Category Archives: Uncategorized

TOO CLOSE TO THE SUN

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Diane Dempsey

The spiel on the back cover of this book describes openly what is wrong with this novel: “…Will Henley appears on the scene. With his good looks and Ivy League pedigree, he’s on the prowl for his next business acquisition” – a winery.

Apparently Old Will is destined to come the master vintner after a season or two. Good luck with that.

I once considered a career in the NBA. I did not go to an Ivy League school and don’t have that pedigree. Hence, I never made it to the NBA. But I know people who went into the Ivys, and they didn’t play in the NBA either.

When they send astronauts to Mars, they return, and none has radiation sickness and die during the trip or upon return, Too Close To The Sun may be worth reading.

GENESIS OF QANON

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Hunter Thompson originated QAnon. He advanced the Thompson Report concept in a book or periodical proposal to his publisher in 1968, The Gonzo Papers, Vol II, p. 15-16. Thompson called it root-hog journalism:

[15] “We have to keep in mind that various outrages are in fact being planned, and that I probably wouldn’t have much trouble getting a vague battle plan…but of course that wouldn’t be enough. I’d have to mix up fact and fantasy so totally that nobody could be sure which was which. We could bill it as a fantastic piece of root-hog journalism – The Thompson Report, as it were. This courageous journalist crept into the sewers of the American underground and emerged with a stinking heap of enemy battle plans – and just in time, by god, [16] to warn the good guys what to watch for. Oh, I would have a ratlin good time with it…I could even compost a fictitious interview with Guru Bailey, the Demo chieftain, during which I try to warn him of this impending disaster and he reacts first in anger, then with tears, throwing down hooker after hooker of gin during our conversation. And a private chat with Johnson, who heard of my dread information and summoned me to the White House for a toilet-side interview with two recording secretaries – a bracing fag and a nervous old woman from New Orleans – taking notes on a voice writer(s) – echoing my words, and Lyndon’s, for the private record.

…(The Case of the Naked Colonel…did you ever see that? A fantastic story and absolutely true..a Pentagon colonel found naked in his car, passed out on the steering wheel with a pistol in each hand… no explanation.)

…Richard Nixon… calls me at my Chicago hotel, during the course of my research and offers me $20,000 for my information…then a meeting with Nixon and his advisors, they want to exploit the freak-out…but an argument erupts when one elf Nixon’s aide makes a crude remark about his daughter – undertones of drugs and nymphomania, Julie, caught in the 14th green at Palm Springs with a negro caddy at midnight, the caddy now in prison, framed on a buggy count.”

It is shameful that the Republicans can originate nothing of their own. The Reps have to reach into the 1960s and Hunter Thompson’s prowess for their journalistic ideas to produce fantasies. The Nixon fact might be raw in 1968, but today anything goes, do your own thing, I have freedom. Every Rep. believes that. They bare all and welcome any overt violence by fragile white people, exhibiting truly hippy behaviors like those manifested during the 1960s in San Francisco., and later elsewhere. Indeed, most of the participants of January 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol in Washington DC looked like hippies – unshaven, unclean, sneering, uncontrollable, likely on meth…

Thompson’s media proposal is being used by the Reps today.

DAWN OF BELLE EPOQUE, TWILIGHT OF BELLE EPOQUE

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MARY MCAULIFEE

These books tell of a completely defeated France (1870), loser of the Franco-Prussian War, and for the next 44 years France’s imagination became culture and industry reinventing its thinking, culture and society, and somewhat its politics. Those achievements in the Arts, in literature, education and scientific endeavors (Pasteur, Pierre, Marie Curie) drove France into the Twentieth Century.

The innovation of this history is an original telling in its approach, beginning in 1870 and year after year going through 1918 (end of World War One). Culture enters the story and artists, including industrialists, struggle for recognition, succeeding as years pass. Politics and foreign affairs are included but not emphasized. Georges Clemenceau, a friend of all the painters and writers, gets the most attention.

The text is easy to follow. Its argument builds with humor, and terrific antidotes, while the Art, society and politics progress. One wonders how Paris was livable. Of the many histories I’ve encountered, this is a brilliant survey presentation. Its style gives the essence of France and the French in a studied, flippant, and charming manner.

