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Previous: 2007

Overview

Next: 2009

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Reading Log For 2008

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THE COMPLETE PERSEPOLIS (2004)

• Originally published in France as Persepolis (2000) and Persepolis 2 (2001)
• 8: Wanted to be a prophet when she grew up.
• 47: She knew two of the 3000 political prisoners released in March 1979: Siamak Jari and Mohsen Shakiba
• 83 - 84: Iranian pilots are released from prison to bomb Iraq. They would only agree on the condition that the Iranian National Anthem be broadcast.
• 99: Boys are given plastic keys which they are told will unlock the gates of heaven if they are martyred.
• 131: She had Iron Maiden and Kim Wilde posters in her bedroom.
• 133: Women chastise her for wearing a Michael Jackson button. She claims it's Malcolm X.
• 137: Their neighbors, the Baba-Levys were among the few Jewish families that stayed after the Revolution.
• 142: She notices a bracelet in the rubble...
• 153: She flies from Iran to Vienna.
• 241:

I had known a revolution that had made me lose part of my family.

I had survived a war that had distanced me from my country and my parents. . .

. . . And it's a banal story of love that almost carried me away.

• 246: The return to Iran.
  

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THE MIND OF THE MARKET

Compassionate Apes, Competitive Humans, and Other Tales from Evolutionary Economics (2008)

Michael Shermer

Hardcover

Times Books, Henry Holt and Company, New York

• xix: Having written on controversial subjects for 30 years, Shermer finds that nothing ruffles feathers as much as discussing economics.
• xx: His introduction to economics came his senior year at Pepperdine University where he was pressured to read ATLAS SHRUGGED. It made a deep impression, though he now disagrees with Rand's ethics of self interest:

(science shows that in addition to being selfish, competitive, and greedy, we also harbor a great capacity for altruism, cooperation, and charity), reading Rand led me to the extensive body of literature on business, markets, and economics.

I cannot say for certain whether it was the merits of free market economics and fiscal conservatism (which are considerable) that convinced me of its veracity, or if it was my disposition that reverberated so well with its worldview. As it is for most belief systems we hold, it was probably a combination of both. I was raised by parents who could best be described as fiscally conservative and socially liberal. Products of the Depression and motivated by the fear of falling back into abject poverty, they skipped college and worked full-time well into their later years. Throughout my childhood I was inculcated with the fundamental principles of economic conservatism: hard work, personal responsibility, self-determination, financial autonomy, small government, and free markets. Even though they were not in the least religious (as so many conservatives are today), my parents were exceedingly generous to those who were less fortunate—greed is good, but charity is better.

• xxiv: The motto of the Skeptics Society comes from Tractatus Politicus (1666) by Baruch Spinoza:

That I might investigate the subject matter of this science with the same freedom of spirit as we generally use in mathematics, I have labored carefully not to mock, lament, or denounce human actions, but to understand them; and to this end I have looked upon passions, such as love, hatred, anger, envy, ambition, pity, and the other perturbations of the mind, not in the light of vices of human nature, but as properties just as pertinent to it as are heat, cold, storm, thunder, and the like to the nature of the atmosphere.

• 1: Begins with a comparison of the Yanomanö hunter-gatherers of Venezuela to the consumer-traders of New York and New Jersey. Their relative wealth can be measured in Stock Keeping Units (SKUs). I generally roll my eyes at discussions of the Yanomanö, since they are so over-used for dubious conclusions, but this is not about their behavior, only their state.
• 16: The general distrust and resentment of those who have benefited from the market comes from our Folk economics, based on millennia of relatively equal distribution inside small bands.
• 18:

Because humans evolved in small groups of a few dozen to a few hundred individuals in hunter-gatherer communities, in which everyone was either genetically related or knew one another intimately, most resources were shared, wealth accumulation was almost unheard of, and excessive greed and avarice were punished. Thus we naturally respond to a free market system in which conspicuous wealth is paraded as a sign of success with envy and anger, and the expectation is that someone or something more powerful than those greedy individuals should implement corrective action. All it evolutionary egalitarianism. Further, throughout most of the history of civilization, economic inequalities were not the result of natural differences in drive and talent between members of a society equally free to pursue their right to prosperity; instead, a handful of chiefs, kings, nobles, and priests exploited an unfair and rigged social system to their personal benefit and at the cost of impoverishing the masses. Our natural response is to perceive such inequalities as ill-gotten gains and to demand controls from the top down to limit the amount of wealth accumulated by any one individual. Whenever anyone says “They should do something about it,” the they that is invoked is inevitably the social institution with the most power—in our case, the government.

• 21: The Russian anarchist and social commentator Pyotr Kropotkin criticized Spencer and Huxley in his book Mutual Aid (1902). He argues that nature shows some species thrive because of social cooperation, rather than greed.
• 25: Darwin must have considered William Paley, who invoked Adam Smith's invisible hand, but inverted it from a bottom-up process to a top-down divine force. Smith, in turn, was arguing against the mercantilists, who believed economic transactions between nations were zero-sum.
• 27: Smith's Wealth of Nations was an argument against the mercantilist system of protectionism and special privilege. Smith writes, “The wealth of a country consists, not of its gold and silver only, but in its lands, houses, and consumable goods of all different kinds.” Yet “in the mercantile system, the interest of the consumer is almost always constantly sacrificed to that of the producer.”
• 27 - 28: For example, Smith argues that growing grapes in France is more efficient than in Scotland. Therefore, if one were truly interested in the consumer, rather than protecting domestic producers, it is better to import.
• 29: French economist Frédéric Bastiat satirized special interest groups in The Petition of the Candlemakers. The Candlemakers appeal to the government to eliminate competition from the sun.
• 31: Four things made illegal by the Sherman Antitrust Act:
1. price gouging (charging more than the competition)
2. cutthroat competition (charging less than the competition)
3. price collusion (charging the same as the competition)
4. monopoly (having no competition)
• 31 - 32: The Aluminum Company of America (Alcoa), based on the inexpensive process invented by Charles Martin Hall in 1886, suffered more than any other company under Sherman. Of course, it was the consumers who were denied cheap materials while other aluminum producers didn't have to compete.
• 33 - 34: Microsoft monopoly trial regarding Netscape's browser vs. Microsoft Internet Explorer.

According to the judge, “This indicates that superior quality was not responsible for the dramatic rise of Internet Explorer's usage share.” In other words, even though Microsoft offered a higher quality product at a lower price, that is not what led to its success over Netscape; rather, Microsoft's exclusive deals and special offers to other companies with whom it desired to do business is what led to its success, and that is not fair. Not fair  to  whom? Consumers? No—as Judge Jackson admitted, it was a boon to consumers. So to whom was it not fair? The answer should be obvious by now: other producers.

• Wrong! Judge Jackson was saying that IE was an inferior product which only got on PCs via deals with manufacturers and AOL! Sorry, but Shermer is looking too hard for historical parallels and mis-interpreted an ambiguous statement. I really hope Shermer corrects this deficiency.
• 35: On April 1, 1983, Ronald Reagan increased the tariff on foreign motorcycle imports from 4.4% to 49.4% to protect Harley -Davidson.
• 36: By employing 1.3 million people, and keeping costs low, Wal-Mart was responsible for 13% of U.S. productivity gains in the second half of the 1990s. George Will notes that for every 50 jobs Wal-Mart causes to be lost, it creates 100 new ones, making it about as important as the Federal Reserve in holding down inflation. Further:

As Will notes, Wal-Mart prices average 17 percent less than those of other retail outlets, drawing 127 million customers per week, and in 2006 more than twnty-five thousand people applied for 325 jobs at a Wal-Mart in Evergreen Park, Illinois. Calling Wal-Mart “the most prodigious job-creator in the history of the private sector in this galaxy,” Will estimates that “Wal-Mart and its effects save shoppers more than $200 billion a year, dwarfing such government programs as food stamps ($28.6 billion) and the earned-income tax credit ($34.6 billion).” To paraphrase Yogi Berra, if people won't work and shop at other retail stores, there's no way you can stop them.

• However, the employment statistics don't account for the quality or number of hours available at these new jobs.
• 37: 2007 is the 50th anniversary of the Treaty of Rome. Denmark, Ireland, and the UK were on economic par with the signatories (France, Italy, Belgium, West Germany, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands), but those three countries fell behind those that opened economic borders. After Denmark, Ireland, and the UK opened their economic borders to the six signatories, they eventually caught up.
• 44: The couldn't foresee how racing bicycles in the early 1980s could be improved—but they were.
• 47: Path dependency or historical lock-in, such as the QWERTY keyboard, leads to bandwagon effect and network effect.
• 48: Microsoft captures a certain segment of the market, leading to a temporary state of equilibrium, optimization, or stability. This may be a Nash equilibrium, named after John Nash (as seen in A Beautiful Mind).
• 48 - 49: Pareto efficient, regarding market efficiency, named after Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto.
• 51: The QWERTY keyboard was not meant to slow down typists, but to separate frequently used letter pairs (T and H, for example).
• 56: Dutch were patentless from 1869 to 1912 and Swiss were patentless from 1850 to 1912, with no ill effects at attracting foreign capital.
• 61 - 63: Bicycles in 1979 were slightly better than those of 1959, but several discontinuous changes (such as public interest in sport racing) led to rapid improvements in the early 1980s.
• 65+: Chapter 5: Minding Our Money. Several cognitive biases:
• cognitive dissonance: mental tension created when a person holds two conflicting thoughts simultaneously (e.g. reaction by followers of Marion Keech when aliens failed to appear as predicted)
• self-justification: ability to rationalize our choices and actions (e.g. “mistakes were made”)
• inattention blindness: becoming blind to dynamic events when attending to one task (e.g. accident reports).
• blind spot bias: recognizing existence and influence of cognitive biases in others, but not themselves.
• introspection illusion: people trust themselves with introspection, but not others.
• self-serving bias: “Lake Wobegon writ large.”
• attribution bias: tendency to accept credit for good behavior, but allow the situation to account for bad behaviors.
• 74: Behavioural economics pioneered by psychologists (not trained economists) Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky.
• 75:

Yet, with characteristic modesty, Tversky said that most of his finding in economics were well known to “advertisers and used car salesmen.” For example, he noticed that customers were displeased when a retail store added a surcharge to a purchase made with a credit card, but were delighted when the store instead offered a discount for paying in cash. This “framing” of a choice as a penalty or as a reward deeply influences one's decision. In another example, Tversky discovered that in reviewing the risks of a medical procedure with patients, physicians will get a different response if they tell them that there is a 1 percent chance of tying versus a 99 percent chance of surviving.

