The Wild Blue by Stephen E. AmbroseMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
View all my reviews
Sunday, June 29, 2025
Saturday, June 28, 2025
Review: Nixon, Vol 2: The Triumph of a Politician 1962-1972
Nixon, Vol 2: The Triumph of a Politician 1962-1972 by Stephen E. AmbroseMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
small-minded, dictatorial, retalitory
IT SOMETIMES SEEMED that Nixon was more concerned about and angrier with the American press than with the North Vietnamese. His fury escalated to new heights at the end of January, when new uniforms he had had Ehrlichman design for the White House police were worn in public for the first time. Inspired by the guards at Buckingham Palace and others he had seen on Nixon’s European tour a year earlier, Ehrlichman had put the White House police into white-tunicked, gold-braided, pillbox-hatted ceremonial uniforms.
The press ridiculed the result. The Chicago Daily News was reminded of movie characters from The Student Prince. The Buffalo Evening News thought “even ushers at old-time movie palaces were garbed with greater restraint and better taste.” “Ruritania, D.C.,” scoffed The New York Times.
Mort Allin, in the News Summary, informed Nixon that Newsweek had used a photo from a 1925 movie, The Merry Widow, and that Life used a photo of Emperor Francis Joseph for comparison.
Nixon was defiant. He wrote on the News Summary, “H—I want our staff to take RN’s position on this regardless of their own views—remind them of K’s line—a W.H. staffer does not have independent views on W.H. matter. H—Have Klein take the offensive on the slovenly W.H. police we found.” Happily for the police, his defiance didn’t last, and soon they were back in less colorful uniforms.
His rage against the press did last. When John Gardner criticized his budget, Nixon wrote: “H & E—He is to be completely cut off from now on. This is an order.”
When Walter Cronkite was quoted by Allin in a critical remark, Nixon circled his name and scribbled furiously, “A Nothing!” He didn’t much like Cronkite’s competitor, either; at his insistence, Jeb Magruder mounted a campaign to discredit David Brinkley, including such actions as having Don Kendall of Pepsi-Cola, an old Nixon friend and client, complain to the NBC corporate heads about Brinkley.
Hugh Sidey was another target. “H—I’m inclined to think Sidey is under orders,” Nixon wrote on one report. “No Contact with him for 30 days will shake him—order this to all hands.”12 When Sidey mentioned in a column Nixon’s lavish private homes and his wealthy friends, Nixon commented, “Freeze him completely for 60 days.”13 He also instructed Magruder to “initiate some letters to the editor comparing RN with LBJ, Ike, and JFK on this score.”
The obsession with the press and PR in the Nixon White House was never ending. On February 27, after his morning conference with the President, Haldeman sent a note to the staff. He began, “There is a need for some cold, tough decisions regarding the amount of time spent being king vs. that spent as leader of the government. Perhaps we should consider a drastic shift—reducing the ‘king’ time to a bare minimum. We also have to recognize that some of the time has to be spent just in being a nice person.”
(Ten years earlier Ann Whitman, Ike’s secretary, had observed in her diary, “The Vice-President [Nixon] sometimes seems like a man who is acting like a nice man rather than being one.”)
Haldeman went on to call for some “deep thinking” about the presentation of the President, “recognizing always that it actually gets down to what is the best television.”
Nixon loved television, especially when he could use it to speak directly to the people from the majesty of the Oval Office, with all three networks carrying his speech on prime time (after the networks caught on and began dividing up the chore, with two showing their regular programs, Nixon’s ratings sank, and he cut back drastically on his TV time).
2nd term plans
Nixon also brought Caspar Weinberger and John Ehrlichman in on his plans. On September 20, at Camp David, he subjected them to a two-hour monologue on how things were going to change after he got his mandate. He wanted Weinberger to prepare a radically austere budget for fiscal 1973. He wanted Ehrlichman to get cracking on the reorganization, not only of departments (Nixon wanted to reduce the Cabinet to eight departments; there would be four new ones, Economic Affairs, Human Resources, Natural Resources, and Community Development, plus four traditional ones, State, Defense, Justice, and Treasury) but by finding new people to replace the current officeholders.
NIXON’S ANTICIPATED MANDATE not only strengthened his tough-guy and mean-streak attitude toward McGovern and the Democrats, and toward his own Cabinet and the federal bureaucracy,...
View all my reviews
Monday, June 23, 2025
Wednesday, June 18, 2025
Review: Life under the Pharaohs
Life under the Pharaohs by Leonard CottrellMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
Social history is a branch of history that examines the experiences, lives, and social structures of ordinary people, rather than focusing solely on political or military events. It explores the everyday lives, social dynamics, and cultural practices of past societies.
Here's a more detailed look at what social history encompasses:
Key Aspects of Social History:
Focus on the "People":
Social history seeks to understand the lives and experiences of individuals, families, communities, and social groups, often those who were not part of political or military history.
Broad Scope:
It examines a wide range of topics, including family structures, social inequality, cultural practices, economic systems, and social movements.
Diverse Sources:
Social historians use a variety of sources, such as diaries, letters, oral histories, and material culture, to reconstruct the lives of people in the past.
Emphasis on "History from Below":
Social history is sometimes referred to as "history from below" because it emphasizes the perspectives and experiences of those who were not typically part of the historical narrative, according to Wikipedia.
Different from Traditional History:
Social history distinguishes itself from traditional political or military history by focusing on the social, economic, and cultural aspects of the past, rather than solely on political events or the lives of elites.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_...
Social history, often called history from below, is a field of history that looks at the lived experience of the past
View all my reviews
Tuesday, June 17, 2025
Review: Climb to Conquer: The Untold Story of WWII's 10th Mountain Division
Climb to Conquer: The Untold Story of WWII's 10th Mountain Division by Peter SheltonMy rating: 0 of 5 stars
Italy v. Greece
an estimated ten thousand of them froze to death. Twenty-five thousand were killed in mountain fighting, and many thou-sands more were taken prisoner. The blow to Italian morale and prestige turned out to be irreparable.
In a memorandum on the Italian fiasco, Lt. Col. L. S. Gerow of the General Staff Corps wrote: "Important lesson learned: an army which may have to fight anywhere in the world must have... units especially organized, trained, and equipped for fighting in the mountains and in winter... such units cannot be improvised hurriedly from line divisions. They require long periods of hardening and experience, for which there is no substitute for time."
Minnie Dole couldn't have asked for a better testimonial, and on October 22, 1941, he received letters from Secretary of War Stim-son and General Marshall stating that on November 15, 1941, the 1st Battalion (Reinforced) 87th Mountain Infantry Regiment would be activated at Fort Lewis, Washington. The first element of what would become the 10th Mountain Division was officially launched.
View all my reviews
Saturday, June 14, 2025
Review: Journey of the Mind: How Thinking Emerged from Chaos
Journey of the Mind: How Thinking Emerged from Chaos by Ogi OgasMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen...
Building on these insights, Grossberg recognized that there had to be two distinct but codependent mental processes underlying the serial position effect, each associated with a different rate of time. The first was a fast short-term memory process that changed in real time as new items were presented, and the second was a slow long-term memory process that acted on a much slower time scale and was influenced by the results of the fast activity. The notion that two mental processes, each specialized for a specific purpose, yet each needing to collaborate with the other to achieve an even larger purpose, eventually contributed to his articulation of the complementary thinking principle.
He also recognized that because the mind was a physical system, it should be treated not as an abstract, noncorporeal entity but as a specific configuration of physical elements interacting with a specific physical environment in real time. Thus, he also embraced the embodied thinking principle.
