French did not believe that the British were sponsoring Jewish and Arab aspirations in good faith, while the British discussed how, rather than whether, to break their agreements with France. Neither Britain nor France planned to honor wartime commitments to Italy. Neither Britain nor France was disposed to carry out the idealistic program of Woodrow Wilson with which, when Washington was listening, they pretended to be in sympathy.”
• The back-stabbing allies really heated up after the Angora Accord, where the French made a separate peace with Turkey, resulting in a proxy war between British-backed Greeks & French-backed Turks in 1921. Wild
• With the dust settled, their empires garnered these states: “Palestine and Mesopotamia [Iraq] to be kept by Britain; Arabia was to remain independent under British-influenced monarchs, Egypt and the Gulf coast already having been taken by Britain; and Syria, including Lebanon, was to go to France.”
• Britain & France screwing over Italy in the spoils of war inspired an Italian political agitator named Benito Mussolini. Boy I sure hope that doesn't result in anything bad.......

Social Democracy
This was my favorite quote:
“In 1920 and 1921 the British economy collapsed. Prices collapsed, exports slumped, companies went out of business, and the country was gripped by mass unemployment on a scale never known before. [...] it had always been Lloyd George's view that ‘the way to prevent the spread of the revolutionary spirit was to embark at once on large schemes of social progress.' In his view, to give up such schemes was to leave the door open for agitation and violence.”
Bingo. This is exactly what FDR, the “man who saved capitalism,” did with the New Deal. That was the point. Force capitalists to give a little to prevent them from losing it all. Workers win in the short term and lose in the long term. This is one reason why anti-capitalists don't trust Social Democrats.

Backfire
• The reason why European imperialism failed so miserably in the Middle East was because of their fundamental misunderstanding in the millennia-old culture and identity of the peoples. Europe imposed a secular nation-state structure to a people who did not want that.
• “Beneath such apparently insoluble, but specific, issues as the political future of the Kurds or the political destiny of the Palestinian Arabs, lies the more general question of whether the transplanted modern system of politics invented in Europe—characterized, among other things, by the division of the earth into independent secular states based on national citizenship—will survive in the foreign soil of the Middle East.”
• “In the rest of the world European political assumptions are so taken for granted that nobody thinks about them anymore; but at least one of these assumptions, the modern belief in secular civil government, is an alien creed in a region most of whose inhabitants, for more than a thousand years, have avowed faith in a Holy Law that governs all of life, including government and politics.”
• It took Europe 1500 years to resolve the collapse of the Roman Empire and form into the modern nation-state system that exists today. It's been 100 years since the end of WW1. I doubt this'll be resolved within the next 100 years.
• “In a leading article on 7 August 1920, The Times demanded to know ‘how much longer are valuable lives to be sacrificed in the vain endeavour to impose upon the Arab population an elaborate and expensive administration which they never asked for and do not want?'”
• Europe didn't care about the minutia around the various religious sects and their millennia-old divisions. Sunnis, Shi'ites, Kurds, none of that mattered to the imperialists. Europe's most prestigious libraries didn't even have to-date information about the region. Britain's leaders made reference to geographic areas from The Bible.
• “An Italian diplomat wrote that “A common sight at the Peace Conference in Paris was one or other of the world's statesmen, standing before a map and muttering to himself: ‘Where is that damn'd...?' while he sought with extended forefinger for some town or river that he had never heard of before.” Lloyd George, who kept demanding that Britain should rule Palestine from (in the Biblical phrase) Dan to Beersheba, did not know where Dan was. He searched for it in a nineteenth-century Biblical atlas, but it was not until nearly a year after the armistice that General Allenby was able to report to him that Dan had been located and, as it was not where the Prime Minister wanted it to be, Britain asked for a boundary further north”. These were the idiots in charge of carving up the Middle East.
• And unsurprisingly, immediately after the war ended and the lines got drawn, the people began uprising against their colonialist oppressors. The British people didn't want to spend the money on maintaining the empire. The government didn't want to commit the troops they needed to maintain their stranglehold.
• Then we come with the greatest quote ever: “Bonar Law argued that if the United States and the Allies were not prepared to share the burden of responsibility, Britain should put it down. ‘We cannot alone act as the policeman of the world. The financial and social conditions of this country make that impossible.'“ Hilarious. Only took another ~3 decades for the US empire to pick up that mantle as world police.

