One-trick books. Erica Thompson's Escape from Model Land and M. Mazzucato and R. Collington's The Big Con.

 There is nothing wrong with the books, which represent and illustrate one single idea but they are boring. Erica Thompson's "Escape from the Model Land" can be summarized succinctly in two sentences, one probably quoted somewhere in the book: "All models are wrong but some are useful". Another is that all social studies models incorporate value judgements of their creators and thus cannot be considered "objective" in the same sense as models of the physical sciences.

Marianna Mazzucato and Rosie Collington's book "The big con" equally illustrates one idea, namely that the decline of in-house expertise of government agencies and industrial companies led to proliferation of the consulting industry to the detriment of the latter. 

Der Untergang des Abendlanden.

 

Sheila Miyoshi Jager. The other great game: the opening of Korea and the birth of modern East Asia.

    A paean to Japanese militarism. What Sheila Miyoshi Jager calls "the opening of Korea" is the annexation and the brutal occupation by the Japanese. Chinese and Koreans are barely considered as people; only as objects of the Japanese policy. Japanese victory in the Russo-Japanese war (1904-1905), which acquired Japan a half of Sakhalin island from Russia but also got Japan a free hand in its robbery of Chinese Manchuria and Korea at the cost of several hundred thousand casualties and reign of terror over subjugated populations is celebrated as a great triumph of its foreign policy. United States, the friendship of which is upheld by Sheila Miyoshi as a cornerstone of its victory and achievement, in fact wrestled from the Japanese the fruits of its victory over Russia at the end in the Peace of Portsmouth. Yet, it led Japan into a swirl of militaristic expansion, which ended with the wars with the USSR and the USA and its ultimate defeat.  

Kenneth W. Harl. Empires of the Steppes.

 Historical science demonstrates a regressive tendency -- from history as science to semi-medieval chronicles telling mostly about the rulers and their campaigns. Kenneth Harl is not alone; he follows in the footsteps of Simon Montefiore, Frankopan and Adrian Goldsworthy in an almost total absence of scientific reflection. 

 I looked up his book thinking that I can learn about the origins of the steppe cultures, the structure and economics of their societies, historical, technological and environmental reasons for them springing from the tribal cradles into the world arena and the reasons their for their decline. I did not find any. Even the decline of nomadic empires in Harl's book ends by the death of Tamerlane and he declares that the nomadic warriors became obsolete with the emergence of gunpowder weapons. Not so; the origins of Mughal Empire in India, Safavid and Hajar Persia and spectacular conquest of the Ming Empire by Manchus were all the triumphs of steppe warriors with gunpowder and all against their settled neighbors. 

Simon Sebag Montefiore. The World: A Family History.

     Continental upper class males with little to do, usually eat, drink and philander. Anglo-Saxon upper classes frequently engage in literary endeavors. Simon Sebag Montefiore is a graphomaniac of distinction. "The World" is a  1200+ pages compilation similar in scope and concept to the Will and Ariel Durant "Story of Civilization", only with a lot of sexual details unmentionable in the 1930s when they began their magnum opus. 

   The book is a wonderful reading during insomnia but, otherwise, is a non-insightful compilation of facts, part correct, part erroneous, largely in a chronological order. Simon Sebag is not shy mentioning illustrious Montefiores of the past. I (and hardly anybody else) can verify all the stories in this enormous volume and, more importantly, their sources. So I mention only the errors from the Soviet history, which come to mind. Maybe, historians of antiquity, middle ages and the like can walk through his narrative in their field of studies. But the concentration of the factual errors in one small section sheds an untoward light with respect to whole endeavor. 

    The information that Leonid Brezhnev was instrumental in arresting Lavrentii Beria appears exclusively in the fake memoirs of Pavel Sudoplatov, Stalin's chief of assassinations and is not credible at all. Brezhnev also was not a prime mover of the conspiracy to remove Nikita Khrushchev but emerged in the end as a compromise candidate between the coalitions of the "old guard" (Ignatov, Voronov, Podgorny) and the "Young Turks" (Shelepin, Mazurov, Semichastnii). So he belonged to the clique of the fence-sitters (himself, Andropov -- then the Secretary in charge of the relations with the Eastern Block and Suslov -- the chief ideologue) who procrastinated until the outcome of the impending coup became clear. 

    The power coalitions considered his appointment an interregnum similar to the Malenkov and Bulganin tenures in mid-fifties, before Khrushchev consolidated his power. However, the co-conspirators severely underestimated Brezhnev's acumen and cunning and were removed one by one, the latest -- Nicolai Podgorny -- the nominal head of the Soviet State, in 1977, a dozen years since the coup. 

    The closer he moves to the Russian present, the least credible are his sources and more-of-the-cuff are his conclusions. This would not annihilate the whole volume if I were not suspicious that a similar number of factual errors and gross misjudgements are not present in, for instance, Arab or Persian sections of the book. 

