Joseph Weisberg. Russia upside down: an exit strategy for the second Cold War.

 Judging by the bookstore shelves, this book attracts much more attention than a usual Russian-bashing agitprop. Also, by its contents, this book must belong to my section "Books that defeat their message". It begins with young idealistic (sic!) Joseph interviewing for the CIA in the late 80s. In the rest of the book he, with many caveats and excuses, harangues on the subject that Russia, though bad enough, is not Mordor as the FT, NYT and "Economist" describe it in every issue. 

    The most powerful message is concentrated in p. 306 when the author is happy about "Latvians, Armenians, Ukrainians" etc. who now enjoy freedom and prosperity. Had the learned CIA analyst looked at statistics lately? Lithuania and Latvia since their independence lost ~1/3 of their population, and, together with Croatia are less populous than after the Second World War when they - without much help from the Germans - exterminated their Jews and Roma and expelled most Russians (Latvia, Lithuania) or Serbs (Croatia) as refugees. Lithuania is also the world champion or strong contestant of alcoholism and suicide rates. This hardly testifies to the vitality of the population. With Ukraine, belatedly, demographic statistic is heavily manipulated to increase the freebies from the EU but the population under control of the Kiev Government is hardly 3/4 of the Soviet-era population. At the fall of the USSR, the living standards were on par with Russia proper, or even slightly higher. Now they are about as different as USA and Mexico. 

    The second amazing scoop, also on p. 306, bewails the state or Russia as "...If United States collapsed after slavery ended, or during the civil rights movements. The Soviets never got that chance..." But Russia did not collapse with the fall of the Soviet Union. 

    Between opening pages and p. 306, Weisberg claims that almost every evil real (and mostly imagined by CNN, etc.) committed by Russian Government can be matched by the behavior of the US Government. But some evils are really outstanding, for instance the murder of Boris Nemtsov. To remind you, this "opposition politician" retired as a Deputy PM after the 1998 default, never had a gainful occupation thereafter -- he went as an adviser to some provincial city government -- and, yet succeeded in accumulating fortune in the hundreds of millions of dollars. Nemtsov lived in a penthouse of a five-star hotel and chartered a plane to fly another model girlfriend to Switzerland for abortion. People like that usually acquire many enemies with big guns and scant respect for the law, irrespectively of the political regime.  

What are his recipes out of a current disastrous situation? That Russian Government must unilaterally disarm, allow unrestricted work of foreign NGOs (what about allowing Al Qaeda in the US?) and negotiate with the so-called opposition. In contrast, to the Gorbachev era he does not even pretend that above-mentioned measures will be in any way reciprocated by the US and the titular West. A possible impact of these steps on Russian society is never enunciated by Weisberg. But, at least, he thinks about these problems rather than the "Foreign Policy" neocons, which have a boilerplate recipe for any foreign policy problem of the US - a "regime change" through sanctions, which never work, and war. 

Ray Dalio. The Changing World Order.

Ray Dalio & Friend 

It is surprising how enlightened the book is, given his advisers, Thomas "Make-the-war-war-war" Friedman and Niall Ferguson, thanked in his "Acknowledgements".  But all the correct things there are non-original and most original - incorrect. Previously, incomparable Azar Gat developed a static approach to measure the "strength of nations" quantitatively. His formula was based only on population and GDP and was not subject to much ideology-driven manipulation. Dalio's approach is dynamic -- it has a predictive power - but it includes many subjective factors that can be fudged. Not surprising that Dalio, a hedge fund tycoon, gives an exaggerated weight to the financial markets. That would not be so wrong, even if one remembers that most of the world largest banks at the end of the Cold War were in Japan, and that by 1900 the strongest bourses were London, New York, but also St. Petersburg (grain) and Buenos Aires (meat). But his ignorance of cultural factors and poorly digested history makes one suspect of his conclusions. 

The largest European powers by the controlled territories on the eve of XVII century were the Polish Commonwealth and the Ottoman Empire. They also had the mightiest armies. The problem with them was that they were dominated by militaristic elites with narrow-minded sectarian outlook, bent on incessant conquest and religious proselytization of subject populations. A string of Catholic bigots on the Polish throne reduced this world power to insignificance and then to the disappearance by the end of the XVIII century. Another Catholic bigot, Louis XIV refused to consider any pragmatic solutions and emptied the treasury of then the richest land in Europe in futile search of military gloria. He could not contemplate neither deportation of the Huguenots to the French America -- proposed by Colbert -- nor mending his religious fervor by the alliances with Protestant powers. A relative financial weakness of France on the eve of the Revolution had its roots in the destruction of the most productive class of the French population in the late XVII century by Louis and his bigoted mistress, Madame de Maintenon. 

But all that said, Dalio, because of his independent wealth, can publish books on social policy, which can inspire some thought apart from a conventional neocon garbage. Yet, even he cannot or would not openly challenge neocon orthodoxy. 

The books which defeat their message: Chanda Prescod Weinstein "The Disordered Cosmos" and Kara Cooney "The Good Kings: The Absolute Power in Ancient Egypt"

   The books by the experts in the fields of Astrophysics and Egyptology differ in the fact that Prescod is mad and Cooney is perfectly normal and supremely organized. 