Iraq
• Britain created the country of Iraq. It is the reason why that nation exists. It bankrolled Iraq's first monarch and orchestrated an astroturf campaign to get him into power.
• “In the east, Kurdish, Sunni, Shi'ite, and Jewish populations had been combined into a new Mesopotamian country named Iraq, under the rule of an Arabian prince; it looked like an independent country, but Britain regarded it as a British protectorate.”
• The US Empire's oil oligarchs supported British Hegemony in their puppet state: “Allen Dulles, chief of the Near Eastern Affairs Division of the Department of State, was one of the many officials who expressed dismay at the thought that Britain and France might relinquish control of their Middle Eastern conquests, and who expressed fear for the fate of American interests should they do so.” Fun fact: Allen Dulles went on to run the CIA and orchestrated the assassination of JFK, as well as the coverup. See: “The Devil's Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America's Secret Government” (2015) by David Talbot


The book stops at 1923, but I really wanted it to keep going and cover the rest of the 1900s. I'll have to find a THIRD book covering that. Not sure what that'll be.

This book is incredible and fascinating and I highly recommend it to anyone interested in history.

I was really eager to listen to this audiobook because it's a history book written from a Marxist perspective and about an area of history I know very little about.
Unfortunately, it was really hard to follow because every character has a French name, every city or region has a French name and is phrased in a way focusing on individual action, not on groups of people. It was quite confusing as an audiobook for me.
Maybe could have been easier to follow as a regular book or if I had some basic understanding of the names and places and people from my schooling. But proletariat slave revolts don't seem important enough to mention.
The most compelling quote I found in the book was: “The race question is subsidiary to the class question in politics, and to think of imperialism in terms of race is disastrous. But to neglect the racial factor as merely incidental is an error only less grave than to make it fundamental.” This is similar to another quote I read as a tweet a few months ago: “Intersectionality without class consciousness is just Identity politics. Class consciousness without intersectionality is class reductionism. We need both. We have the same enemy.”
I would only recommend this book to someone who's got some surface-level understanding of what happened and doesn't mind listening to French names nonstop.

• Good. This is another book that I finished before discovering there is a new version (2018), but it's a “young reader's edition” so it doesn't count. It really does need a new version because it has several chapters that are out of date.
  
  This book is a collection of short stories related to the discovery/creation of various elements on the periodic table. Most of these stories consist of “scientist screws around, discovers something weird, inadvertently poisons self or loved one, dies.”
  
  Really disappointed this book COMPLETELY ignore the Radium Girls. How is that possible? Not even a single solitary sentence. I was shocked. Google them if you wanna know how cool and good unregulated capitalism is.
  
  The author also had a really weird sentence when trying to describe pathological science: “It's not pseudoscience, like Freudianism and Marxism, fields that poach on the imprimatur of science yet shun the rigors of the scientific method.” Seems like a really bold assertion to casually throw out there without any follow-up in this fun little book about chemistry. But alright.
  
  Great dad book. Your dad would love this book.
  
  

This is really just a long form essay. Hardly a book but the algorithm recommended it so here it is, padding the list. It's a rather un-compelling metaphor for why being relentlessly greedy is actually bad. I was unimpressed. I guess this might be useful to some extreme reactionaries? But even then, it's still a 92-page book that they sure ain't gonna read. Show em the Einstein socialism article instead.

This is a great history of the ever evolving category of “white people” and its ties to “race science”/“scientific racism” (white supremacy masquerading as science), class, beauty, nationalism, evolution, and more.

It shows the fascinating historical lockstep of US nationalism, anti-immigrant sentiment, white supremacy, controlling the bodily autonomy of women, and anti-labor sentiment. (Why does this all sound so familiar?)

Italians, Jews, Irish, Germans, and other groups of people were, at one point or another, considered “not white” or “not members of the white races” at some points over the last ~300 years by the leading thinkers of the time.

When the white supremacists in power wanted to keep down labor movements, they blamed it on immigrants, immigrants who were not, at the time, considered white. When those in power wanted to “quantify” beauty and intelligence, they conveniently designed their standards in a way that validated their racist beliefs. The women they like were “objectively” the most beautiful. The people like them (those with power) were considered intelligent and those without power were considered “imbeciles” or “feeble minded.”

“Inferior” races are dehumanized, compared to animals. “Superior” races (whatever Western European countries the specific author at the time likes the most) are considered superhuman, divine.