New Taxonomy of the Polities.

 Twenties century division of the political systems into democracies, autocracies and totalitarian states -- I don't know who invented it, but Brzezinski ingrained it into a law of nature -- is outdated. In the beginning of the XXI century there was only one totalitarian state -- North Korea and a few true authoritarian states, i.e. states ruled by a dictator not answerable to anyone. Now, even the situation with North Korea is not so clear-cut. Cuba and Belarus were also counted as dictatorships but with the death of Castro brothers only a die-in-the-wool Miami Cubans assert this with conviction. For the US Congress, considering modern Cuba an authoritarian state is an exercise of electoral opportunism. 

Turchin whom we reviewed in a previous essay, classified human societies as follows: 

>Politocracies. These are the societies where material wealth comes from the affinity to the extant political powers. 

>Militocracies. Societies where the military establishment exerts economic power and civilian management. 

>Kleptocracies. Societies where political power comes from catering to the needs of the wealthy. 

In the modern world, the pure forms are hard to find (maybe, North Korea as politocracy and Egypt/Pakistan as militocracies) but the point of reference is obvious. This has an obvious analogy in the description by this author, in his review of Azar Gat's magisterial volume, as well as in works of Soviet and post-Soviet historian Yuri Semenov [1]. But he definitely classifies modern USA as a "kleptocracy". This is certainly true after 2010 Citizens United decision by the US Supreme Court. 

That is, a single entrepreneur (Trump, Musk, etc.) can be easily cajoled or crushed by a deadly combination of Department of Justice, ever vigilant NSA and their media toadies. But the Big State, since Reagan, rarely challenges the kleptocratic elite as a whole, even to the degree that such flagrant criminals as Epstein are almost impossible to prosecute. Vice versa, each new presidency usually rushes to their service with tax cuts, easing of regulations and a flurry of federal programs, usually in the fields of health and national security, speciously designed to produce less and pay out more. 

The solution is not the revolution, as the radicals on the left (Occupy the Wall Street; easily dismantled by the Democratic elites) or the right (Bannon; now indicted) may think. First, "We The People" must recognize that there is nothing special in American society. It must obey universal rules of corruption and decay, and revival. As Orwell said: "The freedom is to proclaim that two by two is four. Everything else follows". 

[1] Go to the Comment 3 of the first essay on Azar Gat. 

Biden.

 

Peter Turchin. End Times. Elites, Counter-Elites and Political Disintegration.

My review of Peter Turchin's "End Times. Elites, Counter-Elites and Political Disintegration" might seem as critical to the point of scurrility. In fact, it is a very important book deserving the highest attention. 

It is the second time Lenin strikes back on my watch. His definition of the "revolutionary situation": the elites cannot (reform or repress), the masses would not (obey and comply), all amidst common immiseration, is almost to the point identical to Turchin's signs of social collapse. And, certainly, Lenin knew a thing or two about taking and keeping power: first in the Party and then, the State. 

The new notion Turchin added to this age-old -- literally -- routine was his notion of the "counter-elite". In his rendering, the masses themselves cannot produce structure and leadership for a large-scale social disturbance. Here comes a "counter-elite", a group of disenchanted social climbers who channel a social conflict into a cohesive social movement. 

Turchin identifies the emergence of the counter-elite with the proliferation of the elite credentials and, at the same time, stagnation in the number of the elite positions. He does not mention a genial mechanism invented some time ago to utilize counter-elites and wannabes, which another prophetic voice, Graeber, characterized as "bullshit jobs". Not all, or even most bullshit jobs are used as a mechanism for countering proliferation of the elites but it is, certainly, the most efficient. 

First, are the Graeber's "goons". The ranks include hedge fund managers and wealth trusts creation lawyers. The only function of these is not an iffy "price discovery" in the stock market. They are the rich people hiding assets of other rich people from taxes. Lower on the rungs of the counter-elite chute are the "box tickers": for instance, academic and municipal administrators and HR professionals. The lousier is the university the larger proportion of people it employs exist in different offices with Kafkaesque sounding names. For instance, there is an office of Academic Affairs, but also the offices of Academic Success, Office of Assessment, Office of Academic Advancement ('Advancement' obviously does not mean 'Success' and vice versa), Office of (Racial) Diversity under some name not including 'race' and Office of Sexual Diversity. This is despite of the fact that 50% of the Success office must occupy itself with diversity. 

But the truly all-encompassing category is HR and its offshoots such as "Talent Acquisition" and the like. This was a genial invention of Harvard Business School. In 1970s it encountered with less and less demand for the MBAs -- not that Harvard graduates were employed in HRs -- but they needed endless proliferation of business programs to feed graduating PhDs. They took to the heart Stalin's 1930s adage "The cadres are the deciders", which resulted in establishing Departments of Cadres in everything from the Central Committee to the lowliest machine shop or a tractor station. [1] Before HR revolution, it was thought that managing people is the task, you get it, of management. Moreover, if the managers could not do it, they were considered unfit. After that, the top managers acquired cliques of people whose main distinction was complete innocence in the basic functions of a company or a department but who could be very useful in office infighting and intimidation of the employees. Competence, experience or success in previous endeavors became secondary in selection and promotion of employees. The prime criteria became an ubiquitous "good fit" and compliance with "institutional culture". With that HBS discovered the gold mine for endless demand for people who know nothing but have "people skills", i.e. the acuity in office infighting and, by extension, for the faculty who trains them. 