• 77: representative fallacy:  Telling stories about people and gleaning narrative bits of information to make snap decisions.
• 78: availability fallacy: assigning probabilities based on examples immediately available (e.g. we believe probability of hitting a red light increases when we are late).
• 79: anchoring fallacy: priming a response by giving either a high or low estimate.
• 80: hindsight bias: reconstructing the past to fit present knowledge.
• 82: law of small numbers: believing that small sample sizes are representative of a larger population. Similarly, law of large numbers: very improbable events will occur if given sufficiently large number of chances.
• 83 - 84: Discussion of the “Monty Hall Problem”
• 85: framing effects: putting a choice in either a positive or negative context.
• 85: mental accounting: type of framing effect where we put monies in different categories depending on the context (e.g. people are less likely to make an effort to save money when the relative amount they are dealing with is small).
• 87 - 88: Given two identical mathematical tasks, people tend to do better with the one involving people.
• 89: endowment effect: bias toward the status quo.
• 89: sunk-cost fallacy: rationalizing irrational judgements based on how much one has already invested.
• 90: confirmation bias: we seek and find confirmatory evidence in support of already existing beliefs and ignore or reinterpret disconfirmatory evidence.
• 93: loss aversion: people tend to fear losses about twice as much as they desire gains.
• 99 - 100: Monkeys have the same sensitivity to changes in supply and demand as we do.
• 118 - 120: Universal moral behaviors: affection expressed and felt, attachment, coyness display, crying, and many many more.
• 128: Costly Signaling Theory (CST) is one explanation for why people perform altruistic acts for others who are not genetically related.
• 131: mirror neurons are directly involved in imitation, anticipation, and empathy.
• 141+: Quantitative measurement on how we are all better off than the people 50 years ago.
• 142: Air pollution in L.A. is much less than during the 1980s.
• 149: hedonic treadmill: never ending unsatisfaction with one's income, relative to others.
• 149: regret aversion: irrational preferance to forgo gains rather than feel regret.
• 162: There are over 33,820 denominations of Christianity alone.
• 172: In low population-density countries or with small families, people do not learn conflict resolution strategies.
• 184: Sociopaths comprise about 2% of the population (3-4% of males, and less than 1% of females), yet may account for half of all crimes in the United States.
• 191+: Chapter 10: The Science of Good Rules: As the number of people participating in ultra-long distance cycling races increased, the complexity of the rules (including many of common courtesy) increased dramatically.
• 199 - 200:

The network of trust and the social institutions that enforce them are so deeply embedded in our cultures and psyches that they are virtually invisible. Like the bird that is unaware of the air through with it flies, or the fish that does not notice the water in which it swims, the web of trust in which we live is so all-encompassing and so deeply entrenched in everything we do that we do not even know it is there until something goes wrong. Even when the network breaks, additional layers of trust are in place.

The web of trust is cast upon everything we do, and without it we would be like strangers in a strange land.

• 201: endowment effect: we are more willing to invest in defending what is already ours than in trying to take what is someone else's.
• 201 - 202: With increasing population, the number of dyads (two-person interactions) increases exponentially. In a band of 20 people, there are 190 dyads. In a tribe of 2,000, there will be 1,999,000 dyads. Once a population reaches several hundred, a centralized authority is needed to resolve conflicts.
• 205: Dr. Philip Zimbardo wrote a book about the term where ordinary good people are transformed into doing evil things, The Lucifer Effect.
• 206: Solzhenitsyn quote from THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO.
• 216: The text of Gordon Gekko's “Greed is Good” speech from the movie Wall Street.
• 222: Google started with a spelling error: a 1 followed by 100 zeros is a “googol.”
• 235+: Solutions to the idea of free will that maintain integrity to both science and society:
• Free will as a useful fiction
• Free will as a fuzzy fraction of determinism
• Free will as a causal uncertainty
• Free will as an evolutionary by-product
• Free will as an emergent property of the brain
• Free will as a product of neural compuation: free will may be a proxy for choice compuation.
• 239: On the Paternalism Problem:

The paternalism conclusion is not even wrong. Happiness. Freedom. Government. Pick two. If you want happiness by government fiat, there goes your freedom. Enforced policies to encourage happiness must inescapably lead to a decrease in freedom. This is true by definition—enforced means you are forced: that is, you have no choice. If you want happiness and freedom, you have to minimize government interference. As Jefferson warned, “A government big enough to give you everything you want, is strong enough to take everything you have.”

• 245: libertarian benevolence, a corollary to libertarian paternalism: switching the default option in a binary choice from opt in to opt out. Countries with opt out organ donation have 90% participation, compared to 20%. Companies should automatically enroll employees in opt out 401(k) plans.
• 246:

Libertarian paternalism makes a deeper assumption about our nature—that at our core we are moral beings with a deep and intuitive sense about what is right and wrong, and that most of the time most people in most circumstances choose to do the right thing. Under that principle, the default option should be to grant people the libertarian ideal of maximum freedom, while using the best science available to inform the policies that give structure to the minimum number of restrictions on our freedoms. Let's opt for more freedom and add back restrictions on freedom only where absolutely necessary and with great reluctrance.

• 252: Exchange is the best way to defuse intergroup aggression. Frédéric Bastiat wrote, “Where goods do not cross frontiers, armies will.” A corollary of Bastiat's Principle is where goods do cross frontiers, armies will not.

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THE TWO FACES OF TOMORROW

Based on the 1979 novel by James P. Hogan

Art and Adaptation by Yukinobu Hoshino

Translated from the Japanese by Frederik L. Schodt and Toren Smith

first published in Japan in 1993

English-language edition from Dark Horse Comics 1997, 1998 (13 issue comic book)

Trade paperback 2006

• On the moon, a group of scientists make a request to the space computer artificial intelligence network TITAN. If fulfills their request in a very unexpected way, nearly causing a dramatic accident. A decision has to be made, whether to scale back the capabilities of the TITAN network, or whether to take it to the next level, giving it more independence and survival instinct, with all the inherent dangers therein.
• Rather than risk the public, a prototype system called Spartacus is installed on a space station undergoing construction. The station will is crewed by military forces, should it become necessary to pull the plug. The resulting abilities and learning curve of Spartacus take everyone by surprise.
• Besides being a fantastic read, this comic book was obviously a huge inspiration to the Matrix movies! The similarities are astounding. They both ended with a tense détente and uncomfortable mutual symbiosis. Even small details like the design of the machine drones are too similar to be a coincidence. In fact, I prefer to think of this as a prequel to the Matrix, and believe the Wachowski brothers may have intended it to be such. It would certainly fit into the continuity.

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• Written as a reminiscence as he traveled from Minnesota to Baja by finding parallels along his journey with his governorship and post-governor experiences.
• 53 - 57: A visit to Dallas turns into an investigation into the JFK assassination.
• 57: Assumes that older people in his class must be “plants” to debunk conspiracy theories.
• 58 - 59: Instead of proclaiming National Day of Prayer, he declared July Fourth to be “Indivisible Day” (includes entire text).
• 89 - 90: Believe that his home phone was tapped when the hotline was installed.
• 94: Some permanent state employees in state government are actually CIA personnel. He was introduced to at least one.
• 113 - 114: When visiting Cuba on a trade mission, he had to opportunity to speak with Fidel Castro, and spent 20 minutes on the JFK assassination.
• 164: Property taxes give the wrong incentives. Keeping up property results in higher taxes.
• 165: By expanding state sales taxes to include services, the overall rate could be reduced from 6.5% to 6.0% and still balance the budget.
• 183 - 184: According to former Minnesota governor Elmer Anderson, “Abortion is religion's failure to persuade. So now they must legislate.”
• 201 - 202: Even when turned off, 220 million television sets in the U.S. are drawing power. Advocates for everyone to unplug them.

(Plus, you could have some fun with it. Remember the movie Network? Before shutting your TV down for the night, switch over to Fox News and shout out, “I'm mad as hell and I'm not gonna take it anymore!”)

• 203: On 9/11/2001 he called the “CIA guy who's based in the region.” Months later, the CIA liaison said that Ventura was the only governor who bothered to call him that day.
• 210 - 211: Regarding 9/11 and the “what did they know and when did they know it.” Although he touches on some ideas which verge on conspiracy theories, he really doesn't advocate any, besides general skepticism. Some reviewers have exaggerated his views.
• Ends the book with a fantasy sequence where he used the grassroots enthusiasm of the WWE to get on the ballot in all 50 states to run for president with Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Upon winning, Ventura is shot by a lone gunman.