And we can see this in the present when ultra-nationalist former President Trump said in Mexico City while meeting with President Andrés Manuel López Obrador after first visiting Guatemala “I want to be clear to folks in this region who are thinking about making that dangerous trek to the United States-Mexico border: Do not come. Do not come.” ...oh...wait.........

The book shows where this always ends up: Eugenics, forced sterilization, genocide. We can see the modern versions of this “race science” as perpetuated by far right extremists like Jordan Peterson a perpetuator of the Bell Curve (a modern racist theory of white supremacy) and “cultural Marxism”, a nonsense phrase literally created by literal nazis.

I recommend this book to anyone interested in learning more about their cultural history or want to have a better historical understanding of our modern issues with race, class, and power.

My only criticism is the middle part was a bit of a slog.

When I first started this book, I was hoping it would be a thorough shellacking of our current economic system through the lens of historical context. There was a little bit of that, but I feel a bit short-changed (pun) by how little our present economic system was covered. He barely even mentioned modern credit scores. While he did lambast the evils of the IMF & World Bank, it left me wanting more, but that's because it's not that kind fo book. It's a history book by an anthropologist.

This is my favorite type of book because it gives me historical facts that actually go against our preconceived notions. That's why I read books: to add to my repertoire of fun facts that sound false, but are actually true.

For example: The myth of barter. There's this popular urban legend buried deep into the zeitgeist, invented by the hack Adam Smith, and perpetuated by economics textbooks that before the invention of money, societies operated on barter to buy and sell goods. That was made up by proto-economists and disproven by anthropologists.

The book also shows that the field of economics is closer to philosophy than to the hard sciences. That ties into the most important thing this book shows, which is exactly what I've been saying: Money is made up. Humans made it up. We can do whatever we want as long as it is within the real world, but money cannot hold humanity back because it is an artificial limitation. Anyone who claims we can't do things that help people because of “the economy” or “inflation” or some other nonsense, they either lack imagination or benefit from how the system is designed.

We can build a better world if we believe we can.

Reading theory is hard. though modern theory is more tolerable, especially with the author making reference to modern media and how it relates to the theory. I should have read this BEFORE “Four Futures” as this book asks the question “what comes after Capitalism?” Where “Four Futures” answers the question.

The pinnacle of anti-colonial text. A key book on the shelf of the revolutionary.

While this book has a lot of key messages that are useful in fighting the class war, I think it's far more valuable to people in the underdeveloped world. And as a 5th-generation colonizer on land that required a lot of genocides to steal and slave labor to develop, it really feels like this book isn't FOR me. It's for people far more oppressed than me. While a lot of the content is timeless, he occasionally makes references to timely events with little to no contextualization, usually because he's trying to build a bigger point so the contextualization necessary for those out of the know would have derailed the point.

Regardless I still got some good stuff out of it. Here are some of the quotes I highlighted:

“...it only needs the newly born to fear living a little more than dying, and for the torrent of violence to sweep away all the barriers.” As relevant as ever. Deteriorating material conditions will inevitably spark revolution. Whether the state crackdown that follows extinguishes the revolution, that is circumstantial.

“Imperialism and capitalism are convinced that the fight against racism and national liberation movements are purely and simply controlled and masterminded from ‘the outside.'” We see this any time the corporate media repeat the propaganda of “outside agitators” trying to fight for human rights, like during the 2020 BLM protests.

“Europe's well-being and progress were built with the sweat and corpses of blacks, Arabs, Indians, and Asians. This we are determined never to forget. When a colonialist country, embarrassed by a colony's demand for independence, proclaims with the nationalist leaders in mind: ‘If you want independence, take it and return to the Dark Ages,' the newly independent people nod their approval and take up the challenge. And what we actually see is the colonizer withdrawing his capital and technicians and encircling the young nation with an apparatus of economic pressure.” This is how the world works. Get dominated by a stronger country, and either accept it or fight for your independence and get economically crushed. Hello Cuba.

“Colonialism and imperialism have not settled their debt to us once they have withdrawn their flag and their police force from our territories. For centuries the capitalists have behaved like real war criminals in the underdeveloped world. Deportation, massacres, forced labor, and slavery were the primary methods used by capitalism to increase its gold and diamond reserves, and establish its wealth and power.” Indeed.

