Venki Ramakrishnan. Why we die.

    Nobel Prize winner V. Ramakrishnan (Biology and Medicine, 2009? for the study of ribosomes) is a first-class mind. He refutes most of the myths about mortality. When there is a theory of mortality, he explains that the things are more complicated than meets the eye. All in all, we don't know why we die. There are many mechanisms of aging and apoptosis on the cellular and sub-cellular level but none can consistently explain longevity of organisms across the species.

    Some of the reasoning of Ramakrishnan is deficient. For instance, similarly to Dawkins, he argues that group selection is impossible because in the case of mutation beneficial for the group but imposing cost on the individual, the individuals without this mutation would outcompete the mutated individual in their progeny. 

    This is not convincing because, for instance, there could be several mutually incompatible mutations both leading to evolutionary success. In an imaginary example, a bird of prey can be more successful hunter by flying quieter or flying faster. These properties may be incompatible by fluid mechanics or genetics. Individual having both mutations faces a double energy cost. So it is likely that the population would include both species. Economists call this a separating equilibrium. 

    Owls are not eusocial, so the story ends here. But, for a tribe, a population of excessively aggressive individuals due to random mutation, who consume resources much in excess of minimal needs (soldiers), and individuals who produce food in excess of their individual needs (peasants), obviously is beneficial in terms of survival of both. The tribe becomes well defended and well fed, which is impossible by preponderance of a single group in genetic makeup. 

    There is another train of thought concerning decreasing returns of workers with aging and the need for retirement. However, this reflects the look from the ivory tower of Cambridge, also similar to Dawkins'. The problem is that the countries steadily increase the pension age. But the jobs available for those without Cambridge private pensions are exceedingly rare. And most of them are poorly suitable for the age. I provide a short list.  

                      School bus driver.

                      Security guard.

                       Medical orderly. 

                       Airline baggage handler.

                       And so on. 

Sarah Scoles. Countdown.

  A book written on the basis of Sarah's interview with the people (scientists, engineers, etc.) who maintain nation's nuclear weapons. Sarah, unlike many science journalists, is sufficiently competent to dissemble the information obtained from them but, for the life of me, I could not understand what the book was about. I suspect that she had to clear the book with the censors and they, as the Soviet censors of old, butchered the text till a full unrecognizability. 

Natalie Cabrol. The Secret Life of the Universe. An Astrobiologist's Search for the Origins and Frontiers of Life

    During my childhood and youth, the search for the life in the Universe was the domain of crackpots and madmen. Now, it is the main driver of planetary research and few grants in it can be awarded without a promise of a potential significance for astrobiology. 

    The book by Natalie Cabrol stands out from many similar books by its systematic approach, grouping the exoplanets by their astrophysical characteristics and discussing the possibilities of life or lack thereof in each. Especially exciting is her description of the traces of life in our Solar System. It is not a superb writing but quite an achievement in putting in a small, by the modern standards, book, so many insights into the search for life in the Cosmos. 

Frank Tallis. Mortal Secrets: Freud, Vienna and the Discovery of the Modern Mind.

      

         Tallis is a brilliant storyteller with sometimes razor sharp insights into intellectual world surrounding St. Sigismund, influences on him and his influences on the world civilization. He is a Viennese aficionado with a flair for dramatic. Also, his book is a treasure trove of unexpected facts about Freud's views and work. The book sheds light on his impossible greatness given that late in life he himself began to recognize that psychoanalysis is more an anthropological construct than a therapeutic method and had foreseen its replacement in psychiatry by psychopharmacology. 

    For a practicing analyst, he tells surprisingly little about the structure of psychoanalysis and his venturing into biology is pure crap ([1], pp. 290-293) [2]. And, of course, no nonfiction book emanating from the New York publishing milieu can avoid random (and rather incongruous) mentions of Putin and Ukraine. 

[1] A convergence of mythologies of unrelated tribes and peoples was convincingly explained by U. Eco (some remember that his day job was in semiotics) without references to epigenetics. Namely, that primeval beliefs are centered on the comparison of external objects with a human body. 

