by Richard Subber | Jun 6, 2024 | History, Human Nature, Politics, Power and inequality, Reflections, Tidbits
“I’m a robot, I’m here to help you…”
President Harry Truman viewed the destruction of Berlin and the homeless German civilians struggling to stay alive,
as he waited for word of the first successful test of the atomic bomb at Alamogordo, New Mexico.
Before he knew about the test result, Truman wrote in his diary:
“I hope for some sort of peace—but I fear that machines are ahead of morals by some centuries
and when morals catch up there’ll be no reason for any of it.”
July 16, 1945, at the Potsdam Conference in Germany
from Countdown 1945: The Extraordinary Story of the Atomic Bomb and the 116 Days That Changed the World by Chris Wallace with Mitch Weiss
New York: Avid Reader Press, 2020
p. 123
Truman didn’t need to worry about so-called Artificial Intelligence…
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Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2024 All rights reserved.
The Reader (Der Vorleser)
Not just a rehash of WWII…
by Bernhard Schlink
–
In other words: Poems for your eyes and ears with 64 free verse and haiku poems,
and the rest of my poetry books are for sale on Amazon (paperback and Kindle)
and free in Kindle Unlimited, search Amazon for “Richard Carl Subber”
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by Richard Subber | May 16, 2024 | American history, Book reviews, Books, History, Politics, Power and inequality
“credit” is P.C. for “lending money”
Book review:
American Bonds:
How Credit Markets Shaped a Nation
by Sarah L. Quinn
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019
288 pages
Quinn writes plain academic prose, and she has a lot to say.
“Credit” is a very polite way of saying “lending money,” which is a very polite way of describing what is elsewhere called “usury.”
It’s no surprise that lending money has been part of the social, economic, and political landscapes since money was invented, and certainly credit markets have always existed in America since colonial times.
American Bonds is a deeply engrossing text (it’s not a casual read) about how folks with money and businesses and the government have used credit availability for personal, corporate, and policy advantages. Credit has always been part of the American story.
You might try reading it a chapter at a time.
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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2024 All rights reserved.
Home Team: Poems About Baseball (book review)
Edwin Romond hits another homer…
Writing Rainbows: Poems for Grown-Ups with 59 free verse and haiku poems,
and the rest of my poetry books are for sale on Amazon (paperback and Kindle)
and free in Kindle Unlimited, search Amazon for “Richard Carl Subber”
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by Richard Subber | May 12, 2024 | Book reviews, Books, History, Human Nature, Power and inequality, World history
energy is the bottom line…
Book review:
Foragers, Farmers, and Fossil Fuels:
How Human Values Evolve
by Ian Morris
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015
Contributors:
Richard Seaford
Jonathan D. Spence
Christine M. Korsgaard
Margaret Atwood
369 pages
Ian Morris says right up front that not everyone thinks he’s got it exactly right, but his story is an eye opener: how are human values and moral norms related to how human beings use energy?
Human beings need energy to survive, and obviously we need sources of energy.
The first human-like hunter-gatherers used energy that they could kill or pick up, and the first farmers planted their energy sources and domesticated a few animals, and now we depend (fatally?) on fossil fuel energy to live our lives.
Morris explains (attributes causes for) the different ways of “capturing” energy that are connected to how we feel about ourselves and how we deal with others.
If you’re satisfied with what you know about your code of values and the “do unto others…” stuff, then read Foragers, Farmers, and Fossil Fuels and learn some new stuff.
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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2024 All rights reserved.
Book review: The Map of Knowledge
a slo-mo version of Fahrenheit 451
by Violet Moller
Seeing far: Selected poems with 47 free verse and haiku poems,
and the rest of my poetry books are for sale on Amazon (paperback and Kindle)
and free in Kindle Unlimited, search Amazon for “Richard Carl Subber”
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by Richard Subber | Apr 14, 2024 | American history, Book reviews, Books, Democracy, History, Human Nature, Politics, Power and inequality
the American crisis…
Book review:
Twilight of the Elites: America After Meritocracy
by Christopher Hayes
New York: Crown Publishers, 2012
292 pages
Twilight of the Elites is a frightening assessment of our culture, our government—our civitas.
“We are in the midst of a broad and devastating crisis of authority” (p. 13). You bet we are—and Hayes was writing before Trump was even a speck in your eye.
