lpm100's reviews
711 reviews

Book Review
Almost Black
2/5 stars
"Some interesting thoughts, but not a keeper"
********
Of the book:

-327 pps/36 chapters≈ 9.1pps/chapter
-No index
-No bibliography (forgiveable)
-NEEDS AN EDITOR (its ≠it's)
-5~6 hours reading time

The best part of this book was the attributed quotes at the beginning of every chapter.

Our author decided to pull a confidence trick and see if he could get into medical school with only mediocre medical scores if he posed as black.

The fine print is that:

1. This book was written in 2017 about events that happened in about 1998. (A book written 6 years ago about something that happened 25 years ago.) It may be that after the recent supreme Court rulings that all of this book is meaningless/ historical color from a different era.

2. It was written by some extremely atypical, Americanized Indians. (Most Indians get married by arranged marriage, even Stateside; I've NEVER heard of any of them having children out of wedlock. But, Jojo appears to be unmarried with no children and his sister is a babymama with two children named "Catherine" and "Spencer" and no father identified/in sight.)

3. His undergraduate grades and test scores just may have had external validity; he finally managed to get in the medical school, but he did not stay.

*******
1. The ineluctable conclusion (in spite of this author's left-wing bent) is that there just are not as many blacks of high cognitive ability as there are whites/Asians--and that educational institutions will lower their standards in order to get them there.

2. It may be even worse than it seems, because: the goal of medical schools was to get 3,000 black people enrolled in medical schools, and as I look at an article written just in 2021, they haven't even gotten close.

3. I don't want to make it look worse than it is, but there's not only the issue of getting in medical school.... But STAYING in medical school. As well as passing your boards and getting a residency. (Remember that our author did get in with the grades of what may have been a more typical black person, but he did not stay; if he could not, then what percentage of blacks actually manage to finish?)

4. The author is sanctimonious in ONLY the way that Clueless White People can be

a. (~p.182) He claims being stopped by the police for driving while black. In reality, a hugely disproportionate amount of violent crime and theft really are done by black people. (You been to Chicago / Detroit / Baltimore lately?)

A rational officer would look in the places that are most likely to have crime.  The author's popcorn psychoanalysis that: "Racists are small-minded, fearful people driven by the desperate need to blame others for what they see as their lot in life" just is not accurate in this case.

Maybe these people really are just aware of their surroundings and responding appropriately.

b. (p.211) Jojo talks about being physically ejected from a store by security. But, if you actually work a shift or two as a cashier (I have), then you will see that 99.9% of your retail theft is black people. (Seems like every time there's some kind of civil protest by some black people it immediately turns into a bunch of looting. I wonder if it was a looting exercise that turned into a civil protest or the other way around?)

5. I have a hard time believing some of Jojo's, um, romantic assertions. The first thing is that this guy looks like Shri Thanedar (emphatically not the epitome of sexiness). 

And he's talking about these nice looking Persian women that are interested in him, but..... Middle Eastern people prefer to marry lighter than darker. (When is the last time you saw an Arab or a Persian woman with a black guy?)

He's also talking about the play that he got as a black guy.

And, I guess a lot of black guys can be expected to get a lot of play in the case that:

i. They're an athlete/musician / other celebrity;
ii. They're a normal guy, but interested in White Baby Elephants.
*******
Other thoughts:

1. This book was pretty easy to read, in the author had an impressive memory for names and conversations.

2. Okay to read, but not worth a reread.

The humor was sometimes good, sometimes labored and the author was just too cocky.

3. One would think that he would have been more judicious with his choice of presentation given the negative perceptions of frat boys. (If he could have afforded her speaking fee with all of the money that he bragged about his parents having, he should have hired somebody like Ann Coulter to help him craft a funny book. Her humor never gets stale.)

Also the fact that he was a wealthy but lazy f-off really did not help us readers to be sympathetic.

4. He got lots of interviews from lots of different schools, and  he shared the letters with us (ordinarily you would not be able to get all of them in one place).

The general pattern was that they got him there for an interview, and figured out that he was not black and didn't say anything - - they just put him on the waiting list and let the application die. 

(As an aside: I don't know how anybody could mistake the author for a black guy.)
I know what Tamil Indians look like when I see them because I have seen so many, and I could probably have guessed who he was from a distance of 500 ft. 

What must other black people have thought when they saw him?

For that matter, with the desperation of Indians to get into medical school, is this really the first time this trick has been played? (And with the last name like "Chokalingam," how long could it have stayed a secret? If he had applied with the last name like Jackson or Washington--90% black--he might have been able to fool someone.)

5. It's also interesting that it seems like they put a lot of black people at medical schools at work trying to recruit other black people. (Some of them are actual physicians, but others are just EdDs.) This was a joke that one of my professors told me that: "It seems like every time they have guys like you complete a PhD, instead of having them do original research they write grants to recruit other guys that look like you."

6. Only for deeper thinkers is affirmative action actually detrimental to blacks; EVERY TIME there is some odd black person in a professional position, it's going to be impossible for him to prove that he is as smart as anybody else and was not an "affirmative action admit."

I can see at least one of the characters in this book developing a hatred for black people because of their perceived unfair advantages. (So that's why I have such weird experiences with Asian indians!)

And then you multiply that by a million other Asian/Indian kids that are trying to get in the medical school who feel that they have been treated unfairly, and see what it adds up to.  ("Affirmative Action, an International Comparison," by Thomas Sowell has shown how neighbors can be turned into bitter enemies over racial "balancing" policies. In many countries in the world.)

Verdict: not recommended at the price of more than $4.

*******

Quotes:

1. If you're not failing now and again, it's a sign you're not doing anything very innovative.

2. Warfare is the art of deception.

3. At various points in our lives, or on a quest, and for reasons that often remain obscure, we are driven to make decisions which prove with hindsight to be loaded with meaning.

4. If you want to make peace with your enemy, you have to work with your enemy. Then he becomes your partner

5. Be sure that whatever you are is you.

6. Ask me no questions and I'll tell you no fibs.

7. Abandon hope all ye who enter here

8. Healing is a matter of time, but it's sometimes similarly a matter of opportunity.

9. Men still have to be governed by deception.

10. Guard yourself from lying semicolon there is he who deceives and there is he who is deceived.

11. The greatest deception men suffer is from their own opinions.

12. History is a bunch of lies we have all agreed upon.

13. Never try to win by force what can be won by deception.

14. If you want to trick the world, tell the truth.

15. Sometimes it's the journey that teaches you a lot about your destination.

16. The main difference between a cat and a lie is that a cat only has nine lives.

17. If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything.

18. Every truth has two sides; it is as well to look at both, before we commit ourselves to either.

19. It is one of the superstitions of the human mind to have imagined that virginity could be a virtue.

20. Maybe the falcon was trying to tell the falcon or something he didn't know. (Author's quip. Riff on a William Butler Yates' "The Second Coming.")

Book Review
Stolen Youth
5/5 stars
"Workarounds for parents who want to save their kids from being damaged by woke institutional capture."
*******
Of the book:

-9 chapters plus a conclusion in two parts.
-261 pps prose
-26.1 pps/chapter
-610 point citations. 61/chapter. 2.3/page (=very well sourced)
-Need not be read in order
-No index
*******
This book does not start out trying to trace the causes of a crumbling society, and that is fine because there are other books for that. 

It is more of a practical guide to describe the extent of the problem and offer practical suggestions of how to sit it out and to keep your own kids out of it.

The entire book reads as lightly as a broadside, but I will skip to the conclusion and tell the reader that there are two options presented (we have two different authors, and two different conclusions):

∆∆∆1. Benedict option (enclavism/ retreat from society into a tight-knit community):

a. Learn how to homeschool, working in tandem with other like-minded parents; 

b. Send your kids to private schools;

c. Minimize the television and internet footprint in your home (no video games, TV once a week, and older cartoons).

∆∆∆2. Selective flight option (take children from woke spaces while still participating in overall culture and engaging more in local politics)

a. Be present in school and volunteer where possible

b. Use freedom of information act requests to uncover withheld information.

c. Link up with other like-minded parents

d. Join groups like Moms For Liberty, et al

e. Reinforce your values at home and don't assume the school system is doing it for you.

Whom might this book NOT be for?

If you know of names such as: Matt Walsh, Abigail Shrier, Ben Shapiro, Haidt-Lukianoff, Ryan T. Anderson, etc ..... then this book may not be for you.  You already know how bad the situation is. You can update with more specific examples, but this book is just so much stamp collecting at that point. (Maybe you could learn a few things about keeping your kids shielded.)