[2] Bygren's 1984 observations of intergenerational heart problems after the famine can be easily explained by the fact that, in times of hunger, survival favors people who randomly accumulate bodily fat faster than others. Naturally, in the subsequent generations, this feature increases the prevalence of heart disease. 

        The application of a similar logic to the descendants of the Holocaust/Shoah survivors is more tenuous. But following the previous example, one may surmise that, among the survivors, the people with an extreme propensity to sense danger fared marginally better. Yet, for their descendants being permanently under stress could cause substantial problems of adaptation. 

 

Edward II themed costume party at the Elysee. 

Adam Kirsch. The Blessing and the Curse: The Jewish People and Their Books in the Twentieth Century.

     

Isaac Babel (1894-1940), a Soviet-Russian Jewish writer as distant from Judaic religion as possible.

       Adam Kirsch is very insightful in his study of the (secular) literature created by the Jews. His penetration into literary genre is deep and enlightening. However, his partiality as an art critic of the Wall Street Journal is showing. All the discrimination and oppression of the Jews is attributed to the Germans and Russians and, a little bit, to the French. Supposedly, the Jewish life in the Anglo-Saxon countries was all sunshine and roses. In fact, until the end of the World War II, in the US and England, there was little of the educated Jewish middle class. All Jews were either business and banking tycoons, who imitated the tastes of the upper classes of their respective countries, or lower classes struggling for surviving. The Jewish experience was framed by others, e.g. Fagin in Dickens. Only when the reader of the Jewish books appeared, so did the writers (P. Roth, S. Bellow, I. Asimov, N. Mailer, etc.). 

Martin Sixsmith and Daniel Sixsmith. Putin and the Return of History: How the Kremlin Rekindled the Cold War.

       

            A screed written by a Blair acolyte straight from the templates of the Goebbels propaganda. Only the Goebbels' staff probably learnt about the Jews more than Sixsmith, which is strange given that he spent a few years in Moscow as a BBC correspondent. Why his son, an archeologist, changed his calling into agitprop writing, in unclear. Unless, of course, he was an "archeologist" of the vintage Her Majesty's service sent to the East during the times of the Great Game, or that vicious agitprop pays much better these days. 

    Only one example: his derisive mentioning of Putin's supposed lies about Ukrainian history, Civil War in particular, can be attributed to the clichés of British propaganda [1]. Yet, his inability to explain the meaning of the Russian word (бандеровцы), he transcribes as banderovites or something, and considers an ethnic slur, testifies to his complete lack of interest to any thing Russian and Soviet. Shtepan Bandera who is now considered something like a patron saint of Ukraine and whose name is given to the streets, plazas and the state awards was a pre-war Polish terrorist. During the Second World War he became a chief purveyor of Nazi ideology in the occupied Soviet Ukraine. Unlike Croatia, which did not play much role in the Nazi plans and could be entrusted to a demented sadist like Ante Pavelic, and similarly to the oil-rich Romania, which could not be left in the hands of Sima Horia; Bandera, whose peasant bands did not only mass murdered the Jews and Gypsies but also Russians and Poles, i.e. non-Jewish technical and business class imperative for keeping its factories and railroads running, was too unstable for such an important task. So Germans tucked him in a Berlin hotel until 1944 when they had nothing to lose and replaced him with a reliable Hauptschturmfuhrer SS Shushkevich, also a mass murderer of the Jews and a revered figure in modern Ukraine, but without a popular following among the contemporary unwashed. 

  This mish-mash of lies, multiplied by woeful ignorance and arrogance does not deserve more. 

[1] British propaganda closely follows a revisionist history of Ukrainian nationalists. In fact, a dozen or so regimes changed on the territory of the modern Ukraine, few controlling more than 10% of the territory, which was claimed by the representatives of the Ukrainian People's Republic Government in Exile, formerly the Directory, at the Versailles Conference. This territory, never being a state, is considered by the post-Maidan regimes as its natural borders. Many regimes were foreign.  Russians, Ukrainians, and Poles, but also Rusyns, Hungarians and Romanians fought on the different sides. The Jews were mostly the victims. The only autochthonic force was Makhno's army of anarchists, which never espoused statehood. So any story as a part of an interview is bound to cut the corners. Yet, during the Civil War these regimes generated a lot of jokes of the type: "In the car is our Directory, under the car is their territory", or "here the powers to be changed again today".  

