Chaos and Confusion

Book : Nothing is true, everything is possible

RAND Paper

Didn't want to spam the queue, but if anyone else wants to post parts 2 and 3 of this amazing, comprehensive piece of journalism, here are the other two parts to this story:

Part 2: Internal Divisions President Trump’s election made the Murdoch family more powerful than ever. But the bitter struggle between James and Lachlan threatened to tear the company apart.

Part 3: The New Fox Weapon The Disney deal left the Murdochs with a media empire stripped to its essence: a hardcore right-wing news machine — with Lachlan in charge.

It's a very long read, but worth it.

I also recommend Jane Mayer's seminal book from 2017 entitled Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right to get a full picture of how the oligarchy has slimed in and committed violence against our democracy for over a generation.

Just to highlight some key info:

> As they dig into the viralizing of such stories, congressional investigations are probing not just Russia's role but whether Moscow had help from the Trump campaign. Sources familiar with the investigations say they are probing two Trump-linked organizations: Cambridge Analytica, a data-analytics company hired by the campaign that is partly owned by deep-pocketed Trump backer Robert Mercer; and Breitbart News, the right-wing website formerly run by Trump's top political adviser Stephen Bannon.

Wanna learn more about Mercer's connections? Check out Dark Money by Jane Mayer, an investigative journalist with The New Yorker.

>I'm going to continue to recommend this book on any relevant threads I see (unless a mod tells me to stop for spamming reasons): Nothing is True and Everything is Possible is a book I think anyone who cares about this should read or listen to.

The Kremlin is known to behave in the same way you just described and the author of Nothing is True and Everything is Possible does a really good job of describing in length the effect that has had on the Russian society.

I know that feel bro.

I argued with my 3rd grade teacher that tomatoes were fruits, or at the very least classifiable as both. She insisted I was wrong because they were... in salads. My distrust of institutionalized education began that day, you stupid fucking cunt Mrs. Stevenson.

Relevant: Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong [Paperback]

>What the actual fuck is wrong with politicians.

You're slowly becoming aware of how corrupt and fucked up the world really is... You're not seeing what's going on behind the scenes... they fear the net and hence want to lock everything down.

The (mass surveillance) by the NSA and abuse by law enforcement is just more part and parcel of state suppression of dissent against corporate interests. They're worried that the more people are going to wake up and corporate centers like the US and canada may be among those who also awaken. See this vid with Zbigniew Brzezinski, former United States National Security Advisor.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n7ZyJw_cHJY

Brezinski at a press conference

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VWTIZBCQ79g

Snowden on terrorism/spying.

http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/video/2015/sep/25/edward-snowden-treaty-glenn-greenwald-mass-surveillance-terrorism-video

Democracy Inc.

http://www.amazon.com/Democracy-Incorporated-Managed-Inverted-Totalitarianism/dp/069114589X/

Intereference in other states when the corporations dont get their way

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8mxp_wgFWQo&feature=youtu.be&list=PLKR2GeygdHomOZeVKx3P0fqH58T3VghOj&t=724

From war is a racket:

"I helped make Mexico, especially Tampico, safe for American oil intersts in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefits of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. In China I helped to see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested."[p. 10]

"War is a racket. ...It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives." [p. 23]

"The general public shoulders the bill [for war]. This bill renders a horrible accounting. Newly placed gravestones. Mangled bodies. Shattered minds. Broken hearts and homes. Economic instability. Depression and all its attendant miseries. Back-breaking taxation for generations and generations." [p. 24]
General Butler is especially trenchant when he looks at post-war casualties. He writes with great emotion about the thousands of tramautized soldiers, many of who lose their minds and are penned like animals until they die, and he notes that in his time, returning veterans are three times more likely to die prematurely than those who stayed home.

http://www.amazon.com/War-Racket-Antiwar-Americas-Decorated/dp/0922915865/

Mercers and The Kochs. Read or listen to Dark Money. It's scary.

>Ein nicht zu vernacchlässigender Teil der Bevölkerung wird hier Stück für Stück, Überschrift für Überschrift, von jemandem der Merkel nicht und sich eine Strengere Flüchtlingspolitik wünscht; zu einem der allen traditionellen Medien nicht mehr traut (da sie nie über diese News berichten!) und empfänglich für Verschwörungstheorien ist.

Ein ganz wichtiger Punkt! Zu dieser Entwicklung hat der Journalist Peter Pomerantsew ein Buch mit dem passenden Titel "Nothing is true and everything is possible." geschrieben.

Die Strategie heutiger Propaganda ist nicht mehr, die Menschen auf die eigene Seite zu ziehen. Es reicht schon, das Vertrauen in die Medien der Gegenseite zu erodieren.

Dazu auch ein sehr lesenswerter Artikel von Marina Weisband in der Zeit, Zitat:

> Widersprüchliche Informationen sind deshalb so unbeliebt, weil sie kognitive Dissonanz erzeugen – die auszuhalten Ressourcen kostet. Das ist besonders zum Problem geworden, seit Informationen im Internet gesammelt werden können. Im Netz kann jedes Foto verfälscht sein, kann völlig aus dem Zusammenhang gerissen worden sein. Die Verwirrung und Belastung durch die Vielfalt der widersprüchlichen Information in den sozialen Medien sind ohnehin gewaltig. Nun kommt der Kniff der Lügner hinzu, dieses Potenzial bewusst zu instrumentalisieren.

>Wenn ich Ihnen sage: "Der Himmel ist grün", dann ist es gar nicht so sehr mein Ziel, dass Sie mir auf Anhieb glauben. Mein Ziel ist es vielmehr, so häufig zu behaupten, der Himmel sei grün, bis Ihre Ressourcen, den Widerspruch auszuhalten, erschöpft sind und Sie einlenken und sagen: "Das ist Ihre Meinung. Ich denke, der Himmel ist blau. Es gibt wohl keine Möglichkeit, die Farbe des Himmels objektiv festzustellen." Steter Tropfen höhlt den Schädel. Das Ziel offensichtlicher Lügen ist der Beweis der Machtlosigkeit von Wahrheit; die Verschiebung des Diskurses, sodass alles plötzlich infrage gestellt wird.

Sure, and how about the overthrow of the democratically elected Mosaddegh in Iran in 1952? Or how about the countless meddling in Central and South America? Speaking domestically, why is it that they always infiltrate peaceful groups of citizens and then play the role of provocateur?

The U.S. federal government should basically never be trusted and yet it seems each generation falls prey to their lies and propaganda - especially with regard to foreign policy. WMD's anyone? The American citizenry should always view everything the government says with an inherent distrust. That should be the default position of the citizenry. They have lost the privilege of being trusted. They don't work for or serve the interests of average Americans in the least. When the corporate/MIC/establishment elite want to meddle in another countries affairs or start a war, they will do whatever lying or black bag operations they need to in order to achieve their objective. They've done it plenty before and they will continue doing it until we refuse to allow it any more.

The U.S. government has put down so many populist movements and meddled/overthrown so many governments in the name of "making the world safe for capitalism" it's crazy. No other country even comes close. Yes, that's right, not democracy - that is the biggest lie of them all. The U.S. couldn't give two shits about democracy. Not even here at home. They just want to keep us believing that we live in a democracy and keep us participating in their rigged system so that we won't revolt.

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Mohammad_Mosaddegh

http://www.amazon.com/Overthrow-Americas-Century-Regime-Change/dp/0805082409/ref=tmm_pap_title_0/191-0374213-3312233

http://www.amazon.com/All-Shahs-Men-American-Middle/dp/047018549X/ref=sr_1_1_title_0_main?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1321374076&sr=1-1

I strongly suggest Nothing is True and Everything is Possible, Peter Pomerantsev's exploration of his time as a television producer in Russia.

They've lived under dictatorships and tsars for over a century. Every single Big Promise for the last hundred years or more has gone to the same conclusion, every power vacuum was filled quickly by worse, or at best the same as before. Organized crime is referred to as 'authority'. When the only organization of any kind was criminal, they became the de facto pseudo-government.

This has affected the culture deeply. There's a special kind of permeating philosophy in the day to day mindset, in their relationship to truth, power and certainty.

It's fascinating.

Edit: Ok, thanks for taking my Gold Virginity, random stranger :)

More links: Red Notice by the recently headlined Bill Browder, on the Magnitsky Act and its gruesome origins. I haven't, but I will read this soon.

Bill Browder's lecture on How he became Putin's No.1 Enemy. Basically a longer version of his opening statement to the Senate Judiciary.

Putin's Kleptocracy, a promising but so far a bit dry look into how Putin steals everything.

You have to remember that Hitler was appointed chancellor by a democratically elected president. Genocide doesn't just happen in a week, nor does change.

https://www.amazon.com/They-Thought-Were-Free-Germans/dp/0226511928

https://www.amazon.com/Cant-Happen-Here-Signet-Classics/dp/0451465644

Relevant reads

Read Dark Money

Interview with Dick Morris former advisor and friend of Bill. He left because Hillary was using public funds to hire people to intimidate Bill's victims.

Here Christopher Hitchens talks about how they hired people to kill Kathleen Willey's pet, fuck up her car and more!

Here's Hitchens' full video where he also talks about how Bill gutted the Democratic Party and adopted GOP policies to court their donors.


More info can be found in his book "No One Left to Lie To: The Triangulations of William Jefferson Clinton"

I started reading Dark Money, where they outlined how a whole bunch of think tanks were created to push a libertarian philosophy while espousing non-partisanship, while being funded by hardcore libertarians and billionaires like the Koch brothers, Scaife etc. So bear in mind that some these "non-partisan" think tanks might just be that.

This is a great question that I have thought about a million times. I have actually spent a lot of time trying to find a book on it, but I have not come across one that is specifically about Sociology or Psychology.

I first started to think about this when I was getting my masters degree (in Sociology). Often times I was super excited to share the things I would learn with my family and friends, and how the things I was (and still am) learning are often in contradiction to the things I was told/learned growing up. For context, I'm a white girl who grew up in an upper-middle class politically conservative suburb in a large city with successful parents, and I was always given everything I wanted/needed. I considered myself a Christian and I told people that I was a republican (although I knew nothing about politics and was just identifying with my parents).

Then I started studying Soci and my entire perspective on the world changed. It opened my eyes and forced me to look beyond my tunnel vision of society. It was really hard at times to come to terms with things that I thought I already understood, especially social issues that I had never thought about before or issues that had always been presented to me in a one-sided, biased manner.

A good example of this is the trope of the Welfare Queen. I was told that poor people, esp. poor black people, were moochers and only wanted handouts because they were lazy and didn't want to get a job. Of course, I learned that the Welfare Queen (and welfare "fraud") is a myth that was promulgated by Ronald Regan in order to stigmatize people in poverty so that he could convince Americans that rolling back the social safety net was justified because it was only being used by poor black (read: undeserving) citizens. The truth is that most people on welfare do have jobs (i.e. the 'working poor'). Also, the welfare reforms of 1996 created a 5-year maximum lifetime cap on benefits so that welfare "cheaters" (which did not exist anywhere near the level that we're often told) were literally unable to collect benefits for life (also, contrary to popular opinion, women do not have more babies to get more benefits. In fact, if a woman has a child while receiving benefits, she and her family will be removed from the rolls). Welfare is probably one of the least understood/mischaracterized social issue in American society.

Science in general is often met with the sting of anti-intellectualism, which is part of the answer to your question. However, I think social science in particular gets it worse than the 'natural' sciences like Biology and Chemistry. I used to say that it was because people were generally more suspect of social sciences, but I think it's more than that. People like to dismiss facts about social issues that they don't agree with or have a different view on because it's much easier to disagree that we live in a post-racial society (we don't) than it is to disagree on the functions of bodily organs. People also tend to conflate their individual life experiences with overall reality (i.e. "well, i've never experienced [blank] so it must not be true or its exaggerated" or "well, I know someone who is [blank] but [blank] doesn't happen to them"). You get what I am saying here? Most people don't question or critically think about social norms or commonsense 'truths' because these 'truths' are so embedded in our milieu that its hard to imagine otherwise. So instead of thinking critically, people dismiss sociological knowledge as either "elitist" or "not real science" so that they can remain undisturbed in their own little worlds.

Once I saw a question on r/askreddit that asked what the slogan of your college major or job would be. I would say, "Sociology: reminding people of uncomfortable truths since 1838" or "Sociology: everything you were taught about society was a big lie" lol.

I'm sorry I can't find any literature for you, but I can recommend these instead:

Anti-Intellectualism in American Life

The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why it Matters.

http://www.amazon.com/Lies-My-Teacher-Told-Everything/dp/0684818868

I like how this author puts it. He wasn't the first to discover the America's. He was the last. He was the most historically important because of the impact he had on the America's. Also in the book they talk about the many African boats that sailed the ocean and landed on the southern end of the continent. I believe he wasn't even the first European but he did make it profitable and that's what really mattered.

I agree with both of the other commenters, but thought some perspective might perhaps be helpful.

In his highly acclaimed work Bloodlands, Timothy Snyder estimates that 3.1 million Soviet POWs were murdered by the Nazis through forced starvation as a part of Generalplan Ost. The USHMM estimates that about 1.7 million people were murdered in the Operation Reinhard camps, while another 1.1 million were murdered at the Auschwitz camps.

While many, many more people were murdered as part of the Holocaust via open air shootings, starvation, etc., it is not inaccurate to recognize that the Nazis killed more Soviet POWs through forced starvation than they did through the killing centers most people generally associate with the Holocaust.

A good resource in the first half of the narration--Mossadegh's rise to power, nationalization of oil resources, and overthrow--is All the Shah's Men by Stephen Kinzer. Just be aware that the author is writing partly to make a political point about regime change.

The film is very accurate, although, as you said, a bit simplified in its description. The early 20th century rulers of Iran signed a treaty with Britain allowing the Anglo-Iranian Oil Corporation (later BP) essentially unfettered access to the country's oil resources. Muhammed Mossadegh successful rose to power as a nationalist and populist prime minister. In 1951, he nationalized Anglo-Iranian.

This led to severe diplomatic tensions between Iran and the UK, in which the UK considered using military force, but ultimately decided to overthrow Mossadegh through a coup. Iran then cut diplomatic relations with the UK, expelling most of their spies in the process. The UK was able to convince US President Dwight Eisenhower through his Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and the CIA director, his brother Allen Dulles, to carry out the coup on behalf of the UK. The Americans were concerned that Mossadegh's nationalization of industries was a step on a road to communism, and they were concerned they might lose Iran's oil resources to the Soviet sphere of influence as a result.

Kermit Roosevelt Jr, a CIA officer in Iran, executed Operation Ajax in 1953, which overthrew Mossadegh's government and reinstalled Mohammed Reza Pahlavi as king ("shah") of Iran under the guise of a popular uprising.

This is, of course, still a simplification, but hopefully provides a little more detail. Maybe somebody else can provide some input on the 1979 revolution?

Edit: Corrected as per willpredun.

Most excellent book too!

https://www.amazon.com/Dark-Money-History-Billionaires-Radical/dp/0307947904

I've been posting the amazon link to that book at least once a day for the last month or two :).

Thank you for picking a superb section to post the actual text so people can see exactly why I'm so much in favor of ALL Americans reading this particular book right now. This isn't something that has never been seen before. Sure, it has never been seen like this in the United States, but we have seen it all before. Less than a century ago in fact, back in the 1930's, over in Germany, there was this guy you may have heard of, his name was Adolph Hitler....

ETA: https://www.amazon.com/They-Thought-Were-Free-Germans/dp/0226511928

That search is what made me atheist. The truth is that there is no true history of the bible. It's long lost, a mystery. For instance, we have no idea who wrote the gospels.. .totally anonymous. We don't know who wrote the OT... At best we know Paul's letters and a few other books, and we know when certain things were added or changed (for instance the famous John 3:16 was added by a monk later on).

If you want some insight into the history of Christianity, here are some links. It's a messy world filled with 2000 years of apologetics muddying the waters.

http://www.reddit.com/help/faqs/atheistgems#HistoryandLiteraryAnalysis (specifically this one: Examining the Existence of a Historical Jesus: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MvleOBYTrDE )

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Council_of_Nicaea

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecumenical_council#List_of_ecumenical_councils

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlemagne (responsible for converting most of Europe... by the sword. Dealth penalty for having any pagan items, sacked whole villages, etc). more: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constantine_I_and_Christianity

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoroaster

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Documentary_hypothesis

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monomyth

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_mythology

Now, if you want some good books... I recommend:

http://www.amazon.com/Lies-My-Teacher-Told-Everything/dp/0684818868

http://www.amazon.com/Misquoting-Jesus-Story-Behind-Changed/dp/0060738170

http://www.amazon.com/Wrote-Bible-Richard-Elliott-Friedman/dp/0060630353/ref=pd_sim_b_6

Any other questions?

Great read for those interested in a more historical look at the subject. Very well argued and interesting book, very eye opening in terms of the many different aspects of American society and how they developed over the last few hundred years.

http://www.amazon.com/Anti-Intellectualism-American-Life-Richard-Hofstadter/dp/0394703170

If you want to hear more about this I recommend "Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right". Unfortunately - seminars like this are only the tip of the ice-berg. There are huge ideological enterprises set up with goal of establishing "beach-heads" at prestigious universities by setting up private organizations that are attached to the university but paid to publish certain results. Their role is usually to promote free markets and encourage the inclusion of economic costs in law (not just public good). The Mercatus Institute is another example of one of these privately-funded-but-publicly-housed organizations. They're the guys who made news a few months ago when they published a study on Bernie Sander's medicare-for-all plan that showed that even though it was expensive - it was still cheaper than what we're spending now.

Sorry but if you think the GOP was transparent and honest in 1994, and that America had been the historical good guys up until recently, all that says is how naive and uninformed you were up until recently.

I'm not about to type out the recent history of GOP practices and motivations here, but rest assured that the GOP has been serving the same masters for many, many years, and the "freaking cool" contract was just more of that.

As for the "USA is the world's good guy!" narrative, that's just patriotic propaganda. Yes there is much good, but there is also much bad in our history. Our pioneering use of slavery, genocidal treatment of native americans, exploitation of natural resources, and manipulation of smaller nations' governments for commercial gain, have been with us since the founding days of our nation. Torture, genocide, and untold unnecessary suffering have been the regular result of these national actions. Many of our problems today result directly from obliviousness to the realities of our own history. We can't avoid repeating it if we willfully forget it.

US History textbook authors are one of the biggest promoters of this narrative, so it's understandable that it pervades the national consciousness, but also sad.

Read Lies My Teacher Told Me for a good discussion of this.

The transformation of the Weimar Republic into the Third Reich was gradual.

> "What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if the people could not understand it, it could not be released because of national security. And their sense of identification with Hitler, their trust in him, made it easier to widen this gap and reassured those who would otherwise have worried about it.

> "This separation of government from people, this widening of the gap, took place so gradually and so insensibly, each step disguised (perhaps not even intentionally) as a temporary emergency measure or associated with true patriotic allegiance or with real social purposes. And all the crises and reforms (real reforms, too) so occupied the people that they did not see the slow motion underneath, of the whole process of government growing remoter and remoter.

> "You will understand me when I say that my Middle High German was my life. It was all I cared about. I was a scholar, a specialist. Then, suddenly, I was plunged into all the new activity, as the university was drawn into the new situation; meetings, conferences, interviews, ceremonies, and, above all, papers to be filled out, reports, bibliographies, lists, questionnaires. And on top of that were the demands in the community, the things in which one had to, was ‘expected to’ participate that had not been there or had not been important before. It was all rigmarole, of course, but it consumed all one’s energies, coming on top of the work one really wanted to do. You can see how easy it was, then, not to think about fundamental things. One had no time."

> "Those," I said, "are the words of my friend the baker. ‘One had no time to think. There was so much going on.’"

> "To live in this process is absolutely not to be able to notice it—please try to believe me—unless one has a much greater degree of political awareness, acuity, than most of us had ever had occasion to develop. Each step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained or, on occasion, ‘regretted,’ that, unless one were detached from the whole process from the beginning, unless one understood what the whole thing was in principle, what all these ‘little measures’ that no ‘patriotic German’ could resent must some day lead to, one no more saw it developing from day to day than a farmer in his field sees the corn growing. One day it is over his head.

> "How is this to be avoided, among ordinary men, even highly educated ordinary men? Frankly, I do not know. I do not see, even now. Many, many times since it all happened I have pondered that pair of great maxims, Principiis obsta and Finem respice—‘Resist the beginnings’ and ‘Consider the end.’ But one must foresee the end in order to resist, or even see, the beginnings. One must foresee the end clearly and certainly and how is this to be done, by ordinary men or even by extraordinary men? Things might have. And everyone counts on that might.

> "Your ‘little men,’ your Nazi friends, were not against National Socialism in principle. Men like me, who were, are the greater offenders, not because we knew better (that would be too much to say) but because we sensed better. Pastor Niemöller spoke for the thousands and thousands of men like me when he spoke (too modestly of himself) and said that, when the Nazis attacked the Communists, he was a little uneasy, but, after all, he was not a Communist, and so he did nothing; and then they attacked the Socialists, and he was a little uneasier, but, still, he was not a Socialist, and he did nothing; and then the schools, the press, the Jews, and so on, and he was always uneasier, but still he did nothing. And then they attacked the Church, and he was a Churchman, and he did something—but then it was too late."

> "Yes," I said.

> "You see," my colleague went on, "one doesn’t see exactly where or how to move. Believe me, this is true. Each act, each occasion, is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next. You wait for one great shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join with you in resisting somehow. You don’t want to act, or even talk, alone; you don’t want to ‘go out of your way to make trouble.’ Why not?—Well, you are not in the habit of doing it. And it is not just fear, fear of standing alone, that restrains you; it is also genuine uncertainty.

> "Uncertainty is a very important factor, and, instead of decreasing as time goes on, it grows. Outside, in the streets, in the general community, ‘everyone’ is happy. One hears no protest, and certainly sees none. You know, in France or Italy there would be slogans against the government painted on walls and fences; in Germany, outside the great cities, perhaps, there is not even this. In the university community, in your own community, you speak privately to your colleagues, some of whom certainly feel as you do; but what do they say? They say, ‘It’s not so bad’ or ‘You’re seeing things’ or ‘You’re an alarmist.’

> "And you are an alarmist. You are saying that this must lead to this, and you can’t prove it. These are the beginnings, yes; but how do you know for sure when you don’t know the end, and how do you know, or even surmise, the end? On the one hand, your enemies, the law, the regime, the Party, intimidate you. On the other, your colleagues pooh-pooh you as pessimistic or even neurotic. You are left with your close friends, who are, naturally, people who have always thought as you have.

> "But your friends are fewer now. Some have drifted off somewhere or submerged themselves in their work. You no longer see as many as you did at meetings or gatherings. Informal groups become smaller; attendance drops off in little organizations, and the organizations themselves wither. Now, in small gatherings of your oldest friends, you feel that you are talking to yourselves, that you are isolated from the reality of things. This weakens your confidence still further and serves as a further deterrent to—to what? It is clearer all the time that, if you are going to do anything, you must make an occasion to do it, and then you are obviously a troublemaker. So you wait, and you wait.

> "But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands will join with you, never comes. That’s the difficulty. If the last and worst act of the whole regime had come immediately after the first and smallest, thousands, yes, millions would have been sufficiently shocked—if, let us say, the gassing of the Jews in ’43 had come immediately after the ‘German Firm’ stickers on the windows of non-Jewish shops in ’33. But of course this isn’t the way it happens. In between come all the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step D.

> "And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you. The burden of self-deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident, in my case my little boy, hardly more than a baby, saying ‘Jewish swine,’ collapses it all at once, and you see that everything, everything, has changed and changed completely under your nose. The world you live in—your nation, your people—is not the world you were born in at all. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays. But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves; when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed. Now you live in a system which rules without responsibility even to God. The system itself could not have intended this in the beginning, but in order to sustain itself it was compelled to go all the way.

> "You have gone almost all the way yourself. Life is a continuing process, a flow, not a succession of acts and events at all. It has flowed to a new level, carrying you with it, without any effort on your part. On this new level you live, you have been living more comfortably every day, with new morals, new principles. You have accepted things you would not have accepted five years ago, a year ago, things that your father, even in Germany, could not have imagined.

> "Suddenly it all comes down, all at once. You see what you are, what you have done, or, more accurately, what you haven’t done (for that was all that was required of most of us: that we do nothing). You remember those early meetings of your department in the university when, if one had stood, others would have stood, perhaps, but no one stood. A small matter, a matter of hiring this man or that, and you hired this one rather than that. You remember everything now, and your heart breaks. Too late. You are compromised beyond repair.

Herman Mayer - They Thought They Were Free: The Germans 1933-45

Forget Stephen King, the most horrifying book I ever read was They Thought They Were Free by Milton Meyer. Not because of the outrageousness of what the Germans ultimately did, but because of how mundane and normal it appeared to them before it all spiraled out of control.

"What would I have done?" is a question which really begins to haunt you while you're reading the book - and it doesn't leave you. We would all love to think of ourselves as nobly rejecting the police state, even allowing ourselves to be martyred. But would we, really? In tough economic times, would we turn down that job just because it demands a loyalty oath (but no other objectionable acts)? Especially if your kids were hungry? Would we go against what most of our family and friends (apparently) support, and be happy about being cast out? Would we risk jail and possibly, torture? Certainly some of us would, but how many of us? Enough?

Mayer catalogues a lot of rationalizations and self-justifications, but he doesn't go out of his way to portray the Germans he talked to as particularly evil, because they weren't. They were all too much like you and I. It really brings home the point that It Can Happen Here.

Just an FYI this is exactly how Russia works.

>> Due to my Russian surname no one had yet noticed I was British; I kept my mouth shut. There were more than twenty of us in the room: tanned broadcasters in white silk shirts and politics professors with sweaty beards and heavy breath and ad execs in trainers. There were no women. Everyone was smoking. There was so much smoke it made my skin itch.

>> At the end of the table sat one of the country’s most famous political TV presenters. He is small and speaks fast, with a smoky voice:
We all know there will be no real politics. But we still have to give our viewers the sense something is happening. They need to be kept entertained. So what should we play with? Shall we attack oligarchs? [He continued,] Who’s the enemy this week? Politics has got to feel like . . . like a movie!
The first thing the President had done when he came to power in 2000 was to seize control of television. It was television through which the Kremlin decided which politicians it would “allow” as its puppet-opposition, what the country’s history and fears and consciousness should be.

>> And the new Kremlin won’t make the same mistake the old Soviet Union did: it will never let TV become dull. The task is to synthesize Soviet control with Western entertainment. Twenty-first-century Ostankino mixes show business and propaganda, ratings with authoritarianism. And at the center of the great show is the President himself, created from a no one, a gray fuzz via the power of television, so that he morphs as rapidly as a performance artist among his roles of soldier, lover, bare-chested hunter, businessman, spy, tsar, superman.

>> “The news is the incense by which we bless Putin’s actions, make him the President,” TV producers and political technologists liked to say. Sitting in that smoky room, I had the sense that reality was somehow malleable, that I was with Prosperos who could project any existence they wanted onto post-Soviet Russia. But with every year I worked in Russia, and as the Kremlin became ever more paranoid, Ostankino’s strategies became ever more twisted, the need to incite panic and fear ever more urgent; rationality was tuned out, and Kremlin-friendly cults and hate-mongers were put on prime time to keep the nation entranced, distracted, as ever more foreign hirelings would arrive to help the Kremlin and spread its vision to the world.


Fake news is exactly how Russia operates, smears, fake news, blatant propaganda.

This is from a great book:https://www.amazon.com/Nothing-True-Everything-Possible-Surreal/dp/1610396006

Gish Gallop is what your friends were doing.

Important to understand what Trump is doing ...

Chaos and Confusion - 10 min video

RAND Paper - 10 page paper

Book : Nothing is true, everything is possible

That Robert E. Lee was an honorable fellow, and that the South was fighting for states' rights. If you're interested in this stuff, you should really read Lies My Teacher Told Me

The same Eisenhower who extremely critical of wealthy industrialist taking control of the national and attempting to exploit the poor to their benefit? I'm not saying everything he did was good, but he was aware that a certain, powerful segment of the population was more interested in ranking up a high score in their bank accounts than helping people.

> Neoliberalism, love it or hate it, saved the economy in the 80s and 90s.

That's a massive over-simplification, and mostly inaccurate. While several important metrics from measuring the economy did improve during that period, "real wages" (wages adjusted for inflation) didn't grow significantly between 1981 and 2011. A lot of the economy growth came from women entering the work force in larger numbers & obtaining wages comparable to men, from computers & automation massive boosting the productive per worker, and a massive increase in the access to credit (debt). Of the three, Neoliberalism/Laissez-Faire economy only really affected the third, with probably overall negative consequences. At the heart of the Great Recession was the house market collapse: Because of the lack of real wage growth, people couldn't afford to buy houses except through increasing ridiculous mortgages, which they were able to obtain since the investment class demands growth. This debt bubble was leveraged to create even more (imaginary) wealth, which showed up in most of the economy metrics (especially the stock market). It just disappeared when reality set in and real wages couldn't support incurred debt, crashing the economy.

> Nixon brought in the Environmental protection agency.

I put Nixon on the list for breaking the law to maintain political power. Without Watergate, he would not have made the list.

> Political parties respond to the needs and wants of the electorate.

The reason I mentioned think tanks is that they are one of the tools used by conservative to re-frame and shape the wants of the electorate. Most traditional think tanks collect facts and do analysis to build policy recommendations, but many conservative ones (especially ones funded by the Kochs) begin with the ideology and cherry-pick the data to support the policies they have already written. It's both intellectual dishonest and much easier to build a convincing narrative with. I suggest reading Dark Money and Democracy in Chains if you want to examine the interplay between conservative think tanks, public opinion and money.

> People are the ones who vote after all.

Which is why voter suppression and gerrymandering play such an important role is US elections. Given the ugly history of disenfranchisement in that country, it's much easier to build support for preventing "the wrong people" from voting that it is to actually convince other people to support your policies. It's disguising and disgraceful. Thankfully, the Supreme Court up here has been consistent on supporting everyone's right to vote.

I really can't recommend Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb enough. Teller in particular is amazing, so much so that he was the inspiration for Dr. Strangelove.

That book, and the precursor, The Making of the Atomic Bomb, are great reads if you want to understand both the science and the politics behind the bomb projects. They're written by a historian, so they're not too crazy into the math, but they will explain to you the issues, such as why you need U235 to make a bomb rather than U238.

creating a post-fact world where nothing can be trusted and nothing is true is the first step towards an illiberal, anti-democratic society. It's step 1 in the neo-fascist handbook. It's literally the method Putin used in Russia. See the book Nothing is true and Everything is possible

Speaking of the Koch Brothers, eeryone should read Jane Mayer's Dark Money.

It is absolutely essential reading for understanding what has happened to the Republican party and our greater political zeitgeist.

Not exactly

The German scientists who were working on the Nazi nuclear program were taken prisoner by the British and kept incarcerated in Britain. Their rooms were bugged, and they were secretly recorded discussing in disbelief the news of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs. They knew the science and theory, but many of them didn't believe it was possible.

You are correct they didn't have sufficient uranium. Indeed, thanks to the Allied special forces and air-raids, and Norwegian resistance fighters, the only access to heavy water was destroyed and the largest shipment of heavy water itself was sunk (ironically).

I highly recommend Richard Rhodes The Making of the Atomic Bomb. It won a Pulitzer Prize in its own right. An utterly fascinating book and extremely well written.

Some examples that help cultivate (rightfully so IMHO) the idea that the Koch brothers are "evil"-

1-Koch Industries is one of the top 15 polluters in the U.S. [source] (http://www.politifact.com/punditfact/statements/2014/apr/09/bob-beckel/bob-beckel-koch-brothers-are-one-biggest-polluters/)

2-All the while they've given upwards of 100 million dollars to the climate denial effort. [source] (http://www.greenpeace.org/usa/global-warming/climate-deniers/koch-industries/)

3-Koch Industries produces over 2 billion pounds of carcinogen formaldehyde and has actively worked to keep it from being classified as a carcinogen. [source] (http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/08/30/covert-operations)

4-They've been accused of attempting to steal 31 million dollars worth of crude oil from Native Americans and were the biggest oil and gas industry donors to the congressional committee with oversight of the hazardous Keystone pipeline. I don't think all that cash was to make sure things were kept safe and clean. [source] (https://newrepublic.com/article/120922/keystone-xl-senate-bill-amendments-influenced-koch-brothers)

5-Just this month they did their part to smear the benefits of electric cars. [source] (http://insideevs.com/koch-brothers-attack-electric-cars/)

6-This [video] (https://youtu.be/2mbJhjCbwo8) gives a decent idea of how they've gone about promoting the dismantling of public education.

I could go on but I've got shit to do. Keep in mind this is nothing compared to the decades long campaign they've run to siphon away more and more money and influence from the poor. If you really want to see a bigger picture, read [Dark Money, by Jane Mayer] (https://www.amazon.com/Dark-Money-History-Billionaires-Radical/dp/0385535597).

In other words, Russia.

I have this thread open on another tab. I'll figure I'll repost it here since if I refresh the page it'll be gone forever.

---------------------------RACE HATE FACTS---------------------------

Humans can be genetically categorized into five racial groups, corresponding to traditional races. http://pritchardlab.stanford.edu/publications/pdfs/RosenbergEtAl02.pdf

Genetic analysis “supports the traditional racial groups classification.” http://psychology.uwo.ca/faculty/rushtonpdfs/PPPL1.pdf

“Human genetic variation is geographically structured” and corresponds with race. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15508000

Race can be determined via genetics with certainty for >99.8% of individuals. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15625622

Oral bacteria can be used to determine race. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2013-10-oral-bacteria-fingerprint-mouth.html

Race can be determined via brain scans. http://www.cell.com/current-biology/abstract/S0960-9822(15)00671-5

96-97% of whites have no African ancestry. http://www.theroot.com/articles/history/2013/02/how_mixed_are_african_americans.3.html

97% of Whites have no black ancestry whatsoever. http://www.unz.com/isteve/nyt-white-black-a-murky-distinction-grows-still-murkier/

There was “minimal gene flow” between archaic Europeans and Asians. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/20/science/20adapt.html

Common-sense racial categories have biological meaning. http://www.ln.edu.hk/philoso/staff/sesardic/Race2.pdf

Human intelligence is highly heritable. http://www.nature.com/mp/journal/v16/n10/abs/mp201185a.html

Scientific consensus is that IQ tests are not racially biased. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160289608000305

Very poor Whites are comparably intelligent to very wealthy blacks. http://www.jbhe.com/features/49_college_admissions-test.html

Privately, intelligence experts hold more hereditarian views than they express in public. http://www.udel.edu/educ/gottfredson/reprints/1994egalitarianfiction.pdf

Black children raised in White households have similar IQs to black children in black households. http://psycnet.apa.org/psycinfo/1977-07996-001

The average African IQ is estimated at 79. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0191886912003741

The average African-American IQ is 85, compared to the average White IQ of 100. http://www.udel.edu/educ/gottfredson/reprints/1997mainstream.pdf

The white-black gap in SAT scores, a proxy for IQ, is increasing. http://www.jbhe.com/features/49_college_admissions-test.html

Genes for large brains, linked to high IQ, are common everywhere except Africa. http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB115040765329081636

Intelligence has a 40-50% genetic basis. http://articles.latimes.com/2011/aug/10/news/la-heb-genetic-study-intelligence-20110809

IQ scores are the best predictor of success in Western society. http://psychology.uwo.ca/faculty/rushtonpdfs/PPPL1.pdf

IQ is 75% heritable among Whites. http://psychology.uwo.ca/faculty/rushtonpdfs/PPPL1.pdf

92% of Mulatto (black man, white women) children are born out of wedlock. http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2625893

Gentile whites are the most underrepresented group in top colleges. http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/the-myth-of-american-meritocracy/

Sweden is the rape capital of the West, likely due to immigration. http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/5195/sweden-rape

Asian women find White men more attractive than Asian men. http://sf.oxfordjournals.org/content/89/3/807.abstract

White men are pound-for-pound stronger than black men. http://www.biomedcentral.com/content/pdf/1471-2458-10-508.pdf

Germanic/Nordic people have lower time preference than any other group. http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1481443

Human evolution is not merely ongoing but is in fact accelerating. http://discovermagazine.com/2009/mar/09-they-dont-make-homo-sapiens-like-they-used-to

Human races are diverging into separate species, not mixing into one. http://discovermagazine.com/2009/mar/09-they-dont-make-homo-sapiens-like-they-used-to

Blacks are seven times more likely than whites to commit murder. http://www.colorofcrime.com/2005/10/the-color-of-crime-2005/

The percentage of Blacks and Hispanics, not poverty, is the best predictor of crime. http://www.colorofcrime.com/2005/10/the-color-of-crime-2005/

90% of gang members are non-white. http://www.colorofcrime.com/2005/10/the-color-of-crime-2005/

Asians are nine times more likely than whites to be members of gangs. http://www.colorofcrime.com/2005/10/the-color-of-crime-2005/

The average H-1B immigrant is less intelligent and qualified than the average American. http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/h1b10min.html

Race is a better predictor of crime than poverty. http://www.colorofcrime.com/2005/10/the-color-of-crime-2005/

White immigrants on net improve government revenue, while non-white immigrants cost money. http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/putting-a-price-on-foreigners-strict-immigration-laws-save-denmark-billions-a-759716.html

Blacks are overrepresented in serial killings. http://maamodt.asp.radford.edu/Serial Killer Information Center/Serial Killer Statistics.pdf

Blacks are overrepresented among child abuse and pedophilia, and this isn’t due to biased reporting. http://www.theroot.com/articles/culture/2011/03/black_childabuse_statistics_report_debunks_bias_assumptions.html

White-Asian children are twice as likely as Asians to have mental illness. http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2008-08/uoc–baa081108.php

Black-white children are more likely than both black and whites to make poor decisions. http://www.nber.org/papers/w14192

Racial bias against miscegenation is likely biological in origin. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19422626

Interracial marriages have a 23.5% chance of divorce, compared to 13% for same-race couples. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4145377

Mixed race kids suffer from low self-esteem, social isolation, and poor family dynamics. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1448064/

Mixed race children are more likely to have health problems, high stress, smoke, and drink. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1448064/

The percentage of Blacks in a city, not poverty, is the best predictor of crime. http://www.unz.com/article/race-and-crime-in-america/

Blacks are 600% more likely than non-blacks to commit murder. http://www.unz.com/article/race-and-crime-in-america/

The purpose of section 8 housing is to move blacks from elite urban areas to middle class suburbs. http://www.unz.com/article/race-and-crime-in-america/

Hispanics receive shorter prison sentences than Whites for the same crimes. http://people.terry.uga.edu/mustard/sentencing.pdf

Police hesitate longer to shoot black suspects than White suspects. http://spokane.wsu.edu/admissions/Criminal-Justice/faculty-staff/Racial&EthnicBiasDFJDMStrongerLens_ExperimentalCriminology_JamesKlingerVila2014.pdf

Race-mixers may give less parental support to their children because of greater genetic distance. http://www.humanbiologicaldiversity.com/articles/Rushton%2C

J. Phillipe. “Inclusive fitness in human relationships.” Biological Journal of the Linnean Society 96 (2009).pdf http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1095-8312.2008.01110.x/abstract

15% of the human genome has been under selective pressures since the races separated. http://www.amazon.com/Troublesome-Inheritance-Genes-Human-History/dp/1594204462

Scientific discussion of race has increased since 1946 onwards. http://www.ln.edu.hk/philoso/staff/sesardic/Race.pdf

Over 100 White women are raped by blacks every day in the United States. http://archive.frontpagemag.com/readArticle.aspx?ARTID=26368

Melanin concentration may directly correlate with aggression. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0191886912000840

Africans have higher rates of a gene associated with violence. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1913922/pdf/1744-9081-3-30.pdf

Europeans and Asians are subject to more recent evolution than Africans. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/20/science/20adapt.html

64% of Hispanics have IQs too low to enter the military. http://takimag.com/article/frequently_asked_questions_about_the_jason_richwine_brouhaha_steve_sailer/print#ixzz2TPXmpNgG

Mexican-Americans have higher disability rates than other races. http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/03/150326162658.htm

Europeans and Asians are subject to more recent evolution than Africans. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/20/science/20adapt.html .

