Review: With the Adepts: An Adventure Among the Rosicrucians

With the Adepts: An Adventure Among the Rosicrucians by Franz Hartmann
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

This work of imaginative fiction is part drumbeat for the author's Secret Symbols of the Rosicrucians: Cosmology, or Universal Science and part near desperate yearning for a magical fantasy within human control would arise within view. This elusive envie concludes in an apt metaphor in the narrator finding an alluring water element, the Water Queen, to be real and embraceable.

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Review: Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood

Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood by Trevor Noah
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I thought Noah was a sorry replacement for Jon Stewart and his handling of The Daily Show was the final reason leading to be "cutting the cord" and dropping cable. Still, I heard such good things about this memoir, I decided to try it. While it stops long before his American life and career, it is still a fascinating look into growing up "colored" (mixed, Black and White) in apartheid South Africa with a dysfunctional family and singular mother going from petty criminal to entertainer. Basically, this is an indictment of the fundamental fallacy of institutionalized racism and an unusual life navigating its rocky shoals.

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Review: Man-Eater: The Terrifying True Story of Cannibal Killer Katherine Knight

Man-Eater: The Terrifying True Story of Cannibal Killer Katherine Knight by Ryan Green
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I first read about this would-be(?) cannibal in Beyond Bad. Really, a corpse abuser with slaughterhouse skills and a dinner motif. This brief read seems a bit over-heated in imaging the Knight mind, but it is interesting to read the substantial effect on the investigating officers and Knight's life in prison.

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Review: The Labor Wars: From the Molly Maguires to the Sit Downs

The Labor Wars: From the Molly Maguires to the Sit Downs by Sidney Lens
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The Molly Maguires may have been an Irish 19th-century secret society known for their activism among Irish-American and Irish immigrant coal miners in Pennsylvania. Or maybe they were the nonexistent basis for a folk panic. Either way they are a basis for the history of the roots of militant labor movements in America, sort of like rooting a story of Democracy on semi-legends. Through railroads and infection by communism to mass production, this tellings ends with the successful sitdowns largely in Michigan automotive plants, particularly GM. The author argues that with this transition from fighting in the streets to keep "blacklegs" (scabs) out to making an occupy movement of the strike, fininally unionism became a force to be reckoned with. From then, the "wars" disappeared as the National Guard was no longer called and the unions became established--part of the establishment. This 1974 work ponders an uncertain future by reviewing the Nixon era:

In the second half of 1971 President Richard M. Nixon took two steps which represented back-handed admissions that Pax Americana on the international scene and the synthetic prosperity at home might be in serious trouble. ...

The New Economic Policy, proclaimed at approximately the same time as the announcements regarding China, reflected an international trade and money crisis, and probably forecast the end of the international Pax Americana. ...

Against this background President Nixon elaborated a much tighter control of business and labor than Washington had exercised since the Second World War. It was not, as many believed, a carbon copy of what happened during World War II. It began, first of all, with a freeze of all wages and almost all prices. For ninety days all raises were prohibited, even those provided for in previously negotiated union contracts, the first time any practice of this sort has ever occurred. In effect, collective bargaining agreements were abrogated. And though the period of the freeze was short, it was a major extension of presidential power. Future Presidents doubtless will use it as a precedent for executive reversal of labor-management relations on a broader front.

Debates over the "Nixon Shock" have persisted to the present day, with economists and politicians across the political spectrum trying to make sense of the Nixon Shock and its impact on monetary policy in the light of the financial crisis of 2007–2008.

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Review: True Hallucinations: The Talking Book

True Hallucinations: The Talking Book by Terence McKenna
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I don't care if it is ultimately to me a bunch of over-educated hippies tripping and mythologizing near the Putumayo River in South America. I love hearing Mckenna courageously objectify the psychedelic experience into "vegetable TV" and intelligent mushrooms propagating themselves through the galaxy by opening doors to other dimensions to fortunate species as ourselves. Plus: bonus cameos from UFOs and absolute zero.

Thus audiobook includes songs and sounds from Nomad Band (probably a one-off project as individual musicians including (a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roy_Tuc... Tuckman are credited at the end), cheesy hallucinogenic sound effects, and a few guest voices.

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Review: The Yage Letters

The Yage Letters by William S. Burroughs
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I read this epistolary memoir some years ago. When you get based the lonely hunter's complaints about discomforts and a lack of sex, two things emerge: a budding friendship with Allen Ginsberg and a search for a telepathic-hallucinogenic-mind-expanding drug called yage (ayahuasca; DMT is an active ingredient) which has a resonance with True Hallucinations.

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Review: The Gentlemen Conspirators: The Story of the Price-Fixers in the Electrical Industry

The Gentlemen Conspirators: The Story of the Price-Fixers in the Electrical Industry by John G. Fuller
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is it seems an obscure work on the same period of decades of price-fixing covered in The great price conspiracy;: The story of the antitrust violations in the electrical industry by John Herling...

[N] o matter what General Electric's past [has] been in regard
to the observance of the antitrust laws, "our record for the past
decade and more indicates that the managers of the General
Electric Company are making earnest and successful efforts to
comply not only with the letter, but also with the spirit of the
antitrust laws.

As long ago as 1946 . . . the company embarked upon
an educational program, a program which has been continued to
date with undiminished vigor, designed to sharpen the sensitivity and awareness of all our people to the role and importance
of the antitrust laws."

These words were spoken by Ralph J. Cordiner, Chairman of the Board of the General Electric Company during a May, 1959, appearance before the Senate Subcommittee on Antitrust and Monopoly. They represent the image projected by General Electric at the time of the first
public rumblings of "The Great Price Conspiracy," the revelation and prosecution of which is covered in detail in this book. This is back when Kefauver had become known to the public at large as the chief enemy of crooked businessmen in the Senate. Heck, seven of these industry execs were fined and jailed! I think that's more than happened due to Enron, and none were jailed as a result of the subprime mortgage crisis, right? Still, what is makes me think of is the Terence McKenna quote:

Now technology throws a curve. And the curve is that we live so long, that we figure out what a scam this is. We figure out what what were supposed to work for isn't worth having, we figure out that our politicians are buffoons, we figure out that professional scientist are reputation building grab tailing weasels. We discover that all organizations are corrupted by ambition.

This is echoed here:

...the boys in the training school at GE were taught that "you can always get anybody to do what you wish," and furnished them with the principle, "never say anything controversial." ... you were supposed to spend a lot of time thinking of what other people thought of you, rather than expressing your won convictions. You accepted what you were told, and you learned to worship the "one-over-one" hierarchy system, where contacting anyone beyond your immediate boss was gross heresy."

...

The intellectual comedy arises from the drive which causes the organization man to try top impress others, to conform to the pattern, top achieve status symbols, to be anything but his own spontaneous self.

Actually, what whistleblowers and honest man that did appear in this story suffered as much or more than any of the "Unlucky Seven". And many apparently guilty stayed in power after a deep investigation that included a lot of lie detector tests.

Dr. Gardner C. Means ... asks the question, "Just what is private about an enterprise that organizes a quarter of a million workers into a great productive unit using the capital of more than a quarter of a million stockholders and serving millions of ultimate customers? Is it any more private than, say, the government of New York State?"

GE led an industry-wide price-fixing racket for over half a century.

These authors call for, among other things:

The stiffening of the penalties for the violation of present antitrust laws.

The requiring of public justification for price increases on the part of the concentrated industries.

The equitable divestiture of corporations which have become so powerful that they threaten to eliminate free competition.

Too big to fail?

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