By Nathaniel Philbrick
Audiobook
Whale attacks ship!
Just another pre movie read. This movie is coming out soon so im listening to the book while at the gym. Love it so far.
"We are stoved"
Wednesday, December 31, 2014
The Deluge: The Great War, America and the Remaking of the Global Order, 1916-1931
By Adam Toze
Library book
This book attempts to discuss the "new world order" that emerged as a result of tje end of WWI.
Pg. 12 Just after the war, power was measured by floating steel. The age of the Dreadnought was upon us.
Wow, couldn't really decipher the introduction so I'll go to chapter one and try my luck there.
Pg 165 on 16-17 July the Romanov's were all murdered andnthe real reign of terror by Lenin would begin. Meanwhile the US and Japan were about to invade Siberia. Most Germans at this time.knew that this was make.it.or breakit.for them if not already too late.
338 I didn'trealize that in 1919 there were race riots breaking out in the cities. "...entire African American neighborhoods were aflame...In Chicago the death toll reached 38...The whites targeted the symbols of wartime change -African American servicement and recent migrants to the northern cities." (See Wilkerson The Warmth of Other Suns for the complete story of the black diaspora).
An "upsurge in lynchings [was a symprom] of the most widespread outbreak of violence since the Civil War."(339)
The violence and esspeciallynthe lynchimgs would continue. In 1939 Billie Holiday would sing n about it in a song called "Strange Fruit" taken from a poem by Abel Meeropol first written in 1937. This is the.poem that the Tuskeegee Airman recites on the train ride in that fabulous movie about those "fighting men of the 99th."
355 The end of WwI saw an upsurge in radicalism and the.common man, squeezed to the wall, began to demand some consessions. There was much unrest worldwide and the forces of the property class acted decisively and oppresively. Tooze calls this the world-wide thermidore or the rstoration of order and normalcy as pr o mised by President Harding and ruthlessly carried out by men like Attorney General Mitchell Palmer.
This from the Columia University website on this topic:
GLOBAL THERMIDOR: THE RECESSION OF 1920-1921 AND THE MAKING OF THE INTERWAR ORDER
A talk by Adam Tooze
December 2
4:30-6:30 pm
Columbia University Faculty House (directions)
Abstract: The final stages of World War I and its aftermath, the period 1917-1923 witnessed a high-water mark both of revolutionary activism and of imperialist ambition. Europe, the United States, the Middle East, the Indian sub-continent, East Asia all witnessed unprecedented upheaval. And yet this “great disorder” was contained. Great power war was brought to an end and revolution pacified. The British Empire weathered its first great storm of the twentieth century. There are contending explanations for this worldwide “thermidor.” One can locate them in the relative weakness and strength of particular revolutionary movements or imperial projects. One can point to the violence of repression and the tactical mistakes of the insurgents. Existing social structures proved resilient in the face of attempts to upend them, both from the left and the right. But what such explanations fail to capture is the sheer generality of this experience of disorder and reordering. Following the argument of my recent book The Deluge: The Great War, America and the Remaking of the Global Order, 1916-1931 (Viking, 2014), this paper argues that we are missing one key ingredient that constituted this global conjuncture: the switchback of inflation and deflation that rocked the world economy between 1914 and the mid-1920s. The hyperinflations of the postwar period are the stuff of historical cliché. But what has been vastly underrated is the significance of the global deflationary shock of 1920-1921, which set the terms of the thermidor across the world.
Adam Tooze is the Barton M. Biggs Professor of History at Yale University. As of the summer of 2015, he will be joining the history department of Columbia University. Tooze teaches all areas of modern German History, twentieth-century economic history, social theory and the philosophy of history. His first book, Statistics and the German State 1900-1945: the Making of Modern Economic Knowledge (Cambridge, 2001), explored the connection between the emergence of modern national economic statistics and the crisis of the German state in the first half of the twentieth century and was awarded the H-Soz-Kult Prize for Modern History and the Leverhulme prize. His next book, Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy (Penguin, 2006), provides a novel account of the Third Reich viewed from the perspective of the regime’s efforts to harness the German economy for its bid for continental hegemony. It won both the Longman and Wolfson prizes. Before he joined Yale, he taught for 13 years in the History Faculty of the University of Cambridge.
Pretty impressive reume Professor Tooze.
Dryer than Texas sand. Really a struggle this one. Not sure it was worth it.
