Weekend Book Review - Ayn Rand and the World She Made

Commentary By Ron Beasley

With the Ayn Rand cultist Paul Ryan becoming the Republican Vice Presidential Candidate today I thought this might be a good opportunity to republish my reveiw of the Ayn Rand Biography by  Anne C. Heller from 2010.

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The picture on the left may represent the beginning of the deregulation frenzy that resulted in the current world wide economic disaster. It was taken in 1974 by David Hume Kennerly and pictured are President Gerald Ford, Alan Greenspan, Ayn Rand, Rand's husband Frank Conner and Greenspan's mother Rose Goldsmith. The occasion was Alan Greenspan being sworn in as chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers. The significance of the picture is that Ayn Rand is there next to her disciple Alan Greenspan but to understand the significance you must understand Rand herself and her philosophy. Anne C. Heller helps us do that with her excellent biography of Rand, Ayn Rand and the World She Made.

I recommend this book not because I agree with anything Ayn Rand stands for but because it's a really good read and it's necessary to understand Rand and undererstand how we arrived where we are today. Heller makes it clear that Rand and her life are much more interesting than any of the creations in her fiction and there are times you forget that you are not reading fiction. I am going to concentrate on Rand's early life in this review � it's important because narcissists and sociopaths like Rand are either created early if not born that way.

Alyssa Zinovievna Rosenbaum was born in St Petersburg, Russia in 1905 of Jewish parents. While it's often said that it was the Bolshevik revolution that was responsible for Rand's philosophy and world view according to Heller the foundation for Rand's philosophy predates the revolution.

When Rand was five or so, she recalled, her mother came into the children's playroom and found the floor littered with toys. She announced to Rand and Rand's two-and-a-half-year-old sister, Natasha, that they would have to choose some of their toys to put away and some to keep and play with now; in a year, she told them, they could trade the toys they had kept for those they had put away. Natasha held on to the toys she liked best, but Rand, imagining the pleasure she would get from having her favorite toys returned to her later, handed over her best-loved playthings, including a painted mechanical wind-up chicken she could describe vividly fifty years later. When the time came to make the swap and Rand asked for her toys back, her mother looked amused, Rand recalled. Anna explained that she had given everything to an orphanage, on the premise that if her daughters had really wanted their toys they wouldn't have relinquished them in the first place. This may have been Rand's first encounter with injustice masquerading as what she would later acidly call "altruism." Her understanding of how power can be acquired by a pretense of loving kindness would grow only more acute with time.
Perhaps it's little wonder, then, that from the age of four or five onward, Rand developed a keen sense that anything she liked had to be hers, not her mothers, the family's, or society's, an attitude that readers of her 1943 novel The Fountainhead will recognize in the perverse and complicated character of Dominique Francon. As a corollary, she claimed not to care about being approved of or accepted by her family and peers. Since she generally wasn't accepted, the proud, intelligent child appears to have learned early to make a virtue of necessity. In her twenties and thirties, she would construct a universe of moral principles built largely on the scaffolding of some of these defensive childhood virtues.

The second influence in Rand's life came when she read a serial in a French Boys magazine, The Mysterious Valley. It was there that Rand met Cyrus Vance, a handsome and heroic figure and in Rand's eyes a hero in every way. Rand would spend the rest of her life looking for a Cyrus Vance and creating him in her fiction.

Rand herself was an elitist who lived on cigarettes, amphetamines and chocolate. Elitism was also what she was marketing in her novels. Her characters like Galt and Roark were unbelievable because they were little more than abstract principles personified. Her vision of capitalism was simple and had a grade school like quality to it.

But Rand has impacted us all and still does. The principal architect of our current economic crisis, Alan Greenspan was a disciple for most of his life but after looking at the havoc he had created had to recant. (Via Digby)

"I have found a flaw" in free market theory, Greenspan said under intense questioning by Representative Henry Waxman, the Democratic chairman of the Government Oversight Committee of the House of Representatives. "I don't know how significant or permanent it is," Greenspan added. "But I have been very distressed by that fact."

Pressed by Waxman, Greenspan conceded a more serious flaw in his own philosophy that unfettered free markets sit at the root of a superior economy.

"I made a mistake in presuming that the self-interests of organizations, specifically banks and others, were such as that they were best capable of protecting their own shareholders and their equity in the firms," Greenspan said.

Waxman pushed the former Fed chief, who left office in 2006, to clarify his explanation.

"In other words, you found that your view of the world, your ideology, was not right, it was not working," Waxman said.

"Absolutely, precisely," Greenspan replied. "You know, that's precisely the reason I was shocked, because I have been going for 40 years or more with very considerable evidence that it was working exceptionally well."

But she still has her followers in important places today like the Republican's wonder boy, Congressman Paul Ryan.

It's important to know what motivates the enemy and the Rand cultists are still with us.  As Digby notes Rand's followers are passing out free books.  For that reason this is an important read for anyone concerned about how Ayn Rand is still an influence.

Note:

I received a copy of this book from the publisher for this review.

Book Review - The Trust

Commentary By Ron Beasley

It's not easy writing a review for a mystery novel and The Trust by Norb Vonnegut is no exception. I can't say too much without being a spoiler but I'll try.

Successful investment manager Grove O'Rourke receives a mysterious call from his wealthy mentor, Palmer Kincaid and suspects something is wrong. The next day Kincaid's body washes ashore an apparent accidental drowning victim. O'Rourke is contacted by Kincaid's daughter to get the family's financial affairs in order. He suddenly finds himself in charge of Palmer Kincaid's charitable organization, The Palmetto Foundation. One of the first issues involves The Catholic Fund and a mysterious priest, Father Frederick Ricardo. The Catholic Fund has given 65 million dollars to the Palmetto Foundation and Father Ricardo now wants to dictate where that money goes. O'Rourke is suspicious and that is only reinforced by attorney Biscuit Hughes who has discovered that The Catholic Fund is the owner of a Sex Superstore in Fayettville, North Carolina. At the same time O'Rourke's investment firm in New York is being taken over Morgan Stanley and the FBI is asking questions about him.  O'Rourke himself is contacted by the FBI but agent Torres has lots of questions but few answers.  Then Palmer Kincaid's widow is kidnapped and O'Rourke is forced to join forces with agent Torres to save her.

If you like mysteries this is a great read that includes murder, a kidnapping and financial shenanigans. It is often hard to separate the good guys from the bad ones.

Note:

I received a review copy of this book from the publisher.

Book Review - Guest of Honor

Commentary By Ron Beasley

In 2008 the United States elected a black President - the result was a very negative reaction by about 25% of the population. It's not the first time there was a reaction to shifts in racial equality. In his concession speech in 2008 John McCain mentioned T.R, Roosevelt's dinner with Booker T. Washington in 1901. Like most of us this was the first time author Deborah Davis had heard of this historical event. She became curious and researched the history of the event -*-and wrote Guest of Honor: Booker T. Washington, Theodore Roosevelt, and the White House Dinner That Shocked a Nation.