.

.

Iran had a secularist, western style democracy. Then it demanded to audit the books of BP, so the CIA overthrew it and installed a dictator who would let the west keep looting the countries oil.

I recommend this book on the subject :

http://www.amazon.com/All-Shahs-Men-American-Middle/dp/047018549X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1463470354&sr=8-1&keywords=all+the+shahs+men

Everyone should read New Yorker writer Jane Mayer's book about the Kochs and (to a lesser extent) other far-right billionaires, Dark Money.

Inverting the Pyramid - Jonathan Wilson
A pioneering book that chronicles the evolution of soccer tactics and the lives of the itinerant coaching geniuses who have spread their distinctive styles across the globe.

Teambuilding: the road to success - Rinus Michels
The late Rinus Michels, FIFA's Coach of the Century, offers his unique insight into the process of "teambuilding".

The Coaching Philosophies of Louis Van Gaal and the Ajax Coaches - Henny Kormelink and Tjeu Seeverens
Louis van Gaal, Frans Hoek, Co Adriaanse and fitness coach Bobby Haarms discuss their training methods and philosophies in this book full of creative ideas for soccer coaches at any level.

Dutch Soccer Secrets - Peter Hyballa & Hans-Dieter te Poel
This book is a first attempt to present expert knowledge of internationally proven useful and effective Dutch soccer coaching in theory and practice, based on qualitative data collection.

Attacking Soccer: a tactical analysis - Massimo Lucchesi
This book examines match strategies for creating goal scoring opportunities out of various systems of play.

Outliers: The Story of Success - Malcolm Gladwell
Gladwell takes us on an intellectual journey through the world of "outliers"--the best and the brightest, the most famous and the most successful. He asks the question: what makes high-achievers different?

The Numbers Game: Why Everything You Know About Soccer Is Wrong - Chris Anderson, David Sally
Innovation is coming to soccer, and at the centre of it all are the numbers—a way of thinking about the game that ignores the obvious in favour of how things actually are.

Football Against the Enemy - Simon Kuper
Kuper travelled to 22 countries from South Africa to Italy, from Russia to the USA, to examine the way football has shaped them.

You might see the first AG (attempted) appointee that isn't even an attorney. As crazy as this circus is, you might see Alex Jones on the list. Uncharted territory here everybody.

Nothing is true and everything is possible

"Surprising Op-ed"??


"Singing a new tune"?!?!


Charles and David Koch are the unrivaled kings of gaslighting and manipulation.

They have spent literally hundreds millions of dollars, over decades, on a concentrated effort to influence academia, the media, and public policy towards their pro-corporate (profits) and anti-goverment (public accountability) ends.

"Dark Money" should be required reading for everyone.

Buy it, trust me: https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0307947904

Or listen to the audiobook free here:

Part 1: https://youtu.be/3uoaTlB5oPA

Part 2: https://youtu.be/gcQQKalLbZs

Good next up:

http://www.amazon.com/Overthrow-Americas-Century-Regime-Change/dp/0805082409/

http://www.amazon.com/Confessions-Economic-Hit-John-Perkins/dp/0452287081/

http://www.amazon.com/Americas-Deadliest-Export-Democracy-Everything/dp/1783601671/

If they simply "stopped paying attention", how would you explain the CIA's orders to the Jeddah consulate to grant Al Qaeda operatives visas into the country?

How do you explain the fact that once in the country, the alleged hijackers received training at secure military installations.

It is you, sir, who needs to read some books:

Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II

Confessions of an Economic Hitman

Tragedy and Hope

Wall Street and The Bolshevik Revolution

Wall Street and The Rise of Hitler

Foundations: Their Power and Influence

Bank Control of Large Corporations in the United States

Wake up to reality my friend. These people are not, and have never been, incompetent or negligent. If they were either, they wouldn't be in the positions of power they are in today.

> In my view, the second certainly wasn't

According to Rhodes [1], the Japanese command knew what affected Hiroshima was an atomic bomb [2] but concluded that since it took 4 years to build the first atom bomb, it would take the Allies 4 years to build the next. The folks at the top kept believing that they could force the Allies to a negotiated peace and that westerners were too weak - hence the suicidal efforts in Okinawa/Saipan and kamikaze to demoralize Allied troops.

The Yalta conference required Stalin to enter war against Japan within 90 days of the end of the German campaign. Depending on how you do the math and count timezones, Russia declared war against Japan and entered combat on day 89, 90 or 91.

According to Cook in Japan at War there were 4,335,500 Japanese soldiers at the time of the surrender with about 3,500,000 stationed outside the "home islands" (mostly stuck in Korea and Manchuria). This was a lot more than the Allies thought that Japan had.

Notes:
1 - I forget whether it was in Dark Sun (most likely because it was the followup written after the fall of the Soviet Union which opened up a lot of their secret archives) or The Making of the Atomic Bomb.
2 - The Japanese had 2 atom bomb projects: a chemical separation project in Tokyo and a gaseous diffusion project in what is now called North Korea around the Chosin Reservoir.

> I’m interested in learning more about this. Do you have sources for these or other tactics that are being employed?

There is a book that was published after this story:, same author https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/09/russia-putin-revolutionizing-information-warfare/379880/ (story 2014, book 2015): https://www.amazon.com/Nothing-True-Everything-Possible-Surreal/dp/1610396006

A lot of it comes from my personal observations, which I have basically been doing full time now since 2015 when I personally realized what was going on. my central education is Joseph Campbell's Comparative Mythology, about 8 years of learning on that, and I saw Middle East hate brother-vs-brother MEME patterns (weaponized) being pushed which I recognized from Campbell's teaching. From there, I found out about what Russia has been like the past 10 years, the media of their homeland. Then I also discovered Howard Bloom's year 2000 book about the "Mass Mind". Further, I found a 1993 theory from Duke University Rick Roderick describing a 7-hour idea that I have studied for about 400 hours in total. Roderick was worried about the future of his children, and put forth how he saw human minds could be exploited in various ways to give up their personhood (he called "our fractal selves") through media and ideas. Adam Curtis called out Surkov too, and his December 2014 declaration of the forthcoming British-Exit-EU assault I found.

It's a massive topic, and our enemy is extremely powerful. “I am the author, or one of the authors, of the new Russian system,” Vladislav Surkov told us by way of introduction. On this spring day in 2013, he was wearing a white shirt and a leather jacket that was part Joy Division and part 1930s commissar. “My portfolio at the Kremlin and in government has included ideology, media, political parties, religion, modernization, innovation, foreign relations, and ...”—here he pauses and smiles—“modern art.” - https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/11/hidden-author-putinism-russia-vladislav-surkov/382489/

Only this year we found out the 2012 origins and the Cambridge Analytica integration: https://washingtonmonthly.com/2017/11/24/a-trumprussia-confession-in-plain-sight/

As part of my understanding of where we are, I share some thoughts and patterns I am trying to make sense of over on /r/WhiteHouseHyperReal

in fact there is evidence that ethnically diverse areas have less social trust and cohesion.

http://www.amazon.com/Bowling-Alone-Collapse-American-Community/dp/0743203046

We have been brainwashed for years into thinking diversity is good, but where is the evidence? In general people often self-segregate into ethnic communities because they like living near people who are like them. That is just the ways humans tend to be.

As for Muslims, is there any country on earth with more than, say, 15 or 20% Muslims that isn't plagued with civil war? Yugoslavia? Lebanon? Perhaps our leaders should have considered this before importing millions of Muslims into the West.

It's from the book of the same name. Written in '97, Strauss and Howe look through history and map out generational archetypes and the natural ebb and flow of events centered around Anglo-American societies. I'd highly recommend it. In the book, history is divided into cycles of 80-100 years (a Turning), roughly a generation. Then, the cycles are divided into quarters, a new generation being formed every quarter of a cycle. The authors analyze each generation and their general mood within society. In terms of what's coming up in world events (according to Strauss and Howe), America is currently at the tail end of an Unraveling. The next Turning being the Crisis phase.

I agree. I think the country's economic strength and global leadership peaked about then, and both the loss of the Vietnam War and the fall of the Shah signaled the beginning of our decline.

My comment was really directed at the decline & fall of the republic in terms of political process. I trace the decline of political process effectiveness to Gingrich, whose scorched-earth, win-at-all-costs partisanship destroyed good-faith governance. If there's one person who broke the American model of government, it's him.

I do sort of wonder if the decline and fall of political systems lags the decline and fall of their respective economies. That might make for an interesting study.

If you've never read Strauss & Howe's The Fourth Turning it's well worthwhile. It's fairly easily picked apart in some of its detail, but is chillingly prophetic in its broader strokes and provides good food for thought.

Links to articles, advertisements, new initiatives and books specifically mentioned:

Sarah Kliff & [The Weeds Podcast] (https://www.vox.com/the-weeds)

A Pro-Trump Conspiracy Theorist, a False Tweet and a Runaway Story

[Democrats in Split-Screen: The Base Wants It All. The Party Wants to Win](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/11/us/democrats-midterm-elections.html} Sandy Hook Conspiracy Theorist Gets Prison Time For Threatening 6-Year-Old Victim’s Father

The billionaire GOP patron behind Trump's social media bot army

Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right

UK Labour Film

TrumpCare Ten

Obamacare is in real danger

Nevada's legislature just passed a radical plan to let anybody sign up for Medicaid

Trump gives Priebus until July 4th to clean up White House

First, TH Huxley was his grandfather, my bad. But TH Huxley was very close to HG Welles. They wrote books together and constantly were meeting and having discussions. Alduous Huxley was a fly on the wall for many of these discussions and recounts the influence HG Welles had on him in his book Brave New World Revisited

Both TH Huxley and HG Welles were part of a group called the Rhodes Round Table (a part of the Round Table movement at the turn of the 19th Century) which would be comparable to the CFR today. A Harvard professor named Carroll Quigley wrote an amazing book about their history, rise and fall, called Tragedy and Hope. If you weren't aware, Alduous Huxley was a teacher of Eric Blair (George Orwell) and they both worked in high society circles. Both their books were what they believed would be the logical conclusion of what they saw happening on the inside at the time and this is explicitly stated in this letter from Huxley to Blair.

Huxley's "Brave New World" title is a response/retort/satire to HG Welles' New World Order HG Welles is the originator of the term "New World Order" and that is what Huxley is referring to when he says we're head toward a Brave New World. In his book, Brave New World Revisited, A. Huxley even explicitly makes fun of HG Welles' book The Open Conspiracy for being so evil and moral-less that it is sure to work.

I remember reading this in The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by William Shirer. Fantastic book with so much info about Hitler and the Third Reich. Definitely recommend it for history junkies.

It's 1280 pages.


Edit: if anyone is interested here is a link to buy The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich

Bloodlands is a great read about Eastern Europe mostly under Stalin. It also talks about the famines in Ukraine. It was difficult to read at night for me because what I read would be so depressing, disgusting, horrifying that I would have constant nightmares.

Some years ago I was in France with Uni, we played a game against italians erasmus, and we're talking about a game of 5 vs 5 on a grain field. These fuckers played very deep on the field with lightning fast counterattacks. We lost 2-3.

• • • • 
        
        Inverting the Pyramid
        
        Nereo Rocco --> Catenaccio
        
        Vittorio Pozzo
        
        [Il Metodo] (https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metodo_(calcio) --> Pozzo
        
        [Mixed Zone] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zona_mista) --> Assymetrical italian formation
        

Social networks especially for men have been on steep decline since the 70's. A highly accredited academic wrote about it a while back and he got shit for some reason because he partially blamed multiculturalism. Even if you dismiss the multiculturalism angle which I do his research was very well done and shows a bleak picture of the American social landscape. Charles Murray also wrote about this stuff in Coming Apart.

https://www.amazon.com/Bowling-Alone-Collapse-American-Community/dp/0743203046

https://www.amazon.com/Coming-Apart-State-America-1960-2010/dp/030745343X/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1518974854&sr=1-1&keywords=coming+apart

I will add that the reason men have struggled more with this is because men's groups are exclusive rather then inclusive. Or rather the inclusiveness is based on some metric. I.e we all lift, or we all ride bikes together, or we all enjoy climbing. Female social groups are inclusive. You're welcome here no matter what you do as long as you don't do anything to rock the boat.

Surprisingly both groups are still hierarchical. Female social groups rank hierarchy by the most social person that distributes rewards with equal allocations. Male social groups reward the man that gives out the most the equitable shares.

Explained more simply women give each person in the group an entire pie and the most popular is the one that finds the pie shop. Men work together to make a pie and the leader is the one who carves up the pie and gives it out fairly. I.e. the males that contributed the most ingredients or more involved in preparing the pie get bigger pieces. Men that take the pie all for themselves or give up the pie to others are considered too dominant or too weak.

This goes all the way back to male apes going on hunts while female apes stayed back and waited for meat to be brought to them.

Our modern society is shifted to favor the female schema over the male one and men will suffer until more balance is reached.

Here you go. My reference. http://www.amazon.com/The-Rise-Fall-Third-Reich/dp/1451651686/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1408410932&sr=8-1&keywords=history+of+the+third+reich

> I don't really know much about how general people around Europe would have reacted towards Hiroshima and Nagasaki, however I can help a little with how the scientists of the German Atom Bomb project reacted.

> The scientists who had though to have been working on the German Nuclear Program had been detained during Operation Epsilon and then interned in a bugged house in England. During that time, the reaction these scientists had towards the Bombing of Hiroshima was recorded.

> Obviously, they all have differing opinions on the subject, some for example, such as Otto Hahn, who had discovered Nuclear Fission and won the Noble Prize in 1944, but otherwise had no part in the program, was glad that the Germans never achieved making the bomb (he even considered suicide, believing himself responsible.) Others however, where dismayed they had failed.

> They all seem to wonder why Germany didn't manage to build the bomb, comparing that project to the thousands of people working on the V1 and V2 rockets, as well as talking about the relationship between Germany, and the Scientists, compared with how America treated there project, because they say the Germans didn't trust the Scientists working on the project, and the project would have been difficult to push through because of this, especially as they say the German Government wanted immediate results, not having to wait a long time until the project was complete.

> They also had conversations about what went wrong with the theory behind the German Project (and Heisenberg soon worked out how to build the bomb, after hearing of the dropping of the American Bomb).

> If you want to read more about it, main source is Operation Epsilon: The Farm Hall Transcripts, which has an extract here which says which books you can read the whole transcript in.

After having read "The Making of the Atomic Bomb" (a historical work on The Bomb that won the author the Pulitzer) and seeing how many resources the USA was putting into The Bomb, I don't believe Germany could have ever done it during war time. They were making good progress on an energy producing reactor, but a deliverable bomb was far beyond their war-time means.

Read the book The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. There's a great audiobook version on Audible. I'm American too, except my four years of history classes were in Texas not NYC, and after reading that book I truly realized how little they actually taught us in high school.

One of the great investigative journalists, writers and speakers of the 20th and 21st centuries. I recommend having a ready of his books of essays, e.g. Arguably.

He spent a massive amount of time actually on the ground in places like Kurdistan, Iraq, Cuba (immediately post-revolution, leading in great part - along with the writing of Orwell and various dissidents - to his disenchantment with communism), and so many other places. He was also tremendously well-read and well-informed, as you'll see when reading his essays.

He was a leftist who despised the Clintons for their conduct (his book: No One Left to Lie To) but unfortunately died before this last election - his writing on Trump would've been gold, as would his struggle over the lesser of two evils. He was not afraid to break with the left on different issues, e.g. Iraq, because he'd spent so much time on the ground in Iraq and Kurdistan and had done so much research into things there, and he was greatly disappointed in the post-war rebuilding efforts that followed the removal of Saddam Hussein, but he was in Iraq at different times to see and celebrate progress where it happened (e.g. elections).

He read every word George Orwell wrote (that's available, even later-found letters and diaries). He was basically against dictators and despots everywhere.

In later times he was famous for speaking out against religion, especially where it was also despotic. This is what most people on the internet seem to know him for (hence the often vociferous attacks against him), but this was a small part of his career over his lifetime.

Really, you do yourself a great service by reading his books of essays, very few of which are about religion but most of which are very, very interesting. My father is a conservative Christian, yet he greatly enjoys reading Hitchens' essays!

From the UK deputy PM at the time of Hitchens' death:

>One unexpected tribute came from deputy prime minister Nick Clegg, who worked as an intern for Hitchens years ago. Hitchens was, he said, "everything a great essayist should be: infuriating, brilliant, highly provocative and yet intensely serious".

>"My job was to fact check his articles. Since he had a photographic memory and an encyclopaedic mind it was the easiest job I've ever done," said Clegg. "He will be massively missed by everyone who values strong opinions and great writing".

Jane Mayer, Dark Money

Nancy MacLean, Democracy in Chains

This is well-documented and reported. Please do some reading, specifically on John Olin and the Koch Brothers and James Buchanan and the neoliberal Mont Pelerin Society hostile takeover of higher education and public discourse in general. Even the Tea Party was astroturfed.

The Soviets in the 30s and 40s were, as a whole, far more competent in controlling large areas and people than the Germans. Case in point, the German "Hunger Plan" intended to starve millions of Slavs hardly got off the ground in conquered territories, whereas the NKVD was able to systematically control every field, granary, and loaf of bread in the entirety of modern Ukraine. The Germans resorted to shooting mass numbers of Poles and Belorussians instead.

The Soviets were equally as successful with their Gulag deportations. Party officials were embedded enough to identify problem families in even the smallest hamlets of the USSR and ship them thousands of miles to Kazakhstan or Siberia. This is millions of people we're talking about, all specially selected, charged, and recorded in Soviet archives. While the Germans were very good at rounding up and killing people, they weren't nearly as discriminatory or efficient as the Russians.

Bottom line is that if Trump wants to round up and deport millions of people in a systematic, targeted effort, he should look to the USSR rather than the comparatively sloppy Nazis. I would recommend he read Bloodlands for further research into turning America into an ethno-centrist, totalitarian dictatorship.

Thanks for this... have you read "Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong"?

Great book that highlights a lot of missing or flat our false information our textbooks are shoving down kids throats. Often in blatant attempts to actually change history or just ineptitude.

Going to give your book a read now. Thanks!

It means that generational archetypes repeat every fourth generation, not every other generation. It's why we often get along with our grandparents... they're usually the same archetype as us ;)


Looking at the past 8 generations

--

Missionary Generation (Archetype: Prophet/Aggressive)

Lost Generation (Archetype: Nomad/Neglected)

GI/Greatest Generation (Archetype: Hero/Indulged)

Silent Generation (Archetype: Artist/Sensitive)


--

Baby Boomers (Archetype: Prophet/Aggressive)

Generation X (Archetype: Nomad/Neglected)

Millenials (Archetype: Hero/Indulged)

Meme Generation (Archetype: Artist/Sensitive)

--

Generation PleaseSaveUsOhGod (Archetype: Prophet/Aggressive)


....


In general, the overprotected and moralistic Prophet generation raises the indulged and idealistic Hero generation; and then the empowered Hero generation raises the firebrands that will comprise the new Prophet generation. Alternatively, the neglected but resourceful Nomad generation raises the Artist generation, and then the Artist generation then births and raises the next Nomad generation at a time of greater emphasis on individual autonomy and less insistence on protecting children (most recently, the 60s, the 70s, and the early 80s).

Gen X, like other Nomad generations, are underprotected as children, which makes them very resourceful and efficient adults, though it does scar them. They are neglected by culture, as well, precisely for the reason that the prima-donna generations of the Prophet and the Hero border it. Where the Hero/Greatest/Millenial generations can do no wrong, the Nomad/Lost/Xers can do no right.

This large-scale pattern repeats as you go back in time, all the way back to the War of the Roses, in fact. Whenever the Prophet/Aggressive/Moralistic generation becomes the elders of the society, the western world has experienced a profound crisis, after which the civic order is born anew. This is happening now; but it also happened 80 years ago during WWII, then ~80 years before that in the Civil War, then ~80 years before that in the Revolutionary war. In fact, this tight periodicity keeps going back, again, to the War of the Roses. You can check it all out in the excellent book (written in 1996, economic boom times in America, yet that predicted the Great Recession as well as the deranged state of the civic order and political discourse today), called The Fourth Turning.

We know all parties and countries and special interests use shills. So why wouldn't there be paid conservative shills or propagandists?

The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich
Required lest history is repeated...

Another book worth mentioning: The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes. Won the Pulitzer prize, an instant classic, and perhaps one of the finest non-fiction books ever written. It paints the story of the bomb on a very broad, panoramic canvas, tracing the entire process of turning an outlandish, futuristic idea (all the way back to the musings of H. G. Well) into a real weapon with fatal and geopolitical consequences, through a complex landscape of politics, history, philosophy and psychology. Along the way it drip-feeds a course in elementary particle physics so that the technical details are easy to understand even for a layman — in fact, the first half of the book is pretty much the story of the atomic physics, from the discovery of the atom to modern quantum mechanics. The book is also superbly written; quirkily, occasionally lyrical, and very adept at making its characters come alive with plenty of juicy dramatic tension. (My only criticism about the book: Not enough Feynman!)

You should read up on how Hillary harrassed the alleged victims of Bill's abuse.

> She further alleges that Hillary Clinton, shortly after the alleged rape, verbally intimidated her, implying that Broaddrick better keep her mouth shut -- or else. At a political event two weeks later, Broaddrick claims that Hillary approached her: "She came over to me, took ahold of my hand and said, 'I've heard so much about you and I've been dying to meet you. ... I just want you to know how much that Bill and I appreciate what you do for him.' ...

Just imagine if somebody out there accused Trump of doing such a thing. There would be non-stop MSM coverage.

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2015/07/30/why_do_bill_and_hillary_clinton_still_get_a_pass_127590.html

Here is a great book by Christopher Hitchens that compiles all of the garbage of Clintons called, No One Left To Life To: The Triangulations of William Jefferson Clinton- http://www.amazon.com/One-Left-Lie-Triangulations-Jefferson/dp/1455522996

The Clintons are genuinely terrible people.

Classic Stockholm Syndrome. You should read this book.

Anyway, here is my rebuttal in bullet point form:

Wall St bailouts = fascism

World's largest prison population = fascism

Due process totally destroyed = fascism

Indefinite detention without trial (just claiming the power is bad enough) = fascism

Extrajudicial assassination of American Citizens (Anwar, etc) = fascism

Censoring of free speech (SOPA) = fascism

Constantly using terrorism as an excuse to expand the security state = fascism

Something that certainly shows the rhymes between today and 20th century history worth checking out might be "They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45" by Milton Mayer

https://www.amazon.com/They-Thought-Were-Free-Germans/dp/0226511928

This is a long excerpt (and I'm sure some of you already know it) but I think it's really, really important to read this and think about it:

>"And you are an alarmist. You are saying that this must lead to this, and you can’t prove it. These are the beginnings, yes; but how do you know for sure when you don’t know the end, and how do you know, or even surmise, the end? On the one hand, your enemies, the law, the regime, the Party, intimidate you. On the other, your colleagues pooh-pooh you as pessimistic or even neurotic. You are left with your close friends, who are, naturally, people who have always thought as you have.

>"But your friends are fewer now. Some have drifted off somewhere or submerged themselves in their work. You no longer see as many as you did at meetings or gatherings. Informal groups become smaller; attendance drops off in little organizations, and the organizations themselves wither. Now, in small gatherings of your oldest friends, you feel that you are talking to yourselves, that you are isolated from the reality of things. This weakens your confidence still further and serves as a further deterrent to—to what? It is clearer all the time that, if you are going to do anything, you must make an occasion to do it, and then you are obviously a troublemaker. So you wait, and you wait.

>"But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands will join with you, never comes. That’s the difficulty. If the last and worst act of the whole regime had come immediately after the first and smallest, thousands, yes, millions would have been sufficiently shocked—if, let us say, the gassing of the Jews in ’43 had come immediately after the ‘German Firm’ stickers on the windows of non-Jewish shops in ’33. But of course this isn’t the way it happens. In between come all the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step D.

>"And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you. The burden of self-deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident, in my case my little boy, hardly more than a baby, saying ‘Jewish swine,’ collapses it all at once, and you see that everything, everything, has changed and changed completely under your nose. The world you live in—your nation, your people—is not the world you were born in at all. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays. But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves; when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed. Now you live in a system which rules without responsibility even to God. The system itself could not have intended this in the beginning, but in order to sustain itself it was compelled to go all the way.

>"You have gone almost all the way yourself. Life is a continuing process, a flow, not a succession of acts and events at all. It has flowed to a new level, carrying you with it, without any effort on your part. On this new level you live, you have been living more comfortably every day, with new morals, new principles. You have accepted things you would not have accepted five years ago, a year ago, things that your father, even in Germany, could not have imagined.

>"Suddenly it all comes down, all at once. You see what you are, what you have done, or, more accurately, what you haven’t done (for that was all that was required of most of us: that we do nothing). You remember those early meetings of your department in the university when, if one had stood, others would have stood, perhaps, but no one stood. A small matter, a matter of hiring this man or that, and you hired this one rather than that. You remember everything now, and your heart breaks. Too late. You are compromised beyond repair.

On the insight of China's rise? I don't know any particular source for this. Briefly, China, when ruled by the Hans, was largely isolationist. Even when they explored the known world with Zheng He's fleets, they were diplomatic and merely traded. No colonies. Today, you see the same diplomacy at work - with only limited military engagement when absolutely necessary. Their peaceful relations in the African and Latin regions support this -- regardless of what the US statement department claims. This is the nature of China. It is a trading nation. Relative to other great powers, it has been only infrequently expansionist. During its most expansive times, it was ruled by non-Hans. The idea that today's China wants to "take over the world" is the Western mindset/experience projecting itself onto China. They reason, "We colonized the entire planet when we were strong. So, of course China will do the same to us.". That fear is only part of the problem. The second problem is that America and some Western allies have never given up global conquest. From that perspective, China is a "threat" -- not to world peace, but to their ambitions.

Read this https://www.amazon.com/Tragedy-Hope-History-World-Time/dp/094500110X/

There was also a free book that summarized the main points under a similar title] Tragedy and Hope 101 I think?

If you read Hitchens' No One Left To Lie To, it's clear that Bill Clinton is a total scum bag.

http://www.amazon.com/One-Left-Lie-Triangulations-Jefferson/dp/1455522996

If you're interested in learning more about the history surrounding Operation Ajax and the overthrow of Mosadegh, I recommend reading All the Shah's Men.

After reading The Fourth Turning and witnessing what has occurred the last 4 years and is currently happening now, yes. It was written in the 90s and predicted a great possibility of a WW2 type event sometime around 2020-2024. It posits it based on natural historical cycles and gives tons of proof and evidence, beyond conjecture. 9/11 came like being sucker punched and no one really had premonitions but now, you can feel it in the air. Heavy.

she's an ardent zionist, served in and actively defends and promotes the israeli "defense" forces, most notably vocally supporting the 2014 massacres in Gaza where israel killed over 2500 civilians, including over 500 children. for over 70 years israel has been administering a system of apartheid and ethnic cleansing in historic palestine. in 1948, when israel was founded, over 500 palestinian villages were ethnically cleansed, their populations either murdered or forced to flee as refugees. the villages were then either destroyed or renamed with hebrew names and populated by zionist settler families, mostly from europe. arab citizens in israel are second class citizens in many legal ways including where they can live, work, and travel.

the rest of palestine occupied illegally by israel and the palestinian population has zero political freedom, freedom of movement, or economic opportunities while simultaneously more and more of the land under military occupation is seized (again illegally according to several international conventions and laws) by settlers.

and it's not just in palestine, the israeli government is an ally of right wing forces around the world, including the trump administration. they were a key alley of the apartheid regime in south africa. they've sent guns to the neo-nazi azov battalion in ukraine.

israel, like the united states and canada, is completely indefensible. these states are founded on genocide maintained by apartheid. it's settler colonialism.

> They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45

on amazon.com

and on amazon.ca

love to note the 40% price difference..btw

Relevant; They know what they're doing. And how we will react.

>"Each act, each occasion, is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next. You wait for one great shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join with you in resisting somehow. You don't want to act, or even talk, alone; you don't want to 'go out of your way to make trouble.' Why not?-Well, you are not in the habit of doing it. And it is not just fear, fear of standing alone, that restrains you; it is also genuine uncertainty. Uncertainty is a very important factor, and, instead of decreasing as time goes on, it grows. Outside, in the streets, in the general community, 'everyone' is happy. One hears no protest, and certainly sees none. You know, in France or Italy there would be slogans against the government painted on walls and fences; in Germany, outside the great cities, perhaps, there is not even this. In the university community, in your own community, you speak privately to your colleagues, some of whom certainly feel as you do; but what do they say? They say, 'It's not so bad' or 'You're seeing things' or 'You're an alarmist.'
>
>And you are an alarmist. You are saying that this must lead to this, and you can't prove it. These are the beginnings, yes; but how do you know for sure when you don't know the end, and how do you know, or even surmise, the end? On the one hand, your enemies, the law, the regime, the Party, intimidate you. On the other, your colleagues pooh-pooh you as pessimistic or even neurotic. You are left with your close friends, who are, naturally, people who have always thought as you have....
>
>But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands will join with you, never comes. That's the difficulty. If the last and worst act of the whole regime had come immediately after the first and smallest, thousands, yes, millions would have been sufficiently shocked-if, let us say, the gassing of the Jews in '43 had come immediately after the 'German Firm' stickers on the windows of non-Jewish shops in '33. But of course this isn't the way it happens. In between come all the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step D.
>
>And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you. The burden of self-deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident, in my case my little boy, hardly more than a baby, saying 'Jewish swine,' collapses it all at once, and you see that everything, everything, has changed and changed completely under your nose. The world you live in - your nation, your people - is not the world you were born in at all. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays. But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves; when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed. Now you live in a system which rules without responsibility even to God. The system itself could not have intended this in the beginning, but in order to sustain itself it was compelled to go all the way."

• Milton Mayer
  
  They Thought They Were Free: The Germans 1933-1945

Geopolitics isn't a tinfoil hat doctrine. It's studied at universities and people like Henry Kissinger write nonfiction books about it. If you'd like a primer, try Tragedy & Hope: A History of the World in Our Time by Carroll Quigley. Bill Clinton had Quigley as a professor and called him the biggest influence in his life.

Why's it so unbelievable?

Scott's comment sort of has thread-ender vibes to me, so I'll post one.

Tragedy and Hope: A History of the World in Our Time, by Carrol Quigley.

The Amazon blurb is overly sensational, but not by as much as one might think. For more info I'd recommend checking out Quigley's Wikipedia page.

Excerpt:

> There does exist, and has existed for a generation, an international Anglophile network which operates, to some extent, in the way the Radical right believes the Communists act. In fact, this network, which we may identify as the Round Table Groups, has no aversion to cooperating with the Communists, or any other group, and frequently does so. I know of the operation of this network because I have studied it for twenty years and was permitted for two years, in the early 1960s, to examine its papers and secret records. I have no aversion to it or to most of its aims and have, for much of my life, been close to it and to many of its instruments. I have objected, both in the past and recently, to a few of its policies... but in general my chief difference of opinion is that it wishes to remain unknown, and I believe its role in history is significant enough to be known.

(This was written in 1966.)

Well, they may not know about radiation exposure effects (even though they know something about it. The absolute madman Louis Slotin took a dive near a reactor to fix it, and his colleagues were "shocked", and Japan itself tried to start a nuclear project, failing due to the fact, well, that only the United States had the capability of invest on it: developing nuclear bomb was expensive as hell), but they surely knew that it was different. They saw just a couple of planes, and then hell broke loose, and the aftermath of the explosion was a bit worst than the one of a firestorm. Mind that a fire bombing is not meant to create a shock wave as an atomic bomb does.
And after all of this, after the bombing of Nagasaki, the emperor (I won't ever remember his name) stated:

"The enemy has begun to employ a new and most cruel bomb, the power of which to do damage is, indeed, incalculable, taking the toll of many innocent lives. Should we continue to fight, not only would it result in an ultimate collapse and obliteration of the Japanese nation, but also it would lead to the total extinction of human civilization."

"a new and most cruel bomb": average Japanese may not care about the difference between a firebomb and an atomic bomb, but I can assure you that upstairs, they were concerned about the use of the new weapon.

As an ending note, if you love to read, and if you don't care about lengthy readings, Richard Rhodes wrote a couple of very well documented books about the matter:

• The Making of the Atomic Bomb, which is about the development of the weapons, the Manhattan Project, and ends with the Nagasaki bombing;
  
• Dark Sun: the Making of the Hydrogen Bomb, which is an amazing book that sometimes resembles a spy story and sometimes is just plain scary. Castle Bravo Fuck Up, for example.
  
  Have a good day :)

I agree. More can be read on the topic of Koch and Walton donations in the fairly recent book Dark Money.

Not to mention NPR actually covered said book on Morning Edition.

This is a consequence of many strands of American life dating back to the 1960s, but it has recently been embraced and furthered by the conservative backlash against public schools, environmentalism, 'liberal elites,' etc. It's so frustrating because in every other facet of life, you want someone who knows more than you to help you learn what they know; but somehow in politics those who know more than you are wrong and can't tell you want to do. It's insane-making

These people:

The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine

Starred Review. In his latest work, renowned Israeli author and academic Pappe (A History of Modern Palestine) does not mince words, doing Jimmy Carter one better (or worse, depending on one's point of view) by accusing Israel of ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity beginning in the 1948 war for independence, and continuing through the present. Focusing primarily on Plan D (Dalet, in Hebrew), conceived on March 10, 1948, Pappe demonstrates how ethnic cleansing was not a circumstance of war, but rather a deliberate goal of combat for early Israeli military units led by David Ben-Gurion, whom Pappe labels the "architect of ethnic cleansing." The forced expulsion of 800,000 Palestinians between 1948-49, Pappe argues, was part of a long-standing Zionist plan to manufacture an ethnically pure Jewish state. Framing his argument with accepted international and UN definitions of ethnic cleansing, Pappe follows with an excruciatingly detailed account of Israeli military involvement in the demolition and depopulation of hundreds of villages, and the expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Arab inhabitants. An accessible, learned resource, this volume provides important inroads into the historical antecedents of today's conflict, but its conclusions will not be easy for everyone to stomach: Pappe argues that the ethnic cleansing of Palestine continues today, and calls for the unconditional return of all Palestinian refugees and an end to the Israeli occupation.

>Is there any politician out there willing to fight for Canadians? Is that too much to ask?

Sorry to tell you the government doesn't work for you.

These links will take a while to digest, but if you want to understand what's going on in the world, you owe it to yourself to become informed about the true state of the world.

Our brains are much worse at reality and thinking than thought. Science on reasoning:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PYmi0DLzBdQ

Rd wolf on economics

http://www.rdwolff.com/

"Intended as an internal document. Good reading to understand the nature of rich democracies and the fact that the common people are not allowed to play a role."

Crisis of democracy

http://trilateral.org/download/doc/crisis_of_democracy.pdf

http://www.amazon.com/Crisis-Democracy-Governability-Democracies-Trilateral/dp/0814713653/

Education as ignorance

https://chomsky.info/warfare02/

Overthrowing other peoples governments

http://williamblum.org/essays/read/overthrowing-other-peoples-governments-the-master-list

Wikileaks on TTIP/TPP/ETC

https://youtu.be/ABDiHspTJww?t=17

Energy subsidies

https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/survey/so/2015/NEW070215A.htm

Interference in other states when the rich/corporations dont get their way

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8mxp_wgFWQo&feature=youtu.be&list=PLKR2GeygdHomOZeVKx3P0fqH58T3VghOj&t=724

Manufacturing consent (book)

http://www.amazon.com/Manufacturing-Consent-Political-Economy-Media/dp/0375714499/

Protectionism for the rich and big business by state intervention, radical market interference.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WHj2GaPuEhY#t=349

Manufacturing consent:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KwU56Rv0OXM

https://vimeo.com/39566117

Testing theories of representative government

https://scholar.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/mgilens/files/gilens_and_page_2014_-testing_theories_of_american_politics.doc.pdf

Democracy Inc

http://www.amazon.com/Democracy-Incorporated-Managed- Inverted-Totalitarianism/dp/069114589X

From war is a racket:

"I helped make Mexico, especially Tampico, safe for American oil intersts in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefits of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. In China I helped to see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested."[p. 10]

"War is a racket. ...It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives." [p. 23]

"The general public shoulders the bill [for war]. This bill renders a horrible accounting. Newly placed gravestones. Mangled bodies. Shattered minds. Broken hearts and homes. Economic instability. Depression and all its attendant miseries. Back-breaking taxation for generations and generations." [p. 24]

General Butler is especially trenchant when he looks at post-war casualties. He writes with great emotion about the thousands of tramautized soldiers, many of who lose their minds and are penned like animals until they die, and he notes that in his time, returning veterans are three times more likely to die prematurely than those who stayed home.

http://www.amazon.com/War-Racket-Antiwar-Americas-Decorated/dp/0922915865/

Blum:

http://williamblum.org/aer/read/137

US distribution of wealth

https://imgur.com/a/FShfb

http://www2.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/power/wealth.html

The Centre for Investigative Journalism

http://www.tcij.org/

Some history on US imperialism by us corporations.

https://kurukshetra1.wordpress.com/2015/09/27/a-brief-history-of-imperialism-and-state-violence-in-colombia/

The real news

http://www.therealnews.com

> Mainstream liberals and Democrats have largely been unable to...understand the behavior of the Republican Party over the last few decades

Just finished Jane Mayer's Dark Money. It's very enlightening in this regard. It's a hard read in the sense that is perpetually depressing, terrifying, and enraging, but it clearly explicates the unseen forces at work, including how the Koch network pours money into cut outs that are made to look and sound non-partisan and legitimate (which also aids in their mission to cheat campaign financing and tax laws) and pairs the cut outs' "research" with the worst elements of society (e.g., racism, poverty) to frame their messaging in an eerily similar way as Russian propaganda. That's in addition to all the shell non profits they use to skirt campaign finance laws and funnel ungodly amounts of money to politicians.