View all my reviews
Wednesday, June 11, 2025
Review: Lillian Hellman: Life
Lillian Hellman: Life by William WrightMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
Commies
On several occasions Faulkner spoke to the press of his dislike of "literary circles" and told one reporter he "never associated with other writers." It was not the only instance of Faulkner's striking a pose. The fact is, he spent many long evenings with Hellman and Hammett-just the three of them sitting up all night talking and drinking. Faulkner was intrigued by Hammett, recognizing at once his unaffected honesty. He also identified with Hammett's roustabout background and especially envied his years as a Pinkerton agent. One area of potential discord was politics. Hammett was then beginning his long involvement with Marxism. Although his opinions were unformulated and unorthodox, they were sufficiently communistic to upset Faulkner, who abhorred any form of radicalism.
Dashiell Hammett influence by transference
former self, became a model of purposefulness and decisiveness. Although the purposes and decisions were markedly colored by Hammett's own, they were still hers. Hammett was genuinely fascinated by the person he saw behind the confusions and contradictions of Hellman. Energized by his love for her, he set to work to bring that person into being. Hammett is frequently given credit for Hellman's emergence as a playwright-which is certainly true, but not in the collaborative way that is often implied; his contribution was far broader. He was a collaborator in the creation not so much of the plays as of Lillian Hellman herself.
Letter to HUAC
I am prepared to waive the privilege against self-incrimination and to tell you anything you wish to know about my views or actions if your Committee will agree to refrain from asking me to name other people. If the Committee is un-willing to give me this assurance, I will be forced to plead the privilege of the Fifth Amendment at the hearing.
The committee's response was terse. It would not enter into negotiations with witnesses about what they would and would not testify to.
There is a subtlety to the Fifth Amendment that lay behind this exchange and determined Hellman's eventual course-as it did for many other witnesses. Once you have answered a question that could in any way be considered incriminating, you have waived your right to plead the Fifth Amendment on lesser matters relating to this admission. That is, if you admitted to having been a communist, which was a crime at that time, you couldn't then plead the Fifth when asked the names of other communists you might have known. The Fifth Amendment protects against self-incrimination, not against incriminating others. The Supreme Court had not yet ruled on the constitutionality of the Smith Act and was vague about what was "incriminating." So witnesses before HUAC had to walk gingerly around any questions that could be so construed, even about actions they didn't mind admitting to, if they wanted to keep the Fifth Amendment in their arsenal.
In 1962, Signoret translated Lillian Hellman's play The Little Foxes into French for a production in Paris that ran for six months
Hellman in print lied saying earlier than day before opening night, wanting changes.
In order to buy the rights, Hellman still had to obtain written consent from Hammett's daughters. She wrote them several letters, persuading them of the wisdom of her offer. Her main argument was that if they were to retain the rights, they would be liable for their father's considerable debts. This was not true, as the Government had acquiesced to the sale of the rights in order to close the Hammett account.
disagreeable
Dorothy Samuels, while admiring Hellman, found her an extremely difficult boss. "She was always making dramas out of nothing. She would take things people had said and twist them around until they became dramas of some sort. Orville Schell finally resigned as her co-chairman. He couldn't take the bickering that Lillian thrived on. She got very down on Ray Calamaro, an executive director who preceded me. She was so nasty to him, we all thought he must have turned her down. Whatever it was that set her against him, he finally quit and went to work at the Justice Department.
Nixon
...accusing the intellectuals of failing to speak out against McCarthy, she wrote: "None of them, as far as I know, has yet found it a part of conscience to admit their Cold War anti-Communism was perverted, possibly against their wishes, into the Vietnam War and then into the reign of Nixon, their unwanted but inevitable leader."
"anticommunist left"
... the man who saved Hellman at the time of her HUAC ordeal was Joe Rauh, a pillar of the anticommunist left, of which she and Garry Wills are so scornful. (Rauh himself says, "Not just me, everybody who helped her, Abe Fortas, Stanley Isaacs-we were all of the anticommunist left.") Howe had numerous other complaints, and he ended his piece with an answer to one of Hellman's main Scoundrel Time themes: while having been mistaken in "taking too long to see what was going on in the Soviet Union, I do not believe we did our country any harm" (and the McCarthyites did). Howe wrote:DEAR LILLIAN HELLMAN,
You could not be more mistaken. Those who supported Stalinism and its political enterprises, either here or abroad, helped befoul the cultural atmosphere, helped bring totalitarian methods into trade unions, helped perpetrate one of the great lies of the century, helped destroy whatever possibilities there might have been for a resurgence of serious radicalism in America. Isn't that harm enough?
"...Hellman was a systematic supporter of Stalinism, in spite of its mass horrors, for many, many years, and a savage critic of American liberals who opposed both McCarthy and American communists..."
View all my reviews
Tuesday, June 10, 2025
Sunday, June 8, 2025
Review: Brokenburn: The Journal of Kate Stone, 1861-1868
Brokenburn: The Journal of Kate Stone, 1861-1868 by Kate StoneMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
In her early 20s, Kate Stone journaled a diary through the Civil War from her plantation home Brokenburn Plantation in the Mississippi Delta to refugee flight across the state to Tyler, TX and areas.
Sometimes seeing humanity in the "darkies", she tries to maintain a life of novel-reading, huckleberry-gathering, and socializing while her brothers are pulled away into the war and eventually the "Yankees" arrive regardless.
It is not all war rumors and eroding quality of life. There is, for instance, a comet:
June 30
There is a comet visible tonight. We were surprised to see it, as we did not know it was expected. Have seen nothing of it in the papers. It is not very bright but has the appearance of a large star, Venus at her brightest, with a long train of light seen dimly as through a mist. Jimmy first discovered it. Two splendid meteors fell just above it, and the boys said it was a big star chased by little ones trying to regain its orbit.
Also, sewing up gloves, hats, and jackets as sell as making food like souse.
View all my reviews
Saturday, June 7, 2025
Monday, June 2, 2025
Review: Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mount Everest Disaster
Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mount Everest Disaster by Jon KrakauerMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
I had read this before but apparently did not pen a review
Left for Dead: My Journey Home from Everest
View all my reviews
Saturday, May 31, 2025
Friday, May 30, 2025
Tuesday, May 27, 2025
Review: THE VENUS VIVISECTION. Second Edition.
THE VENUS VIVISECTION. Second Edition. by Gregory James WyrickMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
Karen. Page 39. "This is my Rock 'n' Roll SCAR! When I was in the band Inside Out, I was playing chicken in the slam pit with a pal from High School on my back! It was a kickass show with the bands Angry Red Planet, The Trash Brats and Inside Out. I was so drunk, I fell face-first into a table and gashed my chin open. I couldn't feel a thing!"
View all my reviews
Monday, May 26, 2025
Review: Project Mind Control: Sidney Gottlieb, the CIA, and the Tragedy of MKULTRA
Project Mind Control: Sidney Gottlieb, the CIA, and the Tragedy of MKULTRA by John LisleMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
The figure of Sidney Gottlieb as part of the CIA MKULTRA program has always fascinated me. I was quite please to learn a book is available to take a deep dive into this man's actions. It might be hard for us to think back into the Cold War when parity w/USSR in weapons, like missiles and atomic bombs, was a foreign policy topic for the US. This went, apparently, into areas of mind control.