Whom IS it for?

-Parents who are wondering why and how schools have gotten so......creepy....without their noticing. 

-Parents who want a good defensive/offensive strategy so that they don't have to get involved in the banality of a decaying society.
*******
Bethany Mandel is my kind of mother/person: 

-Married.
-Six children (all one father--her husband)
-Orthodox Jewish (convert)
-A case study in resilience (her mother died when she was 16 years old and she had to make the end of life decisions)


Familiar topics (backbone of each chapter):

1. Children are the target of leftists because a lot of them don't have their own.

2. The covid Hysteria / pandemic was about control more than anything, and the same "social distancing" standards were not applied during the corresponding summer riots.

3. Nut balls from teachers' colleges go on to teach in high schools, and that is a mechanism of transfer of the infestation.

4. Even libraries and books are not safe because the professional societies that guide them have been through the woke meatgrinder at university. Of course they are happy to censor books from people like JK Rowling because she is a "trans exclusionary radical feminist."

5. Focus on politics is corrosive to the overall mission of an organization, medicine specifically in this case. (If people can't give conferences because they are not racially balanced, then no medicine is actually discussed.)

6. Transgenderism is the topic of the hour. Lots of recapitulation of Abigail Shrier. ("Live son, dead daughter" game.) Loudoun County Virginia: one student pretends to be trans and rapes not one but two different girls and two different schools.

7. Drag queen story hours and extremely precocious sex education are gigantic grooming exercises.

8. People like to hide messages behind "the children." 

9. A very notable chapter that describes Bethany's mother's death at 16 and father's suicide 3 years later, and her learning to become an adult as a result.
******

Second Order Thoughts:

1. It sure does seem like when you have Strange White People involved in some morass with each other, EVERYBODY ELSE has to be part of that problem. 

-WWI/WWII was them fighting each other, and somehow EVERYBODY ELSE had to be involved. 

-The Woke/Critical Race Theory Hysteria, much like Communism /Marxism is some of them fighting each other (for primacy of ideas), but it seems like black people have to get involved in this as weapons/chips/mascots/guinea pigs.

2. The author aptly points out that one thing the left wing nut jobs do not do is have children, and so they must indoctrinate / destroy other people's children.(p.9--"If you look at birth rates by ideological persuasion, you will see that it's not progressive having kids; they're entrenched in anti-natalist propaganda.")


3. "Why?" questions.

a. Will this burn itself out? (I think that when we were going through the 60s nobody thought that that time would eventually pass, but it did.)

b. All civilizations and institutions rot; Different pathways lead to the same destination. (The Great leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution in China were Western imports to a historically unbiddably closed country.)  

Can the rot be arrested, and if you are able to stop your own children from getting involved, what does it mean if s/he is the only sane person for miles?. What happens to the next generation?

c. A lot of these professional organizations have overreached really badly with things like COVID. Could they lose their credibility? (p.163)

4. Mandel likes to imagine that using children to push some radical left-wing political agenda is new, when it is not. Cultural Revolution in China, and the Red Guards (average age, 14)/ Hitler Youth in Germany are textbook historical examples.

5. It seems like people who do jobs that have a very heavy empirical component tend to be conservative. Mandel notes that "67% of general surgeons and 65% of anesthesiologists are Republican, while 32% of pediatricians and 24% of psychiatrists are." And of course we know that academics are usually about 1% conservative - - but when you work a job where you don't have to live under the threat of going out of business/ have no consequences for getting anything wrong/ everything is a floating abstraction... What else do you expect?

6. Professional organizations (ideological and institutional capture) show up again and again.  American Academy of Pediatrics.  American Library Association. National Education Association. 

7. If it wasn't this silliness, would it just be any other? (This is a conclusion reached by Richard Dawkins and Helen Joyce; during an interview, Dawkins conceded that his vendetta against the church had been a life wasted because if people weren't being religious in "that" way, then they would just be religious transgender activists.)

8. (Unity of opposites; once you generate one thing, you generate its exact opposite at that moment.) Yascha Mounk has suggested that all of this excessive woke indoctrination will actually create MORE white supremacists.  I think that prioritizing mediocre non-white people for things that require technical competence, such as surgery, will actually intensify the association between "whiteness" and competence.

9. I wonder if it's by design, but: black people end up taking the most damage from these policies that are meant to help them. People can't police areas because it's politically incorrect, and more black people end up getting killed. CPS cannot talk to black families, so more black kids end up getting beaten to death in a home. Everybody wants unlimited abortion access, but black people kill their own babies at a rate four times what white people do. (Thank God they take the lead experimenting on each other with all the damages that come from "transitioning.")

10. Bethany Mandel is one more in a lot of people that have suffered from some extreme trauma and converted to Orthodox Judaism desiring its structure. (It seems like all of us that convert / try to convert are working through some type of genuine trauma.) She's also an example of how children that are shaken up badly earlier in life succeed a lot more often than you would think, the same way children who have had every advantage die of trauma if somebody makes a mean face at them.

Quotes:

1. [Gender Identity] also isn't consistent: the race you're born into decides everything, but your gender can change at anytime.

2. For those of you keeping score at home: "Peter Pan,"/ "Dumbo,"/ and "Lady and the Tramp" are out. Gender-bending Muppets are in.

3. .... a state sponsored pedophile cabal carried out in Germany called "The Kentler experiment"... named after psychologist Helmut Kentler, whose idea it was to hand over homeless teenagers to foster parents who happened to be known pedophiles.

4. Another organization in Indiana was recently exposed for hosting a camp for children as young as eight that featured an instructor who encourages children to explore gender identity, kink, and condom demonstrations.

5. We know from brain research how influential first experiences are for mapping the brain, which should explain how year after year, we're seeing fewer and fewer young people interested in sex, dating, and committed relationships.

6. There is no easy option to avoid the avalanche of indoctrination being aimed at children.

7. They do not want kids under any circumstances to be strong, happy, independent, able to think for themselves and look after themselves. You will never have a revolution, or at least a manipulable citizenry that seeks paternalistic government, with people like that.

8. It becomes a cool status symbol to self identify with any number of mental illnesses.

9. We might define weakness as a trauma inflation regime.

Verdict: Recommended

New Vocabulary:

Duper's delight
Guilty grin
Arielle Scarcella

Book Review
"What the Dead Know"
5+/5 stars
"A Real Life Kay Scarpetta"
******
I have read one Patricia Cornwell book, and I have to say that she is good but she has nothing on this author. 

And that is because Barbara Butcher gathered all of her stories from Real Life Experience.

This is more than a dry recitation of facts, as there is enough biography / narrative arc to keep it from becoming that. 

And all of this in only probably 3 to 4 hours worth of reading time.

We have as our tour guide through a seldom glimpse reality: a lesbian former alcoholic/drug addict (and post-retirement actress/writer) that came into this job as a third career in New York City. She started in 1992 and retired in 2015 after she was ejected by Bill deBlasio.

After that, she was admitted to a mental hospital for quite some time-- even receiving electrical convulsive therapy.


Acquired facts:

1a. "Homicide" can be a misleading word. If someone is that close to death because of blocked arteries and you walk up and sneeze on him and he dies...... The cause is still homicide caused by atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease. (The subtext is that you just cannot readily believe what you read in a newspaper about said topic.)

1b. Homicide≠murder. Knowing the difference requires ascertaining justification and intent.

2. It has been my experience working that funeral directors tend to have problems with alcoholism. Alcoholism and drug addiction are running themes throughout this book (including the author's own alcohol / drug abuse). I guess it's just something about working in death industries. Also, depression, as a result of working with dead people all day everyday.

This book just confirmed something that I've already known for a long time.

3. Medical examiner≠ forensic pathologist. Forensic pathologists figure out the cause of death. Medical examiners figure out how.

4. The fortune is told again that somebody is adopted of unknown parents and the mental problems of their parents resurface in a big way. (Jerry Strohmeyer. Etc.) Daphne Abdela was the adopted psychopath featured in this book. It's not hard to believe that adopted children will disproportionately have mental problems.

5. It's a very bad idea to find your sense of meaning from your job, and that is because once the job finishes, a person is in danger of losing his/her life meaning--as actually happened to the author. All it took was one corrupt administration - - deBlasio- and the author lost her job and spent months in a mental hospital recovering.

6. (p.53) between 1992 and 2015, the years of the author's career, homicides declined from 2,397 to 285 (88%).