Even if I had at some point in the past said "both sides are the same" with respect to donors, I will never fucking say it again after reading this book.

This sounds like another one of the Lies my Teacher Told Me

Here's an interview that Soros did with "60 Minutes" twenty years ago that explains some of his motivations. This video was rumored to exist for a long time, people reported remembering seeing it. After a long hunt, it was finally discovered by a reddit user in a university library with restricted access.

Just watch the man revel in sociopathy. He knows what he is and likes it. Watch George admit he feels no shame for selling out his fellow Jews to the Nazis and pocketing their possessions. Not spelling Nazis, not soup Nazis, not feminazis, but actual Nazis. The social consequences of his actions are of no concern to him. Watch his reaction when the interviewer asks if he feels guilty.

He promotes completely open borders, devaluing the US dollar and replacing it with a singular global currency. Literally a new world order. (The term for this is "globalism")

The answer to a lot of your questions is "we don't know just yet". I know you're trying to ridicule, but super-rich elites really do exist and they really do control a frightening amount of the world we live in. Globalists care no more for human lives than a homeowner cares for the ants that live in his lawn. They will tinker and experiment and if that means starvation for us, they're willing to make that sacrifice. Fortunately we live in an unprecedented era of transparency and we are slowly assembling the answers and finding out who really rules us, and how.

If you really want to educate yourself, read the book Tragedy and Hope: A History of the World in Our Time
by Carroll Quigley. This book is not for the faint-hearted, at 1348 pages it is three inches thick. But it basically lays out the blueprint that globalists like Soros and the Rothschilds believe in. The Dodd Report to the Reece Committee is also worth reading. These are serious, sober works and not froth-at-the-mouth conspiracy theories. I found Carroll Quigley to be quite an affable and communicative writer. He's for globalism, not a raving lunatic decrying it.

There are enough keywords in my last paragraph to keep you busy searching for a while. I hope after you finish reading you can help to spread the word about the works of Quigley, and especially that 60 Minutes interview.

"...America’s 45th president is open about the fact that he doesn’t read much history..." that's a real shame because we could all avoid a lot of pain and suffering if the dumb ass just read a little ...

https://www.amazon.com/Rise-Fall-Third-Reich-History/dp/1451651686

> Einstein appointed himself with plenty, including persuading the US government to develop nuclear weapons.

This is not accurate. Einstein himself had to be persuaded to write that letter by his good friend Leo Szilard. Szilard was the first person to conceive of a nuclear chain reaction that could be used to build a nuclear bomb, but he didn't have the name recognition that Einstein did. So Szilard drove over to Einstein's house and they co-wrote the letter.

Source.

Also wrote No One Left To Lie To: The Values of the Worst Family about the Clintons. Brilliant short book, information in that book alone would be enough to keep the crooks from returning to power.

He had an entire book

No One Left to Lie To: The Triangulations of William Jefferson Clinton

http://www.amazon.com/One-Left-Lie-Triangulations-Jefferson/dp/1455522996

Traditionally the biggest symbols are,

9 - Striker

10 - Best playmaker

7 generally symbolizes a star winger or playmaker, 11 is the same way. Most of these trends come from the compression of the 2-3-5 into the formations we have today. If you haven't read Inverting the Pyramid I highly recommend it. It mentions this topic in passing.

If anyone hasn't read/listened to Dark Money by Jane Mayer you definitely should!

It traces the history of influence by conservative billionaire donors, and it's disgusting and infuriating -- but also incredibly informative.

In simplest terms, the Koch Foundation has put a poop ton of money into George Mason University and other colleges across the US. I highly recommend you read the book but GMU has been in the news this year because of the connections to the Kochs.

The book also goes into the Bush family and a lot of the Republican guard, shit I had no idea about. The Kochs made a shit load of money selling to the Nazis and USSR.

As long as we are suggesting things, People should read Dark Money by Jane Meyer

The two books Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right by Jane Mayer and Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People? by Thomas Frank pair extremely well and are required reading for anyone that wishes to understand how US politics has been shifted so far to the right these past decades. Dark Money, while extremely informative regarding the propaganda of billionaires, largely gives a pass to the Democratic party which Listen, Liberal reveals as being undeserved.

This image gives sort of the essential idea of what has happened. I'd advise the book "the ethnic cleansing of Palestine" by Israeli historian Ilan Pappe to start understanding the history.

If you want to follow that path even further, read this book.

It's a journey through how Putin creates exactly the feeling you're experiencing to control Russia, how the strategy developed over time, and what it's like to live in Russia once truth died.

Edit: Nevermind, it looks like 'War is a Racket' is the book for me.

Found these amazing quotes in a review.

>"I helped make Mexico, especially Tampico, safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefits of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. In China I helped to see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested." [p. 10]

>"War is a racket. ...It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives." [p. 23]

>"The general public shoulders the bill [for war]. This bill renders a horrible accounting. Newly placed gravestones. Mangled bodies. Shattered minds. Broken hearts and homes. Economic instability. Depression and all its attendant miseries. Back-breaking taxation for generations and generations." [p. 24]

These disclosures are incomplete, and leave out some gory details - such as when the CIA sponsored a riot, then got the chief of police to fire on the protesters, all to create the impression that Iran was falling into chaos. The CIA helped design the impression of imminent Communist takeover, in order to justify their actions. They manipulated Eisenhower and Truman, as much as they did the Iranians. All the Shah's Men is a great book on the subject.

What is really sad is, prior to the coup, the US was widely adored in Iran as a non-colonial western power. All that Mosaddegh was asking for was the same partnership that the US had created with Aramco in Saudi Arabia: a 50/50 split of profits between the state and its western concessionaires. If the US had been consistent in applying its values, Iran could easily be an ally today.

As it stands, the only winners to emerge from the CIA's machinations have been the national security apparatus, and the muslim fanatics - in the long term, even the oil industry would have been better off sharing with Iran, rather than pillaging and being thrown out.

Well, what you're discussing here I make a living out of studying (theoretical political science). Just about all technology so far has been good technology, and anything in the not-too-distant future is going to be good technology, and anything in the way-distant future will probably be good technology.

The problem is not with technology, but the dissonance-gap created between the technology we develop, and our behavioral implementation of these technologies into society. Medicine was a good technology, and we've basically implemented it well (some states don't get common medicines, but overall we've been good with Medicine). Radio was a good technology and we've developed it well. Flight is a good technology and we've developed it well. The internet and miniaturized media devices? well, that's a complex one. Obviously it's a defining good of our age, and we could go on all day discussing how good it is for our society in various aspects. But, it's also bad in many -- again, not bad in itself, but in how we as a society have chosen to implement the technology of mobile media and the internet.


This will probably be my dissertation, so suffice it to say these technologies have driven us towards a more democratic political atmosphere (that's little-d democratic as in non-representative, not the party). Referendums, Senate election reform, 24hr. news cycles, daily polls, all serve to pressure elected officials as the democratic citizens pressure them for more instant results. The result is, effectively, an antagonist environment of partisanship, bickering, no-compromise, and misinformation. The evolution of immediacy-technologies (this includes flight, I suppose) has changed the pace of our world beyond what is responsible for most of us. To put it simply, what we have developed in terms of social-accessibility this past century is slightly beyond what we as a people are capable of working with maturely. Infotainment butchers credible news channels, misinformation and bias runs amok, fringe party movements dominate national election, the few qu'ran burning crazies grab headlines. This trend is not a result of human evolution, but a lack of. Our technology has improved and we haven't.

This goes beyond civics though, ironically we can socially flounder because of social media technologies. Just look at all the forever-alones on reddit/the internet, or when you go out with your friends for a drink and they all tap away on their smart phones texting other people instead of enjoying the real moment with eachother. Robert Putnam basically made this his focus of study which can be summed up politically here and more socially analyzed in his book Bowling Alone.

Fortunately, we've grown accordingly with technology where it really matters - international conflict and the nuclear bomb. We haven't had any nuclear winters because we were able to adapt to the new international atmosphere of Mutually Assured Destruction - we were smart enough to put aside our antagonistic nature towards our perceived enemies, and cooled our heads well enough to prevent a nuclear war for 60 years (and still into today!). There have been no major world-wars since we've developed mass-mobilization capabilities, and no crazy biological warfare (of course there are incidents like Hussein and his Kurds, or WW1 gas weapons, but those are regional events or in the case of WW1 an example of us toying with a new technology before truly understanding it)



So, thus far there's no real evidence that we've hit a breaking point where we've gone too far in terms of technological development. But we're getting pretty close. Historically there have been moments of technological development, and moments of social development. During the renaissance we began developing philosophy, human rights, and justice while simultaneously making huge strides in technology (industrial revolution anyone)? Maybe one sparked the other, maybe one allowed for the other, either way we and our technology grew together. I only hope that if we wish to continue our exponential push to singularity, we're able to kick our behavior/cognitive development along with it.

German here. It seems to me like too many people are pinning their hopes on this one investigation.

Too many people are still sure that the system works at some level, even though Trump and his cronies have been busy dismantling it from the inside right since he got into office. They're sure that the institutions will still protect them. They're sure that the population is generally aware of what's going. They're sure that if Trump ever took that final step into authoritarianism, millions would be in the streets.

So I'm just here to say that this process has happened before, and it has happened in many countries, and all of the arguments you're making have been made before - and yet many of these countries fell to totalitarianism.

I'm just gonna leave this quote from a German university professor who was interviewed about what life in Germany was like in 1933-45:

>"But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands will join with you, never comes. That’s the difficulty. If the last and worst act of the whole regime had come immediately after the first and smallest, thousands, yes, millions would have been sufficiently shocked—if, let us say, the gassing of the Jews in ’43 had come immediately after the ‘German Firm’ stickers on the windows of non-Jewish shops in ’33. But of course this isn’t the way it happens. In between come all the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step D.

>"And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you. The burden of self-deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident, in my case my little boy, hardly more than a baby, saying ‘Jewish swine,’ collapses it all at once, and you see that everything, everything, has changed and changed completely under your nose. The world you live in—your nation, your people—is not the world you were born in at all."

(source: They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45)

FYI the Mercer Famiky was/is a major player in the Koch network that brought us the radical right and who now own the Republican Party.

Read Dark Money, buy a copy for a friend.

https://www.amazon.com/Dark-Money-History-Billionaires-Radical/dp/0307947904

I feel you. It can be extremely demoralizing. It's designed to feel that way.

Despite the feeling of stagnation, we are making progress. We are making huge progress in the minds of the people. I would say that we are in the eye of the storm right now, which is why it feels so eerie and stagnant. Remember that almost no one knew who Bernie Sanders was two years ago (I remember, this is around the time I discovered him myself, and nobody I talked to about him had ever heard of him). And now is the most popular politician in the country. That is BIG. Think of all the lexicon and "common sense" he's introduced into daily discourse.

Reddit and the online media are part of a huge bubble. Reddit has always skewed upper middle class, but I really think the concerted shilling efforts have had a markedly noticeable effect on the composition of its primary user base. To be explicit, I think it used to be middle-to-upper-middle-class students and commuting tech workers. Now that shills changed the focus of the discussion, you find a lot more urban professionals and media types. "Journalists", bloggers/vloggers, silicon valley, etc. Plus, I think, more wealthy international redditors (e.g. the 1% in India, China, etc.) Not that all of them are neoliberal of course, just that the ones who are have been empowered to speak their mind more, and the ones who have a progressive or libertarian streak have been pulling back and getting more dormant. The shills are still here as well, but I feel like they have less work to do now.

But the important part to remember is, like they always smugly told us, back before they were the ones who needed reminding, "Reddit is not real life". There is something big going on in the minds of the average American. It takes time for people's worldview to change. By virtue of our participation here, it's evident that we're early adopters. It feels like we've known these things forever. Take heart: I have never been a bleeding edge person. I always adopt new ideas at the cusp, right before the tipping point where it goes mainstream. It's regular enough to be predictive, imo. It happened with smartphones, it happened with Bernie, and it's going to happen with the upcoming revolution (political or otherwise) as well. We will have campaign finance reform, universal healthcare, marijuana legalization, and so on. The collapse of the traditional mainstream media. There will also be violence, and escalation, and war, but whether it's domestic or international I can't say yet. All this within the next ten years.

Read The Fourth Turning if you haven't already. I'm impatient, it's true, but there's no doubt in my mind that it's coming.

To add to this, two good books to read are:

Gulag Archipeligo - Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin - Timothy Snyder

Almost everything mention in this book.

I highly recommend the book “Lies My Teacher Told Me.” It changed my life in a time before the Internet was dominant.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0684818868/ref=mp_s_a_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1511240442&sr=8-2&pi=AC_SX236_SY340_QL65&keywords=lies+my+teacher+told+me&dpPl=1&dpID=51Rr06sJHBL&ref=plSrch

Hi! I skimmed through one cherry-picked article (Senior researcher: a relation of Mr. Chertoff ) in Popular Mechanics, which is owned by The Hearst Corporation, and therefore I am an authority on the entire extremely complicated and obfuscated subject of 9/11.

*American Free Press revealed that Benjamin Chertoff, the 25-year-old senior researcher who authored the 9/11 article, is related to Michael Chertoff, the new Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

Http://www.wanttoknow.info

Army General Wesley Clark: Wars are Planned RE: Memo to take out 7 countries in 5 years: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9RC1Mepk_Sw

US MAJOR Stubblebine exposes 9/11 cover up: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W0xzsbSbVUE

"War is a Racket" By Smedley D. Butler, at the time America's most decorated soldier: http://www.amazon.com/War-Racket-Antiwar-Americas-Decorated/dp/0922915865/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1410494742&sr=8-1&keywords=war+is+a+racket

Testimony from Controlled Demolition Expert Danny Jowenko (recently deceased) ON WTC7: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zHHvo6U4lA



What is a False Flag?

>I honestly believe the US military does not defend the rights of citizens or anything of similar matter.

Here it is from the horse's mouth - a five star general admitted that America's military is the hired muscle for Western capitalists.

http://www.amazon.com/War-Racket-Antiwar-Americas-Decorated/dp/0922915865/

> These ten men were not men of distinction. They were not men of influence. They were not opinion-makers. Nobody ever gave them a free sample of anything on the ground that what they thought of it would increase the sales of the product. Their importance lay in the fact that God—as Lincoln said of the common people—had made so many of them. In a nation of seventy million, they were the sixty-nine million plus. They were the Nazis, the little men to whom, if ever they voiced their own views outside their own circles, bigger men politely pretended to listen without ever asking them to elaborate.

~ Milton Mayer, They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45

All of this is well documented.

https://www.amazon.com/Dark-Money-History-Billionaires-Radical/dp/0307947904

Of course I might be going out on a limb thinking you'd ever even try to read a fucking book for once.

https://i.imgur.com/vCIawHP.png

Sadly, specific names are increasingly more difficult to pin down because they have shifted their funding to means which are not traceable. Regardless, a small number of names and insight are provided in Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right.

Anti-intellectualism has been a part of American culture from its foundation. Our culture has always prided itself on its practicality and industry, and derided intellect, basic research, and arts as irrelevant. Smart people are viewed as untrustworthy and arrogant, their expertise fundamentally anti-democratic. Or, as Asimov put it, in American culture "democracy means 'my ignorance is as good as your knowledge.'"

Happily, and I hope I didn't come off as too abrasive. As I said, you seemed to be asking the question in very good faith.

If you or anyone is interested - not so much in the political decision or if or how to use the bombs - but just in the effort of making of them: The Making of the Atomic Bomb is a massive book (often considered 'definitive') that goes through the Manhattan project in great detail. The only other project that really compares to it is the Moon Landing.

I'd recommend to anyone who's interested to read "Making the Atomic Bomb". One of the aspects that I didn't know about was one of the physicists(I can't recall which one) going to both Churchill and Roosevelt pleading to tell the Russians about it, saying that by not telling them it would instigate an arms race.

It also highlights Gen. Lemay's cold, calculating process of not bombing certain targets so they could get a good reading on destruction levels when the bomb was used. By contrast it also gives much history on the international level of research going on before WW2 and the discovery of fission and decay of elements. It shows that someone was going to develop the bomb because everyone was doing research in the field.

If you don't think it's happening.. go read this:

https://www.amazon.com/They-Thought-Were-Free-Germans/dp/0226511928

Perhaps a place where the government spies on its citizens? taps their phones? Rejects Habeus Corpus? Declares and exercises the right to assassinate anyone, including American citizens?

Turn off CNN and read some history. I suggest you start with, "They Thought They Were Free".

http://www.amazon.com/They-Thought-Were-Free-Germans/dp/0226511928

They epitomize libertarianism. They're largely (almost solely) responsible for the rise of right wing and libertarian think tanks and ideals in the United states over the last several decades. If you ever want to be disgusted by the efforts and successes of the Koch brothers and their oligarch friends, I suggest this book: https://www.amazon.com/Dark-Money-History-Billionaires-Radical/dp/0307947904/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1550262479&sr=8-1&keywords=dark+money. It outlines how they've infiltrated the government, academic institutions, and general society with evil intentions and great success.

Here is another source:

Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right by Jane Mayer

How did we get here? Worth checking out if your library has a copy:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/0394703170

Then you'd like this:

https://www.amazon.com/All-Shahs-Men-American-Middle/dp/047018549X

>This is both anti-historical and incredibly wrong on so many fronts.

Overthrowing other peoples governments:

http://williamblum.org/essays/read/overthrowing-other-peoples-governments-the-master-list

You are incorrect, I can tell you the facts and the figures and you won't reason to the right conclusion.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PYmi0DLzBdQ

The Centre for Investigative Journalism

http://www.tcij.org/

Some history on US imperialism by us corporations.

https://kurukshetra1.wordpress.com/2015/09/27/a-brief-history-of-imperialism-and-state-violence-in-colombia/

From war is a racket:

"I helped make Mexico, especially Tampico, safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefits of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. In China I helped to see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested."[p. 10]
"War is a racket. ...It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives." [p. 23]
"The general public shoulders the bill [for war]. This bill renders a horrible accounting. Newly placed gravestones. Mangled bodies. Shattered minds. Broken hearts and homes. Economic instability. Depression and all its attendant miseries. Back-breaking taxation for generations and generations." [p. 24]

General Butler is especially trenchant when he looks at post-war casualties. He writes with great emotion about the thousands of tramautized soldiers, many of who lose their minds and are penned like animals until they die, and he notes that in his time, returning veterans are three times more likely to die prematurely than those who stayed home.

http://www.amazon.com/War-Racket-Antiwar-Americas-Decorated/dp/0922915865/

Read The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.

It was written in the 60s I think, not long after the events of WWII; but is very complete in discussing how Hitler was able to assume power, his failed attempts, and why the German people "let this happen".

It is very good, and draws a lot of parallels in our recent politics.

Well they had a very well organised spy ring stages deep inside the Manhattan Project. The executed people over it. Its quite well known.

Richard Rhodes: The making of the Atomic Bomb
http://www.amazon.com/The-Making-Atomic-Bomb-Anniversary/dp/1451677618

The spies...
cut/paste from wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_spies
------------------------------------------

1. Morris Cohen – American, "Thanks to Cohen, designers of the Soviet atomic bomb got piles of technical documentation straight from the secret laboratory in Los Alamos," the newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda said. Morris and his wife, Lona, served eight years in prison, less than half of their sentences before being released in a prisoner swap with The Soviet Union. He died without revealing the name of the American scientist who helped pass vital information about the United States atomic bomb project.[13]
   
   
   
2. Klaus Fuchs – German-born British theoretical physicist who worked with the British delegation at Los Alamos during the Manhattan Project. After Fuchs' confession there was a trial that lasted less than 90 minutes, Lord Goddard sentenced him to fourteen years' imprisonment, the maximum for violating the Official Secrets Act. He escaped the charge of espionage because of the lack of independent evidence and because, at the time of the crime, the Soviet Union was not an enemy of Great Britain.[14] In December 1950 he was stripped of his British citizenship. He was released on June 23, 1959, after serving nine years and four months of his sentence at Wakefield prison. He was allowed to emigrate to Dresden, then in the German Democratic Republic.[15][16]
   
   
   
3. Harry Gold – American, confessed to acting as a courier for Greenglass and Fuchs. He was sentenced in 1951 to thirty years imprisonment. He was paroled in May 1966, after serving just over half of his sentence.[17]
   
   
   
4. David Greenglass – an American machinist at Los Alamos during the Manhattan Project. Greenglass confessed that he gave crude schematics of lab experiments to the Russians during World War II. Some aspects of his testimony against his sister and brother-in-law (the Rosenbergs, see below) are now thought to have been fabricated in an effort to keep his own wife, Ruth, from prosecution. Greenglass was sentenced to 15 years in prison, served 10 years, and later reunited with his wife.[18]
   
   
5. Theodore Hall – a young American physicist at Los Alamos, whose identity as a spy was not revealed until very late in the 20th century. He was never tried for his espionage work, though he seems to have admitted to it in later years to reporters and to his family.[19]
   George Koval – The American born son of a Belorussian emigrant family that returned to the Soviet Union where he was inducted into the Red Army and recruited into the GRU intelligence service. He infiltrated the US Army and became a radiation health officer in the Special Engineering Detachment. Acting under the code name DELMAR he obtained information from Oak Ridge and the Dayton Project about the Urchin (detonator) used on the Fat Man plutonium bomb. His work was not known to the west until he was posthumously recognized as a hero of the Russian Federation by Vladimir Putin in 2007.
   
   
   
6. Irving Lerner – An American film director, he was caught photographing the cyclotron at the University of California, Berkeley in 1944.[20] After the war he was blacklisted.
   
   
   
7. Allan Nunn May – A British citizen, he was one of the first Soviet spies uncovered during the cold war. He worked on the Manhattan Project and was betrayed by a Soviet defector in Canada. His was uncovered in 1946 and it led the United States to restrict the sharing of atomic secrets with Britain. On May 1, 1946, he was sentenced to ten years hard labour. He was released in 1952, after serving six and a half years.[21]
   
   
   
8. Ethel and Julius Rosenberg – Americans who were involved in coordinating and recruiting an espionage network that included Ethel's brother, David Greenglass. Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were tried for conspiracy to commit espionage, since the prosecution seemed to feel that there was not enough evidence to convict on espionage. Treason charges were not applicable, since the United States and the Soviet Union were allies at the time. The Rosenbergs denied all the charges but were convicted in a trial in which the prosecutor Roy Cohn said he was in daily secret contact with the judge, Irving Kaufman. Despite an international movement demanding clemency, and appeals to President Dwight D. Eisenhower by leading European intellectuals and the Pope, the Rosenbergs were executed at the height of the Korean War. President Eisenhower wrote to his son, serving in Korea, that if he spared Ethel (presumably for the sake of her children), then the Soviets would simply recruit their spies from among women.[22][23][24]
   
   
9. Saville Sax – American acted as the courier for Klaus Fuchs and Theodore Hall.[19]
   
   
10. Morton Sobell – American engineer tried and convicted along with the Rosenbergs, was sentenced to 30 years imprisonment but released from Alcatraz in 1969, after serving 17 years and 9 months.[25] After proclaiming his innocence for over half a century, Sobell admitted spying for the Soviets, and implicated Julius Rosenberg, in an interview with the New York Times published on September 11, 2008
    ---------------------------------------------
    
    The Soviets used to fly 'supply' missions out of somewhere in the midwest I think, they used to load up the data in that plane and fly it across weekly to Russia via Alaska/Siberia (if I recall correctly). The US intelligence services were mainly oblivious, they were allies after all.

> in that respect, he doesn't seem all that different from the media image of vladimir putin

When I see statements like this, it always reminds me of this excellent BBC article on Russian media tactics.

> Peter Pomerantsev, who recently spent several years working on documentaries and reality shows for Russian TV, argues that Russian state media are not just distorting truth in Ukraine, they go much further, promoting a seductive nihilism.

> "The Russian strategy, both at home and abroad, is to say there is no such thing as truth," he says.

> "I mean, you know, 'The Americans are bad, we're bad, and everyone's bad, so what's the big deal about us being a bit corrupt? You know our democracy's a sham, their democracy's a sham.'

> "It's a sort of cynicism that actually resonates very powerfully in the West nowadays with this lack of self-confidence after the Iraq War, after the financial crash - and that's what the Russians are hoping for, just to take that cynicism and then use that in a military environment."

By the way, if you liked that little blurb, you'll love Pomerantsev's entertaining book, Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible.

EDIT: Linking the BBC article

If you want to see an honest discussion about race, look at these studies and facts:

Humans can be genetically categorized into five racial groups, corresponding to traditional races.
http://pritchardlab.stanford.edu/publications/pdfs/RosenbergEtAl02.pdf

Genetic analysis “supports the traditional racial groups classification.” http://psychology.uwo.ca/faculty/rushtonpdfs/PPPL1.pdf

“Human genetic variation is geographically structured” and corresponds with race. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15508000

Race can be determined via genetics with certainty for >99.8% of individuals.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15625622

Oral bacteria can be used to determine race. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2013-10-oral-bacteria-fingerprint-mouth.html

Race can be determined via brain scans. http://www.cell.com/current-biology/abstract/S0960-9822(15)00671-5

96-97% of whites have no African ancestry.
http://www.theroot.com/articles/history/2013/02/how_mixed_are_african_americans.3.html

97% of Whites have no black ancestry whatsoever. http://www.unz.com/isteve/nyt-white-black-a-murky-distinction-grows-still-murkier/

There was “minimal gene flow” between archaic Europeans and Asians. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/20/science/20adapt.html

Common-sense racial categories have biological meaning. http://www.ln.edu.hk/philoso/staff/sesardic/Race2.pdf

Human intelligence is highly heritable. http://www.nature.com/mp/journal/v16/n10/abs/mp201185a.html

Scientific consensus is that IQ tests are not racially biased. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160289608000305

Very poor Whites are comparably intelligent to very wealthy blacks. http://www.jbhe.com/features/49_college_admissions-test.html

Privately, intelligence experts hold more hereditarian views than they express in public. http://www.udel.edu/educ/gottfredson/reprints/1994egalitarianfiction.pdf

Black children raised in White households have similar IQs to black children in black households. http://psycnet.apa.org/psycinfo/1977-07996-001

The average African IQ is estimated at 79. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0191886912003741

The average African-American IQ is 85, compared to the average White IQ of 100. http://www.udel.edu/educ/gottfredson/reprints/1997mainstream.pdf

The white-black gap in SAT scores, a proxy for IQ, is increasing. http://www.jbhe.com/features/49_college_admissions-test.html

Genes for large brains, linked to high IQ, are common everywhere except Africa.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB115040765329081636

Intelligence has a 40-50% genetic basis. http://articles.latimes.com/2011/aug/10/news/la-heb-genetic-study-intelligence-20110809

IQ scores are the best predictor of success in Western society. http://psychology.uwo.ca/faculty/rushtonpdfs/PPPL1.pdf

IQ is 75% heritable among Whites. http://psychology.uwo.ca/faculty/rushtonpdfs/PPPL1.pdf

92% of Mulatto (black man, white women) children are born out of wedlock. http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2625893

Gentile whites are the most underrepresented group in top colleges. http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/the-myth-of-american-meritocracy/

Sweden is the rape capital of the West, likely due to immigration. http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/5195/sweden-rape

Asian women find White men more attractive than Asian men. http://sf.oxfordjournals.org/content/89/3/807.abstract

White men are pound-for-pound stronger than black men. http://www.biomedcentral.com/content/pdf/1471-2458-10-508.pdf

Germanic/Nordic people have lower time preference than any other group. http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1481443

Human evolution is not merely ongoing but is in fact accelerating. http://discovermagazine.com/2009/mar/09-they-dont-make-homo-sapiens-like-they-used-to

Human races are diverging into separate species, not mixing into one. http://discovermagazine.com/2009/mar/09-they-dont-make-homo-sapiens-like-they-used-to

Blacks are seven times more likely than whites to commit murder. http://www.colorofcrime.com/2005/10/the-color-of-crime-2005/

The percentage of Blacks and Hispanics, not poverty, is the best predictor of crime. http://www.colorofcrime.com/2005/10/the-color-of-crime-2005/

90% of gang members are non-white. http://www.colorofcrime.com/2005/10/the-color-of-crime-2005/

Asians are nine times more likely than whites to be members of gangs. http://www.colorofcrime.com/2005/10/the-color-of-crime-2005/

The average H-1B immigrant is less intelligent and qualified than the average American. http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/h1b10min.html

Race is a better predictor of crime than poverty. http://www.colorofcrime.com/2005/10/the-color-of-crime-2005/

White immigrants on net improve government revenue, while non-white immigrants cost money. http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/putting-a-price-on-foreigners-strict-immigration-laws-save-denmark-billions-a-759716.html

Blacks are overrepresented in serial killings. http://maamodt.asp.radford.edu/Serial Killer Information Center/Serial Killer Statistics.pdf

Blacks are overrepresented among child abuse and pedophilia, and this isn’t due to biased reporting. http://www.theroot.com/articles/culture/2011/03/black_childabuse_statistics_report_debunks_bias_assumptions.html

White-Asian children are twice as likely as Asians to have mental illness. http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2008-08/uoc–baa081108.php

Black-white children are more likely than both black and whites to make poor decisions. http://www.nber.org/papers/w14192

Racial bias against miscegenation is likely biological in origin. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19422626

Interracial marriages have a 23.5% chance of divorce, compared to 13% for same-race couples. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4145377

Mixed race kids suffer from low self-esteem, social isolation, and poor family dynamics. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1448064/

Mixed race children are more likely to have health problems, high stress, smoke, and drink. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1448064/

The percentage of Blacks in a city, not poverty, is the best predictor of crime. http://www.unz.com/article/race-and-crime-in-america/

Blacks are 600% more likely than non-blacks to commit murder. http://www.unz.com/article/race-and-crime-in-america/

The purpose of section 8 housing is to move blacks from elite urban areas to middle class suburbs. http://www.unz.com/article/race-and-crime-in-america/

Hispanics receive shorter prison sentences than Whites for the same crimes. http://people.terry.uga.edu/mustard/sentencing.pdf

Police hesitate longer to shoot black suspects than White suspects. http://spokane.wsu.edu/admissions/Criminal-Justice/faculty-staff/Racial&EthnicBiasDFJDMStrongerLens_ExperimentalCriminology_JamesKlingerVila2014.pdf

Race-mixers may give less parental support to their children because of greater genetic distance. http://www.humanbiologicaldiversity.com/articles/Rushton%2C
J. Phillipe. “Inclusive fitness in human relationships.” Biological Journal of the Linnean Society 96 (2009).pdf
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1095-8312.2008.01110.x/abstract

15% of the human genome has been under selective pressures since the races separated. http://www.amazon.com/Troublesome-Inheritance-Genes-Human-History/dp/1594204462

Scientific discussion of race has increased since 1946 onwards. http://www.ln.edu.hk/philoso/staff/sesardic/Race.pdf

Over 100 White women are raped by blacks every day in the United States. http://archive.frontpagemag.com/readArticle.aspx?ARTID=26368

Melanin concentration may directly correlate with aggression. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0191886912000840

Africans have higher rates of a gene associated with violence. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1913922/pdf/1744-9081-3-30.pdf

Europeans and Asians are subject to more recent evolution than Africans. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/20/science/20adapt.html

64% of Hispanics have IQs too low to enter the military. http://takimag.com/article/frequently_asked_questions_about_the_jason_richwine_brouhaha_steve_sailer/print#ixzz2TPXmpNgG

Mexican-Americans have higher disability rates than other races. http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/03/150326162658.htm

Europeans and Asians are subject to more recent evolution than Africans. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/20/science/20adapt.html

You need to read this book

RT is indeed a worthless propaganda rag.

For starters:

https://www.amazon.com/Ethnic-Cleansing-Palestine-Ilan-Pappe/dp/1851685553/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1538798550&sr=8-1&pi=AC_SX236_SY340_QL65&keywords=the+ethnic+Cleansing+of+Palestine&dpPl=1&dpID=51nAwSlj65L&ref=plSrch

https://www.amazon.com/Idea-Israel-History-Power-Knowledge-ebook/dp/B00EGMBK4I/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1538798577&sr=8-1&pi=AC_SX236_SY340_FMwebp_QL65&keywords=the+idea+of+israel

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B004GXATG2/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1

this is a good recent book about it http://www.amazon.com/Bloodlands-Europe-Between-Hitler-Stalin/dp/0465031471/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1371077339&sr=8-1&keywords=bloodlands

another thing they apparently did was have the prisoner stand against the wall ostensibly to measure his height, then shoot him in the head via a hole in the wall. this way the prisoner didn't struggle.

You really have to study specific conflicts rather than generalized mid-east stuff. A lot of guys will read up on Iraq or Afghanistan before deploying there, but way fewer people will research Iran, which I actually consider the most important influence in the middle east.

All the Shah's men is a really good one. Try to look at books that aren't just "this is why this country is bad and scary" but highlight the culture of those countries and highlight the politics of everything.

Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong by James W. Loewen

>Should your wages go up three time because of nothing you did? Why?

I'll let Richard Wolff, a Phd economics professor elaborate why, and maybe... just maybe... you'll see the big underlying picture he's trying to convery. So pucker up that sphincter hole my friend:

From 1820 to 1970 the following sentence is true: The average level of wages ─ real wages what you actually got for an hours worth of work rose every decade for 150 years. There's' probably no capitalist country that can boast a record like that. It's absolutely stunning and unusual. even in the great depression, real wages went up because even though peoples money wages went down prices fell even more, so you ended up being able to buy more even though you had more dollars in your pocket, because prices fell.

What did this mean? It meant that Americans began to believe, and you know that how deeply that is in our political language, that we lived in a really blessed place. God, if you believe in that, must really like us, something magical about America: You came here, you worked hard, and amazingly, you got more. You could imagine to live in your own home. You could even dream at one point of sending your children to college. To have a car all your own. To wear nice clothes. It was amazing every family thought that it would live better than the generation before in the next generation better still. Parents got into the habit of offering their children to provide them with the education and the support that would make them have a better life.

And the irony here the United States and the marvel was that it was true... millions of people, the ancestors the most of us in this room if we're Americans came to the United states hoping to cash in on this operation, willing to work hard expecting that their life here would reward them with a higher standard of living then they would have gotten if they'd stayed where they came from, and mostly they were right. And it becomes part of the American culture in the American imagination. This is the place where if you work hard you get more pay. Yea... the work may not be pleasant. The work may be difficult, but the reward is at the mall. You'll earn more money and you'll buy more stuff.

Try to imagine with me what it would mean to a population that for a hundred and fifty years internalizes that image, that hope, that expectation if it were suddenly to stop being true. And I ask you to imagine that because that's what happened.

In the 1970's the rising real wage the United States came to an and, it has never resumed. The real wage of the American worker today, the average amount of goods and services you can buy with an hour of your labor is no greater today than it was in the 1978. You may be working harder. You may be working longer You may be working more efficiently because you work with a computer and all these other things. And indeed you are: You are delivering more goods and service per hour of your work to your employer. He's very happy about, but he doesn't pay you one iota more. This is an astonishing change, a sea change, a dramatic alteration in one's circumstance. It's all the more power in our country because it's unspoken. Because in the 1970's or 80's and 90's or to this day, nobody talks about this. Nobody confronts this. No one asks, "why did this happen?" "What do we do about it?" Instead as good Americans, we pretend that it isn't there. We imagine that if it's going on it's just about me and my job and my circumstance rather than a social process. And we imagine that it's not a social problem just my particular problem then I can solve it.

How did the American working class solve the problem. Two things they did, starting in the 1970's and right up until the crisis, and those two things are part of why this crisis happens which is why I'm gonna tell you about them now. The first thing Americans did is conclude,

>"Okay, I'm not getting anymore wages per hour, I know what, I'll do more hours."

Smart move.

>"And not only me the adult male in the house... but my wife. She's gonna go out, she may have been at home, she may have been a housewife... no more of that. She has to go out because we have to sustain the the family standard of living rising. And the old people have to come out of retirement and take at least a part-time job. And the teenager ought to do something on Saturday's at least, don't you think?

Here's a statistic to think about: the average number of hours worked per year by an American right now average, is 20% more than the average number of hours worked by a Swedish, French, German, or Italian worker. Think about it. For every 6 hours you work, they only work 5 or something like that. Some of you go to Europe and you enjoy lovely dinners with wine in an alfresco setting in an Italian town, and you say to yourself, "These people know how to live." And you imagine it's a matter of their culture they just love grapes. It isn't got much to do with culture:

What they have is... TIME.

They don't work like we do. They have time for long dinners. We are the country that invented fast food, and now you know why. It's a necessity, we don't have time to sit down. We need jobs to run by one of those takeout windows and yell something out at a disconsolate teenager who yells something back and hands you something you shouldn't put in your body in any case. And so Americans went to work most importantly the women. In 1970, 40% of American women worked outside the home for money. Today, double 80%. An absolutely fundamental change: those women had to do that. They merely thought of it as women's liberation and it certainly had those dimensions. They wanted to help the family, the point in fact is if the family was going to continue to consume to give its children what it had promised to live the American dream., since husband wasn't gonna get anymore wages ever again. She had to go out. But when the wife goes out all kinds of things change: Women in America, household women held together the emotional life of our society. They did the emotional work. They provided the solace. When that woman has to go out and do 8 hours of work and get dressed and do the travel and back home, she can't do it anymore. She may face that fact, but she can't.

Starting in the 1970's, the United States became the country with the highest rate of divorce, the relationships couldn't survive. We have 6% of the population in the world and consume over half the psychotropic drugs, the anti-depressants, what's going on? Are we crazy people? I don't think so. I think we are under extraordinary pressure. We work the longest hours on the face of the earth. We do more hours per average worker than the Japanese. That's saying something. And our families are stressed, deeply stressed, as anyone who has studied the situation knows. Our behavior has changed under the pressure of this extra work, and one way to describe it to you is to mention a book some of you may know. A Harvard sociologist Robert Putnam, wrote a famous book with a funny title, Bowling Alone, he studies Americans participation in anything other than making their life hang together.

• Bowling leagues used to absorb millions of Americans. No more.

• Trade unions used to be centers of collective life. No more.