“In order to invest in the independent countries, private companies demand terms which from experience prove unacceptable or unfeasible. True to their principle of immediate returns as soon as they invest “overseas,” capitalists are reluctant to invest in the long term. They are recalcitrant and often openly hostile to the so-called economic planning programs of the young regimes. At the most they are willing to lend capital to the young nations on condition it is used to buy manufactured goods and machinery, and therefore keep the factories in the metropolis running.” This was talked about a lot more in “How Europe Underdeveloped Africa” by Walter Rodney (1972). Europe bought the raw material form underdeveloped countries for cheap, then sold the processed goods back for far more. They had no interest in helping other countries develop. They just wanted to exploit them. They still exploit underdeveloped countries. Exploitation is inevitable under Capitalism.

“The more the people understand, the more vigilant they become, the more they realize in fact that everything depends on them and that their salvation lies in their solidarity, in recognizing their interests and identifying their enemies. The people understand that wealth is not the fruit of labor but the spoils from an organized protection racket. The rich no longer seem respectable men but flesh-eating beasts, jackals and ravens who wallow in the blood of the people.” I love this one. I have nothing of value to add to this. I just really liked it.

Read this book if you're interested in anti-colonialism/post-colonial nationalism.
See also:
• “How Europe Underdeveloped Africa” by Walter Rodney (1972)
• “Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent” by Eduardo Galeano, (1971)
• “Christopher Columbus and the Afrikan Holocaust: Slavery and the Rise of European Capitalism” by John Henrik Clarke (1992)

“The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right” by Atul Gawande (2009)

This book shows the benefits of writing things down, compiling procedures into a checklist, and adhering to it during times of intense pressure.

The author covers different professions and how they've successfully incorporated checklists into their daily operation. He covers...

• Surgery
• Pilots checklist
• Patient vitals chart
• Project management for building construction
• Emergency Management
• Encouraging proper higeine in developing countries
• Deciding to invest in a company

It also goes way to into detail of some kinda gross surgeries. Got kinda needless after like the 4th surgery.

I've been saying this for years. I love checklists. I love creating standard operating procedures. I've done so for every job I've had since graduating from college. It's so much easier to just write down how to do things than to use recall. I'm lazy and forgetful. So documenting and adhering to procedure is a no-brainer.

The author helped craft the surgery checklists for the WHO in ~2007. Literally saving lives just by maintaining a basic checklist of procedures that sometimes get overlooked, resulting in a decrease in efficacy and increase in death.

It's insane to me that the revolutionary concept of...writing things down and following the set procedure...has successfully PLUMMETED the rate of surgery complications whenever implemented. And this revolutionary concept is somehow less than 20 years old? Like...my god. The realm of medicine really seems to have just recently evolved out of its infancy. I guess surgery before GWB was a crapshoot of renegade surgeons who just trusted their instincts. Insane.

Regarding the emergency management, the author talks about the failures of Katrina response in New Orleans. He points out that the most effective solutions involved flattening hierarchies and providing support via mutual aid at the local level. He then fails to see how this shows not just the failure of the federal government in that circumstance, but a failure of our economic system as a whole. Oh well.

Book was short. I really liked it.

Listened to this on a plane ride to Japan.

Was disappointed it was just anecdotes and very few bits of useful information about traversing Japan. A few cultural faux pa's but nothing terribly substantive.

It's an autobiography of a young man with a slightly interesting life. Loved the YouTube channel. not impressed by the book.

How did the West bring war to Ukraine? The answer may surprise you...
...it's NATO expansion. It's always been NATO expansion.

This is more of an extended article than a book. The audiobook is only an hour long. So very easy to consume if you're interested in the subject. I think it was really detailed while still being brief.


Here's my book report...

Let me make something perfectly clear from the jump. Regarding this conflict,
• I do not support the government of Russia,
• I do not support NATO or the US Government,
• I do not support the government of Ukraine.