The first half of the book is a mini biography of both T.R Roosevelt and Booker T. Washington. For me this was very informative since I had little knowledge of this period of US history. TR was born into wealth and privilege and Booker T. was born a slave but their lives had many parallels. They first met in 1898 when they discussed the performance of the black soldiers that were part of TR's Rough Riders.

While Booker T. continued to build Tuskegee TR used the popularity of the Rough Riders to become governor of New York. Being TR he manged to upset the New York Republican political machine. The machine convinced McKinley to choose TR as his Vice President just so they could get him out of the State House. TR continued his communication with Booker T and agreed to visit Tuskegee. Fate had other ideas and when McKinley was assassinated TR suddenly found himself President and Booker T suddenly found himself an adviser to the President of the United States.

On October 16, 1901 TR had a evening meeting with Booker T. In addition TR had a big family meal planned that included a hunting friend from Colorado. He made the decision to invite Booker T to dinner. Both men recognized the danger - TR almost withdrew the invitation and Booker T almost turned it down. But the dinner happened and the next morning it was reported in the press.

A summary of TR's daily agenda was read by a reporter at the Washington Post and suddenly realized that a black man had dined with the President at the White House.

"Booker T. Washington of Tuskegee, Ala., dined with the president last evening." he wrote in his column. That one line caused the telegraphs to start clicking furiously in the capital, their shocking message reverberating across the nation like a thunderclap.

In the South the reaction was immediate and angry. TR was blasted for the invitation and the "uppity" Booker T for accepting. The loss of slavery was bad enough for the South but the idea that "coons" were social equals was just too much. The press in the North was for the most part positive.

Although both men were able to accomplish a great deal that dinner haunted them for the rest of their lives.

This is a very readable book covering the history of the US 30+ years after the civil war. It is valuable because it gives us not only a picture of how things have changed in the century since TR was President but also how much really hasn't changed.  I recommend this book to anyone interested in this short period of history.

Cross Posted At The Moderate Voice

Note:

I received a review copy of this book from the publisher.

Guest of Honor: Booker T. Washington, Theodore Roosevelt, and the White House Dinner That Shocked a Nation
by Deborah Davis

Book Review - The RX Factor

Commentary By Ron Beasley

I read mostly non-fiction and when I read fiction is usually Science Fiction. But I also like a good suspense thriller once in awhile. The RX Factor by J. Thomas Shaw certainly qualifies. There is certainly enough suspense and enough murders and assassinations to qualify it as a thriller. In addition there is a lot of corporate and government malfeasance.

Dr Ryan Mathews discovered a cure for ovarian cancer. His company did not have the resources to do the human testing so he sold out to a large pharmaceutical company. Human testing commenced and the results were not good - it didn't work. Ryan's wife came down with ovarian cancer and she was part of the human testing. When the testing was canceled Ryan stole the last two doses his wife required. He was caught and fired from the large pharmaceutical. All of the tests indicated his wife was going to die within months so the decision was made to move to the Bahamas for the last few months of her life. His wife and children were killed in a plane crash on the way to the Bahamas and Ryan spent the next few years drinking in paradise. One day Ryan met another medical researcher there to spend some time with her aunt and uncle. When her relatives ship was blown up Ryan partnered with her to find out what was going on and the adventure began. Many murders and attempted murders in addition to many surprises. It came to Ryan's attention that his drug had worked and the results had been tampered with. But why - the big pharmaceuticals don't want to cure people. People who are well don't buy drugs. More adventures and murders along the way and an ending that unearths an even more sinister plot.

A really great read that I had trouble putting down and the ending was a shocker.

Cross Posted At The Moderate Voice

Note:

I received a review copy of this book from the publisher.

The RX Factor
by J. Thomas Shaw

Book Review - We Heard the Heavens Then: A Memoir of Iran

Commentary By Ron Beasley

I receive several opportunities a month to do book reviews.  I turn most of them down in spite of the fact it means I won't get a free book.  I almost decided against reviewing We Heard the Heavens Then: A Memoir of Iran but eventually agreed.  After reading the first few pages I knew I had made the right decision.

We Heard The Heavens Then by Aria Minu-Sepher is the story of the last few years of Shah�s Iranian monarchy and the revolution that brought it down as seen through the eyes of a young boy who's father was a powerful general in the Shah's air force.  The author has had decades in the United States to think about what happened and presents us with a measured and fair account of social-political reality that led up to the revolution.

There are several characters in this story both family members and others.    Aria Minu-Sepher grew up in a privileged world.  As we might say now he was part of the one percent.  His mother is mentioned but it is rarely a flattering picture.  She was proud of the fact she was part of the aristocracy.  His father, �Baba,�  plays a key part in the narrative.  A very competent pilot and General who adores his son and attempts to mold his son in his own image.  In a way this book is a tribute to his father.  The rest of the authors extended family represent an eclectic mix of Iranian society.  The household staff  also plays a part but none more than the housekeeper �Bubbi.�  She is a very conservative Muslim, a classic member of the Iranian 99%.  She is offended by Western influence.  She objects to serving wine, shrimp and ham.  She objects to automobiles and thinks the F14 fighters the General commands are straight from the devil.  We get the impression that she represents a lot of the 99%.

The author paints a picture of an Iran that is not just divided along 1% - 99% line but also on a secular � pious line, but there is a great deal of overlap.  Much of Iran was not enjoying the miracles from the west but they didn't want to.   I think that we can see some of the problems we are having in Afghanistan � a majority who simply don't want to be forced into a secular world. 

Normally this subject matter would be rather dry but this book is an enjoyable and easy read because it is made up primarily of personal anecdotes.  I highly recommend this book.

Note

I received a review copy of this book from the publisher.

Cross posted at The Moderate Voice

We Heard the Heavens Then: A Memoir of Iran
by Aria Minu-sepehr

The Dumbest Idea in the World

By BJ Bjornson

Today�s recommended reading is this Forbes.com article from Steve Denning reviewing Roger L. Martin�s book, Fixing the Game, which notes that a lot of capitalism�s present problems come from incentives and laws that divert resources and talent away from the real market of producing goods and services for customers and making real profits and instead focus on the expectations market of the stock prices and �maximizing shareholder value� in the immediate short term. An analogy as excerpt:

�Imagine an NFL coach,� writes Roger Martin, Dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto, in his important new book, Fixing the Game, �holding a press conference on Wednesday to announce that he predicts a win by 9 points on Sunday, and that bettors should recognize that the current spread of 6 points is too low. Or picture the team�s quarterback standing up in the postgame press conference and apologizing for having only won by 3 points when the final betting spread was 9 points in his team�s favor. While it�s laughable to imagine coaches or quarterbacks doing so, CEOs are expected to do both of these things.�

Imagine also, to extrapolate Martin�s analogy, that the coach and his top assistants were hugely compensated, not on whether they won games, but rather by whether they covered the point spread. If they beat the point spread, they would receive massive bonuses. But if they missed covering the point spread a couple of times, the salary cap of the team could be cut and key players would have to be released, regardless of whether the team won or lost its games.

There is more at the link, and while the article nor the book covers every problem our economy faces, the one it does cover is a biggie, and one that needs to be dealt with, sooner better than later.