Third way of channeling counter-elites is Graeber's "tape pasters" who can be of any rank. Giant IT companies such as Microsoft, Google, Facebook and Twitter employ endless numbers of highly paid professionals whose only business is to make users' data as harvestable as possible and to redesign endlessly the interfaces so that they can be paid for the newer versions of the product. These new versions are, typically, no better for an average user than the old ones and frequently require paying fees to the same company to make them work.

Turchin's book has other interesting points besides his obsession with cliodynamics, the discipline he himself invented or co-invented. Classification of human societies was stagnant since Marxist-Leninist (but actually, Stalin's) five-category division fell into disuse because of political correctness issues. [2] Namely, according to Turchin all human societies can be classified as having the following characteristics: 

>Politocracy;

>Militocracy; and 

>Kleptocracy. 

In the modern world, pure forms are hard to find (maybe, North Korea as politocracy and Egypt/Pakistan as militocracies) but the point of reference is obvious. This has an obvious analogy in the description by this author, as well as in works of Soviet and post-Soviet historian Yuri Semenov. 

There are many other issues with Turchin's book, but it is an important warning to the American ruling class. Sadly, as noticed by the French politician and historian Edgar Faure in his book La disgrâce de Turgot, the ruling elites during the turning moments of history usually either cannot or would not understand the signs of impending crisis. 

[1] It was logical for Stalin, who, before the disastrous results of the 1941 and 1942 war years proclaimed that "everyone is only a bolt in a machine of the proletarian dictatorship" and "we have no irreplaceables". After 1943 he, obviously, decided that unlike Party functionaries, some generals and weapons designers cannot be easily replaced. It could even work, if in Byzantine fashion, he did not retain Political Departments, Departments of Regimentation and Secret Information Departments at every significant workplace, which were constantly scheming one against other. 

[2] These categories were: "primitive", "slave-owning", "feudal", "capitalist" and "socialist/communist" with a linear progression between them. Despite their aversion to Marxism -- though actual classification was due to reading Engels by Stalin's propagandists -- Western historians largely inured themselves to the use of these categories -- with a possible exclusion of "communist" and addition of "Oriental despotism", the latter itself being introduced by Marx. Richard Pipes described everything from Grand Dukes of Muscovy to Gorbachev in terms of the "Oriental despotism", which totally obliterated its original meaning.  

Martin Edwards. The Life of Crime.

    This is, practically, an encyclopedic sourcebook, which provides a short introduction to the authors of the detective fiction. Like Gian Piero Brunetta's "History of Italian Cinema" it is practically useless without knowing the background works but it is a very good exhibition of the periods and the development of (largely) English-language detective fiction (whodunnits, but also other subgenres). As is usual in such a wide canvasses, it is sometimes wanting in its accuracy. 

       For instance, for the creator of Maigret, Georges Simenon -- the only foreign author with a detailed exposition in the book -- his Nazi collaboration is mentioned in a few oblique and incorrect words. In fact, during the Nazi occupation of France the literature of the kind "How to uncover a Jew" (Communists, Resistance members, etc.) was flourishing and Simenon was one of the most prolific authors. These were not some anti-Semitic rants for which more famous collaborators (Brasillach or Mac Orlan) were known, but detailed instructions of what to ask children (how you spent your last Christmas, can you sing carols for me, etc.), or how to recognize forged ID papers. 

I thank Edwards profusely for mentioning R. van Gulik and putting him in the context of the Dutch detective tradition. Yet, he fails to mention that van Gulik's fame was created by his magisterial non-fiction treatise "Sexual life in Ancient China", which stirred quite a shock in the  puritan 1950s and immediately put its author on the literary map. 

Obviously, in a treatise of such magnitude as Edwards' errors in fact and judgment are inevitable but they cast a shadow over accuracy of other facts, with which I am not familiar. 

Tim Palmer. The Primacy of Doubt.

"With four adjustable parameters, I will 
make you an elephant. With five, I
can make it wiggle its trunk". 

