Books - Q3 2024

This quarter we managed to read ten books, including three that were 5/5s. In Q2 2024, we read seventeen, with two 5/5s. (We did a reading program on Cornucopian thinking.) In Q1 2024, we read seven, including one 5/5. We've read 34 YTD, doing much better than 2022 and 2023.

[In 2023: Q4 read 7 books, Q3 read 11 (one 5/5), Q2 read 5 (two 5/5s), Q1 only two books. (Total of 25 for the year.) In 2022: Q4 read 3 books, Q3 read 7 books (the two 4.5s should really be 5/5s), Q2 read five (one 5/5), Q1 read six (with another 4.5 that should have been a 5/5). (Total of 24 for the year.)]

• Buffett: The Making of an American Capitalist (5/5) Can't remember the first time we read this but decided it was due for a re-read as we've been thinking about Buffett recently. This book was written in 1995, when Buffett was 65 years old. Roger Lowenstein went on to write his other great book, When Genius Failed (also 5/5), in 2000 after the failure of Long Term Capital Management. Some highlights: when Buffett started out as a stockbroker in the early 1950s, "he found small gems - unwanted and very cheap cigar butts... all trading at three times earnings or less. It seemed too good to be true; if the stocks were so cheap, Buffett figured, somebody ought to be buying them. But slowly it dawned on him. The somebody was him. Nobody was going to tell you" to buy. Buffett's father (Howard, the congressman), was what you might call a paleoconservative. He supported Robert A. Taft over Eisenhower in the 1952 Republican primary. Had forgotten that Buffett had Malthusian views (when he was middle aged, at least): "Buffett spent much of the evening arguing that overpopulation was the world's most serious problem." "The mother of all Buffett causes was population control... He had a Malthusian dread that overpopulation would aggravate problems in all other areas - such as food, housing, even human survival." People forget now, but for most of his investing history, Buffett timed the market based on valuation, and he also concentrated heavily in individual securities and sectors. (So maybe we shouldn't feel so bad about being in cash five years ago and heavily in natural resources now?) Good description: "His ascent up the investment food chain had a certain inexorable momentum: [Blue Chip grocery store] stamps provided the cash for See's Candy; the profits from candy fueled the Buffalo Evening News, and the News could bankroll an even bigger prize still." Our economist Armen Alchian is mentioned as being an efficient market adherent, something we had not realized.
• Dark Calories: How Vegetable Oils Destroy Our Health and How We Can Get It Back (4/5) We read Cate Shanahan's Deep Nutrition in Q3 2021. Her two key points from that book were avoiding sugar and avoiding seed oils. Great quote from that book, "there's just not enough olive oil for everyone." Remember, no one is going to give you expensive, wholesome ingredients if they can sneak inferior ones past you without you noticing. With this latest (Dark Calories) she has revised higher the importance of seed oils. She points out that sugar consumption has been dropping while obesity and health have been getting worse. Consumption of vegetable oils has kept increasing, though, and the shift away from trans fats has led to the use of even more dangerous polyunsaturated fats in cooking. She thinks the mechanism is that insulin resistance is happening because the body doesn't want to burn high-PUFA body fat and prefers to draw down blood glucose, even though it leads to hypoglycemia. Highlights: "Changes to animal feeding practices dramatically spiked soy production during the postwar era... Farmers had started adding soy meal to feed because it helped fatten up the animals at a faster rate, boosting profits. But animals could not digest soy meal unless it was defatted, a process that removed the oil. So, during the 1940s, for the first time in history, the majority of the world's soybeans were crushed to yield separate products: oil and meal. The oil was initially used to make plastics..." "Vegetable oil has a unique history of being released into the food supply as a byproduct of two separate industries, soapmaking and confined animal feeding operations." She talks about a Hateful Eight of industrial seed oils: "far cheaper to produce than animal fats and don't require refrigeration to reduce spoilage the way lard and butter do, making them immediately attractive to any business producing large amounts of inexpensive, convenient food." "Almost nobody in the United States has a HOMA-IR score below 1.3." (That means there are not many people with insulin below 5.5 uIU/mL.) The weight-loss drugs Ozempic and Wegovy "continually blast a person's brain with the equivalent of 100 to 1,000 times the level of GLP-1 that normally occurs between meals." She mentions another instance of scientific fraud committed by Ancel Keys. Someone noticed that a grant had been given to test the Keys' diet-heart hypothesis in the 1960s, but the results were never published. He got a hold of the files and found that swapping out saturated fat for polyunsaturated fat increased mortality even though it did reduce cholesterol.