Today's Depression Reading

By BJ Bjornson

Matthew Lynn has some bad news for those hoping for a better economy anytime soon. He sees in the current crisis too many parallels to the Long Depression that started in 1873 and lasted until 1896, a depression created by structural problems rather than the demand collapse of the 1930�s.

He offers five lessons that we should learn from that example, two of which I�l quote.

Second, this depression is structural. The long depression of the nineteenth century had its roots in financial speculation, technological change, and the arrival of a massive new player in the global economy. Our depression likewise has its roots in three huge crises which are all coming together at the same time. We have a debt bubble that has been building up over three decade and which burst spectacularly in 2008. The dollar is in long-term decline as a reserve currency, and as the anchor for the global monetary system, but there is still not much sign of what will replace it. And in the euro, the biggest single economic bloc has created the most dysfunctional monetary system in human history, threatening financial collapses on an unprecedented scale. Think of it as the world economy suffering a heart attack, then a stroke, then getting picked up by an ambulance that crashes on the way to the hospital � it is hardly surprising the patient isn�t in good shape.

. . .

Five, it won�t be fixed easily. The parallel with the 1930s is dangerous, because it has convinced bankers and policy makers that if you can just pump up demand, everything will be okay. It won�t. Sure, demand is important � there is no point in letting it collapse. But this won�t be over until all three structural problems get fixed. Debt needs to be paid down to manageable levels, a new reserve currency needs to be created, and the euro needs to be put out of its misery. None of these are simple tasks, and none will be done quickly.

It probably doesn�t help to say that I�m even less optimistic about a successful recovery that Lynn, in part because some of the structural dysfunction that needs to be fixed is one he fails to really mention in his fixes, the tightening of regulations of financial speculation and over-leveraging that caused the 2008 crash and continues to dog the global financial system. The U.S. missed its best chance for really getting a handle on the banksters that started the ball rolling, and may never get another one in time to make any real difference.

Even more important in the long term are two more structural issues that are going to crimp growth even further than the troubles in the financial realm could do on their own, and will act as a brake on any recovery well past the 2031 date Lynn chooses as an arbitrary end date based on the timeline of the 1870�s depression, namely Peak Oil and Climate Change.

Peak Oil is in a sense the simpler of the two, in that the price for oil has already be shown to have a braking effect whenever the economy starts to heat up. The days of cheap oil are already passing us by, and with so much of our infrastructure based on liquid fuel technology, the high cost of maintaining or switching over to alternatives is going to crimp our overall ability to do anything else. On the somewhat bright side, at least this added cost will show up on economists� radar and stat sheets, so they won�t be able to ignore it.

Climate Change, on the other hand, remains an externality in nearly all respects when it comes to economics, but its effects, in terms of more extreme weather events; droughts, floods, snow and ice storms, etc., are already beginning to be felt, and will only increase with time since we appear incapable of doing anything about it that might threaten economic growth that is already going to be anemic at best thanks to the conditions Lynn has already laid out.

Gets rather depressing sometimes.

Fan is short for . . .

By BJ Bjornson

Not apropos of much, but this line from an article regarding some early reviews of the new Adventures of Tintin film by some of the diehard fans of the books did cause me to chuckle.

Responding to criticism of the new film, he said: "They have created their own interpretation, in the same way different theatre directors interpret Shakespeare. If this movie brings people back to the books so much the better. To be in a position to have Peter Jackson and Steven Spielberg taking it on � it's good for Belgium and it's good for the work." He added that scholars went on to create the New Testament "because they weren't happy with the Old Testament."

Never let it be said that fans don�t take their source material seriously.

Thomas W. Benton - Artist/Activist

Commentary By Ron Beasley

There are many ways to study history. We have written history but that always reflects the philosophy of the individual writing it and that history will change over time. Even the memories of those who lived the history changes over time. There is one thing that is constant - the art that was created in response to the world as the present became history. Thanks to Daniel Joseph Watkins we have the opportunity to see the art of Artist/Activist Thomas W. Benton. Benton's poster art documents the political issues of his home in Aspen Colorado and the United States beginning in the turbulent 60's.



Thomas Benton was born in Oakland California on November 16, 1930. Before enlisting in the Navy during the Korean War he attended Glendale Junior College. Following his time in the Navy he studied architecture at the University of Southern California and practiced architecture in the LA area for several years. In 1962 he moved to Aspen Colorado where he built a studio and taught himself the art of silkscreen. His studio became the meeting place for local intellectuals and Benton became a local activist. Like many during that period the Vietnam war shaped his politics but his fear that the commercialization of the Aspen area would destroy the paradise was also influential. In the late 60s he first met "gonzo journalist" Hunter S. Thomson and his career as a political poster artist took off.

In addition to 150 posters, both political and artistic, this beautiful coffee-table book contains several of the Aspen Wallposters which were a collaboration of Benton's art and Hunter S. Thompson's writing.

Hunter walked into my studio one day and said, "we should do an Aspen wallposter." I said, "what the hell is that?" He said, "It's gonna be a single sheet thing, and it'll have your graphics on one side and my writing on the other." He would write about local politics and other things. We would get together at night in my studio and I'd work on the graphics while he would write the whole damn back page in one night. Of course, that night might take a day and a half.

~Tom Benton

For those interested in the politics of late 60's and early 70's this book is truly a visual treat.

You can find more examples here.

But They Won't!

Commentary By Ron Beasley�

Matt Yglesias correctly points out that the Obama administration and the Democrats don't have to be held hostage when the rise in the debt ceiling comes up and he has a plan.

This isn�t a sudden �shutdown.� Nor is is true that we have to default on obligations to our bondholders. Rather, it means that government outlays are now limited by the quantity of inbound tax revenue. But for a while, the people administering the federal government (to wit Barack Obama and Timothy Geithner) will be able to selectively stiff people. So the right strategy is to start stiffing people Republicans care about. When bills to defense contractors come due, don�t pay them. Explain they�ll get 100 percent of what they�re owed when the debt ceiling is raised. Don�t make some farm payments. Stop sending Medicare reimbursements. Make the doctors & hospitals, the farmers and defense contractors, and the currently elderly bear the inconvenient for a few weeks of uncertain payment schedules. And explain to the American people that the circle of people who need to be inconvenienced will necessarily grow week after week until congress gives in. Remind people that the concessions the right is after mean the permanent abolition of Medicare, followed by higher taxes on the middle to finance additional tax cuts for the rich.

Of course this won't happen -  because they really don't want to.  Obama and the Democrats are owned  by the same people that own the Republicans.  We on the the progresive side used to say the Clinton was the best Republican president since Eisenhower.  Well Obama has accepted the imperial presidency of George W. Bush which as I see it makes him the best Republican president since George H.W. Bush.  While Clinton was to the right of Eisenhower Obama is to the right of Bush 41. He is owned by Wall Street  and the military industrial complex.  The most important paragraph in Elizabeth Gould and Paul Fitzgerald's Crossing Zero is this:

By late 2009 it was clearer than ever that both Congress and the State Department had come to rely on the American military to set the policy agenda. In fact, it appeared that it might even be impossible for Washington to return to a civilian-orchestrated strategy of nation-building anywhere, after thirty years of militarily enforced privatized foreign policy schemes. An entire industry now existed to lobby against any efforts to reverse the trend, change the status quo or even to make private contractors accountable for the taxpayer money they received. A book by Allison Stanger, One Nation Under Contract, outlined the dimensions of a problem where the private sector had become a "shadow government" operating outside the law with billions of federal dollars, but little to no accountability for how or where the money was spent.