                              N. Wiener

      This is a strange book written by a beautiful mind, a genius who is a little bit crank. The most objectionable part of the book is his disquisitions about the quantum gravity. And not because he does not understand it. He studied for his PhD under the same Dennis Sciama who was also Hawking's dissertation adviser and had to suffer Robert Penrose's questions at his defense  -- but it used to be a tradition that one presents her/his ideas first to the professional community, and only when they are accepted, peddles them to the laypeople.  Palmer's desire to use fractal geometry and p-adic numbers is commendable, though I, understandably, cannot understand most of it. And his description in a book is lucid, as always. If I gather his intention correctly, his program must include formulation of the Quantum Field Theory on the fractal embedded into the manifold, which is locally isomorphic to the Minkowsky space, at least at some scale. Then he must build the field operators using p-adic coordinates on that fractal. 

        This program, to the degree of my limited comprehension, was already proposed by V. S. Vladimirov in the USSR, like Palmer, a member of the National Academy, a contributor to the Soviet counterpart to the "Manhattan project", but also a brilliant teacher, and a vicious anti-Semite (Владимиров В. С., Волович И. В., Зелёнов Е. И. P-адический анализ и математическая физика М., 1994). I cannot judge the success of this program but, at the first glance, it should not allow the existence of black holes because the points with strong gravity, which are close in our physical space, can be very distant in the p-adic metric. Or, so I think. And, after 2018, their existence is an experimental fact. 

    Using that much space to criticize the book (better to say, expressing DOUBTS on its treatment) I must say that Palmer is an excellent storyteller. Because of his main field of mathematical meteorology, he is biased towards gigantic models with billions of parameters and he wants more. But, as my epigraph suggests, and everyone in the field of deep learning knows, there is such problem as overfitting. With sufficient slack in a model and sufficient computer power, one can fit anything to everything. The unparalleled brilliance of the General Theory of Relativity was precisely the fact that Einstein's construct was so tight, not allowing variations, for instance, in the velocity of gravitational waves, or in relativistic corrections to the orbit of Mercury. 

            Unlike quantum physics, where I am an enlightened amateur, I understand next to nothing in meteorology. So I cannot question Palmer's assertion that gigantic agent-based models with umpteenth parameters can be as useful in biostatistics for propagation of epidemics, traffic control and finance, if only we reach a sufficient computing power. 

His proposal of a "stochastic computer", which uses thermal noise in semiconductors to simulate random processes is quite interesting, and he claims that the specialists in that field already appropriated his ideas. I believe him. 

 

Ben Wilson. Urban Jungle.

      

        Well-intentioned but self-contradictory book. In one place, the author praises XIX century Paris for its boulevards, and New York's Central Park in other places he critiques modern cities including London and New York city for the lack of greenery. In some places, he praises city-bound agriculture, in others -- the wild and unrestrained growth of weeds. 

Wilson's book cover shows a highrise adorned with story-wide vegetation but brackish water and mosquitoes are hardly conducive to a healthy habitation. In 90s and 2000s, the Chinese experimented with collection of rainwater in residential buildings. The houses and their rooftop gardens became damp hothouses for mosquitoes. Newer buildings disposed with this environmental friendliness. Mosquito is a veritable flying bioweapon dispersing a panoply of viruses and blood parasites. Density of urban populations amplifies their nefarious influence many orders of magnitude. 

Swamps, which Ben praises as reservoirs for biodiversity breed mosquitoes, gnats, snakes and other kind of vermin. Urban swamp areas are intrinsically unhealthy, especially for the dense populations. Fertilizers for urban agriculture pollute rivers and further increase populations of vermin, rats especially, and invasive species. 

While making modern cities better places to live is a commendable goal, the one size fits all approach is bad and utopian. 

Evan Mandery. Poison Ivy: How Elite Colleges Divide Us

 The book is a well-intentioned narrative about the perpetuation of the inequality by the top universities (appr. Ivy Leagues + Stanford + Chicago). First, the title is appropriate -- it is not clear whether there is "us" or "US". Second, the discussion is up to the point. But, on the whole, his reasonable suggestions are similar to the oncologist asking his patient to treat his eye cataracts first. 

All modern societies but the US the fastest are quickly transforming into a "new feudalism." The fastest growing sector of employment in the US and, probably, UK is domestic help. Now it is not limited to butlers, cooks, cleaners and nannies. Billionaires and runner-up families quickly expand personal companies for managing their finances, staffs of retainer lawyers, accountants and personal shoppers. 

US Congress practically eliminated taxes on capital gains. Interest write-offs on self-dealing loans are perfectly legal, if one is rich enough to hire high-powered lawyers to structure these deals. That created an incentive for the rich people to establish corporations essentially occupied by providing services to themselves. 

Education in the United States had long served as a great equalizer. Yet, once you establish a privilege -- a practically guaranteed career to the graduates of Harvard, Princeton and Yale -- be sure that the wealthy would find a way to skew it in their favor. As this happened with the sexual services. Once Hollywood began to clean its act, and the wealth migrated from industrialists into haute finance, the strawberry patch of the rich and powerful shifted from Southern California and Florida to New York based model industry. And it  allows underage girls to work! When I look at the careers of Harvard graduates published in the university's digest from 50s and 60s, bankers, politicians and white shoe lawyers surely predominate, but there are also military retirees, poets and gardeners. News of recent graduates are uniform; investment banking, private equity, politics, lobbying and high-powered law firms with a sprinkling of academics is all that left. When I view at the obituaries of the prominent physicists in the "Physics Today", their undergraduate education is dominated by big names, but there are also public universities and lesser name schools. Obviously, in olden times, high-falutin schools accepted the best and the brightest from a lesser contestants, the ladder, which has now been thrown away. 