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SCIENCE FRICTION

Where the Known Meets the Unknown (2005)

Michael Shermer

Hardcover

Times Books, Henry Holt and Company, New York

• xii - xiii: Sir Francis Bacon lists four “idols,” or psychological barriers that prevent our understanding of the natural world:
• idols of the cave: individual peculiarities
• idols of the marketplace: limits of language and communication
• idols of the theater: preexisting beliefs
• idols of the tribe: inherited foibles of human thought
• xx  - xxi: Comic book writer and Spider-Man illustrator John Byrne had several “predictions” of tragedies that later came to pass (e.g. New York blackout and Challenger disaster) which colleagues refer to as “the Byrne Curse.” Of course, he realizes that comic books have hundreds of incidents which don't come to pass. People remember the hits and forget the misses.
• xxix: In 2003 geneticists determined that all breeds of dogs are descended from a single population of wolves that lived in China fifteen thousand years ago.
• 19+: Chapter 2: The Big “Bright” Brouhaha
• 38+: Chapter 3: Heresies of Science
• Shermer evaluates each with a “fuzzy factor” from 0.1 (least likely to be true) to 0.9 (most likely to be true).
• Heresy 1: The Universe Is Not All There Is; fuzzy factor of 0.7
• Heresy 2: Time Travel Is Possible; fuzzy factor of 0.3
• Heresy 3: Evolution Is Not Progressive; fuzzy factor of 0.8
• Heresy 4: Oil Is Not a Fossil Fuel; fuzzy factor of 0.5
• Heresy 5: Cancer Is an Infectious Disease; fuzzy factor of 0.6
• Heresy 6: The Brain and Spinal Cord Can Regenerate; fuzzy factor of 0.7
• 101:

Now that Neanderthals are extinct, we are the only species who is aware of its own mortality. Death is an inescapable end to life. Every  organism that has ever lived has died. There are no exceptions. Behind every one of the 6.2 billion people now living lie seventeen others in the ground, for 106 billion, according to demographer Carl Haub, is the total number of humans who have ever lived. Our future is sealed by our past.

• 103: Harvard Medical School surgeon Judah Folkman has controversial angiogenesis theory of cancer. Once a “dominant” tumor is removed, chemical inhibitors disappear, and secondary tumors will appear.
• 111+: Chapter 8: Darwin on the Bounty: The How and the Why of the Greatest Mutiny in History
• 130+: Chapter 9: Exorcising Laplace's Demon
• The contingent-necessity model, illustrated by the QWERTY keyboard arrangement.
• 153+: Chapter 10: What If?
• Example of Sound of Thunder by Ray Bradbury.
• 227+: Chapter 13: The Hero on the Edge of Forever
• The controversy surrounding attribution the famous Star Trek episode between Harlan Ellison and Gene Roddenberry.
• 242 - 243: Science writers Daniel Dennett, Richard Dawkins, and Robert Wright are all critics of Stephen Jay Gould who believe his literary style misleads the public about evolution.

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MAKE LOVE*

*The Bruce Campbell Way (2005)

• Bruce Campbell attempts to move from B-Movies to the romantic comedy Let's Make Love! Starring Richard Gere and Renée Zellwegger, to humorous effect.
• Despite having the aid of a Hollywood makeup artist, I doubt that he could pull off an impersonation of mogul Robert Evans to his close friends.
• 267: Chris McDonald supposedly stole several roles from Bruce, because they play the same “type” of smarmy, snotty, or obnoxious guy.
  

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THE ACCIDENTAL TIME MACHINE (2007)

Joe Haldeman

Paperback

ACE Books, New York

2008-08-11 to 2008-08-12

• Matt Fuller: MIT graduate student who has just lost his job and his girlfriend.
• For some unknown reason, pressing the RESET button on a calibrator project causes it to disappear into the future. The length of time between re-appearances lengthens logarithmically. He soon discovers than anything inside a metal container (Faraday cage) attached to the calibrator will be taken as well.
• The process is complicated in that the machine moves in space proportionately to the length of time involved.
• Like all time travel stories, realism takes a back seat to plot. After all, the Earth is rotating and traveling through space at a decent clip. A machine that could travel only in time but not space would most likely end up outside the atmosphere. Yet a machine that could travel instantly through space would require even more suspension of disbelief.
• Martha: In a future Christian theocracy, Matt is assigned a graduate assistant. This leads to some very interesting dialog and situations regarding the tension between science and religion.
• La: Artificial Intelligence that runs a greater Los Angeles region. Another staple of science fiction: In a future where humans needs are provided for by machines, will the machines take control?
• This book was a healthy hybrid of light and hard science fiction. Vast ideas are contemplated, but in a context of adventure and romance.

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CROUCHING TIGER, HIDDEN DRAGON

Author Andy Seto

Story Wang Du Lu

Executive Producer & Script Writer So Man Sing

Episode 1 (2002)

ComicsOne Corporation

• The manhua (Chinese comic book) adaptation of on the five novels by Wang Du Lu:
1. Crane Frightens Kunlun
2. Precious Sword, Golden Hairpin
3. Sword's Force, Pearl's Shine
4. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
5. Iron Knight, Silver Vase
• According to wikipedia, this series depart considerably from the text of the novels. Unfortunately, there are no English translations of the novels available.
• Episode 1 deals with how Li Mu Bai meets Yu Shu Lien. Mu Bai is caught up in the action when Shu Lien's father, Grand Yu, is attacked by his enemies.
• The art is extraordinary. The fights are full of mysticism, where the combatants tend to announce their moves (similar to Dragon Ball Z).
• The publisher, ComicsOne Corporation, went out of business before the publication of Episode 2. In order for the authors to retain the copyright, HK Comics later published “revised and expanded” editions, on glossy paper with additional material and artistic effects.

Episode 2 (2003)

HK Comics

• Some sections overlap with the Ang Lee movie (such as the affair between Jen Yu and “Dark Cloud” Lo), but this series is remarkably different.
• The most significant difference is the addition of the character Long Gao, husband of Jade Fox. Although Long Gao has no quarrel with Li Mu Bai, his love for Jade Fox dictates that the two must fight.
• Long Gao's health prevents him from using the internal chi techniques of kung fu, of which Li Mu Bai has superior skills. Interestingly, this disadvantage actually makes them more evenly matched than Mu Bai's other opponents.

Episode 3 (2005)

HK Comics

• The later issues have Li Mu Bai fighting evil spirits. They seemed to be defeated by issue 10, so it seemed that the protagonists could get on with the work of fending off an invasion led by the Four Commanders. However, the staff have other plans.
• A foreboding essay at the end of issue 11 explains:

I am glad to tell you that I determined to believe in Christ and accept Him to be my sole Redeemer on April 17, 2005. At first I was a bit worried because Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon is about kung fu and as the old Chinese saying goes, “All kinds of kung fu originate from Shaolin”, which is a Buddhist monastery. Moreover, the latter part of the story is not only about kung fu. Li Mu Bai's experience of being possessed by the evil spirits as well as all kinds of supernatural forces in fact belongs to the realm of Buddhism. Furthermore, the ultimate goal of a Buddhist is to reach enlightenment rather than being redeemed by Christ. As such, am I preaching Buddhism in this comic?

Those who have seen the movie may have the impression that Li Mu Bai, played by Chow Yun Fat, has already reached a rather high level of kung fu training, as he told Yu Shu Lien (Michelle Yeo) that he can see light when he trains. At the end of the movie when he was dying due to intoxication and Yu Shu Lien asked him to use his last gasp to attain the supreme state of Taoism, he instead chose to kiss her and express his love for her at his last gasp. Why did a Taoist disciple who had achieved so much finally give up what he had learned all his life? Is what he learned useful and practicable? I think the readers will have their own answers. For me, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon is in fact the story of an unbeliever. The grand finale in the next volume will echo the ending of the movie. Please don't miss it!

So Man Sing

• The last two issues are a total mess. The evil spirits promise unimaginable power to those who will bow down and adore them. Then the evil spirits are clumsily revealed as an allusion to the Christian version of Satan, even down to the red skin and pointy horns!
• Earlier issues had some interesting conversations regarding the differences between, Buddhism, Taoism, and Shaolin. Continuing the philosophical discussions would have been a grand opportunity to introduce these concepts to foreign audiences. But the story ended as a thinly-veiled screed against “pagan” religions. What a waste!
• This is reminiscent of the worst kinds of artistic abuses during the Middle Ages, where Greek, Norse, and Celtic mythology was willfully subverted (if not outright destroyed) in favor of Christian propaganda. I am also reminded of how the Taliban was compelled to destroy those ancient Buddhist statues.
• The delusion of the writers is so profound that they finished the series with a supernatural essay about others who had escaped from the “nightmare” of eastern religion:

Although a person may gain some benefit by pursuing these mystical things, they can never achieve inner peace. For this reason, he finally gave up. Later, Dr. Leung became a Christian and understood that these immortal beings, buddhas and bodhisattvas were in fact evil spirits in disguise.

• I am so disgusted with how the series ended, that I have no desire to spend any more money to purchase the expanded editions of Episode 1. I originally wanted to learn more of the back story of the characters from the movie, but now I have to question just how faithful these stories are to the novels.

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BATMAN AND PHILOSOPHY

The Dark Knight of the Soul (2008)

Series Editor: William Irwin

Edited by Mark D. White and Robert Arp

Paperback

John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey

Why Doesn't Batman Kill the Joker? by Mark D. White

• 8: A classic philosophical moral dilemma is the “trolley problem” introduced by Philippa Foot and elaborated upon by Judith Jarvis Thompson. Basically, if you see that a trolley is heading to kill five people, should you change its track to only run over one person?
• 10: Thompson introduces a similar problem where a surgeon is tempted to take the organs from a healthy living person to transplant into five others who would otherwise die:

With the possible exception of our bandaged and demented Dr. Hush, few people would endorse such a drastic plan (least of all Dr. Thomas Wayne,bless his soul). You can see where I'm going with this (Batman fans are so smart)—“What is the difference between the bystander in the trolley case and the surgeon in the transplant case?” In both cases a person can do nothing, and let five people die, or take an action that kills one but saves five. Thompson, and many philosophers after her, have struggled with these questions, and there is no definitive answer. Most people will agree that throwing the trolley switch is justified, and also that the surgeon's actions are not, but we have a very difficult time saying precisely why we feel that way—and that includes philosophers!