The US populace has never been known as a people who knows their history, or having a basic understanding of the actions of their government. But let's break this down as simply as possible
• WW2 is won on the backs of millions of Soviet soldiers overwhelming and defeating the Germans.
• Stalin expects to be folded into the new world order alongside its fellow superpower, the US Empire.
• The US Empire is ruled by Capitalists who would rather betray their allies than dare surrender another dime of profits to the working class. Normalizing relations with the USSR would normalize the concept of worker-controlled enterprise. Cue the Cold War.
• NATO is created, does a lot of coups around the world.
• 1962, NATO installs missiles in Turkey, right at the Soviet front door. The USSR, in kind, installs missiles in Cuba. The US comes minutes away from nuclear Armageddon. Then every makes a deal to withdraw the Cuban missiles in exchange for the Turkey missiles. Crisis averted.
• Yada Yada Yada
• 1990, The Soviet Union collapses. US & European enterprise pick to the bone all social programs in the former soviet states, resulting in a crashing of life expectancy and other health indicators. For some strange reason, a large % of people surveyed in these countries wished it never collapsed. Huh. Weird.
• The Russian Government, AFTER losing the Cold War, thinks it'll FINALLY be folded into the now unipolar world order.
• Instead, the US and NATO continue to provoke Russia with NATO expansion. The purpose of NATO has always been to fight Russia. Always. Its expansion is a clear and present danger for the existence of the Russian state. The Russian government understands this clearly.

• “According to an analysis by the National Security Archive of George Washington University, where relevant declassified documents are posted, ‘a cascade of assurances about Soviet security [were] given by Western leaders to Gorbachev and other Soviet officials throughout the process of German unification in 1990 and on into 1991.' These assurances pertained not only to the question of NATO's expansion into East Germany, as is sometimes asserted, but also to the expansion of NATO into the countries of Eastern Europe. Nonetheless, within a few years, NATO began to expand toward Russia's border. Although the assurances had not been instantiated in formal treaties, ‘subsequent Soviet and Russian complaints about being misled about NATO expansion' were not simply Russian propaganda but, rather, were ‘founded in written contemporaneous [memoranda] at the highest levels' of Western governments.

• So we lied to them saying that their existence was secured since NATO would not expand. But NATO expanded anyway. Golly I wonder why Russia doesn't trust us. Putin must be paranoid, that's it. Only logical explanation.

• 1999 NATO brings in Poland among other countries. “In a recent interview, Army Colonel (retired) Douglas Macgregor, Ph.D., a storied Iraq commander who helped develop U.S. war plans for Europe, commented on the admission of one of these countries: ‘[W]hen we decided in 1999 to bring in Poland...[t]he Russians were very worried—not so much because NATO was hostile at the time but because they knew that Poland was. Poland has a long history of hostility toward Russia.... Poland is, if anything, at this point in time, a potential catalyst for war with Russia.'”

• 2001, GWBush withdraws the US from the Antiballistic Missle Treaty with Russia. This is seen as yet another western provocation. Treaties help prevent war. Withdrawing from them helps antagonize and goad toward war.

• 2004, “NATO admitted additional East European countries, including Romania and Estonia, the latter of which borders on Russia. By this point, NATO had expanded close to a thousand miles toward Russia.” This is more provocation.

• 2008, at a NATO summit, NATO announced its intentions to admit Ukraine and Georgia as members. Both countries border Russia. “Although European members of NATO had serious reservations, the administration of President George W. Bush used the position of the United States as senior member of the alliance to push the issue, and the following unequivocal statement was included in the memorandum: ‘We agreed today that these countries [Ukraine and Georgia] will become members of NATO.'”

George W. Bush is one of the key players at fault for the war in Ukraine. This is a red line for Russia. an unacceptable scenario for the very existence and autonomy of their country.

• 2008, In an official cable from the then-U.S. ambassador to Russia (William J. Burns headlined “Nyet Means Nyet [No Means No]: Russia's NATO Enlargement Redlines.” and read: “Not only does Russia perceive encirclement, and efforts to undermine Russia's influence in the region, but it also fears unpredictable and uncontrolled consequences which would seriously affect Russian security interests.”

• 2008, Georgia
• “United States led a 2,000-man military exercise inside Georgia.”
• Days later, Georgia “launched a massive, fourteen-hour artillery and rocket assault on a semi-autonomous Georgian district (South Ossetia). That district borders on Russia and has close ties to it.”
• In response, Russia invades Georgia, fighting against soldiers armed and trained by the US.
• The US Media called it “an unprovoked invasion.” Did i say “media”? I meant “consent manufacturers”
• Colonel Macgregor explains: “The Russians ultimately intervened in Georgia, and the whole purpose of that intervention was to signal to us [the United States] that they would not tolerate a NATO member on their borders, particularly a member that was hostile to them, as at the time the Georgian Government was. So, I think what we're dealing with now [the war in Ukraine] is exactly the outcome that Ambassador Burns feared when he said ‘no means no.'”

