Old Possum's Book Review: November 2013

Saturday, November 23, 2013

Ian Stewart. Visions of Infinity. The Great Mathematical Problems.

Great book. How many good popular science books are there now! Mario Livio (see my review) is slightly surpasses him in style and historical erudition but Stewart may be even better in explaining mathematics in layman's terms.

D. T. Max, Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace, Penguin.

The bio of possibly the greatest American author of his generation (unless you are editorial assistant, reading his "Infinite Jest" requires a grant, which I did not receive) is more an D. T. Max' advertisement (For his parents? For Penguin editors?) that he graduated from Harvard.

An example: "But Kari encouraged him in his investigations [voluminous footnote], and by the time that he left for Syracuse he had blossomed into a committed therapand, as eager to ferret out the roots of his personal malaise as he'd once been to crack logical paradoxes."

Antony Padgen, The Enlightenment and Why It Still Matters, Random House

Padgen gives quite a spirited description of Kant and surprising modernity of his political views. Otherwise, it is an obsessive screed declaring global political evolution of the last two centuries the brainwork of (Western) intellectuals. Had industrial revolution, two World Wars, revolutions in France, Russia and the third world had something to do with it? Silence.

Please, respect my privacy

I welcome comments on the factual errors and, given that most of the material on the blog is book reviews, copyright inquires and corrections. Whatever your opinion on what I am writing I welcome your input as long as you don't insert talking points, which replaced views and opinions in the murdochized world media. Life is too short for one's own stupidities to repeat somebody else's.

If you want to vent your adolescent angst anonymously, I heartily recommend web sites of major Israeli newspapers ("Haaretz," "Jerusalem Post"), in which case your angry disposition will be appreciated by the whole world, not just myself. And no, I am not interested in links to Asian porno sites.

Personal Quotations

"Why all the civil libertarians a.k.a. social Darwinists I've met were either rich heirs or tenured professors?"

Q. Who is lonelier than a psychic winning a lottery?
A. A neocon who sacrificed his life for his country.

Modern technology gave everyone a possibility to become a writer. I am waiting for the new technology to create readers for all this crap.

Science is a branch of human experience where sensible distinction can be made between fact and opinion.

Original meaning of Second Amendment according to Judges Scalia, Alito, Thomas and Roberts:

"We consider these truths to be self-evident... that every crook, psychopath and senile moron should be able to have in his possession guns with firepower exceeding that of a current (1787) company of the US Army"

What about a "well-regulated militia?" Well, "And traffic them to Mexico."

Thought is something which occurs in your mind with immediate certainty of being real.

Paraphrase of Descartes

I do not want to convert anybody to my religion. I want somebody to convert me to their atheism.

The shortest summary of the world politics for the last two centuries: two periods of Western colonial expansion--one with a Gatling gun--and the other with a Predator drone, punctuated by the half-century of the "epic" struggle with Communism.

Riddle: Why so few supermodels are Jewish, while quite a few beautiful actresses are?
The key: Stupidity, for which our race is rarely known, is in their job description.

Eco-Glamour: a contradiction in terms. Glamour, by definition, is a stylish form of conspicuous consumption. Sorry, Brad Pitt, sorry Matt Damon. Sorry, Darryl Hannah, sorry Angela Lindvall. Shut up, and consume. Or shape up and pontificate. But not both.

I did not write my suicide note yet. I'm still working on it.

Electoral slogan by Ron Paul: "Give me my liberty and screw everyone else."

The Department of State made it official: every country with hydrocarbons and without American military bases violates human rights.

Envy is the most irrational of all human feelings (sins): technically, you cannot be anyone but yourself.

If you cannot defeat your enemies, try, at least, to outlive them.

Germany was born in primordial sin--from a copulation between Prussian militarism and Bavarian parochialism--and no effort of its enlightened politicians beginning with Bismarck and ending with Helmut Schmidt could erase this monstrosity.

Something is wrong with me today: even the librarians are rude.

British PMs might command the third largest Navy in the world, sixth or seventh most powerful army and one of the top ten world economies but since Tony Blair they are talking and, what is more peculiar, thinking like a third-ranking Pentagon or Department of State officials: currying favor with second-rank State Department or CIA officials etc.

Polish foreign policy for the last four centuries consisted in stirring conflict between Russia and the leading European power for the benefit of Poland, which inevitably ended suffering from both.

There was a time (XIX century) when Europe was ruled by the tiny gangs of Germanic officers called "dynasties", who spoke French, wore Florentine uniforms and whose first language was English imbibed from their Scotch or Irish wet nurses. And their rule was not all that bad.

If alien historians will ever write history of humanity, it will probably begin with: "Around year 2012, the Internet acquired sentience and reallocated human resources into senseless pursuits (Facebook, Twitter, Bitcoin, etc.) only benefiting uncontrollable growth of the World Wide Web."

(In fact, Italo Calvino already prophesied in 1960s that the computerized phone network--the predecessor of the Internet will acquire self-consciousness).

