(Part 2) Reddit mentions: The best united states history books

One of the main things to do in Baton Rouge is to eat delicious food.

• Enjoy exploring Louisiana Creole cuisine (surprisingly great Wikipedia article!) and Cajun cuisine. Two favorites: blackened redfish, and bread pudding.
  
• Eat the incredible seafood poboy (get it with sprouts, and hashbrowns on the side; apply tabasco liberally) at Louie's by LSU (open 24hrs, usually--closed sunday nights?).
  
• Be awed by the epic summertime thunderstorms that roll through almost every day around 2pm.
  
• Visit the observation deck at the top of the state capitol. It's open till 4pm. Prepare for your visit by reading All The King's Men by Robert Penn Warren (or watch either of the films--the 1949 film won best picture, and the 2006 re-make was filmed locally), a fictionalization of the rise and fall of Huey Long. Pick up a copy of the book at Cottonwood Books.
  
• Visit the Louisiana State Museum (by spanish town and the capitol; free).
  
• Try to get a tour of the ExxonMobil refinery.
  
• Two local obsessions: Raising Canes chicken fingers and LSU Football.
  
• Eat pizza at Capitol Grocery in Spanish Town, at 5pm (except Sunday). Sit outside and listen to some locals telling stories. Wander around Spanish Town and Arsenal Park.
  
• Run/bike/drive around the LSU lakes. Gawk at the amazing houses.
  
• Visit Mike the Tiger at LSU. While you're there, check out the special exhibitions at the LSU library.
  
• Eat delicious food at George's restaurant, an incredible dive bar under I-10. Favorites are the burgers (the 'heavy hitter' with avocado), the pastrami and swiss on rye, the ribeye sandwich. Legendary for their shrimp poboys, though I have never had one. Leave a dollar on the tar-encrusted ceiling.
  
• Play tennis or golf at City Park or visit the dog park
  
• See the crazy snake collection at Bluebonnet Swamp nature center
  
• Drink beers, eat red beans and rice, boudin balls, and hushpuppies at the Chimes by LSU. Tin roof amber is a great local beer (it's not on the menu, but they have it!). If it's your first time, start out with an Abita Amber and a fried alligator appetizer.
  
• Admittedly it isn't Cafe du Monde, and, after being razed by Walmart, the neighborhood ain't what it used to be, but you can still get your beignet fix at Coffee Call.
  
• Visit the new Tin Roof brewery (friday afternoons only) and enjoy free samples.
  
• See a show and get dinner at Chelsea's, also in the I-10 overpass area. One favorite is the grilled cheese on foccacia; goes well with a blue moon.
  
• Drink coffee at PerksGarden District Coffee (on Perkins Rd) or Highland Coffee (by LSU; always full of lots of studying students).
  
• Get a plate lunch at Zeeland Street Market (by Perks). Get the lunch special. On Wednesdays they have the best fried chicken in town. On Fridays get the fried catfish with mac and cheese on the side. Best time to arrive is just before the 12:00 noon crowds. Closed Sunday.
  
• Take a date to lunch at Yvette Marie's, a cute low-key restaurant in an antique store. I like the jalapeno chicken sandwich. If you're looking for something more traditional, you can't go wrong with their muffuletta sandwich.
  
• Ride in the monthly Critical Mass bike ride with approximately 200 other cyclists through the streets of the city. Last friday of every month, 6:30pm, LSU parade ground/clocktower. See also the bicycle events calendar.
  
• Go on a swamp tour with Marcus de la Houssaye (Lake Martin/Breaux Bridge), Ernest Couret (Butte La Rose), or Dean Wilson (Bayou Sorrel- afterwards, take the Plaquemine-Sunshine ferry across the river and eat lunch at Roberto's River Road Restaurant)
  
• Read Cherry Baton Rouge to hear about this week's goings-on.
  
• Listen to 91.1 KLSU (college radio station) and 89.3 WRKF (NPR affiliate).
  
• Find the river road ruins south of LSU.
  
• On the first friday of the month, go to Stabbed in the Art.
  
• Some other restaurants to look up: Parrain's Seafood; Juban's; Roberto's River Road Restaurant (Sunshine, LA)
  
• The Old State Capitol is beautiful, historic, and free to visit. On the river at North Blvd (by the Shaw Center).
  
• Stroll on the levee and watch the ships (barges) go by.
  
• If you are a civil engineering / geology nerd, you will enjoy reading John McPhee's book The Control of Nature (or read it online) which details the century-long but almost-certainly-doomed effort to control the Mississippi river. If this stuff interests you, drive up and visit the Morganza Spillway and Old River Control, about 1 hour drive north from Baton Rouge (maybe a bit shorter now due to the new Audubon Bridge). There is also the Bonnet Carré Spillway on the way to New Orleans. (Morganza is also the location of the "cafe scene" from Easy Rider; visit The Bear (bar) for some memorabilia.) Check out this beautiful overlay of some old geological maps showing the past courses of the Mississippi river onto Google Maps. Roadside Geology of Louisiana is good too.
  