Throughout his depositions, Gottlieb stressed that in order to understand his work, it was necessary to understand the context in which it was done. At the beginning of the Cold War, the CIA had feared that Communist powers like the Soviet Union and China possessed methods of mind control powerful enough to manipulate a person’s beliefs and behaviors. One reason why the CIA feared such a thing was because Russian scientists had pioneered the field of behavioral conditioning. Back in 1897, Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov had shown that by ringing a bell every time that a dog ate, he could condition the dog to salivate at the sound of the bell alone. Surely the Soviets had since extended Pavlov’s work to include human subjects. Another reason was because in the 1930s, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin had held a series of show trials in Moscow to remove his political opponents from power. Strangely, many of the defendants begged to be found guilty of the false charges levied against them. Yuri Pyatakov even prostrated before Stalin and asked for the honor of shooting his fellow defendants. (Perhaps his plea fell on deaf ears because his ex-wife was among the group.) Why were the defendants behaving so bizarrely? Had they been drugged? Had they been hypnotized? Had they been subjected to some other form of mind control? Then, in 1948, Cardinal József Mindszenty, leader of the Catholic Church in Hungary and a vocal critic of the country’s new Communist regime, was arrested on charges of treason. Again, the charges were obviously false. The Communists were simply trying to silence one of their most influential critics. But at a show trial six weeks after his arrest, Mindszenty had somehow changed. He wasn’t his fearless, outspoken self. Instead, he appeared cold and unemotional. He didn’t even recognize his own mother when she came to visit him. Strangest of all, he confessed to the false charges. The image of this downtrodden priest, once so full of conviction, confessing to crimes that he didn’t commit caused many CIA personnel to wonder whether he had been subjected to mind control. “Somehow they took his soul apart,” said one intelligence officer.
This project evolved into dosing unsuspecting people and observing them. This included involving the over-enthusiastic George White.
Beginning in June 1953, he established a safe house in Greenwich Village, New York City, where he dosed his guests with drugs. It was “a small three-room apartment,” Gottlieb said, “and it was equipped with [a] one way mirror so that things going on in the one side of the mirror could be viewed from the other side.” Back in the OSS days, White had injected THC into cigarettes; now he injected LSD through the cork of a wine bottle. One of his first targets was gangster Eugene Giannini. Journalist Ed Reid, a close friend of White’s, witnessed the drugging and described what happened: “Giannini, glass in his hand, looked around and smiled. He leaned back and talked and talked and talked. He talked about the syndicate in Manhattan, about its friends in high places, in political clubs, in the halls of Justice, in the United States Attorney’s office in the Federal Building on Foley Square. He gave names, dates, places. . . . He talked.” Five months later, Giannini’s body was found sprawled in a gutter with two bullets in his head.
[...]
Using magician John Mulholland’s sleight-of-hand tricks, White occasionally slipped LSD to his unsuspecting friends and tried to seduce them into orgies.
[...]
On a separate occasion when Eliot was away, White drugged nineteen-year-old Barbara and her friend Clarice Stein with LSD, even though Barbara had brought along her baby daughter. White wrote in his diary that the women contracted the “Horrors” that night. Afterward, Barbara left Eliot and moved back in with her parents. When Eliot visited her, “She was cowering in a corner,” he said. “She thought the Mafia was out to get her. Her parents were unable to cope with the problem, so on our psychiatrist’s advice I admitted her to Stony Lodge Hospital in December 1958. Not long after that we got divorced, and Valerie,” their daughter, “went to live with my parents.” At the hospital, Barbara exhibited a paranoia eerily reminiscent of Frank Olson’s and insisted that her telephone was being tapped by an unidentified “they.”
[...]
MKULTRA was trying to determine whether such a thing was possible. Could drugs make someone talk during an interrogation? Could they make someone obey commands? “If we can find out just how good this stuff works, you’ll be doing a great deal for your country.” As Bureau of Narcotics agents, White and Feldman knew “the whores, the pimps, the people who brought in the drugs”...
Beside dosing people without their knowledge, some groups with limited knowledge of what they were consenting to, such as prison inmates, were used. The full extent of this may never be known.
Jolly West often treated the airmen at Lackland Air Force Base for their mental disorders. In one of his letters to Sidney Gottlieb, he suggested using the airmen, along with “prisoners in the local stockade,” as guinea pigs for MKULTRA experiments. Jimmy Shaver was known to have suffered from debilitating migraines. During West’s interrogation of him, Shaver had said, “I was already sick, Doc. I have headaches. Seven-eight hours at a time, Doc, you know? And they drive you to do anything to get away from them. I’ve ducked ’em in almost solid ice, and drank, and done everything.” At Shaver’s trial, his wife testified that he had often complained of headaches. Did West ever “treat” Shaver for his headaches prior to the murder of Chere Jo Horton? Was Shaver a guinea pig in an MKULTRA experiment? Curiously, all of West’s patient records from 1954, the year of the murder, survive except for a single file: last315 names “Sa” through “St.”
LSD appears to have been a gateway drug to the CIA as it sought anywhere some soft of Philosopher's Stone of pharmacology.
His files also indicate that he withdrew the spinal fluid of comatose patients in an attempt to identify the compounds that cause “maximum levels of physical and emotional stress in human beings.” When asked during a 1977 Senate investigation why the CIA was interested in such a grim topic, Geschickter said, “I can only give you the report that came to me from Allen Dulles, and I will quote it: ‘Thank God there is something decent coming out of our bag of dirty tricks. We are delighted.’”
It ends up, we weren't in an arms race with the Communists on this front. They found what has been long known -- Nothing magical is needed to break down the will of a human being.
The Communists weren’t controlling people through drugs, hypnotism, or “occult methods.” Instead, they were using the same methods that had been employed for centuries: hunger, beatings, isolation, stress positions, and sleep deprivation.
[...]
In their report, Wolff and Hinkle marvel at the dramatic effects that mere isolation can have on a person’s psyche: The profound boredom and complete loneliness of his situation gradually overwhelm the prisoner. There is literally nothing for him to do except ruminate and because he has so much to worry about, his ruminations are seldom pleasant. Frequently, they take the form of going over and over all the possible causes of his arrest. His mood becomes one of dejection. His sleep is disturbed by nightmares. . . . Some prisoners may become delirious and have hallucinations. God may appear to such a prisoner and tell him to cooperate with his interrogator. He may see his wife standing beside him, or a servant bringing him a large meal. In nearly all cases the prisoner’s need for human companionship and his desire to talk to anyone about anything becomes a gnawing appetite. If he is given an opportunity to talk, he may say anything which seems to be appropriate, or to be desired by the listener. . . . He may be unable to tell what is “actually true” from what “might be” or “should be” true. He may be highly suggestible. The similarities between the effects of isolation and LSD, down to the hallucinations, are striking. Although the Communists didn’t use LSD in their interrogations, it’s little wonder why the CIA thought that they might have. Ironically, Wolff and Hinkle headed the cutout organization— the SIHE— that would allow MKULTRA to flourish, even though they also wrote the report that debunked the claims that had led to the creation of MKULTRA in the first place.
(These tried-and-true techniques recalled to me the "rest cure" used in history to, really, control women. See The Cure for Women.)
Eventually, the CIA realized what it should have already known.
...document from 1961 summarizing a conversation between two anonymous CIA officers, sodium pentothal, the “pure gravy” drug that Artichoke teams had used to interrogate foreign spies, “should not be considered more effective for elicitation than getting a man drunk.” In fact, a CIA memo from February 1953— two months before MKULTRA was created— argues that there was “no428 reason for believing that drugs are reliable for obtaining truthful information.”
[...]
Gottlieb tried to put a positive spin on the negative results. When asked whether he had learned anything useful from the various MKULTRA experiments, he said, “Sure. Sure. I think [we] learned a lot of things. Most of the information was negative information, but you know, I think it established pretty clearly the limits of what you could do in surreptitiously altering a human’s behavior by covert means. It was damn little.”
This poorly managed drug experimentation drifted into melding with political assassination during the CIA's heyday with that activity.
Under the alias “Sid from Paris,” Gottlieb arranged to meet Lawrence Devlin, the CIA station chief in Léopoldville, inside a private room of a high-rise apartment building. Once the door behind them was locked, Gottlieb handed over the pouch and told Devlin what it was for. “Jesus H. Christ!” Devlin exclaimed. “Isn’t this unusual?” He asked Gottlieb who had authorized the assassination. “President Eisenhower,” Gottlieb said.
[...]
Years later, O’Donnell reflected on the episode: “All the people I knew acted in good faith,” even Bissell and Gottlieb. “I think they acted in light of— maybe not their consciences, but in light of their concept of patriotism.” They weren’t “evil people,” he said. They had simply abandoned their moral compass “because the boss says it is okay.”