Books:
Dreadnought
The Economic Consequences Of The Peace: Premium Edition
Tuesday, December 30, 2014
Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption
By Laura Hillenbrand
Ebook
What a story. Not my usual type of book really but since I'm going to the movie I though I would read it.
Friday, December 26, 2014
The Quantum Moment: How Planck, Bohr, Einstein, and Heisenberg Taught Us to Love Uncertainty
By Robert Crease
63 so Mr Bohr's "quantum leap" became a pop phrase and in thenprocess it's meaning was changed. When we say "quantum leap" we mean a huge step forward in space and technology. When in reality a quantum leap is quite small. So the nexxt time I hear that something is a quantum leap forward I will think "really that small huh".
Update: pg 69 If the scale.were the same the space traveled by the electron would be equivalent to own trip to the sun. So it ereally is a huge leap after all albeit in a tiny place.
Books:
In Search of Schrödinger's Cat: Quantum Physics and Reality
Erwin Schrodinger and the Quantum Revolution
Music and the Making of Modern Science
Seeing Double: Shared Identities in Physics, Philosophy, and Literature
Essays:
How You Get That Story: Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle and the Literature of the Vietnam War
Article first published online: 4 OCT 2005
DOI: 10.1111/j.1540-5931.2005.00177.x
Thursday, December 18, 2014
Landslide: LBJ and Ronald Reagan at the Dawn of a New America
By Jonathan Darman
Library book
This book is going to be good. Its the 1000 days from the Kennedy assassination to the 1966 midterm elections. In that time the cou try had seemingly abandoned The Democrats, Johnson and his Gdeat Society. The mid terms are a disaster for the Democrats as the republicans begin to appreciate and harness the backlash. This backlash politics would see many new republican governors elected as well, includinv the other star of this book Ronald Reagan.
Pg. 7 The autbor says bere that the news networks had full run of the TV the weekend of the Kennedy assassination. This was new to them and they tried hard to fill the time. The eventually had to just keep playing the same footage repeating the same facts over and over. Hence the CNN model was borne.
Pg. 13 He earner the derisive term "Landslide Lyndon" by beating Coke Stevenson bh 87 votes for the 1948 Senate race. Of course later, he has a legitimate landslide against Goldwater in 64.
Pg. 108 The backlash made alot democrats into republicans yes but it was the move to the suburbs that was the political whirlwind. The more people vot ojt of the city, the more attitudez changed about what was needed to fix them.
Pg. 116 And even though Johnson ' s warns him in a memo of the posible revolt of white middle class ("see to the men with the lunch pails") Johnson ignore him and speeds out furfher to the extreme. Those with lunch pails would not forget their abandonment. This is the very people, like my own parents, who would make up the force of fhe backlash.
Johnson promised Utopia and yet nite after night on the news our Utopian cities would burn. My parents watched this in alarm. Hippies and rioters and people protesting everywhere. I can just hear them thinking oh no this will not do.
Eh was ok I guess. Slipped at the end a little.
Books:
Robert Caro The Four book "Years of Lyndon Johnson" series
Mchael Harrington The Other America
Collision Course: Ronald Reagan, the Air Traffic Controllers, and the Strike that Changed America
Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan
A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House
The definitive account of the assination:
The Death of a President: November 20-November 25, 1963
Essays:
Our Invisible Poor - The New Yorker
By Dwight Macdonald
This above is his answer the Galbraith s The Affluent Society.
Wednesday, December 17, 2014
Hand to Mouth: Living in Bootstrap America
By Linda Tirado
Audiobook
Finished this one at the gym this morning. Good book and it's always great when the author reads their own work, especially in this case. Ms Tirado is an exuberant and energetic speaker and im sure will have no problem doing the circuit.
This is a topic that not many feel comfortable discussing. Nobody wants to be poor or associate with the poor but blaming the poor is always in season. I love the quote from Steinbeck that she uses. Basically he sayIs that socialism would never catch on here because there are no poor people--just millionaires and those on the way to becoming millionaires. Still holds true today. I have friends, one disaster away from welfare themselves, defend the rich and deride the poor.
It's a great system if your rich. It keeps the majority fighting with each other and leaving you alone. It works everytime.
Im no socialist but uh...Hey rich dude! When is enough going to be enough for you? Maybe ya could let up a little and give someone else a chance?