Joseph Tainter, Collapse of Complex Societies and Paul Cooper, Fall of Civilizations.

  The first book is well grounded in scientific facts, reflects author's own original research and hardly readable, at least by a layperson. The second book is eminently readable and mostly grounded in Google searches. No wonder that the second book is everywhere on Amazon, while the first book is hidden and unpopular. 

Robert Sapolsky. Determined: A Science of Life without Free Will.

     Sapolsky, a titular genius, wrote a book denying a free will entirely. Interestingly, in my old age, I begin to believe in the absence of the free will more and more because during my life I made the same mistakes in absolutely similar situations. So, I got to assume that my behavioral failings were conditioned by my genetics and upbringing. Sapolsky's outlook on the culpability of the criminals and a possibility of punishment in the absence of the free will is decidedly odd, the chapter is called "Fun of punishment" or something like that. So he suggests to replace penitentiary system and ritual by private vendettas and retribution? I think, not.  

    However, from both philosophical and scientific point of view, Sapolsky's argument, as much as I solidarize with his statement does not seem to be very convincing. From the philosophical point of view, he did not define correctly what the "free will" is. He implicitly means by that the actions, which are not conditioned on heredity, past history and the current environment. But these must be completely random as it was already clear to Jean Buridan (c. 1301 - c. 1359). 

    My definition of the "free will" would be as follows. Whether it is possible to predict human actions (in a strong form, infinitely long into the future) knowing everything about the individual that is allowed, in principle, by physics, chemistry and biology? I cannot find a plausible argument why it is. 

    The "in principle" clause is important because our current knowledge of the mind and its working is incomplete. Yet, the thought argument, in which we copy someone's brain with molecular precision and then attach it to the robot -- is possible. Would this organism behave exactly like the person whose brain was copied? I very much doubt that. 

    Too bad, I cannot talk directly to Sapolsky and have to restrict myself to talking to my landlord's dog. 

P.S. I heard an interview with Dr. Sapolsky on NPR. I was negatively surprised that he treats the absence of the free will not as a conclusion of his scientific observations but as a foundation of his philosophical identity. While I am sympathetic to his ideas, science is about proofs, not convictions. 

Jeremy Eisler. Time's Echo.

  The book tells a story of contemporary classical music role in forming the narrative of the Holocaust, the Shoah. Jeremy Eisler is a brilliant stylist, verbally penetrating into music like few others. His book has passages, which are literary masterpieces in their own right. 

    Of course, I cannot question the author's choice of key figures. There are only four in the pages: Richard Strauss, the conformist; Arnold Schoenberg, Dmitry Shostakovich and Benjamin Britten. JE is little too fond of neo-romantic music for my taste. There is a incomplete list of composers and producers of music annihilated in the Shoah: Victor Ullmann, Peter Kein, David Beigelman, Paul Haas, Hans Krasa and Gideon Klein. Some survived: Karel Berman and Hans Adler. 

    However, he is right to the point that Schoenberg and Shostakovich worked out a musical idiom of the unspeakable even before the word "Holocaust" was coined. 

The Oldest Book in the World, by Bill Manley.

    Bill Manley, senior curator of the Egyptian Collections of the National Museums of Scotland, provided new and modernized translation of "The Teaching of Ptahhatp", the oldest manuscript surviving in its entirety. As a commentary to it, he provides the parallels to even more remarkable inscription Why Things Happen?, which declares that all traditional gods were imagined by Ptah, the Risen Earth, before whom there was nothing,  Non-Being. He certainly knows his stuff and is well versed in Christian theology, which he wants to uphold throughout his book. 

    This book only confirms that 1) the best of English humanities survives outside the universities who became the abode of well-bred and well connected, and 2) that a tradition of eschatological interpretation of ancient texts is alive and well. 