[...]
Satisfied with Gottlieb’s explanation of his involvement in the attempt to assassinate Patrice Lumumba, attorney Joseph Rauh moved on to another incident. “Could you tell us what you know about any CIA mailing of a handkerchief with poison to an Iraqi colonel?” “I have a remembrance of that operation taking place. I can’t pinpoint the time it was done, but it was not an assassination operation in any way.”
[...]
...the chief’s request to “incapacitate” Qasim eventually landed on the desk of Sidney Gottlieb. To carry out the “incapacitation” attempt, Gottlieb procured a handkerchief doused with tuberculosis from Fort Detrick, took it to what is only referred to as an “Asian country,” and mailed it to Qasim. Apparently the package never reached him.
[...]
...another involved lacing Castro’s famous Cuban cigars with LSD. Ike Feldman, the Bureau of Narcotics agent who had helped George White conduct Operation Midnight Climax, was put in charge of the operation. “One of my whores was this Cuban girl,” he later said, “and we were gonna send her down to see Castro with a box of LSD-soaked cigars.” But by the time that everything was ready, the CIA had become less interested in humiliating Castro and more interested in killing him.
MKULTRA, assassinations.... The CIA came to believe it could do what it wanted, including torture.
The CIA, in turn, awarded psychologist James Mitchell an $ 81 million contract to conduct these “enhanced interrogations.” Mitchell, who had never so much as witnessed an interrogation before, was a supervisor for Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape (SERE) training in the military. The SERE program had been developed at the end of the Korean War to teach soldiers how to defend themselves against Communist interrogation methods. Armed with a knowledge of SERE, Mitchell reverse engineered those methods for the CIA. In his view, the key to a successful interrogation was to treat each detainee “like a dog in a cage.” When an FBI agent confronted Mitchell about the fact that the detainees weren’t dogs but human beings, he responded, “Science is science.” An undisclosed number of detainees died as a result.
[...]
...Mitchell’s “Clockwork Orange kind of approach,” as an insider described it, indeed got the detainees to talk. One of them confessed to knowing that his companions in the terrorist group al-Qaeda were plotting to blow up malls, banks, supermarkets, nuclear power plants, the Golden Gate Bridge, and the Statue of Liberty. Of course, none of the plots were real. The detainee wasn’t even a member of al-Qaeda.
I was amused to read of the CIA's Technical Services creations, including "skyhook" referenced in the 2008 film The Dark Knight mentioned by Lucius Fox as a means of re-boarding an aircraft without its landing.
Perhaps the most imaginative of the TSD’s inventions was the skyhook, designed to extract an agent from any location in a hurry. As part of the skyhook system, the agent would attach one end of a nylon line to a body harness and the other end to a helium balloon that he would release into the air. A capture plane equipped with thirty-foot “horns” protruding from its nose would snag the dangling line...
There was a connection to the headlines if not the marquee.
TSD ... gave the pilots a new suicide device in the form of a needle coated with sticky brown shellfish toxin. One finger prick from the needle would deliver enough toxin to kill a grown man. To prevent any accidental pricks, the needle was stored in a narrow hole drilled into the side of a silver dollar. The needle soon made international news when a U-2 spy plane was shot down over the Soviet Union. Its pilot, Francis Gary Powers, parachuted to safety, but the Soviet military captured him and confiscated his suicide needle.
This, of course, led to the CIA merging its willingness to operate domestically and without conscience to meet at involvement with the Watergate scandal.
...TSD had supplied the perpetrators with disguises, false identification papers, and a voice-altering device. In the wake of the Watergate scandal, Gottlieb was driven out of the CIA.
During the Form administration, oversight, investigation, and sunlight were applied to the CIA, especially around The Family Jewels, a 693-page secret report commissioned by CIA Director Richard Helms to investigate allegations of illegal CIA activities, especially during the Vietnam War. The report was compiled by the CIA's own Inspector General's Office.
...In response to the directive, a surprising number of people submitted reports. The CIA’s Office of the Inspector General compiled all of them into a secret 693-page file nicknamed the “Family Jewels.” Ironically, Schlesinger had issued the directive to stay one step ahead of the press, but by forsaking compartmentalization and assembling the CIA’s most sensitive secrets into one file, he made it much easier for those secrets to leak out.
[...]
Colby didn’t have any luck silencing Hersh this time. On December 22, 1974, the front page of The New York Times proclaimed in bold letters, “Huge C.I.A. Operation Reported in U.S. Against Antiwar Forces, Other Dissidents in Nixon Years.” The story revealed that the CIA had spied on thousands of antiwar protestors despite the fact that the CIA’s charter forbade it from operating within the United States.
[...]
Schorr taped a news segment for CBS that began, “President Ford has reportedly warned associates that if current investigations go too far they could uncover several assassinations of foreign officials involving the CIA.” The cat was out of the bag. Ford now had no choice but to tell the Rockefeller Commission to add assassinations to its list of CIA activities to investigate, the very activity that the commission had been created to conceal.
[...]
During Colby’s testimony, Senator Church asked with a hint of excitement, “Have you brought with you some of those devices which would have enabled the CIA to use this [shellfish toxin] for killing people?” “We have, indeed.” In front of the awestruck audience, Colby unveiled a battery-powered dart gun fitted with a telescopic sight. It shot a frozen dart of shellfish toxin that would melt inside of the victim’s body, eliminating any trace of the crime.
[...]
“Some of them apparently have been destroyed.” “Do you know who destroyed them?” “I do. I have a report that one set was destroyed by the Chief of the Division in question before his retirement.” “Do you know who that was?” “Mr. Gottlieb.” “Is that Mr. Sidney Gottlieb?” “Yes.” On live television, Colby and the Church Committee associated one name with the suspicious activities of the CIA’s past: Sidney Gottlieb. The public was eager to learn more about this mysterious figure whom newspapers quickly dubbed “Dr. Death.”
[...]
Twenty years later, in 1996, Colby’s dead body was found in an offshoot of the Potomac River. His green canoe was nearby, weighed down with sand. The CIA, which had exclusive control of the death scene, said that there were no signs of foul play. The medical examiner suspected that Colby had suffered a heart attack while canoeing, fell into the water, and drowned. Not everyone believed the official explanation. Colby’s body wasn’t bloated or disfigured, as is common in drowning victims. Also, the supposed time of death was around 10:00 P.M., an odd time to go canoeing.
[...]
The CIA could have easily lied about the existence of the files. Or it could have issued the famous Glomar response, “We can neither confirm nor deny . . .” Or it could have refused to release the files under the pretense that doing so would jeopardize national security. Instead, Admiral Stansfield Turner, the new director of central intelligence, wanted the files released. Ever since the Year of Intelligence, journalists and congressional committees had been airing out the CIA’s dirty laundry. Better, he thought, to add these files to the heap and bear the inevitable backlash now rather than later.
I see there is new doc on the mysterious death of William Colby.
This led to a Victims Task Force being formed and documenting much more than the widely known Frank Olson case of a life upended by CIA dosing.
Barbara was the woman whose husband, Eliot, had been away when White drugged her with LSD, even though she was caring for her baby daughter. Following the incident, she left Eliot, moved back in with her parents, experienced acute paranoia, and spent the rest of her life in various sanitariums receiving electroshock therapy. She died six months before the creation of the Victims Task Force.The book reconsider this MKULTRA story in the light of the damage and disinformation damage of secrecy and rippled effects of real government conspiracies.
[...]
By the time that the Victims Task Force disbanded in late 1979, Laubinger had contacted twelve of the fifteen potential unwitting victims mentioned in White’s diary. Some of them insisted, “It didn’t happen to me.” Others told him, “Thanks, I learned that a long time ago. Please go away and leave me alone.” Clarice was the only one who sued the CIA. She initially sought $ 150,000 in damages, but she settled for $ 15,000, plus the lunch. As insignificant as her lawsuit may have seemed at the time, it was a harbinger of things to come.