• In 2014, the US government backed a coup in Ukraine. Why? The same reason why the US has been backing coups for 100+ years: more money for investors. Open the markets to more effectively drain the wealth of the target country. The US succeeded in installing a pro-west government in a country that borders Russia.

• In response to the 2014 US-backed coup, Russia annexed Crimea to prevent Ukraine from blocking access to “its vital warm-water naval base in Sevastopol, Crimea—access to which Russia had previously negotiated....”

• After the annexation of Crimea, “the U.S. began a massive program of military aid to Ukraine. According to the U.S. Congressional Research Service, a partial accounting since 2014, not including most of the military aid initiated since the 2022 war began, amounts to over four billion dollars, most coming through the State Department and Department of Defense.”
This was essentially a way to unofficially bring Ukraine into NATO. They wanted to “improve interoperability with NATO” even though Ukraine wasn't in NATO (yet).

• 2016, The US installs a an anti-ballistic missile [ABM] system in Romania. “Though ostensibly defensive, the ABM system uses the Mark-41 ‘Aegis' missile launchers, which can accommodate a variety of missile types: not just ABMs, designed to shoot down incoming ballistic missiles, but also—crucially—nuclear-tipped offensive weapons like the Tomahawk cruise missile.” Wow. Missile sites at the Russian border. Where have I heard this before?? Surely this won't be seen as provocative, right???

“The American response to Mr. Putin's concerns about the ABM sites has been to assert that the United States does not intend to configure the launchers for offensive use. But this response requires the Russians to trust America's stated intentions, even in a crisis, rather than to judge the threat by the potential of the systems”

• 2017, The US begins selling lethal weapons to Ukraine, a change to a 2014 policy that only non-lethal items were sold (like body armor).

• 2019, “the United States unilaterally withdrew from the 1987 treaty on intermediate-range nuclear weapons.” They claimed the Russians were cheating, but “the key point is that the United States withdrew unilaterally rather than aggressively seeking to resolve the issues. In deciding to do so, the Americans may have sensed a military advantage, because the missiles in question would be placed in Europe, close to Russia, whereas Russia did not have plans to place weapons at equivalent distances from the United States”

• 2021, “Ukraine and America co-hosted a major naval exercise in the Black Sea region involving navies from 32 countries. Operation Sea Breeze almost provoked Russia to fire at a British naval destroyer that deliberately entered what Russia considers its territorial waters.”

That's it. That's the road to war. Was it all “Russian Aggression?” is “Putin crazy?” And “as bad as Hitler?” I don't think so. I think if you back someone into a corner, they lash out. You back Russia into a corner, they lash out. Do I support this war? No. Do I support Russia? No. But I can see where they're coming from.

Imagine if you will if the shoe were on the other foot. What if the USSR overthrew the government of Canada or Mexico to install a puppet government for them to control? Would the US sit idly by? Of course not, they'd invade immediately. Would the media frame this as “unprovoked US aggression?” Of course not. It'd be called “liberating the people from the new tyrannical government” or the US media would be completely silent on the matter.
And yet somehow “freethinking bleeding heart dove liberals” don't seem to grasp what's happening here. They immediately fall into the same trap every time: “US good. US enemies bad”.

The key takeaway is that we need to understand our history or else we'll keep getting dragged into one bullshit conflict after another.

What's the resolution here?
• Ukraine is in NATO, their economy gets destroyed by more corporate ghouls as well as the US wanting to get some of the money back that it lent to em. (Most probable)
• Russia takes over all of Ukraine and absorbs it into Russia or some new confederation (least probable)
• Ukraine and the US sue for peace and sign a treaty saying Ukraine will NOT join NATO ever. (2nd-least probable but what I think would be most ideal)

This book connects the past research of the 19th century with the atrocities of the 20th century and the continued eugenic efforts in the modern era. The author has a PhD in genetics and knows first hand knowledge of the modern capabilities of genetic biology.

The foundational history of eugenics in the 19th & 20th century were anything but scientific. People with inherent biases (sometimes) used the tools of scientific analysis to come to an already predisposed conclusion: “the rich white people who are currently in charge are superior to everyone else.” How convenient. The 20th-century eugenics movements were merely an effort to shroud classist and white-supremacist ideologies with fabricated scientific legitimacy and fantasies of “Declinism” and called for “Nordic purity”.

Eugenic thinking is still prevalent, still espoused by our leaders, and still forced upon people not just in far away lands, but right here in the imperial core. Eugenics has never been ideologically neutral and is always used as a reason for the powerful to prey upon the less powerful.