The Persians. Lloyd Lwellyn-Jones.

    

     The title of Lwellyn-Jones' book is a misnomer. A proper name for this eminently readable book would "The palace history of the Achaemenid Empire according (mostly) to Greek anecdotes". The most original (and subjective) is the foreword and conclusion, in which Lwellyn-Jones discusses the cultural foreground and prospects for the "Persianism" in the world culture.

    The book tells very little about the demographics, society, economy, even the military organization of the Persian society. Why the Persian armies were victorious on the battlefield for so long, until their ignominious defeat in the hands of tiny bands of marauding Greeks and Macedonians? The bulk of it deals with sexo-politics of the dysfunctional polygamous family, which were the Achaemenids and reads like a detective story. 

    Remarkably, the reference section contains the sources, from which one could possibly learn about the Persian society and identity in more detail. 

Peter Brown. Journeys of the Mind. A Life in History.

    Peter Brown decided to reconcile the history of the Roman Empire with the dogma of the Catholic Church. The result transcended his Catholic Orthodoxy. It was the revision of the history describing the Empire after the Second Century as decaying and the fall of the Western Roman Empire as a watershed. He proved that, intellectually, the Roman Empire evolved quite naturally from a pagan worldview of the mid-Second Century to the conservative Christian society of the Late Empire. Furthermore, culturally, there was no watershed between the Late Roman Empire and the Germanic states, which replaced it thereafter. Currently, these views are accepted as normative in historical science. 

    The memoir is splendidly structured as recollections of his meetings with colleagues in a rough chronological sequence, so that one travels with him to Middle East, Iran and the United States. 

    However, Peter Brown's great revisionist coup obscures the following undeniable facts. Fourth century Roman Empire was less populous and poorer than the Empire at its zenith, the fact noticed by the most prescient of contemporary authors. Civic construction was at a standstill -- after the Baths of Diocletian there were few buildings of comparable size and stature -- and the cities started to be abandoned, first by the upper classes. Secular literature of any quality disappeared. The quality of sculpture and minting declined significantly, which suggests that the urban middle classes devoid of support by the magnates, were fewer and far between. The only mention of economic decay of the Late Empire, which I encountered in his 700 page book is "Trans-Mediterranean trade had already run down considerably before the Muslims reached the sea". 

     This reinforces a currently dominant view -- largely due to Peter Brown himself and others mentioned in the book -- that the fall of the Western Roman Empire was not as much of a watershed as a contiguous process of mutual adaptation between Roman and Germanic societies, but it was a slow decay nevertheless. 

    

Robert Darnton. The Revolutionary Temper. Paris 1748-1789.

      

      Harvard doyen Robert Darnton's book about seething unrest leading to the French Revolution is quite a good reading. Political, economic and administrative realities of the French society serve only as a frame to describe the changes in public opinion, his specialty. 

    The picture of the French society he describes in his book -- without expounding on that -- hints at the causes of the French Revolution as incompatible divergences of the political elites. And these were four: the court, the (upper) clergy, the executive -- the ministers and the Parliaments. Each had its sets of publicists to support their positions. Incongruously, but consistent with American academic tradition, Darnton describes these medieval institutions, the Parliaments, as democracy in action. But he honestly shows that they were largely defenders of entrenched interests of the urban upper classes. Even in one case -- the absolution of the Jansenists -- in which Parliaments were seemingly on the side of the freedom of the press and consciousness, they were defending Jansenism. But it became a superstition long ago, contrasting with a "more enlightened" views of the upper clergy. 

     At the same time, Gallican Church, or at least her upper echelons were more and more entrenched in their Ultramontanism and complete inflexibility, first and foremost, with respect to their own taxation. 

      The most progressive part of the elite were the ministries but they were hamstrung by the court intrigues and the laziness and the indecision of both kings, Louis XV and Louis XVI. Because of the parochial interests of the Parliaments they had to introduce reforms by "tyrannical" (compared with the French Revolution -- ha-ha) methods. 

