Gardening Basics- R. S. Rusbot & Carmen Ellis

 Small and pretty light on actual information other than they worked real hard to sell organic gardening. There were a few useful tips that I knew but hadn't thought about in a while. (get your soil tested, cube gardening instead of rows, etc.) I guess they didn't want to overwhelm or scare off any newbies, but I didn't think this was worth my time. 

The Shock Doctrine: The rise of Disaster Capitalism - Naomi Klein

"The best time to invest is when there's still blood on the ground."

This book made me so freaking mad! SO MUCH of the pain and poverty in the world could have been avoided if governments, especially the US government, weren't trying to make stupid amounts of money for their friends and blindly raping other countries based on faith in a provenly false economic theory. Anyone associated with the Chicago School's economic theories or Milton Friedman should be considered a terrorist. I highly recommend this book to anyone alive today or in the future. I fully suspect that, as of today, the current administration is attempting to manufacture home-grown panic that will allow this exact process to take place in the US. *Spoiler alert* Places where this took root are still struggling decades later. 

It's amazing how intertwined the world is now.  The current destruction in Palestine is directly caused by Boris Yeltsin and meddling from the Bush 1 admin. But you couldn't know that without a lot of knowledge about the current history of both regions, religion and economics. There are people who specialize in all those things and that's why I read their books; they do all the background for me. I'll leave you with a few general quotes to give you an idea of the book:

- "A more accurate term for a system that erases the boundaries between big government and big business is ... corporatist. It's main characteristics are huge transfers of public wealth to private hands often accompanied by exploding debt, an ever widening chasm between the dazzling rich and the disposable poor, and an aggressive nationalism that justifies bottomless spending on national security."  Sound familiar?

- " ... more cuts, more privatization, more speed. In that year and a half, many of the country's business elite had had their fill of the Chicago boys' adventures in extreme capitalism. The only people benefiting were foreign companies and a small clique of financiers known as the piranhas, who were making a killing on speculation. The nuts and bolts manufacturers who had strongly supported the coup were getting wiped out." Also sound familiar?

- "The clear goal in Russia was to erase the pre-existing state and create the conditions for a capitalist feeding frenzy, which, in turn, would kick-start a booming free market economy, managed by overconfident Americans barely out of school."  This smacks of Musk's high school grads running amok in the payroll offices.

- " ... the rise of Russia's billionaire oligarchs proved precisely how profitable the strip mining of an industrialized state could be. And Wall Street wanted more. Immediately following the Soviet collapse, the US treasury and the IMF became much tougher in their  demands for instant privatization from other crisis wracked countries. The most dramatic case to date came in 1994... when Mexico's economy suffered a major meltdown known as the Tequila crisis. The terms of the US bailout demanded rapid-fire privatization and Forbes announced that the process has minted 23 new billionaires. The lesson here is fairly obvious, to predict whence the next burst of billionaires will issue look for countries where markets are opening."

- "The promises made to the Poles and Russians, that if they followed Shock Therapy, they would wake up in a normal European country. Those normal European countries with their strong social safety nets, workers' protections, powerful trades unions, and healthcare emerged as a compromise between communism and capitalism."

- "After the speech, plenty of Pentagon staffers complained that the only thing standing between Rumsfeld's bold vision of outsourcing the army was the small matter of the US constitution, which clearly defined national security as the duty of government, not private companies. 'I thought the speech was going to cost Rumsfeld his job.' my source told me. It didn't. And the coverage of his declaration of his war on the Pentagon was sparse. That's because the date of his contentious address was September 10, 2001." 

- "Once a market has been created, it needs to be protected. The companies at the heart of the disaster capitalism complex increasingly regard both the state and non-profits as competitors. From the corporate perspective, whenever governments or charities fulfill their traditional roles, they are denying contractors that could be performed at a profit."

- "Apparently, charities and NGOs were infringing on their market by donating building supplies, rather than having Home Depot supply them for a fee."

- "...disaster apartheid, in which survival is determined by who can afford to pay for escape.  That what's needed are leaders who recognize the destructive course we are on. But I'm not so sure. Perhaps part of the reason so many of our elites, both political and corporate, are so sanguine about climate change is that they are confident that they will be able to buy their way out of the worst of it."

- Lockheed-Martin ... received $25 billion of US taxpayer's dollars in 2005 alone."

- "Memory, both individual and collective, turns out to be the greatest shock absorber of all. Despite the successful attempts to exploit the 2004 tsunami in Asia, memory also proved to be an effective tool of resistance where it struck, particularly in Thailand. Dozens of coastal villages were flattened by the wave. But unlike in Sri Lanka, where many fishing families were forced to relocate inland and to find another means of survival, many Thai settlements were rebuilt in months. The difference did not come from the government. Thailand's politicians were just as eager as those elsewhere to use the storm as an excuse to evict fishing people and hand over land tenured to large resorts. Yet what set Thailand apart was that villagers   approached all government promises with intense skepticisms, and refused to wait patiently in camps for an official reconstruction plan.  Instead within weeks, hundreds of villagers engaged in what they called 'land reinvasions'. They marched passed the armed guards on the payroll of developers, tools in hand, and began marking off the sites where their old houses had been. In some cases, construction began immediately." I don't believe anyone would be surprised that taking matters into your own hands is both quicker and safer than waiting for some guy in a suit to decided what to do and how. 