• The Conservative Futurist: How to Create the Sci-Fi World We Were Promised (3/5) Written by a former journalist who now works for AEI, so it is a bit soft on scientific detail. It's really about the Great Downshift - the decrease in productivity since 1970 - and ideas for getting productivity to grow again. Instead of right wing and left wing, he divides the country into "Up Wing" and "Down Wing". That concept was invented in the 1970s by futurist Fereidoun M. Esfandiary (the "godfather" of transhumanism). The author thanks Marc Andreessen in the acknowledgements, which is interesting in light of this tweet about the SF/VC shift towards Trump. He thinks the solution ("Up Wing") is "solution-oriented future optimism," with the key notion being that economic growth solves all other problems. "You can look to the left and the right and find plenty of Down Wingers" - hence "conservative futurism." He says that Herman Kahn was an Up Wing conservative futurist. Apparently, so were H.G. Wells (The Shape of Things to Come) and J.M Keynes (Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren). Some highlights: "Until 1958, more people crossed the Atlantic Ocean aboard ships than on airplanes." Wired magazine started out as very Up Wing, e.g. its Long Boom article by Peter Leyden in 1997. Papers and Patents Are Becoming Less Disruptive over Time. Giving up on nuclear energy is a great example of the type of Down Wing mindset that has resulted in productivity stagnation. Arthur C. Clarke thought that we'd be further along by now: "Beyond fission lies fusion - the welding together of light atoms such as hydrogen and lithium. This is the reaction that drives the stars themselves; we have reproduced it on earth but have not tamed it. When we have done so, out power problems will have been solved forever." This could have been about Amazon: "One vast and ecumenical holding company, for whom all men will work to serve a common profit, in which all men will hold a share of stock." A Down Wing novel Ecotopia imagines "a new countercultural country formed by the secession of Northern California, Oregon, and Washington." Down Wingers like Paul Ehrlich were low agency, claiming that "nothing could prevent" worldwide famine in the 1970s. Meanwhile, Herman Kahn would make a list of dozens of things that could possibly prevent famine; cornucopian possibilities like higher crop yields, more land under cultivation. (This is the Green Revolution.) Only some of them needed to work, and some of them did work. Who knew: Charlton Heston pushed for Soylent Green to be made because he was personally concerned about overpopulation. Newt Gingrich was Up Wing, a futurist and follower of Alvin Toffler. Interesting idea: "think of the American economy as a $21 trillion living supercomputer, a wondrous, wealth-generating, techno-organism constructed from a lattice of human powered networks [with] one primary purpose: to process information (to reorder matter)." Socialist economies don't have this - remember the Impossibility of Economic Calculation under Socialism. Interesting point: "America's most productive cities should be a lot bigger." The reason that we have NIMBY politics in home construction is violent crime, which is costing the country far more than most people realize. 
• Casa California: Spanish-Style Houses from Santa Barbara to San Clemente (3/5) "[T]he high point of the Spanish colonial revival in California and throughout America came in the twenties, especially between the years 1924 and 1932." "One could suggest that this surge of interest in things Hispanic was an expression of America's assumed 'Pax Romana' protectorate over the whole of the Spanish New World." "Of all the provinces of Spain, it was Andalusia that offered California architects an easily adaptable form that suited the state's climate and landscape." "Andalusian farmhouses are traditionally white-stuccoed, sculptural volumes with larger and smaller parts assembled in an informal massing." "I have felt that the Spanish influence in California is one of the great charms our state possesses, a precious heritage second only to our climate and that it should be preserved in every possible way." California cities mentioned: Santa Barbara (of course), Malibu, West Los Angeles / Santa Monica, Beverly Hills / Brentwood / Bel Air, Hollywood, Hancock Park, Pasadena / San Gabriel Valley, Palos Verdes Estates, San Clemente. A key architectural detail is the loggia: partially enclosed rooms that open to gardens or yards, offering a transition between indoor and outdoor spaces. The loggia is enclosed by a succession of arches. Other features: white stucco exteriors, arched windows and doorways, private (walled) courtyards, colorful tiles, terra-cotta, thick walls, red clay tile roofs.