THE BROWNSVILLE AFFAIR

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ANN J. LANE

Upon leaving the Presidency Theodore Roosevelt wrote a thoroughly enjoyable, well written Autobiography. The text gives a gleaming glow and presentation of the man, except

Roosevelt failed to mention the incident at Brownsville, Texas, 1906. Newly arrived companies of African-American soldiers were accused of shooting up the town, and killing a bartender. It did not matter no one could identify who the shooters were, or that witnesses failed to see or identify the shooters/rioters. It did not matter that those companies of soldiers did not have access to weapons on their base. None had revolvers. Rifles were locked up.

Roosevelt discharged, without honor, all the newly arrived African American soldiers despite knowing of these facts supporting non-participation by these soldiers.

The Brownsville Affair should be read along side of Roosevelt’s Autobiography to determine how rashly, imperial, erratic, and simple-minded that President was. Roosevelt had not been educated to understand the rules of evidence: What is proven; what is not proven. Instead, he accepted myths, fantasies, fancies and fears of Texas white people about those soldiers. He supported the conventional wisdoms common amongst all whites. Suspicions of assaults, rape, discourtesies, proud men seeking social equality and sneakiness and deception: Keys to guns were left untended and obviously the soldiers had access and used the rifles, although there was not time to do everything. All whites knew the soldiers were quick-change artists, like actors. They could be in two places at once.

Roosevelt did not, but should have, asked himself, What would Abraham Lincoln do? Lincoln would have required evidence, not guesses, speculation and fantasy, and Lincoln would have known the prejudices and Southern hatred for African-American soldiers would sully truth.

The Brownsville Affair has been a guide for racially-related incidents since 1906. Take George Floyd’s murder. Chauvin the cop said he was threatened by the bystanders on the curb, pleading that Chauvin get off Floyd’s neck. How was Chauvin threatened? Some of the bystanders were African Americans. Some of the bystanders were taking photos and making film. Some were asking questions. Some were reporting the incident to the police department. BUT without the cameras and film and the audio, would that trial have turned out the same way?

It is disappointing to read of an incident in 1906, and realize the similar or same language and prejudices are within America and Americans today. It is time to change. If no one believes it, read, The Brownsville Affair.

HUE

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Frank Bowden

This excellent telling of the battle of Hue (Vietnam, February 1968) needs to be read.

(1) What happened? (2) Lies the American government and military told itself and Americans about the Tet Offensive (February 1968) and Hue. (3) The gallant, unselfish, courageous fighting of United States Marines against forces more than three or four times their number. (4) The lies the North Vietnamese told themselves to pursue fighting in Hue. (5) The military mistakes made by the Vietnamese, South and North, and Communist Part during the offensive in Hue. (6) Mistakes of the North Vietnamese were not capitalized on by the Americans. (7) The effect on the residents of Hue during the four weeks of fighting. (8) The small forces the South Vietnamese had and went through the daily grind of fighting for four weeks.

Somehow Bowden tells of combat, of wounds and of deaths (mostly Americans): Marines, where they came from, their training, their units, companies and a few battalions, where Marines were supposed to go – target, eliminate the opposition, and whom Marines were fighting against. Suddenly, a wound or a death of a Marine, introduced and ended that story. It was combat in a small city, not in the jungle. Everyone was crammed together, ill-supported except for weapons and ammunition, no washing, no hygiene, no clean clothes. Marines asked for tanks and sometimes never had any or enough; they fought with hand-held delivery of artillery, beginning with hand grenades.

There were no drones, no surveillance devices, no way of looking and locating the enemy. There’s no GPS. Hue was an old-time battle.

This book is well-written. Reading it at once takes the reader to the year 1968 and gives readers the sense of what Hue Marines went through, as well as the North Vietnamese, during those four weeks.

The book lacks comprehensive maps, on which every location mentioned, is on a map. There is no listing of maps in the Table of Contents, and what each map represents. NOTE, these omissions help tell of the battle. Every combatant, Marine, U.S. Army, North Vietnamese and Viet Cong were strangers to Hue, and truly did not know where they were: Where was one landmark or building in relation to any other landmark. Indeed, a Marine Lt. Col. took off the wall of a gasoline station, a map of the City (large distances per millimeter) to help orient him and organize his advance to eliminate the opposition.

CIVIL POLITENESS: FINISHING SCHOOL

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This education is little taught today, being replaced by immediate offense, banishment, laws and litigation.

However, upon reading a biography of Grace Kelly-Princess Grace, I realized this girl/woman had gone to finishing school, and learned! Two examples.