[...]
Ritchie had known White back in the 1950s. “My605 God,” he thought, “how could he have done that to me?” Was Ritchie right? Had he been an unwitting victim of Operation Midnight Climax? Fortunately, White’s diary offers a clue. On December 20, 1957, the night that Ritchie lost his mind, the diary entry reads, “Xmas606 party Fed bldg Press Room.”
[...]
At the end of the forensic investigation, Starrs made a shocking announcement: Frank Olson had received “a stunning blow to the head by some person or instrument prior to his exiting through the window of room 1018A.” Olson was “intentionally, deliberately, with malice aforethought, thrown out of that window.”
[...]
But Starrs’s conclusion wasn’t definitive. Another member of the forensic team maintained that the blow to Olson’s head was consistent with him hitting the window on the way out. Yet another member of the team complained that Starrs “tends to relish the spotlight more than he does the details” and “sometimes he overlooks, or tends to brush aside, pertinent facts, or evidence, in favor of his opinions or theories.” Starrs had reached the conclusion that he had wanted to. Nevertheless, it’s an interesting coincidence that in 1997, the CIA declassified a short primer written in 1953— the year that Olson died— titled “A Study of Assassination.” The primer describes seven different methods of assassination: drugs, manual, edge weapons, blunt weapons, firearms, explosives, and accidents. For manual methods, the primer says that simple tools are often “the most efficient means” available. “A hammer, axe, wrench, screw driver, fire poker, kitchen knife, lamp stand, or anything hard, heavy and handy will suffice.
[...]
The existence of the primer has caused much speculation about the Olson incident, but there’s little reason to think it describes what happened. For one, Olson went through the window blinds, which the primer discourages. Additionally, Lashbrook didn’t make an “outcry” or play the “horrified witness.” Lastly, the primer specifically advises against creating a “wound or condition not attributable to the fall,” which wouldn’t have been the case if Olson had been bludgeoned in the head, as Starrs claimed.
[...]
Rose Ann Sharp, a preschool teacher who volunteered with him, said, “A lot of Sid’s later life was spent atoning, whether he needed to or not, for how he had been exposed publicly as some sort of evil scientist.” Gottlieb came to deeply regret MKULTRA, to the point where he completely lost his peace of mind. The project that had ruined so many lives finally claimed its last victim. In that sense, Gottlieb “was not a monster but a man,” his friend Lois Manookian reminded the world.
MKULTRA is a case study in the vicious cycle of secrecy. Compartmentalization and bad recordkeeping practices (secrecy) emboldened the perpetrators (plausible deniability) to conduct unethical experiments (reckless behavior), and the fear of exposure (embarrassment) prompted them to destroy the files (secrecy).
[...]
As James Madison observed at the beginning of the American experiment, humans are not angels, and therefore “auxiliary precautions” are required to keep their ambitions in check.
[...]
There are two straightforward solutions. The first is to support free speech that speaks truth to power and a free press that exposes abuses. The second is to realign the incentives of elected representatives so that they take seriously their role as overseers. Gerrymandering, closed primaries, plurality voting, and winner-take-all elections currently incentivize these representatives to engage in political theater at the expense of actual governance. If the American people can end gerrymandering and implement some combination of open primaries, ranked voting, and proportional representation, then they can create a system that better prioritizes service over selfishness.
[...]
While the propagation of conspiracy theories can delegitimize the truth (as in censorship through noise), the propagation of the truth can legitimize conspiracy theories. The fact that the government conducted unethical programs such as MKULTRA, “enhanced interrogations,” involuntary sterilizations , human radiation experiments, and others of a similar nature, combined with the fact that the government has engaged in cover-ups, gives credence to conspiracy theories.
Sunday, May 25, 2025
Saturday, May 24, 2025
Review: The Genealogy of Demons: Anti-Semitism, Fascism, and the Myths of Ezra Pound
The Genealogy of Demons: Anti-Semitism, Fascism, and the Myths of Ezra Pound by Robert CasilloMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
Richly researched and annotated, this is a thorough analysis of Pound's embrace of antisemitism and a fascistic especially through his Cantos and radio addresses.
According to one unnamed observer, Pound became anti-Semitic through contagion; anti-Semitism was "in the air" in the teens and 1920s, and he caught a strain of it. Another explanation is that Pound's anti-Semitism derives from his American nativism and especially his Populism, for like Pound the Populists denounced the tyranny of Eastern banks and had strong agrarian and middle-class values. Other critics argue that Pound's anti-Semitism springs entirely or mainly from his hatred of usury, which he then mistakenly identified with the Jews. And others argue that it stems from his anti-monotheism and paganism, and is a "logical corollary" of these beliefs.
Pagans
Of all religions, Upward most associates Judaism with the idea of God as an absolute authority who, through fear and prohibitions, thwarts man's instincts and desires: "fear is the enemy that the Idealist has to fight," although "fear is the hardest word for him to understand." The remote and fearful Jewish God affronts human desire and intelligence: "If the Man Outside is a good man, then he cannot want us to fear him. He can only want us to live so that we need not fear him." Upward thus splits the idea of God into two conceptions, one an inaccessible and uncontrollable force, the other an indulgent being amenable to human control. The last of these, says Upward, is "the foe worth fighting, for when the Man Outside wrestles with us under this form he means us to prevail." No one is luckier than the Divine Man, whom the Man Outside has chosen to be his "privileged" servant, an "ambassador of the great King. "3
Pound likes Upward's idea that "the real God is neither a cad nor an imbecile" but an amiable being. "That is," Pound adds, "a fairly good ground for religion" (SP, 405). Like Upward and Zielinski, Pound distin-guishes between the good gods, indulgent and attractive to man, and the ugly and repressive Jehovah.4 The Greek gods are known by their "beauty," while "demons" are "unbeautiful" (SP, 47), and Jehovah, as repopularized by Calvin, is a "maniac sadist" (SP, 70). Pound believes that the Italian Catholic habit of "moderation" is attributable to such prayers as the one in an Italian schoolbook which supplicates God by referring to "the hilarity of thy face" (GK, 141). In numerous other instances Pound views divinity as an attribute possessed by favored human beings...
Fascism
In Pound's opinion the Italian Fascist guild and corporatist system is the antidote to an atomistic, deceitful, and usury-wracked parliamentarianism. Since, according to Pound, "Most men want certain things IN their own lives, largely inside the sphere of their own trade or business", Fascism endows the "people by occupation and vocation with corporate powers", and thus installs them within an "organic" system of needs and functions. Mussolini, he says, "wants a council where every kind of man will be represented by some bloke of his own profession...". In the United States as well, "any or every state could organize its congressional representation on a corporate basis," whereby each profession "could have one representative". This idea, which Pound endorses for the United States as late as 1960, and which he shares with Mussolini, would overturn the concept of citizenship as it descends from the French Revolution. 51 Meanwhile, the American "big employer" should pursue a "corporate solution" in the Italian Fascist sense. Trade unions, however, should be denied legal status because they lack "RESPONSIBILITY" and are hence dysfunctional.
Although Guild Socialism, like Fascist syndicalism, had originally favored local and autonomous guilds, Guild Socialist theory gradually developed the idea of "joint management" in which all producers are partners of the state and the state is endowed with "coercive functions" in disputes between producers. 52 In Italian Fascism there similarly developed the conception of the state as the coordinator, supervisor, sometimes even the nullifier of social and economic conflict. The state was to integrate classes, reward the fulfilment of economic functions, place labor and capital on an "equal footing," and encourage economic "collaboration" between capital and labor within the corporation, all in the interests of the nation as a whole. 53 To quote Mussolini's Consegna of the Fascist year XI (1933): "Discipline the economic forces and equate them to the needs of the nation"...