  
• The Lessons of History (5/5) Will and Ariel Durant wrote an 11-volume "Story of Civilization" between 1935 and 1975. He was born in 1885 and as soon as he found success with "The Story of Philosophy" in 1926 he was able to quit teaching and focus on his lifetime project. What is interesting about this small book is that it distills what the Durants felt they learned in their lifetime of research and writing about history. (This was published in 1968.) Amusingly, they were probably typical 1960s liberals (like Warren Buffett) but because he was born so long ago some of his comments sound reactionary today. For example, "In a semitropical climate a nation of half a billion souls may breed like ants, but enervating heat may subject it to repeated conquest by warriors from more stimulating habitats." "[T]he laws of biology are the fundamental lessons of history. We are subject to the processes and trials of evolution, to the struggle for existence and the survival of the fittest to survive. If some of us seem to escape the strife or the trials it is because our group protects us; but that group itself must meet the tests of survival. So the first biological lesson of history is that life is competition." "The second biological lesson of history is that life is selection... Nature loves difference as the necessary material of selection." "Leave men free, and their natural inequalities will multiply almost geometrically." "Even when repressed, inequality grows; only the man who is below the average in economic ability desires equality; those who are conscious of superior ability desire freedom; and in the end superior ability has its way. Utopias of equality are biologically doomed, and the best that the amiable philosopher can hope for is an approximate equality of legal justice and educational opportunity." "The third biological lesson of history is that life must breed. Nature has no use for organisms, variations, or groups that cannot reproduce abundantly. She has a passion for quantity as prerequisite to the selection of quality; she likes large litters, and relishes the struggle that picks the surviving few... She is more interested in the species than the individual, and makes little difference between civilization and barbarism." Here's a prediction: "In the United States the lower birth rate of the Anglo-Saxons has lessened their economic and political power; and the higher birth rate of Roman Catholic families suggests that by the year 2000 the Roman Catholic Church will be the dominant force in national as well in municipal or state governments." I would say he predicted the Catholic Supreme Court - after Stevens retired in 2010, the Court had an entirely non-Protestant composition for the first time in its history. Here's something you never hear about anymore: "the [French] Revolution was a revolt of the indigenous Gauls ('Alpines') against the Teutonic Franks who had subjugated them under Clovis and Charlemagne." Also: "the Crusades, the Thirty Years' War, the Napoleonic Wars, [and] the First World War depleted the Nordic stock and left it too thin to resist the higher birth rate of Alpine and Mediterranean peoples in Europe and America." Here's an idea he shares with Empty America on Twitter: "American civilization is still in the stage of racial mixture... a fresh racial fusion [is occurring] which will hardly be complete for centuries to come." Interesting thought: "we cannot be sure that the moral laxity of our times is a herald of decay rather than a painful or delightful transition between a moral code that has lost its agricultural basis and another that our industrial civilization has yet to forge into social order and normality." "If history supports any theology this would be a dualism like the Zoroastrian or Manichaean: a good spirit and an evil spirit battling for control of the universe and men's souls." "In one way Christianity lent a hand against itself by developing in many Christians a moral sense that could no longer stomach the vengeful God of the traditional theology. The idea of hell disappeared from educated thought, even from pulpit homilies." This was interesting about economics: "[H]istory reports that 'the men who can manage men manage the men who can manage only things, and the men who can manage money manage all.'" "[H]aving studied the fluctuations of prices, they know that history is inflationary, and that money is the last thing a wise man will hoard." The concentration of wealth "may reach a point where the strength of number in the many poor rivals the strength of ability in the few rich; then the unstable equilibrium generates a critical situation, which history has diversely met by legislation redistributing wealth or by revolution distributing poverty." (See our notes on The Great Leveler.) "The government of the United States, in 1933-52 and 1960-65, followed Solon's peaceful methods, and accomplished a moderate and pacifying redistribution; perhaps someone had studied history. The upper classes in America cursed, complied, and resumed the concentration of wealth. We conclude that the concentration of wealth is natural and inevitable, and is periodically alleviated by violent or peaceable partial redistribution. In this view all economic history is the slow heartbeat of the social organism, a vast systole and diastole of concentrating wealth and compulsive recirculation." Interesting thought: "Marx was an unfaithful disciple of Hegel: he interpreted the Hegelian dialectic as implying that the struggle between capitalism and socialism would end in complete victory of socialism; but if the Hegelian dialectic of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis is applied to the Industrial Revolution as thesis, and to capitalism versus socialism as antithesis, the third condition would be a synthesis of capitalism and socialism; and to this reconciliation the Western world visibly moves." Good economics: "Since wealth is an order and procedure of production and exchange rather than an accumulation of (mostly perishable) goods, and is a trust (the "credit system") in men and institutions rather than in the intrinsic value of paper money or checks, violent revolutions do not so much redistribute wealth as destroy it." Our takeaway: Wealth inequality creates pressure for socialism and redistribution. Printing money creates wealth inequality. So we can expect pressure for socialism to continue.
