How Democracies Die - Steven Levitsky & Daniel Ziblatt

 Disturbingly relevant. :(  This was written about 2019 and I would LOVE to see an updated version taking into account the actions of the last 2 years!

- "Have they or their partisan allies sponsored or encouraged mob attacks on opponents? Have they tacitly endorsed violence by their supporters by refusing to unambiguously condemn it and punish it?"  Does this sound familiar?

- "Readiness to curtail civil liberties of opponents, including media: . . . Have they threatened to take legal or punitive action against critics in rival parties, civil society or the media?" Sound familiar too?

- "Have they tacitly endorsed violence by their supporters by refusing to unambiguously condemn it and punish it? Trump has. Have they praised or refused to condemn other significant acts of political violence, either in the past or elsewhere in the world? Trump has. Have they supported laws or policies  that restrict liberties such as expanded libel or defamation laws or laws restricting protests, criticism of the government, or certain Civic or political organizations? Trump has. Have they threatened to take legal or other punitive action against critics in rival parties, civil society, or the media? Trump has. Have they praised repressive measures taken by other governments either in the past or elsewhere in the world? Trump has. This all should have set off alarm bells. The primary process had failed in its gatekeeping role and allowed a man unfit for office to run as a mainstream Party candidate."

- "Because these measures are carried out piecemeal and with the appearance of legality, the drift into authoritarianism does always set off alarm bells.  Citizens are often slow to realize that their democracy is being dismantled even as it happens before their eyes.  One of the great ironies of how democracies die is that the very defense of democracy is often used as a pretext for its subversion."

- "Polarization can destroy democratic norms. When socioeconomic, racial, or religious differences give rise to extreme partisanship in which societies sort themselves into political camps whose world views are not just different but mutually exclusive, toleration becomes harder to sustain."

- "White Protestant voters are not just any constituency. For nearly two centuries, they comprised the majority of the US electorate and were politically, economically, and culturally dominant in American society. Now, again, white Protestants are a minority of the electorate, and declining. And they have hunkered down in the Republican party. In his 1964 essay, the paranoid Style of American politics historian Richard Hofstetter described the phenomenon of status anxiety, which he believed is most likely to emerge when a group's social status, identity, and sense of belonging are perceived to be under existential threat. This leads to a style of politics that is overheated, over suspicious, over aggressive, grandiose, and apocalyptic. Half a century after its publication, Hofstetter's publication may be more relevant than ever. The struggle against declining majority status is in good part what fuels the intense animosity that is to define the American right."

- "The Senate was likewise transformed by the arrival of Gingrich senators,  whose ideology, aversion to compromise, and willingness to obstruct legislation helped speed the end of the body's traditional folkways. Though few realized it at the time Gingrich and his allies were on the cusp of a new wave of polarization rooted in growing public discontent, particularly among the Republican base. Gingrich didn't create this polarization, but he was one of the first Republicans to exploit the shift in popular sentiment, and his leadership helped to establish Politics as Warfare as the GOP's dominant strategy."

- "Although mass responses to extremist appeals matters more is whether political elites and especially political parties serve as filters. Put simply, political parties are democracy's gate keepers."

- "If partisan animosity prevails over mutual toleration, those in control of Congress may prioritize defense of the president over the performance of their constitutional duties. In an effort to stave off opposition victory, they may abandon their oversight role, enabling the president to get away with abusive, illegal, even authoritarian acts. Such a transformation from Watchdog into lap dog… "

- "Trump, even before his inauguration, tested positive on all four measures on our litmus test for autocrats. The first sign is a weak commitment to the Democratic rules of the game. Trump met this measure when he questioned the legitimacy of the electoral process and made the unprecedented suggestion that he might not accept the results of the 2016 election."

- "Levels of voter fraud in the United States are very low and because elections are administered by state and local governments, it is effectively impossible to coordinate national level voting fraud."

- "Under Donald Trump, the United States appears to be abandoning its role as democracy promoter for the first time since the cold war. President Trump's is the least pro-democratic of any US administration since Nixon's. Moreover, America is no longer a democratic model. A president whose country attacks the Press, threatens to lock up his rival, and declares that he might not accept election results cannot credibly defend democracy. "

Swing Trading: How to Easy-Make Profit with Stock and Forex trading and create your own passive income - Michael Bateman

 This is a great book to read after you read all the "Introduction to" and "for Beginners" books.  It's slightly more in-depth and talks about lines and candles and trends much more than the others.  It did spend a fair bit of time on Forex, which I couldn't care about, so that was a little bit of a waste of time. Overall, good for a new person just getting into the topic. 

Housewitch - Katie Schickel

 Cute story, but I don't think I'd read any more by this author when there are some many other potentially much more amazing books in the world. This is the speed my mother might like, mostly predictable. 

Swing Trading Simplified - Mark Lowe

 This is actually a really great first-read.  I feel that the author does an excellent job of discussing all the basics and really emphasizes the need for safety in the case of a downward trend. I appreciate that.  The discussions about indicators was good as well.  An excellent place to start your trading journey. 

Rage becomes Her: The Power of Women's Anger - Soraya Chemaly

 Welp, everyone needs to read this book! It's pretty much a giant list of all the way women get screwed in modern society and we can't get to fixing these problems if you don't even see them (looking at you, men). 

- "In expressing anger and demanding to be heard, we reveal the deeper belief that we can engage with and shape the world around us, a right that, until now, has almost always been reserved for me."