Pauline Christianity
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pauli...
Pagans
Nazism, as in Pound, this kind of thinking masks a pagan hatred of Christianity and justifies programmatic anti-Semitism. Rosenberg believed that Jesus' great personality had been obscured by "the sterility of Near Eastern, Jewish, and African life," in short, the brutality of sacrifice, and that Christianity had been corrupted by that "Jewish preacher of race-chaos, St. Paul." Thanks to St. Paul, the world was not elevated "because of the life of the Saviour, but because of His death...." "This," he adds, "is the sole motif of the Pauline Scriptures," against which Rosenberg praises a non-Jewish "positive Christianity," based on the example of Jesus' life. Hitler too de-mands "positive Christianity" in Mein Kampf and in the twenty-five points of the official Nazi programme.26 In view of these religious perversions, the swastika takes on a new significance. It represents not only the solar cycle but the ascendant solar god, who instead of dying on the cross rises with the immortal sun, source of Nature's energy and vitality. This is the symbol of "life affirmation" under which millions of Jews were exterminated.
If the swastika is thus quite different from the Christian cross, what then of the cross Pound mentions, which "turns with the sun"? Pound's probable meaning is determinable through Allen Upward's Divine Mystery, which Pound reviewed most enthusiastically, and which, though Upward himself has no connection with Nazism, is sometimes reminiscent of Nazi cultural speculation.
fascism
If Pound belongs within the fascist ideology, he likewise shares its massive confusion and contradictions, which are embodied in his metaphors and images, the form and content of his works. Repeatedly Pound's ideology is problematized and undercut by his text; our task has been in large part to reveal these hiatuses in meaning. Not the least of Pound's contradictions is the disparity between his hope of installing an homogeneous, "organic," and "totalitarian" culture around a single luminous image (a religious and ritual object such as the goddess of Terracina) and the poem's final status as an aggregate of some bright and other terrifying images, a work that approaches totality only through numerical inclusiveness rather than through the all-embracing mythical symbol. Besides mirroring the ideology and pol-icy of fascism, The Cantos mirror what fascism tried violently and desperately to overcome, the fragmentation of modern culture.
View all my reviews
Tuesday, May 13, 2025
Review: Mostly Harmless
Mostly Harmless by Douglas AdamsMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
The villagers had watched in consternation as the woman had marched boldly to the hut of the Sandwich Maker. The Sandwich Maker had been sent to them by Almighty Bob in a burning fiery chariot. This, at least, was what Thrashbarg said, and Thrashbarg was the authority on these things. So, at least, Thrashbarg claimed, and Thrashbarg was and so on and so on. It was hardly worth arguing about.
Almighty Bob is the god of the tribes of Lamuella
View all my reviews
Sunday, May 11, 2025
Thursday, May 8, 2025
Wednesday, May 7, 2025
Tuesday, May 6, 2025
Saturday, May 3, 2025
Review: Plutarch Fall of the Roman Republic [Penguin Classics L 84]
![Plutarch Fall of the Roman Republic [Penguin Classics L 84]](https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1697019052l/139481549._SX98_.jpg)
Plutarch Fall of the Roman Republic [Penguin Classics L 84] by Rex WarnerMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
As a politician [Crassus] was singularly inconsistent, neither a steadfast friend nor an implacable enemy. Where his self-interest was involved he found no difficulty in breaking off an attachment or in making up a quarrel. Indeed it often happened that, in a short space of time, he came forward both as the supporter and as the opponent of the same man and the same measures. He was strong because he was popular and because he was feared - particularly because he was feared.
View all my reviews
Review: Coming Back Alive: The True Story of the Most Harrowing Search and Rescue Mission Ever Attempted on Alaska's High Seas
Friday, May 2, 2025
Tuesday, April 29, 2025
Sunday, April 27, 2025
Review: Stayin' Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class
Stayin' Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class by Jefferson R. CowieMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
Saturday Night Fever is a 1977 American dance drama film directed by John Badham and produced by Robert Stigwood. It stars John Travolta as Tony Manero, a young Italian-American man who spends his weekends dancing and drinking at a local disco while dealing with social tensions and disillusionment in his working class ethnic neighborhood in Brooklyn. The story is based on "Tribal Rites of the New Saturday Night", a mostly fictional 1976 New York article by music writer Nik Cohn.
He wrote the 1976 New York article "Tribal Rites of the New Saturday Night", which was the source material for the movie Saturday Night Fever.[1] In 1996, Cohn revealed the article to have been a complete fabrication, based only on clubgoers he knew from his native England.
From the INtro
From a policy perspective, the Democratic Party faced a dilemma that it could not solve: finding ways to maintain support within the white blue-collar base that came of age during the New Deal and World War II era, while at the same time servicing the pressing demands for racial and gender equity arising from the sixties. Both had to be achieved in the midst of two massive oil shocks, record inflation and unemployment, and a business community retooling to assert greater control over the political process. Placing affirmative action onto a world of declining occupational opportunity risked a zero-sum game: a post-scarcity politics without post-scarcity conditions. Despite the many forms of solidarity evident in the discontent in the factories, mines, and mills, without a shared economic vision to hold things together, issues like busing forced black and white residents to square off in what columnist Jimmy Breslin called “a Battle Royal” between “two groups of people who are poor and doomed and who have been thrown in the ring with each other.”10
The mercurial nature of the politics of ’72 was such that when Wallace was eliminated from the race, Dewey voted for the most left-leaning candidate of any major party in the twentieth century, Democratic senator George McGovern. The choice did not come easily. The autoworker was genuinely stumped about whether incumbent Richard Nixon’s Silent Majority or challenger George McGovern’s soggy populism best represented his interests. It would be a betrayal of everything he stood for to vote for a Republican, he believed, but he had grave concerns about McGovern and his entourage of student radicals. He also sensed a “meanness” creeping into McGovern’s campaign after he threw vice presidential nominee Tom Eagleton off the ticket due to his earlier problems with mental illness. Much of the labor movement, especially the hierarchy of the American Federation of Labor-Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO), could not stomach McGovern’s New Politics with its anti-war positions, youth movements, and commitment to open up the Democratic Party to wider spectrum of Americans. The labor federation, fearing for its traditional kingmaker role in the Democratic Party, fought the McGovern insurgency with every scrap of institutional power it could muster.11
Meantime, Richard Nixon, taking his cues from Wallace, was designing his own heretical strategy to woo white working-class voters away from the party of Roosevelt. His plans to build a post-New Deal coalition—the “New Majority” he liked to call it—around the Republican Party in 1972 was based on making an explicit pitch for white, male, working-class votes by appealing to their cultural values over their material needs. His targets were men like Burton, who had first been dislodged from the Democratic mainstream by George Wallace. Despite Nixon’s courtship of Dewey’s vote, the autoworker remained suspicious of Nixon’s loyalties. “Nixon hasn’t proved anything to me when he raises the prices of new cars and freezes the wages of the people who build them,” Burton explained about falling back on bread-and-butter Democratic politics with his vote for the left-leaning McGovern. “I really don’t think McGovern will win,” he finally concluded. “But maybe if we vote for him we can show Nixon what we want, what the working man wants.” The majority of white working-class voters disagreed, selecting Nixon...