It's impossible for congress to reduce military spending because they depend on money from defense contractors get reelected - the best government money can buy.   Of course the same thing can be said for the too powerful to fail banks.  The plutocrats are in the drivers seat.  If the Tea Party figures that out they may prove to be our salvation.

The Government They Deserve

Commentary By Ron Beasley

Matt Taibbi has a new book out, Griftopia, all about the Tea Party. There is an excerpt available at AlterNet that is worth a read.  This sums it up pretty well:

By rallying behind dingbats like Palin and Michele Bachmann -- the Minnesota congresswoman who thought the movie Aladdin promoted witchcraft and insisted global warming wasn�t a threat because "carbon dioxide is natural" -- the Tea Party has made anti-intellectualism itself a rallying cry. The Tea Party is arguing against the very idea that it�s even necessary to ask the kinds of questions you need to ask to grasp bubble economics.

Bachmann is the perfect symbol of the Dumb and Dumber approach to high finance. She makes a great show of saying things that would get a kindergartner busted to the special ed bus -- shrieking, for instance, that AmeriCorps was a plot to force children into liberal "reeducation camps" (Bachmann�s own son, incidentally, was a teacher in an AmeriCorps program), or claiming that the U.S. economy was "100 percent private" before Barack Obama�s election (she would later say Obama in his first year and a half managed to seize control of "51 percent of the American economy").

When the Chinese proposed replacing the dollar as the international reserve currency, Bachmann apparently thought this meant that the dollar itself was going to be replaced, that Americans would be shelling out yuan to buy six-packs of Sprite in the local 7-Eleven. So to combat this dire threat she sponsored a bill that would "bar the dollar from being  replaced by any foreign currency."

So we have not only a citizenry of morons but the morons are finding their way to Washington.  How did we get here?  In 2006 a Gallup report indicated the over 50% of Americans did not believe in Evolution.  It would be easy to blame the Religious Right and the right wing media but I think it the problem has it's origins much earlier.  I raised two sons who attended public school in the 80s and early 90s.  We lived in a middle and upper middle class community primarily made up of baby boomer professionals.  The boys schooling went well until high school.  My oldest son had a problem with algebra - his math teacher said he was not receptive.  Since I was an engineer I had a working knowledge of the subject and was not only able to teach him what his math teacher couldn't but found him to be a very receptive student.  My youngest son was a voracious and great reader.  He loved history.  When he was very young I would read to him at night before he went to sleep and it was history that he wanted to read.  Much to my amazement when he got into college we discovered he was unable to write.  He could write but had little knowledge of grammar or sentence construction.  I was able to correct that in a few short weeks - another receptive student.  It's easy to beat up on teachers and the public school system but I noticed something else.  The parents of my son's friends - boomer professionals like me - were horrible parents, that is to say they had little time to be parents.  They spent little time with their children and a family sit down meal was rare to non existent.  The values and knowledge of the parents was not passed on to the children.  And keep in mind we are not talking about a low income area with uneducated parents - just the opposite.  Those students of the 80s and the 90s are today's teachers.  They have little knowledge of US history or the Constitution.

Given the above is it really surprising we now live in a country that is simply too dumb for democracy?

Note:  My two sons turned out just fine.  One is a sensible conservative and the other a liberal like mom and dad.

Some More Spells to Break

By BJ Bjornson

I am currently in the process of reading Daniel Dennett�s Breaking the Spell, which is basically a tome on how we should treat religion as a natural phenomenon to be studied and analyzed. At the point I�ve gotten to, Dennett is providing a counter to the argument that only the faithful can understand religion well enough to study their own faiths with the following passage:

We would never let business tycoons get away with saying that since we weren�t plutocrats ourselves we couldn�t hope to understand the world of high finance and were hence disqualified from investigating their deals. Generals can�t escape civilian oversight by claiming that only those in uniform can appreciate what they are doing

It is passages like that that make me go back to the copyright page to see just when the book was published (2006 as it happens). On the first point, while I certainly agree that we shouldn�t let business tycoons get away with saying that only they are capable of understanding high finance, that is pretty clearly become the prevailing wisdom of far too many these days. After all, it is exactly that argument that was used to protect the jobs of those most responsible for the massive financial mess we find ourselves in, and to defend their continued outrageous bonuses on the backs of the taxpayers; that they and only they understood how just badly they had screwed the pooch to possibly be able to fix it, and to remove them and actually force them to pay for their horrid screw-ups would cause even more damage for us poor uninitiated rubes.

The ease of which this argument has been swallowed in too many quarters gives a whole new meaning to the term, �Worshipping the Almighty Dollar�.

As to the second, I would point you to this post by Tom Levenson over at Balloon Juice referring to Lieutenant Colonel Andrew Milburn�s article where he argues that military officers are not only obligated but justified in refusing legal orders from their supposed civilian masters. (I�d also suggest reading Lieutenant Colonel Paul Yingling�s piece in the Small Wars Journal answering Milburn�s article. Yeah, it�s a lot of reading, but it�s good stuff, really.)

Levenson�s point, and one that has been made here on occasion as well, is that the kind of warrior worship that has become more and more commonplace is helping to set up a situation where the authority of the civilian government can become increasingly marginalized.

I don�t actually think that the US is in any proximate danger of a military coup.  But as Yingling recognizes, Milburn�s article � published, remember, by a journal from one of the military�s own graduate schools�is just one of many examples of the pressure that military and its fans put on any civilian leadership.  This is yet another warning shot aimed at driving upstarts like President Obama and his administration out of the rooms where real men make decisions.

Dennett says in his book that due to the outsized importance of the role played by religion in the world today, we�d be fools not to subject it to the kind of scrutiny and study other important topics are subjected to. That�s what spell he is looking to break. And the specific point that letting only the insiders of such a phenomenon be the only ones entitled to examine it is also clearly a mistake, since their own biases will ensure anything they find is rather suspect. From the above, it appears we need to remember and remind people of that in other areas as well.

Weekend Book Review - The Monster

Commentary By Ron Beasley

Do you like a good crime novel - a corporate crime novel? If so The Monster: How a gang of predatory lenders and Wall Street bankers fleeced America - and spawned a global crisis by Michael W. Hudson is for you. Unfortunately it's not a fictional novel but the history of the mortgage crisis that may yet bring down the US and world economy.

This book is not directly about the foreclosure crisis but about the seeds of that crisis - deceptive and fraudulent mortgages that left desperate people worse off than before and without a chance of meeting the obligations of the contracts they had signed.