Americans embrace the American Dream, the Horatio Alger thing, that is, meritocracy: the acceptance and endorsement of the goodness of the idea that we should help ourselves to prosper and be successful, and that those among us with the greatest talent and strength and ambition should enjoy greater prosperity and greater success. It is an article of faith among most Americans that the cream will rise to the top, and deservedly so. Honest hard work will and should be rewarded. One of Hayes’ definitions of a benign meritocracy is “the aristocracy of talent.”
An obvious characteristic of meritocracy, of course, is inequality. “It is precisely our collective embrace of inequality that has produced a cohort of socially distant, blinkered, and self-dealing elites. It is those same elites who have been responsible for the cascade of institutional failure that has produced the crisis of authority through which we are now living…the consistent theme that unites [these failures] is elite malfeasance and elite corruption” (pp. 22-23). This acceptance of the meritocracy mythology “allows everyone to imagine the possibility of deliverance [from unfavorable circumstances], to readily conjure the image of a lavish and wildly successful future” (p. 47).
Hayes points out, however, that “a deep recognition of the slow death of the meritocratic dream underlies the decline of trust in public institutions and the crisis of authority in which we are now mired. Since people cannot bring themselves to disbelieve in the central premise of the American dream, they focus their ire and skepticism instead on the broken institutions it has formed” (p. 63). There is ample attention to the dreadful failure of the media, among other institutions, to sustain our communal understanding and respect for facts and the truth.
A suggestion about one possible agent of positive change identifies a “radicalized upper middle class” that bridges the liberal-conservative division, and forces accountability on our institutions of government, justice, education and finance. Hayes imagines “a crisis…necessary upheaval and social transformation,” and acknowledges the obvious: those with power never want to give it up.
Twilight reminds us that the ultra-wealthy, ultra-powerful 1% will hang on to what they’ve got—and keep trying to get more—until their reality changes.
Hayes tells many truths about the devastation that wracks American culture and most Americans, because the myth of the American dream is enabling a tiny elite to amass wealth and power, and use both to corrupt our society.
Americans must accept the frightening hardships
of a sincere commitment to change things.
Let’s get started.
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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2024 All rights reserved.
Book review: Tales from Shakespeare
summaries by Charles and Mary Lamb…
Writing Rainbows: Poems for Grown-Ups with 59 free verse and haiku poems,
and the rest of my poetry books are for sale on Amazon (paperback and Kindle)
and free in Kindle Unlimited, search Amazon for “Richard Carl Subber”
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by Richard Subber | Apr 6, 2024 | American history, Book reviews, Books, History, Politics, Revolutionary War
the Adams-Jefferson “friendship”
Book review:
Friends Divided: John Adams and Thomas Jefferson
by Gordon S. Wood (b. 1933)
New York: Penguin Press, 2017
502 pages, extensive index and notes
Gordon Wood is a rightly acclaimed historian and author. Friends Divided is not his best work.
Wood has enviably thorough knowledge of the history of the American revolution, and his oeuvre is fascinating and compelling.
It seems to me that Wood has invested too much of idealized historical circumstances into the thinking of Adams and Jefferson, and the torrent of writing that they produced.
They were influential human beings and leaders in their society. I don’t buy the so-called “great man” concept of historiography. I don’t think Wood endorses it, but it seems that he has pasted the towering personalities of Adams and Jefferson into and onto his remarkably comprehensive understanding of the Enlightenment, American revolutionary politics, and the social/commercial evolution of America before and after the divorce from Britain.
Adams and Jefferson had a celebrated (then and now) on-and-off friendship during most of their adult lives.
Friends Divided is not what the American Revolution is all about, despite Gordon Wood’s rapturous concatenation of the “friends” and the world they lived in.
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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2024 All rights reserved.
In other words: Poems for your eyes and ears with 64 free verse and haiku poems,
and the rest of my poetry books are for sale on Amazon (paperback and Kindle)
and free in Kindle Unlimited, search Amazon for “Richard Carl Subber”
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by Richard Subber | Feb 4, 2024 | Human Nature, Power and inequality, Tidbits
many may wear the crown…
“Many kings have sat down upon the ground;
and one that was never thought of
hath worn the crown.”
Book of Sirach (Ecclesiasticus), 10:5, KJV
If you think you’re so smart and important, try telling your neighbor’s dog what to do.
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Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2024 All rights reserved.
Book review: “The Gentle Boy”
The Puritans, they had a dark side…
by Nathaniel Hawthorne
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In other words: Poems for your eyes and ears with 64 free verse and haiku poems,
and the rest of my poetry books are for sale on Amazon (paperback and Kindle)
and free in Kindle Unlimited, search Amazon for “Richard Carl Subber”
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