Best chapters....

All of the book was good, but I'd have to say the most interesting chapters were:

1. Hoarders. It happened enough times that she had to include a chapter of people that hoarded so much that the door to the apartment couldn't even be opened. Another of two Collyer brothers that had 120 tons of product in their apartment.

2. Suicides. (Quotes 10, 11, 12.)


Quotes:

1. Reuven raced back to the office where he fielded calls from his girlfriend and his wife. Mrs Reuven thought that he worked the day shift; His girlfriend thought he worked 4-12s.

2. People can handle the truth, but not uncertainty. The things they imagine are almost always more painful than the facts.

3. Neighborhood kids would bring me their roadkill finds, and I'd dissect them in front of an eager audience.

4. Relatives sometimes claimed that the decedent was carrying $1,000 and that First responders had stolen it. It was always $1,000, for some reason.

5. Dead men *do* tell tales. You just have to listen.

6. Nothing ruins a beautiful theory like an ugly fact.

7. The most popular of the solitary pleasures was auto-erotic asphyxiation, often mistaken for suicide..... Some people gratify themselves by wrapping their bodies and latex, breathing only through a tiny straw, which can clog.

8. (About her *coworker* Nathan): it was the same kind of need that made him smoke crack. Nathan was a junkie full of dreams.

9. But I knew better - - gang and drug-related murders were rarely solved, and by the time they were, the perks were already dead, victims of their lifestyle. It was an occupational hazard.

10. That is the ultimate loneliness, when you're only available friend is the stranger who just investigated your death. (The author went to a synagogue to ask the rabbi to say kadish for a suicide decedent.)

11. The bodies at the Marriott tended to ricochet off the balcony rails and the elevator shaft, breaking into pieces before landing at the feet of shocked and terrified guests. That wintry afternoon, I accidentally stepped on a piece of the man's liver while walking through his scattered remains.

12. I have seen scores of suicides.....they fell roughly into two categories: angry and sad. The angry suicides died publicly, in violence, noise and blood - - with a bang, not a whimper. The sad suicides were quieter, more private. An overdose of pills at home in bed over the end of a marriage, carbon monoxide in the garage after years of loneliness, slashed wrists after the death of a loved one.
 
13. When everything around you is chaos, you focus on what you can control, no matter how seemingly unimportant that is.

Vocab :

cerebellar ataxia
stippling
rigor mortis
livor mortis
algor mortis
Collyer brothers
fascinoma
forensic odontology

Verdict: Strongly recommended. You cannot fail to get something from this book

Book Review
The Righteous Mind
5/5 stars
"Thought-provoking words from intellectual practical conservative"
*******
Of the book:

-12 chapters
-315 pages of prose, 26.25 pps/chapter
-663 point citations; ≈2.1/page
-≈504 references in Bibliography
-excellent index 

It's a good thing that I'm one of those people that believes in finishing a book, because I would have to say that the most interesting chapters came in Part 3 of the book.

My last few books on Evolutionary Psychology had really shattered my faith in the field, but this book helped me renew it 

Many pop psychology books quote the same experiments and make the same observations, just in different orders and with different emphases.  So, if you had facts A/b/C(!) in the first book, then the second one might have c/B(!)/a, and bingo! 

You've got a new book!

For Parts I&II, there is overlap in that way.

Also, as par for the course:

1. Plenty of experiments that illustrate some point in an interesting way, but that may have zero external validity (p.181);

2. Lots of data is gathered by survey, and the first page of any Statistics book is that surveys are not reliable data because of self-selection.

Author talks about these effects and he doesn't bother to quantify (not in a single one of these 663 point citations that make up the book). Does this effect make people 1% more likely to do something? 50%? 200%?

And, even given that, if the values are statistically significant, are they practically significant?

*******
The takeaway messages that I get from this book are that: 

1. The human tribalism (Democrats v. Republicans / Confucianists v. Legalists/etc) is something like a side effect gone awry of the evolutionary benefits of living in tribes.

2. Similarly to the way that knowing that human beings have five tastes (sweet, sour, salty, bitter, umami) doesn't allow you to work forward to predict Indian/Chinese/etc cuisine..... knowing that you can break people's moral foundations down onto 6 axes is really just so much stamp collecting that doesn't tell you what moral position they may take. But you can always offer enough ex post facto explanations to make you happy.   

And it seems to be a special case that shows up generally in the field of Evolutionary Psychology: you can explain anything you want, but going forward and making predictions is another kettle of fish entirely (hence my boredom with books on this field).

*******
Second order thoughts:

1. When Einstein came up with special relativity, I think he went on record as saying that all of the pieces were already there and it was just a matter of time before somebody put them together. And that he was fortuitously that someone.

I am reading in a variety of books over and over again that:

a. (p.213) Phenotype can correspond to other intellectual structures just by accident. If foxes bred for tameness can have white patches of fur and curly tails after 9 generations....... Then why couldn't it be that lower IQ, criminal impulses, and short time horizons correspond to African phenotypes?

b. (p.214) Group selection really is/can be a thing. If individual selection is not the best way to create chickens that lay the most eggs, but instead selecting *groups* of chickens that produce the most eggs..... Couldn't it be that there is group selection on certain races of people? (Say, ones that were bred on plantations? Or ones that spent centuries in European ghettos before the Jewish Emancipation?)

The human genome is very cheap to sequence in its entirety for any given human being.

All the tools are there to bring us to some extremely uncomfortable conclusions about race in the United States (as well as elsewhere).

2. This book answers a lot of my questions about my religious journey in the past 10 years (into Orthodox Judaism). People in these communities don't behave religiously with respect to interpersonal interactions-- although they might never think of consuming cholov stam dairy.  But, someone would be a fool to think that this religion was useful in that way; this version of Judaism is primarily about the community relations of an ETHNICITY of people. Providence and Jewish law play only a supporting/secondary/optional role to that. 

3. (p.305). It is ironic that liberals accept Darwinian evolution and reject intelligent design with respect to Biology. But, they reject natural evolution with respect to allowing markets to generate services and putting their faith in intelligent design by the government.

4. Maybe these observations are just so much trivia. Ultimately, societies die and it's just the nature of the thing: it's not like some voice of reason can convince us to disagree more constructively. In the same way that even if you convince a patient to eat healthy every day of his life, he will still die. So, too, for societies.
*******
Otherwise, the book has a lot of resonances to ones that were written MANY years ago that I myself have read:

1. Daniel Kahneman, "Thinking, Fast and Slow." System 1 and System 2.

2. Malcolm Gladwell, "Blink." Visceral reactions to things based on System 1 evaluations.

3. Jonah Lehrer', "How We Decide." Emotion and reason do not operate on two separate tracks.

4. Chabris and Simons,"The Invisible Gorilla." Different types of mind blindness when engaged in tasks. 

5. Richard Nisbett, "The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently...and Why." Self-explanatory.

6. Cochran/Harpending "The 10,000 Year Explosion." Human evolution has accelerated exponentially in the last 10,000 years. Gene-culture coevolution.

7. Michael Shermer "The Believing Brain." The human brain as a hair trigger detection device heavily weighted toward false positives. Religion is the ultimate creation/attribution of agency to explain random events.

8. Thomas Sowell "A Conflict of Visions." Human beings have either a "constrained" or "unconstrained" vision of reality. 

9. Thomas Sowell "Race and Culture." He brings up the concept of cultural capital, which.

This particular book adds the least value for people who are regular readers of books that talk about human perception (like the present reviewer) and the most value in its expansion on the interface between genes, environment and civilization.
*******
Many of these experiments I've read in other books.

1. Ventral medial prefrontal cortex injury In decision-making.

2. Julie and Mark are the brother and sister who decided to experience sex (along with several other "harmless taboo" stories).

3. The horse and rider metaphor to illustrate the conflict between reason and emotion.

4. Affect primacy. Affective priming. (And that funnels into "implicit bias."). First principle of moral psychology: intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second.

5. Necker cube. Muller-Lyer illusion.

Verdict: Recommended at more than the price of $10. It's a keeper.

Good quotes

- (p.75) "The social world is Glauconian. Appearance is usually far more important than reality."

-(p.216) "....74,000 years ago.... We know that almost all humans were killed off at some point during this time... every person alive today is descended from just a few thousand people who made it through one or more population bottlenecks."

-(p.257) "...in other words, the very ritual practices that the New Atheists dismiss as costly, inefficient, and irrational turn out to be a solution to one of the hardest problems humans face: cooperation without kinship."