A Generation of Sociopaths: How the Baby Boomers betrayed America - Bruce Cannon Gibney

 This book is shockingly eye opening. I highly recommend it for anyone trying to figure out what in the hell is going on in the US right now. The book was published in 2017 and I would love to see a newer analysis with the most recent political insanity included, though perhaps about 1 year in the future from now so we know a little most about how this evil will shake out. I made a TON on bookmarks on this. I think it's too many to include in a single review so I might paraphrase them. If you're looking for exact quotes or more detail, you should read the book. Everyone should read this book; it brings enlightenment to so many current issues! I'll start my paraphrasing now, in my own words: The most selfish generation ever to exist has done their damndest to pull the ladder up behind them every single step of the way. They hate their children. They hate their planet. And they probably hate themselves.

- "Rather it is the mass democratically sanctioned transfer of wealth away from the young and towards the boomers, the later having adjusted tax and fiscal policies to favor the accumulation of wealth during their lives at the expense of the future.  A future whose course is of little concern because whatever failures it holds will be cushioned by the tens of trillions of entitlement dollars boomers will receive." We're not even out of the introduction yet before this book starts throwing punches.  This section also draw attention to the difference between median income and mean income and how the big difference between those two numbers show significant problems rumbling through the economy.

- "TVs limits pose special problems when it comes to news programming." People who get most of their news from a tv get fewer facts at a slower pace than written news (nearly 1/3 of a news program is commercials, banter, junk, segues). People who are highly knowledgeable about current events or the mechanics of government are not people who get their news from the TV. I've had this argument with my own boomer father. 

There's so much more I want to say (maybe I'll add it in later), but suffice to say, just read the dang book!

- "All of these factors, the shift to more progressive parenting, baby formula and television, had affects that manifested by the mid-1960's. Studies repeatedly show that more permissive parenting styles produce lower performance in schools, make children more susceptible to peer pressure and more likely to exhibit problem behaviors. . . It is, perhaps not surprising that boomers' test scores started sliding. Before they were even adults, boomers were already failing. Constant SAT scores in both verbal and math categories slipped from 478 to 424 between 1964 and 1980, that is, when the boomers were taking these tests. Once the boomers graduated, test scores stabilized."

- "Northern Europeans have vastly more generous welfare states and higher personal savings rates. They understand that even in generous systems, individual responsibility remains paramount."

- "A key feature of boomer sociopathy is maximizing present consumption regardless of future costs. So reshaping the economy would be the focus of the revolutionary project. This proceeded under a set of theories, political and economic, now known as neoliberalism." Without going into the full description of neoliberalism, boomer neoliberalism is even more messed up because it's practically free-market a la carte, where they pick the benefits that they want and everyone/thing else can just implode on the market. 

- "Nothing could be less helpful to the shortsighted glut of sociopathy than this explanatory system of evidence and causality, one that happened to undermine the deceit of which sociopaths are so fond. Vastly better suited to the sociopathic enterprise are feelings, guaranteed to align with the needs and desires of the moment because they supply them in the first place." 

- "Many boomers dressed up indulgence as a moral crusade, just as they had with draft dodging, tax cuts, and their own military adventures."

- "The debt ceiling has been raised 16 times from 1997 - 2015, which makes it something like a diet where the number of permitted calories rises the fatter the dieter gets." You have only 1 guess as to which cohort was firmly in charge of the government during this period.  I'm so disappointed thinking that for my generation, this kind of kick-the-can-down-the-road is now normalized. 

- "The crisis was not so much acute, as ongoing, beginning with the SNL disaster of the mid-1980's and continuing with the LTCM emergency of 1998, the dot com crash of 2000 and the housing and financial panics of 2008, and yet, over years of boomer control, the response has always been the same: more deregulation, more spending, lower taxes, and no adequate structural reform during the windows of opportunity between scandals. Despite the quickening of crisis, nothing about boomer finance changed." Idiots, this is the definition of an idiot: doing the same thing over and over but expecting different results. 

- "As the boomers became Washington's most lethal invasive species, environmentalism waned."

- "The erosion of the church-state boundary has been another boomer era loss. A humanist republic must now endure the humiliation of watching boomer supplicants ... pay obeisance to a medieval theocrat as their counterparts busily misquote the bible. Jefferson would have thought the whole thing ridiculous while JFK would be astounded because his own election suffered from the perception that JFK would be obedient to papist idolatry at the expense of the protestant civic tradition."

- "During the 1950's, before boomers were old enough to exert political control or even participate in opinion surveys, polls showed overwhelming support for science and technology. . . When asked whether all things considered would you say that the world is better or worse off because of science, 83% of Americans answered better.  The better percentage dropped to around 70% in the 1970's, which while still high in absolute terms, reflected a disturbing shift in attitudes. Notably, the percentage who believed that science had made things outright worse rose from 2% to 5-8%, low numbers to be sure, but alarming enough given their embrace of a view radically contradicted by the facts. These were sentiments one might expect from popes and younkers, not boomers swaddled in space-age prosperity. . . while the public displayed increasing skepticism for science's ability to solve society's problems."  Remember that part above about using feelings to dictate government? Science doesn't care about your feelings, and that's why boomers hate is so much while they use it freely to keep being awful. 

Hexed (The Iron Druid Chronicles, Bk. 2) - Kevin Hearne

 I'm a big fan of these books. My only complaint is that I wish they were longer!