• Dreams of El Dorado (3.5/5) We would not know who Theodore Roosevelt was but for the sinking of the USS Maine and the assassination of William McKinley. The USS Maine was obviously a false flag (and Roosevelt was an Assistant Secretary of the Navy!) but we have always taken the McK story at face value. Makes you wonder, though. "This might have augured the end of his political career, for the vice-presidency had a reputation as the office where ambition went to die. But an anarchist rescued Roosevelt y shooting McKinley, six months into the president's second term." Author H.W. Brands is a prolific American historian. (We reviewed his gold rush book in 2015.) He has a book coming out this month about the debate between Lindbergh and Roosevelt about isolationism. Brands is by no means "based," but he certainly picks some controversial subjects. I think that today's communists would prefer to memory hole the isolationism topic. Also, what are we to make of Brands, a history professor, moving from Texas A&M to UT Austin? Can we get a physiognomy check? We have his Texas independence book in our stack to read, although it will be tough to beat Lone Star. Wouldn't mind reading his books on T.R., A.J., patriots vs loyalists, the 1890s, MacArthur and Truman, and capitalism vs progressivism. He did a book of Haiku History: The American Saga Three Lines at a Time. Geography of Texas - there are a dozen rivers that reach the sea instead of one big one that branches (like the Mississippi or the Columbia Rivers). So there was no single river mouth that could be seized to give control of the interior. "Houston made it his life's work to separate Texas from Mexico." Santa Anna tipped the balance to Houston: "Even Austin reluctantly agreed, concluding that Santa Anna's usurpation had shattered any hope of a happy, prosperous Texas within Mexico." "In the 1840s American nationalism was scarcely distinguishable from militant Protestantism; the emerging ideology of Manifest Destiny portrayed Columbia, the spirit of America, advancing west with the flag in one hand and the Protestant Bible in the other." The Oregon trail by 1843: "the mystery of the trek had been largely dispelled; the key points of the route were understood, the difficult passages plotted, the places where the danger of Indians dictated special precautions identified." Mentions Thomas Hart Benton: "ardent advocate of America's westward expansion." We could have had British Columbia: "James Polk had campaigned on an all-of-Oregon platform, but the prospect of war with Mexico over Texas put him in a compromising mood." Good discussion of western geology: "The movement of the plates has had still other effects less noticeable at the earth's surface. The heat of the melting at the western edge of the continental plate distilled and separated various minerals found in the rock of the crust, in much the way the heat of a petroleum refinery distills and separates the constituents of crude oil. Transported under great pressure by superheated water, the minerals eventually precipitated out of solution when the water rose and cooled. The result was the gathering and deposit of certain minerals and metals in concentrations far higher than in the original rock." While westward expansion started east and moved west, gold mining started west (California) and moved east as resources were depleted. It happened fast: "by the 1870s they had almost run out of promising geology." John Brown: "when the North made a saint of this terrorist, Southerners despaired that they could ever be safe within the Union." Southerners were really holding Manifest Destiny back. Once they seceded, Congress was able to pass a Pacific Railway Act and a Homestead Act. Southerners wanted to settle the west with black slave plantations and not free white settlers. Leapfrogging loyalties: "Americans who lived at a greater distance, with less to gain or lose, often displayed greater sympathy toward Indians and supported more accommodating policies." And cornucopian economics even make an appearance: "Since the 1870s farm prices had been falling relentlessly, pushing prosperous farmers into the ranks of the marginal... Ironically, a principal cause of the price decline was the farmers' very success: they produced more corn, wheat, cotton, pork and so on than the markets for those commodities could absorb." "So the farmers blamed something else: the money system." The increased productivity was deflationary, but the farmers had borrowed money in nominal terms to buy their farms. The unexpected windfall to creditors wasn't really fair and could have been fixed by indexing debt contracts to a price index.