1). During her first movie with Alfred Hitchcock, Dial M for Murder, the director told an obvious, vulgar joke to Ray Milland, the male star, while Grace Kelly was within earshot. Hitchcock wanted to observe the nice, proper, blonde actress’s reaction. Grace responded, I went to a Catholic Covent school as a teenager, and I heard that joke eight years ago.

Hitchcock liked the response.

2) Marilyn Monroe posed for an early issue of Playboy, and later a reporter asked her, What do you wear to bed? Monroe’s fabulous response: “Chanel No. 5.”
Later, a reporter asked Grace Kelly what she wore to bed. Kelly: I don’t think that’s anyone’s business, because if it became known, my life would be laid out like it was in a magazine.

THE INVENTION OF MURDER

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BY BOOKJudith Flanders

The story of murder in the Nineteenth Century promises more than this book gives. In Nineteenth Century England an active swirl surrounds death, accusation, murder, trial and execution. According to the book not many murders happened, but enough gained public attention. Some stories survived decades; one Seventeenth century death was picked up during the Nineteenth century and used. The Invention seems to tell this story. It does in the first 110 pages when I stopped reading repeat actions and stories of death, accusation, etc… Victorian England had to be a dull place for the masses and the middling peoples to be enthralled by this sort of deviancy.

What could interest me in this book’s subject was developing detection of crimes and causes into evidence presented in court. This is no indication that this knowledge or ways were of interest, but the same trip, all well-put down. However, this book is neither a cultural anthropology nor a sociology. It is one telling of death, one after another, as though the public insisted upon new deaths to become sensational to engage them. One prays for the public’s interest to be distracted – like professional sports, largely a Twentieth Century invention coming from America.

How to judge this for The Invention? From a case that lasted decades, any reader and watcher of bit plays, would expect the basic facts of death, accusations, etc to be used as procedures and processes of detection became sophisticated; those ways and means would be written into the story as the time from the events distanced. Note the criminal is not the protagonist; nor is the victim. But investigators become prominent and their methods interesting. MORALE: the bad people are caught and punished.

In the one telling of a 1840’s murder, the story, according to the book, had to be close to the real facts for a long time. What Victorians seemed to like was thoroughly retro and religious: Repetition of accepted facts and outcomes as though to reassert the foundations of the purity, the justice and righteousness of their society. No one has to read 480 pages of that. However, writers might be expected to mention and use changing methods of detection. Those writers did not exist.

By 1894 Conan Doyle changed crime and detective stories, and decades of more nonsense followed. Raymond Chandler’s writing analyzes some of that, chopping up popular, misleading detective stories for readers to observe the nonsense. Chandler used current methods changing criminal investigations and writing. And what of detective stories today, and of the last 25 years? Can anyone spell DNA?

BITCOIN, ET AL

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People are agaga over Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, like they were about software programs thirty years ago, and the Internet and Telecommunication companies in the late Nineties. Remember World Com? Financial journalists think its a big story, currency-commodity/LeonardoDeVinci art ready to replace currencies and other means of exchange on earth. The journalists are novices to currency/commodity and similar markets. Their questions are prepared by writers. Journalists like to talk with the in-crowd. They interview persons with state, status and investments in cryptocurrencies, and each interviewee wants to support artificial electronic payment systems with crypto.

Bitcoin arises from a software program/technology called blockchain. I cannot describe it. Probably, most investors owning crypto have no idea how to describe blockchain technology.

It is said that 21,000,000 Bitcoins exist. I do not know if anyone knows 21,000,000 is an accurate figure. There likely has been no audit. No telling how many of the other cryptos exist.

Bitcoin trades only electronically. Where, no one will say? It seems doubtful taxing authorities know where and how trades are made. It is rumored that the unscrupulous and the criminal use crypto and Bitcoin. Someone (Peter Thiel?) says the North Koreans and the Chinese use crypto to conceal activities. Reportedly, China calls crypto an “alternative investment.”

Bitcoin trades 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Buying and selling is always available from which ever device which supports the trading. The number of Bitcoin, sold or purchased, does not seem pertinent to persons interested in the price. Hence, there are no volume figures. It is possible for the price of Bitcoin to drop seven percent over a weekend and be unchanged from Friday’s price on Monday. There seems no regulation governing any part of purchase of sale.

SO, the price movement never stops. What drives the trading to increase the price ten-fold (March 2020 to April 2021)? Many computer generated programs founded on modeling, might be involved. Those are primarily mathematical schemes intending indicating to a buyer or seller when to act. More than one person has the skills to construct modeling, so there may be thousands of models giving buy and sell signals, perhaps at the same time. A consistency is likely in each model – everyone uses the same approach. Is modeling a completely reliable means to buy or sell?