• I've had the contention for a long time that the reason philosophers are still kept busy is because they base their arguments on their feelings (as the author betrays here) rather than pure logic. These feelings come from instincts, which ultimately stem from millennia of evolutionary psychology. That is why I believe that the study of evolutionary psychology is much more effective than philosophy in helping us understand why we consider certain actions ethical or unethical. However, because these come from our impressions, rather than objective reality, our evaluation of ethics can be mislead, in the same way that our perceptions can be mislead by optical illusions.
• 13: Make the trolley case tougher by saying that a dense fog obscures the view of the main track and we know that sometimes people are there. This is much more reasonable. We must always realize that our decisions are based on imperfect information. It is hubris to believe that we can predict all the consequences of our actions. Otherwise, why not run around with a pistol, shooting people for the flimsiest of potential justifications?
• 5 & 8: The Joker killed the second Robin, Jason Todd, who later returned from the dead and chastised Batman for not killing the Joker to put a stop to his other potential victims. But once you add the element of life-after-death, especially resurrection, that argument becomes moot. If Batman kills Joker, what's to stop Joker coming back to life the same way that Jason Todd did? Further, isn't Jason admitting that the Joker's victims aren't truly gone forever?

Is it Right to Make a Robin? by James DiGiovanna

• 19: deontological ethics comes from the Greek work deon, meaning “duty.” Example: Immanuel Kant (1724-1804)
• 20: consequentialist ethics more concerned with consequences than moral rightness. Examples: Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) and John Stuart Mill (1806-1873).
• 21: virtue ethics emphasizes general character traits. Example: Plato (428-348 BCE)
• 23: Plato and Aristotle (384-322 BCE) emphasized training someone to be ethical rather than explaining how to be ethical.
• 25 - 26:

We can now return to the question from the beginning of this chapter: Is Batman's decision to train Robin morally permissible? No matter how you may answer based upon a particular ethical perspective, what seems clear is, in the context of this issue, Batman is a lousy deontologist, a decent consequentialist, and, most assuredly, some kind of virtue ethicist. And without being the world's greatest detectives (or philosophers), we'll have to leave it at that!

Batman's Virtuous Hatred by Stephen Kershnar

• 28: Batman hates criminals. In THE DARK KNIGHT RETURNS, he could have killed the leader of the mutants, but instead he destroyed him.
• 29: virtue ethics regards how a person should be, rather than what they do.
• 31: Gordon tells his wife about his affair in Batman: Year One (1987). According to a Virtuous-Persons Theory, this shows that Gordon is a virtuous person. Well, that's debatable!
• 32: Expands this to a Virtuous-Thoughts-and-Actions Theory.

No Man's Land: Social Order in Gotham City and New Orleans by Brett Chandler Patterson

• 42: No Man's Land chronicles the disintegration of Gotham after a massive earthquake. It has an eerie resemblance to the aftermath of hurricane Katrina (August 29, 2005), though it predates Katrina by six years.
• 42: Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) argued that the natural state of humans is war and mistrust.
• 45: Stories such as Joseph Conrad's HEART OF DARKNESS,William Golding's Lord of the Flies (1954), and TV's Lost suggest that isolation can bring out the “wild side” in people.
• 45: The media exaggerated stories of looting, rape, and murder following the flooding in New Orleans.
• 46: In No Man's Land, Commissioner Gordon represents a “paternal” power while police officer William Petit represents a “despotical” power, but described by Hobbes' Leviathan.
• I wonder if Petit (French for “small”) is a reference to Kurtz (German for “small”) in Heart of Darkness?

Governing Gotham by Tony Spanakos

• 56 - 57: In THE DARK KNIGHT RETURNS, Superman is authorized by the government, and sees himself as “legitimate,” while Batman's activities are unlicensed, and even admits to being a “criminal.”
• 67: Batman does not mete out punishment, leading to the important relationship between him and Commissioner Gordon.
• 68:

But while this order comforts readers, and lets us know that we can sleep at night because someone is watching over the prowlers in Crime Alley, it is very threatening to the state. The state believes it must monopolize the legitimate use of violence. And more than the villains he fights, it is Batman, and to a lesser extent Gordon, who is a threat to the state, for it is Batman who challenges the state's monopoly over the legitimate use of violence. This is why he is hunted in DKR and Year One, and why his actions are challenged in Year Two and Dark Victory. The irony of the Batman's relationship with the state is that the more he reduces crime and contributes to public order, the more he challenges the state, as it becomes obvious that the state's use of violence is ineffective. That makes Gordon necessary to prevent the Batman from being a complete threat. Batman trusts Gordon and will turn over criminals to him, and in return Gordon recognizes him as the exception to the state's monopoly.

The Joker's Wild: Can We Hold The Clown Prince Morally Responsible? by Christopher Robichaud

• 70: Joker cackles, “Don't get ee-ee-even, get mad!” in Alan Moore's The Killing Joke (1988).
• 72: Michel Foucault (1926-1984) warned that many groups have been unfairly marginalized by being labeled as insane.
• 75: Discussion of determinism.
• 79: According to his origin story in The Killing Joke, Joker was a husband and father who entered crime as the Red Hood to make ends meet.

Batman's Promise by Randall M. Jensen

• 93: Does it make sense to make a promise to a dead person? Can they be wronged if the promise is broken? Of course, in Batman's world, resurrection is possible.
• 94 - 95: Epicurus (341-279 BCE) argues that death is nothing to be afraid of. He was a hedonist, who strove to maximize pleasure, and he believed the dead cannot feel either pleasure or pain.

Should Bruce Wayne Have Become Batman? by Mahesh Ananth and Ben Dixon

• 107: Regarding Peter Singer:

In true utilitarian form, Singer makes clear that location, especially in our richly interactive global market, is irrelevant with respect to moral decision making. Every person morally counts as one, and that's it. So, the suffering of Gotham's “first-world” citizens at the hands of crime, while important, is outweighed by the needs of huge numbers of starving poor in impoverished nations facing certain death. Thus, Wayne's familial ties to Gotham allow for no additional “points” in a utilitarian calculation that weighs harms versus benefits. The idea here is that Wayne cannot use the supposed rightness of honoring his parents' memory by focusing on helping Gotham, even when it has the benefit of alleviating some suffering there, as any kind of trump against a utilitarian like Singer.

• 111: Bruce Wayne looks to the past to justify being Batman, while utilitarians look to the consequences of the future.
• 112: Batman had to choose between protecting Robin and saving an Ethiopian refugee camp in A Death in the Family. Batman chose the latter in a fundamentally utilitarian decision: “It's ironic that this very way of thinking would have prevented Wayne from becoming Batman in the first place!”

What Would Batman Do? Bruce Wayne as Moral Exemplar by Ryan Indy Rhodes and David Kyle Johnson

• 114: Examples of moral exemplars: Jesus, Buddha, Gandhi, Mother Teresa, and the Dalai Lama. I take issue with all of these. The authors do cite some critics of Teresa (such as Christopher Hitchens) and Gandhi in the end-notes.
• 119 - 120: They admit that many of the stories of “historical examplars” are embellished or exaggerated. Yet they still argue that Jesus, Gandhi, and Mother Teresa were “good people—it's just that the idea of them that we hold up as a moral exemplar may not be entirely historical.” The criticisms of Gandhi are tenuous, but even if (or especially if) the stories of Jesus and Mother Teresa are correct, I would argue that they are not moral exemplars.
• 121 - 122: Fictional characters make better moral exemplars.
• 122: How can one pick the true Batman? Among other incarnations, Batman: The Animated Series (1992-1995) enjoys near universal acclaim for getting the character right.

Under the Mask: How Any Person Can Become Batman by Sarah K. Donovan and Nicholas P. Richardson

• 131: Using three stories: Batman: Year One (1987), Arkham Asylum (1989), and THE DARK KNIGHT RETURNS (1986).
• 133: Nietzsche and Foucault agree that truth is a human construct.
• 137: Nietzsche coins the phrase will to power to describe our desires for survival and power. Also, eternal recurrence (aka eternal return of the same) is the ability to welcome both the highest peaks and darkest valleys of our individual lives.
• 135 & 138: In Arkham Asylum, Dr. Cavendish descends into madness upon reading the journal of Amadeus Arkham, whose childhood shares some features with Bruce Wayne.

Could Batman Have Been The Joker? by Sam Cowling and Chris Ragg

• 145: They claim that “2 + 2 = 4” in every possible world (necessarily true), while superheroes may exist in other worlds (contingently true).
• Ultimately, this essay was a waste of ink.

Batman's Identity Crisis and Wittgenstein's Family Resemblance by Jason Southworth

• 158: More than one person has been Batman. After his back is broken in Knightfall (1993-1994) Bruce Wayne gives the mantle to Jean-Paul Valley (aka Azrael). Dick Grayson (aka Nightwing and Robin) replaces him in the Prodigal arc (1994-1995).
• This essay was not very good either.

What Is It Like To Be A Batman? by Ron Novy

• 168:

Now, acting like Batman is quite different from actually knowing what it's like to be Batman. At best, one can “do as Batman does”—brood in the Batcave, admire the long curve of Catwoman's calf, or tumble down an alley with some of the Joker's henchmen, Insofar as your actions mirror those of Batman, with a little practice you could do a pretty fair job of behaving as Batman behaves—but this is not the same as knowing what it's like for Batman to be Batman. Your late-night patrols, undertaken with your Keatonesque, Kilmerite, Baleian, or even West-like physique packed firmly into a Kevlar-and-Lycra costume worn by an actual ice-skating stunt double in the movie Batman and Robin, may even garner an above-the-fold story from a cub reporter on the Gotham Gazette police beat.

• 171: bat = Chiroptera
• 171: Barbara Gordon was Batgirl before becoming Oracle, the brains behind Birds of Prey. Suppose she had never seen color. Upon seeing red for the first time, would her experience be the same as yours?
• 174 & 178: The Joker knows better than anyone what it's like to be Batman, as witnessed by their shared laughter to a joke at end of The Killing Joke.
• 168 & 176: Kant described the world that exists behind other appearances as the noumenal world. Contrasts with phenonmena: subjective appearance of material objects in your own conscious experience.