• Special Tasks (3/5) This is a somewhat-ghostwritten autobiography of Pavel Sudoplatov, who was the architect of the assassination of Lev Bronstein (Leon Trotsky) in Mexico City in 1940. Not many of the 20th Century communist dictators got what was coming to them, but Trotsky and Ceaușescu did. As Sudoplatov says, "From 1936 to 1939 there were two life-and-death struggles in Spain, both of them civil wars. One pitted nationalist forces led by Francisco Franco, aided by Hitler, against the Spanish Republicans, aided by Communists. The other was a separate war among Communists themselves. Stalin in the Soviet Union and Trotsky in exile each hoped to be the savior and the sponsor of the Republicans and thereby become the vanguard for world Communist revolution. We sent our young inexperienced intelligence operatives as well as our experienced instructors. Spain proved to be a kindergarten for our future intelligence operations. Our subsequent intelligence initiatives all stemmed from contacts that we made and lessons that we learned in Spain. The Spanish Republicans lost, but Stalin's men and women won. When the Spanish Civil War ended, there was no room left in the world for Trotsky." He quotes Stalin saying, "There are no important political figures in the Trotskyite movement except Trotsky itself. If Trotsky is finished the threat will be eliminated." Like any memoir (e.g. Khrushchev's, which we read), it is self serving. He was an enthusiastic soldier for two of the worst mass murderers in history, Stalin and Beria. His conclusion, after a wasted life (including 15 years in prison on the orders of Khrushchev): "The Soviet Union—to which I devoted every fiber of my being and for which I was willing to die; for which I averted my eyes from every brutality, finding justification in its transformation from a backward nation into a superpower; for which I spent long months on duty away from Emma and the children; whose mistakes cost me fifteen years of my life as a husband and father – was unwilling to admit its failure and take me back as a citizen. Only when there was no more Soviet Union, no more proud empire, was I reinstated and my name returned to its rightful place." Other interesting things: "[Manhattan Project] scientist saw themselves as a new breed of superstatesmen whose mandate transcended national boundaries; [Sudoplatov] and his officers exploited this hubris." (We noticed this when we read The Making of the Atomic Bomb.) Before Harry Truman was ever told about the atomic bomb, Stalin already knew every detail of the Manhattan Project and the bomb design, thanks especially to Fuchs but also to other scientists like Oppenheimer and Bohr. "Whenever the [USSR] began to settle down and progress economically, Stalin created new tensions by fabricating imaginary crimes." "[I]n the 1920s Jewish CHEKA officers adopted Russian names so as not to attract attention to their Jewish origins..." "In the early 1920s, when the Bolshevik regime was first establishing itself, there was a preponderance of Jewish names in administrative positions at all levels because they had the education to fill these jobs." Observation: from the Revolution until the death of Stalin (36 years) nobody ever got simply fired when they lost out in a Soviet palace intrigue, they got shot. But despite this, these people never saw it coming, except for Alexander Orlov (Lev Feldbin), who suspected that he was going to be purged in 1938 and defected to the U.S. ("Orlov left two letters for the Soviet ambassador, one for Stalin and one for the NKVD chief Yezhov. He told them that he would reveal everything he knew about NKVD operations if any action was taken against him or his family.") Now that we've read Stalin's War, it is surprising that he does not mention anything about the massive (absurd) amount of supplies that the Soviets were receiving from the United States. Surprising detail about Beria: "Oil refineries were his particular passion. In his office he kept three scale models of oil refineries." Here is what was so terrible about the atomic espionage: "Stalin pursued a tough policy of confrontation against the United States when the Cold War started; he knew he did not have to be afraid of the American nuclear threat, at least until the end of the 1940s. Only by 1955 did we estimate the stockpile of American and British nuclear weapons to be sufficient to destroy the Soviet Union. That information helped to assure a Communist victory in China's civil war in 1947-1948." This is odd: "The fact that the Rosenbergs were arrested promptly after Greenglass confessed indicates that the FBI was not seriously determined to discover the extent of the Rosenberg spy ring." When Sudoplatov got out of prison he was given 80,000 rubles of government bonds that he had been required to buy through paycheck deductions throughout his career, but the currency had lost 90% of its purchasing power.