     The weakness of Darnton's book -- henceforth it cannot replace the classics of De Tocqueville "The Old Regime and the Revolution" and Edgar Faure's "La disgrace de Turgot" -- that all the problems are sorted out from the point of view of Parisian educated middle class. The ones that could afford to pay 9 livres for a literary pamphlet and subscribe to the "Gazette de Leyde" -- his favorite broadsheet source and the barometer of the public opinion.  

Emma Southon. A Rome of One's Own: The Forgotten Women of the Roman Empire.

   This is an odd work of a Christian Feminism. Modern wokeism tinged it with replacement of slaves by the "enslaved people", though I cannot figure out why the latter is better than the former. Furthermore, "enslaved" does not indicate whether people in question were enslaved during their lifetimes, or were born as slaves. 

    But the book only proves the point that Hellenistic, including Roman, women played no role in state politics. Few exceptions only underline the message. If we exclude semi-legendary women of the Kingly Rome, like Tarpeia and Queen Tanaquil in her book, the only women who actively participated in big political decisions were Severan, i.e. Syrian/Balkan women: Julia Domna, Julia Maesa and Julia Mamaea described by Southon in one of the chapters. A Christian princess Galla Placidia, in another chapter, played a great role in Rome's final demise but this was because of her decision to side with the Goths against her Empire. If one adds to them a treacherous, murderous last wife of Augustus, Empress Livia, or so she is shown in "I, Claudius", the list will be over. 

    So the outrageous remark of one of the 1960s professors that delivering a lecture course on Roman women will be like delivering a course on Roman dogs does not seem so outlandish after all. Women, Roman, or otherwise, Etruscan, British, etc. played a great role in the life of the Roman society, which Dr. Southon shows quite clearly -- with the ample use of obscenities and allusions on the English popular culture, some of which I cannot understand -- but their political influence was negligible. 

William Burns for "Foreign Policy"

 The magazine "Communist" in the Soviet times, despite a visible thickness and demagoguery of its articles, performed a very important function. Through it, the Party and Government leadership as well as a few highly-placed propagandists explained and inculcated current policies of the Party and Government to the masses of its functionaries. Without teeth-crunching studies of the "Communist" articles during special workshops and Party meetings, the functionaries would be left without a guiding light on a frequently changing and, sometimes, contradictory Party policies. 

    Currently, the Washington blob, uses "Foreign Policy" for essentially the same purposes. But the pronouncements, which can easily emerge from large and empty heads of Blinken and Nuland, look really odd when coming from William J. Burns, the only remaining foreign policy whiz in the Biden administration. Basically, it affirms the triumph of Bushism-Bidenism: a complete merger of the foreign and military-intelligence policies with no place for diplomatic conflict resolution and/or mutually beneficial economic cooperation. 

    In his article, Burns advocates a complete destruction of Russian Federation and the reduction of China to semi-colonial status, as the implicit goals of American foreign policy. It is hard to imagine many Russians or Chinese agree with that agenda or not employing every resource to forestall this conclusion. In fact, since the first enlargement of NATO into Eastern Europe in 1998, the American polity was steadily degrading into something very much resembling a traditional Eastern European or Latin American society. We now have domination of the moneyed elite, political parties, which do not recognize the legitimacy of each other and freely appropriate any instrument of control. That includes secret police methods to displace the opponent, kangaroo courts, judging entirely on their political persuasion and ignoring the law, universal surveillance by the police, secret blacklisting, etc. etc. So the unrestrained imperialism of the neocons was hurtful to the majority of the US population. 

   But the most risible is the suggestion that CIA is "totally unpolitical". English language has a distinction between "politics" and "policy", which is not translated to adverbial usage. If the "policy" meaning is in question, than everything what CIA does is "political". If the meaning of (un)political is derived from "politics" then what can he say about the infamous, Blinken-inspired letter of a hundred or so intelligence operatives claiming that information from Hunter Biden's notebook bears "classic features of Russian disinformation". As if Russian intelligence could monitor repair and recycling of laptops in all of the United States. 

  Again, I do not think for a second that Mr. Burns believes in such stupidities. But the fact that he must repeat them to occupy positions of power in today's Washington sheds a dark light on the current state of the US politics. In whichever meaning you take it. 