 -(xii) "People who devote their lives to studying something often come to believe that the object of their fascination is the key to understanding everything.... This is one of those books."

-(p.272) "If you think about religion as a set of beliefs about supernatural agents, you're bound to misunderstand it. ... But if you take a Durkheimian and Darwinian approach to morality, you get a very different picture. You see that religious practices have been binding our ancestors into groups for tens of thousands of years."

-(p.207) "....a word is not a relationship between a sound and an object. It is an agreement among people who share a joint representation of the things in their world and who share a set of conventions for communicating with each other about those things."

Chapter Synopses:

1. Attempts to determine whether or not morality is innate, rational (self-constructed by children on the basis of their experiences with harm), or empirical (from childhood learning).

2. (Has the perfume of Jonah Lehrer's "How We Decide" about it.) Who is in control here? The heart or the head? Attempts to disambiguate between three competing theories. Sociobiology is renamed as "evolutionary psychology." Yes, we know that decisions are an emotion before they are a reason. Judgement≠justification.
 
3. Expansion of the first half of the concept that: Intuitions come first. Strategic reasoning second. Time can temper the preference for intuitive reasoning over strategic reasoning. (Everyone has been told to "sleep on it.")

4. Expansion of the second half of the fact that intuitions come first strategic reasoning second.

Part II

5. Western (autonomous) morality versus Eastern (sociopentric) morality. Ethics of: autonomy, community, divinity. Very much a recapitulation of the Nisbett book. 

6. Restatement of the second principle of moral psychology: there's more to morality than harm and fairness. First approximation is that there is: care, fairness, loyalty, authority, and sanctity.

7. (The extremely bizarre case of Armin Meiwes and Bernd Brandes.) And innateness is defined as: "Nature provides a first draft, which experience then revises..... Built-in does not mean unmalleable; it means organized in advance of experience." Sacredness and disgust are codependent (because something can only be discussing the further you take it from sacredness)

8. Author goes into debunking group selection, and he suggests that altruism, tribalism and cooperativeness are vestigial qualities from the time that human beings really did live in small bands where everyone was related.

Part III

9. Some furtive attempts at squaring the circle of sociobiology/eusociality between colonial insects and that of human beings. Maybe the key to group selection is a shared defensible nest, which is allowed because shared intentionality allows human beings to "construct nests that are vast and ornate, yet weightless and portable" (=metaphor for human society). Upshot: i. Major transitions produce superorganisms; ii. Shared intentionality generates moral matrices; iii. Genes and cultures coevolve; iv. Evolution can be fast.

10. "The hive hypothesis." Human being is 90% chimp and 10% bee.  Under certain conditions (think of goose-stepping military units/ people having an ecstatic religious experience/ Haredim all dressed like a bunch of penguins). 

11. A more nuanced and expansive look at religion--especially as a way to put to bed some of the screechiness of the Four Horsemen of the New Atheists (Dawkins/ Dennett/Harris Hitchens). It is something a lot more complicated than just believing in a god/gods. (p.267): "The only thing that was reliably and powerfully associated with the moral benefits of religion was how enmeshed people were in relationships with their co-religionists. It's the friendships and group activities, carried out within a moral matrix that emphasizes selflessness. That's what brings out the best in people."

12. Further good thoughts about the codependency of liberal/conservative schools of thought (yin and yang). Brief discussion of good points from either side. Restatement of the 6 philosophical underpinnings of both schools of thought. Diversity is not a categorically good thing. It is a very good way to reduce social capital.
 
Vocabulary:

consilience
moral matrix
moral entropy
bonding capital 
bridging capital
Prophet Mani (and Manicheanism)
moral monist
multilevel selection

Book Review
Jack Reacher: Killing Floor
3/5 stars
Light and readable; Extremely implausible
*******

This book was recommended to me by somebody at work.

I saw that it had 66,313 Amazon reviews and I thought that there might be something to it.

Then again, "Fifty Shades" has 111,868. So there's that.

It was a fun read, but I will not be picking up a Jack Reacher book again.

Even though this book is 500 pages, the prose is so light that it can be read through in a day or two.

Lee Child says that Jack Reacher was inspired by a "medieval knight-errant paradigm" but that seems unrelatable to almost all human beings. To me it seems more like Reacher was inspired by Hannibal Lecter ("Silence of the Lambs"): in the first case, you have a psychiatrist of superhuman intelligence that is helping people (that it doesn't exactly make sense for Lecter to help) produce a psychological profile of a killer. In this case, you have a forensic expert/trained killer of what seems to be supehuman intelligence helping people (that it doesn't exactly make sense for him to help).

The biggest problems are 2:

1. We have seen the case before where some Englishman thinks that because we speak the same language that he can just deduce what conditions are in the United States.

The "Fifty Shades" author did the same thing, choosing to set her book in Washington because that happens to have been a state that she heard of. But then she put in you suggested a completely foreign to American ears, such as "ringing someone on the phone" or "taking a smart rucksack on holiday."

He says that his wife is from New York. Didn't she offer some proofreading?

A selected listing of some of the awkward words:

smart (as in, a smart dark green car)
copse (instead of "thicket")
automatic box ("transmission")
jink (a very Scottish word in place of "zigzag")
grauch ("crackle")

a. This author had white people going into black barber shops, which NEVER EVER happens in the United states. I have seen with my own eyes a white guy walking into a barbershop when I was a child asking the price of a haircut, and they told him that he would have to go down the street because they didn't know how to work with straight hair there. 

b. Black beauty shops are never open on Sunday and Monday and barber shops are only rarely open those times. Even less likely in the South.

2. Just, plausibility issues. And I know that you need to make a plot work, but there's only so many improbable things in sequence that a reader can be asked to believe. I don't know if it was the author's intention, but this book is bordering on magical realism:

a. Who can live with no form of identification and do everything that he needs without them? Paying cash is not enough if you want to do something like rent a car. And also not enough for most hotels.

b. Jack Reacher goes to the penitentiary and they allow him to keep his street clothes on? Has anybody ever heard of this?

c. (p.44) The protagonist has never even finished a single semester in the same high school? He has not been in one place long enough, but he had music lessons, such that he had perfect pitch and could transpose in his head Bobby Blue Bland down from G to E-flat?

d. Over 3 million square miles of the United states, and he ends up in the exact same city where his brother that he is not seen in 7 years was murdered 2 days ago?

e. Somebody is arrested one day and then a couple of days later is working front and center with the police of a local department with no badge and no interest in this?

f. Three people can keep a secret if two of them are dead. How long could a counterfeiting operation like this stay a secret with so many people involved? 5 minutes? 10 minutes?

Also, they would have to be some paper trail somewhere that would show all of this money coming into this poor southern town from nowhere.

g. Somebody gives a guy with no ID and no address a Bentley and a stack of cash to ride around in? For that matter, if somebody owns a Bentley, who takes it to work everyday?

h. Busts into a police house and a firehouse with a Rolls-Royce Bentley and it works out exactly the way that he thinks it did to extricate someone from jail in 90 seconds.

Minor problem: Some number of clichés--and this is probably unavoidable in this type of book. (And the author does mention that he is aware of some of these dangers.)

a. Magical Negro (Finlay. This is a common Stephen King device.)
b. Small racist Southern town
c. Disinterested hero rides off into the sunset (a lot of westerns are like this)
d. Damsel in distress
e. The character that the reader is misdirected to think is dead all through the novel and he magically reappears within the last 50 pages. (Just like in "The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo.")

Verdict: it's worth it if you have some spare time and $1.

Book Review
Untenable
Jack Cashill
5/5 stars
"Black barbarism brought into sharp and uncomfortable focus"
*******

Of the book

-30 chapters over 270 pages, 9pps/chapter
-206 point references. ≈0.75/page
-32 "ibid" and about 1/3 internet articles and YouTube videos
-Extensive use is made of census data
-4~5 hours of reading time
********

On the one hand: This is a good, short, book, that contains a lot of information and a respectable number of quotable quotes.

On the other: It's very painful to read because it brings into sharp focus a lot of uncomfortable things: 1) The highly disproportionate amount of barbarism to be found among black people; 2) The trite way that countries tear themselves apart through mistakes and sorry leadership.

And also it's uncomfortable because I share too much of  the same ethnic background of these stupid, destructive, knuckle-dragging social degenerates for my own comfort.

The author has a great, dry sense of humor about a topic that is actually pretty morbid.(He reminds me of a hybrid between Bob newhart and Ann Coulter.)