Chanda Prescod Weinstein repeats on every page "As a Black woman astrophysicist...". O'K, Sandra, we learnt it from the second page. On every sixth page, she tells that she is Jewish. When she speaks about physics, her thought is lucid and up to the point. But these are rare intermittencies among mad rant about oppression of the Blacks and Native Americans with the extensive references from Woke literary universe. But somehow, in the beginning of the book she repeats--a correct, in my view--mantra that race is a socio-cultural construct. Indeed, if we take skin color as a race marker, it does not conform with genetics. The populations of Sudan are more distant genetically from the populations of Namibia than Norwegians are from Indonesians. If we add territory of ethnic origin, or language, nothing again will make sense. For instance, if the characteristics of a White Race are its European origin and Indo-European languages, the whitest Finns and Estonians, together with Hungarians, not to speak of Jews are excluded. And so on. But if race is an artificial construct of European colonizers, why one has to identify with a particular race at all? Furthermore, her views are Amero-centric. She obviously, does not realize that, historically, class, religion and place of origin played much more significant role than race. 

For instance, in the Late Medieval Europe, where the Christianity and ability to form an organized state defined the characteristics of the "Master race", the barbarians were the blond and blue eyed Finns and, especially, Lithuanians, who adopted Christianity only in 1387. It mostly repeated Graeco-Roman classification of German tribes as barbarians for their lack of classic culture and statehood. 

Equally strange is the Kara Cooney's discussion of the Egyptian civilization. First, it was the most successful civilization in the world history, ours included, which maintained itself for about 27 centuries with little change. This testifies to the incredible resilience of the structures of its society and powerful centripetal  tendencies despite all foreign invasions and conqueror rules. Her criticism was that it was a despotical state based on the cult of deified pharaohs. This is really odd given that a modern democracy is barely older than 200 years and already has developed the signs of senility. Egypt suffered upheavals once in half-millennium, while more "democratic" Roman Empire, for most of its history, had these at least once in twenty years. But this is not the worst part of her altogether interesting book. The worst part are her immature projections of the Egyptian polity on the modern politics (Putin and Trump, in particular--no book should be without them), including women's rights, which she asserts in the epigraph proudly declaring herself being in charge of her family affairs. 

[Recently, I re-examined the book of beau Cara. Because I was not sufficiently attentive while reading it the first time, I realized that every passage in the book is peppered with modernizations purporting to prove the connection between autocracy -- a very uncertain term -- and male patriarchy, and white privilege. These diversions make the book more readable, yet they are ahistorical, modernizing -- not in the good sense -- and totally unwarranted. Re-phrasing her argument one can also consider polar exploration, Apollo program and LHC at CERN as monuments to the power preservation and vanity of the Christian male patriarchs.] 

E. O. Wilson. The Social Conquest of Earth.

 A great book, written by one of the XX Century great minds. Too sad that much of it is dedicated to polemic with inclusive fitness theory and, especially, Dawkins, whom he hates so much that he even uses arguments of B. F. Skinner against him, despite the fact that behaviorists are uniformly despised by him in other parts of the book. Noam Chomsky is viciously derided by Wilson as well. Furthermore, he promotes a competent linguist, who unnaturally evolved (pun intended!) to a neocon philosophical charlatan in the spirit of Fukuyama and a defender of pedophile Epstein, Steven Pinker, whose views are congenial to Wilson's. But Dawkins' and Chomsky's views are not so incompatible with his own. Group selection theory, which Wilson advances against inclusive fitness is remarkably difficult to formalize. 

But one can imagine that, sometimes, a population splits into disconnected clusters which do not exchange genes between themselves. In fact, the Galapagos observations were instrumental for Darwin. A given cluster might have a suboptimal genetic profile, which is yet insufficient to cause its extinction. But, in case of a large environmental catastrophe, only one population with a given genetic profile could randomly survive, or be the best adapted to the new environment and propel its genes to posterity. Then, Wilson group selection theory can be formulated in the language, probably almost identical to the "selfish gene" proposal of Dawkins. 

Heino Falcke. Jorg Romer. Light in the Darkness, the Universe and Us.

 

  The author is brilliant and he is not shy to flaunt his incomparable brilliance: "Forty more seconds to go, and then, for the first time, people all over the world will marvel at the image of a giant black hole... Humanity's thousand -year journey of discovery...--today they all will be brought together...". He is also not shy to proclaim his Catholic-tinged Protestantism in every chapter and devotes the latter part of his book to his theological disquisitions. 

His book can be read with interest by a person with no physics background at all as well as the ones with a significant background in physics and astronomy. It is also written clearly and with gusto--a rare combination, and both authors are Germans--for whom English is a second language. 

Falcke's appropriation of all the history of Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) to himself and his own efforts for funding leaves the reader with the bad taste in mouth, even if everything he tells is true. But if one wants to discard his pride, equal to his achievement, as a small nuisance, one can expect a wonderful travel among the stars and galaxies.