David Graeber, David Wengrow. The Dawn of Everything.

 In a book of a such overwhelming ambition there have to be problems. And there was no lack of criticism poured on Graeber and Wengrow. Yet, there is no doubt that untimely deceased Graeber was the mind of the first magnitude. His wonderful "Bullshit Jobs" exposed the fragility of the modern civilization with unparalleled alacrity. 

 The main thesis of Graeber and Wengrow is that the modern nation-state was not an inevitable product of the development of civilization. Furthermore, the last 500 years when this form of organization became dominant is a small blip on the overall history of humanity. 

    The mainstream progression of the history of human civilization accepted by the Western historians is strangely similar to the concept proposed by Friedrich Engels, the main collaborator of Karl Marx, and enshrined in bronze by Stalin (actually, by his court historians). With world popularity of Yuval Harari, it is unassailable. Namely, once their were hunter-gatherer (forager, in more modern terminology) societies build on a more or less uniform template. At some point, some of them progressed to chiefdoms, started agriculture and cities. Agricultural society begot hierarchies in the form of the rulers and the ruled and widespread enslavement. First civilizations were built by the slave labor. There were two main forms of the developed statehood--slave-owning Empires of the West--Hellenistic and Roman--and the "oriental despotism" based on the uniform conscription of the labor force by the state. 

  After the fall of the Roman Empire, the Germanic states formed in its wake, reworked its slave owning system into something called "feudalism". At the sunset of the Middle Ages, the national monarchies began to form, which started to transform into nation states and so it went till the "End of History" declared by Fukuyama after the Cold War. 

    Not only this scheme was Eurocentric but also it omitted the societies, in which the majority of the human race lived most of the time. In fact, after the falls of the Roman, Parthian Empires, India's Guptas and China Han dynasties, their former populations were somehow organized, and their organization was not identical to the previous, only on a smaller scale. Nomadic peoples populated all Eurasia from east of Hungary to the north of Korean border. Native American societies were a completely different story altogether. 

    The main "discovery" of Graeber--still contested--was that prehistoric societies had a variety of forms of social organization. Even societies with the same mode of production, fisheries, in case of his studies, had a vastly different template. Northwestern tribes had chieftains, noble hierarchies and enslavement, with little role for women. Northern California tribes were more egalitarian with women playing a significant role (I wonder whether a current difference between California and Alaska politics had anything to do with his vision😏). But altogether this is highly probable that foraging societies had as much difference in their political organization as the modern nation-states. For, if the template was uniform, how it happened that it evolved in so many unrelated social units?

Death of Graeber in the beginning of the COVID epidemic is an unreconcilable blow to the anthropology and humanities in general. 

Rob Copeland. The Fund.

     During the assault on the Trump presidency, the "New York Times" made "sensational" accusations of the collusion of his team with the Russians. The proofs could have made the stage-managers of Stalin's show trials blush. One had an e-mail account on a different name, another met Russian Ambassador (at the Washington diplomatic corpse assembly in official capacity) and so on. 

        The book by Rob Copeland is a similar hack hit job. First, he describes Ray Dalio in the terms usually reserved for the serial killers and drug lords. Then, at 200 pages of his book he lists his high crimes and misdemeanors. What are his trespasses? Sometimes, he was rude and/or insensitive to his associates. He made occasional wrong decisions overriding his colleagues. Ray fired a mid-ranking executive without a reasonable cause, according to the fired individual. Who in the position of power over people, even a manager of a warehouse, or a restaurant did not? 

Chris Impey. Worlds without end: exoplanets, habitability and the future of humanity.

  A very good book in its first half. Contains a lot of useful popular information on exoplanets and how they are discovered and investigated. The second half is dedicated to unrestrained speculation about humans role in the Cosmos. 

Clive Oppenheimer. Mountains of fire: a nothing burger.

 I checked out the book of Professor of Volcanology in Cambridge (sic!) to learn about 1) why volcanoes exist, 2) how they operate, 3) what is their geological function, 4) how they influence biosphere, 5) what instruments scientists use to study volcanoes. All I got was a crummy travelogue. 