• Community organizations used to get lots of people. PTA's did too. No more.

Americans turned inwards in the last 30 years, and it's not some mysterious cultural phenomenon. It has to do with you're working too hard, you're stressed out of your mind. Your relationships are falling apart. Your intimate life is a disaster. But you don't want to see it in terms of wages and the job, and that's what I'm gonna stress.

So the American people ever resourceful did something else which further traumatized them. To keep the consumption going to deliver the American dream to their children, they went on a borrowing binge the likes of which no working class in the history of the world ever undertook before. Starting in the 1970's the Americans savings rate collapsed. We stopped saving money, but much worse than that, we BORROWED money. We invented a new way to give everybody debts. It's called the credit card. Before the 1970's they didn't have that. only the rich people had an American Express card. After that we developed the American Express card for the masses, it's called Master and Visa, and you all have them, you have lots of them. You collect them. You max one out, you get another one. And you keep hoping that this Russian Roulette will not get you. And so in 2007 we came to the end of the line for the working class. They couldn't work anymore hours, they were exhaust, they were stressed beyond words. and now they were overwhelmed by having violated what their parents have told them, "Save money little boy." "Hold something back little girl for a difficult time. For a rainy day. For a special expense. For an illness." Not only did we not save anything, but we're in a hock up to our ears.

Both. Books and articles. Do a quick Google search and you will find plenty. Also, many many interviews on YouTube.

http://www.amazon.com/One-Left-Lie-Triangulations-Jefferson/dp/1455522996

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/fighting_words/2008/01/the_case_against_hillary_clinton.html

http://youtu.be/qE8PG2mpo58

Do you want to go down the "conservatives are biologically inferior to liberals" route? Because that's a dangerous route to go down.

Case in point (and this is only a small portion):

---------

Race
Race (General)

Human evolution is not merely ongoing but is in fact accelerating. Source: http://discovermagazine.com/2009/mar/09-they-dont-make-homo-sapiens-like-they-used-to

Human races are diverging into separate species, not mixing into one. Source: http://discovermagazine.com/2009/mar/09-they-dont-make-homo-sapiens-like-they-used-to

The average H-1B immigrant is less intelligent and qualified than the average American. Source: http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/h1b10min.html

Immigration has reduced the average skill level of Americans. Source: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/424796/immigration-wave-post-1965-pew-study

54% of college educated immigrants in America are not proficient in literacy. Source: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/424796/immigration-wave-post-1965-pew-study

15% of the human genome has been under selective pressures since the races separated. Source: http://www.amazon.com/Troublesome-Inheritance-Genes-Human-History/dp/1594204462

Scientific discussion of race has increased since 1946 onwards. Source: http://www.ln.edu.hk/philoso/staff/sesardic/Race.pdf#page-15

Melanin concentration may directly correlate with aggression. Source: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0191886912000840

Race is a better predictor of crime than poverty. Source: http://www.colorofcrime.com/2005/10/the-color-of-crime-2005/

The purpose of section 8 housing is to move Blacks from elite urban areas to middle class suburbs. Source: http://www.unz.com/article/race-and-crime-in-america/

The percentage of Blacks and Hispanics in an area, not poverty, is the best predictor of crime. Source: http://www.colorofcrime.com/2005/10/the-color-of-crime-2005/

High income does not help Middle Eastern, East Indian and Asian men date White women. Source: http://sf.oxfordjournals.org/content/89/3/807.abstract

Women who claim to be willing to date any race are lying and are just as discriminatory as women with explicit racial preferences. Source: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=895442

Half of hate crimes are Blacks and Hispanics attacking each other. Source: https://www.novapublishers.com/catalog/product_info.php?products_id=7337

White and Asian women have more successful marriages than Black or Hispanic women. Source: http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nhsr/nhsr049.pdf#page=7

Blacks and Hispanics have less ability to delay gratification than Whites. Source: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0191886901000290

Racism is an “automatic” part of human behavior. Source: http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fpsyg.2011.00108/abstract

Men with high testosterone, who are also more attractive, are more likely to be racist. Source: http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/ironically-a-mans-face-can-tell-you-if-hes-likely-to-act-like-a-racist

Of the 30 most deadly mass shootings in America, non-whites committed 36%, a slight overrepresentation. Source: http://www.vdare.com/posts/of-the-thirty-deadliest-shooters-at-least-a-dozen-are-not-white-males

Most students accused of sexual assault on college campuses are non-White. Source: http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/argument-sexual-assault-race-harvard-law-school

Whites

White men are pound-for-pound stronger than Black or Hispanic men. Source: http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2458/10/508

Germanic/Nordic people have lower time preference than any other group. Source: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1481443

Asians, Hispanics and Blacks would rather live among White people than among other minorities. Source: http://sf.oxfordjournals.org/content/89/3/807.abstract

90% of gang members are non-White. Source: http://www.colorofcrime.com/2005/10/the-color-of-crime-2005/

Non-Jewish Whites are the most underrepresented group in top colleges. Source: http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/the-myth-of-american-meritocracy/

The Western aesthetic of big eyes and pale skin is universally considered appealing. Source: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/03/23/about-face

There are more significant artistic figures from West than from the rest of the world combined. Source: http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs12129-012-9276-9

Blacks

Europeans and Asians are subject to more recent evolution than Africans. Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/20/science/20adapt.html

48% of African Americans have Herpes Simplex Virus. Source: http://www.cdc.gov/stdconference/2000/media/AfAmericans2000.htm

Gonorrhea rates are 30 times higher in African Americans than in Whites. Source: http://www.cdc.gov/stdconference/2000/media/AfAmericans2000.htm

Police hesitate longer to shoot Black suspects than White suspects. Source: http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs11292-014-9204-9

Over 100 White women are raped or sexually assaulted by Black men every day in the United States. Source: http://archive.frontpagemag.com/readArticle.aspx?ARTID=26368

Blacks are overrepresented in serial killings, and this overrepresentation is increasing. Source: http://maamodt.asp.radford.edu/Serial%20Killer%20Information%20Center/Serial%20Killer%20Statistics.pdf#page=3

Blacks are overrepresented among child abusers, and this isn’t due to biased reporting. Source: http://www.theroot.com/articles/culture/2011/03/Black_childabuse_statistics_report_debunks_bias_assumptions.html

39% of all cop killers are Black, although Blacks are only 12% of the population. Source: https://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/leoka/2013/officers-feloniously-killed/felonious_topic_page_2013.pdf#page=4

73% of Black babies are born out of wedlock. Source: http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr61/nvsr61_01.pdf#page=8

The average Black has an IQ score 1 standard deviation (15 IQ points) lower than the average White. Source: http://www.gifted.uconn.edu/siegle/research/correlation/intelligence.pdf

The Black-White IQ gap in America is equal to the gap in South Africa, even though SA is ruled by Blacks. Source: http://psychology.uwo.ca/faculty/rushtonpdfs/ravensiii.pdf

The Black-White IQ gap exists even when both races are raised in identical environments. Source: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/016028969290028P

93% of Black men who are murdered are killed by other Black men. Source: http://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/bvvc.pdf#page=3

The Black-White IQ gap still exists and has not decreased in size. Source: http://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/wp-content/uploads/The%20totality%20of%20available%20evidence%20shows%20the%20race%20IQ%20gap%20still%20remains.pdf

70% of Black children are born out of wedlock. Source: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2625893

Blacks commit 56% of all robberies, despite being only 12% of the population. Source: https://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2013/crime-in-the-u.s.-2013/tables/table-43

Blacks commit 50% of all murders, despite being only 12% of the population. Source: https://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2013/crime-in-the-u.s.-2013/tables/table-43

Despite making up less than 12% of the US population, Blacks commit 1 in every 3 rapes. Source: https://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2013/crime-in-the-u.s.-2013/tables/table-43

Young Black men kill 14 times more often than young White men. Source: http://ideas.time.com/2013/08/22/viewpoint-dont-ignore-race-in-christopher-lanes-murder/#ixzz2ciWBxj00

Africans have higher rates of a gene associated with violence. Source: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1913922/

Black women are four times more likely to be overweight than White women. Source: http://sf.oxfordjournals.org/content/89/3/807.abstract

Blacks are seven times more likely than Whites to commit murder. Source: http://www.colorofcrime.com/2005/10/the-color-of-crime-2005/

Students of all races perform worse in schools with more Black students. Source: http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2015/09/24/study-finds-students-underperform-in-schools-with-large-Black-populations

Blacks have an average brain size of 1267 cubic cm, compared to Whites at 1347 cm. Source: http://psychology.uwo.ca/faculty/rushtonpdfs/RandRProgressIntell2003.pdf

97% of White men refuse to date Black women. Source: http://sf.oxfordjournals.org/content/89/3/807.abstract

The percentage of Blacks in a city, not poverty, is the best predictor of crime. Source: http://www.unz.com/article/race-and-crime-in-america/

Blacks are 600% more likely than non-Blacks to commit murder. Source: http://www.unz.com/article/race-and-crime-in-america/

In New York City, 1% of people arrested for shootings were White, while 74% were Black. Source: http://www.nyc.gov/html/nypd/downloads/pdf/analysis_and_planning/enforcement_report_year_end_2014.pdf#page=17

In New York City, 43% of people arrested for rape were Black. Source: http://www.nyc.gov/html/nypd/downloads/pdf/analysis_and_planning/enforcement_report_year_end_2014.pdf#page=8

In New York City, 61% of people arrested for robbery were Black. Source: http://www.nyc.gov/html/nypd/downloads/pdf/analysis_and_planning/enforcement_report_year_end_2014.pdf#page=10

Blacks have lower emotional intelligence than Whites. Source: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/ijsa.12069/abstract

Fuck it. Finally ordering it now.

Really stoked to get fucking depressed about the CU decision again.

Edit: can I post a link to Amazon? I'm gonna post the link to Amazon. And here's the Smile.Amazon link.

Edit: Also, if you don't like reading and want a primer on this stuff... good documentary from HBO here.

Oh dear Lord.

This looks like the same sort of hyperbolic screeching as Jane Meyer's Dark Money. Some of these muckrakers need a heavy dose of Hanlon's Razor.

Here are a couple of books that will get you on the right track:

The Reactionary Mind and Anti-Intellectualism in American Life.

Great questions. I don't think there's an easy or foolproof answer to them.

>should lay people who have zero expertise in a field trust such general academic consensuses as being broadly correct?

Broadly correct? I would think that's a solid way to look at things. I'm in agreement with you.

>Are there good reasons for non-experts to be skeptical about the scientific consensus on vaccines, climate change or evolution?

"Good" reasons? Eh........I'll give a few scattered thoughts here:

• Some people are just going to be contrarians. I don't have any sources to link at the moment, but I think we've all encountered this at some point.
  
• Other people, often those who feel they have been marginalized by society (ex. white people who watched their friends go to college but couldn't go themselves—I'm referring to my own mother in this case), have a deep longing for "secret knowledge" and the sense of power it brings. Michael Barkun's A Culture of Conspiracy gives one of the breakdowns of this phenomenon while Richard Hofstadter's Anti-Intellectualism in American History (1966) shows that none of this is new. For people who usually possess traits we associate with intelligence (they are intensely curious and often willing to reading extensively) but who feel like they have been unfairly excluded from the centers of intellectual life, the idea that that everyone but them has it wrong is a bit intoxicating. Especially when a small groups of other marginalized people begin listening to them. I am not justifying this phenomenon—it probably shares some of the same social DNA as the incel movement—but I am trying to humanize it.
  
• In addition to these two groups (contrarians and the intellectually marginalized), we might also add those people who have been turned off by the fervency and (please, don't throw anything at me) fundamentalist fanaticism of some popular science devotees. While 99% of modern people simply go about their days with a fairly healthy view of science and knowledge, we are all aware of the loud fringe who wants to paint anyone who disagrees with them as a "science denier" and launch social media crusades against them. Again, I'm trying to use a scalpel here and not a broad brush—it's the militant defenders of Scientism who have (like their religious counterparts) managed to turn some people off.
  
• Then there are what I like to "gut thinkers." These often genuinely good and kind-hearted people often make decisions (like whether to vaccinated their kids or not) based on emotion rather than strict reason. For them, there is nothing in the world more important than their child and the idea of their child being harmed by something they chose to do terrifies them. While they might not ever realize it, they operate in a similar fashion to those people in the "Trolley Problem" who refuse to pull the lever and save some lives because then someone would be dying as a direct result of their action. These people often hear conflicting stories (vaccines are safe vs vaccines cause illnesses) and it troubles their gut to the point where, rather than sitting down to rationalize a solution, they avoid the issue or default to whatever option requires the least amount of direct action.
  
• Lastly we might add those people who would otherwise accept scientific findings but who have one or two core beliefs or predispositions that can complicate things. For example, while we commonly label American fundamentalists as "anti-science," anyone working in that field knows from the work of the eminent George Marsden that they are rather ardently pro-Baconian science—meaning that they absolutely love empirical, directly observable science based on inductive reasoning. What they reject is deductive science and its long-range projections both forwards and backwards in time. I can say from experience that understanding this and acknowledging it in discussions with these people does wonders for the conversation and really disarms a lot of suspicion.
  
• I don't know that there is a perfect solution here, but one possible approach would be to start affirming "folk culture" within modern society. I'm literally just tossing this one out here and I expected it to be a bit controversial, but maybe it will stimulate some discussion. In essence, we (as modern, scientific Westerners) usually don't find it problematic to acknowledge, accommodate, and affirm indigenous forms of knowledge. In fact, we often condemn those who try to "Westernize" others for being colonial or destroying culture. For those who belong to tribes or ethnic enclaves, practicing non-scientific forms of knowledge is seen as a good thing by most of the intellectual elites in the West. But for those born into Western society, there is little socially-acceptable opportunity to seek out and develop alternative forms of knowledge. Perhaps creating a safe social arena for such a "folk culture" to re-emerge could give these above groups a healthy and socially legitimate avenue for exploring and fulfilling some of their deep unmet needs without the subversiveness that presently undermines a lot of the good work that science is doing.

This is frustrating. I agree with Maher on his point, but he really should have prepared himself to explain it. He just made a statement and didn't really bother to discuss it further... and in my opinion, that's probably part of the problem of American stupidity. Nobody has the patience to listen to further explanations or intellectual discussions.

I suggest to anyone interested in this topic to read Richard Hofstadter's Anti-Intellectualism in American Life. It was written in 1964, and won the Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction that year... but it is still extremely relevant today.

The difficulty of discussing Christianity and the Holocaust, directly, is that relatively few people, even within Germany, were truly aware of the extent of the Holocaust until near the end of the war. As a result, you will find it a little more difficult to find information directly related to that topic. Christianity's relationship to Naziism, on the other hand, does have some more readily available information.

While a good portion of Germany's Christian population either supported, or at least failed to oppose, Naziism, that is not universally the case. You might be interested in a biography of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a pastor and theologian who strongly opposed Hitler and Naziism, and was eventually executed by them. He was moderately known at the time, but became extremely influential in the past few decades or so.

While it's an extremely large volume, and not directly related, you might find some useful information in "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich". It's very comprehensive, and does talk a bit about the Christian Democrat party's opposition to Nazism early on, only to eventually fail to mount any meaningful opposition as Hitler began rising to power.

Finally, while I don't know of any specific books on the topic, you probably will want to look into the influence of Martin Luther (specifically his antisemitism) on Germany, Naziism, and Hitler. This is topic that has been widely written about, to my knowledge, so there should be an abundance of information out there on it.

I believe you're a bit taken in by the neocon propaganda. Muslims don't hate us for our freedoms and they aren't too much different than you or I in their life goals.

The part I believe that you haven't heard ever is how the US has for decades oppressed and exploited other countries. There are numerous examples of US economic manipulation and exploitation that cause serious hardship for the poor of other countries. This leads to a lot of underlying resentment for western style of business practices and what can be spun by the neocons as "liberalism".

If you truly want to educate yourself on the actions of the US around the world, I would suggest reading the book Overthrow.

We assassinated leaders. We supported the overthrow of a number of democratically elected leaders financially and militarily. We installed despots who sold their peoples' birthrights. Some of those despots received IMF loans which went straight into their Swiss bank accounts. Some of those countries continue to carry the burden of this debts to this day! We built alliances with drug lords and armed and trained their protectors. The CIA was caught flooding inner cities in Californa with drugs from our 'friends' in Latin America. This is all well known and here Obama acknowledges at least some of it and apologizes. He must if we hope to do business with the emerging nations. China is encumbered with no such legacy. Hillary says she will look to Kissinger for advice! This is why Hillarys glorification of Kissinger is so apalling to Bernie. He was objecting to these criminal policies vigorously back in the day. The books below are a must read. It will help you understand the Hillary Hate.
Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II http://www.amazon.com/Killing-Hope-C-I-Interventions-II--Updated/dp/1567512526/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1458068896&sr=1-2&keywords=killing+hope+u.s.+military+and+cia+interventions+since+world+war+ii+by+william+blum
And Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire http://www.amazon.com/Blowback-Consequences-American-Empire-Project/dp/0805075593/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1458841254&sr=1-1&keywords=Blow+back+Chalmers+Johnson
And The New Confessions of an Economic Hitman http://www.amazon.com/New-Confessions-Economic-Hit-Man/dp/1626566747/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1458841994&sr=1-1&keywords=confessions+of+an+economic+hitman+by+john+perkins

More interesting is the book The Plot to Seize the Whitehouse a story about how the rich elite of America tried to overthrow President FDR and how General Smedley Butler refused to cooperate and saved US democracy/ Smedley also eventually authored the great book War Is A Racket. General Butler is the greatest American hero this country has ever seen, Lindbergh is a glorified hack.

TL;DR There are still, and have been a lot of changes. Because soccer is such a global game with different names for everything, a clash of cultures and an open field.

WALL OF TEXT WARNING. There have been some changes to the way certain positions operate making them almost unrecognizable from the way they used to operate. They are somewhat static, though, and I have a few ideas on why that is (I'll point out the soccer/AFL thing too, though I know more on soccer than AFL). Please not that I'm basing a lot of my earlier knowledge of league from old tapes and discussions as I wasn't there.

I don't know how old you are but no.3 used to be "outside centre" and no.4 used to be "inside centre" as in attack they would move to opposite sides of the field to attack. This has a good bit on why that is.

Another thing you'll notice is the modern emphasis on "spine" players. Fullback and hooker were both important positions, but that is nothing compared to today where if you have a good fullback/hooker combo you'll generally be in contention for a top 4 spot (Souths, Manly, Melbourne). Both these positions are now playmakers.

Back in the day you needed a hooker to be a good defender, who could pinch the ball at scrums (when was the last time you saw a hooker "hook" the ball), scoot from dummy half and have a pair of functioning ears to listen to his halfback (kinda oversimplifying). Cameron Smith and Robbie Farah would be halfbacks thirty years ago. They can pass exceptionally well, they can kick, have great vision, call the shots and often slot in to first receiver. Cameron Smith changed this role by kicking ass.

Fullbacks are also now playmakers. Jarryd Hayne would have played in the halves, ditto Boyd. They used to slot into the backline as an extra set of hands to try and get around the outside of a winger, now they are slotting in and given several options to make a play. I think this is because of the fitness of the players means they can play a better "out and in" defence which makes it VERY hard to get on the outside of a defensive line, but that's just speculation.

Halfbacks and five-eighths don't always play on the half and five-eighth line (first and second receiver. I mean Daly Cherry-Evans and Kieran Foran most of the time could be called "left and right halves". Benji was often the dominant half and usually played first receiver despite being a five-eighth.

The game is changing in the forwards quite significantly in the last few years. Look at the Dogs ball movement in the forwards from 2012. This came about (I assume) from a lack of quality halves so they HAD to change it up. They did well and we're seeing it a bit more. Teams are stuck on either side of the field more than they used to be. You used to, say, hit the ball up across the left, then have your backline across the right, with all but your winger switching sides but staying in position. You have left/right second rowers now which is different.

On to soccer, the game is based across the entire world, and has intercontinental competitions where playing styles are suddenly clashing. As a team gains ascendancy, everyone else plays "follow the leader". E.g. the Storm wrestled and won, so now everyone does it. Scotland beat England in the VERY early days with a very controversial tactic known as the "passing game". Rather than get the ball and run it up the field until you were chopped down, the womanly Scots actually passed the ball to players who were open, confounding the English. Eventually they gave in and copied it. This required switching up how you play.

These changes have been mirrored all over the shop: from "catenaccio" in Italy to "total football" from the Netherlands to combat it, which required "pressing" to be invented in (I think, but I'll check when I get home to my books) Eastern Europe. Each one of these required different formations: less forwards so you can press, a "sweeper" so you can play the old Italian style. These are quite obvious and all have different names, even though they are quite similar. If the changes happened in league they wouldn't change the name. Matt Scott and James Graham do not play the same role but wear the same jersey and are called "props". If it was football, you wouldn't call them the same name, ie if you are a striker you can be an "out and out", a "false 9", an "inside forward". If you want a better understanding you should read Inverting the Pyramid, you can borrow mine it if you want. I'd call Glenn Stewart and James Graham "forward halves" or something.

Also, bear in mind that Greg Inglish looks like a prop, as do most centres and wingers. I would argue we DO have different positions of props, who are also very quick.

From what I can gather, the old VFL/WAFL/SANFL teams used to "bomb the ball forward" and have tall forwards try and take a grab. Quite simply, they took soccer tactics and adapted them, interchanges helped them to "press" over the massive field, forwards dropped deep to help press and hold possession, etc. I think Kevin Sheedy went to Manchester to scout this but I'm not sure.

Inverting the Pyramid is really solid.

China is the newest hegemony. The US didn't have a choice in Germany or Japan after WWII, since it was either step in or let Stalin take over. Read this fascinating article:

> Stalin had been secretly plotting an offensive against Hitler’s Germany, and would have invaded in September 1941, or at the latest by 1942. Stalin ... wanted Hitler to destroy democracy in Europe, in the manner of an icebreaker, thereby clearing the way for world communism. The book undermined the idea that the USSR was an innocent party, dragged into the second world war. Russian liberals supported Suvorov’s thesis; it now has broad acceptance among historians

The US was founded by slaveowners using the pretext of representation, but it was all about commerce. They put in place a horrific non-democratic system, the Electoral College. The US has intervened repeatedly in democracies and put in place brutal regimes. Read All The Shah's Men, for example.

One reason you might have started with a rosy view is that republicans control how US history is taught to schools across the country; see last two chapters of this book.

As for California, your Congressional representatives are amazing. I'm counting on them to nail that fucking orange traitor.

To counter the criticism above, it was the US that finally shoved the UN aside in Bosnia and stopped the genocide with a few well-placed missiles, albeit three years and 100,000 civilians too late, and it was the US that shoved the UN aside very early when Serbia attacked Kosovo later in that same decade. Fucking Kofi Annan and his inaction in Rwanda... (The hero of that story is Canadian: Romeo Dallaire.)

> The middle class got reamed while the rich stood by and watched and placed bets on us.

The middle class doesn't understand the nature of capitalism. They believe the myth of “balance” in capitalist societies.

http://homepages.law.asu.edu/~dkarjala/OpposingCopyrightExtension/commentary/MacaulaySpeeches.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Term_Extension_Act#mediaviewer/File:Copyright_term.svg

Also the bailout:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eVjz1OyBJCc

Overthrowing governments

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vg_-NjjnvP4

http://www.amazon.com/War-Racket-Antiwar-Americas-Decorated/dp/0922915865/

“I helped make Mexico, especially Tampico, safe for American oil intersts in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefits of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. In China I helped to see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested.” [p. 10]

“War is a racket. …It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives.” [p. 23] “The general public shoulders the bill [for war]. This bill renders a horrible accounting. Newly placed gravestones. Mangled bodies. Shattered minds. Broken hearts and homes. Economic instability. Depression and all its attendant miseries. Back-breaking taxation for generations and generations.” [p. 24]

The 9 trillion dollar bank bailout

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eVjz1OyBJCc

Libor scandal

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libor_scandal

Rule of law is impossible under capitalism, since the kings of business (he who has the gold makes the rules) get to do whatever they want and the public gets fucked.

Important history:

http://williamblum.org/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OcA1v2n7WW4

Couple different reasons:

1. The "Elites" have been writing down their plans for a New World Order since HG Welles coined the term back in the day. His book with the same name explains how the Elites will evolve and then keep the beta human monkeys as their pets: http://www.voltairenet.org/IMG/pdf/Wells_New_World_Order-5.pdf
   In the 60s, Carroll Quigley wrote the plan down again in his book Tragedy and Hope More recently, Obama string pullers like Zbignew Brezenski have written down the plan for the NWO in books like the Technotronic Era
   
   
2. Hundreds of elites repeat it over and over in their speeches: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UVYBDIkgxKo . Gary Hart is especially egregious: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HTOCRa9lTZc
   
   
3. There have been hundreds upon hundreds of whistleblowers throughout the years that have come forward. Listen to the story of Aaron Russo. Listen to Naval Intelligence whistleblower Bill Cooper in 1991. Listen to Darrell Hamomoto (trained through the Rockefeller Foundation).
   
   
4. Look at Wikileaks. Hillary Clinton said outright to Wall St insiders that she wants "Hemispheric Government and trade". That's the definition and fear of the NWO (one world global elitist government).
   
   
5. Look at the TPP. 100% undeniable proof that Obama wanted to consolidate Mexico, America, and Canada into a single "Trans Atlantic Union". Look at the European Union. It's all about the consolidation of power. If you think about the NWO simply as the consolidation of power into globalist government hands, then what Julian Assange says in this interview makes the NWO perfectly clear: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b6qlc3lStM4

> Take your own suggestion and read some old history books.

Anyone even remotely familiar with history would know that Hitler removed all aspects of socialism from the Nazi party (often violently).

I understand that I'm wasting my time arguing with someone who has no interest in reality, but please take your own advice and pick up a history book. I'd recommend the "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich". It's an absolutely exhaustive coverage of not only Hitler, but the factors and moods that led to him, written by a journalist who was stationed in Berlin during Hitler's rise, and often provides first-hand account of many of the events he covers.

https://www.amazon.ca/Rise-Fall-Third-Reich-History/dp/1451651686

Please, educate yourself. Don't just parrot goofy memes.

Yes this! For anyone interested in learning more about how and why this whole situation came about (including right-wing media) I recommend checking out this book. I truly wish everyone in this country would give it a read (or listen) to better understand what the fuck has happened to our politics.

For anyone interested in a historical study of this, frankly, uniquely American problem I highly recommend Anti-Intellectualism in American Life by Richard Hofstadter. It pretty dated now (1968 I believe) but he does a remarkable job going through American history and examining the relationship between the experts (not merely academics) and the "common people."

> I always wondered how did German people allow things to get how they did.

I highly encourage you to read They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45.

It's terrifying.

It's an extract from the book They Thought They Were Free: The Germans by Milton Mayer. The full book gives a more detailed view with examples.

This comment is also available in convenient book form.

http://amzn.com/0394703170

Also, check out Nothing is True and Everything is Possible for more on how the Russian society has been led down a hole of pessimistic cynicism through the use of the Firehose. It's sickening to see it happening here in the US, but moreso infuriating that it's coming from the Oval Office and the shitstain with a breathing apparatus they float as spokesperson.

The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes!

Excellent Pulitzer Prize winning history of the Manhattan program.

If you want more there's a well-known book on the subject:

https://www.amazon.com/Inverting-Pyramid-History-Soccer-Tactics/dp/1568587384

Inverting the Pyramid: The History of Football Tactics by Jonathan Wilson is a book that I simply can't recommend enough. You learn a lot about the development of the game, not just tactics but the great early players, great teams, the significance of changes in fitness levels on pressing, the different philosophies of the biggest minds in football and how they inspire each other.

Inverting the Pyramid

Soccernomics

Fever Pitch

Alex Ferguson

I am the secret footballer

The numbers game

If you have the time, try to read Jonathan Wilson's Inverting the Pyramid. This is a really great read on football tactics, formations, why certain formations evolved and then fell out of style. Wilson does a much better job explaining all of this than a redditor could do in a post-comment.

Here is the Amazon link to his book:http://www.amazon.com/Inverting-The-Pyramid-History-Tactics/dp/1568587384

Note: I am in no way affiliated with Jonathan Wilson or the publishing company. I am just a coach with an interest in understanding the game better to explain things to my players, and this is a good book to read to understand a bit beyond the basics.

Very good job putting globalism into the context of the ambitions of turn of the 20th century industrialist Cecil Rhodes (rhodesia/s.african mining interests), and his connection with Milner. This actually explains a lot, filling in a piece of the puzzle connecting to the early american industrialist dynasties and thereby, to the rev. war and beyond into history.

Also good job in demonstrating that financial climate of preNazi Germany as created by the establishment which was abusing them into a mass social movement based on anger, betrayal and desperation.

Hopefully the rest of you here read it like I did: that these preconditions of preNazi germany parallel the current climate in america. As a cautionary tale. Well done, sir. For this excellent piece I'm giving you gold.

BTW Tragedy and Hope has been on my reading list, ever since I found out it was written by Clinton's prof and was 'conspiracyish'. Also, refreshing to see the matrix/truther use of 'redpill' that isn't in the context of tricking women into sleeping with you.

No, not entirely. Everyone has beliefs and opinions that may not be supported by facts, be it willful suspension of skepticism or mere ignorance. The core issue and the examples given are, in fact, facts. Check them out for yourself. Also, pick up a copy of Carrol Quigley's Tragedy And Hope for some real mindblowing action. Warning, it's fucking LONG.

All the information is available for anyone to check out...it's depressing, but at the same time, very interesting and far more thrilling than just about any work of fiction.

You should read All the Shah's Men.

1949: The First Israelis is a good one for Israel.

All the Shah's Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror This one is a good primer to understand the politics that got america so deeply involved in the middle east.

Lies My Teacher Told Me is a fantastic resource for this sort of thing. He explicitly mentions Wilson's resegregation in the opening chapter.

>IMO, he makes G W Bush look like a saint.

Let's not be hasty.

> I don't deny facts or anything, thats not who I am.

If you're a communist, you are either denying facts or advocating genocide. Your pick which you are.

>For the events you linked, the evidence backing death counts is widely sporadic. 2 to 12 million people? That's a ridiculous range that would be thrown away in any other circumstance.

there are very precise estimates of the deaths. but "we killed so many people we lost track of how many died" is NOT a good argument for your ideology of choice.

> My point in mentioning how capitalism is responsible for millions of deaths every day

you can mention things that aren't true all you want, that doesn't make them good arguments. There are 8 billion people alive on the planet today, almost all of them because of capitalism.

> Due to man-made limitations on health care access

This phrase makes zero sense. man made limits on healthcare? Where do you think healthcare comes from? It doesn't grow on trees. People have to make it, they have to learn to become doctors, have to produce medicine, etc. Under capitalism, people are rewarded for doing that, so lots of healthcare is produced. Communism did not pave the way in medical science and practice, capitalist countries did.

> Its not even remotely the same as denying the holocaust.

It's exactly the same. You're denying the crimes of people you are ideologically sympathetic towards. If anything, that's worse that holocaust denialism. Most holocaust deniers, while awful people, don't say hitler had a bunch of ideas that were really good, just poorly implemented.

>I can tell you have a hatred of communism and for that reason you aren't providing anything constructive for someone like me. Thanks for the attempt though.

if 100 million corpses wasn't enough to change your mind, I certainly don't expect to.

http://www.reddit.com/help/faqs/atheism#RecommendedReading

also.. here is my own list of things I've actually personally read and recommend.

http://www.amazon.com/Demon-Haunted-World-Science-Candle-Dark/dp/0345409469

http://www.amazon.com/Letter-Christian-Nation-Sam-Harris/dp/0307265773

http://www.amazon.com/Misquoting-Jesus-Story-Behind-Changed/dp/0060738170

http://www.amazon.com/Some-Mistakes-Moses-Robert-Ingersoll/dp/0879753617

http://www.amazon.com/Short-History-Nearly-Everything/dp/0767908171

http://www.amazon.com/Lies-My-Teacher-Told-Everything/dp/0684818868

http://www.amazon.com/Genome-Autobiography-Species-23-Chapters/dp/0060194979

I have found a lot of good discussion and support for men at /r/MensLib/

I've also heard about the term "social infrastructure" and how we have lost a lot of it which contributes to a lack of spaces for people to connect with one another. The historical "social infrastructure" for men have been bars, bowling alleys, VFWs, etc. but they have fallen out of favor as places for meaningful social interactions.

I haven't read it, but have heard the book 'Bowling Alone' mentioned alongside similar conversations. https://www.amazon.com/Bowling-Alone-Collapse-American-Community/dp/0743203046

In a broader sense of community impact, the podcast 99% invisible has a good episode about social infrastructure. https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/palaces-for-the-people/

Robert Putnam has done a significant amount of research related to racial and ethnic diversity. He published an article and later a book by the same name, entitled Bowling Alone wherein he discusses the detrimental effects of a multiracial society. The following is a quote from the above linked Wikipedia article:

>In recent years, Putnam has been engaged in a comprehensive study of the relationship between trust within communities and their ethnic diversity. His conclusion based on over 40 cases and 30,000 people within the United States is that, other things being equal, more diversity in a community is associated with less trust both between and within ethnic groups.

The more homogeneous the population, the more social capital that population has. Diversity is not a strength but is, in fact, a weakness.

Regardless of what you think about the idea of cyclical generations, Strauss & Howe do talk a lot about this in their work. It was written in 1997, but The Fourth Turning had a final section that was all about what they thought the next 20 or so years would look like if we entered a "crisis era" like that around the two World Wars.

If you don't get hung up on specifics, it's more accurate than you'd think. Like, they talk about a refocus on family values leading to a big backlash against no-fault divorce. We never really saw that, but everything they say was a dead ringer for the gay marriage debate, the reasons behind it, and how it played out. It's at least an interesting read.

It is very interesting, two guys (Neil Howe and William Strauss) using their research based on generation cycles correctly predicted in 1997 that some kind of event between 2005 and 2008 would happen that would be the catalyst to fundamentally change America. Low and behold, what happened in 2008? We had a economic crash and a financial crisis. Here is a 35 min video of them on CSPAN from 1997 talking about their generational theory and research:

Neil Howe and William Strauss on The Fourth Turning in 1997 CSpan

The Fourth Turning is the first book they wrote detailing their research. (William Strauss passed away in 2007).

Strauss-Howe Generational Theory

To give you some perspective, the Millennial Generation is what they call a "Hero Generation". The most recent example of a "Hero Generation" is the generation that grew up during the Great Depression and fought in WW2 (which that generation is virtually gone now).

>Hero generations are born after an Awakening, during a time of individual pragmatism, self-reliance, and laissez faire (hmm that sounds kind of like our last 30 years). Heroes grow up as increasingly protected post-Awakening children, come of age as team-oriented young optimists during a Crisis, emerge as energetic, overly-confident midlifers, and age into politically powerful elders attacked by another Awakening. Their main societal contributions are in the area of community, affluence, and technology. Their best-known historical leaders include Cotton Mather, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, John F. Kennedy. These have been vigorous and rational institution builders. In midlife, all have been aggressive advocates of economic prosperity and public optimism, and all have maintained a reputation for civic energy and competence in old age.

If you have any interest in this kind of stuff, I highly recommend reading their book:

The Fourth Turning: What the Cycles of History Tell Us About America’s Next Rendezvous with Destiny(1997)

Neil Howe also published a book in 2000:

Millennials Rising: The Next Great Generation

To quote one of the reviews:

>Still, the book is engrossing reading. It was actually recommended to me by a distinguished U.S. Army officer who suggested that the book could give military leaders insights into the wave of young people currently entering the armed services. I believe that many other professionals could also benefit from a critical reading of this book.


The recent research conducted today about the Millennial Generation largely supports Neil Howe and William Strauss generational theory.

Those two guy should be given some kind of recognition for their work.

Further reading: "The Fourth Turning"

This is silly. Did you wake up this morning and decide to take up geopolitics as a pastime?

Most of the readers here are too far into this to waste time giving history lessons.

If you want to brush up on the subject here are a few books to start with:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0805075593?pc_redir=1408767114&robot_redir=1

http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0985271027?pc_redir=1408686538&robot_redir=1

http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0615602223?pc_redir=1408631528&robot_redir=1

http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/1935439618?pc_redir=1408800754&robot_redir=1

http://www.amazon.com/Shadows-Ultimate-Insiders-Story-Presidents/dp/0684834979/sr=8-1/qid=1163059092/ref=pd_bbs_1/102-8219747-6907339?ie=UTF8&s=books

http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/094500110X?pc_redir=1408852909&robot_redir=1


Read these books and then do your own research and look into the claims for yourself. Most of his claims are common knowledge, and have been widely reported with frequency over the past decade. They are easily researchable with rudimentary search engine skills.

Your burden of proof logic games are misguided and add nothing to such a prima facia discussion

Don't have to you proved my point.

I worked EOD. Besides cleaning up IED's, we also did post blast and safing of areas. You see enough death and you look at the consequence of politicians you tend to go you know what this is a bad idea. Ten years later, areas that were supposedly safe, have people being put in cages and melted in acid, troops we trained refused to fight and let cities get captured by ISIS because fuck them they are Sunni and we are Shia and a number of repressive type behavior came from the Iraqi government. The people had it better under Saddam.

So peace muscles, why don't you read War is a Racket.

Yep, it's been going on since the late '70s. The Koch brothers and their billionaire friends (Richard Scaife, Rich DeVos, John M. Olin) have been slowly, systematically filling the government and academics from the bottom up with corporate-friendly lackeys.

Source: Jane Mayer's Dark Money

While I rarely shill, I recommend to all the people of /r/EnoughTrumpSpam to read Anti-Intellectualism in American Life by renowned historian Richard Hofstadter. It reminds you that this is not a new line of thought in America, but rather one that predates the establishment of the country.

Let me help you:

The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine by Ilan Pappe

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. "In his latest work, renowned Israeli author and academic Pappe (A History of Modern Palestine) does not mince words, doing Jimmy Carter one better (or worse, depending on one's point of view) by accusing Israel of ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity beginning in the 1948 war for independence, and continuing through the present. Focusing primarily on Plan D (Dalet, in Hebrew), conceived on March 10, 1948, Pappe demonstrates how ethnic cleansing was not a circumstance of war, but rather a deliberate goal of combat for early Israeli military units led by David Ben-Gurion, whom Pappe labels the "architect of ethnic cleansing." The forced expulsion of 800,000 Palestinians between 1948-49, Pappe argues, was part of a long-standing Zionist plan to manufacture an ethnically pure Jewish state. Framing his argument with accepted international and UN definitions of ethnic cleansing, Pappe follows with an excruciatingly detailed account of Israeli military involvement in the demolition and depopulation of hundreds of villages, and the expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Arab inhabitants. An accessible, learned resource, this volume provides important inroads into the historical antecedents of today's conflict, but its conclusions will not be easy for everyone to stomach: Pappe argues that the ethnic cleansing of Palestine continues today, and calls for the unconditional return of all Palestinian refugees and an end to the Israeli occupation. Without question, Pappe's account will provoke ire from many readers; importantly, it will spark discussion as well."