The scientific discoveries and technological developments in the 21st century are not sufficient to achieve any sort of “designer baby”, and the more humanity learns about genetics, the more we realize how utterly impossible it would be to achieve.

The current level of genetic testing, embryo selection, end reproductive self-determination is not “eugenics”.
Though some of the claims made by genetic testing companies about what they can screen for are reaching beyond scientific fact. These tools should be liberated as an option for the masses instead of being locked away for only the super rich. These include...
• Genetic counseling
• pre-implantation diagnosis, screening fertilized eggs for genetic diseases
• Embryo selection to select for embryos without genetic abnormalities or disease genes to be implanted.
• prenatal screenings and testings
• Access to abortion in the event a genetic abnormality is discovered.
These are not eugenics, these are medical techniques specifically conceived and designed for the alleviation of suffering in individuals.

We should slowly, carefully, and safely progress with advances in genetic microbiology, gene editing, and genetic research what the ultimate goal of eliminating inheritable diseases, not toward any sort of far-fetched “enhancement” effort.

We as a society should continue to strive toward a better understanding of the human genome and how it is impacted by outside conditions. The solution to improving humanity is not through mass culling of the “unworthy” or sci-fi genetic alterations to load the dice. It is by raising the minimum standard of living, improving universal education, instilling universal access to healthcare. Eliminate poverty, hunger, and homelessness and you'll see a decrease in “inferior” people.

Likewise eliminate or flatten the power structures capable of giving rise to forced eugenics on the people. Any state apparatus willing and capable of legalizing forced eugenic practices upon the population is one that should be dismantled.

I would strongly recommend this book to anyone who has any interest in (or disgust toward) eugenics and genetic modification. I think it was really well written and eye-opening.

~~

Here are some quotes and fun facts I liked from the book...

“We often deploy the clumsy ideas of nature and nurture to describe what is innate in us, and what is extrinsic. What this really means is: genetics (that is, what is encoded in DNA), and everything else in the universe. [...] Nature was never versus nurture; it is and always was via.”

“I'm a scientist, and we are a tribe whose pursuits, in theory, serve a higher purpose. We constantly strive for real truth, via our tried and tested methods that seek to supress the political, or the subjective, and amplify a reality that exists independently from these flawed minds and feeble bodies that we inhabit. What we do, in principle, transcends politics and morality.
Scientists can tell themselves this lie as often as they like, but it will never be true. When we talk about the control of lives, the question of who gets to live or reproduce, we are in a territory where biology and politics are inseparable.”

“The United Kingdom's principal African colonizer Cecil Rhodes, Francis Galton, a young Winston Churchill and many other leaders were open in expressing the sense that White supremacy was the moral duty of the British: to fill the world with the dominant race of the best type of men. This era [1890 to 1910] provided a rich soil for the formalization of eugenics. The idea of racial decay was the fertilizer. Superiority could be achieved with science as the engine of social change.”
Eugenics has never successfully been separated from racial superiority. And since race is an artificial social construct, it means eugenics cannot be scientifically implemented.Winston Churchill was a racist and a eugenicist.

“All these people and so many others of cultural and historical significance were great supporters of an idea we have learned to despise. A common response to this truth is that they were women and men ‘of their time.' This is vapid. All people are of their time, and it is impossible to be alive at any other time. It is perfectly possible and indeed desirable to criticize the past, and to criticize the views of people in the past through the lens of our values and those of their contemporaries. That is the definition of history. Hitler was a man of his time, and was legitimately (albeit among political chaos) appointed to the position of German chancellor in 1933.
Too often, the argument that the past was a foreign country where people did things differently, and that they were simply acting appropriately for that era, is deployed to end or avoid discussion and debates, or to reinforce a cultural history that serves only to make the powerful feel comfortable.”

Eugenic thinking falls apart because it assumes every negative and positive trait is inheritable, rather than environmental. “We inherit our environment from our parents, family and peers, so for many of the traits that animated the eugenicists, the prospect of breeding them out of families and populations was always doomed to failure. Criminality can run in families, but there is no gene for it. Alcoholism can run in families, and while there are genes that increase the risk of addiction, there is no gene for alcoholism. You can have every one of those risk factors, but never become an alcoholic if you never drink alcohol. Poverty runs in families, but there is no gene for being poor.” A lot of the “feeble minded” people targeted for extermination by eugenicists would later turn out to actually be people suffering from fetal alcohol spectrum disorder, a non-heritable environmentally-induced issue.