P. Zeihan, Disunated nations: the scramble for power in an ungovernable world.

 The endless wars since 2001 bred "security consultants" and "defense contractors" so much so that even the deep pockets of CIA could not feed them all, so they turned to literature. They all subscribe to neocon dogma because they know the hand which feeds them. If fact, no other way of thinking about international affairs survived the onslaught of the "New York Times", WP, CNN and the web censorship by Microsoft and Google. 

Even the title of this book is plagiarized from a number of manuscripts (Sean Byrnes, Suga Chen and onwards to 1957). The chapter about the US is lifted from the opus by Mandelbaum and Zakaria with its (half-right as almost everything Mandelbaum in the new century) assertion that the US de-facto performed the functions of the world government in the field of defense, trade, circulation of currency, etc. etc. and extended it to the XVIII-XIX century UK. First, the model of the "World Government" was successful only because in the other parts of the world another power, the USSR, maintained some semblance of the world order. Equally, Britain could have ruled the world in the XIX century but never Europe (A paraphrase of Metternich's that "I sometimes ruled Europe, but never Austria"). Other powers -- the Ottomans, the Austrians, the Prussians and the Russians did the same in their spheres of influence. I.e. they suppressed local nationalisms, established and kept trade routes, provided protection for the allies and defense from enemies and promulgated uniform legislation and religious observance. 

    For China, 5.2% of the annual GDP growth is proclaimed a "crisis" by the Economist's neocons; with the same op-eds, they celebrate UK growth in excess of 1% as a triumph of British economic policy. Equally, he pommels on (totally invented) depopulation of Russian Federation, while at the same time oblivious to the fact that Japanese death rate exceeds the birth rate, one of the lowest in the entire world, by almost twice. Japan's population "pyramid" has two peaks -- one at 50 and another at 75, with overwhelming preponderance of population after 50 and experiences monotone fallout below that age.  

     His most ridiculous conclusion is that China and Russia are spent powers, while he predicts rising of France and Japan. Of France there is no discussion -- for he proposes that it reestablishes its colonial empire and takes over the Suez. Some of his pronouncements suggest that he might have had too many tequilas at lunch. Gas and oil pipelines between Russia and China will never be built (they are already functioning). The Japanese Navy is superior to the Chinese. At least, numerically, there is no comparison. Or, because of his racial prejudices, he considers Japanese perennially superior in technology? In fact, technological prowess of Japan is largely a myth -- it is enough to compare Japanese and Chinese rocket and nuclear programs. Of all defining modern technologies, only in industrial robotics, they are leading, yet followed closely by SK. 

  Koreans, Indonesians, Philipinos, etc. will agree to occupation by Japan in a new incarnation of the "New Sphere of Co-Prosperity in Asia" -- a nickname for the wartime Japanese empire-building. Given wartime behavior of the Japanese on the occupied territories, the understanding by the Japan's neighbors of its good intentions is certainly sweet. And Zeihan's craziness continues on every other page. 

      

    

     

Another nice one-trick pony. Agathe Demarais. Backfire: how sanctions reshape the world against the US interests.

 A one idea tugging along throughout the book is that the sanctions, now only one of two instruments of the US foreign policy, another being war must be better harmonized with the EU, otherwise they would backfire. 

    This view is not surprising given that Demarais was a French foreign service officer in charge of sanctions at the Embassy in Moscow. First, the American sanctions went the way of the Papal excommunications in the Late Middle Ages. Deadly efficient at first, they were applied so speciously and for the obvious benefit of particular papal families that, with time they completely lost their effectiveness being factored in an overall conduct of the European foreign policy. 

But this is important that the subject of "sanctions" (in reality, economic warfare) started to be discussed. In fact, the Peace of Ausburg compact of 1555, appearing well before the birth of the modern nation-state in the aftermath of the Thirty Years War, presumed that the  "obstacles to lawful commerce" might constitute a casus belli. The destruction of the international system undertaken since early 1990s in favor of an unrestrained US domination, threw the international law back nearly 500 years.