Alfred, The Dark Knight of Faith: Batman and Kierkegaard by Christopher M. Drohan

• 187: Alfred Pennyworth has been kidnapped 27 times (according to Batman: Gotham Adventures #16 (Sept. 1999).
• 189: When Batman finally captures Joe Chill, the murderer of his parents, he takes pity on him:

Furthermore, Chill's mother, Mrs. Chilton, may have even helped raise Bruce Wayne, leaving us to wonder whether caring for Bruce caused her to neglect raising her own son, and if this could have, ironically, led to Joe's life of crime. Regardless of all these twists of fate, Batman trudges on toward justice, desperately trying to make some good of his tragic life, so that his parents' deaths were not in vain.

• 191 - 192: Batman is like the knights described by Kierkegaard:

“The knights of the infinite resignation are easily recognized: their gait is gliding and assured.” Having found a higher reason for living, these knights glide toward it like bats in the night soaring from one rooftop to another, plunging at it blindly, but without fear, for they are not afraid to die in the name of what is glorious. Their life is now but a means to an infinite end, an end that surpasses all other concerns, including self-preservation.

Dark Nights and the Call of Conscience by Jason J. Howard

• 201: In Being and Time (1927), Heidegger develops the notion of “fallenness” = people taking on the expectations and concerns of other people.
• 202: Heidegger describes human beings as Dasein, who are aware of their own “Being” (Sein) as always “there” (da) in some specific place.
• 206: Batman's success in Gotham is questionable. Crime never really drops, the criminals he puts away usually escape, his very presence attracts lunatics and he spawns copycat vigilantes.

Batman's Confrontation with Death, Angst, and Freedom by David M. Hart

• 212: Fans wanted, and received, a “kinder, gentler” Batman with his literal exorcism in 52 #30 (November 29, 2006).
• 220: Heidegger defines Angst as the uncomfortable feeling of authentically confronting the certain possibility of one's own death.
• 222: Bruce Wayne experiences Angst in Batman: Year One, when he hesitates to call Alfred to dress a potentially mortal wound.

Why Batman Is Better Than Superman by Galen Foresman

• 228: Value theory is concerned with the study of value (what makes a thing good) and evaluation (the process of determining how good or bad something is).
• 232: People often mistakenly say “This begs the question” instead of “This raises the question.”
• The author (rather arbitrarily) values bravery over power in a superhero, which makes Batman the winner.

World's Finest…Friends? Batman, Superman, and the Nature of Friendship by Daniel P. Malloy

• 241: Superman's concept of friendship can be traced to Aristotle, while Batman's concept can be traced to Nietzsche.
• 244: Batman is one of the few DC superheroes not inspired by Superman, so he can stand on equal footing.
• 246: Instances where Batman has manipulated or betrayed his friends, leading to him being voted out of the Justice League:
• Tower of Babel (2001) shows that Batman has plans to neutralize other members of the Justice League.
• Batman had deployed the Brother Eye satellite to spy on meta-humans in Infinite Crisis.
• 248: Despite their names, Batman better embodies the Nietzsche Übermensch than Superman.
• 248: Batman does not want superpowers. In one adventure, his mind was put into Superman's body, but he worried of the danger of relying on sheer power rather than his wits.
• 250: Whenever they do fight, Batman always defeats Superman because Batman doesn't fight fair. “Deep down, Clark's essentially a good person. And deep down, I'm not.”

Leaving the Shadow of the Bat: Aristotle, Kant, and Dick Grayson on Moral Education by Carsten Fogh Nielsen

• 255: Aristotle wrote in Nicomachean Ethics that being good requires practice and repetition. For example, we become just by performing just acts and brave by performing brave acts. This is a circular definition.
• 258: Children should admire people who actually are morally admirable, rather than authority figures who may not be worthy of admiration or imitation.
• 259: Kant disagrees that we can use exemplary human beings to determine what to do in Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (1785).
• 260: Kant argued that the defining feature of human beings is autonomy: their ability  too live under universal principles that they have chosen. Letting one's life be determined by external authorities is heteronomy.
• 261 - 262: In the 1960s Batman TV series, Robin is not independent. Batman is always the one who leads them out of traps.
• 263: In some versions of the story, Batman does not accept when Dick Grayson/Robin stops being his sidekick, leading to a heated encounter.

The Tao of the Bat by Bat-Tzu (as interviewed by Mark D. White)

• 268: Batman lets his yang dominate (the white part representing masculine, hard, and unyielding) and does not embrace his yin (the black part representing feminine, the soft, and the nurturing).
• The last few lines indicating that “Bat-Tzu” is actually Alfred are just painful.

---

G33K MAFIA (2006)

• 15: List of Paul's (former) coworkers.
• With the help of Chloe's “Crew,” Paul negotiated a stock selling arrangement netting him $850,000 by blackmailing his former coworkers. He should have just paid the group $85,000 (10%) and walked away. But it wouldn't have made for a very exciting book if he didn't want to lead a life of crime too.
• 50+: As a challenge, Paul comes up with a money-making venture based on creating counterfeit comic books, sealing them in CRG (Comics Rating Group) cases, and selling them on eBay. This has the added benefit that nobody will ever know they have been ripped off, since no collector would ever open a sealed case.
• The most difficult-to-believe part involved printing out fake comic book covers based on photographs taken of legitimate copies. Since they didn't control the conditions of the photography, a camera would be much less reliable than using a scanner. Also, it would have looked very suspicious for a “reporter” to photograph the back cover of famous comics.
• 68 - 71: Tale of how Chloe came to be a con artist.
• 89: By coincidence, Paul's scheme was going to gross $85,000. He felt obligated to pay them back for their help, so my way would have been more direct.
• 93: Discussion of how to live “off the grid.”
• 94:

“Sounds like a party. We'll definitely have to pull that one. I'll look into it, see if there are any angles we can play to make a few bucks while we're there.”

“You're always looking for the angles aren't you?”

“I never seem to find any angels, so angles are all that's left.”

• 117: “No one ever got anywhere trying to impress a crazy person.”
• 171: Paul comes up with another scheme as a means to formally join the Crew:

“Well, I was driving around earlier today looking for inspiration and then it literally hit me. Who are the most credulous, illogical people out there? Who'll believe any damn fool thing, no matter how ridiculous, as long as it's said with authority? Who deserves to have their money separated from their bank accounts on general principal, just for being so obnoxious?” He paused to milk the moment. “The answer's obvious — right-wing talk radio listeners.”

---

SEX AND ROCKETS

The Occult World of Jack Parsons (1999)

new edition (2004)

John Carter

with an introduction by Robert Anton Wilson

Paperback

feral house, Los Angeles, California

Introduction: A Marvel Walked Among Us by Robert Anton Wilson

• viii - ix: A list of events in 1914, the year of Parson's birth:

Police arrested the legendary labor hero Joe Hill in Utah on January 13 for a murder he almost certainly did not commit, and the State executed him the following year. His last words, “Don't weep for me, boys—organize!” became a mantra to union members for decades after.

In Colorado, John D. Rockefeller's hired goons killed 21 people (including 11 children) in a clash with other labor “radicals.” Leftists protested outside Rockefeller's New York office and got arrested for it: a court order banned any other people with signs or banners from parading in front of that sacrosanct shrine of the Almighty Dollar. Novelist Upton Sinclair appeared that next day with a blank sign, telling reporters that free speech had died. Suffragettes marched on Washington June 28, demanding equal rights for women.

Charles Taze Russell, founder of the Jehovah's Witnesses, announced that the apocalypse would begin on October 2—coincidentally or synchronistically, the very day Marvel Whiteside Parsons [who would later, as Jack Parsons, call himself the AntiChrist] emerged from his mother's womb, or from even darker places, and began to investigate and meddle with this planet.

• xii: Robert Anson Heinlein's STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND (1961) was the first sci-fi novel to reach the New York Times best seller list. Many say that his good friend Jack Parsons was hugely influential on it.
• xviii: On the duality of his personality, and his drug use:

Jack Parsons' magick and John Parsons' science have a closer unity than most people can imagine. They both aimed at the stars.

By the way, all over northern Europe traditional art shows the fairy-people and sorcerers surrounded by mushrooms, usually the “liberty cap” mushroom, now identified as psilocybin, the same used by Native American shamans for around 4000 years. The Irish Gaelic name for this fabulous fungus, Pokeen, means little god (“Little fairy” in modern Gaelic, but pook derives ultimately from bog, the Indo-European root for “god.”)

Crowley spoke for this tradition when he said true religion always invokes Dionysus, Aphrodite and the Muses, which he also called “wine, women and song.”

Nowadays we call this magick trinity Sex and Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll, and celebrate them at Raves that hauntingly resemble the earliest stirrings of cosmic questing by ancestors who dressed in animal skins and looked even more like gorillas than we do.

• xix: H.L. Mencken said that Christians have “the haunting fear that somebody, somewhere, might be having a good time.”

[Main text]

• xxv: There is a joke in the aerospace world that “JPL” stands for “Jack Parsons' Laboratory” or even “Jack Parsons Lives.”
• 8: Parsons and friend Ed Forman attended a famous lecture by graduate student William Bollay about the rocket experiments of Austrian Eugen Sänger. The talk concluded with the possibility of “stratospheric passenger carriers.”
• 8: JPL started as the Guggenheim Aeronautical Laboratory, California Institute of Technology (GALCIT).
• 8: In 1926 GALCIT came under the direction of Hungarian professor Theodore von Kármán (1881–1936). He was a descendant of Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel of Prague, who legend says created the Golem.
• 9: Parsons often recited Aleister Crowley's “Hymn to Pan.”
• 9: In 1958 von Kármán said that the three most important people in developing rocketry in the United States were himself, Frank Malina and Jack Parsons.
• 17: Hsue-shen Tsien joins the group. On page 198, the author mentions THREAD OF THE SILKWORM (1995) as a good source on Tsien.
• 23: Parsons and Malina wrote a 38-page manuscript outlining a proposed novel with an anti-war message:

Near the end of the story, Belvedere [based on Parsons] accidentally blows himself up trying to stop one of his experiments—it should be noted that this story was written 15 years before Parsons died the same way, an eerie prophecy. Further, the character based on Tsien gets sent back to China under suspicion of communism and drops out of touch with the others, an incident that later occurred. Many of those who remain are investigated for their anti-capitalistic political beliefs, and Malina's great fear—that their work would be used for wartime applications—also came true. In the story it is a rich investor who actually sells their secrets to the Nazis and Fascists.