Eugenics simply does not work

“...[C]omplex traits rarely have single genetic causes, they always involve the nongenetic environment and genetics is probabilistic, not deterministic. This is a key reason that the eugenics project was always on precarious ground: the conditions under scrutiny, whether it was feeblemindedness or epilepsy or alcoholism, do have a genetic component to them—almost everything in human biology and psychology does—though they are never single genes, and those genetic causes are rarely if ever deterministic.”

There is no “intelligence gene” to breed for or cull for or genetically modify. And even if we knew how to do it, it could backfire.

“The first major [genome-wide association study] on cognitive abilities (in 2013, this time via the metric of educational attainment) featured 126,559 people and it uncovered 3 single-letter genetic changes of significance. Three years later, the sample size had doubled, but the genetic landmarks of interest had gone up to 74. Or there was the landmark 2018 study that had 269,867 participants and found genomic locations of note in 1,016 genes. Or the other 2018 landmark paper that had 300,486 individuals and found 148 genetic markers and 709 genes. Or maybe the big daddy, also in 2018, when the number was 1.1 million people and 1,271 places in the genome that were associated with cognitive abilities.
Finally, after a hundred years of searching, we had found the 709 genes associated with general intelligence. Or the 1,016 genes. Or whatever the correct number turns out to be.”

Now we could throw more data into the machine to try and figure out “what gene[s] make us smarter” even though we have a very limited (and extremely Western) understanding of intelligence. OR we could look at the chronic stress associated with poverty and its relation to “intelligence”. Maybe kids would be smarter if they weren't hungry & poor.

“IQ correlates with many things, some considered positive such as income and longevity, and other not so desirable, such as mental health problems.”

“...we already know how to improve the intelligence of populations with better education, health care and access to physical exercise, without having to fantasize about tinkering with genes that would only be accessible to a minuscule minority.”

“When people start anxiously or glibly opining about gene editing for designer babies or selecting embryos for blue-eyed children, they're not really talking about our contemporary understanding of genetics. Instead, they are relying on a hugely outdated or a never true version of altering heredity that is pretty much impossible.”
This was the most revelatory quote of the book. I remember posting about the morality of “designer babies” ~5 years ago. I thought we were maybe a generation away before these thought experiments became a reality. Seems more like a century away or more likely never.

“Would I want to select embryos with those variants, or even edit the genomes of embryos to harbor those variants? No. Not while the roles of those bits of DNA are poorly understood. Not when we don't know if selecting for something means you are inadvertently selecting against something else. One study found that IQ positively correlates with anorexia, anxiety disorders, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and asthma. Though, as I've argued, the gains might be slight, a nudge taller or smarter, you may also be nudging that child toward an eating disorder or other unforeseen health problems.”

“If a couple have histories of inherited disorders in their families, the first step would be genetic counseling. [...]The next stage could be pre-implantation diagnosis. An in vitro fertilization can be screened for sex and for an ever-increasing number of genetic diseases. Embryo selection comes next, where only those without any genetic abnormalities or disease genes are implanted into the mother's womb. The pregnancy can then be monitored for normal progress, including the prenatal screens for Down syndrome and other potential abnormalities.
I want to be explicitly clear here. In my considered opinion, none of these interventions are eugenics. What they are is medical techniques specifically conceived and designed for the alleviation of suffering in individuals. They are medical treatments that reduce the risk of serious illnesses, and give options to parents who wish to have children but, for no reason other than blind luck, carry a higher risk that their kids (and by extension their family) will suffer hardships or reduced mortality well beyond that of a typical life.”

“You may have noted that most of the people who knock around the idea of embryo selection tend not to be the ones who will have to endure the daily rounds of injections to induce ovarian hyperstimulation, or the needle through the vaginal wall to get access to the ovarian follicle. The people who seem most excited by the idea of eliciting molecular control over reproduction don't tend to have wombs at all.”

Whoa Social Democracy is better than Eugenics? What a shock!

“I would also not want embryo selection when the gains of those variants are so marginal that they can be overwhelmed by solutions that are known, and understood, and can be deployed to populations instead of individuals—things as radical as education for all without privilege, tailored to individual needs. Things like better nutrition, health care, exercise, welfare. If we want the betterment of our people—and who doesn't?—we don't need to turn to a scientific creed that is at best poorly understood.”