The remobilization of the business leadership was one of the most dramatic shifts in postwar policy history, recasting the legislative landscape for generations to come. If the New Deal was the revolution, this was the counter-revolution. Having contained labor policy for the entirety of the postwar era, corporations lost key legislative battles during the Johnson and Nixon years, fought to a stalemate during the transition period from 1975-77, and, by 1978, got reorganized and stood poised to win almost every battle on taxation, spending, regulation, and inflation for decades to come.28
II
Despite the draconian demands of policy makers, few working people were immediately abandoning the Keynesian ship—there was not a large-scale lurch to the right in popular economic thinking. The conservative movement made substantial inroads into white workers’ cultural identity in the late sixties and early seventies, but it was still a long way from scoring points on economic grounds. This is where Nixon’s groundwork on wooing working-class voters paid off, and where conservative strategists began to learn what country musicians already knew. Economics may have broken the policy levees and convinced policy elites, but it was the social issues that delivered working people to the new political waters. As the New Right’s media guru Richard Viguerie noted, “We never really won until we began stressing issues like busing, abortion, school prayer and gun control. We talked about the sanctity of free enterprise, about the Communist onslaught until we were blue in face. But we didn’t start winning majorities in elections until we got down to gut level issues.” In a similar vein, Pat Buchanan continued his earlier work for Nixon, plowing terrain and sowing seed for a working-class right—often consciously setting the poorer and the more affluent elements of the New Deal coalition off from one another. The future of the Republican Party, he argued, would be as “the party of the working class, not the party of the welfare class.” The federal government and know-it-all cultural elitists were well on their way to eclipsing the bosses as the workingman’s enemy. As M. Stanton Evans, the president of the American Conservative Union, put it, the key was finding a common ground of anti-statism: “some of them reach their political position by reading Adam Smith while others do so by attending an anti-busing rally, but . . . all of them belong to a large and growing class of American citizens: those who perceive themselves as victims of the federal welfare state and its attendant costs.”29
William Rusher, in his 1975 book The Making of the New Majority Party, argued, like Tom Wolfe, that the politics of old class divisions were over. An odd cross-class coalition of business, industrialists, blue-collar workers and farmers stood in opposition to a McGovernite “new class led by elements that were essentially non-productive” members of the chattering classes—like academics, intellectuals, government bureaucrats, and the media elite—who claimed to know what was good for the nation. The modern welfare state, Rusher argued, “exists simply as a permanent parasite on the body politics—a heavy charge on both its conscience and its purse, carefully tended and forever subtly expanded by the verbalizers as justification for their own existence and growth.” Although strategists like Rusher and Viguerie had hoped that they might be able to entice former actor and California governor Ronald Reagan as the standard bearer for a new Conservative Party (sharing a dream ticket with George Wallace, they hoped), Reagan finally rejected the tactic of a new party but fully embraced the white working-class Republican ideal. In 1976, Reagan failed to win the nomination of his party for the presidency, but he was en route to capturing its soul.30
As Reagan told the Conservative Political Action Conference in 1977, “And let me say so there can be no mistakes as to what I mean:The New Republican Party I envision will not be, and cannot be, one limited to the country club-big business image that, for reasons both fair and unfair, it is burdened with today. The New Republican Party I am speaking about is going to have room for the man and the woman in the factories, for the farmer, for the cop on the beat and the millions of Americans who may never have thought of joining our party before, but whose interests coincide with those represented by principled Republicanism.... The Democratic Party turned its back on the majority of social conservatives during the 1960s. The New Republican Party of the late ’70s and ’80s must welcome them, seek them out, enlist them, not only as rank-and-file members but as leaders and as candidates.
The New Right’s coalition linked worker and businessman, shop floor and Wall Street, tavern and country club, cultural conservative and economic libertarian. Roosevelt’s famous “Forgotten Man” was becoming a Republican, his enemy less the “economic royalists,” the class elites, against which Roosevelt inveighed in his landslide 1936 victory, than the cultural elitists who would look down on the politics and culture of blue-collar America. Not all of even the white, male working class joined the New Right, of course, but certainly enough to make a viable coalition on the margins where elections are won.
"It's the economy, stupid!"
The cultural exhaustion crept in alongside the decline in union victories. “Maybe Vietnam, the civil-rights thing, Watergate and all the rest of it wore me out,” she continued. “I worry more now about the price of a head of lettuce than the issue of who picked it.” The decline was hard to take.
View all my reviews
Saturday, April 26, 2025
Review: All the Shah's Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror
All the Shah's Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror by Stephen KinzerMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
Preface
One day I attended a book party for an older Iranian woman who had written her memoirs. She spoke for an hour about her eventful life. Although she never touched on politics, she mentioned in passing that her family was related to the family of Mohammad Mossadegh, who served as prime minister of Iran for twenty-six months in the early 1950s and was overthrown in a coup d'etat staged by the Central Intelligence Agency.
After she finished speaking, I couldn't resist the temptation to ask a question. "You mentioned Mossadegh," I said. "What do you remember, or what can you tell us, about the coup against him?" She immediately became agitated and animated.
"Why did you Americans do that terrible thing?" she cried out. "We always loved America. To us, America was the great country, the perfect country, the country that helped us while other countries were exploiting us. But after that moment, no one in Iran ever trusted the United States again. I can tell you for sure that if you had not done that thing, you would never have had that problem of hostages being taken in your embassy in Tehran. All your trouble started in 1953. Why, why did you do it?"
This outburst reflected a great gap in knowledge and understanding...
As a postrevolutionary generation came of age in Iran, Iranian intellectuals began assessing the long-term effects of the 1953 coup. Several published thoughtful essays that raised intriguing questions. One appeared in an American foreign-policy journal:
It is a reasonable argument that but for the coup, Iran would be a mature democracy. So traumatic was the coup's legacy that when the Shah finally departed in 1979, many Iranians feared a repetition of 1953, which was one of the motivations for the student seizure of the U.S. embassy. The hostage crisis, in turn, precipitated the Iraqi invasion of Iran, while the [Islamic] revolution itself played a part in the Soviet decision to invade Afghanistan. A lot of history, in short, flowed from a single week in Tehran.
The 1953 coup and its consequences [were] the starting point for the political alignments in today's Middle East and inner Asia. With hindsight, can anybody say the Islamic Revolution of 1979 was inevitable? Or did it only become so once the aspirations of the Iranian people were temporarily expunged in 1953?
View all my reviews
Wednesday, April 23, 2025
Sunday, April 20, 2025
Thursday, April 17, 2025
Review: The Time Paradox: The New Psychology of Time That Will Change Your Life
The Time Paradox: The New Psychology of Time That Will Change Your Life by Philip G. ZimbardoMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
Time-based personality types
In our work, we have consistently found that time perspective plays a fundamental role in the way people live. People tend to develop and overuse a particular time perspective—for example, focusing on the future, the present, or the past. Future-oriented people tend to be more successful professionally and academically, to eat well, to exercise regularly, and to schedule
preventive doctor’s exams. The “late” seminarians and other individuals who live in fast-paced communities are likely future-oriented and so are less willing to devote their time to
altruistic pursuits.
In contrast, people who are predominantly present-oriented tend to be willing to help others but appear less willing or able to help themselves. In general, present-oriented people are more likely to engage in risky sexual behavior, to gamble, and to use drugs and alcohol than future-oriented people are. They are also less likely to exercise, to eat well, and to engage in preventive health practices such as flossing their teeth and getting regular doctor exams.
Consequently, future-oriented people are the most likely to be successful and the least likely to help others in need. Ironically, the people who are best able to help are the least likely to do so. In contrast, present-oriented people are less likely to be successful but are more likely to help others. Again ironically, individual who are most likely to help others may be those least likely to help themselves. The situation is more complicated when we consider people whose primary time perspective is the past. For some, the past is filled with positive memories of family rituals, successes, and pleasures. For others, the past is filled with negative memories, a museum of torments, failures, and regrets. These divergent attitudes toward the past play dramatic roles in daily decisions because they become binding frames of reference that are carried in the minds of those with positive or negative past views.
Surveys: https://www.thetimeparadox.com/
Stoic, quote from Epictetus - "It's not things that upset us but our judgments about things"
We authors believe that the past matters, but it matters less than Freud and the behaviorists claimed. Everyone is affected by the objective past but not completely determined by it. And it is not the events of the past that most strongly influence our lives. Your attitudes toward events in the past matter more than the events themselves. This distinction between the past and your current interpretation of it is critical, because it offers hope for change. You cannot change what happened in the past, but you can change your attitudes toward what happened. Sometimes changing the frame can alter the way you see the picture.