The recipes provided by Mandery are mostly geared towards underrepresented minorities. Their chances were steadily improving but now the Supreme Court undercut this path of social ascendance as well. Understandably "Students for Fair Admissions" ruling will cause a new flurry of the byzantine admission practices by the admissions offices, extricating the same information from the resumes, publicly available data and student essays. Like the old affirmative action their policies will be cynical, counterproductive and liable to lawsuits. 

The only remaining way for social ascendancy are the over-bloated armed forces and intelligence services of America, now constantly at war. As with the Roman Empire, the future is less than promising. 

Jeff Lieberman. The malady of the mind.

                                                                 Psychiatrists, people very remote from medicine.

                                                                                                      Popular, amongst doctors

    Jeff Lieberman is pretty enlightened for a psychiatrist. He correctly dispenses with witch remedies for schizophrenia.[1] Usually, in the US medical profession, disparaging the colleagues in words like "your previous physician was an idiot" means the end of the career. Even if it were so, American physician must use oblique phrases like "In view of the lack of progress, I would recommend a different course of action". Obviously, not so among the psychiatric profession. He describes the doctors who treated some of his patients in the most diminutive terms. 

    His book is a paean for clozapine. The problem with it, as with all antipsychotic medications, is their terrible side effects. Lieberman spends only a couple of paragraphs out of 300+ page book on this subject. Yet, reticence to use psychopharmacology has little to do with lack of medical enlightenment as Lieberman suggests. These are terrible side effects of antipsychotics, which cause many people to disconnect treatment or avoid it altogether. They include extreme forms of akathisia and fatigue so severe that patients contemplate suicide. Not because of a mystical "suicide ideation" but because of a quite real helplessness. And this not to mention a weight gain, interactions with numerous other drugs, sometimes lethal as with MAOI antidepressants, ticks, convulsions, incurable tardive dyskinesia and numerous other adverse effects. 

Why the book uses long-outdated definitions of schizophrenia from DSM-II and DSM-III in its appendices is a mystery. 

[1] Lieberman's vituperations against Freud are totally misplaced. Would we dismiss Galileo because he did not have a clue of the Second and Third laws of Newton (he invented the First law himself) not to speak of Quantum Mechanics? Galileo even did not fully appreciate the laws of Kepler, his younger contemporary. His epigraph to the chapter about Freud saying that Freud was a medical novelist is quite accurate but misguided. In Freud's times there was no possibility to help psychiatric patients but also no scientific analyses available for diagnostics and, consequently, no clinically-based language. Indeed, Freudianism failed miserably as a therapeutic method. Yet, as an integrative theory of personality it is pretty much the foundation of all the modern approaches. 

Sabina Hassenfelder. Existential Physics.

 Very serious and accurately researched book. Some statements are questionable and open to discussion. For instance, her denial of the free will contains multiple caveats of "occasional" quantum phenomena, which, she asserts are totally independent on the mind. Sure, but the mind is not independent on them. Quantum phenomena are not "occasional". They are the very fabric of reality. Only when we look at "coarse-grained" (another of her favorite words) reality, we observe the classical world. 

    Her figure Fig. 11 is thus plain wrong. The picture must look something like... 

The problem is that, by observation, one cannot establish an initial state, even in principle, because some of the intermediate states could have been entangled and later experienced decoherence. One can only establish distribution of probabilities and exclude some eventualities. For instance, one can safely assume that Martin Luther, the author of the "Slavery of the Will" was not born in Peru and was not influenced by Inca society and culture. 

    Another problem with her narrative. Having a perfect description of something is different from the ability to recreate the object. No amount of technical documentation on Boeing 747 can deliver her from Frankfurt to LA. 

Oscar Farinetti. Serendipity.

   A very cool book by a Piedmontese nationalist, so much so that the book contains sentences written in Piedmont dialect -- how many people speak it today -- and ascribes all culinary "firsts" to Italians, and most to the Northern Italians. But it is a pleasure to read. 

[1] I would make a single comment concerning Italian, rather than the French origin of the "Russian Salad". The story that it emerged because the Italian chefs replaced beets in Insalata Rossa (Rusa in some dialect) for the Tsar (more probable, for the heir to throne) with potatoes and carrots and renamed it Insalata Russa in honor of the august guest is quite possible. In Russian a beet version is called vinegret (from the word 'vinegar'). But the reason for occasional renaming must have been that the red color was associated with the French Revolution, equally detestable for the Imperial Prince and his hosts in Nice. 