This book was written but just a plain old person like the rest of us. Its part of that leveling that the last technological innovation was to bring about. I hope.we see more like this.
Sunday, December 14, 2014
The Return of George Washington: 1783-1789
By Edward J. Larson
Library book
So, I just finished Ratification a decent if not sleepy tome on the Constitution. And in conjunction with that, and coming out at a similar time is this book by Larson. It picks up where the Revolution ends, and tells a version of the story of America's very early days. I frequently enjoy time traveling to this era. I find that alot of what transpires today in polktics and government is explained here at the source.
5 Washington returns his commission to Congress and this scene is later immortalized by John Trumbull a student of Benjamin West, in a painting that currently hangs in the Capitol's Rotunda. I encourage you to view paintings from this era and with these themes--very enlightening and refreshing.
62 Washington becomes president of a company that tries to open navigation on the Potomac River. If becomes and entangled mess between Virginia and Maryland and Pennsylvania. The trials and tribulations experienced by this endeavor are what spark the calling of the Annapolis Convention to regulate interstate commerce. This of course leads to the Constitutional Convention and history.
I watched The Crossing last night which is a dramarazation of the crossing of the Delaware and subsequent attack on the Hessians at Trenton. George Washinvton was a bad ass! In the movie he speaks to the defeatist attitude of his generals by simply saying "as long as I command so much as aa corporal's guard I shall endeavor." Wow!
Pg 184 And now we are at the part of the story which is ratification. Honorable mention here of Maier's book on this subject which I just finished prior to this. An exhausting tome, but we got through it.
Books:
Douglas Southhall Freeman's Six Volume classic
James Thomas Flexner's four volume work
Chernow Washington A Life
Jack Rakove Original Meaning
This book Washington helped finance
Travels Through North and South Carolina
http://docsouth.unc.edu/nc/bartram/menu.html
Paul Finkelman
An Imperfect Union: Slavery, Federalism, and Comity
Monday, December 8, 2014
Machine Made: Tammany Hall and the Creation of Modern American Politics
By Terry Golway
Ebook
Love this so far.
The failire of the potato crop brought Irish immigrants to America by the thousands.
There were several schemes afoot to blame the "unworthy poor" for their disasterous plight. I especially like this,"A new publication called The Economist insisted that government interference in the distribution of food would only transfer resources “from the more meritorious to the less.” Fox News wasn't born yet but this sounds just like them.
14% "Dagger" John Huhhes and the Tammany men were more than happy to round up the starving newly arrived Irish masses and help turn them into a voting block.
Golway calls it an "Irish Diapsora" This from Wiki' "The diaspora to America was immortalised in the words of many songs including the famous Irish ballad, "The Green Fields of America":
- So pack up your sea-stores, consider no longer,
- Ten dollars a week is not very bad pay,
- With no taxes or tithes to devour up your wages,
- When you're on the green fields of Americay.
- The Irish changed everything in America by sheer force of numbers alone. They felt that they were deliberately starved by Queen Victoria whom the refered to as the "Famine Queen"
- In the 1850's the Irish and their Mayor Fernando Wood dominated. This was the era of the gang like the Dead Rabbitts who battled others in NYC's notorious Five Points district. Nativists like the Know Nothings were ever present as well.
- None could see that the coming years wo7ld see change like none before in NYC.
- 21.8%
Books:
How the Irish Saved Civilization: The Untold Story of Ireland's Heroic Role From the Fall of Rome to the Rise of Medieval Europe (The Hinges of History) by Thomas Cahill
Countdown to Zero Day: Stuxnet and the Launch of the World's First Digital Weapon
By Kim Zetter
Audiobook
Very interesting. Keeps me attention at the gym. I'm fascinated by this topic anyway so that helps too but very interesting.
Stuxnet was a worm released by The US with an assist from Israel sent to disable the centrifuges in the uranium enrichment plant in Natanz, Iran.
The bug was captured in the wild and through subtle clues was traced back to the source - Us. So the first shots fired in the international cyber war were fired by the USA.
I guess it's a little more subtle that the Israeli's at Osirak. Sadam was out there like fargin' Maroney saying "I'm gonna know down the wall, and this wall, and that fargin' wall over there." And then therebwas nothing but a hole in the ground. "You fargin' a sneeky bastages."
So yeah, i guess it was better than bombjng them.