• Napoleon: A Life (5/5) A spectacular and concise biography of Napoleon by the great writer Paul Johnson. (We've mentioned previously his art history tome.) Paul Johnson is British and Catholic, and the British were the great enemies of Napoleon, who was atheist. So it is a critical portrayal of a "great" man, but great in the sense of leaving a mark on the world like Caesar or Alexander (which was what Napoleon wanted to do) and not in a moral sense. Napoleon was born in 1770, right about the same time as Beethoven, Andrew Jackson, explorer William Clark, and Hegel. As Johnson says, Napoleon is "the grandest possible refutation of those determinists who hold that events are governed by forces, classes, economics, and geography rather than by the powerful wills of men and women." Some long term effects of Napoleon: "the eventual revulsion against Bonaparte [in German-speaking countries] played a critical part in creating a spirit of German nationalism that was to become aggressive and threatening itself." "A new concept of total warfare was born, and alongside it grew other institutions: the secret police, large-scale professional espionage, government propaganda machines, and the faking of supposedly democratic movements, elections, and plebiscites." "[I]n due course France inevitably began to slip from her position as the leading power in Europe to second-class status - that was Bonaparte's true legacy to the country he adopted." "[I]n the political anarchy that emerged from [WWI], a new brand of ideological dictator took Bonaparte's methods of government as a model, first in Russia, then in Italy, and finally in Germany, with many smaller countries following suit." Johnson says - as do many - that Napoleon "did not understand the true strategic significance of the sea." Napoleon's motivations: "[He] was not by temperament a mercenary. But he was not a patriot, either. He was not moved by sentiment, secular or religious... He needed not a paymaster, like a mercenary, not a disembodied ideal, like a patriot, but a source of power, so that he could capture it and obtain more power. So he asked himself: Where does the nearest source of real power lie? And the answer came immediately: France." "Few successful men have ever carried a lighter burden of ideology." His skills as a young man: "Bonaparte began to pay constant attention to the role of calculation in war: distances to be covered; speed and route of march; quantities of supplies and animals, and the vehicles required for their transport; rates at which ammunition was used in varying engagements; replacement rates of men and animals; wastage figures from disease, battle, and desertion - all the elements of eighteenth-century military logistics. He made a habit of working these things out in his head, so that they could easily be dictated for orders. He also became a master map reader, with a gift amounting almost to genius for visualizing terrain from a two-dimensional, often fallible piece of engraved paper." "In the artillery parc at Valence, he tried to educate himself by intensive reading, as the young Winston Churchill was to do during his Indian service." How he came to power: "Revolutionary France of the 1790s... demonstrated the classic parabola of revolution: a constitutional beginning; reformist moderation quickening into ever-increasing extremism; a descent into violence; a period of sheer terror, ended by a violent reaction; a time of confusion, cross-currents, and chaos, market by growing exhaustion and disgust with change; and eventually an overwhelming demand for 'a Man on Horseback' to restore order, regularity, and prosperity. Victor Hugo, a child of one of Bonaparte's generals, was later to write, 'Nothing is more powerful than an idea whose time has come.'" Napoleon "learned from Barras how effective brutal reprisals against royalists could be, and how the advent of Revolutionary 'justice' could be made into an opportunity to grab wealth as well as a chance to grab top positions." As mentioned, Napoleon was a man of artillery (land-based) and not navies (sea power): "it is impossible to overemphasize the role cannonading played in his success on the field." "After Toulon and Dego, Vendémiaire was Bonaparte's third widely published success. All were achieved by cannon." "Pontoons, mobile metal bridging materials, siege howitzers, anything involving naval technology including barges and troopships - he was not interested." On the revolution: "Bonaparte would not have possessed the ruthless disregard of human life, of natural and man-made law, of custom and good faith needed to carry [the conquest of Italy] through without the positive example and teaching of the Revolution. The Revolution was a lesson in the power of evil to replace idealism, and Bonaparte was its ideal pupil. Moreover, the revolution left behind itself a huge engine: administrative and legal machinery to repress the individual such as the monarchs of the ancien regime never dreamed of; a centralized power to organize national resources that no previous state had ever possessed; an absolute concentration of authority, first in a parliament, then in a committee, finally in a single tyrant, that had never been known before... In effect, then, the Revolution created the modern totalitarian