Erika Nesvold. Off-Earth. Ethical questions and quandaries for living in outer space.

     It is good that some people think about these problems. But the more I read about space colonies, the more I doubt their viability. All that Erika writes about their potential problems suggests to me that the best solution (who owns what, how environment is shared and protected, who can have kids, who receives scarce medical care) for the management of the space colonies is totalitarian rule. Furthermore, in conditions that all resources are strictly rationed, the emergence of totalitarianism is inevitable. And this is not a pleasant option. One of the reason for extreme unpleasantness of totalitarian rule is that it needs periodic lethal intimidation of the populace for its reinforcement. The attempt of Soviet rulers to dispense with random terror after Stalin resulted in collapse of the state. 

Vaclav Smil. Invention and Innovation.

 Chinese Communists determined early on that Mao was 70% right and 30% wrong. This closed the discussion and spared the Chinese the disasters of perestroika. The book, as everything Smil, seems to be 99% accurate but 1% of his idiosyncrasies and grotesque mistakes sow doubt in the rest of his narrative. 

    Of course, as a loyal Czech he must disparage all things Soviet and Russian, which is a minor distraction, and a climate sceptic that biases his outlook on many important matters. In his book on energy (which? he has many) he suggested that electric cars cannot replace gas-powered vehicles based on his estimate that a combined power of all electric vehicles is comparable to a power of all the world's utilities. 

    He forgot that at any given moment only a tiny fraction of motor vehicles is on the road and most rarely, if ever, run the engines at their maximum. Similarly silly is his suggestion that photovoltaics are not that efficient despite a spectacular decline in price because "the module cost is now about 15 percent of the total investment. The rest is needed to cover structural costs and electrical components... , inverters... , labor costs and other soft costs. Obviously, none of these components, from steel and aluminum to transmission lines, permitting, inspection and sales taxes is tending to zero, and hence the overall cost of installation show a distinctly declining rate of improvement..." Yes, indeed, but these costs are the costs of any electric infrastructure, so if the new houses were to have electricity at all, they have to be factored in. Furthermore, old electric infrastructure is continually replaced irrespectively of underlying method of generation. 

    Smil also claims that in the last half-century there were few breakthroughs outside of computing and electronics, which he measures by the size of electronic components. Yet, he misses a revolution in biotech. If it were not for it, new Covid-19 vaccines might never appear, certainly not at that short times scale and humanity would have suffered truly catastrophic consequences. Without the Internet, slow or fast, quarantine and isolation of that many people -- to the utility of which Smil obviously does not subscribe -- would be impossible. But the humanity might not progressed to Covid era at all without modern antiviral drugs becoming extinct in early 2000s because of the HIV (I am joking). 

    His points about obvious boondoggles: Musk's hyperloop, electric aircraft and fusion energy are well taken. I can also agree with his judgement that there is no net acceleration in the pace of inventions. If any era in human history was truly explosive, it was the century beginning some time in 1840-1850s. These were electric telegraph (predecessor of the internet), telephone, automobile, radio, aircraft, synthetic drugs and fertilizers, television, jet propulsion, nuclear energy, and, finally electronic computers. 

    Vaclav Smil is certainly an intellect to be reckoned with unlike philosophical charlatans of the Fukuyama school. I would like to talk to him rather than the neighbors' dogs to whose company I am now confined. But his 1% messes it all. 

Soros

 

C. Sunstein. Worst-case scenarios.

    In contemporary United States all professional positions require special education and experience, in sharp contrast to the times of Thomas', Jefferson or Edison. But the investment bankers, high-powered lawyers, journalists and political operatives are considered suitable for anything: planning military strategy, negotiating international treaties or regulating a giant industry. 

    Cass Sunstein is no exception. The book is based on his understanding of extreme events in cost-benefit analysis. His main thesis is that, because some policy decisions are irreversible and can have truly dire consequences, they justify almost any mitigation measures. This is similar to Pope Borgia's reasoning in the British series who claimed that because the salvation of souls is at stake, any cost comes as a bargain. Sunstein uses this reasoning to justify activist climate mitigation policy, and I am on his side this time. 

    Yet, the reasoning smacks of Rumsfeld's "unknownable unknowns" and Cheney's admonition that, in case of terrorism, nothing less than 100% surety suffices. So, as Cheney went, any measures -- wars, torture, law-breaking and violations of the Constitution -- are justified in his "war on terror". 

    First, no human endeavor, no matter how carefully planned, can assure 100% success. Second, more philosophically, not all problems can be formulated in a linear "cost-benefit" paradigm. Every engineer or urban planner intuitively understands that any design involves inevitable compromises. 