Soviet Communists, unlike their Chinese counterparts, failed not because they were good Marxists but because they were bad Marxists. Chinese leaders never followed Marxist precepts but they studied them and took them very seriously. Soviet leaders were completely cynical about Marxist-Leninist dogma, so they felt obliged to implement it to the bone.

Mark Twain once said: "Half of the members of Congress are capable of nothing. Another half is capable of anything." US were ruled O'K when these two categories were evenly split between parties. Sadly, now one party unites those capable of nothing, and another--capable of anything.

Remember that during the Kennedy era, most World War II veterans were in their late-thirties, or early forties. Kennedy was the self-image of American man of his generation: young, optimistic, handsome, smart and sexually promiscuous. Trump is also the self-image but of a current American man: old, pessimistic, senile coach potato, who still, on meth and Viagra prowls for the young women on the Internet, each to his own financial capacity. That's the source of his immense popularity.

Napoleon was a great tactician but a mean strategist. His vision was circumscribed by the battlefield. His deficiency of strategic thinking is even more remarkable given that he created Code Napoleon.

Lord Nelson was only a vice-admiral. Admirals of the age are long forgotten.

Kissinger was a titan of his age: all women wanted to be with him and all men wanted to be like him. His books were instant bestsellers, his pronouncements true and invented were immediately popularized by the media, and he became immensely rich by counseling the potentates. Only as a diplomat he was a patent failure.

It is also surprising that so many of Kissinger's pronouncements teach how to win wars given that he lost his only one.

The twentieth century could have become a German-American century, if Kaiser would do at least two of the three things: naval detente with Britain, land arms control with France or an economic union with the Russian Empire--German machines for the Russian resources. Instead German elites decided to use their temporary superiority in economic and technological power to get rid of the three rivals. After the two world wars lost it slided into geopolitical insignificance. Is it not a lesson for contemporary America?

The logic of Empire: after Alexander conquered Egypt, Greek colonists began to mummify crocs and marry sisters. After the Roman conquests, temples of Isis and Mithra appeared in Rome. And currently, we have Romanian/Pakistani elections, Polish customer service and Bulgarian/Albanian respect for the rule of law.

Russian diplomacy has a longstanding tradition to erase both war victories (Seven Year war, etc.) and defeats (Crimean war, so forth).

Neoconservative globalism evolved like Leninism: envisioned to spread wealth globally, it spread misery.

Q. Why all the right-wing pundettes look like they were recruited from the same escort service?
A. They, probably, were. Women who look differently (S. E. Kupp, Kristin Soltis, M. Kelly) do not hang in there for long.

According to the apocrifa, Klaus Kinkel, then Foreign Minister of Germany, said after the German unification: "And now we turn Russians to the new-age Jews". He forgot to mention whether he meant Jews vintage 1467 or 1967.

After the Cold War, US could do anything -- send a human to Mars, build an economic community from Newfoundland to Terra del Fuego or fix social security till the year 20020. Instead, Madeline Albright and Jesse Helms decided to have an Empire in Eastern Europe and Balkans, ... just like the Soviet Union had once.

Enlightened Swedish overlords possessed Finland for 600 years and there was nothing except peasant and fishermen's huts, fleas and cockroaches. After a century of Russian oppression, Finns developed world-class music, architecture, mathematics and philosophy. What does it say?

Germany was united through the efforts of many generations beginning with Romantics and completed by Bismarck's diplomacy. It would be impossible without the near-sightedness of Nicolas I, the vainglory of Napoleon III and the grandstanding of Palmerston. Yet, in the end, it was ascribed wholly to Kaiser and his generals. The rest is history. US victory in the Cold war was the culmination of many processes, and the alliance with People's Republic of China. It forced USSR to keep a million soldiers on its Eastern border and to spend billions supporting pro-Soviet factions of world Communism. Yet, all that was etched in American public consciousness were Reagan and the neocons.

Sister blog is now open

I also maintain sister blogs:

www.russianscotch.blogspot.com

which is dedicated to (surprise, surprise) not to a consumption of Scotch by the Russians but by cultural contribution of Scots, mostly military mercenaries, but also poets, architects, etc. to the Russian society, mostly in XVIII-XIX centuries. This blog takes no position on political issues, past or present, and is intended for pure fun of history buffs.

http://mars2044.blogspot.com/ -- discussion of the future (or the lack thereof) of the manned space exploration

http://russiancentury.blogspot.com/ --the author's translations of XX Century Russian poetry.

http://oldpossumsmoviereview.blogspot.com--movies as a social, political or historic comments with intentional disregard for their artistic or cinematic value

and http://contraedison.blogspot.com

--anti-Rube Golberg contraptions. From dog cages to starships--as simple as it can be!

Old Possum's Book Review

Saturday, November 23, 2013

Ian Stewart. Visions of Infinity. The Great Mathematical Problems.

D. T. Max, Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace, Penguin.

Antony Padgen, The Enlightenment and Why It Still Matters, Random House

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Sister blog is now open