I just wonder hownthey got the bugnto cross the air gap. Someone had to load it on the machine in person. I wonder how they pulled that off. Maybe they'll yet say in the book. I'm still in the beginning.
Finished this this morning at the gym. Very interesting book to say the least. I have to look into this "zero day" bug issue a little more. I love the quote from one of the US security officials that said it is a though we, who live in a glass house have just thrown a stone. It may come back to bite us. I mean we have certainly surrendered the moral high ground here with this attack. Many woes can become us when our digital infastructure is attacked.
Certainly alot to think about.
Motown: Music, Money, Sex, and Power
By Gerald Posner
Ebook
This book was incredible. I have read several books about the recording industry in general that always sort of just touched on the subject of Motown and just moved on. So i really had no full idea of the impact of the label on music as a whole and my life specifically.
I grew up with Motown. I watched the Jackson 5ive cartoon on Saturday mornings. And when Michael came of age with in 1980 with Billie Jean, I was also coming of age listening to it in Germany away from home for the first time.
From the Temptations, whose Vh1 story of was awesome by the way, to the Supremes even Marvin Gaye and Lil' Stevie Wonder , these artists and their songs were the soundtrack of my life.
This is a must read for all those who want to know the true story of just what went on in that little white house on West Grand Boulevard with the sign on it that said Hitsville U S A.
Thursday, December 4, 2014
Ratification: The People Debate the Constitution, 1787-1788
By Pauline Maier
Library book
Xi - People put more stock in the Federalist papers than they sometimes deserve. Maier reminds, "[the Papers] were too often read as if it were a dispassionate, objective analysis of the Constitution" and not what it really was, which was actually just a "Partisan statement written in the midst of a desperate fight in a critical state."
Xiii July 4, 1788 "Antifederalists burn the constituion,"which for them was a percectly patriotic act."
Xiii- Maier says "shorthand men" copied the highlights of the state conventions for publication. "The printed debates were never exact" and may I add probably tendentious and partisan. Today, in our media saturated world, we would have the actual footage from everyone participating in excruciating detail. It's up to us to yet determine which was better, synopsis or minutiae.
Xiv - "Antifederalist was a Federalist term" (And a term of opprobrium). Interesting point, the winner tells the story and uses his own labels and terms. Just ask any Indian about that theory.
Pg. 15 Amongnst all tbet troubles with the ineffectual Articles, the event that prompted action was Shay's Rebellion. Some say it wasn't really a crisis at all and the powers of government inherent withing the framework of the Articles were certainly up to the task of putting it down as witnessed. To others it was a fire bell in the night.
Washington was not even sure he should attend this Convention, whose purpose was to fix up the Articles, and not to make a whole new government. He worried that in attending, he would violate tbe Cincinnati. He had beat his sword into a plowshare and was more than happy to rest under his "vines and fig trees." But where was the honor? For Washington, above all else, wanted to do the honorable thing.
Pg.32 It is stated very clearly in the Constitution that "Congress alone could declare war." If we had only stuck to this we could have avoided alot of heartaches.
Congress would pass laws that were "necessary and proper" to running the government. This and "promoting the general welfare" would be used and abused by partisans arguing that their position was constirutional. It would givebthe lawmakers Carte Blanche!
Pg. 72 II'm amazed at tbe vituperatude of the populace toward simple criticism of the document that would later become the Constitution. It was sort of a mob or sheep mentality took over with the more vocal side who.favored ratification threatened violence to those who thought differently.
Soon the first "Cato" letters (most likely George Clinton) appeared in the New York Journal.These letters along with other reconstituted Romans, mark the appearance of the first organized resistance to ratification. These essays taken together make up what some call the Anti-Federalist papers and became the loyal opposition's written response.
The crisis of Shay's Rebellion and the fear of the loss of Kentucky to spain and Vermont to England was what was driving the hysteria. Its and age old method of insuring the wishes of the powers that be get passed even if it's not in the best interests of the governed. How do you get people to vote againsf tbeir own interests? You scare them by exacerbating the crises all out of porportion. Works everytime. "Centinel" (likely Pennsylvania supreme court justice George Bryan's son) says hey wait a minute here, there is no immediate crisis. Let us take our time and really go over this document and give itsome scrutiny becore voting.
It's the same reason people voted for the PATRIOT ACT without even reading it. Nothing but time separates politics and human nature.