The seeds were initially planted over 30 years ago in the form of deregulation of the financial industry. The seeds sprouted in the late 80s and blossomed into the S&L crisis. Little if anything was learned and the deregulation continued - still more seeds were planted. By the early and mid 90's the players that had escaped the S&L crisis and even some who didn't were back at it writing predatory sub prime loans. The deception and outright fraud was becoming even more prevalent easily circumventing the few new consumer protections. At about the same time mortgage backed securities were a hot commodity. The Wall Street investment banks had stayed clear but a familiar name in the most recent crisis, Lehman Brothers, saw an opportunity it couldn't pass up. As the money to be made in subprime mortgages increased so did the deception and fraud as well as involvement by more and more Wall Street banks.

Like any good crime novel this story has a cast of villains and victims. Of course this is not a novel so the people are real. One of the main characters is Roland Arnall who grew a small Orange County S&L into the mortgage giant Ameriquest. The way it grew was to place sales and profit above all else. There was nothing an Ameriquest salesman would not do to close a loan.

At the downtown L.A. branch, some of Glover's coworkers had a flair for creative documentation. They used scissors, tape, Wite-Out and a photocopier to fabricate W-2s, the tax forms that indicate how much a wage earner makes each year. It was easy: Paste the name of a low-earning borrower onto a W-2 belonging to a higher-earning borrower and, like magic, a bad loan prospect suddenly looked much better. Workers in the branch equipped the office's break room with all the tools they needed to manufacture and manipulate official documents. They dubbed it the "Art Department."

........

What if a customer insisted he wanted a fixed-rate loan, but you could make more money by selling him an adjustable-rate one? No problem. Many Ameriquest salespeople learned to position a few fixed-rate loan documents at the top of the stack of paperwork to be signed by the borrower. They buried the real documents at the ones indicating the loan had an adjustable rate that would rocket upward in two or three years - near the bottom of the pile. Then, after the borrower had flipped from signature line to signature line, scribbling his consent across the entire stack, and gone home, it was easy enough to peel the fixed-rate documents off the top and throw them in the trash.

There was lots of money to be made so neither the investment banks that were packaging the loans or the investors buying them questioned the loans themselves. But the continued growth depended on a continued influx of new loans and rising home values - it was in effect a Ponzi scheme. When the housing bubble deflated in 2007 the Ponzi scheme collapsed.

I recommend The Monster: You can pretend it is fiction and have an enjoyable read or you can learn about how greed driven fraud and deception resulted in the worst economic crisis since the great depression. While Wall Street and the bankers are still quick to blame those who don't make their mortgage payments you will see who the real victims are.

Note:

I received a review copy of this book from the publisher.

Cross posted at The Moderate Voice

Ayn Rand for Dummies

Commentary By Ron Beasley

A few months ago I reviewed the biography of Ayn Rand by Anne C. Heller.  Now I see Ms Rand as a ridiculous sociopath.  One on my favorite writers, John Scalzi, gives us his thoughts on Rand's (in)famous Atlas Shrugged.  Here is a small portion but go read the entire thing.

That said, it�s a totally ridiculous book which can be summed up as Sociopathic idealized nerds collapse society because they don�t get enough hugs. (This is, incidentally, where you can start your popcorn munching.) Indeed, the enduring popularity of Atlas Shrugged lies in the fact that it is nerd
revenge porn � if you�re an nerd of an engineering-ish stripe who
remembers all too well being slammed into your locker by a bunch of
football dickheads, then the idea that people like you could make all those dickheads suffer by �going Galt� has a direct line to the pleasure centers of your brain. I�ll show you! the nerds imagine themselves crying. I�ll show you all! And then they disappear into a crevasse that Google Maps will not show because the Google people are our kind of people,
and a year later they come out and everyone who was ever mean to them
will have starved. Then these nerds can begin again, presumably with the
help of robots, because any child in the post-Atlas Shrugged world
who can�t figure out how to run a smelter within ten minutes of being
pushed through the birth canal will be left out for the coyotes. Which
if nothing else solves the problem of day care.

All of this is fine, if one recognizes that the idealized world Ayn
Rand has created to facilitate her wishful theorizing has no more
logical connection to our real one than a world in which an author has
imagined humanity ruled by intelligent cups of yogurt. This is most
obviously revealed by the fact that in Ayn Rand�s world, a man who
self-righteously instigates the collapse of society, thereby inevitably
killing millions if not billions of people, is portrayed as a messiah
figure rather than as a genocidal prick, which is what he�d be anywhere
else. Yes, he�s a genocidal prick with excellent engineering skills.
Good for him. He�s still a genocidal prick.

Make no mistake - the fans of Ayn Rand are sociopaths, would be sociopaths or dangerous sociopaths if they actually gain positions of responsibility.

PS:  I was one of those engineering-ish types but I knew how to use my slide rule as a weapon, the jocks were all friends of mine and I didn't even have to do their physics homework. I also picked up a copy of Atlas Shrugged because it was in the Science Fiction section of my local book store but unlike John I was so bored after a few pages I quit reading it.

Note: I am still working on a review of 4 of John's excellent books, The Old Man's War quadrilogy (is quadrilolgy a word, not according to spell checker but I like it).

Book Review � The Transformation of War � Martin Van Creveld

By BJ Bjornson



A few years ago, the blogger Fabius Maximus wrote that the secret to accurately predicting the trends of the Iraq War was to:

1. Carefully read Martin van Creveld�s book The Transformation of War (1991).

2. Each week read the Sunday newspaper, or one of the major weekly magazines.

3. Determine what page of the book we are on.

Given Iraq has mostly fallen off the news pages these days, it won�t work quite so well anymore, but you can transfer this easy three-step process to the fighting in Afghanistan and pretty much any other insurgency without too much difficulty.



My reason for referring to the book is thanks to a couple of posts here in recent weeks. The first is one by Steve regarding the fact that the coalition�s killing of civilians creates new insurgents. No big surprise there, but the point that seems to trip a number of people up is the fact that civilian deaths caused by insurgents don�t seem to have anywhere near the same kind of effect.

But in their study, the researchers found that there�s a greater spike in violence after ISAF-caused civilian deaths than after insurgent-caused ones. �An incident which results in 10 civilian casualties will generate about 1 additional IED attack in the following 2 months,� the researchers write. �The effect for insurgents is much weaker and not jointly significant.� In other words, even if the insurgents possess a �total disregard for human life and the Afghan people,� as an ISAF press release reacting to this weekend�s insurgent bombings in Herat put it, Afghans effectively would rather be killed by other Afghans than foreigners.

Creveld had the answer a couple of decades ago, something called the paradox of strength:

Here we are concerned with a situation where the relationship between strength and weakness is skewed; in other words, where one belligerent is much stronger than the other. Under such circumstances, the conduct of war can become problematic even as a matter of definition. Imagine a grown man who purposely kills a small child, even such a one as came at him knife in hand; such a man is almost certain to stand trial and be convicted, if not of murder then of some lesser crime. In the same way, legally speaking, the very existence of belligerence, war, and fighting already implies that the opponents should be of a broadly comparable nature. Not by accident is the bellum itself said to come from due-lum, a combat of two. Where no symmetry exists, violence may still take place, even violence that is organized, purposeful, politically-motivated, and on a fairly large scale. However, usually the name such violence is given is not war but disturbance, uprising, or crime. These are accompanied by their opposite numbers, namely, repression, counterinsurgency, and police work.