HOW DO YOU BECOME FUTURE-ORIENTED?
No one is born with a future time perspective. No gene pushes people into a future time zone. You become future-oriented by being born in the right place at the right time, where environmental conditions help transform little present-oriented babies into restrained, successful, future-oriented adults. These conditions include:
Living in a temperate zone
Living in a stable family, society, nation
Being Protestant (or Jewish)
Becoming educated
Being a young or middle-aged adult
Having a job
Using technology regularly
Being successful
Having future-oriented role models
Recovering from childhood illness
Living in a Temperate Zone
Preparing for seasonal change involves planning and modifying behavior to fit the changing weather. For that reason, people become used to anticipating worse weather in winter and summer than in the usually glorious fall and spring. In contrast, living in a mildly tropical climate is being in paradise with an extended lease. It is always the same season, only with more or less rain.
Living in a Stable Family, Society, Nation
When you focus on the future, you make decisions that anticipate consequences. In predicting the pluses and minuses that will result from a given action, you assume there is sufficient stability for you to make that judgment possible. A stable government and family allow you to predict what actions will generate desired rewards or, indeed, if there will ever be the promised reward for chores you do now. In general, stable, reliable environments are likely to be the best breeding grounds for budding futures.
Being Protestant (or Jewish)
The concept of original sin in Christian doctrine is based on Eve’s succumbing to her present-oriented appetite when the serpent tempted her to eat the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. All Christians have been paying for her moment of “weakness” ever since, and are often reminded that “Idle hands are the devil’s workshop.” After the Protestant Reformation, Calvinists in particular came to believe in predestination—the idea that God had predestined some people to be saved and others to be damned. The worldly sign of this destiny was apparent in one’s worldly success and accumulation of wealth. The Protestant work ethic generated a new hardworking class of entrepreneurs. In general, even today the gross national product of primarily Protestant nations is greater than that of Catholic nations.
Being Jewish is likely to push one toward future orientation, because Jewish tradition honors scholarship and education as a means of personal and community advancement. Education in academic settings is all about goal-setting, planning, delaying gratification, and anticipating rewards for progress, the building blocks of a solid future-oriented foundation.
Becoming Educated
Education makes a student more future-oriented. Schools teach delay of gratification, goal-setting, cost-benefit analysis, and abstract thought. Cynics would argue that the subtext of a program for success is learning to respect authority: staying in one’s seat, knowing one’s place in the hierarchic ranking of intelligence, and learning to tolerate boring lectures, all in the promise of securing boring jobs. Nevertheless, education is the boot camp that trains presents to become futures.
View all my reviews
Wednesday, April 16, 2025
Review: Death of Nature; Women, Ecology and the Scientific Revolution
Death of Nature; Women, Ecology and the Scientific Revolution by Carolyn MerchantMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
Twentieth-century ecology emerged from the intellectual frame-work historically associated with an organic approach to nature and society. Employing the hierarchical variant of the organic model, ecologists in the early decades of this century used concepts such as "organic community," "mutual interdependence," and "evolution toward higher forms" on a hierarchical scale to provide an under-standing not only of the organization of bacterial colonies, grass-land climax vegetation, and bee and ant communities, but also of human tribal societies and the world economy. They stressed an evolution toward greater cooperation on a worldwide basis and argued that nature could provide the model for an ethic of human sharing, integration, and unity. But the emergence of fascist tyranny based on a centralized organismic model glorifying the father as absolute dictator undermined the evolutionary hierarchical component of their argument, and ecology turned in a mathematically reductionistic direction.
Post industrial info age charismatic autocratic disruptor
Millenarianism represented a preindustrial form of social revolution. It differed from the movements of the industrial revolution by preparing people, through revelation, to accept revolutionary change, as opposed to politicizing the working class. Signs in the heavens, prophets, and saviors would appear predicting the arrival of the millennium. For example, persisting since the Middle Ages was the prophecy that Frederick I (Barbaroso), King of Germany, would be resurrected; he had died in 1190 on the third crusade and was idealized as a savior of the poor who would bring with him a communal state. He would banish the Pope as Antichrist, and destroy his cohorts-the clergy, the wicked, and the rich, well-fed laity. Throughout the Middle Ages, prophets and written manifestos sustained revolutionary influences and the real hopes of the poor for a new social order.
England European
... By the end of the century, childbirth was passing into the hands of male doctors and "man-midwives."
While women's productive roles were decreasing under early capitalism, the beginning of a process that would ultimately transform them from an economic resource for their families' subsistence to a psychic resource for their husbands, the cultural role played by female symbols and principles was also changing. The female world soul, with its lower component, Natura, and the nurturing female earth had begun to lose plausibility in a world increasingly influenced by mining technology essential to commercial capitalism. The older organic order of nature and society was breaking up as the new mercantile activities threatened the ideology of natural stratification in society.
Symbolic of these changes were the midwife and the witch. From the perspective of the male, the witch was a symbol of disorder in nature and society, both of which must be brought under control. The midwife symbolized female incompetence in her own natural sphere, reproduction, correctable through a technology invented and controlled by men the forceps. But from a female perspective, witchcraft represented a form of power by which oppressed lower-class women could retaliate against social injustices, and a source of healing through the use of spirits and the regenerative powers of nature. For women, the midwife symbolized female control over the female reproductive function. But until medical training became available to women and licensing regulations were equalized for both women and men, women had no opportunity to compare the effectiveness of the older, shared traditions of midwifery as an art with the new medical science.
Descartes
moved the spirit out of matter in sensing a mechanized world
Similarly, his Principles of Philosophy (published in 1644) re-structured the cosmos as a mechanism, based on the motion of inert material corpuscles that transmitted motion consecutively from part to part through efficient causation. The force that produced the motion was not something vital, animate, or inherent in bodies, but a measure of the quantity of matter and the speed with which they moved. Motion was external to matter and was put into the universe at the moment of creation. It could be transferred among bodies, but its total amount was conserved from instant to instant by God. Change occurred through the rearrangement of inert corpuscles. The spiritus mundi of the Neoplatonists was translated into a subtle mechanical ether whose whirlpool circulations pushed the planets around, a sleight-of-hand not lost on subsequent critics such as Henry More and Henry Power.
The ghost got back into the machine, ushered in by the forgotten Leibniz-inspiring and Kabbalah-reading Anne Conway, an English philosopher whose work was in the tradition of the Cambridge Platonists.
THE MONADS OF CONWAY, VAN HELMONT, AND LEIBNIZ.
By September, after Van Helmont's March 1696 arrival in Hanover, one finds in Leibniz's writings the first use of the term monad to characterize his concept of "individual substance." In long hours of conversation with Leibniz and the Electress Sophie, Van Helmont spoke about his own ideas, those of Anne Conway, and of Knorr von Rosenroth's Kabbalah Denudata, conversations which Leibniz found "very instructive," in contrast to Van Helmont's books, which were more enigmatic.
Prior to 1696, Leibniz had used the terms entelechie, formes substantielles, unité substantielle, point metaphysical, and forces primitives interchangeably to mean "individual substance." But in 1696, the disparate elements of his metaphysics coalesced when he began using the concept of the monad to represent an independent individual-a substance endowed with perception and activity-existing in a state of accommodation and consensus with other substances.
View all my reviews
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Review: The Wild Blue
The Wild Blue by Stephen E. Ambrose My rating: 4 of 5 stars View all my reviews
-
Blacklisted by History: The Untold Story of Senator Joe McCarthy and His Fight Against America by M. Stanton Evans My ...
-
1920: The Year of the Six Presidents by David Pietrusza My rating: 3 of 5 stars The presidential electio...
-
Trump in Exile by Meridith McGraw My rating: 4 of 5 stars [I read the Audible version narrated by [auth...