state, in all essentials, if on an experimental basis, more than a century before it came to its full and horrible fruition in the twentieth century." Why he won, at first: his "great qualities - speed of action, decisiveness, risk taking, and wonderful leadership, together with iron will and courage," though these "could not have succeeded without the corresponding weaknesses of his enemies - lethargy, indecisiveness, and weak, divided leadership, together with a lack of will to see the struggle through, and often blatant cowardice." However: "Becoming emperor lost Bonaparte most of the European liberals." Interesting: "If the record shows that Bonaparte was a great general, it equally demonstrates beyond argument that he could not rule on a long-term basis. [...] If Bonaparte had been married earlier, to a fertile woman, and produced children to succeed and assist him, who could be trained to rule, he would have looked at the empire as a long-term investment to be treated and coaxed and cherished accordingly." Czar Alexander "was an ideologue, who held legitimacy to be sacred... The czar's refusal to sanctify his friendship with Bonaparte by a Christian family marriage was one of the most momentous mishaps in the dictator's career. Such an alliance would have made the eventual clash between France and Russia far less likely; might have ruled it out altogether, especially if the two powers began cooperating against Turkey and British India." "Burke carved the case against Revolutionary France (and by implication Bonaparte, its residual heir) in flaming tablets of stone. His hugely successful and much-read essay Reflections on the Revolution in France played a key role in keeping the thinking part of the nation steady during the long years of gloom-laden warfare that followed." Here's where we come down: "If Bonaparte had used France's legitimate rights to its American territory to explore and create an enormous dominion across the Atlantic, instead of trying to carve out an illegitimate empire in Europe, he would have enriched France instead of impoverishing her, provided scope for countless adventurous young Frenchmen instead of killing them in futile battles, and incidentally inflicted more damage on his British opponents than all his efforts in Europe. He would also have changed the globe permanently, something his career failed to achieve in the end. But he knew nothing of America, and desired to know nothing until it was too late." "No dictator of the tragic twentieth century... was without distinctive echoes of the Napoleonic prototype."
• Napoleon: A Life (4/5) The Andrew Roberts biography. If Paul Johnson wrote an anti-Napoleon case, this is the pro- case. The Fondation Napoléon published the complete correspondence of Napoleon (33,000 letters) and Roberts thought that it warranted a "complete re-evaluation of this extraordinary man." Roberts argues convincingly that Napoleon's institutions ended both the Revolution and the monarchy, and that he was not a "totalitarian dictator." Certainly, Napoleon was much less sociopathic and a more just ruler than Lenin or Stalin. Roberts says, "He personified the best parts of the French Revolution, the ones that have survived and infused European life ever since." "The ideas that underpin our modern world - meritocracy, equality before the law, property rights, religious toleration, modern secular education, sound finances, and so on - were championed, consolidated, codified and geographically extended by Napoleon." The absolute monarchies of Russia, Austria, and Prussia, as well as England hated this - seven coalitions in 23 years to fight him. When Wellington was asked who was the greatest captain of the age, he replied: "In this age, in past ages, in any age: Napoleon." Roberts: "It is untrue that he cared nothing for his men and was careless with their lives." It hurts when you have to try to rebut that accusation. The great Minard map popularized recently by Tufte shows the loss of half a million men on the Moscow campaign. Roberts thinks that Hitler's visit to Napoleon's tomb in June 1940 unjustly links the two men in people's minds: "the two dictators born outside their countries who sought to dominate Europe, both of whom, after initial military successes, went to their downfalls due to a failed invasion of Russia, their own insatiable hubris, and the efforts of a group of tenacious Allies who coalesced against them." Napoleon and dimensional analysis: "to be a good general you must know mathematics - it serves to direct your thinking in a thousand circumstances." His mathematical aptitude paved his way into the artillery, which meant that he was the one who dispersed the Royalist opposition on 13 Vendémiaire in front of the Église Saint-Roch using a "whiff of grapeshot." Amusing: "the initial rumblings of the French Revolution were regarded by the [Bonaparte] family through the prism of whether the political changes in Paris were more or less likely to relieve [them] of their debts, and whether they might perhaps be granted a further agricultural subsidy by the state." Napoleon read a book as a young man by Jacques-Antoine Dulaure called Critical history of the nobility: "in which its prejudices, its robberies and crimes are exposed." (Napoleon had an "exhaustive