But, I think that the best function served is that of telling a story (that has happened countless times) that people have collectively tried to deny out of existence:

Black people move to the neighborhood that was otherwise just fine, and they bring a lot of crime and destruction with them and white people (logically enough) just choose to move elsewhere to avoid the inextricable links between enough black people and complete social collapse. Of course, there is always a Jesse Jackson/Ron Karenga / Louis Farrakhan to keep the pot stirred.

And this never seems to happen with anybody else.

The story that (the left of) the United States is trying to sell itself is more like: 

Hard-working black people who are identical in EVERY WAY to these white neighbors that they move next to cause a panic, and white people leave and take their business with them for NO REASON other than hate, racism and spite. And Every Bad Thing that happens afterward is a result of structural/systemic/environmental/ goonie-googoo racism and the black people involved in this have no free will and no agency other than to act like animals.

It's like a gigantic national psychic epidemic.

1. Almost none of these black homes had fathers. The white ones did, at a higher rate than the national average.

2. There were Cassandras that questioned the wisdom of these series of policies. (In this case, it was Daniel Patrick Moynihan, among others.) Predictably, they were ignored.

Corrections and highlights of the historical record:

1. Many businesses left Newark long before anyone ever heard of the word "White flight."

2. Working class whites did not flee with their new GI benefits, because there was no reason to flee at that time. (1950 Newark, 24 murders).

3. There was plenty of integration even before Brown v. board of education. A lot of the angriest writers (Amiri Baraka/ Ibram Kendi) grew up in integrated neighborhoods.

4. Black people's destruction of Newark New Jersey took only about 10 years (p.98).

5. (p.234): More black men were dying in the streets of American cities than were dying in the jungles of Vietnam.

*******
It seems like history imitates itself without any real talent-- and it seems like the black people are particularly untalented in this way:

1. The corrupt black mayor that runs the city into the ground cliche showed up here. (We've all seen Coleman Young / Herbert Worthy/ Kwame Kilpatrick here in Michigan.) Cashill added Ken Gibson and Richard G. Hatcher, and that's not even a rounding error of the total number.

2. Repurposing other religions and mixing elements of Christianity into them. Kwanzaa looks an awful lot like Hanukkah. The Nation of Islam looks like what would happen if a jackleg preacher added some Islamic symbols. (In his way, it seems like the cultish, ignorant Black Hebrew Israelites are just so much old wine in new bottles.)

3. Nation of Islam prefigured Prislam, (which actually started out of Newark).

4. Let's burn down everything that we own! (1968 riots; Rodney King riots; George Floyd riots; Detroit) and then sit in a burned out city for decades because of lack of competence to rebuild it.

5. A lot of black people rely on the government to be their best friend, and really it was (and is) their worst enemy

Second order thoughts:

1. Cashill's experience is completely consonant with what I have seen before. And yet it took so long for this book to be written; how many history books does somebody have to sort through before they find one that gives a real version of events versus a sanitized, fictionalized one?

2a. A lot of people like Ibram X. Kendi ($300,000 in one year for consulting fees), Ta-Nehisi Coates (net worth $6 million) and Robin D'Angelo make bank in consulting fees repeating this narrative.

2b. It's a running theme here that these real life problems become academic talking points for people who live nowhere near the actual situation. (p.131) "Everyone with whom I spoke knew exactly why they left. It's just that no one bothered to ask them."

Authors have written entire interesting books about a snapshot of History by just taking the time to INTERVIEW PEOPLE THAT WERE ACTUALLY THERE. ("The Corpse Walker." Liao Yiwu.)

3. Is there an algorithm to use when selecting history books? Is it even worth the time that it takes to sort through all of these books in pursuit of the truth? It's not always possible to believe the statements even of people who were there. And then people who were not there are likely to be even less accurate.

4. I think the position of black people is probably going to get worse over time in the States. We have a lot of people coming in from outside who don't feel that they owe any debt to black people and will be a lot less tolerant / willing to give them the benefit of the doubt in any situation. 

5. The university system also has a hand in this. It's amazing how many people: a) participate in riots/murder, b) go to prison, and then c)are awarded an academic job.  Angela Davis. Ron Karenga. William Ayers. 

After this civilization has collapsed, future historians may look back and decide that the tenure system and the inability of governments to keep certain professional pot stirrers in prison was a Very Bad Idea.

Quotable quotes: 

1. (p.42): Before government made work more or less optional, people had no choice but to go where the jobs were. They felt an obligation to make a living.

2. (Hoffer): "Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket."  (Cashill insert): "Kendi's brand of anti-racism skipped the first two phases. It was conceived as a racket."

3. (p.120): Brennan apparently failed to anticipate the parents of all races might object to putting their little ones on buses for exhausting hours every day to solve someone else's theoretical problem.

4. (p.123) Between 1960 and 1980, Newark lost more than 150,000 white residents. During the same. Detroit and Chicago each lost close to a million, the great majority of whom were ethnic and working class.

5. (p.145) Election fraud is a cottage industry in Newark.

6. (p.220) Whites in Newark saw the world more clearly. Having grown up around and among people of color, they do not romanticize them..... As one friend tells me, "I had the guilt beaten out of me a long time ago."

7. (p.234, Jesse Lee Peterson): "In Alabama, I had been taught not to hate..... Hate of the white man in particular gave me a satisfying way to explain all my other failures."

8. (p.240, Amiri Baraka): "Rob whitey, rape his daughter, and burn him." / "You can help by dying. You are a cancer. You can help the world's people with your death."

Verdict: Recommended

Supplemental notes:

The 10 worst run cities in the United States (according to WalletHub), and how black they are:

150. Detroit, MI (82%)
149. St. Louis, MO (48%)
148. Jackson, MS (71%)
147. Shreveport, LA (56%)
146. Flint, MI (60%)
145. Stockton, CA (12%)
144. Gary, IN (84%)
143. Toledo, OH (27%)
142. Memphis, TN (63%)
141. Cleveland, OH (53%)
140. Baton Rouge, LA (50%)

I am surprised that Baltimore wasn't in here. I know that of their last 3 mayors one had to step down and a couple more had fraud charges. (For the record, they are #129, 64% black.)

Average percent black. 55%
Standard Deviation. 20%

The 10 best run cities in the United States, and how black they are.

1. Nampa, ID (1%)
2. Provo, UT (1%)
3. Boise, ID (2%)
4. Durham, NC (37%)
5. Lexington-Fayette, KY (8%)
6. Las Cruces, NM (3%)
7. Billings, MT (1%)
8. Virginia Beach, VA (20%)
9. Missoula, MT (1%)
10. Fargo, ND (3%)

Average percent black. 7.7%
Standard deviation. 11.2%

Interesting. (Durham should probably be thrown out because it is such an outlier. But I'll leave it in just the same.)

Correlation coefficients of the first and last 10.:
r=0.82
r^2=0.64

Book Review
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
Milan Kundera
1/5 stars
"Overwrought, overdone, and 312 pages to get a couple of dozen good quotes."

This is the third book that I have read by Milan kundera. (The first two being "The Joke" and "The Unbearable Lightness of Being.")

I was piqued to purchase this when I recently learned of his death--and I had read some good reviews about this book. (After reading this, I have come to suspect that: people read books like this so that they can show other people how smart they are by pretending to understand.)

It's (approximately) an extended meditation on laughter and forgetting, and it is true that they mean different things at different times.

The book was written in Czech first and then translated to French and then later to English.

On the one hand: His prose reads beautifully when translated into English (maybe profound thoughts are language-independent?). And he could have been the one to put down some memorable thoughts on a great topic.

On the other: most of the book is utterly incomprehensible.

He employs the literary technique known as "magical realism" (and I have to admit here that fiction books are only about 10% of all that I read). I've only encountered magical realism in a few cases (Tony Morrison's "Song of Solomon"/Maxine Hong Kingston's "Woman Warrior"/Stephen King's "Rose Madder").

For some reason, magical realism was readable in the context of those books, but not this one. (It was also not present in the other two books of Kundera's that I read.)

I did not read the Cliff's notes to try to explain to me what he could have been talking about, because that would be admitting to defeat. 

Also, the book is just not worth it.

There are lots of stories about people with conflicted emotional states interspersed by some insights. (Perhaps this is the graphomania that is marked by condera, but that is very present in this work.) 

But, for people like me who work all day get bills paid, we "dream no dreams and nurse no grievances" and conflicted emotional states are secondary to getting the house note paid, let alone reading about somebody else's.