Have you read up on the Saudi support of Al queda and the taliban? Or the numerous times that the US government had knowledge of the 9/11 terrorists moving around in the US and getting trained.. and did nothing?

>What he also should have done was get us in, and get us out.

ummm.. that wasn't the point though. The point was to establish an occupation and begin a nation-building exercise that would funnel money into the hands of contractors and thieves.

... and yet you want to go "blitz" into Afghanistan after the Taliban? Neocons crack me up when they call for outrageous nation-building fiascos and at the same time call themselves "conservative", but Democrats trying to justify a failed occupation are even more funny.

> We just really wanted to get bogged down fighting for decades in Afghanistan?

Bogged down? Do you not understand that spending a decade fighting in Afghanistan lines the pockets of the people who made the decision to go there?

http://www.amazon.com/War-Racket-Antiwar-Americas-Decorated/dp/0922915865


You need to get reading.


>Building 7 was hit with a perimeter column from the collapse of the main towers which caused it to become unstable and it was "pulled" down with cables to create a safer collapse.

None of this is true. If it is please provide citations. NIST itself says the debris from the other towers had no significant role in the collapse. There is no evidence whatsoever of cables being used to pull it down.

I think the reason you don't understand this conspiracy at all is because you are not aware of the facts.

Korrekt, Kirken idag er ligesom public-service, det ikke for folket selvom de påstår det, det istedet blevet et kulturmarxistisk propaganda foretagende.

https://www.amazon.de/Kabbalah-Secrets-Christians-Need-Know/dp/1095680005

https://www.amazon.com/Kabbalah-Meditation-Nations-Yitzchak-Ginsburgh/dp/9657146127

https://www.amazon.com/Tragedy-Hope-History-World-Time/dp/094500110X

https://www.saxo.com/dk/the-culture-of-critique-an-evolutionary-analysis-of-jewish-involvement-in-twentieth-century-intellectual-and-political-movements_kevin-macdonald_haeftet_9780759672222

Because this is a serious question, I will give you an answer: no, this is absolutely nothing like that. This is a great resource on how the Nazis actually did what they did: https://www.amazon.com/Rise-Fall-Third-Reich-History/dp/1451651686

Truman approved the bombing of Hiroshima in the erroneous belief that it was a military base and not a city with a military base in it.

Truman gave a radio address on August 9, 1945 in which he said:

> The world will note that the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, a military base. That was because we wished in this first attack to avoid, insofar as possible, the killing of civilians. But that attack is only a warning of things to come. If Japan does not surrender, bombs will have to be dropped on her war industries and, unfortunately, thousands of civilian lives will be lost. I urge Japanese civilians to leave industrial cities immediately, and save themselves from destruction.

Truman wrote this speech himself. He tells us in a note in his handwriting dated "Aug 10 '45",

> While all this has been going on, I've been trying to get ready a radio address to the nation on the Berlin conference. Made the first draft on the ship coming back. Discussed it with Byrnes, Rosenman, Ben Cohen, Leahy and Charlie Ross. Rewrote it four times and then the Japs offered to surrender and it had to be done again. As first put up it contained 4500 words and a thousand had to be taken out. It caused me a week of headaches but finally seemed to go over all right when it was said over the radio at 10 P.M. tonight.

A photograph even shows him writing it.

In earlier drafts of this speech, Truman used even stronger language, asserting Hiroshima was "purely a military base." Truman also wrote to Sen. Russell on August 9, in response to a telegram in which Russell had urged that Tokyo be "utterly destroyed," that bombing civilians was still only something that might happen in the future:

> For myself, I certainly regret the necessity of wiping out whole populations because of the "pigheadedness’ of the leaders of a nation and for your information, I am not going to do it unless it is absolutely necessary. It is my opinion that after the Russians enter into war the Japanese will very shortly fold up.

> My object is to save as many American lives as possible but I also have a humane feeling for the women and children in Japan.

Truman was likely misled by the advice of Henry Stimson.

Stimson had a meeting with General Groves on the morning of May 30 to discuss the targets of the atomic bombs, with the target committee's leading choice being Kyoto. Kyoto was a major rail link between Tokyo and Osaka, contained factories manufacturing armaments, was a "typical Jap city" whose wooden houses would easily burn, was a highly culturally significant city whose destruction would have a great psychological impact, and was home to intellectuals who would appreciate the significance of the new bomb. Groves later recalled that Stimson told him bluntly, "I don't want Kyoto bombed." On June 1, Stimson wrote in his diary that he had told General Arnold "there was one city that they must not bomb without my permission and that was Kyoto."

Stimson took his concern for Kyoto straight to the top. On July 24, 1945, he met with Truman and wrote in his diary,

> We had a few words more about the S-1 program, and I again gave him my reasons for eliminating one of the proposed targets. He again reiterated with the utmost emphasis his own concurring belief on that subject, and he was particularly emphatic in agreeing with my suggestion that if elimination was not done, the bitterness which would be caused by such a wanton act might make it impossible during the long post-war period to reconcile the Japanese to us in that area rather than to the Russians. It might thus, I pointed out, be the means of preventing what our policy demanded, namely a sympathetic Japan to the United States in case there should be any aggression by Russia in Manchuria

What did Truman take away from this meeting? He wrote in his diary,

> This weapon is to be used against Japan between now and August 10^(th). I have told the Sec. of War, Mr Stimson to use it so that military objectives and soldiers and sailors are the target and not women and children. Even if the Japs are savages, ruthless, merciless and fanatic, we as the leader of the world for the common welfare cannot drop this terrible bomb on the old Capitol [Kyoto] or the new.

> He + I are in accord. The target will be a purely military one and we will issue a warning statement asking the Japs to surrender and save lives. I'm sure they will not do that but we will have given them the chance. It is certainly a good thing for the world that Hitler's crowd or Stalin's did not discover this atomic bomb. It seems to be the most terrible thing ever discovered, but it can be made the most useful.

Truman appears to have come away with the impression that Kyoto was a civilian target and the other options were military ones, when in reality every place on the target committee's list was a city inhabited primarily by civilians.

On August 10, 1945, Henry A. Wallace wrote in his diary of that morning's Cabinet meeting,

> Truman said he had given orders to stop atomic bombing. He said the thought of wiping out another 100,000 people was too horrible. He didn't like the idea of killing, as he said, "all those kids."

After that date, Truman no longer says that he has avoided killing innocent civilians with atomic bombs. Now he says that this is just what atomic bombs do. In a December 1945 speech (p. 13), he claims that when he and Stimson talked about whether the bomb should be used, "I couldn't help but think of the necessity of blotting out women and children and non-combatants." In 1948, he said, "this isn’t a military weapon. It is used to wipe out women and children and unarmed people, and not for military uses. So we have got to treat this differently from rifles and cannon and ordinary things like that."

But to get more directly to your question: by that point in the war, any true purely military target that would have been worth nuking had already been bombed. The Army Air Force had literally been ordered to suspend them bombing of certain cities just so there would be some sufficiently impressive targets left for the atomic bombs. A warning shot over an unpopulated area was also considered, but this option was never put before Truman.

Study, I dunno. I like to listen to books about nuclear science, nuclear power, weapons, accidents and the like while I'm driving. I don't do many fiction books.

While it may not be studying, learning about the world around you can help expand your mind and keep it active while you're focusing on the road. I've listened to these books a few times over by now.

Link 1
Link 2
Link 3
Link 4
Link 5
Link 6

Szilard is featured prominently in Richard Rhodes’s The Making of the Atomic Bomb, which is probably the best and most accessible history of the Manhattan Project ever written. It also has the greatest opening paragraph of any book, ever:

>In London, where Southampton Row passes Russell Square, across from the British Museum in Bloomsbury, Leo Szilárd waited irritably one gray Depression morning for the stoplight to change. A trace of rain had fallen during the night; Tuesday, September 12, 1933, dawned cool, humid and dull. Drizzling rain would begin again in early afternoon. When Szilárd told the story later he never mentioned his destination that morning. He may have had none; he often walked to think. In any case another destination intervened. The stoplight changed to green. Szilárd stepped off the curb. As he crossed the street time cracked open before him and he saw a way to the future, death into the world and all our woes, the shape of things to come.

I've been reading [Inverting the Pyramid] (http://www.amazon.com/Inverting-Pyramid-History-Soccer-Tactics/dp/1568587384) which covers the history of soccer tactics and it's gotten me thinking a lot about how we talk about the game. I think we need a better framework/language to process what were seeing/what teams are doing. There's so much potential out there. I feel like we as a sport are where Soccer was tactically in the early 1900's. I don't know the answer, but I'd love to see more effort made to explore tactics.

A very nice Rupert Fryer piece on Riquelme, "The Quixotic Enigma"

Marcela Mora y Araujo on Riquelme's return to Boca

Part one of a story where the author flies from England to Argentina to watch Riquelme (featuring life endangerment)

and

Jonathon Wilson on Riquleme from Inverting the Pyramid

>It is Riquelme, mournful of demeanour, graceful of movement and deft of touch, who best embodies the old-style enganche. When Eduardo Galeano drew the comparison between footballing artists and the devotees of milonga clubs, it was to players like Riquelme he was referring, and it is upon him that the debate about the future of such players has focused. Riquelme has become less a player than a cipher for an ideology.

>‘In the pause,’ the columnist Ezequiel Fernández Moores wrote in La Nacion, quoting a phrase common in the blues tradition of Argentina, ‘there is no music, but the pause helps to make the music.’ He went on to recount an anecdote about Charles Mingus walking into a bar to see an impetuous young drummer attempting a frenetic solo. ‘No,’ the great jazz musician said, ‘it’s not like that. You have to go slowly. You have to say hello to people, introduce yourself. You never enter a room shouting. The same is true of music.’

>But is it true of football? Nostalgists and romantics would like to believe so but, Moores argued that Riquelme would have to change, that he would have to learn, like Messi, a directness. Can the game today cope with a player who does not charge and hustle and chase, but exists apart from the hurly-burly; the still point of an ever-turning world, guiding and coaxing through imagination rather than physique? ‘Riquelme’s brains,’ Jorge Valdano said, ‘save the memory of football for all time… he is a player of the time when life was slow and we took the chairs out on the streets to play with the neighbours.’ Perhaps his melancholic demeanour reflects his knowledge that he was born out of his time. Then again, perhaps his lack of pace would have found him out whichever era he played in: he is, after all, not a paradigm for theoretical debate but an individual with many very great gifts and one very obvious weakness.

>In Argentina, Riquelme is adored and despised in equal measure, the depth of feeling he provokes indicative of how central the playmaker is to Argentinian notions of football. The enganche, Asch wrote in a column in Perfil in 2007, is ‘a very Argentinian invention, almost a necessity’. The playmaker, he went on ‘is an artist, almost by definition a difficult, misunderstood soul. It would, after all, hardly seem right if our geniuses were level-headed’; it is as though they must pay a price for their gifts, must wrestle constantly to control and to channel them. Certainly there is that sense with Riquelme, who eventually frustrated the Villarreal coach Manuel Pellegrino to the extent that he exiled him from the club.

>‘We are not,’ Asch wrote, ‘talking necessarily about a leader. Leaders were Rattín, Ruggeri, Passarella or Perfumo, intimidating people. No. Our man is a romantic hero, a poet, a misunderstood genius with the destiny of a myth… Riquelme, the last specimen of the breed, shares with Bochini the melancholy and the certainty that he only works under shelter, with a court in his thrall and an environment that protects him from the evils of this world.’ Perhaps, Asch said, he should never have left Boca.

>Well, perhaps, but it is not that Riquelme cannot prosper away from the club he clearly adores. He struggled with Barcelona, but he was the major reason Villarreal reached a Champions League semi-final 2005-06, and his intelligence was central to Argentina’s sublime progress to the quarter-final of the World Cup later that summer. And yet he took blame for his sides’ exits from both competitions. He missed a penalty against Arsenal in the Champions League, and was withdrawn after seventy-two anonymous minutes against Germany. Some cited Riquelme’s supposed tendency to go missing in big games; but what is striking is that the coach, José Pekerman, replaced him not with a similar fantasista, despite having Messi and Saviola available, but with the far more defensive Estaban Cambiasso, as he switched to a straight 4-4-2. He either decided that Torsten Frings, the more defensive of the two German central midfielders in their 4-4-2, would get the better of any playmaker he put on, or, as many argued, he lost his nerve completely and lost faith in the formation because of Riquelme’s ineffectiveness. Little wonder that Riqelme has commented - as a matter of fact, rather than from bitterness - that when his side loses, it is always his responsibility.

>Riquelme is a wonderful player. He may prosper at Boca, to whom he returned at the beginning of 2008. He may even prosper for Argentina, for international defences are not so well drilled as those at club level, but he is the last of a dying breed, a glorious anachronism.

>It would be a damn shame (not really) were this Epstein saga to expose people like Clinton, Trump, Pinker and Krauss.

That can of worms goes deeper than you can even imagine. Epstein was so closely tied to the Democratic political machine that Florida state prosecutors wouldn't press charges on him when he was first arrested in 2006.

People are salivating at the prospect of this being tied to Trump, but he may actually come out of this looking better than people think.

I'd actually be more scared for Stephen Pinker. That Clinton was involved with Epstein is no surprise to anyone who knew anything about him, but what the hell was Pinker doing associating with that creep?

Of course, all this assumes that he won't just escape prosecution like he did the last three times he's been accused of exactly the same child molestation charge.

Welp. I was pretty against him for the longest time. I never liked the whole "good politician = good liar" thing. I never understood how democrats would blindly defend Bill Clinton like they do. He was just Republican-lite. The only thing worse than another Clinton to me is another Bush.

http://www.amazon.com/One-Left-Lie-Triangulations-Jefferson/dp/1455522996 Good book, by the way.

Welcome, if you know absolutely nothing about soccer then you've got your work cut out for you. You can imagine knowing nothing about football and then suddenly tuning in. At first, just looks like a bunch of guys standing around and running occasionally. After a while, it will start to look like more but really understanding it in a deep sense to where you can stand around the cooler and talk plays, situational decisions, etc requires years and years, like growing up with it right? Europeans like to say that Americans don't understand soccer. They are snobs that way, but they are also not wrong. Most fans are in that intermediate step of watching the game and enjoying it but not being able to peel away the next layer of the onion with a detailed understanding of the tactical elements, etc.

If you're up for it, I'd recommend this book, one of the best soccer books out there which gives you both a detailed history of the game but more importantly a detailed history and understanding of tactics: https://www.amazon.com/Inverting-Pyramid-History-Soccer-Tactics/dp/1568587384

Other than Jonathan Wilson's Inverting the Pyramid, I recommend reading Michael Cox's Zonal Marking blog. Cox analyzes the tactics of recent games, from which I've learned a lot.

His Tactics in the 2000 series is also well worth a read.

You need to read "They Thought They Were Free"

Please, read the book Dark Money.

This is a very good book on Koch Bro's: https://www.amazon.com/Dark-Money-History-Billionaires-Radical/dp/0385535597

You need to read a book. For instance Dark Money by Jane Mayer

Once you've done that come back and talk to me about the Kock brothers.

I'm seriously in love with her now.

Black or white, the distain for education, learning, and "professionalism" is deep seated in our country. This.

Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin - http://www.amazon.com/Bloodlands-Europe-Between-Hitler-Stalin/dp/0465031471/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1394553680&sr=8-1&keywords=bloodlands+europe+between+hitler+and+stalin

I've specifically read documented cases of it happening during the Holodomor, as well as among [Soviet prisoners of war](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_prisoners_of_war_(Nazi_Germany) (a group of Holocaust victims that are often overlooked, ignored, or simply not included).

Off the top of my head I can't recall ever reading about cannibalism happening inside the concentration camps. This does not mean that it didn't happen, and logic would tell us it almost certainly did. However getting caught engaging in cannibalism would almost certainly be a capital offense. Furthermore there is the cultural stigma that it carries. These factors would contribute to participants remaining silent on the matter.

Other factors would include a lack of the necessary free time required to engage in it (daily schedules for prisoners were meticulous, and purposefully designed to ensure very little free time and privacy), a lack of method for preparing a body for consumption (some barracks had stoves but they were usually in the middle of the room and therefore constantly under scrutiny, and then you have to think about the tools that would be required to butcher a corpse. It would be very difficult to butcher meat without a knife, and where do you get that in a concentration camp?), and finally the fact that any bodies that would be available for consumption would almost certainly be severely malnourished and therefore not a great source of nutrition (and it's not like humans are an ideal source of food to begin with).

However, knowing what we know about starvation, it almost certainly did happen. At some point when human beings' needs are not met, we WILL revert to our baser instincts. I have read accounts that inmates would beat or kill over matters of food. Fistfights would often break out in the meal lines (your place in line could easily determine whether you would get food that day). Inmates would eat food regardless of its condition. Even if food was moldy, dirty, soggy, or stale, it would still be eaten. I've read that when soup was spilled, inmates would drop to their hands and knees and suck at the mud in order to get a few drops. In addition to the simple needs of humans, food could also be used for bribes and favors.

If you have any clarifying questions, please don't hesitate to ask.

EDIT: As far as bugs and rodents, I again can't recall any specific instances, but when you're starving to death, you'll eat anything. Conditions in the camp certainly attracted all sorts of vermin, so they were definitely available to those that could devise a way of catching and eating them.

Sources

Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin

Hitler's Death Camps: The Sanity of Madness

Maus: A Survivor's Tale

You may want to read up on how the USSR treated ethnic minorities. A lot of it is covered in Bloodlands by Yale historian Timothy Snyder.

In short - a lot of murdering and ethnic cleansing.

I know I'm late to the party and there are a lot of good answers, and there are a lot of "hur der cause koran" replies...

This isn't so much on the extremism rise in Islam but more to the anti-western sentiment. This is more of a summary and lacking a lot of detail but a lot of it can be traced back to Operation Ajax in 1953 where MI6, with the help of the CIA, decided to overthrow the democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh and put "their guy" (the Shah) in charge because Mosaddegh wanted to nationalize Iranian oil, thus making AIOC (now part of BP) pay more taxes if they wanted to drill in Iran.

It is hard to make a TLDR to the situation in Iran between the coup and the revolution in 1979 but essentially. Shah turned out to be a dick as a ruler, people were pissed at the US and GB for helping force the pro west regime change, started gathering in mosques since the Shah banned public gatherings due to riots, anti-west / radical clerics get into the heads of people that are pissed and things start going downhill from there.

Now you have a hard anti-west sentiment growing around the region and the west essentially cock blocking any attempt at people getting back on their feet so you have a lot of poor, uneducated people that have a lot of hate toward the US. They may not be completely sure why but as is the case with most extremely uneducated people they listen to what they consider to be smart people, in this case the clerics who are telling them to hate the US even more. A lot of the terrorists in the field (the meat shields sent out to die) are illiterate and couldn't read the Koran if you put it in front of them so they only know what they are told.

It doesn't help the US when it decides to go in every few years and bomb things back to the stone age. There may be justification to some of the bombing like removing someone who is truly bad but some of the people that live there don't see it that way, obviously. All they see is the US rolling in with their tanks blowing their houses and killing their children. This doesn't justify what the terrorists are doing by any means in my opinion but it may help shed some light on why they are doing it.

The more detailed read you could start with:
1953 Iranian coup d'état - Wiki


Steven Kinzer's - All the Shah's Men and Overthrow are also pretty good.

Overthrowing Mossadegh was one of the greatest mistakes America ever made. This is an excellent book on the subject if you're interested.

I think you'd get a kick out of Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong.

There is short book I read to that effect. "Lies My Teacher Told Me" Good, interesting bits of history that you won't get in high school. Which is where I assume most of us stop studying history.

Also good: James Loewen's Lies My Teacher Told Me.

Topics that US history textbooks always get wrong (Reconstruction, settler-Native American interactions, deification of American heroes) or leave out (minorities, the Vietnam War).

I remembered the term wrong it is third place which is why google didn't bring anything up when you looked into it. Here is the wikipedia article on it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_place

Here is how I would describe it.

Third Place is a concept of a place that we spend a lot of time socializing and enjoying ourselves at that is neither work nor home. The Cheers bar, bowling alleys, cafes, coffee shops, book shops, heck even hair salons or anywhere you can socialize with people you get along with. Due to economic changes which means less money to spend and people more likely to work less set hours, the internet, and having less free time in general third places have disintegrated which has caused a lot of harm to socialization.

This is the primary book on the subject.


https://www.amazon.com/Bowling-Alone-Collapse-American-Community/dp/0743203046

I believe there is a cycle nature to it. Read this book for greater detail.
.
We (America) have had religious revivals at roughly ~70 year intervals since the colony days. These revival periods sets the spiritual paradigm on a national level for each of the following 60 years. The philosophical system gets re-examined in depth during the revival period. But the latest "revival" movement of the 1960-1970's is different, in that instead of a focus on Christianity, a whole new direction was chosen. Coming out of that "new" direction, we are entering a Post-Christian America.
.
There will likely be another religious movement staring in about 15-20 years. How interesting and difficult will that be? Will we go deeper into anti-theism as /u/Croesgadwr put so well?

> there's been surprisingly little generation-level analysis since the gen x stuff faded away.

This guy builds a case that Generation Y represents a sharp contrast to the boomers. He says the psychological profile strongly suggests a throwback to the values of the WWII generation.

This guy also has a lot to say about Generation Y.

> I don't think the generation y label ever really caught on.

It's definitely a real phenomenon and used in marketing circles, at least. It certainly exists as a demographic artifact; it's the generational echo of the boomers.

i believe in libertarianism on a case by case basis, not as a dogmatic principle that must be followed.

For example, our foreign policy [should clearly be restrained] (http://www.amazon.com/Blowback-Second-Edition-Consequences-American/dp/0805075593)

[Affirmative action harms blacks] (http://www.amazon.com/Mismatch-Affirmative-Students-%C2%92s-Universities/dp/0465029965/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1407799886&sr=1-1&keywords=mismatch)

Drug legalization would clearly not result in a society filled with addicts

Farm subsidies are useless and increase income inequality

Taxi licensing harms the poor

[Untolled highways make our country dependent on oil and harm those who cannot afford cars] (http://www.amazon.com/Asphalt-Nation-Automobile-Took-America/dp/0520216202/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1407799997&sr=1-1&keywords=asphalt+nation)

[Student loans inflate college tuition] (http://www.amazon.com/Going-Broke-Degree-College-Costs/dp/0844741973)

And so on and so forth. Each government program should be attacked on its merits.

I was attracted to libertarianism because it challenged the assumption that every problem can be solved at the moment if we put enough effort. Poverty and greed are elements of the human condition that will always be present, not things that can be solved by legislation.


Most problems is this country nowadays (sprawl, high rents, unemployment, mass incarceration, student loan debt, income inequality) are either wholly caused or exacerbated by government.

This will never end. Read Blowback by Chalmers Johnson:

http://www.amazon.com/Blowback-Consequences-American-Empire-Project/dp/0805075593

Read "Overthrow" by Stephen Kinzer. It's a great book that details all of the 14 governments the US has had a part in overthrowing. He does a great job of establishing the context in each situation, which often highlights how short sighted the people involved in these events really were.

Another comprehensive, really well written book on the same subject.

War is a racket.

I'm gunna buy it. I need other book suggestions to make it $25 for free shipping.

Here are some of my suggestions to others:

>The U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual (Paperback)
>by John A. Nagl
>http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0226841510

>Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam (Paperback)
>by John A. Nagl
>http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0226567702

>War is a Racket: The Antiwar Classic by America's Most Decorated Soldier (Paperback)
>by Smedley D. Butler
>http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0922915865

>Cultivating Exceptional Cannabis: An Expert Breeder Shares His Secrets (Marijuana Tips Series) (Paperback)
>by DJ Short
>http://www.amazon.com/Cultivating-Exceptional-Cannabis-Breeder-Marijuana/dp/0932551599

Obviously these girls are assholes who should be kicked in the teeth, but this is a pet peeve of mine. Not every person who kills an animal and doesn't care is a potential serial killer.

Some people are just assholes who don't think that animals have any value.

I mean, Hitler was a vegetarian (according to The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich), an antivivisectionist and (according to the same book linked above) around the time that Hitler joined the German Worker's Party he was so concerned about the hunger of mice he used to leave bread on the floor of his room for them at night.

One man's concern for the welfare of animals didn't translate into a concern for human beings. Another person's cruelty to animals doesn't mean they'll be cruel to people.

That book is The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. It's a very good book if you want to learn about how Hitler rose to power and how the Nazi's were destroyed.

The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich is huge, but very detailed on a lot of the higher-ranking German Soldiers during the war.

Of course, I read it in Germany on the Bahn -- a book with a swastika on the cover earns you strange looks.

It's quite a lot to bite off, but everything you want is contained in these four books:

https://www.amazon.com/Making-Atomic-Bomb-25th-Anniversary/dp/1451677618/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8

https://www.amazon.com/Dark-Sun-Making-Hydrogen-Bomb-ebook/dp/B008TRUB6O/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8

https://www.amazon.com/Arsenals-Folly-Richard-Rhodes-ebook/dp/B000W93DEO/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8

https://www.amazon.com/Twilight-Bombs-Challenges-Dangers-Prospects-ebook/dp/B003F3PKXQ/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8

Rhodes is the guy for nuclear history. I've read all four, but the last two are, admittedly, somewhat forgettable. They deal with the continuing command issues surrounding nuclear arsenals and the eventual political movement to eradicate (or, as it happened, simply limit) strategic stockpiles.

That being said, the first two, Making of the Bomb and Dark Sun, are utterly indispensible. The Making of the Atomic Bomb is a Pulitzer Prize-winning, 1986 history of the scientific effort to elucidate the physical principles which led to bombs and of the miliitary-scientific-industrial effort to realize the possibility of a weapon. It discusses many interesting characters within this history, such as Ernest Lawrence, Leo Szilard, and of course, Oppenheimer.

I have to be honest with you - I've saved Dark Sun for last for a reason. This is one of the most phenomenally engaging books I've ever read. It has everything: the creation of doomsday weapons of, and I don't use this term loosely, unimaginable destructive potential and the obsessive quasi-fetishization of their refinement and testing on behalf of the United States' and Soviet militaries. Rhodes discusses the post-war split within the scientific community over whether to develop a hydrogen "Super" bomb, whether to share information relating to it with the Soviet Union, and the factional leveraging of security privileges and political favor to exclude those from research who did not take a sufficiently hard stand against cooperation with the USSR.

Dark Sun details bomb physics and the minutia of the testing program in just enough detail to remain compelling and accessible. Rhodes also does his best to humanize Soviet scientific personnel such as Igor Kurchatov, the father of the Soviet bomb, and the strained relationship they shared with their political patrons, such as the Darth Vader-esque Lavrenti Beria.

I hope this answers your question, and I hope that you enjoy these books as much as I did!

Peter Pomerantsev's book about Russia and his time at RT makes a fascinating read about this:

https://www.amazon.com/Nothing-True-Everything-Possible-Surreal/dp/1610396006

> nothing matters

> anything can happen

Nothing is true, and everything is possible

I've heard good things about Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible to detail the cultural mindset of the "New Russia" but to be frank I have yet to read it.

Here's an excellent publication by an Israeli professor, documenting Israel's mass slaughters of Palestinian villages and forced expulsion from their territory.

Highly recommend you read it. Let me know what you think!

https://www.amazon.com/Ethnic-Cleansing-Palestine-Ilan-Pappe/dp/1851685553

Actually the ethnic cleansing process started 6 months before the war started. This is well documented by Israeli historians themsevles. Over half the Palestinians were ethnically cleansed and many thousands more were murdered before a single arab army had stepped foot in the region.
Technically it wasn't a "newly formed Israeli army" as you claim because Israel had not been founded during most of the ethnic cleansing. The Zionist forces included trained Jewish militias and many radical Jewish terrorist groups such as the Irgun and Stern Gang, who committed countless massacres against small Palestinian villages, causing many Palestinians to flee in fear of an attack.

I highly recommend you read The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine by Ilan Pappe. http://www.amazon.com/Ethnic-Cleansing-Palestine-Ilan-Pappe/dp/1851685553/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1407139475&sr=8-1&keywords=the+ethnic+cleansing+of+palestine

I read every page back to back; it was a truly horrific mass expulsion that ended centuries of coexistence.

> Definitely not apartheid please don't use that word flippantly

no... its apartheid.. when people like Desmond Tutu(someone who has actually lived under apartheid) call it apartheid, its apartheid. Im guess you aren't familiar with what is going on in the west bank...

As for the other thing, I recommend reading Noam Chomsky or Israeli Historians like Ilan Pappe and maybe look into the Nakba and specifically the Deir Yassin Massacre or the Lydda Death March.

>Det hersker nemlig en sjelden grad av enighet innenfor alle relevante vitenskapelige disipliner om at det ikke finnes menneskelige raser.

Tull. Dette har med vitenskapelige paradigmer å gjøre, ingenting mer. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Watson er jo f.eks ikke akkuratt en amatør. Dawkins (som indirekte også sier det finnes menneskeraser) har også tatt han i forsvar. Nicholas Wade kom for en stund sia ut med denne boka som har skapt mye debatt.

> større genetisk variasjon innenfor folkegrupper enn det er mellom dem.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Genetic_Diversity:_Lewontin%27s_Fallacy

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/d-brief/2014/05/02/dna-test-can-trace-your-ancestral-origins-back-1000-years/#.VRgaFeE0nxI
Forskjellene er kanskje små, men de er der. Den solide posisjonen ville vært å omfavne forskjellene.

The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature by Steven Pinker

A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History by Nicholas Wade

On Genetic Interests: Family, Ethnicity, and Humanity in an Age of Mass Migration by Frank Salter

The Culture of Critique: An Evolutionary Analysis of Jewish Involvement in Twentieth-Century Intellectual and Political Movements by Kevin MacDonald

On Sparta by Plutarch

Meditations by Marcus Aurelius

Beyond Good and Evil and The Anti-Christ by Friedrich Nietzsche

Confessions of a Reluctant Hater and New Right vs. Old Right by Greg Johnson

Well here are the sources taken out if that helps you look past site:

[1] https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/1594204462?adid=0DGMDK7MHNT4Y2RSWZ6N&camp=2902&creative=19466&creativeASIN=1594204462&linkCode=as4&tag=nofo-21

[2] https://www.technologyreview.com/s/403895/race-and-medicine/

[3] http://www.spectator.co.uk/2014/05/the-genome-of-history/

[4] https://www.technologyreview.com/s/411668/beyond-race-based-medicine/

I hate that you are being downvoted because there is a very real possibility that this is true. This book is basically all about how manipulative the Russian government is and how their strategy is to create an environment where no one knows what is real or fake.

All part of the Israeli land grab. Make the place as unlivable as possible, then after the people leave, Israel can claim they left on their own and build Jewish settlements on it. It's not the first time Israel has done it.

What do you know about 1948? Did you live through it? Did your immediate family get affected by it? My family was and would never wish it upon anyone.

Being locked up in rooms in your own house by [Haganah militia] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zionist_political_violence) (terrorists, led by the likes of Tsipi Livni's father) watching your family members executed in front of you and being forced to drink your own piss while watching your aunt get raped.

Tell me kind sir what the living f*ck do you know about 1948? Please enlighten me.
Educate yourself and read Ilan Pappe's Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine please.

You can always google this stuff, it's pretty common

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2019/07/nelson-mandela-grandson-slams-israeli-apartheid-190707053146087.html

​

​

and with regards to ethnic cleansing by Israel one of Israel's top archivists made a book an it because there was just so much of it but never reported by main stream

article about ethnic cleansing by Israel

https://www.globalresearch.ca/israels-scheme-bury-nakba/5683236

book

https://www.amazon.ca/Ethnic-Cleansing-Palestine-Ilan-Pappe/dp/1851685553

>Worked with:Robert Faurisson and Alison Weir

Defending the right of someone to free speech is not the same as condoning their opinion.

>Demonizes Israel

You mean "criticizes" Israel

>doesn't discuss the conflict in an even-handed manner.


One, you have not given an example on how he "doesn't discuss the conflict in an even-handed manner". Second, in a conflict that was started based on the Systematic Ethnic Cleansing of one side is very hard to be "even-handed":https://www.amazon.ca/Ethnic-Cleansing-Palestine-Ilan-Pappe/dp/1851685553/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1457747715&sr=8-1&keywords=ethnic+cleansing+of+palestine




>"Denies anti-Semitism is a major issue in the world today."

1)Citation needed

2)"Major Issue" compared to...?

3) Assuming the presumption of question is correct, What are the main causes of it?

OP you should do a Bit of reading as to the Origins of the conflict.

might I suggest you familiarize yourself with The Nakba

and other events surrounding it like the Lydda Death March

and the Deir Yassin massacre

here is good book from Noam Chomsky on the matter of the conflict.

Gaza in Crisis: Reflections on Israel's War against the Palestinians

Perhaps read About The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, by Israeli historian Page semi-protected
Ilan Pappé

"They weren't Nazis. They just adhered to the Nazi ideological/racial worldview and were complicit in mass murder."

Inform yourself OP.

>The center's findings come after Communist Party members earlier this month called for streets to be renamed and monuments to be erected to Stalin throughout Russia ahead of celebrations in May marking 70 years since the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany, the Kommersant newspaper reported.
Asked by the Levada Center how they felt about the initiative, 39 percent of Russians said they would back plans for erecting a monument to Stalin, who was supreme commander in chief of the Soviet army during World War II.

That's fucked up. Everyone needs to read 'The Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin' by Timothy Snyder. I'd venture to say Stalin was worse than Hitler after reading that.

http://www.amazon.com/Bloodlands-Europe-Between-Hitler-Stalin/dp/0465031471

I was a bit of a history nerd in school and university, still am a bit, I'm not a historian by any stretch of the imagination. The North Africa theatre is fascinating, and can be somewhat disassociated from the war crimes narrative that accompanies most of the Wehrmacht's campaigns, as it was fought in a somewhat 'gentlemanly' fashion. If you have any interest in the real WW2 I cannot recommend Timothy Snyder's 'Bloodlands' as a primer, great book about the Eastern Front:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0465031471?pc_redir=1411768435&robot_redir=1

Lies My Teacher Told Me = great book

I recommend Lies My Teacher Told Me or Bryson's Short History of Nearly Everything. If you are looking for something a little more scholarly and drier then I suggest A History of Knowledge by Van Doren. As a world history teacher myself, I loved all of these books.

Howard Zinn is one of the best writers when it comes to history and if you let him, he'll change your concept of history.

Check out Lies My Teacher Told Me by James Loewen, we used it alongside some of Zinn's material when I was still beginning my college career. :)

There's a book called The Fourth Turning that I would HIGHLY recommend reading. It's by a historian and economist that got together and looked at trends the last few centuries that have lead to our great wars. They found there is a, roughly, 80 year cycle when shit MAJORLY hits the fan, and the generation of young adults has to fix it, for better or worse.

Ex: about 80 years ago was WWII, 1860 was US Civil War, 1780 American Revolution, etc etc (and this is just the US)

If I didn't know that these guys were scientists, I would think they were prophets. They predicted a ton of major events that came to pass including the market collapse and Great Recession and the FACTORS THAT WOULD CAUSE IT... at least 10 years prior to it happening.

The book doesn't take a side (liberal or conservative), it just looks at trends in history and economic factors and calls it like it is. It also stressed the DUTY that you and I and our entire generation has to make sure the world doesn't turn to shit.

Every shits on the millenials and compares us to the "Greatest Generation" from WWII, but the old people from their time were shitting on them and accusing them of being lazy and spoiled just like people are doing to us now. It's just a cycle. Stay strong, dude, and stay positive.

There's this book that was written in the 90's about our generation. It's called The 4th Turning. You might be interested in the theory that generational behaviors follow circadian rhythms and that we may in fact BE an echo of the Greatest Generation, or at least in the same position in the cycle. Check it out!

Currently: The Twilight War: The Secret History of America's Thirty-Year Conflict with Iran

After this I will probably read

The Bear Went Over the Mountain: Soviet Combat Tactics in Afghanistan

On War

Black Flags: The Rise of ISIS

The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11

Illusions of Victory: The Anbar Awakening and the Rise of the Islamic State

On Grand Strategy

A fellow on the combined defense discord layed out his recommendations for books on nukes, so I'll list them here.

On Thermonuclear War By Herman Kahn

On Limited Nuclear War in the 21st Century by Jeffrey Larsen and Kerry Kartchner

The Evolution of Nuclear Strategy, Third Edition by Lawrence Freedman

Russian Strategic Nuclear Forces by Pavel Podvig

Nuclear Statecraft: History and Strategy in America's Atomic Age by Francis J. Gavin

Eating Grass: The Making of the Pakistani Bomb by Feroz Khan

Prevention, Pre-emption and the Nuclear Option: From Bush to Obama by Aiden Warren

Nuclear Deterrence in the 21st Century: Lessons from the Cold War for a New Era of Strategic Piracy by Thérèse Delpech

Analyzing Strategic Nuclear Policy by Charles L. Glaser

Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes

Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb by Richard Rhodes

Nuclear Strategy in the Modern Era: Regional Powers and International Conflict by Vipin Narang

Building the H Bomb: A Personal History By Kenneth W Ford

The Logic of American Nuclear Strategy by Matthew Kroenig

Paper Tigers: china's Nuclear Posture by Jeffery Lewis

Arms and Influence by Thomas Schelling

On this topic I always recommend people read Richard Rhodes' The Making of the Atomic Bomb. It's really more a history of science/technology but it does cover the German and Japanese bomb programs as they relate to the Manhattan Project.

What I recall is that the general story of the Germans is that they lost some key physicists early on (many of them Jews who emigrated) and that Werner Heisenberg and his crew made an ill-advised decision to pursue a bomb design that required deuterium. Their deuterium came from a single source, a hydroelectric facility in Norway, and the French, Brits, and Norwegians were able to sabotage it often enough to keep the supply limited.

Add to this Hitler's fascination with some other projects-- and late in the war the better salesmanship from the rocket developers --and the German project really never had the resources necessary to win the race against the US.

The Japanese bomb project was really quite modest and probably doomed to failure as their scientists-- unlike the Germans --were isolated from the global community of theoretical physicists and thus lacked the necessary background to develop a bomb. They too lacked support from military/civilian leadership so their program was years behind the Germans, which itself was at least a couple of years behind the Manhattan Project.