Traditional graph reading seems less reliable. Every price move seems alone: No volume, No interest rates or fluctuations in the dollar, a weak stock market or a general buy signal and no correlations to other graphs or products, also graphed. Crypto trading suggests emotion and impulse (the ADD kids in elementary school) dictate price moves. 

So who are the traders? They seem to have the endurance of the crowd playing video games. No one seems to buy for the long term, capital gains at a lower tax rate after a year. There seems to be no buy and hold. Bitcoin has price movements of 20 percent in a week. Its volatility runs contra to long term stability.

But volatility attracts traders: Make ten or five percent in a day, or more over a week. It is volatility without certainty…Some call that the greater fool theory. The whole of Crypto facts and trading might be best said by Mark Twain, describing mining: A mine is a hole in the ground with a liar on top.”

When oil was running over $100 dollars a barrel, and going higher, studies were made on prices and actions and attitudes of market participants. Those studies have to be brought out and accessed. 

With crypto currencies it is difficult to believe participants are acting independently of one another absent regulation. 21,000,000 bitcoins times $5,000 per coin, an estimated $1,500,000,000,000 market value (1.5 Trillion dollars or more). Take a multi-millionaire who bought 500 Bitcoin in March 2020 at $5,000 a piece, $2,500,000 purchase price. Sell it today at $50,000 plus a piece, and that multi-millionaire can buy a house or houses, after taxes. It is likely that multi-millionaire is not investing alone but in concert with other liked-enriched individuals. 

The glory days of the market before 1930 may be upon us. Pooling big money, to buy or sell at a price and let the market ride, but manage it in favorable directions. Mishaps, missteps and malfeasance to small investors were common before 1930. The history of those actions and market drivers favor wealthy cliques, rings and groups. And markets that trade in the age of Reddit, Robin Hood and Internet communities are nearly impossible to track, to control and to police.  

NARRATING A STORY

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“In the middle of an exacting history course, it takes a high degree of moral courage to resist one’s own conscience to take time off; to let the imagination run; to give serious attention to reading books that widen our sympathies, that train us to imagine with greater precision what it is like to be human in situations very different from our own.

“It is essential to take that risk. For a history course to be content to turn out well-trained minds and deeper sympathies would be a mutilation of the intellectual inheritance of our own culture, of an element of imaginative curiosity about others whose removal may be more deleterious than we would like to think to the subtle and ever-precarious ecology on which a liberal western tradition of respect for others is based.”

Brown, Peter, SOCIETY AND THE HOLY IN LATE ANTIQUITY, p. 4.

This grand three-sentence, two paragraph statement somewhat expresses the point. I found it of interest and read on in this book. There was something wrong with the writing, though, and I remembered that this book was a collection of the author’s lectures. Apparently, nothing had been edited to remove the oral-nature of the lectures. Reading became problematic especially when the author did not develop the point, mentioning it as though it was an advertising teaser in a commercial. So I stopped reading.

Fortunately, I have been reading Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad. That book is told in narration, by one man to another about what happened to a subordinate office of a ship who abandoned it with all the ship’s crew, while leaving all the Muslim pilgrims aboard a sinking ship. LORD JIM is not always easy to read. Passages and paragraphs can run two pages, and sentences… The narrative style of telling anything can make the story difficult and the writing impossible. Conrad writes Lord Jim about as well as can be done, using that voice.

Yet, this is exactly what the problem historian, Peter Brown, faces in his collection of lectures. In an exacting history, no historian writes, “Once again…” and that sort of parenthetical is littered in the pages of Brown’s book I read, 30-40 pages. I quit. I have read books that develop the passage, above, from page 4, and upon reading it, I hoped Brown would give greater and deeper analyses. Nope.

BEFORE GOING TO LAW SCHOOL

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Consider,

Giambattista Vico, author of Scienza Nuova, who “Abandoned law in his youth to write poetry – and emerged a better historian for it.

‘For at this age,” he wrote, ‘the mind should be given free rein to keep the fiery spirit of youth from being numbed and dried up, less from too great severity of judgment, property to maturity but too early acquired, they should later scarcely dare to attempt anything.'”

Citing Gambattista Vico, a fifth century historian, is Brown, Peter, SOCIETY AND THE HOLY IN LATE ANTIGUITY, p.4.