What I take from the book is:

---Laughter. Something that you make yourself do to forget the present. Two types of laughter: that of devils (sardonic and nihilistic)  and that of the angels (laughable laughter).

---Forgetting. Something that you do voluntarily in order to forget a painful past. Something that you do involuntarily as once-important memories fade away. When memories fade away, there is only the present. (And in communist countries, there is no past or future; only "an eternal present in which the party is always right.")

What Kundera knows is being exiled from the Czech Republic as well as the unpleasantness of the Russian occupation, and it is formed the basis of many of his books. (At this point, this subject has run into diminishing returns.)

In this one, at first Communists were welcomed by the "better half of the nation" (p.10)--at the beginning - - but down the road, it became the "2% of the nation still believed in the Communist Party."

Seven stories are claimed to be interwoven, but they are only this inasmuch as Kudera comes into narrate. The characters have no relation to each other outside of their own story.

The 7 chapters:

1. "Lost letters." A scientist is reassigned a job as a construction worker for political reasons. ("They were forced to leave their jobs for isolated workshops in the depths of the country - - that is to say, for places where no one would ever hear their voices.")

2. "Mama." A married couple in a menage à trois.

3. "The Angels." Delineation of different types of laughter with a parable involving angels and devils. The beginning of the events that forced him to leave Czechoslovakia.

4. "Lost Letters." A woman is trying to retrieve her husband's Love letters to her in difficult circumstances, because her memory of him is starting to fade.

5. "Litost."  The story of a frustrated love affair and how misery loves company - - accompanied by overdefinition of the title word.

6. "Angels" Tamina takes a magical realist to an island of children with some perplexing symbolism, and Kundera spends time with his dying father who has lost his ability to speak.

7. "The Border." An aging Playboy takes stock of his life. Another person dies from some unknown illness. Odds and ends events.
*******

Verdict: NOT recommended.

This is, however, a most quotable book, and really that is the ONLY value of this book.

I will present the ones that I thought best so it can save a jealous-of-his-time reader the trouble:

1. The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.

2. .... Just as she was capable of imbuing the most abstract relationship with the most concrete feeling, so she was capable of giving the most concrete of acts an abstract significance and her own dissatisfaction a political name.

3. Since there is not a single historic event we can count on being commonly known, I must speak of events that took place a few years ago as if they were a thousand years old.

4. For he was aware of the great secret of life: women don't look for handsome men. Women look for men who have had beautiful women. Having an ugly mistress is therefore a fatal mistake.

5. Historical events mostly imitate one another without any talent, but it seems to me that in Bohemia history staged an unprecedented experiment.

6. He was familiar with this kind of deal. They were ready to sell people a future in exchange for their past.

7. Just as someone in pain is linked by his groans to the present moment (and is entirely outside past and future), so someone bursting out in such ecstatic laughter is without memory and without desire, for he is admitting his shout into the world's present moment and wishes to know only that.

8. "... and in his often vacant gaze you could recognize the sadness of a man who realizes that the stars merely promise him suffering."

9. We want to be masters of the future only for the power to change the past.

10. There are two laughters, and we have no word to tell one from the other.

11. The conversation with the taxi driver suddenly made clear to me the essence of the writer's occupation. We write books because our children aren't interested in us. We address our sales to an anonymous world because our wives plug their ears when we speak to them.

12. The invention of printing formerly enabled people to understand one another. And the era of universal graphomania (a mania for writing books), the writing of books has an opposite meaning semicolon every once surrounded by his own words as by a wall of mirrors, which allows no voice to filter through from outside.

13. For children have no past, and that is the whole secret of the magical innocence of their smiles.

14. Those who are fascinated by the idea of progress do not suspect that everything moving forward is at the same time bringing the end nearer and the joyous watch words like "forward" and "farther" are the lascivious voice of death urging us to hasten to it.

15.... it was a strange conversation between someone who nothing but a great many words and one who knew everything but not a single word.

16. It's just those details - - poorly chosen clothes, slightly flawed teeth, delightful mediocrity of soul - - that make a woman lively and real.

17. Oh yes, my Gd, the memory of revulsion is stronger than the memory of tenderness!

18. Death has a double aspect: it is not being. But it is also being, the terrifyingly material being of a corpse.

19. Our only immortality is in the police files.

Book Review
"Early Indians: The Story Of Our Ancestors...." 
5/5 stars
"A dense, multi-disciplinary book of abductive reasoning that is sure to make many people uncomfortable."

*******
Of the book:
-276 pages of prose
-4 chapters, and epilogue, a summary, and FAQs
-85 reference sources, about 1 every 3 pages

*******
The number of sources here is fewer than many books on said topic, but Joseph does a yeoman's work of actually going through and reading all of these obscure papers and stapling them together into a fairly readable narrative.

In a way, more is less; sometimes trying to create a narrative arc around too much data creates a long and boring book. (This book was 274 pages, but Tony Joseph co-authored another book about the same topic that was 650 pages long and just came out this year.)

There's also some journalistic work here around: the relationships of the scientists, the dates of their findings, and some of the political pushback when trying to release certain findings.

And yet: in spite of its smaller number of sources, the book still feels like drinking water through a fire hose.

The author does deliberately choose repetition in order to help us remember so many of these numerous and disparate facts. 

With that in mind, I will just give some impressionistic observations as well as selected interesting concrete facts found in the text.

This book is a riff on:

1. "Who We Are And How We Got Here," by David Reich.

It shows the story of something like: Population A is in one place, and Population B comes to mix with it creating Population C. Sometimes there is back-mixing or incomplete mixing to create a gradient of levels of admixture. (West Eurasians from around Turkey and Iran mixed in varying degrees with North and South Indians.)

2."The 10,000 Year Explosion," that human evolution accelerated with the advent of agriculture, although it was just as regional.

People have been in (what is now called) India for an extremely long time. Something like 65,000 years after leaving Africa. And the genetic diversity there is greater than any place in the world outside of Africa (genetic diversity and population age are directly proportional). 

It is a bit more studyable than Africa because it has a longer literary tradition and is not so thinly populated.

3. Joseph Tainter's "The Collapse of Complex Civilizations." The Harappan civilization, like many others, was one that just disappeared for mysterious reasons.

The 4 major chapters are arranged around successive layers of migration to India.

1. Migrations out of Africa (65,000 years ago) create the "First Indians."

2. First Indians mixed with herders from around what is now Iran to create early civilization. (10,000-8,000 BCE)

3. Harappan civilization shows up about 5,000 years after this. (2600BCE)

4. The latest migrants (Arya) were warriors and pastoralists from the Asian Steppe that amalgamated their languages and religious customs with the existing Harappan traditions (2000 BCE). 

All the same: First Indian ancestry is still 50 to 65% of most population groups. (The comparable figure in many parts of Europe is about 6%.)

The caste system came into being about 2,000 years ago, and the theretofore free mixing between the Indian groups stopped and the populations started to diverge. ("The difference between people in a single Indian village is two to three times that between North and South Europeans," p.259)

*******
The book spends most of its time triangulating between: molecular genetics of populations, archeologic, linguistic and climatologic data.

And it does make sense that these are all four necessary to reconstruct the past.

-Archeology is blind to genetic reality
-Genetics is blind to timing of population replacements/miscegenation. It's also blind to environmental influences.
-Climate data can give us an idea of what happened when - - what COULD have happened when.
-Linguistics can prove common origin / interaction between populations, but it can't tell us when. It's also incomplete, because most language was unwritten up until recently (say, 5000 years ago).

And between these four disciplines, whatever is left after you have eliminated everything else must be the explanation.

No matter how uncomfortable or improbable.

And even just the methodology is useful to know, because there are way too many specific cases and way too much information for somebody who is not a specialist in the field to be able to have it at his fingertips.

Other observations:

1. Population genetics is just as political as it is scientific:

a. (p.91). Sanskrit and The Vedas cannot be the singular source of Indian culture if the Harappan civilization predated either of them. Before the Indian people would collaborate, the non-indian people had to change the names of the basis populations to "Ancestral North Indian" and "Ancestral South Indian."

b. (p.21). China seems to have a lot of holdouts that Chinese people took a separate evolutionary path from archaic humans.

2. There's huge genetic diversity, as well as about 780 different languages (22 of them are recognized in the Constitution).

3. Religion plays an important part in all societies transitioning through phases. Even if it's never the same story twice. In this case, the temple owns a lot of land and extract productive surplus and decide it's allocation. (Sacrifices and offerings to god.) They also seem to have ways of bringing people together in large numbers for cooperation.