. . .



A war waged by the weak against the strong is dangerous by definition. Therefore, so long as the differential in force is not such as to render the situation altogether hopeless, it presents few difficulties beyond the tactical question, namely, how to inflict the maximum amount of damage on the enemy without exposing oneself in open fighting. By contrast, a war waged by the strong against the weak is problematic for that very reason. Given time, the fighting itself will cause the two sides to become more like each other, even to the point where opposites converge, merge, and change places.



. . .



A small, weak force confronting a large, strong one will need very high fighting spirit to make up for deficiencies in the other fields. Still, since survival itself counts as no mean feat, that fighting spirit will feed on every victory, however minor. Conversely, a strong force fighting a weak one for any length of time is almost certain to suffer from a drop in morale, the reason being that nothing is more futile than a string of victories endlessly repeated. Conscious of the problem, such armies have often sought to compensate the troops by providing them with creature comforts; one is reminded of the iced beer that was helicoptered to American units operating in the Vietnamese jungle and, a more absurd example still, the mobile banks that accompanied the Israelis into Lebanon. However, over the long run no amount of pampering can make up for the fact that fighting the weak demeans those who engage in it and, therefore, undermines its own purpose. He who loses out to the weak loses; he who triumphs over the weak also loses. In such an enterprise there can be neither profit nor honor. Provided only the exercise is repeated often enough, as surely as night follows day the point will come when the enterprise collapses.



Another very important reason why, over time, the strong and the weak will come to resemble each other even to the point of changing places is rooted in the different ethical circumstances under which they operate. Necessity knows no bounds; hence he who is weak can afford to go to the greatest lengths, resort to the most underhand means, and commit every kind of atrocity without compromising his political support and, more importantly still, his own moral principles. Conversely, almost anything that the strong does or does not do is, in one sense, unnecessary and, therefore, cruel. For him, the only road to salvation is to win quickly in order to escape the worst consequences of his own cruelty; swift, ruthless brutality may well prove to be more merciful than prolonged restraint. A terrible end is better than endless terror and is certainly more effective. By way of an analogy, suppose a cat-and-mouse situation. Its very size precludes the mouse from tormenting the cat, though it is capable of driving him crazy-a different matter altogether. The cat, however, must kill the mouse at once. Should it fail to do so, then its very size and strength will cause its actions to be perceived as unnecessary; hence-had it been human-as cruel.

There is, of course, much more in the book that feeds into this concept, but the above should give you the gist of the argument. It does, however, quite eloquently explain why the civilian casualties caused by the insurgents don�t seem to merit the same kind of outrage amongst their supporters as the ones the NATO forces cause do. Fighting against the most advanced military forces on the planet with only a tiny fraction of the technology or budget available to them forgives a lot.



That brings me to the other post that got me thinking about this book and the above section in particular, where Dave posted on the slaughter of a NGO medical team, and ended with following:

NGOs are a cheap, vulnerable and valuable adjunct to American style COIN.  I am just surprised that NGOs are not hit more often as the return on investment is much higher than hitting a uniformed patrol.

The answer is that the return on investment of hitting NGOs, at least the truly vulnerable ones, is subject to rapidly diminishing rewards once you take into account the moral dimension of asymmetric warfare. So long as the insurgents are hitting uniformed patrols, the above dynamic of the weak fighting the strong holds true, and the occasional atrocity goes without comment or significant cost to their support. Switch to the softer NGOs, and they no longer look like the brave forlorn hope going up against the big, bad foreign occupiers, but more the savage and hated bullies killing those too weak to defend themselves. Under those circumstances, the population is unlikely to remain loyal, and the insurgents will have defeated themselves. As with most things in such a war, perception is key, even among the insurgents themselves. I seriously doubt young Afghans go to bed dreaming of bravely slaughtering unarmed medical personnel. Attacks on NGOs can easily do more harm to the insurgents than their initial ROI might make apparent.

In any case, I recommend The Transformation of War as a must-read for anyone who wants to understand modern warfare, and particularly modern insurgencies.

Weekend Book Review - World Made By Hand

Commentary By Ron Beasley

Tainter makes this observation; substantial increased costs occurred late, shortly before collapse and were incurred by a population already weakened by a pattern of declining marginal returns. It was not a challenge that caused the collapse but a system that had been unproductively complex was unable to respond.


Tainter says that the only solution for over complexity is simplification but complex systems are unable to voluntarily simplify. Collapse is nothing more than involuntary simplification.

The above is from my review of The Collapse of Complex Societies by Joseph A. Tainter. At the forefront of those predicting the collapse of our civilization is James Howard Kunstler. In a 2004 article Kunstler had this to say:

When the tipping point comes, Americans will be compelled to live very differently than they do today. One leading American social critic, James Howard Kunstler, sees serious political and cultural turmoil up ahead as the way of life Americans have built over the last 60 years begins to break down. With decreasing access to cheap oil, Kunstler sees the fundamentals of industrial agriculture, manufacturing and retail trade changing significantly.


"The whole Archer Daniels Midland model of turning oil into corn into Taco Bell�that whole complex, that system, is really going to be over," says Kuntsler. "We're going to be forced to grow more of our food locally and return to a kind of agriculture that really hasn't been practiced here in a long time. A lot of the land that has only had value as suburban development in the past 30 or 40 years is going to have to be reassigned."


Likewise, Kunstler foresees "the demise of Wal-Mart style, big box, national chains." Companies whose profit margins depend on "merchandise made by factories 12,000 miles away" simply won't function in a world of $100-plus barrels of oil. "We're going to have to seriously reorganize our whole system of retail trade and economy."

Kunstler expanded on this in his book The Long Emergency: Surviving the Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century. But what might the collapse look like? To answer this question Kunstler turns to fiction, World Made by Hand


It is the summer of 2025 and the location is Washington County in upstate New York. There has been a major war in the middle east. Washington DC has been destroyed taking out the US Government and Los Angeles has been destroyed dealing a death blow to the US economy. There is no government, no electricity, no oil, no automobiles, no newspapers or any other communication. Millions have died and the ones that remain spend most of their time producing food. The main character is Robert Earle, a former software salesman turned carpenter/handyman. We also meet a minster and his wife, a group of thugs that work as scavengers, a large landowner who has a fiefdom complete with serfs and a charismatic religious cult leader.
This is all about a group of people trying to create a new civilization on top of the ruins of the old one with very little to work with. Robert Earle is forced into a position of leadership he really doesn't want but he knows that someone has to do it. The subjects are humans so there a good people and bad, many with a lot of ambition and many with just enough to survive. There is love and murder, lawlessness and frontier style justice. As depressing as it sounds there is always a thread of hope.
This novel may have a political message but even those who don't but the message were forced to admit it is a well written story and a good read. It is not what you would expect from an author known primarily for non fiction. Kunstler manages to take us into the hearts and souls of the characters.

Even if you don't agree with the premise I would still recommend the book because it is simply a very good read.  You can find out more about the book here. I can hardly wait for the sequel, The Witch of Hebron: A World Made by Hand Novel, which is coming in September.