autodidactic reading program.") The Revolution allowed Napoleon to rise quickly: "Rarely in military history has there been so high a turnover of generals... capable young men could advance through the ranks at unprecedented speed." "On December 22, 1793, having been on leave for fifty-eight of his ninety-nine months of service - with and without permission - and after spending less than four years on active duty, Napoleon was made, at twenty-four, a general." In comparison, the baby boomer generation has no turnover. The current chiefs of staff of the U.S. military - four star generals and admirals - are all 60 years old. Roberts calls Napoleon a "quintessential landlubber": "The maritime aspect of grand strategy was always one of Napoleon's weaknesses: in all his long list of victories, none was at sea." Great line by Napoleon to the Directory: "I warn you, and I speak in the name of eighty thousand men, that the time when cowardly lawyers and wretched babblers guillotined soldiers is past." The Rosetta stone was discovered in July 1799 by French officer Pierre-François Bouchard during the Napoleonic campaign in Egypt. More on naval matters: at Trafalgar the Franco-Spanish fleet lost 22 ships while Nelson lost none. "The battle led to British naval dominance for over a century. As the philosopher Bertrand De Jouvenel put it, 'Napoleon was master in Europe, but he was also a prisoner there.'" "He never understood that a fleet which spent seven-eights of its time in port simply could not gain the seamanship necessary to take on the Royal Navy at the height of its operational capacity." So he came up with a protectionist Continental System to choke off British trade with the continent: "I will conquer the sea through the power of the land." France was backwards compared with Britain, the same way the U.S. south was compared with the north: "Napoleon couldn't even provide the insignia stitched onto his officers' uniforms except by resort to British manufacturers." "As the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars progressed, the casualty rates in battles increased exponentially..." because of the increased presence of artillery. Taking on Spain: "Napoleon undertook the occupation of another, far bigger territory in which much the same factors were in play [as Calabria]: bad communications, fanatical Catholic priests, a hardened, primitive peasantry, a Legitimist Bourbon monarch with a far better claim to the people's loyalty than the Bonaparte candidate, and every prospect of easy resupply by the Royal Navy." Key point: "many of the phenomena of Napoleonic warfare that had been characteristic of his earlier campaigns - elderly opponents lacking energy, a nationally a linguistically diverse enemy against the homogeneous French, a vulnerable spot onto which Napoleon could latch and not let go, a capacity for significantly faster movement than the enemy, and to concentrate forces to achieve numerical advantage for just long enough to be decisive - were not present or were simply impossible in the vast reaches of European Russia." "If it had not been for you, English, I should have been Emperor of the East; but wherever there is water to float a ship, we are sure to find you in our way."
• Thank God for the Atom Bomb and Other Essays (2/5) Paul Fussell's Class is a 5+/5, but this collection of his essays sure isn't. The titular essay is worthwhile. If you care about young American GI's lives, the atomic bomb was a good thing. Fussell points out that atomic bomb critics are virtue signalling (before that term had been coined). The criticism "can perform for the speaker a valuable double function. First, it can display the fineness of his moral weave. And second, by implication it can also inform the audience that during the war he was not socially so unfortunate as to find himself down there with the ground forces." We have never heard anyone point this out before, and it goes to show the great insights that Fussell could come up with through his lens of social class. Much more useful than his academic career in literary criticism (which most of the rest of the turgid essays in this book consist of.) He also points out that John Kenneth Galbraith, another A-bomb critic, worked in the Office of Price Administration (i.e. communist central planning) during the war. Also points out that Ronald Reagan "fought the war on the film lots of Hollywood." The Japanese practiced "universal national kamikaze." Had never heard that there was a Congress of American Mothers that protested in Washington against conscription, hanging a bill sponsor in effigy. He wrote a gun control essay "A Well-Regulated Militia" that is surprising to see, and totally erroneous. (Heller: "The Amendment’s prefatory clause announces a purpose, but does not limit or expand the scope of the second part, the operative clause. The operative clause’s text and history demonstrate that it connotes an individual right to keep and bear arms.") I think there is a decent chance that if Paul Fussell had been born in 1964 instead of 1924, he would be "out and proud" and have a Kamala Harris yard sign this year. Been thinking lately about how Fussell, Herman Kahn, Charlie Munger, and Henry Kissinger were all born in the early 1920s. Andy Rooney was born in 1919.