• 29: Malina didn't want to use rockets for military applications. Parsons was more interested in the end result.
• 26 - 28: Parsons testifies as an expert witness at a car bombing trial.
• 30 - 31: Fritz Zwicky, who had taken graduate courses under Einstein, believed that rockets could not fly in a vacuum.
• 37+: A short history of the Ordo Templi Orientis (Order of the Temple of the East)
• 44: The OTO grades from 0° = 0° to 10° = 1°
• 48 - 55: Parsons and Forman are featured in the August 1940 issue of Popular Mechanics.
• 57: Lord Bulwer-Lytton is famous for starting a novel with the phrase, “It was a dark and story night.”
• 57 - 58: Parsons meets Jack Williamson, author of the novel Darker Than You Think. Williamson was surprised that Parsons took it more seriously than he did.
• 60 & 65: Possible meeting between Parsons and Robert Heinlein.
• 65 - 66: Successful JATO (Jet-Assisted Take-Off) test of an Ercoupe hobby plane using the fuel GALCIT-27 (meaning there were 26 failures before it).
• 70 - 71: In November 1940, a young associate of Parsons and Forman got drunk and carjacked a young couple.
• 72: Starting with GALCIT-53, liquid asphalt is used as a new solid rocket binder (instead of glue), with great success.
• 73: The Aerojet corporation is founded on March 19, 1942, by von Kármán, Malina, Summerfield, Parsons, Forman, and von Kármán's attorney Andrew Haley.
• 76: Well-established engineers were reluctant to work with rockets, which had a bad reputation, so Aerojet had to hire unskilled workers.
• 79 - 82: A thinly-veiled Parsons and others are featured in the science fiction novel Rocket to the Morgue by William A.H. White.
• 86: Parsons places ads to attract boarders who are “bohemians, artists, musicians, atheists, anarchists, or other exotic types” to the mansion. I find it deeply ironic that Parsons identifies with atheists, despite the fact that his occult beliefs ultimately stem from religion in general, and Christianity, in particular.
• 96: GALCIT changes its name to Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL).
• 98: The word “thiokol” was coined from the Greek words for “sulpher” and “glue.”
• 100: The founders of Aerojet look for new markets in the Post-War period. It is ironic that they had become dependent on war, despite their earlier leanings.
• 102: Parsons takes up his “magic” with his Betty, the younger sister of his wife Helen, after she left. He encouraged an open relationship, which backfired when she became attracted to L. Ron Hubbard.
• 109: Parsons refers to Enochian magic developed by Dr. John Dee and Sir Edwin Kelley. Dee (b. July 13, 1527) was Royal Astrologer to Elizabeth I. He an agent of espionage who signed secret communiqués as “007.”
• 112: Development of the Enochian language:

After the hazardous dictation process was completed, the angel provided Kelley with the English translations, which require that Dee had to go back over the entire collection of transcripts and substitute the English. Although each Enochian letter has its English counterpart, it is not a letter-for-letter substitution or a code. The letter correspondences were only provided as a pronunciation guide. An actual dictionary was dictated, and Dee had to translate accordingly. Enochian is thus a language unto itself, with its own grammar and syntax. It is very succinct and has an odd relationship to English that it does not have with other languages. One example of Enochian is the word “Babalon,” meaning “harlot” in Enochian, as in the “Whore of Babylon.” The Enochian system being complicated, the entire process of dictation and translation took seven years, from 1582 to 1589.

Amazingly enough, considering the language's complexity, the Enochian Calls translate into English remarkably well. Regardless of the fact that they were dictated backwards and forwards, and that the translations were only provided later, Enochian turned out to be a coherent language previously unknown to man.

The Calls, when translated, are quite evocative, and contain some very beautiful passages. Although it could easily be claimed Kelley was making the whole thing up, the Calls were nothing at all like his usual writing style, which was quite crude even when he wrote verse. It seems improbable for Kelley to have defrauded Dee in this regard, as the system is just too immense and well structured.

• With that, it becomes clear that the author actually subscribes to the same supernatural nonsense as Parsons. It was developed in a manner remarkably reminiscent the Book of Mormon. It should be blatantly obvious that the Enochian “translator” was just making it up.
• 113: Dee and Kelley were “told”:

1. That Jesus was not God.
2. That no prayer ought to be made to Jesus.
3. That there is no sin.
4. That man's soul doth go from one body to another childes quickening [i.e., reincarnation].
5. That as many men and women as are now, have always been.
6. That the generation of mankind from Adam and Eve, is not historical but allegorical.

• Perhaps number 5 of the above list might have made sense in the 16th Century, but it should be clear that such a concept is ridiculous in an era of rapid population explosion.
• 116: The Semitic word “Bab-Il” (from which Babylon is derived) means  “the gate of God.”
• 119+: Parsons major project was “invoking” the “Babalon Working.”
• 133: The numbers 7, 49, and 11 are “sacred” This is typical of credulous believers. Are there any numbers that do not have some significance to these people?
• 155: Parsons, Hubbard, and Betty create a company called “Allied Enterprises” on February 20, 1946. L. Ron Hubbard ends up running off with the money and the girl.
• 157: Parsons catches up with Hubbard (with some help from the U.S. Coast Guard) and successfully sues him in Dade county, Florida.
• 159: Parsons loses his security clearance. He believes this is due to his membership in the OTO and for circulating Liber OZ, a statement of “the rights of man.”
• 160 - 161: According to his FBI file, he was investigated due to his association with known Communists. Parsons is investigated and regains his clearance.
• 166: According to the Book of Acts (8:9), Simon Magus peddled wares under a Christian guise, leading to the term “Simony.”
• 170: Parsons performs a security breach at Hughes. He probably was just taking old JATO paperwork to pad his résumé.
• 172: Parsons security clearance is revoked again on January 17, 1952, this time for good.
• 177: Parsons is killed by an explosion on Tuesday, June 17, 1952 at 5:08 p.m. The Los Angeles Times reports “ROCKET SCIENTIST KILLED IN PASADENA EXPLOSION”
• 178: According to John Bluth his last words were “I wasn't done.” According to Jane Wolfe, they were, “Who will take care of me now?”
• 179: His mother commits suicide.
• 185: Possible connection to the “spy squad” murder case in which Parsons testified.
• 190 - 191: Film appearances by Marjorie Elizabeth Cameron, partner of Parsons.
• 191 - 192: The Church of Scientology spins the relationship between L. Ron Hubbard and Parsons. They make him out to be some sort of secret agent. An excerpt:

L. Ron Hubbard was still an officer of the U.S. Navy [and] because he was well known as a writer and philosopher and had friends among the physicists, he was sent in to handle the situation. He went to live at the house and investigate the black magic rites and the general situation and found them very bad.

• They cannot admit that Hubbard was involved with a cult, because that would imply that Scientology is one as well.
• 193: Parsons was introduced to UFO-researcher and debunker Jacques Vallee, who was the role model for the French scientists in Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
• 198: Parallel to a short story called “End as a World” by F.L. Wallace:

The story started with newspaper and radio accounts of the end of the world. Day-to-day activity stopped as people look up and wait for the end. Suddenly a loud noise was heard, and a bright flash of light was seen overhead. It was not what was expected, i.e., the explosion of the planet: It was the first rocket ship. It was indeed the end of the world, the story concluded, but the beginning of the universe.

John Parsons, self-professed Antichrist, may not have brought about the end of the world, but not through his contributions to science he played a part in brining about the beginning of the universe.

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SPOOK COUNTRY (2007)

William Gibson

Paperback

Berkley Books, New York

• Set in February 2006
• Hollis Henry: former member of a band called the Curfew, along with Reg Inchmale and Heidi Hyde (p. 75).
• Tito and his cousin Alejandro are being spied upon by Brown and Milgrim.
• 18: Volapuk: Russians approximating Cyrillic on Roman keyboards. Essentially an artificial language, like Esperanto.
• 18: IF = Illegal Facilitator
• 36: Hollis is on assignment for Blue Ant, an obvious crossover with PATTERN RECOGNITION.
• 65: The most interesting applications of new technology tend to happen either in art galleries or the battlefield.
• Bobby Chombo: GPS expert who grids his floor and sleeps in a different grid every night.
• 87: The CIA works together with pirates to inspect (and steal cargo) from suspected WMD-smugglers.
• 104: tulpa = a projected thought form from Tibetan mysticism. Under the right circumstances, celebrity will survive its own death, such as Elvis sightings.
• 107: Mentions anonymous footage being posted on the net, which is another reference to PATTERN RECOGNITION.
• 119: Milgrim contemplates:

But the other aspect of the Free Spirit that fascinated him, and this applied to the whole text, was how these heresies would get started, often spontaneously generating around some single medieval equivalent of your more outspoken homeless mumbler. Organized religion, he saw, back in the day, had been purely a signal-to-noise proposition, at once the medium and the message, a one-channel universe. For Europe, that channel was Christian, and broadcasting from Rome, but nothing could be broadcast faster than a man could travel on horseback. There was a hierarchy in place, and a highly organized methodology of top-down signal dissemination, but the time lag enforced by tech-lack imposed a near-disastrous ratio, the noise of heresy constantly threatening to overwhelm the signal.