Cross posted at The Moderate Voice

Weekend Book Review - The Collapse of Complex Societies

Commentary By Ron Beasley

The implication is clear: civilizations are fragile, impermanent things.

This is the review of a book most of you will not read, The Collapse of Complex Societies. The Author, Joseph Tainter, is an academic and writes like one and it's full of examples and histories of past societies.

Anyone who has studied history knows that societies/civilizations are born and eventually collapse. The collapse of societies have been analyzed individually but Tainter was interested in what those failures of complex societies had in common - he was looking for a unified theory of collapse. He evaluates several complex societies that failed and discovered they all had one thing in common - increasing complexity until there was a sudden simplification or collapse.

The first part of the book is dedicated to the discussion of 11 popular explanations for the collapse of societies.

1. Resource depletion.


2. New resources.


3. Catastrophes.


4. Insufficient response to circumstances.


5. Other complex societies.


6. Intruders


7. Conflict/contradictions/mismanagement.


8. Social dysfunction.


9. Mystical.


10. Chance concatenation of events.


11. Economic explanations.

With the exception of "Mystical" Tainter thinks they all have some validity but come up short because they only look at one or two societies and don't explain how some societies survive the same adversities. Tainter builds on the economic model for his unified collapse theory.

Human societies and political organizations, like all living systems, are maintained by a continuous flow of energy.

The real currency is energy and until the industrial revolution that energy was primarily grain and other foodstuffs to feed people. Today with think of energy as fuel to feed machines but a shortage of that fuel will ultimately result in a shortage of the historical energy.


When we discuss energy sources we have to look at the EROEI - energy return on energy invested. It takes energy to produce energy. As the process to recover energy becomes increasingly complex it takes more and more energy to produce it. When oil was first tapped the EROEI was 100 - for each barrel of oil spent you got 99 barrels you could use to make energy. Compare that to the Alberta tar sands that have an EROEI of 1.6. Ethanol from corn has an EROEI of less than 1 - it takes more energy to produce than you get back when it is used as a fuel. A nuclear power plant has to operate at near 100% for 15 years to produce the energy that was required to build the plant and process the fuel.


Could something similar apply to societal complexity? Is it possible that the benefits of complexity can reach a point where they no longer justify the expense? Tainter supplies four concepts to help answer the above questions:

1. human societies are problem-solving organizations;


2. sociopolitical systems require energy for their maintenance;


3. increased complexity carries with it increased costs per capita; and


4. investment in sociopolitical complexity as a problem-solving response often reaches a point of declining marginal returns.

To demonstrate his concept Tainter looks at three complex societies;

1. Western Roman Empire


2. Maya of the southern lowlands


3. Chacoan Society of the American Southwest

Tainter makes this observation; substantial increased costs occurred late, shortly before collapse and were incurred by a population already weakened by a pattern of declining marginal returns. It was not a challenge that caused the collapse but a system that had been unproductively complex was unable to respond.

Tainter says that the only solution for over complexity is simplification but complex systems are unable to voluntarily simplify. Collapse is nothing more than involuntary simplification. He further states that collapse is �not a fall to some primordial chaos, but a return to the normal human condition of lower complexity�an economizing process� - it's not a catastrophe. I would guess that the millions (billions)of people who are displaced or will die might disagree with that conclusion.

What we see today is a sociopolitical system that requires more and more resources to maintain but is unable to respond to challenges in a meaningful or productive way. Climate Change, Peak oil, peak water, peak soil and peak many other resources most of us wouldn't recognize are the challenges.
Cross Posted at The Moderate Voice.

The Bottom of the Fox: A True Story of Love, Devotion & Cold-Blooded Murder

Commentary By Ron Beasley

Newshoggers friend Shaun Mullen has a new book, The Bottom of the Fox: A True Story of Love, Devotion & Cold-Blooded Murder.  I'm going to pick up a copy and I will do a weekend review.  But there is no need for you to wait, you can pick up a copy here.

Eddie Joubert�s midlife crisis arrived right on schedule. The former
truck driver and Teamsters Union organizer fell hard for the Poconos, a
resort area in Pennsylvania where he bought a rundown tavern that became
a magnet for an eclectic clientele that ranged from world-class jazz
musicians to bikers to returning Vietnam War veterans.

But the
Poconos held a dark secret. When Joubert was hacked to death, it was yet
another in a series of unsolved murders and puzzling deaths involving
hippies, gays and other people whom the authorities cared little about.
This is because they were considered to be lowlifes.

The Bottom
of the Fox lays bare that secret for the first time in detailing the
astonishing level of violence in an area known for resorts and verdant
woodlands while revealing how evil doers could literally get away with
murder.

Weekend Book Review - Kaboom: Embracing The Suck In A Savage Little War

Commentary By Ron Beasley

I graduated from college in June, 1968. This was a few months after the Tet Offensive. The United States still had a draft and I was caught in it. I received my draft notice in September and I was ordered to report in November. If I went the draft - two year route it was almost guaranteed that I would end up as a grunt in Vietnam so I went down to the local recruiting office and enlisted for Army Intelligence. I gave up another year of my life to possibly save it. I never saw Vietnam or combat. I served with other college graduates on the frontiers of freedom in downtown Munich, Germany. Most of us opposed the war and opposed being in the Army. We might not have been in or near combat but we had a relationship I had not experienced before and have not experienced since.



Fast forward forty years and some things have changed but others are the same. There is no draft but there is a futile war managed by men who don't know what they are doing. The situation on the ground in Iraq is the subject of Kaboom: Embracing the Suck in a Savage Little War by Matt Gallagher. Kathrine Tomlinson of California Literary Review tries to compare Gallagher's book to other war literature - she misses the point. Ms Tomlinson has never been in the military or close to war and doesn't understand that this is not a book about war but a book about soldier's relationships in war. It's about what they refer to in the military as esprit de corps. It's about those personal relationships - looking out for others in your unit regardless of politics because of the shared "suck".


So who is Matt Gallagher?

I was born into a class, in a time, to a people, in a place where someone else's sons and daughters served in the armed forces. While I wasn't a politician's boy or a spurner of old money like in the fables, a child of two lawyers still qualified as a Fortunate Son in most parts of the world. I was raised in that curious subculture of Americana enslaved to emo music, new friend requests on Facebook, and lots and lots of Internet porn-part of the generation that the "An Army of One" slogan supposedly appealed to, due to our obsession with all things self. I didn't come from the breadbasket of rural America or the urban ghettos like most of my men, and I didn't seek out the military for glory or for country. I came from the West Coast suburbs, modern white collar contentment at its most gnarled and escapist, and happened to read too many damn books about soldiers.

While Gallagher was from a different world he easily became one with his men - that is esprit de corps or shared "suck" at work. One of the things they shared was a disdain for incompetent field officers and civilians. You can appreciate that if you have been in the military but even if you haven't you have probably had experience with incompetent middle mangers in the civilian world.


In December, 2007 Gallagher and his platoon, The Gravediggers, found themselves NE of Baghdad in Saba al-Bor doing counterinsurgency as part of "the surge".