    Take battle tanks. Increasing armor for protection also increases weight and reduces maneuverability. To compensate for increased protection, the tank needs a more powerful engine, which weights more and requires more space, which also requires protection. More powerful engine also burns more fuel, which in turn takes weight and space and so ad infinitum. In many cases, no compromise, which is technically possible, insures adequate performance and the customer, military in the above case, has to plan for different equipment, for instance, using several types of fighter planes. Each type has its own embedded set of compromises in the coordinates of "cost", "performance against air targets", "performance against ground targets" and so on. While cost criteria can be reasonably well established, performance criteria are frequently iffy and can be ascertained only in a real-life test, i.e. war, and even then not with certainty. Cold War-style weaponry was pretty useless against Taliban, which did not have a centralized command, extensive arms depots or other identifiable military infrastructure, which could be destroyed from the air by precision weapons.

    Climate change mitigation is a very serious issue. Assessing it requires a lot of technical competencies, which can only be acquired through careful research and case-by-case analysis. For example, nuclear power is widely considered indispensable by the specialists to assure carbon-neutral future. Yet, because of NIMBY attitudes, a safe storage of the nuclear fuel is practically impossible. Because no new reactors are constructed, the expertise in designing and operating ones is not accumulated and much of it can be irretrievably lost. Fukushima disaster did not happen because of the violation of some arcane nuclear physics laws. It happened because the Japanese Ministry of Trade and Industry and the Westinghouse engineers ignored an obvious common sense recommendations. "Don't build nuclear reactors on a seismic fault and near an ocean" -- they ignored both -- and "don't place storage of the spent fuel rods above the reactor hall". 

    Humans are not mean-variance optimizers and environmental policy cannot be evaluated by the same methods banks price financial securities. Dear Cass, the fact that you are smart about law, politics and women does not mean that you are smart about everything. But leaving life-and-death decisions in modern America in the hands of bankers, journalists and lawyers is our predicament. 

C'est ne pas une caricature.

 

US politicos tirelessly working for the good of the people during the horrible epidemic.

Dominic Lieven. In the Shadow of the Gods. The Emperors in World History.

     This is an easily read opus of a noted political scientist, a good man and a great erudite. Yet, it demonstrates that no erudition can replace sound historical methodology and original research, whether in archives or the field. First, the choice of the subject is based on Anglo-centric translation. This is a vagary of the latter that we call Chinese Huandi or Tianzi an Emperor, while the ancient rulers of Siam or Khmer Empire are called "Kings" as well as Egyptian-Greek rendering of "Pharaoh" is translated as the "King of Egypt". Empire can be defined as "Military-political dominion over polities with disparate socio-economic structure". If this, or similar definition are taken, most Chinese and Egyptian polities, as is properly mentioned by Lieven are not empires. Nor it will be surprising that the title of Emperor springs from Proconsul Imperium, which simply meant "A Commander of the Armed Forces". The rulers of the Roman Principate insisted that it was not "the King", Rex. 

    Second, Prince Lieven follows in the footsteps of Joseph de Mestre. Unholy Abbot considered the Kingdom of France as as close approximation of the Kingdom of G-d as is possible in this world. Lieven transfers this understanding to the British Empire. Nothing can compare with its political system, prowess of its military, its economic successes or its culture. Its horrible genocidal acts in Ireland and the Indian Raj (comprising modern India, Pakistan and Bangladesh) are not mentioned. 

    Third, he, as a brilliant conversationalist, is sometimes prone to the off the cuff remarks. For instance, he claims that the murderous Sultan Abdul Hamid built a modern Turkish Army, which supposedly exhibited "stellar performance" against the British, French and the Russians in the First World War. Gallipoli still hurts despite it being a poorly coordinated operation practically in Istanbul suburbs. In fact, the Turkish Army never succeeded in a single World War I offensive except for its "victory" in Armenian genocide. Lieven again mentions Peter Durnovo together with completely innocent Count Witte as prophets of doom advising against the war with Germany as a precursor to the socialist revolution in Russia. "Durnovo memorandum" is an easily identifiable fake. Moreover, Durnovo was hated by Nicolas II for his heavy-handed methods in running St. Petersburg police department -- for instance, raiding Brazilian Embassy to search for the letters of his mistress --- and was personally asked never to show up in the Council of the State. So he could not advise the Tsar on anything. 

Silvia Ferrara. The Greatest Invention.

 Never since reading "Social Conquest of Earth" by the untimely deceased E. O. Wilson, I felt a true intellectual titan of the author transpiring through all the imperfections of the book. The main one for SF is her drunkenness with superiority of her style, which sometimes makes better of her, especially in the second half of the book (compare with Falcke, Darling or Gaia Vince). In it she advertises the successes of her INSCRIBE group and cautions everyone against possible attempts at decipherment of the Cypro-Minoan. 

Joel Warner. The curse of Marquis de Sade.

 

The "divine marquis" (the words of Guillaume Apollinaire) is the second most misunderstood author of the Western Canon after Niccolo Machiavelli. I gobbled Joel Warner's book instantly on the bookshelves. The book does not fully penetrate into rather impenetrable De Sade, in particular, because the author tries to uphold him to the standards of the normal person. Not so, De Sade certainly was a textbook case of incongruously named "Borderline Personality Disorder" deprived of the benefit of the modern psychotropic medications.  