4. The Harappan language has not been deciphered after a century of work  (although it took several centuries to decipher Egyptian). It's amazing that a civilization which covered one third of India has only been rediscovered within the past several decades after vanishing without a trace for several thousand years.

5. Southern Indians tend to refuse to speak Hindi and also don't watch North Indian television, but this book puts it into a new light. It is not that they are backward and intransigent, it is just that they are the minority remnant of a very much older Indian cultural substrate.

6. Even though India is a multi-source civilization, it stabilized probably about 4,000 years ago (the last migrants were in 2000 BCE). Other immigrants have arrived --Jews, Paris, Syrians-- but they were too small to make an impact.

6. The caste system started probably about 19 centuriea ago, and free mixing stopped at around 100 CE (p.224). And even as big as the country got, and is, it is different to China in that there are a very large number of small inbred populations vis-a-vis the Chinese, that have been mixing freely for thousands of years (p.228).

What specific facts are going to make a lot of people very uncomfortable?

1. Some races of people (that exist as of a moment in time) really are more productive than others and they come to wipe out their competitors. All these conquests detailed in the Tanakh of Israelites conquering surrounding people may be dramatic and literary--but it is hardly new, and therefore not unique.

2. Sexual selection is a ruthless process, and there are a small number of winners and huge number of losers.90% of women have been after 10% of men for many thousands of years; that would explain the way that Yamnaya males left behind so many children and how they sidelined so many of the local males. (In this case, it is Iberian males. p.183).

3. The Nazis were wrong that Aryans were Nordic, and the Indians were and are wrong that they were a pure race. (They were mixed-raced pastoralists from the Eastern European steppe.)

4. Intra-racial competition is a real thing--and some people really are losers in these contests. 

a. South Indians are direct descendants of much older populations (p.212--the further south, the blacker), but they have been pushed back over many thousands of years by North Indians containing Steppe ancestry. 

b. Ashkenazim probably did not even exist 1500 years ago, but in the last several centuries they have come to dominate Judaism both in and out of the land of Israel.
c. The "Talented Tenth" envisioned by WEB DuBois was mostly mulatto.

5. If some ethnicity wants to talk about keeping its race "pure" (and Asian Indians are quite big on this), what you define as pure depends on your starting point.

6. Tribal Indians are the same thing as the other 92% of indians.

Verdict: This book was worth the read and the time, though it was not necessarily an easy read. Worth it at the second hand price of about $10.

Vocabulary:

Yamnaya
Corded Ware
Denisovans 
steatite
sindoor
lots
Brahmana period (BCE 900-700)

Book Review
"New People"
Joel Williamson
2/5 stars
"Oh, how the author could have used the talents of a James Michener or an Isabel Wilkerson"
*******

Of the book:

-4 chapters and 1-10 page epilogue
-187 pages of prose ≈47pps/chapter
-325 cited sources (≈1.7/page--well sourced)
-Originally published in 1980

This is probably one of the heaviest slogs that I've read this year. Difficult, boring reading is what I have come to expect from books published on University labels--and this book did not disappoint in that way.

I kept at it because:

1. I needed an alternative storyline to the done to death "systems of oppression" / "white privilege"/"white supremacy" arguments that have been thrashed out in these past couple of years.

2. There is good information here (provided you are willing to fish for it), but there's just no relatable narrative arc to pull it together. ("The Warmth of Other Suns," by Isabel Wilkerson, does just that but with a very interesting backstory.)

3. I paid good money for this book and I wanted  my money's worth; 

*******
I think that an overarching  message is that: the situation with respect to miscegenation in the United States was so complicated that any narrative retroactively superimposed on the events of that time is just as likely to be false as true. (How many times have you heard some black person say that "the reason black people prefer to be light skinned is because house slaves were treated better than field ones?" OR how many times have you heard that the influx of white DNA into black Americans was because of coerced conjugal relations between white slave masters and black wenches.)

Reality was a lot more complicated--as it should/must be, given that the United States is 3.8 million square miles and was settled by different people at different times. 

What reason would we have to assume that the slave society as practiced by the Spaniards would be identical to that practiced by the French, and then later the English? All of whom settled different parts of what are now the United States

In addition: I find that this book can be read as a cautionary tale of assuming that establishment scholars actually know what they're talking about *just* because they say they do.

Any number of people really used to believe the strangest things back in those days.

1. Mulattos were sterile after the third generation?

2. The electrical signals through black people's nerves ran in one direction, and those through white people ran in another direction and people who were mulattos with temperamentally confused because their electrical signals were running in two different directions?

3. There were three types of mulatto: Dominant. Balanced. Recessive. 

4. Race mixing was going to make it such that people with majority African ancestry would just disappear.

5. (Carolina Bond Day, black anthropologist undertaking a study of mulatto elite): "... The abandon with which many ignorant negroes relinquish themselves to song and dance is...... since they are not intelligent enough to function on the psychological level of the majority of the [other black] people in Group I or Group II." (These were a couple of groups that she invented for purposes of her research. Kind of the same way that you could invent a group of people that have a longer second metatarsal-- but I don't know how valuable such a delineation is.)

I will say that Williamson's definition of "mulatto" was WAY too expansive for this book. 

That term is traditionally understood to mean somebody that is half black and half white but it seems like Williamson used it to include ANY black person with ANY fraction of white blood--and that explains how he managed to:

1. Include people like Countee Cullen, who was as black as shoe polish. Also, his description of Langston Hughes as "very light";

2. Conclude that in America 10% were Negroes but more than 75% were mulattos (p.160);

3. Mix in a lot of people who might have had *some* black ancestry but did not actually marry other blacks (Walter White, Lena Horne, Jean Toomer)

I understand that Williamson felt a book needed to be written, but sometimes when you stretch your definitions a little bit too far......
*******

Chapter 1 (beginning-1850):

Due to different historical circumstances,The South is broken up into two parts, the first from Pennsylvania to North Carolina and the second from North Carolina down to the Gulf of Mexico. The miscegenation happened in waves, and the first one finished in the early part of the 18th century, with less of it after that time. Mulatto elite, for some reason, decided to fuse with the darker masses.

What do we learn?

1. Contrary to popular belief, most of the race mixing did not happen as a result of white planters and black slave women. It was actually impoverished servant whites and blacks.

2. The categories of these different classes of people were not born fully formed. There was a lot of churn in order to figure out who was who over a lot of varying time and space.

3. It seems that mulattos in the "Lower South" followed a different pattern to the "Upper South" because there were larger numbers of black slaves and the whites needed something like an intermediate buffer of people between them and the slaves. (This is similar to how South African Coloureds became a class between whites and a much larger number of blacks.)

4. Initially, Louisiana Creoles (think: Jelly Roll Morton) did not want any part of blacks as marriage partners, and they actually inbred intensively--although preferentially with whites when they married out. 

5. 1850 census of the US lists 406k mulatto out of 3.639K blacks, 11.2% of the black population and 1.8% of the national total. Free: 159k, slave: 247k. All 57K mulattoes in the North were free.

Chapter 2 (1850-1915--before the Civil War, through Reconstruction and up to the Harlem Renaissance): 

At the beginning of this period, mulattos existed in some uncomfortable modus vivendi in the South. By the end of this era, white Southerners wanted a more pure bloodline (lower class whites needed to separate themselves from people that they had just been working in the same fields with last week), and so people who were mulatto became "blacker." 

And hence, the "one drop rule." (Also, white people who had corrupt characteristics were thought to be black.)

What do we learn?

1. The one drop rule did not fall out of the sky, and it happened over a slow period of time in response to changing circumstances. 

2. By the end of this period, 90% of blacks still lived in the South.

Chapter 3 (Brown America--fusion of mulatto and Black America):

What do we learn?

1. The number of mixed race who lived around blacks increased from 12% in 1870 to 15.2% in 1890 and then to 20.9% in 1910.

2. After 1928, the only census terms were "black" and "white," whereas before 1920 mulattos were terms. At this point, it becomes harder to keep track of the fraction of mulattos.

3.(p.117). It seems like mixed marriages were completely shut off by 1944. People like Carter Woodson suggested that "miscegenation was restricted to the weaker types of both races." And the infusion of white blood into black Americans came as a result of internal miscegenation (mulattos marrying blacks) rather than between blacks and whites.

4. "Strange Fruit" was initially a novel by Lillian Smith that featured a lynching, and only later became the popular Billie Holiday song.