Just another day in the Suck. Just another day of counterinsurgency tedium, solving a nonconventional, nation-building, political problem with a conventional military used to nation destroying that sometimes forgot it was trying to be nonconventional. Just another day of our dismount teams walking with me between creeping Strykers, winding through the back alleys and alley backs of Saba al-Bor. Just another day of talking to the locals and listening to their multitude of gripes, bitches, and complaints. Just another day of "mistah, mistah, gimme--"
"Please, sir, I want some more."

Gallagher gives is a first hand account of the nuts and bolts of the counterinsurgency effort during the "surge". He does very little editorializing and I will leave it up to you to decide the wisdom and effectiveness of the policy.


More important for me was not the war itself but the relationship of men thrown together 24 hours a day, seven days a week in an alien and hostile place far from home.


The majority of Americans have no idea what war is all about. I recommend Kaboom because it may well help in a small way facilitate that understanding.  It's also a good read as Matt Gallagher also has a pretty good way with words and adds some humor to what should be a humorless situation.
Cross posted at The Moderate Voice





Note:

I received a copy of this book from the publisher for this review.

Books which influenced me most

by Ian Welsh

Seems there is a blogger meme going around about naming the books which influenced you the most. This is a hard one to resist, so I'm not going to, though I know I'm certainly not going to "win" this, as my tastes are not high brow. While I've read Plato and Nietzsche and so on, they were not major influences on my thinking.

Jane Jacobs, "The Economy of Cities", "Cities and the Wealth of Nations", "The Death and Life of Great American Cities". These three books, especially the first two, may have influenced my thoughts on economics more than any others. Jacobs willingness to throw standard economics overboard and to look at particular details of how the world actually works on a basic building block level, and her mastery not of detail, but of the lessons which can be drawn from detail, made a big impression on me. She certainly wasn't right about everything, but she grabbed a few strings, pulled hard, and wasn't scared by the fact that what came up didn't match orthodoxy.

Bullfinch's Mythology. I spent the better part of grade 4 reading every book on mythology I can find, and this is just a stand in for all of them. I don't remember the names of most of them, but to this day I remember the stories: the Golden Fleece, Leda and the Swan, Ragnarok, and so on. Other youngsters had favorite superheroes or sports stars, I had favorite Gods (Athena, Artemis and Odin). My twitter icon is Odin with his two ravens, Hugin and Mugin (thought and memory). I seriously considered naming this blog "the Cassandra Complex".

Robert Parker's Spencer Novels, in particular "Early Autumn". Light easy reads, but Parker had a message about how to live life. Be good at something (it doesn't matter what), know what you will do and won't do, figure out the traits the person you want to be has, and work until you have those traits. When I was 21, and read all the novels published to that point in a couple weeks, that was a message I needed to hear.

Thomas Kuhn, "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions". The cycle of how paradigms are accepted, filled out and then overthrown enthralled me. Read this one alongside Randall Collins' "The Sociology of Philosophies" to get an overview of how intellectual networks form, how they require change, and how intellectuals cluster into networks with "great" intellectuals tending to be major nodes.

Randall Collins, "An Introduction to non-obvious Sociology" and "Interaction Ritual Chains".  Collins meshes together a theory of how symbols are formed and how
interaction empowers or disempowers people into a construct which
explains important parts of phenomena as diverse as fandom, religion and
marriage. These books and his "Weber: A Skeleton Key" introduced me to
conflict theory, to Weber and to and in combination with Kuhn, helped
me understand not just how much "reality" is socially constructed (I
knew that at a young age) but some of the mechanisms by which it is
socially constructed.

"God Stalk", by P C Hodgell. Odds are you have neither heard of this book, nor read it, but in my teen years I probably read it over 30 times. The way the protagonist, Jame, manipulated belief to create and destroy minor gods fascinated me, but so did the fact that there was a reality which could not be manipulated, a bedrock where belief did not matter�it was what it was. Likewise her struggle to both be honorable and to live the life she wanted struck a cord. Raised as I was with a belief in noblesse oblige and that to be a man was to have a code of honor, Jame's dilemma, though written in the high relief of fantasy, seemed all too familiar.

Andrew Vachss "Burke" Novels. In my early twenties I was down and out, bloody fingernails away from the street, working at awful, humiliating menial jobs and suffering from the beginnings of an illness which would wind up costing me my health for the remainder of my twenties. My world was an ugly one: rooming houses, loading docks, screaming bosses, minimum wage and the possibility of a future which offered nothing better. I would look in the mirror and see myself at 50, older, wrinkled, worn and without hope. Vachss showed me a world even grittier than mine, which his protagonist and friends managed to live in with integrity: true to themselves. Certainly I was no martial artist, or clever ex-con, or mechanical genius, but still, the sense of despair, of making the smallest of differences, of the only thing that mattered being having your own rules and sticking to them, spoke to me. If Burke could do it, if he could use a moral code to wring dignity and meaning out of the world, so could I.

"The Second Sex" by Simone de Beauvoir. The second time I went to university, I became fascinated by feminism�by the anger, the hatred and the sense of injustice that many of the feminists I met seemed to ball up inside themselves, like eternally burning pitch�black and consuming. I took a number of courses on feminism, but in none of them was I told to read The Second Sex. Instead, a couple years later, I stumbled on it, and everything they had been trying to say clicked into place as I read Beauvoir. The Second Sex summed it all up and said it better than any of the feminists who came after. Beauvoir was angry, make no mistake, but her anger was kept on tight leash, it did not consume her, but instead served as fuel and illumination. Since then I've rarely read any feminist and not thought "Beauvoir said it better, decades ago."

"The Art of War", Sun-Tzu and "The Japanese Art of War", by Tomas Cleary. I read these two books around the same time, and they changed how I thought not just about strategy but about how to think and act. The principles of formlessness and concentration, the Japanese concept of how one masters an art by mastering the details till one forgets them, and the Buddhist concept of acting without placing a censor before one's actions all enthralled me. This lead to a further fascination with Buddhism, Taoism and the different ideas and paths towards, not so much enlightenment, but seeing the world clearly by seeing it without preconceptions. Later I was to conclude that if you aren't, indeed, enlightened, the best you can do is to choose the paradigms or glosses you place over the world, knowing that you are doing so, and knowing the advantages and limitations of whatever model you are using.

Barbara Hambly, The Darwath Trilogy. Not great fiction, not even great fantasy, these three books nonetheless made a huge impression on me because Hambly's theory of knowledge and power resonated with me. I have come to accept as true her maxim that people, things and even ideas give themselves to you when you love them for themselves, and not for what they can do for you. I have used this theory when leading teams, when making friends, and when learning new fields, and when I have been able to execute it, it has never failed me.

There are more books which have influenced me, of course. For much of my life I read at least a book a day, and sometimes more, and even now I read a couple a week and wish I read more (the internet sucks away my time and I sometimes wish it had never been invented.)
Still, these books have all helped make me who I am today. They have laid the bricks of my intellectual foundation and have taught me about what it means to create a life worth living in a universe which has the meaning we give to it, and nothing more.

What are some books which have influenced you, how have they influenced you, and why?