But the author goes far enough in recognizing that De Sade was a visionary who was so disgusted by what he saw in human nature that it drove him to the point of insanity. Some of the artistic influences such as Bunuel's L'Age d'Or are aptly described in the book. I did not like more recent "Quills" very much despite my admiration for Geoffrey Rush because it was so serious. Much better take was made by the French cartoonists who made the full-length animation on De Sade making its personages animals -- with Divine Marquis himself as a noble  Labrador retriever -- and the sadistic scenes of his writings as his imaginings in the prison cell of the Bastille. 

Marquis did not kill anyone in his life except maybe as a cavalry officer for the French Crown, and the war was and is currently considered a noble endeavor in the US. On the contrary, Napoleon, his jailer significantly depopulated contemporary Europe. 

The degree of derangement and vision of Marquis de Sade can be proven that one of the last of his manuscripts contain the drawings of the concentration camp barracks. With such knowledge, what forgiveness. 

Prince Macaroon.

 

Edward Dolnick. The writing of the gods.

   

 

Brilliant account of deciphering of the Egyptian hieroglyphics. Especially encouraging, in view of the current triumphant Ango-Saxon chauvinism is ED's correct placement of Champollion as the main hero and Thomas Young as an author of genial guesses, but hardly in the same league as Champollion. Also, his narrative includes smart parallels from many languages, both dead and extant, cameos about George Smith, one of the main decipherers of Akkadian cuneiform, Michael Ventris of Linear B fame and many others. 

Annalee Newitz. Four Lost Cities.

 Wonderful melancholic book about the lifecycle of the four ancient/medieval cities: Chatal Huyuk, Pompeii, Angkor Wat and virtually unknown Cahokia in North America. The author suggests cycles of concentration and dispersion when the dispossessed masses bring parts of their developed culture to the new places of habitation. She predicts the same fate to our cities propelled by the climate change, mass migrations and resource wars...

There is one big difference between their civilizations and ours. In past eons, the only productive force was manpower, so that every extra unit of effort had to be compensated by extra water, food and infrastructure to accommodate the increase in manpower. Since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, the mechanical connection between production and consumption -- to consume more one had to take it from somebody else -- has weakened to the point of unrecognizability. 

The account by A. Newitz sharply contradicts the off-the-cuff assumption by Monica Smith in her Cities, that cities never die (except for, of course, Chernobyl whatbookcanbewithoutit). All the mentioned locations, Catalhoyuk, Pompeii, Angor Wat and Cahokia, were abandoned long ago and so was Troy (Hissarlik), etc. 

Gaia Vince. Nomad century.

 The book is a compendium of disjointed observations, some brilliant, some less than, some simply misinformed. I attribute the last to the haphazard uses of questionable sources. 

But, unlike most books on the public policy these days, there is no obvious malice in her narrative. The principal idea is that inevitable climate change will cause a gigantic peregrination of the world population, mainly from the equatorial regions, which quickly become uninhabitable into more temperate zones. 

The previous Great Migrations caused warfare, the fall of the civilizations on an enormous scale (the first documented "Dark Ages" in the Eastern Mediterranean and the Fertile Crescent around 1100 BCE, the fall of the Roman Empire and the subsequent Dark Ages, conquests by the Arabs and Mongols, or European expansion into Americas). Vince is right to suggest that a careful planning is needed to avoid catastrophic results. 

There are some fantastic figures, suggestions and conjectures. For instance, on the eve of Italian unification, only 2.5% of the population of peninsula spoke Italian (p. 58). Which languages were spoken by the rest 97.5%? Similarly absurd is her suggestion that only 10% of the French population used French before the French revolution, if not later. Syrian refugees are mostly middle-class professionals (p. 138). But these are lies by the British and German press having no connection to reality. Poland and Hungary are not undesirable destinations for the immigrants, just vehemently opposed to arrival of other ethnic groups. Stern Catholicism in Poland does not help either. And immigrants cannot populate future Estonian cities -- where? Probably, under water because populated areas of that country are low-lying beachfronts. Furthermore, Estonians are among the most racist people on the planet Earth, even if we throw Japanese and Vietnamese into the mix. And who told her that the "Sea Peoples" whose raids caused the destruction of the Ancient Middle East were Philistines? 

Remembering Nansen passports is good. Yet, the post-World War I Russian immigrants -- for whom they were initially designed -- described them as practically worthless. 

Francesca Stavrakopoulou. God: an anatomy.

 A very well argued case that anthropomorphic G-d and the remnants of polytheism existed in Holy Land well into the Biblical times and throughout the history of ancient Israel and Judea. But the argument is highly repetitive and boring. Also a good placing of the Judaism into the context of other Middle Eastern religions and cults.