Author tries to bring in some big names  around this point in order to "keep it fresh." (Lena horne. Joe Lewis. Malcolm X. Ralph Ellison.)

Chapter 4 (Harlem Renaissance and after):

This is sending the context of the Harlem Renaissance and some period early in the start of the Great Migration.

What do we learn?

1. Harlem was an area of less than 2 square miles containing 200,000 blacks (as of 1930).

2. The leadership of this moment in history was small and number, and they were mulatto in large numbers: James Weldon Johnson, WEB DuBois, Langston Hughes, Jean Toomer, Countee Cullen, Walter White.

3. There were "blue vein" societies up until around the 1920s. (To be admitted you had to be light enough to be able to show blue veins. A more modern version of this is the "paper bag test.")

4. The intellectual ferment of the Harlem Renaissance also attracted some white people. (Some remembered, such as George gershwin. Some forgotten, such as Carl VanVechten.) They took what they like, and repurposed it in other venues in a more "white-friendly" way.

Other thoughts:

I have a very hard time believing some of what this author says. 

1. For example, Lena Horne and Eartha Kitt's claim to not being accepted because of being light skinned.

It just doesn't ring true in current times, and these events are not all that far back. All the black guys love the redbone girls, and they're more expensive both in the dating market AND for purposes of sex work.

He doubles down on the unlikeliness when he talks about having light skin females describe and security over their color.

Just, no.

2. Also, I don't think that there is any black American that does not know the term "colorstruck" or know about a relative/friend who will only consider a light skinned boyfriend/girlfriend. Not only does that very old word not show up even once in this book, the author asserts the opposite-- that black people are commonly ashamed of white ancestry.

Not hardly.

3. This book went on past the Harlem Renaissance, but even as I think back to the years that were roughly contemporaneous with BT Washington (I read his "Up From Slavery"), it seems like Washington paints a different picture - one that is more shot through with practical aspects of socializing people just recently out of slavery.

4. The Harlem Renaissance is a topic in its own right, and I think the reader might be better served by sorting through what is available about that topic and select for readability and other first person accounts. Also, a discerning reader might get more practical detail about the contributions of that time.

5. A lot of his opinions are quite clueless. "There has been relatively little mating between the races,... So small as to be practically inconsequential."(p.188).
 
Verdict: Weak recommendation.

Vocabulary:

quadroon ball (plaçage; white guy would go there to meet a quadroon that looked good to him and agreed to provide her a living allowance and support for any kids she bore him)
meamelouc (1/16th black)
sang-mele (1/64th black)
sambo (3/4 black)
mango (7/8 black)
mustee (1/8 black)
mulatto (1/2 black)
mestizo (European and Indian; Spanish / French origin word)
Carolina Bond Day
Gunnar Myrdal
Madison Grant 
Asa Philip Randolph
juke/jook (guitar) joint
Arthur Schomburg Museum
"Shuffle Along"

Book Review
The Microbiome Diet
2/5 stars
"Sourcing is too thin and too many questions unanswered."
*******

I really do like to read books about popular health misconceptions (and give them the benefit of the doubt), and that is because later books have shown that what once was standard medical practice is COMPLETELY wrong. (Richard Atkins/ Jason Fung/ Nina Teicholz's "Big Fat Surprise"/ulcers were later found to be bacterial infections and not stress, etc.)

This reader is torn between dismissing this as Yet Another Quack treatment as opposed to realizing that this might be a physician speaking up against a medical establishment that has ossified into a position that may be erroneous. (Think about how long people thought that weight loss was a simple matter of calories in< calories out. Or that all cholesterol is bad. Or ignored insulin response. Or that all fats were / are bad.)

The notes are also extremely sparse. About 40 notes (3 ibid) over 184 pages of prose (0.2/per). 

Unacceptably thin for a book of this type.

It is interesting that a lot of these things also correspond to what has been long known.

For instance: Jason Fung would treat insulin resistance as a question of homeostasis;  Kellman treats the exact same disease as a disturbance of the microbiome creating a leaky gut.

For the record, Kellman's claim is that: 

1. Reactive foods leak through intestinal walls>>>
2. Immune system sends out antibodies>>>

3. Antibodies create cravings>>> 

4. Killer chemicals create inflammation>>>

5.  Inflammation leads to storing fat instead of burning it.

Dr Fung has one biomarker that can be reliably measured (insulin level/HbA1c) and that corresponds to a lot of things. 

By contrast, Dr. Kellman  has this thing called a "microbiome" which has hundreds of different bacteria that have not all been sequenced and we aren't sure the ways in which all these bacteria interact with the human body (leading to a lot of assumptions/ uses of the phrase "I believe").

There's also the issue that you never have the same microbiome twice between different individuals, and so getting the data is even harder for that reason.

Some things that he says are unbelievable:

"Balancing your microbiome will also help you prevent or even reverse such conditions as rheumatoid arthritis, lupus, multiple sclerosis, and other autoimmune conditions" (p.52). 

I'm not sure how Kellman could know this, because this book was published in 2015. Even papers (that I find) published a few years after that give ESTIMATES for the number of bacteria, and also no. paper. anywhere. claims to have sequenced all 2 million component genes.

Millions of people have autoimmune diseases: might not someone earlier have noticed the effect of diet on the progression of the disease?

1. There are actually many more people who go to chiropractors, and they have been in business for over a century selling the stupid notion that diseases are caused by subluxations - - shifting of the spinal column. 

And there is a chiropractor on every corner in the United States. (What makes this doctor different from chiropractic?)

2. A doctor like Paolo Zamboni had the idea that multiple sclerosis was caused by CCSVI--and what he wrote was about is thinly sourced as this.

3. Deepak Chopra is worth US$80 million with his Sokal-hoax-style interpretation of medicine.

*******
Kellman uses a bunch of terms (inulin, arabinogalactins, fructooligosaccharides, zonulin).

I've read other books like that where some author wants to reduce a large number of things to levels of ONE SPECIFIC chemical in the body. (The villain in "The Zone" by Barry Sears was "arachidonic acid." But, even a couple of decades after that book was written, it is still controversial. He's essentially saying low density carbohydrates. Nothing new.)

Kellman talks about leaky gut, and even as I look 9 years after the book was written... There is still not a good and non-invasive way to diagnose this condition. 
Other questions:

1a. Why would an extended fast not allow ine to reset the bacteria in the microbiome?

1b. (p.110). "Stress rapidly destroys many of the healthy bacteria that we need." (Okay, but how can he know that, since we don't know the totality of the microbiome. And there is no paper that is cited that says this, so how can he know?)

1c. (ibid). "The microbiome is so sensitive, that even 24 hours worth of stress can significantly change its population." But then if that's the case, then why doesn't removal of the stressor change it back? And why does it take more than one re-innoculation to make it right?

2. Why are there no fat people in China, but the rate of diabetes there is higher than the United states (12% vs 11.3%)? Do *all* of those people have disturbed microbiomes? And since diabetes is a recent thing, were their microbiomes fine up until just now?


3. If a few courses of antibiotics can disturb the microbiome, then why couldn't re-innoculation be done after every course?

4. Do we have some mechanisms of action here? Other things that I read say that the bacteria help human beings excrete more of the food as fat, and that explains weight loss - - as opposed to the leaky gut theory.

5. What is the likelihood that "leaky gut" can be a causative agent in as many things as this author says if physicians are not easily able to know enough cases to come up with a statistical relationship between that and other diseases.

6. Kellman quotes a few rat studies in his thin sourcing, but rats and human beings are not the same. (Even different of the great apes are used for studying different aspects of man.) Why not some human being studies?

7. If probiotics are available in yogurt, and they have effect, why not just eat more yogurt?

8. Is there anything more to go on than the author's belief / opinion? To make major dietary changes, I'm going to need to go off of more than just hope. (p.142).

9. Kelman asserts (p.139) that the bacteria for the microbiome can transfer genetic information between the bacteria that make it up - - and jumping genes/transposons are not unknown. But, what good gene is jumping from one bacteria to another and then,  how is that helping? 

We have no idea.

10. Why is Kellman the only one that seems to do / believe this? Why are there so few practitioners? 

His clinic has 118 reviews (average rating of 4.6) and this is in the city of New York. 

I open up a chiropractor near me at random, and he has 104 reviews in a small Midwestern City for a "practice" that has been known to be fake since the first week it was established.

Verdict: There may be something to the microbiome, but this book is not able to bring that across. Maybe that book is yet to be written after further research is done. 

Not recommended.