• 206: Alejandro taught Tito to practice writing a new signature upside down.
• 350 - 351: The reason for the mission is presented. And it's a bit of a let-down. The only reason I continued reading after about half way through was hoping for a satisfying resolution for why a cargo container was transferred from ship to ship at sea, never allowed to make it to port. Money laundering is rather banal reason. Meanwhile, it is never explained why someone with vast resources would make the effort to make the money impossible to launder (by shooting it with cesium) and have no interest in obtaining the money itself. I did appreciate the supposition that a mega-church would be used to facilitate the laundering.

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SHADOW OF THE GIANT (2005)

Orsen Scott Card

Hardcover

Tor, New York

• The conclusion of the “Shadow” series revolving around Bean and the other members of Ender's Jeesh.
• 13: The public had been told that Mazer Rackham (hero of the Second Bugger War) had left on the first colony ship. In fact, he and Graff (of Battle School) have been working hard behind the scenes to prevent the world from descending into all-out war.
• Han Tzu (aka “Hot Soup”) becomes Emperor of China after their disastrous last war.
• Alai has been made Caliph over a united Muslim League, although he finds his power to mostly be symbolic.
• 58 - 59: Rackham suspects that Hive Queens aren't the only aliens out there. This is why he hopes Peter Wiggin can unite the world:

“We want Earth to stop wasting its resources on war, and spend them on colonizing world after world, and then trading among them so that the whole species can profit from what each one learns and achieves and becomes. It's basic economics. And history. And evolution. And science. Disperse. Vary. Discover. Publish. Explore.”

• 65: Virlomi creates videos to catalog Muslim atrocities after they invaded India:

“And that is why there are no true Muslims in the world, because they may not choose to cease to be Muslims. If a Muslim tries to become a Hindu or a Christian or even a simple unbeliever, some fanatical Muslim will kill him.”

Pictures were flashed on the screen of beheaded bodies. Well-known images, but still potent as propaganda.

“Islam is a religion that has no believers,” she said. “Only people who are compelled to call themselves Muslims and live as Muslims under fear of death.”

• 84: Volescu, the doctor who created Bean through genetic manipulation, wishes to create an entire race of such people. As Anton explains:

“A different species, yes. The children of Homo sapiens. Homo lumens, maybe. Still capable of interbreeding, the the old style of human—they grow to be old, but they are never big. And they are never very smart. How can they compete? They are gone, Bean. Your people rule the world.”

• 106: The plan is for Bean and Petra to find their children who share his condition to fly away at relativistic speed until a cure can be found. Yet Bean does not think there will ever be a cure for Anton's Key, and comes up with a plan of his own:

When he got on the starship with the babies that had his same disease, he expected to take off and head outward into the stars. He would live long enough to teach the children how to run the starship. They would explore. They would send reports back by ansible. They would map habitable planets farther away than any other humans would want to travel. In fifteen or twenty years of subjective time they would live a thousand years or more in real time, and the data they collected would be a treasure trove. They would be the pioneers of a hundred colonies or more.

And then they would die, having no memory of setting foot on a planet, and having no children to carry on their disease for another generation.

And it would all be bearable, for them and for Bean, because they would know that back on Earth, their mother and their healthy siblings were living normal lives, and marrying and having children of their own, so that by the time their thousand-year voyage was over, every living human being would be related to them one way or another.

That's how we'll be part of everything.

So no matter what I promised, Petra, you're not coming with me, and neither are our healthy children. And someday you'll understand and forgive me for breaking my word to you.

• 108: Peter's criteria for member states in the Free People of Earth (FPE): majority, viability, contiguity, and compactness.
• 118: Bean learns that Peter has been using Ender's pension. Bean insists that software be derived from the “Giant's Drink” program to run his pension in perpetuity. Obviously, this semi-autonomous software later becomes Ender's companion Jane. It was unfortunate that the derisive description of the “educational software” detracts from the mystique that it held in the first book.
• 266: Rackham explains his motive to Peter:

“We want you to win so that the human race can stop spending its vast surpluses on ways to kill each other, and can instead send all the people that would have been killed in war out into space. And all the money that would have been spent on weapons can be spent on colony ships, and on trading ships, eventually. The human race has always produced a vast surplus of human beings and wealth, and it has used up almost all of it either on stupid monuments like the pyramids or on brutal, bloody, pointless wars. We want you to unite the world so that this waste can finally stop.”

• 300: Euripides wrote: Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad.
• Virlomi eventually starts to believe her own propaganda that she is an instrument of the gods. She marries Alai and leads an invasion of China.
• A woman named Randi gave birth to Bean and Petra's 9th child in secret, thinking it he the son of Achilles. She plans to take him to a colony world An obvious potential sequel.
• Often, the book doesn't follow important battles, just narrating the before and after.
• 341: As almost all nations have joined The Free People of Earth (the United States is the last holdout), it has four capitals: Bangkok, Rwanda, Rotterdam, and Blackstream (Ribeirão Preto).
• I had several problems with the Shadow series. My first issue is the disconnect between high- and low-technology. Three interstellar wars have already been fought with spaceships, but battles on earth are fought with rifles, tanks, trucks, jeeps and helicopters (even though the latter may not have rotor blades). The larger issue is why these wars are fought in the first place. One would think that globalization of economics, culture, and migration would tend to reduce the tendency of nations to invade their neighbors for... what exactly? Don't they realize that once you overturn a legitimate government, then suddenly you are responsible for fixing the potholes? The motives seem to boil down to ancient religious and cultural animosities, which is hard to fathom centuries in the future.
• An issue that carried over from earlier works is relationships between these children (who are now fully-fledged adults, in every sense) and their parents. Sure, many of them lost their childhoods to Battle School, but I really don't think that people in such positions of power would tolerate having their parents interfere with lives.
  

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MANAGING MARTIANS (1998)

Donna Shirley

with Danelle Morton

Paperback

Broadway Books, New York

• Donna Shirley was Manager of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory's Mars Exploration Program. Link to Mars Site: http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/
• 50 - 52: She had some close calls while getting her pilot's license. On her first solo cross country flight, she descended through an opening in the clouds. Afterwards, her instructor chastised here. If the hole had closed, she would have been flying blind.
• 53: While descending to pick up a friend, she just barely made it over some telephone lines. On the ascent, they went under the telephone lines.
• 58: During a stressful technical drawing competition (where the men were condescending), she spilled ink on her drawing.
• 65: Her college grades were very poor. When she got engaged, and briefly lost interest, her grades got even worse.
• 68 - 69: Her fiancé Johnie's favorite fantasy of the future was them as senior citizens, sitting on the front porch, and waiting for their grandchildren to visit. She realized that this was not for her.
• 69: Most recruiters from aerospace companies were not interested in her, except for one from McDonell Aircraft, who invited her to his hotel room.
• 73 - 74: Her boss constantly propositioned her. She finally avoided the harassment by saying that acting out on their feelings would jeopardize their security clearances and their jobs.
• 95: During the 1970s Shirley led a group developing alternative energy. Yet when Reagan was inaugurated, he declared the Energy Crisis over, and the program ended.
• 111: CARD = Computer Aided Remote Driving
• 123: President George H. W. Bush announced on July 20, 1989 that we were going to the Moon, to stay, and then on to Mars. This provided some temporary enthusiasm.
• 135: NASA's original Cold War purpose was to “flex our missiles.”
• 192: After spending thousands of dollars testing and modifying Motorola modems, the next batch they ordered were different. When management at Motorola learned they were planning to fly with commercial hardware, they sent a letter saying performance was not guaranteed and requesting that the JPL team not use them lest the hardware fail and give Motorola bad publicity.
• One of the major problems of the missions was that the modem frequencies varied with temperature. Small differences in frequency between the transmitter and receiver caused communication failure.
• 241: Pathfinder lands on Mars on July 4, 1997
• 271: Shirley published her book Managing Creativity electronically at http://managingcreativity.com/
• 273: Pathfinder saved money by adapting the spacecraft to the operations system.
• 274: Donna's Laws:
• The customer isn't always right, he may want something that can't be done for the money.
• A really creative team will probably be as contentious as it is brilliant.
• You may have to give up credit for an idea to see it happen.
• There is never enough time and money—but you'll have to get the job done anyway.
• Everything is a big hassle; if it isn't a big hassle you probably don't understand the situation.
• Work should be done playfully as often as possible.
  

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• This is a story about an alien ship crash landing on Earth—with a twist. The aliens landed in a small village in Germany in 1348, as the plague was sweeping through Europe. The writing is split between then and modern times, where Tom is investigating the historical mystery and his girlfriend Sharon is developing a multiverse theory, which could explain their means of interstellar travel.
• 25:

A hard man to deal with, Dietrich thought as Joachim left, and a harder one to know. The young monk wore his rags with greater pride than the pope in Avignon his gilded crown. The Spirituals preached the poverty of Jesus and His Apostles and railed against the wealth of the clergy; but the Lord had blessed not the poor, but the poor in spirit—“Beati pauperes spitu.” A clever distinction. As Augustine and Aquinas had noted, mere poverty was too easily attained to merit such a prize as Heaven.

• 32: Tom explains “forces of history” to Sharon:

“If affinity were the only force,” Tom continued, “the entire population would be sucked into the local maximum. But population density itself creates a second potential because, cæteris paribus, people prefer wide open spaces to getting someone's elbow in their ear. So there's a countertendency for the population to spread out evenly across the landscape in a kind of cultural heat death. The interaction between these two forces generates the differential equations for a reaction-diffusion process. Population accumulates at the equilibrium sites, with settlement sizes distributed according to Zipf's rank-size law. Each settlement generates a cultural potential field whose strength is proportional to its wealth and population and which diminishes with the square of the distance. Geographically, these settlements and their hinterlands form hexagonal patterns called Christaller grids. Ert, Nagy kisasszony?”