All those factors considered, the US also had the tremendous advantage of not being a war zone. We could simply fence off a chunk of eastern Washington to develop uranium concentrating processes in secret. Ditto Oak Ridge in TN and of course Los Alamos in NM. No bomber raids and Oppie always had enough vodka on hand to make a Moscow Mule for his guests-- a far cry from trying to develop a weapon in an underground lab with unskilled slave labor, a la the German rocket program.

I just can't work for the Clintons and this is one reason why...reading this book (link below) and I too agree the DNC needs to wake up to their corruption. and if Hillary gets in we will get EIGHT YEARS OF HER! I am sure no one will challenge her. and I am 65... I can't bear for this to be my final years. all of it is hard medicine. I will say I still go back and forth but reading this book and listening to clips online of Hitch talking about the Clintons ... I go back and forth about how I could ever vote to put this corrupt couple back in power. Could it be possible they could do more harm than an idiot (Trump)? with their ties to corrupt foreign governments through the Clinton Foundation? http://www.amazon.com/One-Left-Lie-Triangulations-Jefferson/dp/1455522996#reader_1455522996

I think the best book was written by someone on the left. Christopher Hitchens was actually a communist in the 60's, but took on a more socialist tint in his later years. Hitchens on Charlie Rose 4/28/99

His book No One Left to Lie To: The Triangulations of William Jefferson Clinton is a hair raising book, and I'd highly recommend it.

Edit: Corrected the link to the part with Blumenthal

While not specifically United books, three books that I highly recommend and have increased my knowledge of the sport are:

1. Money and Soccer: A Soccernomics Guide; by Stefan Szymanski
   
   I really recommend this one if you're interested in the financial aspect of the game. It explains a lot about Manchester United's dominance in that front and discusses how many other clubs have to go about obtaining success. It's a pretty easy and entertaining read. I really enjoy Stefan's writing and work and this was one of my favorites.
   
   
2. The Numbers Game: Why Everything you Know about Soccer is Wrong; by Chris Anderson
   
   This is an easy read that uses advanced analytics to explain the sport. It goes into detail about how many times cliches and sayings (e.g. defense wins championships!) are often mistaken and breaks things down from an analytical point of view. Even if you're skeptical of advanced metrics, it provides an interesting view. Actually quite an easy read considering the subject.
   
   
3. Inverting the Pyramid: The History of Soccer Tactics; by Jonathan Wilson
   
   This one is great from a tactical point of view. Not a lot about United. It focuses mainly on the evolution of the game and providing history and context. I found it very dense and labored through the book a bit. Still some very interesting stuff to help grow your knowledge of the sport and it's history from a tactical point of view. Louis van Gaal I believe gets quite a bit in it, mainly his time at Ajax and Barcelona, but it focuses primarily on 'innovators' of tactics. So the end is quite heavy on the possession tiki-tika style that is seen as the future of the sport. A little disappointed with the lack of SAF and United in this book, still a worthwhile read.

My Turn: A Life of Total Football

By Johan Cruyff. I have still yet to read it, but I've heard good things about it.

Also, another one is Inverting the Pyramid, but its not by a player/manager though. Brilliant book on tactics, either way. Definitely worth the read.

Personal bias aside, My Story: Steven Gerrard is a very good read as well. Published after he left Liverpool, so you can imagine the weight of the words he writes.

Just to add: the name "association football" was created to distinguish it from "rugby football," which was being developed around the same time (per Inverting the Pyramid).

It's a book written by Jonathan Wilson with brilliant analysis of how tactics have evolved throughout history. A must-have to all fans of football ;) The posts here are condensed chapters of it.

Agreed. This is a relatively new field, so it will take a while for reluctant media egalitarians to accept it.

It will happen though, even the NYT couldn't ignore the HUGE IQ gene discovery from 2017:

NYT: 'In ‘Enormous Success,’ Scientists Tie 52 Genes to Human Intelligence'

It will take longer to accept the racial angle, but the former NYT Scince Editor wrote a WHOLE book about race realism! If you can belive it lol

'A Troublesome Inheritance' by Nicholas Wade

Yeah... for that perspective I'd highly recommend They Thought They Were Free by Milton Mayer.

He interviews and forms relationships with around a dozen citizens of a small town in Hesse over the course of a decade or so about their experiences and thoughts during the rise of Nazism and the following years.

Haha - my girlfriend keeps telling me to start a YouTube channel. Personally, I think she just wants me to rant around the house less lol. But I've been thinking about putting something together - the lovely response from Redditors when I post comments like this make me think it might have a chance to be a successful way of getting the message out.

But if you're interested in reading about this stuff here are a few books by the people with real talent who did all the investigative legwork that I'm just repeating:

Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right https://www.amazon.com/dp/0307947904/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_i_V2.xDbT0G7T9Q

Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right's Stealth Plan for America https://www.amazon.com/dp/1101980966/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_i_23.xDbQ9EHJR5

If you like non-fiction:

Periodic Tales - Hugh Aldersey-Williams


Dark Money - Jane Mayer


Between the World and Me - Ta-Nehisi Coates

Yep, I'm supes liberal. Sorry.

This here is just bursting at the seems with real life examples of the state doing its best to save small property owners from the predation of the ultra wealthy. Can't imagine how "please don't dump mercury into the river that waters my farm" would go over without the state there to back that up.

“from 2005 to 2008, a single source, the Kochs, poured almost $25 million into dozens of different organizations fighting climate reform . . . Charles and David had outspent what was then the world’s largest public oil company, ExxonMobil, by a factor of three.”



Source: Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right by Jane Mayer

You're right, of course.

Tragedy and Hope: A History of the World in Our Time

IMHO, here's a very good place to start learning about the European history of WW2. Get yourself to a Library, or better yet, just buy the book. It's a good, in depth look at what happened and how it happened.

The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany
http://www.amazon.com/The-Rise-Fall-Third-Reich/dp/1451651686

This book has it all: Hitler's youth, the roots of his hatred for jews, the brown shirts, how he was elected into office...on and on. 1500 pages or so.

The book Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq is a great read and goes into detail on just about every example you could want over the last hundred years. You can buy it on Amazon here: https://www.amazon.com/Overthrow-Americas-Century-Regime-Change/dp/0805082409

I blame the corrupt leaders and co-opted media. While you and I know the reasons for the Iraq war were lies, Fox is now saying we went there to plant the seeds of democracy. The media should be fact checking a excoriating those who lied in the past, but it is not happening. I really don't think that young people taking up arms know how corrupt our current government is. It is hard to believe. I don't want to believe it.

My 17 year old granddaughter, whose 4 year college tuition my wife and I have already paid for in advance, is thinking of enlisting. We are doing out best to disabuse her of the idea that military service protects and promotes freedom. I bought her "War is a Racket" by Smedley Butler She thinks she will be able to serve with her boyfriend who is enlisting and the recruiters are lying. But she thinks she is in love for life and her boyfriend buys the military hero BS hook line and sinker. My granddaughter wants to give her prepaid tuition to her younger sister. She thinks she is being noble. I don't know if you have tried talking sense to a teenager, but they think their life is novel and different from all those who have gone before and that they are the best judge of the nature of reality. She literally has no idea what she would be signing up for.

My own grandmother used to say to me, when unable to set me straight about something in life; "you can't put an old head on young shoulders" and it is true.

Maybe a few kids who enlist want to kill and be bad asses, (there are always a few of those types of people) but I honestly don't think that is the motivation for most. They are duped. It is not their fault that they are young, inexperienced and naive. There are vast forces of propaganda arrayed against them. That is, in my opinion, where the blame lies.

War Is A Racket

war's always been ugly and cruel. pick up this book by two time medal of honor recipient Marine Major General Smeadley Butler called: War is a Racket.

"War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small 'inside' group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes."

"I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested. Looking back on it, I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents."

and this was back in the 1930s. Very little has changed. the article mentions how the farmer was working in his poppy fields. that's because we're allowing the manufacturing and distribution of drugs in Afghanistan. this situation is Vietnam and Somalia all over again.

And you have zero evidence to back up your claim, yet an entire book has been authored supporting the position that U.S. military action fuels terrorism.

Assigned Reading: http://www.amazon.com/Blowback-Consequences-American-Empire-Second/dp/0805075593

Not a ref. link, not whoring money. Bush hasn't done anything but make us more at risk at the cost of our liberty and billions of our tax dollars.

This is a good book about that exact thing by an ex Naval Intelligence Officer.

https://www.amazon.com/Blowback-Consequences-American-Empire-Project/dp/0805075593/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&qid=1497341914&sr=8-4&keywords=blowback

This book hits it right out of the park. It is an unbelievably cogent argument about how US Foreign Policy has caused and will continue to cause future generations of hatred towards America and her citizens

Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire

>he term "blowback," invented by the CIA, refers to the unintended results of American actions abroad. In this incisive and controversial book, Chalmers Johnson lays out in vivid detail the dangers faced by our overextended empire, which insists on projecting its military power to every corner of the earth and using American capital and markets to force global economic integration on its own terms. From a case of rape by U.S. servicemen in Okinawa to our role in Asia's financial crisis, from our early support for Saddam Hussein to our conduct in the Balkans, Johnson reveals the ways in which our misguided policies are planting the seeds of future disaster.

>In a new edition that addresses recent international events from September 11 to the war in Iraq, this now classic book remains as prescient and powerful as ever.

And Blowback, by Chalmers Johnson, also describing the American “promotion of democracy” in South America, the Middle East and Asia.

Chalmers Johnson wrote several good books on this subject.

Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire

The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic

Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic

Dismantling the Empire: America's Last Best Hope

My main problem is that it appears that a Ron Paul fan took a Chalmers Johnson talk, and stuck a couple of RonPaulRevolution "me too!" bookends on it.

The more succinct explanation is Johnson's original explanation found here. An extended conversation involving Chalmers Johnson can be found here (though the video is old, so it has some cheesy intro and old-style production values).

Chalmers Johnson is one very sharp guy, and the original video seems to try to ride on Johnson's coattails. Johnson literally wrote the book on Blowback (four books, to be more precise). He also has a key role in the movie "Why We Fight", one of the best documentaries I've ever seen.

Drunk or not, I hope you keep this up.

It sounds like you really gained a lot from your time in, namely: (1) personal growth and maturity, and (2) a broadened world view from experience. Experience as someone actively taking part in US foreign policy, and also just as a young American going overseas and seeing how the rest of the world lives (and how truly fortunate we are here). Just that you called your 16-year-old self "naive" shows this change in mindset. Also, I think that any introspection is healthy and natural, especially for such a serious topic. It's a tough time, especially watching the current shit-storm in Iraq with those ISIS assholes.


I appreciate and generally agree with Nate Fick's view of the US on the international stage:
http://youtu.be/7mBr1UydKf0?t=18m2s

Sure, the US has done some not-so-great things or maybe done well-intentioned things the wrong way. But I don't think we're the bad guys in the broader scheme of things. Yeah, that's up for debate. Also, I'm gonna guess you're not evil on the individual level.

and more along a similar line, specifically about the Middle East and elsewhere:
http://youtu.be/fQu_7hNjPqY?t=3m27s



a serious issue, but a little [British] humor on a related note: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ToKcmnrE5oY

Sorry, gatorbuck, but most corporatism is not what you describe. Nor is it even just corporations; unions and other special interests can and do influence government policy for unfair advantage.

As to corporations using the government, "regulation" is a perfect example. The very first federal regulatory agency -- the Interstate Commerce Commission, set up in 1887 to regulate the railroads -- quickly became "a sort of barrier between the railroad corporations and the people and a sort of protection against hasty and crude legislation hostile to railroad interests." See Understanding Obamacare by Luke Mitchell, Harper's Magazine for the quote, and much more on the subject.

Most corporatism involves private corporations and other entities that become ever-more entangled with government. Some, like much of the the military-industrial complex, would not exist without government to start with, but that doesn't change anything -- read my definition of corporatism again. I'd also suggest Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq for a very readable history of how corporations have used our military for their own gain.

The main point remains, in any case: without a coercive power center for corporations to influence for their own advantage, corporations are generally benign. People can not do business with Apple if they want; but we can't choose to not do business with (or to provide unfair advantage to at our expence) Halliburton or Monsanto or the megabanks. Government coercion is the difference.

"Destabilize" kind of implies doing things subtly tho.

When was the last time we even practiced that? It's been pretty direct since the Banana Republic days. We've six years to fix it, or else expect another 150 years of revolving door dictators in SA and the ME

A great book on this subject is called Overthrow. It doesn't exclusively deal with Central America, but a good chunk of it does.

We've done it again and again.

add this puppy to the pile

Eisenhower warned about the military-industrial complex. And now it's well rooted into the US...and perhaps the Global...economy. Exploitation of war for profit hasn't gone away. Good read: http://www.amazon.com/War-Racket-Antiwar-Americas-Decorated/dp/0922915865/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1300005423&sr=8-1

The Making of the Atomic Bomb

Einstein wasn't really involved in the project, though he played a significant role in warning the US government that it was possible and how bad an idea it would have been to let the Nazis get it first. Even though he wasn't involved, he had the name recognition that the president would read something that he sent.

Oppenheimer was basically in charge of all the science during the project.

Feynman did work on it, but he was pretty young at the time, so he wasn't one of the senior people.

There's a really excellent Pulitzer Prize winning book by Richard Rhodes that describes everything, if you're interested.

> Want to know more?

You should also read this book, "The making of the atom bomb".

I would love to have him around this election cycle. He would most likely be skewering Obama, and especially Hillary. He hates the Clintons, and was one of the first journalists to dig deep into all of their scandals.

The whole clinton strategy has been say one thing, and do everything the Republicans want: http://www.amazon.com/One-Left-Lie-Triangulations-Jefferson/dp/1455522996

Voting for her is basically the same as an establishment GOP candidate like Cruz.

If you want some insight into how truly corrupt the Clintons are, pick up No One Left to Lie to by Christopher Hitchens - and thats just the corruption that occurred in the 90s.

https://www.amazon.com/One-Left-Lie-Triangulations-Jefferson/dp/1455522996/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1481000042&sr=8-1&keywords=no+one+left+to+lie+to

I just finished reading Inverting the Pyramid: The History of Soccer Tactics by Jonathan Wilson. It's really interesting, assuming you're into the history of soccer and soccer tactics.

I've heard good things about this book:
http://www.amazon.com/Inverting-The-Pyramid-History-Tactics/dp/1568587384

Jonathan Wilson wrote a book called "Inverting the Pyramid" that does a nice job of weaving the strengths and weaknesses of different formations with their histories in world soccer. Here's a link to it: https://www.amazon.com/Inverting-Pyramid-History-Soccer-Tactics/dp/1568587384/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1469839235&sr=8-1&keywords=inverting+the+pyramid

An Epic Swindle is the best book on the ownership and direction of Liverpool under our former American owners Hicks & Gilette. An excellent read, and honestly very important in terms of setting the stage for FSG's tenure - elements of the H&G reign are still affecting Liverpool as a club today, and part of what made last season's title challenge so special was that it came less than 4 years after we almost went into administration.

The Anatomy of Liverpool is one I'm reading at the moment. Written by The Guardian's Jonathan Wilson, author of another highly recommended football book called Inverting The Pyramid (a history of football tactics), The Anatomy of Liverpool picks out 10 matches in the club's history and uses them as the basis to discuss that era of the club - the players, the manager, the seasons, the direction of the club, let alone that match itself. Bear in mind that both this book and Inverting The Pyramid can occasionally be very dry reads, but worth persevering with!

And then, of course, LFC players' autobiographies. There's also Pepe Reina's autobiography, in addition to the ones on that list, which also has some insights about the club under Rafa & Hicks & Gilette

Books:

Please May I Have My Football Back by Eric Alexander

Manchester: The City Years by Gary James

Gary James also wrote The Big Book of City, I can't find an Amazon link and it's a difficult book to find in general.

I'm Not Really Here by Paul Lake

Movie:

Blue Moon Rising

I'm currently reading a biography on Bert Trautmann, and next up is Uwe Rosler's autobiography.

If you want to really understand football, I'd recommend Inverting the Pyramid by Jonathan Wilson It's a bit dry, but it's the history of football tactics, and of the game itself. I love tactical discussions and talking about the game, so I really enjoyed the book, but some people find it boring.

There's an old BBC documentary on Youtube, I think it's from the early 80's. Also on Youtube the 1999 match vs Gillingham, and the 2002 match against Blackburn that secured promotion back to the Premier League. Both very important to the clubs history.

Someone's been reading Inverting the Pyramid.

Which is named after a book which is an even better primer

http://www.amazon.com/Inverting-The-Pyramid-History-Tactics/dp/1568587384

Just in case any other curious folk stumble across this thread, here is the season preview post that OP mentions.

>I've only a casually watched soccer so I don't know all the rules, strategies, formations, etc so I'll be looking forward to learning everything as the season goes on.

If you're a nerd like me who wants to dive straight into the deep end and learn everything on the subject I would recommend Inverting the Pyramid by Jonathan Wilson. It is the definitive, go-to book for understanding soccer strategy and tactics.

---------------------------RACE HATE FACTS---------------------------

Humans can be genetically categorized into five racial groups, corresponding to traditional races. http://pritchardlab.stanford.edu/publications/pdfs/RosenbergEtAl02.pdf

Genetic analysis “supports the traditional racial groups classification.” http://psychology.uwo.ca/faculty/rushtonpdfs/PPPL1.pdf

“Human genetic variation is geographically structured” and corresponds with race. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15508000

Race can be determined via genetics with certainty for >99.8% of individuals. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15625622

Oral bacteria can be used to determine race. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2013-10-oral-bacteria-fingerprint-mouth.html

Race can be determined via brain scans. http://www.cell.com/current-biology/abstract/S0960-9822(15)00671-5

96-97% of whites have no African ancestry. http://www.theroot.com/articles/history/2013/02/how_mixed_are_african_americans.3.html

97% of Whites have no black ancestry whatsoever. http://www.unz.com/isteve/nyt-white-black-a-murky-distinction-grows-still-murkier/

There was “minimal gene flow” between archaic Europeans and Asians. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/20/science/20adapt.html

Common-sense racial categories have biological meaning. http://www.ln.edu.hk/philoso/staff/sesardic/Race2.pdf

Human intelligence is highly heritable. http://www.nature.com/mp/journal/v16/n10/abs/mp201185a.html

Scientific consensus is that IQ tests are not racially biased. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160289608000305

Very poor Whites are comparably intelligent to very wealthy blacks. http://www.jbhe.com/features/49_college_admissions-test.html

Privately, intelligence experts hold more hereditarian views than they express in public. http://www.udel.edu/educ/gottfredson/reprints/1994egalitarianfiction.pdf

Black children raised in White households have similar IQs to black children in black households. http://psycnet.apa.org/psycinfo/1977-07996-001

The average African IQ is estimated at 79. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0191886912003741

The average African-American IQ is 85, compared to the average White IQ of 100. http://www.udel.edu/educ/gottfredson/reprints/1997mainstream.pdf

The white-black gap in SAT scores, a proxy for IQ, is increasing. http://www.jbhe.com/features/49_college_admissions-test.html

Genes for large brains, linked to high IQ, are common everywhere except Africa. http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB115040765329081636

Intelligence has a 40-50% genetic basis. http://articles.latimes.com/2011/aug/10/news/la-heb-genetic-study-intelligence-20110809

IQ scores are the best predictor of success in Western society. http://psychology.uwo.ca/faculty/rushtonpdfs/PPPL1.pdf

IQ is 75% heritable among Whites. http://psychology.uwo.ca/faculty/rushtonpdfs/PPPL1.pdf

92% of Mulatto (black man, white women) children are born out of wedlock. http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2625893

Gentile whites are the most underrepresented group in top colleges. http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/the-myth-of-american-meritocracy/

Sweden is the rape capital of the West, likely due to immigration. http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/5195/sweden-rape

Asian women find White men more attractive than Asian men. http://sf.oxfordjournals.org/content/89/3/807.abstract

White men are pound-for-pound stronger than black men. http://www.biomedcentral.com/content/pdf/1471-2458-10-508.pdf

Germanic/Nordic people have lower time preference than any other group. http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1481443

Human evolution is not merely ongoing but is in fact accelerating. http://discovermagazine.com/2009/mar/09-they-dont-make-homo-sapiens-like-they-used-to

Human races are diverging into separate species, not mixing into one. http://discovermagazine.com/2009/mar/09-they-dont-make-homo-sapiens-like-they-used-to

Blacks are seven times more likely than whites to commit murder. http://www.colorofcrime.com/2005/10/the-color-of-crime-2005/

The percentage of Blacks and Hispanics, not poverty, is the best predictor of crime. http://www.colorofcrime.com/2005/10/the-color-of-crime-2005/

90% of gang members are non-white. http://www.colorofcrime.com/2005/10/the-color-of-crime-2005/

Asians are nine times more likely than whites to be members of gangs. http://www.colorofcrime.com/2005/10/the-color-of-crime-2005/

The average H-1B immigrant is less intelligent and qualified than the average American. http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/h1b10min.html

Race is a better predictor of crime than poverty. http://www.colorofcrime.com/2005/10/the-color-of-crime-2005/

White immigrants on net improve government revenue, while non-white immigrants cost money. http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/putting-a-price-on-foreigners-strict-immigration-laws-save-denmark-billions-a-759716.html

Blacks are overrepresented in serial killings. http://maamodt.asp.radford.edu/Serial Killer Information Center/Serial Killer Statistics.pdf

Blacks are overrepresented among child abuse and pedophilia, and this isn’t due to biased reporting. http://www.theroot.com/articles/culture/2011/03/black_childabuse_statistics_report_debunks_bias_assumptions.html

White-Asian children are twice as likely as Asians to have mental illness. http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2008-08/uoc–baa081108.php

Black-white children are more likely than both black and whites to make poor decisions. http://www.nber.org/papers/w14192

Racial bias against miscegenation is likely biological in origin. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19422626

Interracial marriages have a 23.5% chance of divorce, compared to 13% for same-race couples. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4145377

Mixed race kids suffer from low self-esteem, social isolation, and poor family dynamics. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1448064/

Mixed race children are more likely to have health problems, high stress, smoke, and drink. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1448064/

The percentage of Blacks in a city, not poverty, is the best predictor of crime. http://www.unz.com/article/race-and-crime-in-america/

Blacks are 600% more likely than non-blacks to commit murder. http://www.unz.com/article/race-and-crime-in-america/

The purpose of section 8 housing is to move blacks from elite urban areas to middle class suburbs. http://www.unz.com/article/race-and-crime-in-america/

Hispanics receive shorter prison sentences than Whites for the same crimes. http://people.terry.uga.edu/mustard/sentencing.pdf

Police hesitate longer to shoot black suspects than White suspects. http://spokane.wsu.edu/admissions/Criminal-Justice/faculty-staff/Racial&EthnicBiasDFJDMStrongerLens_ExperimentalCriminology_JamesKlingerVila2014.pdf

Race-mixers may give less parental support to their children because of greater genetic distance. http://www.humanbiologicaldiversity.com/articles/Rushton%2C

J. Phillipe. “Inclusive fitness in human relationships.” Biological Journal of the Linnean Society 96 (2009).pdf http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1095-8312.2008.01110.x/abstract

15% of the human genome has been under selective pressures since the races separated. http://www.amazon.com/Troublesome-Inheritance-Genes-Human-History/dp/1594204462

Scientific discussion of race has increased since 1946 onwards. http://www.ln.edu.hk/philoso/staff/sesardic/Race.pdf

Over 100 White women are raped by blacks every day in the United States. http://archive.frontpagemag.com/readArticle.aspx?ARTID=26368

Melanin concentration may directly correlate with aggression. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0191886912000840

Africans have higher rates of a gene associated with violence. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1913922/pdf/1744-9081-3-30.pdf

Europeans and Asians are subject to more recent evolution than Africans. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/20/science/20adapt.html

64% of Hispanics have IQs too low to enter the military. http://takimag.com/article/frequently_asked_questions_about_the_jason_richwine_brouhaha_steve_sailer/print#ixzz2TPXmpNgG

Mexican-Americans have higher disability rates than other races. http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/03/150326162658.htm

Europeans and Asians are subject to more recent evolution than Africans. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/20/science/20adapt.html .

.

.

----------------Diversity and Ethnocentrism Hate Facts------------------

More diverse neighborhoods have lower social cohesion. http://www.citylab.com/housing/2013/11/paradox-diverse-communities/7614/

Diversity increases psychotic experiences. http://bjp.rcpsych.org/content/201/4/282.abstract?etoc

Diversity increases social adversity. http://bjp.rcpsych.org/content/201/4/282.abstract?etoc

A 10% increase in diversity doubles the chance of psychotic episodes. http://bjp.rcpsych.org/content/201/4/282.abstract?etoc

Diversity reduces voter registration, political efficacy, charity, and number of friendships. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-9477.2007.00176.x/abstract;jsessionid=279C92A7EB0946BBA63D62937FC832A9.f04t03

Ethnic diversity reduces happiness and quality of life. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-9477.2007.00176.x/abstract;jsessionid=279C92A7EB0946BBA63D62937FC832A9.f04t03

Diversity reduces trust, civic participation, and civic health. http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2007/08/05/the_downside_of_diversity/?page=full

Ethnocentrism is rational, biological, and genetic in origin. http://www.pnas.org/content/108/4/1262.abstract

Ethnic diversity harms health for hispanics and blacks. http://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/abs/10.2105/AJPH.2012.300787

Babies demostrate ethnocentrism before exposure to non-whites. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-7687.2012.01138.x/full

Ethnocentrism is universal and likely evolved in origin. http://www-personal.umich.edu/~axe/r

Are you projecting? Who says that? After all, superior is subjective.

Race matters, like it or not, believe me when I say that I wish it didn't..., but then again I wish many things, but I don't get to decide those, Nature does.

If you want to have a honest discussion about race try to inform yourself a little about our actual positions and not some Hollywood stereotype.

• For normie entry level see this:
  
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MOnQPXuU81Q
  
  
• For a more critical view read this book:
  
  https://www.amazon.com/Troublesome-Inheritance-Genes-Human-History/dp/1594204462
  

> Because Homo sapiens are not different from one place to another. There is nothing unique to Chinese at this base level.

Not to open a major can of worms, but I believe this interpretation is going by the wayside with more modern research on genetics. I found Nicholas Wade's book A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History to be a fascinating read, though one certainly doesn't need to take it all as fact. His thesis is that "human evolution is recent, copious and regional." The existence of genotypes conducive to "conformity" could very well exist in greater numbers in East Asian races.

An awesome book on this, "Nothing is Real and Everything is Possible": https://www.amazon.com/Nothing-True-Everything-Possible-Surreal/dp/1610396006/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1484255984&sr=8-1&keywords=nothing+is+true+and+everything+is+possible

The guy they interview wrote Nothing is True and Everything is Possible, which goes into far more detail and is a whole lot of fun.

Of course!

What prompted my support of Palestine was the way my father was treated when visiting for a business trip.

He was a businessman for a large American company a few years back, and the one of the best in their history. He was invited by a prestigious Israeli institution to negotiate a sale.

Before that, he was in favor of a two state solution, and generally supported Palestine. He was then detained at the airport for eleven hours, had all his belongings seized, was interrogated and verbally harassed by Israeli officers. This was all because he was Muslim.

On his trip he met many Palestinians and talked to them about their struggles, and it really opened his eyes. Many of them still have the keys to their now demolished homes.

The history of the state of Israel is one of the most complicated and hard to navigate, so it’s understandable that many people have a hard time forming an opinion.

Ilan Pappe, an Israeli-Jewish historian, wrote a book called The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine , which is very insightful in explaining the complex history of the region, which I’d get into, but is too long and difficult to condense into a reddit post.

This Video is very powerful and pretty non-partisan, and more accessible than the book I linked above.

I’m glad you asked, and I hope you can inform an educated opinion on the issue!

All Israel is doing is creating thousands of new angry, raging Muslims (and many non-Muslims too including me and many Europeans). The seeds for vengeance are being sown today. Ten years from now when Americans have forgotten about this massacre, Americans will be asking "Why do the Muslim world hate Jews so much to kill thousands of them?" Because the hatred for Jews today started with this:


The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine


The renowned Israeli historian revisits the formative period of the State of Israel. Between 1947 and 1949, over 400 Palestinian villages were deliberately destroyed, civilians were massacred, and around a million men, women, and children were expelled from their homes at gunpoint. Denied for almost six decades, had it happened today it could only have been called "ethnic cleansing".

Decisively debunking the myth that the Palestinian population left of their own accord in the course of this war, Ilan Pappe offers impressive archival evidence to demonstrate that, from its very inception, a central plank in Israel’s founding ideology was the forcible removal of the indigenous population. Indispensable for anyone interested in the Middle East.


"In his latest work, renowned Israeli author and academic Pappe (A History of Modern Palestine) does not mince words, doing Jimmy Carter one better (or worse, depending on one's point of view) by accusing Israel of ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity beginning in the 1948 war for independence, and continuing through the present. Focusing primarily on Plan D (Dalet, in Hebrew), conceived on March 10, 1948, Pappe demonstrates how ethnic cleansing was not a circumstance of war, but rather a deliberate goal of combat for early Israeli military units led by David Ben-Gurion, whom Pappe labels the "architect of ethnic cleansing." The forced expulsion of 800,000 Palestinians between 1948-49, Pappe argues, was part of a long-standing Zionist plan to manufacture an ethnically pure Jewish state. Framing his argument with accepted international and UN definitions of ethnic cleansing, Pappe follows with an excruciatingly detailed account of Israeli military involvement in the demolition and depopulation of hundreds of villages, and the expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Arab inhabitants. An accessible, learned resource, this volume provides important inroads into the historical antecedents of today's conflict, but its conclusions will not be easy for everyone to stomach: Pappe argues that the ethnic cleansing of Palestine continues today, and calls for the unconditional return of all Palestinian refugees and an end to the Israeli occupation."

Iran's democracy was formed in 1906 in a popular pro-West Constitutional Revolution led by actual freedom fighters againt colonialists; Israel was officially "created" by the colonialists in 1948 on the smoldering heap of Palestinians dead bodies
https://www.haaretz.com/1.5262454

https://www.amazon.com/Ethnic-Cleansing-Palestine-Ilan-Pappe/dp/1851685553


Israel is a "Democracy" that has racially segregated schools and laws that prohibit intermarriage, among other things that would not be tolerated in any actual democracy

https://www.haaretz.com/jewish/.premium-could-you-marry-in-israel-1.5250455

https://www.thedailybeast.com/israels-most-liberal-city-introduces-racially-segregated-kindergartens

And government officials who shout about the Superior Jewish Race - literally

https://shadowproof.com/2012/06/03/israeli-interior-minister-this-country-belongs-to-us-the-white-man/

https://www.newsweek.com/jews-are-smartest-race-world-and-superior-humans-israeli-lawmaker-claims-977896

That's why the Gaza Strip today has a population of 1.8 million people, about as high a population density as Hong Kong, out of which 1.6 million are refugees who were forced there after Israel took their lands

So called genocide and ethnic cleansing? Dude, acts of Genocide, ethnic cleansing and terrorism began literally a couple of years of the second world war ending. That's pretty fucked up don't you think? It's going today as well. Villages being destroyed and homes being bulldozed forcing people out of their homes and land is ethnic cleansing. Shooting people's babies out of their hands and using white phosphorus to burn people on the streets is Genocide. People pulling up chairs to watch it like a fireworks show are fucking sick in the head. This is what you get from the terrorist state of Israel for many decades now and still ongoing.

http://www.timesofisrael.com/new-deputy-defense-minister-called-palestinians-animals/

Also look at the language. The Nazis used to call Jews Vermin, Zionists calling the Palestinians animals or wild beasts or snakes like your bitch of a 'justice' minister. They are all itching for the extermination of these people they can't even see as humans. If you can get to that level of hate then it's easy to murder them because they aren't seen as human.

Also you want me to post up the charred bodies from the white phosphorus chemical attack? You sure this is the place to do it? Just type in Israel white phosphorus attack on Gaza and you will see the images. Fool, it's clear examples of genocide get your head out of your ass!

Here's a good book for you to read.

The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine
https://www.amazon.com/Ethnic-Cleansing-Palestine-Ilan-Pappe/dp/1851685553

im using the benny morris / ilan pappe definition. ilan pappe even wrote a book with that title: https://www.amazon.com/Ethnic-Cleansing-Palestine-Ilan-Pappe/dp/1851685553

benny morris wrote a book comprised almost entirely from zionist archival material where he describes the ethnic cleansing in detail, called The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited (2004)

Poland has been through some shit.

It's funny that you call it self-imposed, but let me ask you... where did you learn the majority of your history? Did you research it yourself, or did you learn it in school?

If you learned it in school... is it the student or the teacher that is to be blamed? Come on, there are books written on the inaccuracy of the American Textbooks!

"Bravo Two Zero" or "Immediate Action" by Andy McNab.

"Supernature" by Lyall Watson. An old, but interesting and thought-provoking book.

"Hyperspace" by Michio Kaku.

"Lies My Teacher Told Me" by James Loewen.

"People of the Lie" by M. Scott Peck.

Edit: I was going to suggest "The Hot Zone" as well, but Amberkisses got there ahead of me, so I upvoted him/her instead.

I teach college courses on writing, social justice, and activism. My students read the intro and the chapter on Columbus every Columbus day.

I'd also recommend Lies My Teacher Told Me by James Loewen. http://www.amazon.com/Lies-My-Teacher-Told-Everything/dp/0684818868

Ooooh, just one? Just a mention that I am atheist, though none of these are really directly in favor of atheism :)

http://www.amazon.com/The-Demon-Haunted-World-Science-Candle/dp/0345409469

http://www.amazon.com/Genome-The-Autobiography-Species-Chapters/dp/0060932902

http://www.amazon.com/A-Short-History-Nearly-Everything/dp/0767908171

http://www.amazon.com/Lies-My-Teacher-Told-Everything/dp/0684818868

http://www.amazon.com/Fahrenheit-451-Ray-Bradbury/dp/0345342968

http://www.amazon.com/Brave-New-World-Aldous-Huxley/dp/0060929871

Lies My Teacher Told Me, by James Loewen.
http://www.amazon.com/Lies-My-Teacher-Told-Everything/dp/0684818868

No. While there may be many things wrong with American society, there is absolutely no valid historical parallel between American society in 1960 and American society in 2011 that would predict the emergence of mass social movements. The causes for the New Left and the sixties were many, and almost none of those causes are shared today:

• Frustration with a culture of political repression (the McCarthy era) and general conformity.
  
• A decade-long economic boom, which allowed, for the first time, a critical mass of Americans to consider issues less directly pertinent to their lives. You don't have much time, energy, or interest in the morality of a war or the ethics of an existing social system when you're barely scraping together enough money to eat.
  
• A pre-existing mass social and political movement which had involved millions of Americans and already laid much of the groundwork for much of the later movements (from the New Left, to the feminist movement, to the gay rights movement), almost all of which had direct connections to the African-American civil rights movement, which exposed people to the systemic violence, widespread poverty, and racial injustice throughout the South.
  
• There was a high level of political capital and engagement. In the 1960s, political campaigns depended almost entirely on a volunteer staff, and were much cheaper to run. More people voted, more people attended places of religious worship on a regular basis, more people were involved in local organizations (from the local bridge club to the PTA to the bowling league). This meant that not only were people aware of what was going on in the world -- it meant that they trusted each other more, and they trusted government more. If you look at the 1960s, people wanted the government to fix problems in their lives; ever since Watergate, trust in government and other Americans has plummeted.
  
• There was a huge expansion in the number of university students. Between 1960 and 1975, the percent of Americans with a bachelor's degree or higher more than doubled. That's not the percentage of people attending college, that's the percentage of the total American population with a college degree, including old people. The number of MAs and PhDs granted per year tripled in that period. Numerous studies have demonstrated that people with a college education tend to be more socially liberal -- the backlash against the repressive and socially conservative society of the 1950s should therefore come as little surprise as this new generation of young Americans entered the workforce.
  
• There was also a huge number of young people. The baby boom that followed World War II had produced a huge cohort of 18-29 year-olds -- the exact group which also tends to be the most liberal.
  
  The current climate is far different.
  
  
• Until 2007, apathy was the primary defining characteristic of the American political climate. Since then, we have seen spurts of outrage or excitement, but there has been nothing akin to the political repression that we saw in the 1950s, nor do we see anything akin to the political engagement of the 1950s and 1960s.
  
• Since the 1970s, the United States economy has been largely stagnant, with a brief surge of prosperity in the 1990s. In 2008, we entered the greatest economic crisis since the Great Depression.
  
• There has been no sustained mass grassroots movement since the 1960s. Attempts have been made -- the feminist movement, the environmentalist movement, the gay rights movement, &c. -- but none of these efforts were able to sustain the requisite commitment on the part of everyday people. Sure, all three of those movements remain as at least recognizable political influences in the United States today, but as insider politicos: people who raise money for candidates, who hire lobbyists, who send out mass e-mails, and who run issue ads. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but it is most certainly not a parallel to the groundwork and widespread radicalizing social effects of the civil rights movement.
  
• No one votes anymore, no one is politically, socially, or even culturally engaged anymore. Even on college campuses, it's difficult to get people to turn out for events without bribing them with free food. Books have been written on the decline of the American public sphere (see: Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community).
  
• There has been little change in the percentage of Americans with a BA since the mid 1980s, and what changes have taken place has been the result of older Americans dying off. Moreover, the United States is an aging society -- hence our problems with funding social security and medicare.
  
  While I certainly agree that much has to change, you make the fundamental errors of assuming that it will change, that it will change rapidly, and that it will change as the result of people waking up and realizing what is going on.
  
  EDIT: wanted to expand some more on what I said.

You know, I don't have an answer. Most of the selections so far are from before Wallace's prime. (Quick aside: Philip Roth's best books are his latest, but who he was to the world was always the man who wrote Portnoy's Complaint. His worldview never changed. Rather he grew in his craft, and his later characters were various iterations of Portnoy getting old, perhaps with the great exception of American Pastoral.)

Anyway, I don't have an answer because Wallace arrived at a deadlock in American life that we have not yet overcome. He was a prophet of America's decline. What I believe Wallace wanted was certainty and authority in a time where it wasn't granted him.

Politically conservative (he voted for Reagan and admired John McCain), he was desperate for a sense of civic life that was already in decline, and he wanted badly to be led.

Raised by atheist academics, he sought out the comfort of the Church. He wanted unironically to believe in "the sub-surface unity of all things" but couldn't get himself to do so, conceding instead that, "You get to decide what to worship." His message, instead, was existential: life is what you make of it, so pay attention. But he wanted more. He sought "redemption" through literature and contemplation, seeking something of substance to soothe his "inner sap." Perhaps he found it in glimpses, but his long-time depression betrayed dissatisfaction. He searched endlessly in mythology, folklore, and collective subconscious imagery, only to catch his own tail in a Kafkaesque cat-and-mouse chase with himself.