- "That anger metaphors are filled with kitchen imagery: anger simmers and smolders before reaching a boiling point, a person has to mull things over and cool off, that we are supposed to contain or put a lid on our anger or it will leave a bad taste in the mouth, strikes me as a more than an interesting coincidence. As women, we often have to bite our tongues, eat our words and swallow our pride. It's almost as one of my daughters put it, as if we're supposed to keep our anger in the kitchen."

- "A society that does not respect women's anger, is one that does not respect women, not as human beings, thinkers, knowers, as active participants or citizens. Women around the world are clearly angry and acting on that emotion. That means, inevitability, a backlash. Often among moderates who are fond of disparaging angry women as dangerous and unhinged. It is easier to criticize the angry woman than to ask the questions: What is making you so angry? And, what can we do about it? The answers to which have disruptive and revolutionary implications."

- "In my experience, it is difficult for parents to accept that boys can and should control themselves and meet the same behavioral standards that we expect from girls. It's even harder to accept that girls feel angry and have legitimate rights not to make themselves cheerfully available for boys' development."

- "In 1976, in one of the earliest attempts to understand how parental biases influence behavior. Researches intentionally masked babies gender and asked adults to describe what they saw when they observed them. adults "saw" different emotional states, whether they thought the baby was a boy or a girl. A fussy boy, for example, was considered irritable and angry, whereas a fussy girl was more likely to be described as angry or sad."

- "The dynamic of who gets to express anger matters in all unequal social relationships. Among men, status related to race, ethnicity and class also limits the expression of rage and affects the perception of risk. Within like groups, however, meaning same class or ethnicity for example, it is generally more appropriate for women to keep anger to themselves."

- "Leisure time highlights the problem. In the United States, a recent survey revealed that men engage in relaxing and entertaining activities 35% of the time that women are doing chores. For women, that number is almost half 19%." 

- "A 12 year longitudinal study which assess change over time, found a 70% increase in cancer related deaths in people with the highest scores for suppressing their negative emotions. A follow-up to a 1989 study on this topic found that the survival rate for women with breast cancer who suppressed their anger was twice that of women who kept their anger to themselves."

- "However, studies show that men reliably overestimate their domestic contributions. Many men also undermine efforts at equalizing the distribution of work. In one 2014 study conducted in the United Kingdom by a large retailer, 30% of survey heterosexual men admitted to purposefully doing housework poorly so their partners would stop asking and do the work themselves."

- "Most of us learn to think that boys and men are the world's risk takers, but that's only because we don't seriously address the risks women must take as they navigate boys and men." 

- "...found that boys speak 9-10 times more. Her work examining the gendered construction of speech in early childhood confirms earlier findings that in western classrooms boys are allowed by adults to consume 5 times as much verbal space through, as she put it "imperceptible signals of significance", over girls."

- "This compliance puts girls and women at a disadvantage as the move into collage and the workplace where disruptive speech is an element of competence, self-promotion and competitiveness." 

- "Anger, not sadness, leads to perceptions of higher status and respect. Like happy people, angry people are more optimistic, feeling that change is possible and that they influence outcomes. ... have shown that anger, unlike sadness, encourages "unstructured thinking" when a person is engaged in creative tasks and that people who are angry are better at generating more ideas."

- "We look away from girls anger and collude in the systems that erode their sense of worth. Then turn around and wonder what it is about their nature that makes them so lacking in confidence as women."

- "Boys and girls parted ways when asked to describe actual incidents of sexual violence. Sexism against boys and men was discussed primarily in rhetorical, theoretical and speculative ways. Whereas sexism against girls and women was shared in painful individual or witnessed incidence. When students were asked where, if anywhere, does sexism come up in your everyday life, girls told personal stories of sexual harassment or violence, denigrating humor and demeaning stereotyping. The boys, however, provided mainly hypotheticals. All of the students reported witnessing acts of sexism against girls and women. There were virtually no actual examples of anti-male sexism, instead students focused, for instance, on stereotypes in advertising."

- "People who deny sexism will always be more hostile to your anger, than to what is actually causing your anger."

- "As children, we learn that the realm of feelings is feminine. So it is easy for men and boys to fall into a habit of outsourcing relationships, social networking, and the emotional work that comes with them."

- "Faking orgasms, which up to 80% of women say they do, is a good example of how the belief that men are owed nurturing emotional protection and niceness from women plays out in intimate ways."

- "Boys are 10% more like to be paid for work at home."

- "When women make up roughly 17% of a crowd scene (an eerie coincidence with leadership percentages) viewers perceive a 50/50 gender balance. There is an auditory corollary to this visual one. When women speak 30% of the time in mixed gender conversations, listeners think they dominate."

- "A common response is to empathize by defining women, the ultimate in unhelpful, patriarchal thinking, relationally, my daughter, my wife, my sister, my mother. This defines women not by their rights as individuals, but as extension of men and their rights."

- "Societies with his levels of household and interpersonal sexism are also the least stable and secure. ... showing that the greatest predictor of a nation's peacefulness and security is the way that girls are treated in their own homes."

Grow your own Tea - Christine Parks & Susan M. Walcott

 This is a fantastic book with experiences you can tall the authors collected from real life experiences. I would say this is a must for anyone who does want to grow their own tea plants. If I ever get somewhere to grow tea, I'll totally buy this as a primary reference!

Hollywood Dead - Richard Kadrey (Sandman Slim Series, Bk. 10)

 Fantastically fun, very gross. When looking up the series to find which title to read next, I saw a comment that this book was sorta slow and a place-holder for the series.  I would disagree with that. I thought it was right in line with the normal running about like a crazy person that this author specializes in! It was great.