• 33: When Sharon thinks she has seen something that Tom had overlooked, “No field of knowledge is so transparently simple as another's.”
• 47: Dietrich comments on the democracy in Max's native Switzerland:

“I fear the hands of all those neighbors, raised together, may impose one day a tyranny weightier than the hand of a single lord. With a lord, at least you know who to bring to account, but when a mob raises its many hands, which holds the blame?”

• 105 - 106: Dietrich had considered the Krenken as morally equivalent to people, until his Aristotelean reason got in the way. One has to ask whether his tolerance and immunity from superstition was compatible with his time and religious conviction.

Dietrich trembled. All beings, desiring their proper end, move toward it by nature. So a stone, being earth, moved naturally toward the earth; and a man, loving the good, moved naturally toward God. But in animals, the appetites are moved by the estimative power, which rules despotically, while in men, they are moved by the cognitive power, which rules politically. So, the sheep esteems the wolf as enemy and runs without thinking; but a man may stand his ground or flee as his reason suggests. Yet, if the Krenken were ruled by instinctus, the rational appetite could not exist in them, since a higher appetite necessarily moved a lower one.

Which meant that the Krenken were beasts.

• 108: The speed of light is getting lower.
• 110 - 111: The expansion of the universe analogous to points on a balloon.
• 158: When Hans comments on a mason's evident lack of skill in constructing spiral stairs:

“But no,” Dietrich said. “The stumble-steps are so attackers climbing the tower ‘trip up.’ The stairs spiral right-handwise for similar reason. Invaders cannot wield their swords; while the defenders, fighting downward, have a full swing.”

Hans shook his head, a gesture he had acquired from his hosts. “Your ineptness proves always cunning.”

• 164: When Sharon admits she is researching the slowing speed of light:

There was the warning from the tribunal. Repent of your heterodoxy or be damned. But Sharon Nagy was on the scent of something very peculiar, and Jackson Welles knew nothing of Évariste Galois. Facing a duel at dawn, Galois had spent his last night scribbling the foundations of algebraic group theory. A good night's sleep, and he might have survived the duel; but there is a certain frame of mind that prizes discovery over life itself. If death had not daunted young Évariste, what terror had loss of funding over Sharon? She was not as young as he had been, but she knew how to take a bullet.

• 200 - 201: Pastor Dietrich writes a letter in his defense of harboring and baptizing “demons,” later published by liberals in a book called Tolerance Through the Ages. They had believed Dietrich was perhaps harboring  a band of Jews.
• 202: Tom is surprised to hear that the Inquisition had rules.
• 216: William of Ockham arrives. He leaves about the same time that the plague arrives, and is never heard from again.
• 255 - 257: Description of a multiverse theory and the possibility of instant interstellar travel through higher dimensions.
• 280 - 281: Quantized time as an explanation for redshift gaps.
• 300: Sudden shift to first person perspective of one of Tom's Germany friends, Anton Zaengle.
• 300: Brains are used to read between the lines. That is what “intelligence” means: inter legere.
• I did have a couple issues with the book. While the aliens have large, almond-shaped eyes, their appearance is more akin to giant grasshoppers than the well-known “Greys.” Had the author gone with the latter, or perhaps even a more traditionally “demonic” appearance, it might be a way to explain how a particular form took root in the common imagination.
• The other inherent problem with the story was how so many items were the equivalent to 21st Century technology. For example, headsets and plastique explosives would be very unlikely to exist outside a rather narrow time and place in a specific culture. The names Dietrich chose for many technologies were anachronistically similar to names readers would be familiar with.

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• 32, 41, etc.: Society seems to have chosen “Machiavellian” to describe someone manipulative and duplicitous. See THE PRINCE by Nicoló Machiavelli.
• 40: Richard Christine took the opportunity of a year off as a fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences to try to develop the psychological equivalent of Einstein's unified field theory.
• 42: Criteria for Machiavellian personalities:
• View others as objects to be manipulated rather than as individuals with whom to empathize.
• Lack concern with conventional morality. Lying, cheating, and other forms of deceit are acceptable forms of behavior.
• Lack obvious psychopathology. Although perhaps not the epitome of mental health, contact with the more objective parts of reality would be within normal range.
• Have low ideological commitment. They are more concerned with tactics for achieving possible ends than in an inflexible striving for an ultimate idealistic goal.
• 49 - 50: Psychology professor John McHoskey argues that Machiavellianism and psychopathy are one in the same.
• 65: Uses the terms microevolution and macroevolution. I thought only Creationists used those terms.
• 69 ftnt: Regarding the term evil genes:

*Okay, if you really wanted to be picky here, you could say “problematic alleles,” or even “quantitative trait loci that have been affiliated with specific personality disorders,” with the caveat that environment can often play an important accompanying role in those with a genome that has set them at risk. But it doesn't have quite the same ring, does it? In any case, it's important to remember that depending on the constellation of other genes in a body, supposedly evil genes might have a neutral, or even positive effect. Or such genes could have mixed positive and negative effects, such as increased intelligence coupled with increased neuroticism.

• 72 - 74: Malfunctions of the SERT, or “serotonin transporter” molecule, may lead to depression by not restraining natural fears and anxiety.
• 76: The concept that one gene may affect many parts of the body is called pleiotropy, from the Greek pleio (“many”) and tropo (“turning toward”). For example, activation of the APOE4 allele may help children survive malnutrition, and can lead to sharper memory in children, but causes predisposition to Alzheimer's disease later in life.
• 76: The opposite is polygeny, where a single trait is influenced by many genes.
• 79: The COMT gene has two versions, val and met. The val version is associated with aggressivity, while the met leads to anxiety, summarized as “warrior” versus “worrier.”
• 81: A damped connection between the orbitofrontal cortex and the amygdala might lead to trouble with stimulus-reinforcement learning.
• 83: Genetic traits that don't run in families are called emergenesis.
• 86 - 87: Child prodigy Norbert Weiner pointed out that in Jewish culture, a learned rabbi was generally always able to make a good living and support a large family, while traditionally in Christian society, the learned man was absorbed into the Church and would not have children. Could this have bred out some intelligence?
• 98 - 99: Williams Syndrome is characterized as “antipsychopathy,” because those with it are extraordinarily trusting and sociable.
• 104 - 105: Mirror neurons lead to empathy.
• 105 - 106: Anatomical differences in the hippocampus seem to exist between “successful” and “unsuccessful” psychopaths. Psychopaths with impairments have difficulty learning social cues and are more likely to get caught.
• 134: Schizophrenia and bipolar disorder are classified as Axis I disorders. Other conditions thought to be due to psychosocial stresses are put in Axis II. Insurance companies tend to only cover Axis I, leading to over-diagnosis.
• 146: “Gaslighting” comes from the 1944 movie Gaslight where Charles Boyer tries to make Ingrid Bergman believe she is losing her mind.
• 149: People with borderline personality disorder consume a disproportionate amount of medical resources.
• 154: Slobodan Milosevic changed his ideology like a chameleon.
• 169: When Milosevic revoked Kosovo's autonomy in 1989 all Albanian professors were expelled from the University of Pristina and schools were closed. Children ended up in illegal privately organized high schools.
• 174 - 175: Continuing from linguist Noam Chomsky, Steven Pinker, Judith Rich Harris, John Tooby, and his wife Leda Cosmides concluded that the “module” for learning language evolved just like any other body part.
• 175: Chinese speakers use different areas of their brain for mathematics than English speakers. Eye-tracking studies show that they literally see the world differently.
• 187: Emotional reasoning (“emote control”) preceded rational thinking, which may only have emerged withing the last 150,000 years.
• 189: Political thinking, like getting a fix, doesn't let the facts get in the way of a conclusion. In fact, the parts of the brain associated with reasoning are not activated when“emote control” begins to occur.
• 190: Confirmation bias, cognitive dissonance, etc. Isn't it interesting that authors like Oakley and Shermer write about how easily people are manipulated and fooled (even by themselves), while pundits like Rush Limbaugh and Bill O'Reilley emphasize certainty.
• 191: “Such government-mandated programs as busing and the projects, often generated by emote control related to genuinely altruistic considerations, have wasted billions of taxpayers' dollars and led to a worsening of the very conditions they were meant to solve.”
• 221: Borderlines have a “lack of object constancy.” This is the ability to soothe ourselves by remembering the love others have for us.
• 242: Mao's “Little Red Book” was said to cure the blind and deaf, heal paralytic limbs, and even once raise a man from the dead.
• 262: A genetic shift has been found in American Indians which allows more effective use of mitochondria, adapting to cold. Some adaptations in humans seem to be lost in modern lifestyles: olfactory abilities, detoxifying natural plant poisons.
• 264: Changes in behavior and environment result in Baldwinian evolution, named after American psychologist Mark Baldwin. For example, the spread of mosquitoes and subsequent malaria from slash-and-burn farming lead to sickle-cell anemia mutations to be partially beneficial.
• 267: Virtually everyone in the Asian steppes is carrying DNA of Genghis Khan's family, through Genghis and his brothers. The progenitor of China's Qing dynasty, Gioncangga, is the probable ancestor of 1.6 men living today.
• 268: Niall of the Nine Hostages is thought to be a direct paternal ancestor of 1 in 5 men from northwest Ireland.
• 271 -: The slave girl Roxalena became the wife of Sultan Suleyman the Magnificent, and a manipulative founder of a dynasty in her own right.
• 277 - 278: Borderline personalities tend to embed themselves in hereditary aristocracies by being drawn to power.
• 303 -304 ftnt: Philip Zimbardo recently published The Lucifer Effect about his famous Stanford Prison experiment.
• 311 - 312: Hitler had an excellent memory, which he used to arrogantly claim he knew better than military experts. Mussolini, Castro, Stalin, Mao, and Milosevic were similarly known for their remarkably good memories.
• 327: APOE4 increases the risk of Alzheimer's but reduces the risk of getting polio.

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