In love, he was a bachelor, who one time contemplated murder over jealous love. He was a womanizer who held his manhood cheap, retreating to books to "feel less alone."

Like Hal in Infinite Jest, he found no authority, neither from his wild, filmmaking father, nor in the life-sucking entertainments of his time. Instead, Wallace found solace among the meek, the addicts, and the defeated (he himself suffered from alcohol abuse). Deep down, it wasn't enough. Deep down, beneath his giant brain, down in the bones of his Anglo-American stock, he knew something was wrong in America. He lamented our cafeteria democracy of boring politicians. He lamented what he called the "death of civics." Look at us now: government in chaos, the waning of religion across the West, an epidemic of addicts, no closer to cultural wisdom or unity, individuals still atomized and community still broken. (As an aside, I believe these premonitions sparked his interest in Quebec's secession movement. There, at least, people were fighting for something.)

In short, Tl;dr: Wallace was perfectionist born in a time that he couldn't perfect. What we have of him is a glorious attempt to surmount the chaos and fragmentation he felt in his heart and in the world around him. The reason I don't have an answer to your question is because I don't think anyone else got as close to articulating that as he did, and I think his fictions and his essays will be read in the future with great pity because I believe that we will rise to the occasion—in politics, in art, and in society—in due time. We always do.

The principle of Fürherprinzip is mostly organic. Humans naturally look towards strong leaders. And while the Third Reich was not completely organic, it was a substantial improvement over the liberal Judeo-Capitalist Weimar Republic. Adolf Hitler's long-term plans for Germany would have fully brought about the National Socialist ideal.

\>Have you had many bad experiences with people outside of your cultural background?

Yes, I went to a high school full of Negroes and mestizos, but that's purely anecdotal evidence, no? I'm intellectually honest, so I'll give you something more substantial. It's a study by Dr. Robert Putnam, entitled Bowling Alone. In it, he initially set out to prove the axiom that "diversity is our greatest strength", but quickly discovered quite the opposite. While studying the great cities of America, he found that ethnic diversity is strongly correlated with loss of social cohesion, diminishment of social capital, and a decrease in overall community engagement, not just between ethnic groups, but within them.

This is the book. I can't find a free PDF anywhere, but I have no doubt that you'll be able to find a torrent of it somewhere.

This last point addressed your other queries, too. The reason society must be organized along racial and ethnic lines, without getting into the spiritual side of things, is that human nature ensures that that's the only kind of organization that WILL work.

How to Win Friends and Influence People.

Bowling Alone.

>Strangely, those with an active vibrant spiritual life tend to be people with large amounts of leisure time and excess income (ie, rich people and the elderly).

It's also that if you attend church, you have a large social circle of like-minded individuals, for which humans are hard-wired. This is a lament I tend to hear from my atheist friends that in America there are few networking opportunities as thorough as attending a church. A good book about this is "Bowling Alone" about the decline of American civil society (outside of churches, but church attendance is also declining).

I wrote about this over on that other site that shall remain nameless and got a few comments, but also some not-so-good ones. Perhaps the community here might be more understanding and less critical, because this makes perfect sense to me.

Strauss & Howe co-authored a book published in 1997 entitled The Fourth Turning that I could not put down. While researching another topic, they discovered something odd, so they switched gears and researched in depth. They discovered that truly, history repeats itself, with quite distinctive and repeating patterns, going all the way back to the 1100s.

Their premise is simple. Each "turning" is comprised of approximately four 20-year periods similar to regular seasons of spring, summer, fall and winter. Each period lasts the time an average person is born till when we start having children. Four of these equal 80 years, an average lifespan.

The best way to envision this is to put yourself in the shoes of a person born in London England around 1904. Speaking in general, Zeitgeist terms, what would their life experiences be? That period was one of great technological advancement. Trains had been around for quite a while. Automobiles were new and were gaining in popularity. Next, what would be the life experiences of someone born in London in 1924? This time became known as "The roaring twenties" due to industrialization.

Lastly, what was the experience of a Londoner born in 1944? Starkly different. And to finish, envision the life experiences of 1964 London.

Strauss & Howe found the same repeating pattern over and over and over again, all the way back to the Dark Ages. The "turning" prior to and analogous to WWII included the Civil War. The one before that included the Revolutionary War. See where I'm going with this?

Each period corresponds to a season. "Spring" for us during this turning was just after WWII where we all rebuilt and put things back together. "Summer" was in the 1960s and everyone here knows what that was like. "Fall" was the 1980s. This is a period where things reach a zenith and begin to show signs of dying, just as during a regular fall the weather turns colder and trees lose their leaves. And then there's "Winter".

Guess where we are today?

Those born during each season also exhibit repeating patterns. We Boomers were born to buck the system, to challenge the conventionality of society, and that we did. The authors gave our archetype the name of "Patriots". Our job during the winter cycle is to help the "hero" generation, our present-day millennials.

And here is where I get to the reason for this long post. We are in this turning's "Crisis" period, which will end in approximately 2020 to 2025. Just as WWII's Dough Boys fought in the trenches during the last Crisis period, it will be the Millennials this time fighting the great fight. They will need our help, fellow Boomers. That's our job. We offer direction, but they are the one's who get it done.

And this makes me so proud and gives me hope. They are almost speaking in one voice: Enough of the madness, we want progressive policies. They are the ones who are to change the world. So your initial post is spot-on in that our systems and structures are becoming more and more dysfunctional, which will worsen until there's a single event, a tipping point if you will, that will bring everyone together. We have not reached the tipping point yet, but we can all feel and see it coming.

I just hope this time around we don't have a WWIII.

From what I've read and watched it does seem like he believes in the pseudoscience touted in The Fourth Turning, which is what I'm referring to. This is a separate concern from whatever he's peddling over at Breitbart.

The intellectual framework that explains many of the questions brought up in the podcast about the current state of American politics can be summed up
in two seminal books, A Conflict of Visions and
The Fourth Turning. After completing these two
volumes, Fox News will suddenly start making sense to you, since some of the language and terms used by the right wing are quite literally incomprehensible (what's "unconstrained vision"?) without these guides.

 

The first book in particular, about the distinction between people and processes, is very relevant today. Why does America tolerate a racist, misogynist, xenophobe? Because one won the election fair and square, while the other stole the
primary nomination from Bernie. So the right wingers are focused on the election process (regardless of candidate), and the left wingers are focused on the candidates (regardless of process). We are literally talking past each other when we don't
grasp this fundamental difference; no communication can take place.

 

About the creation of an Asian-American political voice, the right wing view is that more identity politics is NOT the answer. Again, the distinction between people and processes. We don't want to focus on Asian people (or Black people, or Green people...), instead we want to focus
on the process. BLM is an anger that exists because Obama didn't really make black peoples lives significantly better. Having a hypothetical Asian-American man in the White House wouldn't make our lives significantly better either. And having a racist, misogynist, xenophobe there won't make our lives
significantly worse either, and that's what processes are all about. Checks and balances built-in the system, as opposed to having a god-like dictator who's above the law.

 

If you are short on time, at least glance over the first 100 pages of A Conflict of Visions. The explanatory power of his thesis is profound, and reveals why we should fear the left much more (think 18th century French Revolution, which is what today's not-my-president protesters want).

Best explanation I've ever seen of this idea.

Might help to also explore the incredible repetitive and circular cycles of American politics. Amazing how we repeat ourselves so regularly. A good one I liked from the perspective of the President and how a good one governs with the tenor of the American political lean in mind:

Presidential Leadership in Political Time

I'd also check out:

The Fourth Turning: An American Prophecy

Despite it getting a bad wrap due to Steve Bannon using it to explain away his idiotic end of time accelerationism bullshit, it's an excellent book towards understanding how frighteningly repetitive we are.

From the article AlterNate linked, quoting what the Authors of The Fourth Turning said in 1997:
>Based on historical patterns, America will hit a once-in-a-century national crisis within the decade...'like winter,' the crisis or 'fourth turning' cannot be averted. It will last 20 years or so and bring hardship and upheavals similar to previous fourth turnings, such as the American Revolution, the Civil War, the Great Depression and World War II. The fourth turning is a perilous time because the result could be a new 'golden age' for America or the beginning of the end. It all will begin with a 'sudden spark' that catalyzes a crisis mood around the year 2005.

So, according to them, we're looking at a massive crisis that would be triggered around 2005, and be in full force no later than 2007.

From Wikipedia:
>The subprime crisis impact timeline lists dates relevant to the creation of a United States housing bubble and the 2005 housing bubble burst (or market correction) and the subprime mortgage crisis which developed during 2007 and 2008.



edit: realized that I needed more exposition.

There is a fantastic book by Chalmers Johnson on this issue called "Blowback". https://www.amazon.ca/Blowback-Cost-Consequences-American-Empire/dp/0805075593

>Am I missing something

You are, in the 90's, pc games you had entire control of the game software and files, you could mod things for free and people could make levels and share stuff for free. Ever since mmo's and steam, the corporate world has been doing a full court press against software ownership.

Pre mass high speed internet penetration they had to give you the entire game to run on your PC. Ever since they discovered the average gamer is tech illiterate and not very bright, they've been doing horrible stuff to the game files like encrypting stuff and making them difficult to mod.

Paid mods is further erosion of control of game software so they can remove your rights completely to own anything you are paying for. They are basically theives at this point and it would take a long discussion of intellectual property law and the mass corruption of capitalist society to fully flesh out.

Your post speaks to your political and historical ignorance of how corrupt the world really is, you don't really understand how evil the companies around you really are.

IP law is corrupt and is never going to be non corrupt, capitalism is not compatable with rule of law. You do not live in a democracy.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZYFxtNgOeiI

Book:

http://trilateral.org/download/doc/crisis_of_democracy.pdf

Before I begin your brain does not reason nor see reality as it is:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PYmi0DLzBdQ

Protectionism for the rich and big business by state intervention, radical market interference.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WHj2GaPuEhY#t=349

Manufacturing consent:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KwU56Rv0OXM

https://vimeo.com/39566117

Testing theories of representative government

https://scholar.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/mgilens/files/gilens_and_page_2014_-testing_theories_of_american_politics.doc.pdf

US distribution of wealth

https://imgur.com/a/FShfb

http://www2.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/power/wealth.html

What goes down in the US goes down in all capitalist western states, they all follow the same model of "politics as show" where the public has no input if you look at the research.

From war is a racket:

"I helped make Mexico, especially Tampico, safe for American oil intersts in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefits of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. In China I helped to see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested."[p. 10]

"War is a racket. ...It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives." [p. 23]

"The general public shoulders the bill [for war]. This bill renders a horrible accounting. Newly placed gravestones. Mangled bodies. Shattered minds. Broken hearts and homes. Economic instability. Depression and all its attendant miseries. Back-breaking taxation for generations and generations." [p. 24]

General Butler is especially trenchant when he looks at post-war casualties. He writes with great emotion about the thousands of traumatised soldiers, many of who lose their minds and are penned like animals until they die, and he notes that in his time, returning veterans are three times more likely to die prematurely than those who stayed home.

http://www.amazon.com/War-Racket-Antiwar-Americas-Decorated/dp/0922915865

I think most of us Americans feel shame over slavery and the Amerindian genocide, plus the numerous smaller abuses (railroad coolies, abuse of Irish, Japanese internment of WWII, etc.). Also those who have read our history recognize that our foreign policy has been nasty and exploitative since a few years after our founding (we exploited the hell out of the Caribbean and Latin America since the early 1800s, I highly recommend this).

That said, we've also done some wonderful things! Despite the propaganda and televised jingoism, most Americans are good-hearted and generous folks. I would even argue that we're the most benign and beneficent of the superpowers in history (compare us to Victorian British Empire or Colonial Spanish Empire or Holy Roman Empire or Rome itself, etc.).

I am proud to be an American, but also recognize that [like nearly ever people] we've done some horrible things. It is far more shameful to pretend we never did evil (Japan & Nanking, Turkey & Armenian genocide) than to recognize and admit our mistakes.

Globalism grew out of Cecil Rhodes Round Tables from around 1900, which sought to control the entire world for the benefit of Billionaire Oligarchs like himself.

After Cecil Rhodes death in 1902 the various Rhodes Foundations set up with his vast wealth were administered by Lord Alfred Milner and Lord Rothschild.

With the decline of the British Empire and the transfer of Hegemony and Global power from London to the U.S. between WW1 and WW2, the focus of the Globalist Groups transferred to controlling the politicians in Washington DC.

There are dozens of Globalist groups, but major ones include the Council of Foreign Relations (the CFR which was founded in the 1920's in New York), Chatham House (the CFR equivalent in London), the Trilateral Commission (founded by Rockefeller and Brzezinski in the 1970's), the Rockefeller Foundation, and George Soros "Open Society" forums and their multiple spin offs.

All of these groups seek to transfer wealth and power from the many to the few. The few being the owners and CEO's of major private banks, major Corporations and other Billionaire Oligarchs.

Since the 1980's wealth has been gradually transferred from the Middle Class to the elites in the top 0.01% by transferring well paid middle class jobs to the Third World or other low cost labor countries. This process was hugely accelerated in the 1990's with the advent of the internet, Globalist Trade deals such as NAFTA and the admission of China to the WTO.

Globalists support Open Borders for cheap labor which decreases wages for all but the top 5% of the Western population. (See the decline in well paid U.S. manufacturing jobs, U.S. illegal immigration from Mexico, South and Central America or H1B visas for software programmers from India. Or the expansion of the EU with cheap labor from former Warsaw Pact countries like Poland and Romania.)

Real median male wages in America have now declined to the levels last seen in 1972 and Home Ownership rates have declined to the levels of the early 1960's. Ordinary people from Western Europe have seen similar declines over the last 15 to 20 years.

Globalists seek to transfer power from democratically elected legislatures at State, Local and City levels, to undemocratic supranational institutions controlled by Corporate money (see the expansion of power of the U.S. Federal government in DC, or the EU in Brussels).

TPP and TTIP were both excellent examples of Globalist initiatives. Both included ISDS (Investor State Dispute Settlement) which sought to transfer power from democratically elected legislatures to a transnational arbitration panel composed of Corporate lawyers sitting as judge, jury, defense and prosecution, all paid by large Multinational Corporations.

TPP, TISA and TTIP agreements are massive Corporate power grabs dressed up as trade deals http://ian56.blogspot.co.uk/2015/11/tpp-tisa-and-ttip-agreements-are.html

The scheme to replace democratic governance with one world government controlled by a small cabal of Banking and Corporate Elites was documented in the 1960's by Georgetown Professor Carroll Quigley - a mentor of Bill Clinton:-

Tragedy and Hope by Carroll Quigley https://www.amazon.com/Tragedy-Hope-History-World-Time/dp/094500110X

The other strand of Globalist Doctrine derives from the Godfather of Neoconservatism Leo Strauss who also advocated anti democratic, authoritarian and totalitarian, one world government controlled by a handful of Ruling Elites.

The Neocon Agenda and its Results http://ian56.blogspot.co.uk/2015/04/the-neocon-agenda-and-its-results.html

from Carroll Quigley's book Tragedy & Hope (1966)

"The argument that the two parties should represent opposed ideals and policies, one, perhaps, of the Right and the other of the Left, is a foolish idea acceptable only to doctrinaire and academic thinkers," he wrote. "Instead, the two parties should be almost identical, so that the American people can 'throw the rascals out' at any election without leading to any profound or extensive shifts in policy."

Stop voting for the "practical" lesser of two evils - you're rewarding the evil establishment by saying no matter how bad a major party's candidate is, he's got your vote b/c at least he's not as bad as the other guy. Well guess what - over, and over, and over again the establishment will give you evil b/c they know you will vote for it.

Kaczynski made a lot of sense until he started talking about a violent uprising.

I would add to the list "Tragedy and Hope" by Carroll Quigley.

And anything / everything by Philip K. Dick.

I read Rise and Fall of the Third Reich back when I was in high school. I've since started listening to it again on audio book.


I highly highly recommend it, it is the best book on Nazi Germany that I have ever read. It is written by journalist William L. Shirer, who was a correspondent for US media in the years leading up to the war and he continued to live in Berlin until the US and Germany went to war and he was asked to leave the country.

Hell of a book and apparently non fiction counts as literature so +1.

This has such a long and many faceted answer. Be aware this is just my opinion, if you want an in depth look at how it happened The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich is well written and does not read like a textbook, I recommend it.

The heart of it lies in the years following The Great War, WWI, or what your local history chooses to calls the European war from 1914-1918. At the end of that war The Treaty of Versailles drove the German economy into the dumpster. The resulting Germanic generation that grew up in the 20's and 30's were barely getting by. They had little to look forward to or be proud of. Their country was broken up, they were basically allowed no heavy industry, and they were paying billions of Reichsmark in reparations that left them with no working capital and very broken economy. This goes right along with the world experiencing the [Great Depression] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Depression). No money, no jobs, no hope. This makes for a very unhappy people willing to do almost anything to be proud again.

Along comes a man wanting to "Make Germany Great Again". This man is a great orator, he speaks to the pride of the German peoples. He terrorizes the established political setup and through force of will and quite a bit of jack-boot thuggery finds himself in charge. He tells the rest of the world that he is going to industrialize his nation and in the process make a small army just for their own protection. "Sorry about your treaty but, we're going to ignore it." He then found a scapegoat that they can demonize and blame for their problems.

We now have political machine that knows how to use violence to get into power and keep it. We have a government that has successfully told the rest of the world to go away and let Germany ignore the treaties. You have a scapegoat to blame any remaining problems on. You have a large enough portion of your populace either complacent enough or afraid enough to allow it all to happen. Now they ramp up the industrialization and build a real army.

A large percentage of the German population have spent their lives beat-down, poor, and barely getting by with no hope for the future. But now there is hope! The economy is working again, the German people are strong and proud. They are taking back lands that are traditionally belonging to Germanic peoples with their new army. They are removing their scapegoats from their towns and villages. Pretty quickly this leads to war.

By 1944 Germans know there are massive problems. They can't write it in the papers but, they do whisper it. They are losing the war and they remember what comes of losing wars.

I really feel the slaughter at Oradour-sur-Glane is frustration and fear of what will happen when Germany looses again. The soldiers fear a return to the Germany of the 20's and 30's. They don't want another gutted economy, no luxury items, barely enough to eat, no work, no hope, and no pride. That type of fear is primal. There's a deep seated need for violence and domination of your adversaries in the human brain that goes back to our earliest survival. To survive you must crush your competition and drive them out if not for yourself, for the next generation. I'm not saying that is the only reason but I do believe this animal drive is a significant contributing factor that was satiated through this violence. But, like a lot of violence it only made things worse.

tl;dr Fear is a powerful thing.

Pathetic human being? Sure. Nazi? Sounds like you need to brush up on your history a bit. Rather than bash you and downvote you, I invite you take the opportunity to actually learn what a nazi is:
https://www.amazon.com/Rise-Fall-Third-Reich-History/dp/1451651686

Wages of destruction by Adam Tooze

History of the Third Reich Series which include:

The Coming of the Third Reich

The Third Reich in Power

The Third Reich at War


Rise and fall of the Third Reich

Thats very good reading material right there.

I'd recommend The Second World War and World War Two Day by Day.

My first WW2 book was Rise and Fall of the Third Reich but it just covers Germany. Good book though add it to your list.

Was going to recommend Keegan as well, so at least that's two random internet strangers who agree this would be a good starting point!

There is also Shirer's Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. It may be a bit massive, but it's a damn good read.
https://www.amazon.ca/Rise-Fall-Third-Reich-History/dp/1451651686

You need to get your head out of your ass mate. They don't want to "meet the left halfway", they aren't interested in dialogue, or compromise, or getting along.

They would glady curb stomp you and piss on your corpse except it's just slightly against their favor right now. But every cringing waffling "surely we can talk through our differences!" type empowers them.

Since you enjoy edification, pick up a book next time.

They Thought They Were Free is another must-read. There's one quote from it which terrifies me because it's exactly what we're going through with trying to figure out the flashpoint that brings people into the streets.

I don't think there will ever be a perfect repetition of history or any historical figure, but we can at least look at the years that mirror ours and the traits he shares with other demagogues. 2018 is as much 1789 or 1848 as it is 1928 or 1932. He has the personality of a Mussolini with the ambitions of Lewis Levin with the ego of Hitler with the same audience that Huey Long had. All of these are a really bad combination if we face any sort of national crisis or economic downturn. Normalcy bias has killed so many people in the past that it can't dictate how we respond to today and tomorrow.

If you have time, I highly recommend reading that entire book. The whole thing is fascinating because it dives down to the personal level with interviews with Germans who lived through the whole process.

The book's a little awkward to read in public though, what with the big swastika on the cover. I got more than a few strange looks on the train.

There's an awesome book out I learned about today called "They Thought They Were Free" (http://www.amazon.com/They-Thought-Were-Free-Germans/dp/0226511928) about the perception everyday Germans had during World War II. Most were aware SOMEthing was wrong, but they were all mutually benefitting from whatever it was, so chose, some unconsciously to not say or do anything. Fascinating book. I'm about 3/4 through.

Yea, it seems like nobody takes protests seriously unless you're willing to become violent. Ghandi actually felt it the Jews in WW2 should have protested by walking into the ovens. Fascists are willing to kill, giving them an instant advantage over their nonviolent adversaries. The whole "their evil but they wouldn't actually black bag me and send me to a camp" mentality. Several excellent books have covered this trend in fascist uprisings.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0226511928/ref=pd_aw_sim_14_2?ie=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=NMB493XQXAH9GFM2Z16F

https://www.amazon.com/Cant-Happen-Here-Signet-Classics/dp/0451465644

This is a good question.

I would like to echo that sentiment.

While the Koch brothers have had an aggressive political agenda for some time, applying their billions of dollars to influence a radical agenda onto US politics Dark Money, by Jane Mayer ...

The bigger issue here is:

• Do you trust the site?
  
• Do you trust the author?
  
• Do you trust the content?
  
• Do you trust the OP? reddit-user-analyser
  
  Be skeptical.
  
  Some of us are misanthropes, some of us are a bit kooky, some of us might actually be reasonable normal human beings; but some among us are bad actors which have commercial, corporate or political agendas. some of us are bots, trolls, manipulators.
  
  Again, this is a good question.

I've actually been really disappointed to read into the history and current usage of most modern non-profits (charities) and realized that they are basically a tax dodge for the super-rich. For instance, think of the tax breaks for donating to various non-profits. They don't disappear if you own the charity, allowing you to create charities, place your own money in them to reduce your tax burden, and spend it how you like.

And almost none has to be directed towards your stated goal, similar to how non-profits like The Wounded Warriors Project use less than 10% of the donated money to actually help veterans.

Even worse, depending on the type of 501 non-profit it is, you can usually use that money politically. Recent-ish court cases have determined that, even ones that were originally designed to not permit political spending, the word "primarily" allows for up to 49% of money to be spend on political issues directly. And obfuscation can allow for plenty more to indirectly support political issues.

A final piece of the puzzle is how you can set up tax-free trusts for your kids to avoid estate taxes. They sound good: the rich get no taxes to transfer money to their kids because the interest that accrues on the trust for a decade or two goes to charities. But when own the charity you are giving the interest to, it's just a tax dodge.

If you are interested in reading more, the book Dark Money is a fascinating read. It is a bit left of center, though. Provides a lot of background on non-profits and their inception though... they used to be illegal and thought of as thoroughly un-American. And now, they are used to take billions of dollars from the wealthy, while reducing their tax burden, to fund their political causes with no limits, thanks to cases like Citizen's United.

Sorry if this was all a little off topic.

Keep digging:

Look up Jane Mayer and Nancy MacLean.

Look into the Koch, Scaife, Olin, De Vos, Bradley, and Coors families, as well as Sheldon Adelson.

Look into the economics departments at the University of Virginia, Virginia Tech and George Mason University since the 1950s.

Follow the money.

And look at the use of neurolinguistic programming in the higher levels of the fundraising, voter registration and get-out-the-vote schemes in both of our major political parties.

And once you've done all that, go volunteer to work for your county or state party political organization to see how the pyramid works and whether or not I'm talking out the side of my neck.

cc: u/Lamont-Cranston, u/troublesomefaux

Yes, it was a Princeton study iirc... a short summary can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5tu32CCA_Ig

If you're interested in a detailed and quite focused historical review of how the US went from democracy to oligarchy I would recommend Jane Mayer's, "Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right"

>A tinge of anti-government rhetoric is justified and healthy given government's role as the primary enforcer of feminist injustice against men.

This anti government rhetoric isn't grass roots. The right wing of the mrm has been astroturfed. Its not really for mens interests, its for the interests of billionaires.

https://www.amazon.com/Dark-Money-History-Billionaires-Radical/dp/0385535597

it's not 'taking over'

anti-intellectualism has been a 'thing' in mrrka for many years

hell, this pulitzer-prize winning book dealt with this very issue in the 1960s

I don't think this is exclusively an American phenomenon. However you may be onto something given how anti-intellectual American discourse can be and how averse Americans seem to be towards disciplines that they don't see as practical. A whole conversation on American anti-intellectualism seems to be what you're looking for. http://www.amazon.com/Anti-Intellectualism-American-Life-Richard-Hofstadter/dp/0394703170

If you watch Jersey shore then it's probably still for fags. It's been around far longer then mass media though. Check out

Anti-Intellectualism in American Life

Det må være bogen "They Thought They Were Free" om tyskerne i årene 1933 til 1945. Spændende læsning. Men omslaget er et kæmpe kagekors, hvilket gør at jeg er nødt til at gemme bogen af vejen, da den ellers giver for mange kommentarer fra folk, der konkluderer før de undersøger. Bogen kan ses her: https://www.amazon.com/They-Thought-Were-Free-Germans/dp/0226511928

Edit: Hagekors ikke kagekors...

Which is fine and dandy up until you find out that a lot of people who were actually killed were innocent of those crimes, and that it's also used to wipe out political opposition. Seriously, that's a stupid argument.

"The Soviets were cool, because they only killed people who were threatening social order." Which is fine and dandy, except it ignores the huge swaths of people who were killed for "threatening the social order" who were either completely innocent or just killed for political convenience.

There have been books written all about how people who live under totalitarian regimes who thought things were great when they actually weren't, and only noticed how shit things were right before the shit hit the fan so hard everyone in a square mile got covered in it. Hell, one book, as well as one of the most famous and best books on this very matter, is literally called They Thought They Were Free, which describes life in a wide variety of totalitarian nations from Nazi Germany, to Fascist Italy, to the Soviet Union, to North Korea.

>The Philippines is a sovereign country, this is the man they chose, he has popular support as do his policies, and that's where it end.

Sure, but that doesn't mean the man isn't doing things that are terrible and should be heavily criticized. The "they're a sovereign nation" argument only gives you that they have a right to elect a totalitarian nutbag as president, it does nothing to justify the choice thereof or excuse him from criticism.

Being popularly supported doesn't make your actions humane, them being humane makes them humane. And inhumane actions, regardless of how popularly supported, are still inhumane.

>There isn't some one-size-fits-all law, rule or political system which is applicable to or appropriate for all countries at all times. Thinking there is is a type of deranged fanaticism.

But what there are are broadly agreed upon standards of human rights and necessary laws. One of the most important among them, especially with regards to the justice system, being the right to due process and trial instead of the unilateral ability for someone to arbitrarily decide you are guilty and thus worthy of execution.

There's a really excellent (and sort of scary) book about this called "They Thought They Were Free". The author went back to Germany, and interviewed "regular joe" type people that were alive during Hitler's rise to power. When asked how they let it happen, they all said that they thought Hitler had their best interests in mind and was protecting them from all kinds of threats.

A quote from Sinclair Lewis comes to mind: "When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross."

> I understand the worries, but starting to compare permanent marks on your body such as implants ..... is not that fair.

Except of course it is already happening. More companies are chipping their workers like pets

>Also comparing a company wanting to identify you through your fingerprint to Nazi concentration camp is maybe taking it a bit too far don't you think?

I did not compare the two. I explained why people may violently oppose this policy change. To you it's a trivial matter, but to others it is a cause for great concern, worthy of losing their job over and fighting for in a tribunal/court room .

Is this concern reasonable? Maybe not. But your original post asked the question "Why are people obsessing over this?". And I have answered why some may be horrified by it.

Some people see this as the thin edge of the wedge. A wedge that in the past ended in concentration camps. If you still don't get it perhaps you should read "They Thought They Were Free: The Germans 1933-45 by Milton Sanford Mayer" First published in 1955

It explains how a representative democracy turned into a dictatorship. Not overnight, but piece by piece. Little by little and a warning from history to never let it happen again.

Some people take that warning seriously.

> they do it in small enough increments that nobody notices while it's happening..

In "They Thought They Were Free", Milton Mayer returned to Germany and interviewed Germans to try to determine how they had let Hitler come to power. One of them remarks:

> "What no one seemed to notice," said a colleague of mine, a philologist, "was the ever widening gap, after 1933, between the government and the people. Just think how very wide this gap was to begin with, here in Germany. And it became always wider. You know it doesn't make people close to their government to be told that this is a people's government, a true democracy, or to be enrolled in civilian defense, or even to vote. All this has little, really nothing to do with knowing one is governing.

> "What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if the people could understand it, it could not be released because of national security. And their sense of identification with Hitler, their trust in him, made it easier to widen this gap and reassured those who would otherwise have worried about it.

> "This separation of government from people, this widening of the gap, took place so gradually and so insensibly, each step disguised (perhaps not even intentionally) as a temporary emergency measure or associated with true patriotic allegiance or with real social purposes. And all the crises and reforms (real reforms, too) so occupied the people that they did not see the slow motion underneath, of the whole process of government growing remoter and remoter."

the root cause is billonaire dirty energy magnates spreading their anti-science agenda through their donation networks. check out dark money, chapter eight. i'm not sure how basic science literacy will help a sprawling, well-funded anti-science propaganda campaign.

the kochs, scaifes, and their ilk are enemies of mankind and should be treated as such.

here

​

also if you got the time

Maybe this?

From: https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/kochland-examines-how-the-koch-brothers-made-their-fortune-and-the-influence-it-bought

>If there is any lingering uncertainty that the Koch brothers are the primary sponsors of climate-change doubt in the United States, it ought to be put to rest by the publication of “Kochland: The Secret History of Koch Industries and Corporate Power in America,” by the business reporter Christopher Leonard. This seven-hundred-and-four-page tome doesn’t break much new political ground, but it shows the extraordinary behind-the-scenes influence that Charles and David Koch have exerted to cripple government action on climate change.
>
>Leonard, who has written for Bloomberg Businessweek and the Wall Street Journal, devotes most of the book to an even-handed telling of how the two brothers from Wichita, Kansas, built up Koch Industries, a privately owned business so profitable that together they have amassed some hundred and twenty billion dollars, a fortune larger than that of Amazon’s C.E.O., Jeff Bezos, or the Microsoft founder Bill Gates. The project took Leonard more than six years to finish and it draws on hundreds of hours of interviews, including with Charles Koch, the C.E.O. and force without equal atop the sprawling corporate enterprise. (David Koch retired from the firm last year.)
>
>While “Kochland” is more focused on business than on politics, in line with Leonard’s “The Meat Racket: The Secret Takeover of America’s Food Business,” from 2014, it nonetheless adds new details about the ways in which the brothers have leveraged their fortune to capture American politics. Leonard shows that the Kochs’ political motives are both ideological, as hardcore free-market libertarians, and self-interested, serving their fossil-fuel-enriched bottom line. The Kochs’ secret sauce, as Leonard describes it, has been a penchant for long-term planning, patience, and flexibility; a relentless pursuit of profit; and the control that comes from owning some eighty per cent of their business empire themselves, without interference from stockholders or virtually anyone else.
>
>Saying anything new about the Kochs isn’t easy. The two brothers have been extensively covered: they are the subject of Daniel Schulman’s excellent biography “Sons of Wichita,” from 2014, and the focus of much in-depth investigative reporting, including a piece I wrote for The New Yorker, from 2010, and my book “Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right,” from 2016.
>
>Leonard, nonetheless, manages to dig up valuable new material, including evidence of the Kochs’ role in perhaps the earliest known organized conference of climate-change deniers, which gathered just as the scientific consensus on the issue was beginning to gel. The meeting, in 1991, was sponsored by the Cato Institute, a Washington-based libertarian think tank, which the Kochs founded and heavily funded for years. As Leonard describes it, Charles Koch and other fossil-fuel magnates sprang into action that year, after President George H. W. Bush announced that he would support a treaty limiting carbon emissions, a move that posed a potentially devastating threat to the profits of Koch Industries. At the time, Bush was not an outlier in the Republican Party. Like the Democrats, the Republicans largely accepted the scientific consensus on climate change, reflected in the findings of expert groups such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which had formed in 1988, under the auspices of the United Nations.

Here's a big list.

https://www.haaretz.com/us-news/.premium-researcher-dupont-helped-nazi-germany-out-of-ideology-1.7186636

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/ibm-holocaust_b_1301691

https://www.amazon.com/IBM-Holocaust-Strategic-Alliance-Corporation/dp/0914153277

https://www.amazon.com/War-Against-Weak-Eugenics-Americas/dp/0914153293/ref=pd_lpo_sbs_14_t_0?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=PD3S20TYT0CRAFMCV31W

https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/1796

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2004/sep/25/usa.secondworldwar

https://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/10/books/review/the-brothers-by-stephen-kinzer.html

https://www.amazon.com/Brothers-Foster-Dulles-Allen-Secret/dp/0805094970

https://www.democracynow.org/2016/1/20/the_kochs_the_nazis_book_reveals

https://www.amazon.com/Dark-Money-History-Billionaires-Radical/dp/0307947904/ref=asc_df_0307947904/?tag=hyprod-20&linkCode=df0&hvadid=312669563714&hvpos=1o1&hvnetw=g&hvrand=5810486821632951259&hvpone=&hvptwo=&hvqmt=&hvdev=c&hvdvcmdl=&hvlocint=&hvlocphy=9021356&hvtargid=pla-432540147973&psc=1

https://www.thenation.com/article/hitlers-willing-executioners/

https://www.thenation.com/article/kodaks-nazi-connections/

https://www.academia.edu/21745112/The_Myth_of_the_Good_War_America_in_the_Second_World_War

https://www.amazon.com/Myth-Good-War-USA-World/dp/1550287710

https://libcom.org/files/How%20the%20Allied%20multinationals%20supplied%20Nazi%20Germany%20throughout%20World%20War%20II.pdf

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MaWz42tmxug

https://www.amazon.com/Trading-Enemy-Charles-Higham/dp/044019055X

Here's a good place to start. Dark Money goes into the history of these shadowy megadonors and surprise! They're racist!
[Here's a link]
(https://www.amazon.com/Dark-Money-History-Billionaires-Radical/dp/0307947904)

Read Dark Money, strongly recommend reading that along with Piketty's Capital in the 21st Century.

Read Dark Money. Billionaire “donations” are powerful tools.


https://www.amazon.com/Dark-Money-History-Billionaires-Radical/dp/0307947904

Unfortunately, I don't think it can be said with full context. But I'll try. You can get what the book is about here:
https://www.amazon.com/Dark-Money-History-Billionaires-Radical/dp/0307947904/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1506716249&sr=8-1&keywords=dark+money

Basically, the trust fund kids (koch brothers and other billionaires) are creating/funding think tanks that focuses on whatever means to add to their bottom line. They are willing to skewer education in the way that teaches limited government is good for business. However, when the bailout idea came, they gladly took it. So they're not really taking on any ideological side, but whatever is easy for them to gain more money.

The reason for this is because the Koch brothers were brought up in a very militaristic style parenting by their father.. who teaches you must do whatever means to win. They were pitted against each other in fights, games, etc. so they carry that determination in business as well, and it's causing harm in our political system and society because they have so much control of wealth and thus influence.


There's a lot more to this obviously, the book is really a must read.

You're probably right... One of those books on this subject matter: https://www.amazon.com/Dark-Money-History-Billionaires-Radical/dp/0385535597

Mainly pushed by the Koch Brothers:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L1O94kDLV7E''

https://www.amazon.com/Dark-Money-History-Billionaires-Radical/dp/0385535597

Jane Meyer wrote a interesting book about the Kochs and Dark Money

http://www.amazon.com/Dark-Money-History-Billionaires-Radical/dp/0385535597

Whatever your persuasion, this should concern you.

People ought to read Dark Money.

This thing may just well be a long con, well thought out on a timeline that exceeds the intelligence and collective memory of most US citizens.

Your assertion that there is absolutely no state-sponsored influence on any facets of American media, and that there are no power players who involve themselves in advertising, is obviously, categorically false. Your argument is founded solely on either naivety or misinformation. I'd recommend to everybody seeing this read The Dictator's Handbook, NY Times best-selling Dark Money, and maybe even Pulitzer-prize winning Black Flag for a more in-depth study on the complicated issue of how exactly we're manipulated and exploited.

> the alarming rise of Anti-Intellectualism

We've been dealing with it for a while in the US

Appropriately titled: Anti-Intellectualism in American Life

Richard Holfstradter has a good collection of the Lincoln Douglas debates.

Another great work published in 1963 that still applies today.

> Hitler took about a decade from locking people up to systematically killing them. Concentration camps were never intended to kill people. I mean, of course plenty of people died, but mostly due to neglect. They didn't really care if people died, but it wasn't the goal. Death camps were part of their Final Solution which only really happened when their war in the East started and they were suddenly in a hurry.

There's a great book, Bloodlands (https://www.amazon.ca/Bloodlands-Europe-Between-Hitler-Stalin/dp/0465031471/) I recently read that focuses on the years of 1933-1945 on Hitler and Stalin in central and eastern Europe.

Hitler initially hoped to 'rid' to Jews to Russia, after it was taken over by Nazi Germany. It was supposed to be dumping ground. When he failed in doing that, that's when the plans changed, and the concentration camps shifted to extermination camps.

I think you're thinking of one particular book, which is really good: Nothing is True and Everything is Possible, by Peter Pomerantsev.

No one is saying you shouldn't maintain your skepticism of the news, but there's a distinction to be made between news outlets, don't you think?

A news outlet that aspires to truth and one that aspires to propagandize shouldn't be falsely equated to one another.

Before claiming this is a false equivalence (or the opposite- claiming they are indeed similar enough to be equated) one should ensure there's substantial evidence supporting this claim. Otherwise the argument only serves to muddy the waters between news outlets.

There are some really dystopian consequences of removing all public trust in the media/press- imagine a country where everyone believes that Nothing Is True And Everything Is Possible.