James Wilsom comes out in support of the Constitution by saying that state constitutions should have a bill of rights because the state governments assume all power unless otherwise specified. Whereas the Federal Government will asume none unless specified, therefore a bill of rights is not necessary and may acutally be counterproductive. If he only knew to what extent the bounds of the Federal Goverment would be stretched he would have felt differently I think.
Pg. 93 Maier reminds us that the "Antifederalists contested the term and, above all, The implications of disloyalty it carried."One can oppose the government and still be loyal. Isnt tbat every American's right?
Pg 104 so in the end, the vocal minority won in Pennsylvania. The convention voted to ratify against some pretty stiff competition. In spite of the rush to be first to ratify, they lost that race to Delaware who voted to ratify with no opposition as did New Jersey. Georgia was next and again with no opposition. So by the end of 1787, four states had signed on to tbe scheme. Next the spotligbt would move.to Connecticut and Massachusetts whose conventions were slated to meet early in 1788.
Pg. 138 Connecticut goes off without a hitch, and unlike Pennsylvania the loosers "didn't go away mad." Now on to Massachusetts (which at this time includes Maine-and you know how they love to dicker) and to the land of Daniel Shays, the reason this whole Constitution thing got started in the first place. Got a feeling this one's gonna take some doing.
170 One of the things displeasing to the Massachusetts men was the lack of the word God in the preamble.
179 On discussing pay, Theodore Sedvwick stood up to defend the right of Congressmen to set tbeir own pay, in a sense pay themselves. Sedgwick naively says, "Congress would not give its members exorbitant salaries, (can you imagine?) because they are answerable to the people." Ha! If you only knew where that was going sir. Not only would they vote themselves "exorbitant" salaries, they would also get exorbitant pensions and healthcare that would gaurentee their safe retirement. Which in turn makes our esteemed Representative less likely to fix the medical and retireme t system of their so-callex bosses.
215 so with Massachusetts firmly in the ratify column (a hard won fight). It's on to Richmond! But first...
New Hampshire adjours without a vote
Pg. 225 Rhode Island says no!
Pg. 247 Maryland is in! Seven pillars!
252 South Carolina is in! Eight!
Buy the summer of 1788, eight states had voted to ratify, most with reservations. Most people wanted to see a "bill of rights" attached prior to giving their approval. In June it would finally be decided as Virginia and New Hampshire and New York would all meet that same month and by the end we would know if this thing they called a constitution would become the supreme law of the land.
Virginia would meet firat and if a yes vote could be achieved, then they would be the official 9th state and the one who would forever go down in history as the deciding state. On to Richmond!
312 While we were stuck in the Richmond Statehouse listening to Patrick Henry drone on and on and on and on and on.... New Hampshire beat us to the punch. Intead of Virgina, the Old Dominion being the deciding ninth state New Hampshire would.go down in history as the decider. Virginia votes to ratify, but like many other states before her wants a Billof Rights inserted prior to ratification. Now the federal facade has ten pillars and more than enogh to pass. The events that proceed seem anticlimactic. But the fact that it played out just a few miles from my childhood home provokes my interest. On to Poughkeepsie!
Pg 360 In the midst of the raging debate in Poughkeepsie, news arrives the Delaware has rsatified bringing the total to nine and making the whole point of further debate moot. Yet amazingly the debate continued.
Pg 390 Word arrives that Virginia has also ratified really making furhter discussion superfluous. Yes lile true politicians they ignore the obvious and continue to bloviate.
400 New York is in! 11 staes now have ratified.
Pg 435 North Carolina is in and the game is over 12 states ratified. All in (as usual no one care about Rhode Island--Rhode who?
Done! I must say this book never really grabbed me. It had a few enjoyable moments but was mostly a chore.from start to finish. The information is important though so I stayed with it, but yikes!
Topics:
Shay's Rebellion
The Anti-Federalist papers
Wednesday, December 3, 2014
The Floor of Heaven: A True Tale of the Last Frontier and the Yukon Gold Rush
By Howard Blum
Ebook
This was ok. It was two stories in one or maybe three actually. It told the stories of Charles Siringo, George Carmack (whom, no offense to Johnny Horton, actually found the Bonanza gold), and Soapy Smith.
It gives a good flavor of the Gold Rush days and being in Alaska at that time.
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