AKA Nothing is True and Everything is Possible. https://www.amazon.com/Nothing-True-Everything-Possible-Surreal/dp/1610396006

This is a good read: https://www.theguardian.com/news/2015/apr/09/kremlin-hall-of-mirrors-military-information-psychology

And he adapted his various essays into a book:

https://www.amazon.com/Nothing-True-Everything-Possible-Surreal/dp/1610396006

"Fake news" isn't an accurate or appropriate name for the problems you're describing. It's a term that was originally coined to pick out a very specific kind of social media-driven disinformation that's deliberately designed to undermine the credibility of authentic news providers. The fact that Trump and his supporters have succeeded in hijacking the concept and turning it against the mainstream media (which happens to be highly critical of Trump and his administration) is frankly kinda breathtaking.

Here's the reason why "fake news" recently entered the popular lexicon in such a big way:

>Moscow’s influence campaign followed a Russian messaging strategy that blends covert
intelligence operations—such as cyber activity—with overt efforts by Russian Government agencies, state-funded media, third-party intermediaries, and paid social media users or “trolls.”
Russia, like its Soviet predecessor, has a history of conducting covert influence campaigns focused on US presidential elections that have used intelligence officers and agents and press placements to disparage candidates perceived as hostile to the Kremlin.
>[...]
>Russia’s state-run propaganda machine contributed to the influence campaign by serving as a platform for Kremlin messaging to Russian and international audiences.

That's not a conspiracy theory. It's from the official US Intelligence Community Assessment.

In this video, Senator Jack Reed questions James Clapper, the former Director of National Intelligence, about the Russian influence campaign.

>REED: "One of the aspects of this Russian hacking was not just disseminating information they had exploited from computers, but also allegations of fake news sites, fake news stories, that were propagated. Is that accurate, or was that one aspect of this problem?"

>CLAPPER: "This was a multifaceted campaign. The hacking was only one part of it. It also entailed classical propaganda, disinformation, fake news."

>REED: "Does that continue?"

>CLAPPER: "Yes."

A guy named Peter Pomerantsev wrote a very well-received book called Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible in 2014, right around the time of Russia's annexation of Crimea. You should read that, along with this in-depth article he wrote for The Guardian in April of the following year. Here's a representative excerpt:

>Late last year, I came across a Russian manual called Information-Psychological War Operations: A Short Encyclopedia and Reference Guide (The 2011 edition, credited to Veprintsev et al, and published in Moscow by Hotline-Telecom, can be purchased online at the sale price of 348 roubles). The book is designed for “students, political technologists, state security services and civil servants” – a kind of user’s manual for junior information warriors. The deployment of information weapons, it suggests, “acts like an invisible radiation” upon its targets: “The population doesn’t even feel it is being acted upon. So the state doesn’t switch on its self-defence mechanisms.” If regular war is about actual guns and missiles, the encyclopedia continues, “information war is supple, you can never predict the angle or instruments of an attack”.
>
>[...]
>
>Where once the KGB would have spent months, or years, carefully planting well-made forgeries through covert agents in the west, the new dezinformatsiya is cheap, crass and quick: created in a few seconds and thrown online. The aim seems less to establish alternative truths than to spread confusion about the status of truth. In a similar vein, the aim of the professional pro-Putin online trolls who haunt website comment sections is to make any constructive conversation impossible. As Shaun Walker recently reported in this newspaper, at one “troll factory” in St Petersburg, employees are paid about £500 a month to pose as regular internet users defending Putin, posting insulting pictures of foreign leaders, and spreading conspiracy theories – for instance, that Ukrainian protestors on the Maidan were fed tea laced with drugs, which led them to overthrow the (pro-Moscow) government.
>
>Taken together, all these efforts constitute a kind of linguistic sabotage of the infrastructure of reason: if the very possibility of rational argument is submerged in a fog of uncertainty, there are no grounds for debate – and the public can be expected to decide that there is no point in trying to decide the winner, or even bothering to listen.

It's important to understand that what we've been calling "fake news" isn't just fake news. It isn't The Onion or even The National Enquirer. It's something entirely novel: a potent new kind of propaganda, actively funded and deliberately steered by a hostile foreign power, delivered on a massive scale via open social media platforms that are uniquely vulnerable to it.

And it's working--not just in the US and the UK, but all over the Western world. The fact that you and so many others are prepared to dismiss credible news sources as "fake" and turn instead to unsourced, disreputable, thoroughly discredited conspiracy theories (e.g. the 4chan thing you mention) is proof of that.

There's also a book called "Nothing is true and everything is possible".

> And did you know Healthcare is 1/6th of the economy?

Yes, if you didn't know this and you are commenting on health policy then you are an idiot.

> and voted Stein in the general.

Congrats. You handed Trump his win. The amount of votes going to Stein in the three states that unexpectedly put Trump over the top all received more Stein votes than Trump's margin of victory. I think Stein is right in a few areas but is for the most part a bonehead. And completely unelectable.

> If you cannot hear the war drums beating and almost the exact same trumped up, on wishy washy non-evidence like in the run up/(foist) to the Iraq War

What I hear is a reaction to Russia's obvious malfeasance and aggressive actions against our country.

You should probably just purchase this:

https://www.amazon.com/Nothing-True-Everything-Possible-Surreal/dp/1610396006

If you are pretending Russia isn't an aggressive actor bent on harming the US then you haven't been paying attention.

> I think Stein is even better than Bernie on foreign policy.

Who cares? She can't get elected.

Another good one - Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia

The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine

In his latest work, renowned Israeli author and academic Pappe (A History of Modern Palestine) does not mince words, doing Jimmy Carter one better (or worse, depending on one's point of view) by accusing Israel of ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity beginning in the 1948 war for independence, and continuing through the present. Focusing primarily on Plan D (Dalet, in Hebrew), conceived on March 10, 1948, Pappe demonstrates how ethnic cleansing was not a circumstance of war, but rather a deliberate goal of combat for early Israeli military units led by David Ben-Gurion, whom Pappe labels the "architect of ethnic cleansing." The forced expulsion of 800,000 Palestinians between 1948-49, Pappe argues, was part of a long-standing Zionist plan to manufacture an ethnically pure Jewish state. Framing his argument with accepted international and UN definitions of ethnic cleansing, Pappe follows with an excruciatingly detailed account of Israeli military involvement in the demolition and depopulation of hundreds of villages, and the expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Arab inhabitants. An accessible, learned resource, this volume provides important inroads into the historical antecedents of today's conflict, but its conclusions will not be easy for everyone to stomach: Pappe argues that the ethnic cleansing of Palestine continues today, and calls for the unconditional return of all Palestinian refugees and an end to the Israeli occupation. Without question, Pappe's account will provoke ire from many readers; importantly, it will spark discussion as well.

In no particular order:

http://www.amazon.com/Beirut-Jerusalem-Thomas-L-Friedman/dp/1250015499

http://www.amazon.com/Lawrence-Arabia-Deceit-Imperial-Making-ebook/dp/B00BH0VSPI/ref=zg_bs_4995_5

http://www.amazon.com/My-Promised-Land-Triumph-Tragedy-ebook/dp/B009QJMXI8/ref=zg_bs_4995_4


http://www.amazon.com/Ethnic-Cleansing-Palestine-Ilan-Pappe/dp/1851685553/ref=zg_bs_4995_10

http://www.amazon.com/Arabic-Thought-Liberal-Age-1798-1939/dp/0521274230/ref=cm_lmf_tit_3

http://www.amazon.com/History-Arab-Peoples-Albert-Hourani/dp/0446393924/ref=cm_lmf_tit_4

http://www.amazon.com/Women-Gender-Islam-Historical-Modern/dp/0300055838/ref=cm_lmf_tit_9

http://www.amazon.com/Emergence-Modern-Studies-Eastern-History/dp/0195134605/ref=cm_lmf_tit_10

http://www.amazon.com/Peace-End-All-Ottoman-Creation/dp/0805068848/ref=cm_lmf_tit_17


As a non-Muslim, non-Jew, non-Arab, non-Semite, American, and having read these (yay strict immigrant parents!) and some other histories, as well as having had the attacks of 9/11 give me a neurosis about following the news in the Middle East/Central/South Asia as regards potential US involvement and issues:


A lot feels familiar to me, some of it even seems like stuff I know a good deal about, and a few things about "The Middle East" which is a massively rich and complex sociopolitical place and slice of humanity are things I'd consider myself very well read on.


And I don't know shit.


I can tell you as a native born American and US voter what I think my country's policies (in a limited, broad strokes sense) should be - - - but beyond that, there's very little I've ever seen as conclusive and firm coming from anyone who by dint of identity didn't have 'skin in the game' .

http://www.amazon.com/Ethnic-Cleansing-Palestine-Ilan-Pappe/dp/1851685553

It is indeed a complex situation, but these would be a good start:

• “State of Terror: How terrorism Created Modern Israel” by Thomas Suárez
  
• “The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine” by Ilan Pappé
  
• “Culture and Resistance: Conversations with Edward W. Said” by David Barsamian
  
• “The Battle for Justice in Palestine” by Ali Abunimah
  
• “Palestinians in Israel: Segregation, Discrimination, and Democracy” by Ben White
  
• “The 51 Day War: Ruin and Resistance in Gaza” by Max Blumenthal
  
  Earlier history:
  
  
• “All That Remains: The Palestinian Villages Occupied and Depopulated by Israel in 1948” and “Before Their Diaspora: A Photographic History of The Palestinians 1876-1948” by Walid Khalidi
  
  For more contextual books, I would recommend:
  
  
• “Orientalism” by Edward Said
  
• “The Holocaust Industry” and “Beyond Chutzpah” by Norman Finkelstein
  
• “Not by Might, nor by Power: The Zionist Betrayal of Judaism” By Moshe Menuhin

https://www.amazon.com/Ethnic-Cleansing-Palestine-Ilan-Pappe/dp/1851685553

Yawn take this sad and wornout hasbara revisionism elsewhere, even Israeli historians admit to the genocide and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians

https://www.amazon.com/Ethnic-Cleansing-Palestine-Ilan-Pappe/dp/1851685553

https://www.haaretz.com/1.5262454

You should read "The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine" by Ilan Pappe

It's very enlightening. I haven't finished it yet, I keep giving my copy away.

>The state of Israel was established by a decision of the UN from November 29th, 1947. That's the legal warrant.

It was only a non-binding recommendation. It didn't grant the zionist party the authority to unilaterally implement the partition plan. The execution of the plan could only be justified if both parties consented to it. The Palestinians rejected it understandably because it was not equitable towards them. By establishing Israel in the face of Arab and Palestinian rejection, the Zionist committed an egregious act of war.

>Access to Jordan's only seaport of Aqaba and to Israel's only Indian Ocean seaport of Eilat is contingent upon passage through the Gulf of Aqaba, giving the Straits of Tiran strategic importance. Egypt's blockade of the Straits to Israeli ships and ships bound for Israel in 1956 and again in 1967 was a catalyst to the Suez Crisis in 1956 and the Six-Day War in 1967.

I understand but none of that can be reasonably interpreted as an act of war. In fact a good case can be made that those Egyptian actions were done in the effort to avoid war. The fact remains Israel started the hostilities in both 1956 (along with France and UK) and 1967. The brute facts can lead to no other conclusion

>There goes your justification for Hamas violence against Israel.

What? I support the Palestinian struggle against Israel as they are righteously fighting for freedom, liberty, justice and self-determination.

>Under the Alon plan, the territories that Israel grabbed in its war of defense in 1967 would have been returned in return for full peace. The Arabs rejected that plan. They could've gotten the territories back pretty much for free, but they chose to fight a war, and lost.

Wikipedia describes it as a plan to “to implement the "Jordanian option" to the Palestinian refugee problem (also known as "Jordan is Palestine").” That is unacceptable. You hold a strange definition of “free” here.

>No. I justify the invasion because towns all across Israel's northern border were under constant Katyusha fire. The assassination attempt in the UK was just the last straw. Moreover, I don't justify the way the war turned out. It was presented falsely to the Israeli government and fought under false pretenses. I don't deny that. This is a case of a good cause poorly executed.

Well, that admission is commendable but one has to consider the Katyusha fire in the context of the Palestinian refuge crisis and the illegal occupation. It is not honest or fair to leave this out of the picture whenever discussing Palestinian (and Arab) hostility and aggression against Israel.

>I actually ran into an account of these refugee camps from 1961. Apparently not too squalid.

Are you arguing that since some of their camps aren't that bad (and this is just one eye witness account of dubious reliability, since the American media has always been extremely partial towards Israel) it is unreasonable for the Pals to hold ill-will towards those who expelled them from their ancestral homes?

>It's true that Israel expelled some Palestinians. However, most of them ran away so as not to get in the way of the "soon to be victorious" advancing Arab armies, without having seen an Israeli. They were planning to return shortly.

That is at best groundless conjecture and at worst outright fabricated propaganda. Most of the evidence indicates the Pals were expelled in a systematic campaign of terrorism and ethnic cleansing. They were in fact strictly told by the Arab governments to stay put and not leave their homes under any circumstances. This is how wikipedia describes the effect of the Dei Yassin massacre, for example:

> Contemporary reports, originating apparently from a commanding officer in Jerusalem of one of the irregular forces involved (the Irgun), Mordechai Ra'anan[6], gave an initial estimate of 254 killed.[7] The size of the figure had a considerable impact on the conflict in creating panic and became a major cause of the 1948 Palestinian exodus.[7][8]

This book provides a good historical account of the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians: http://www.amazon.com/Ethnic-Cleansing-Palestine-Ilan-Pappe/dp/1851685553/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1239164330&sr=1-1

>There are ways to rectify these grievances other than allowing them to return. In fact, most refugee crises don't end with the refugees returning home. They end with the refugees being settled in the countries that gave them refuge.

Even if that is true (which I have doubts about) the moral and just solution would be to allow the Palestinian refugees back to their ancestral homes. But I learned a long time ago that moral considerations doesn't figure much in the thoughts of the zionist.

>I didn't claim that it justifies "ethnic cleansing" of anybody. I claim that it justifies not allowing the Palestinian refugees to return.

You are arguing that the the direct consequences of the ethnic cleansing of Palestine should be maintained. There is really not much difference between that and justifying and defending ethnic cleansing.

> It is as necessary to address the grievances of Jewish refugees from Arab states as it is to address the grievances of Arab refugees from pre-1948 Palestine. My point was that there is more than one way to address these grievances.

Those grievances must be addressed in a just and equitable manner for the conflict to be truly resolved. Your (non) solutions will not get us there. Sorry to tell you that. Further the Mizrahim are not stateless refugees any more. The situation is not similar at all any more.

>I'm pleasantly surprised to find someone who has opposing views to mine, and is able to discuss them by addressing my claims and without reverting to insults.

De nada.

You know how people are always saying to read books? There are lots of books about the motivations of terrorist orgnizations towards the United States, and I've always liked this one; http://www.amazon.com/Blowback-Consequences-American-Empire-Project/dp/0805075593
(spoiler: The reason is foreign involvement, and less to do with culture)

I would also recommend William Blum's Killing Hope and Rogue State, as well as Chalmers Johnson's trilogy on empire, Blowback, Sorrows of Empire, and Nemesis.

This is a good place to start.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overthrow_(book)

https://www.amazon.com/Overthrow-Americas-Century-Regime-Change/dp/0805082409

(maybe some of the section on Guatemala at least is in the preview - I didn't look)

This book is also well worth reading, it expanded his section on Iran in Overthrow. Another long-term foreign policy disaster.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_the_Shah%27s_Men

I agree with your overall sentiment, but it is strange to be skeptical on this issue, which has overwhelming evidence.

I think there is a danger in receiving everything passively from Reddit, you have to actively seek out ideas and information from a wide range of sources. If you have a broader base of knowledge it is easier to know what seems fishy (on Reddit or anywhere else).

If you want a quick, moderate overview on the topic at hand here is a good book:
http://www.amazon.com/Overthrow-Americas-Century-Regime-Change/dp/0805082409

Amazon link to the book he's referring to.

And might I suggest another book on the topic? This one is written by a former US State Dept. historian: Killing Hope: U.S. Military and C.I.A. Interventions Since World War II.

Hawaii 1880s. A group of sugar plantation owners arranged to usurp control of the islands from the monarchs to lower labor standards and import tariffs to the US. Then came the banana republics, the Nicarauga Canal, America's war of aggression against the Spaniards and John Foster Dulles shitting all over the world because of communists he thought he saw.

Might I recommend All The Shah's Men author Stephen Kinzer's Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change

To allow companies access to cheap labor and resources. Low taxes & tariffs, minimal regulation typical neoliberal stuff. Access to financial markets bank loans, investments etc. Also to establish a network of military infrastructure to enable future conquest and prevent competing countries to do the same.

Some recommended reading:
http://www.amazon.com/Overthrow-Americas-Century-Regime-Change/dp/0805082409


http://www.amazon.com/Shock-Doctrine-Rise-Disaster-Capitalism/dp/0312427999/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1427577478&sr=1-1&keywords=shock+doctrine


You can find PDFs of both, I just linked the amazon page because they're both good books and quite cheap.

Smedley remains the most highly decorated soldier in US history. The full speech is available as a book Good reading, and amazingly still topical given that it was published in 1935.

I guess I'm not sure what to say about your "climate cult", but scientists and engineers (and the jobs they create) will go to where the culture favors them. That was the US from the 1930s to today. Perhaps you want them to go to France now?

I strongly encourage reading The Making of the Atomic Bomb.

This book details how the UK, Germany, Holland, France, and Russia all had a few pieces of the puzzle, but only the USA brought the scientists and engineers together to make the first atomic bomb and fucking win WWII. It's a star-spangled version of science and industry, far better than the Moon race.

Denying climate change basically says "fuck everything we have ever learned about science and engineering in the 20th century, let's let a few rich oil fucks make a few last bucks while America rots."

I say fuck that shit, we're better than that, let's continue taking the best scientists of the world and producing the best high-end products. But we can't do that unless this country welcomes the best and the brightest. Which means we cannot be Baghdad Bob about climate change.

Leo Szilard hade ideen och var orolig att Tyskland skulle komma först redan 1933.

~

Allmänt.
En av de bästa böckerna jag någonsin läst:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Making_of_the_Atomic_Bomb

Håller med varje ord i denna recension. Vill tillägga de fantastiska anekdoterna:

1. När Fermi dirigerar världens första kedjereaktion under en squash läktare i Chicago. En stoppstav hänger i ett rep från taket och en gubbe står med en yxa ...Fermi instruerar utdragande av bromsstav millimeter för millimeter, Geiger räknaren stiger och slår i botten, skiftar område, stiger och slår i botten igen, skiftar på nytt område ... Personer lyssnar på tickandet som går över i ett högfrekvent tjut och är osäkra om de ska stå kvar eller springa därifrån. Fermi är cool och deklarerar experimentet lyckat och avstängning.
   
   
2. Det är en fin hög ("pile") det där, säger en hantlangare när uran anländer inför chicagoexperimentet. En vetenskapsman hör det, blir kritvit, sliter fram och arbetar räknestickan några minuter innan han slappnar av och säger: "Nej, det är det inte". Fotnot, en del av uranet kommer från en kapad tysk ubåt på väg till japan med det senaste i tysk teknologi, inklusive Me 262 delar).
   
   
3. Teoretiske kärnfysikern och judinnan Lise Meitner begrundar ett brev i ett kyligt Göteborg (vädermässigt och något antisemitiskt) efter att precis ha funnit det nödvändigt att lämna Tyskland. Brevet kommer från hennes före detta kollegor och vänner, etniskt tyska vetenskapsmän som inte förstår resultatet av ett experiment de precis genomfört och ber (teoretikern) Meitner hjälpa till att förklara det. Flyktingen Meitner blir på så vis ensam i världen att först förstå att kärnvapen och kärnenergi har lämnat sfären av spekulation och nu är reell och trolig verklighet. Tyskarna (Otto Hahn bla) hade klyvt uranatomen utan att ha förstått det.
   
   
4. Den tyska atomklyvningen tillkännages (av Nils Bohr?) på Columbia University. Den hade hemlighållits, inte av militära skäl, det kommer snart, men för att säkerställa vetenskaplig preferens, rätt personer skall få äran av upptäckten. En undergraduate springer ner i Columbias källare och upprepar det tyska experimentet innan föredraget är över.
   
   
5. Nils Bohr smugglas till England från Danmark i ett Mosquito bombrum. Hans huvud är för stort för hjälmen och han svimmar av på vägen av syrebrist.
   
   >The book covers the subect on a number of levels. First is the factual story of the events leading up to the making of the bomb, which in themselves would be fascinating. For example, the fact that in two years the Manhattan Project built an industrial plant larger than the US automobile manufacturing base. That only in December of 1938 was the fission of Uranium first discovered, but the course of events were so rapid as to lead to the Trinity test in July of 1945. As a sometime program manager, but no General Groves, it was a fascinating account of the world's most significant projecct.
   The second level is a very enjoyable history of nuclear physics as the reader is lead through the discovery process from the turn of the century to thermonuclear fusion. That discovery process is the vehicle for the third and fourth levels of the book. The stories and personalities of the scientists, around the world, who added to that knowledge, what shaped and motivated their lives and how they indiviually gained insight, brilliant insight, into the riddle that was physics. I felt I got to know people like Rutherford, Bohr, Oppenheimer, Fermi, Szilard, and Teller. The fourth level was that the insight was not really individual but collaborative. This book is one of the finest descriptions of the scientific process and how this open, collaborative and communicative process works across boundaries.
   
   >http://www.amazon.com/The-Making-Atomic-Bomb-Anniversary/dp/1451677618

Not being patronizing by saying you might not know Hillary well but here are some resources you might enjoy if you haven't seen/read them. After taking them in tell me if you still think Trump is more scary than the Clintons:

1. Clinton Cash
   
2. No One Left To Lie To
   
   There are many more but the Clintons and Hillary must be stopped. They turned politics into pay-to-play cesspool and it isn't acceptable. Also I think the TPP ends the sovereignty of all member countries and will never vote for someone who supports it.
   
   I love Jill Stein and I wish I would have been sending her money instead of Bernie.

If they don't like that one maybe they can read No One Left to Lie To: The Triangulations of William Jefferson Clinton by Christopher Hitchens.

video

I found that one pretty interesting.

Watching this as I type this. Though they had me at Christopher Hitchens. Have you read No one left to lie to?

He also wrote a pretty good book called "No One Left to Lie To: The Triangulations of William Jefferson Clinton" that calls the Clintons out on their flip-flopping and willingness to throw their loyal underlings under the bus.

And finish it up with this oldie but goldie.

Christopher Hitchen's No One Left to Lie to: The Triangulations of William Jefferson Clinton is a good short read on the young Arkansas governor's rise to power.

I recommend everyone read No One Left to Lie To by Christopher Hitchens. The Clintons are a real piece of work.

He wrote an entire book on his dislike of the Clintons, yes plural, find it here: https://www.amazon.com/One-Left-Lie-Triangulations-Jefferson/dp/1455522996

• this book does detail the rape of two anonymous women. its truly shitty how the clintons treated his victims. but what can we expect from the people who said blow jobs werent sex; and are unclear on the meaning of 'is'. Forcing a woman to bring in a cum stained dress befoe admitting something should be all you need to know.
  
  
• Since ive bothered to say so much -- let me close with: Hillary Clinton was given debate questions. Thats a 'small' matter to the current Democrats.

>https://www.amazon.com/One-Left-Lie-Triangulations-Jefferson/dp/1455522996

You understand we're talking about Hillary Clinton, right? How does a book by a dead atheist about Bill Clinton, essentially lamenting his triangulation strategy, have anything at all to do with your point?

>LOL The point that other politicians are also dishonest doesn't somehow negate the fact that she is devoid of honesty and integrity.

But that's not my point.

One of two things must be true: either (A) Clinton is especially unqualified as a politician because she is fundamentally dishonest/lacks integrity, or (B) Clinton is as honest as any other politician. If B is true, then either (1) all politicians are unfit for office (i.e., are so dishonest they are unfit), or (2) all politicians have a certain level of dishonesty that society has deemed acceptable.

You are arguing A (or possible B(1), it's unclear since you've provided no real evidence for either claim), and I am arguing that B(2) is true.

Now, you can argue, (and I'd agree) that society as a whole should be reformed such that honesty in rewarded, but your initial assertion that Trump, who has a complete and total disregard for truth at all, is the same as Clinton severely undercuts your claim, as it suggests that any dishonesty is the same as extreme dishonesty, and failing to appreciate large differences is a huge bar to incremental improvement.

You think that Hillary supporters are leftists? Actually, let's be more specific. You think PUMA folks are leftist? There's a huge difference between being a nominal Democrat and actually falling on the left.

EDIT:

• Look into this
  
  
• And this
  
  Compare PUMA with the average Fox viewer and tell me what you find.

Inverting the Pyramid by Jonathon Wilson

An extensive book about football tactics, regarded as the best around

So one way to get started is this book but its not necessarily newbie friendly. I find this series of videos to be fun and interesting. Lastly I recommend when watching a game to have a drawing of the starting formation handy and periodically (after a big play or near miss) take a look at where each player is on the field in relation to their starting position it will start to become clear the rolls different spots have. Also look for triangles, boxes and diamonds. Hope this gets you started.

If you're interested in a bit of reading, I suggest Inverting the Pyramid, by Jonathon Wilson. All of his books are really good, he's got a really interesting one about the Soviet Top League during the U.S.S.R., but Inverting the Pyramid probably is most comprehensive for tactics and how the fundamentals of the game work. As a Napoli supporter you'd probably like it, it talks about a lot of the history around Italian football! : )

Also, Football Manager. Take how it rates players with a grain of salt, but it's fantastic for learning how tactics work. Just... be prepared to deal with the amount of time you'll sink into it.

Inverting the Pyramid

Also, after watching Thierry Henry's goals, watch his statue unveiling (bonus: Dennis Bergkamps statue unveiling), Henry and Bergkamp are two of the most influential players from the past three decades in Arsenal who represent both attacking style and finesse, as well as having a big heart for the club. If you enjoy reading, maybe you'd like Wenger's biography and if you're interested in footballing history, Inverting the Pyramid by Jonathan Wilson is a good read.

To get a bit of insight into why the matches against Tottenham can be very intense, maybe this can help you: "I Hate Everything About Them" - North London Derby

Ah I'm glad you asked!

My next project coming up is actually to create a site for analyses like this, aimed towards teaching others, like yourself, how to think tactically. Unfortunately there aren't many resources available for “a beginners approach to tactics”, per se, which is a shame; as the initial learning curve can definitely be steep and intimidating.. but, I'll share with you the process I used to learn about tactics and hopefully I can give you some ideas on how to learn to think tactically!

---

1. Pick a team / manager whose style you like and follow them. Watch games of various teams in various leagues. Like how a certain team plays? Follow the team, watch games of them when you can, and look for analyses of some of their bigger games online. (If you are a Crew fan and you want to analyze Crew games, watch the game the first time to “enjoy the game”, then watch it again in-depth to dissect it. It also helps that you know what is going to happen; ask yourself: What led to the Union’s goal? What events happened prior to it? Did the Crew make adjustments later on to fix an obvious problem? - I bought MLS Live specifically so I could do this.
   
   
2. Focus on the positioning of players. - one part of the field / position at a time. Ask yourself the following questions when watching a game such as: what formation are both teams using? How are players finding space? Are the teams playing wide or narrow? Fast or slow? Possession or counter? Fluid or rigid? etc. - (I’ll provide a complete list in an article later this week)
   Once you learn a tactic, pay attention to how that tactic fares against other teams' tactics (ie. 4-3-3 v 4-3-3; 4-3-3 v 4-4-2; etc.).
   
   
   
3. Follow the players when they leave said team This will naturally branch out your tactical knowledge, and allow you to compare and contrast the different systems.
   
   
   
4. Choose high profile games to watch, with big-name coaches. There are quite a few distinct styles today; Tiki Taka (Pep@Barca), Juego de Posicion (Pep @Bayern), and Gegenpressing (Klopp @ Dortmund & Liverpool) being the most talked about, but there are many that exist.
   
   ---
   
   Some really interesting reading materials and resources:
   
   
   Inverting The Pyramid : This book is what I call my “soccer bible”. It gives an incredible scope into how soccer has changed throughout its existence, and while it only lightly covers modern tactics, as it was written in 2008, it explores the intricacies of various tactics, why they are used, and how to identify them. Its long, and very detailed so it may be a tough read but if you can get through it you will be gold.
   
   Football and Chess I mentioned in another comment how soccer is analogous to chess, as this book taught me. A good starting point as it is a very accessible book to any reader.
   
   Pep Guardiola: Another Way of Winning A fantastic read by itself, but with many parallels between Berhalter and Pep, this book can help understand some of Crew SC's tactics.
   
   Zonalmarking.net : The “Tactics in the 2000’s” section is almost an extension to the aforementioned book; it outlines the current trends in football really well. The author of the site also does very detailed statistical and analytical recaps of matches.
   
   Spielverlagerung.com (bonus content if you speak German- the German side of their site .de has even more info): The “Tactical Theory” section is a good place to start - While they are rather advanced articles, they do a good job at defining some of the key concepts in modern football. The writers are all very knowledgeable about tactics, and do in depth game analyses regularly.
   
   The Number 6 Role : His last post sadly was 2 years ago, but his pieces are fantastic. Of course I'm biased, but Sean’s analysis of Frank de Boer’s Ajax team is incredible, and I would completely recommend a read as Berhalter employs similar offensive tactics (defensively totally different, but the situational pressing application is fascinating).
   
   Think Football : Site focused on providing a wide range of info, content has declined in recent years as the site has sort of turned into a news site with brief articles, but it provides a bit more insight into world football happenings than say sky sports or fox sports; Good intro material.
   
   ---
   
   I hope this helps, and feel free to contact me if you have any questions as I’m happy to help you learn! Also I have begun writing a rather lengthy piece that will expand on the 6 points highlighted above, it’s far too long to post here but I will be sure to let you know when I have it up on my site. For now you have a reference sheet you can save and hopefully I set you up with a good place to start!

Yo leí el famoso inverting the pyramid, si no te jode leer en inglés (es lo que más se consigue en internet) te recomiendo: Brillant Orange y why england lose. Bien bien táctico leí hace poco attacking soccer y está bueno, aunque a algunas de las ideas se les notan los años.

I would go to r/footballtactics or other similar subs. The False 9 is a decent resource. But real quick a note on formations

The important thing to keep in mind is that there are 3 phases in the game and the shape varies based on the phase. For example if the lineup card says 4-4-2 you can expect 2 banks of 4 in the defensive phase and fullbacks overlapping the wingers in the attacking phase with one DM and one hybrid midfielder in the center. With 5-3-2/3-5-2 in the defensive phase you will usually see 5 at the back and then 3 at the back in transition and when in attack you will almost always see 2 at the back (unless American players coached by Klinnsy are running it but I digress) with your ball playing defender stepping into a DM spot.

Also to understand Guardiola's system I would look up grid theory (4-4-2 actually had a surprisingly decent article on it) and to understand the 4-2-3-1 run to perfection I would read up on Jose's Inter squads.

Edit: Also, there are more exotic formations like the old Mexican 4-3-1-2 and the Zambian (IIRC) Christmas tree when they won the Africa Cup of Nations some years ago. The latter formation is something you can probably find a couple decent articles about and it's a good one to use when you know your squad is inferior. Hell, Dortmund broke it out today. I know they won't run it the same way the Zambians did but it's still fun to see.

Edit2: http://thefalse9.com/

Edit3: https://www.amazon.com/Inverting-Pyramid-History-Soccer-Tactics/dp/1568587384 - Inverting the Pyramid by Jonathan Wilson

http://spielverlagerung.com/2014/12/25/juego-de-posicion-under-pep-guardiola/

Here you can find all the previous chapters, and you can purchase the book here (that's a non-referral link, by the way.)

[Inverting the pyramid by Jonathan Wilson]
(http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/1568587384?pc_redir=1398670428&robot_redir=1)

This is something I hope can help you:

Humans can be genetically categorized into five racial groups, corresponding to traditional races. http://pritchardlab.stanford.edu/publications/pdfs/RosenbergEtAl02.pdf

Genetic analysis “supports the traditional racial groups classification.” http://psychology.uwo.ca/faculty/rushtonpdfs/PPPL1.pdf

“Human genetic variation is geographically structured” and corresponds with race. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15508000

Race can be determined via genetics with certainty for >99.8% of individuals. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15625622

Oral bacteria can be used to determine race. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2013-10-oral-bacteria-fingerprint-mouth.html

Race can be determined via brain scans. http://www.cell.com/current-biology/abstract/S0960-9822(15)00671-5

96-97% of whites have no African ancestry. http://www.theroot.com/articles/history/2013/02/how_mixed_are_african_americans.3.html

97% of Whites have no black ancestry whatsoever. http://www.unz.com/isteve/nyt-white-black-a-murky-distinction-grows-still-murkier/

There was “minimal gene flow” between archaic Europeans and Asians. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/20/science/20adapt.html

Common-sense racial categories have biological meaning. http://www.ln.edu.hk/philoso/staff/sesardic/Race2.pdf

Human intelligence is highly heritable. http://www.nature.com/mp/journal/v16/n10/abs/mp201185a.html

Scientific consensus is that IQ tests are not racially biased. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160289608000305

Very poor Whites are comparably intelligent to very wealthy blacks. http://www.jbhe.com/features/49_college_admissions-test.html

Privately, intelligence experts hold more hereditarian views than they express in public. http://www.udel.edu/educ/gottfredson/reprints/1994egalitarianfiction.pdf

Black children raised in White households have similar IQs to black children in black households. http://psycnet.apa.org/psycinfo/1977-07996-001

The average African IQ is estimated at 79. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0191886912003741

The average African-American IQ is 85, compared to the average White IQ of 100. http://www.udel.edu/educ/gottfredson/reprints/1997mainstream.pdf

The white-black gap in SAT scores, a proxy for IQ, is increasing. http://www.jbhe.com/features/49_college_admissions-test.html

Genes for large brains, linked to high IQ, are common everywhere except Africa. http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB115040765329081636

Intelligence has a 40-50% genetic basis. http://articles.latimes.com/2011/aug/10/news/la-heb-genetic-study-intelligence-20110809

IQ scores are the best predictor of success in Western society. http://psychology.uwo.ca/faculty/rushtonpdfs/PPPL1.pdf

IQ is 75% heritable among Whites. http://psychology.uwo.ca/faculty/rushtonpdfs/PPPL1.pdf

92% of Mulatto (black man, white women) children are born out of wedlock. http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2625893

Gentile whites are the most underrepresented group in top colleges. http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/the-myth-of-american-meritocracy/

Sweden is the rape capital of the West, likely due to immigration. http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/5195/sweden-rape

Asian women find White men more attractive than Asian men. http://sf.oxfordjournals.org/content/89/3/807.abstract

White men are pound-for-pound stronger than black men. http://www.biomedcentral.com/content/pdf/1471-2458-10-508.pdf

Germanic/Nordic people have lower time preference than any other group. http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1481443

Human evolution is not merely ongoing but is in fact accelerating. http://discovermagazine.com/2009/mar/09-they-dont-make-homo-sapiens-like-they-used-to

Human races are diverging into separate species, not mixing into one. http://discovermagazine.com/2009/mar/09-they-dont-make-homo-sapiens-like-they-used-to

Blacks are seven times more likely than whites to commit murder. http://www.colorofcrime.com/2005/10/the-color-of-crime-2005/

The percentage of Blacks and Hispanics, not poverty, is the best predictor of crime. http://www.colorofcrime.com/2005/10/the-color-of-crime-2005/

90% of gang members are non-white. http://www.colorofcrime.com/2005/10/the-color-of-crime-2005/

Asians are nine times more likely than whites to be members of gangs. http://www.colorofcrime.com/2005/10/the-color-of-crime-2005/

The average H-1B immigrant is less intelligent and qualified than the average American. http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/h1b10min.html

Race is a better predictor of crime than poverty. http://www.colorofcrime.com/2005/10/the-color-of-crime-2005/

White immigrants on net improve government revenue, while non-white immigrants cost money. http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/putting-a-price-on-foreigners-strict-immigration-laws-save-denmark-billions-a-759716.html

Blacks are overrepresented in serial killings. http://maamodt.asp.radford.edu/Serial Killer Information Center/Serial Killer Statistics.pdf

Blacks are overrepresented among child abuse and pedophilia, and this isn’t due to biased reporting. http://www.theroot.com/articles/culture/2011/03/black_childabuse_statistics_report_debunks_bias_assumptions.html

White-Asian children are twice as likely as Asians to have mental illness. http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2008-08/uoc–baa081108.php

Black-white children are more likely than both black and whites to make poor decisions. http://www.nber.org/papers/w14192

Racial bias against miscegenation is likely biological in origin. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19422626

Interracial marriages have a 23.5% chance of divorce, compared to 13% for same-race couples. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4145377

Mixed race kids suffer from low self-esteem, social isolation, and poor family dynamics. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1448064/

Mixed race children are more likely to have health problems, high stress, smoke, and drink. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1448064/

The percentage of Blacks in a city, not poverty, is the best predictor of crime. http://www.unz.com/article/race-and-crime-in-america/

Blacks are 600% more likely than non-blacks to commit murder. http://www.unz.com/article/race-and-crime-in-america/

The purpose of section 8 housing is to move blacks from elite urban areas to middle class suburbs. http://www.unz.com/article/race-and-crime-in-america/

Hispanics receive shorter prison sentences than Whites for the same crimes. http://people.terry.uga.edu/mustard/sentencing.pdf

Police hesitate longer to shoot black suspects than White suspects. http://spokane.wsu.edu/admissions/Criminal-Justice/faculty-staff/Racial&EthnicBiasDFJDMStrongerLens_ExperimentalCriminology_JamesKlingerVila2014.pdf

Race-mixers may give less parental support to their children because of greater genetic distance. http://www.humanbiologicaldiversity.com/articles/Rushton%2C J. Phillipe. “Inclusive fitness in human relationships.” Biological Journal of the Linnean Society 96 (2009).pdf http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1095-8312.2008.01110.x/abstract

15% of the human genome has been under selective pressures since the races separated. http://www.amazon.com/Troublesome-Inheritance-Genes-Human-History/dp/1594204462

Scientific discussion of race has increased since 1946 onwards. http://www.ln.edu.hk/philoso/staff/sesardic/Race.pdf

Over 100 White women are raped by blacks every day in the United States. http://archive.frontpagemag.com/readArticle.aspx?ARTID=26368

Melanin concentration may directly correlate with aggression. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0191886912000840

Africans have higher rates of a gene associated with violence. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1913922/pdf/1744-9081-3-30.pdf

Europeans and Asians are subject to more recent evolution than Africans. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/20/science/20adapt.html

64% of Hispanics have IQs too low to enter the military. http://takimag.com/article/frequently_asked_questions_about_the_jason_richwine_brouhaha_steve_sailer/print#ixzz2TPXmpNgG

Mexican-Americans have higher disability rates than other races. http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/03/150326162658.htm

Europeans and Asians are subject to more recent evolution than Africans. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/20/science/20adapt.html