• The Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory is about 30 miles east and offers public tours on some fridays and saturdays. Contact them in advance. CAMD operates a synchrotron light source in town (across from Whole Foods); you might be able to get a tour there too.
  
• Get a group of friends together, bring a cooler full of beer, and go Tiki Tubing down the Amite River. If Tiki Tubing isn't quite your style, rent a kayak at the Backpacker and take it out on some local river or bayou. They have equipment that will let you carry a kayak on just about any vehicle.
  
• Head out to Zydeco Breakfast at Cafe des Amis in Breaux Bridge (1 hr drive west) early Saturday morning (8am). Or the cajun/zydeco dance at Whiskey River Landing Sundays at 4pm, or their neighbor McGee's Landing Sundays at noon (also: airboat rides). Listen to KRVS 88.7 FM on the way over.
  
• Tour Laura Plantation and stroll the grounds of Oak Alley Plantation. I've heard Laura Plantation has a much better, more historically-informed tour; skip the tour at Oak Alley and go directly for the mint juleps.
  
• Abita brewery, about 1.5 hours east, has free tours
  
• Feed the giraffes at Global Wildlife (near Hammond)
  
• Get an airplane flying lesson at Fly By Knight (Hammond)
  
• Go to Tsunami on the roof of the Shaw Center (art museum) for the best view of the river (thanks BiscuitCrisps). Great place for a drink! Also, check whether any events are going on at the Shaw Center or the co-located Manship Theatre. They often have interesting shows and films.
  
• The Cove has this city's best selection of whiskey (thanks malakhgabriel).
  

Well, arguing that you “should” have a moral compunction to do anything is a virtually impossible task, because morals are internal motivation. I can try to appeal to those morals through guilt (which you don’t like), though calculating marginal utility and appealing to your sense of community (the EA approach, which you don’t like), or by demonstrating that you did benefit from other people (which I will continue to try). But if you truly believe that you are entitled to everything you have and not only owe nothing to people to whom you profited from (because that’s the way the world works) and do not wish to address disparities even though the cost to you is much less than the benefit to someone else (because it’s yours and you worked for it), then you are free of moral compunction and I can’t change your mind. That’s why this is usually the provenance of religion, which promises a punishment from a higher being to encourage what many societies have defined as “the right thing to do.”

First, I would like to agree with you about capitalism as a force for good. The expansion of globalized trade and capitalist economies has made the people on this planet healthier and wealthier than at any other time in human history. Those gains have been distributed, but they have not been equally distributed, and as a result, there is massive global inequality both between and within nations. And actually, the OECD suggests economic strategies by which lessened inequality promotes more growth, growing the pie for everyone (so the pursuit of maximizing only profits at the expense of other developments is not necessarily the greatest global good).

That being said, I will address your three points.

The most important is #2. The idea of “business-friendly values” is a very popular one, but values alone cannot make an economy thrive (or a government or a society) without institutions that protect and promote those values. It is not at all clear that implementing “western values” create prosperity in any kind of automatic way, and certainly not without protective institutions. In addition, it is rare for people in positions of power to voluntarily give up that power, and so disenfranchised people tend to remain disenfranchised. I would say that in your example of immigrants that come to the “Western world” and prosper can do so not because of their values, but because of the institutions that allow that to happen. I suggest Acemoglu and Robinson's Why Nations Fail and Paul Collier's The Bottom Billion as further reading.

It’s also part of the reason that innovation tends to come from a subset of economies. Countries that innovate, have good institutions, and invest in education tend to have more innovators, find a balance between protection of profit and distribution, and make more innovators. There is also an incentive to oppress innovation on discoveries outside of the original innovation centers, which is why we have overzealous patent protection and unequal business agreements that use proprietary tech (Point #1).

Which brings me to the idea that international business can perpetuate disenfranchisement. Many companies use economic power to subvert the power of the people in order to protect their profits, whether through appropriating the use of force or through lobbying elected officials. BP lobbied the US and the UK to overthrow the democratically-elected government of Iran to prevent oil fields from being nationalized (and resource profits sent overseas) in 1953. The United Fruit Company convinced the Eisenhower administration to overthrow the government of Guatemala in 1954 to avoid agrarian reform policies. In 2007, Chiquita banana admitted to funding a terrorist organization in Colombia to protect their interests. Domino Sugar today refuses to comply with labor protections in the CAFTA agreements, using disenfranchised Haitian-Dominicans to harvest sugarcane (part 1) (part 2). Conflict minerals in the DRC and Zimbabwe are still used in a large proportion of electronics. Nestle still uses child labor to harvest cacao in the Ivory Coast.

Rich countries are not immune. Fossil fuel lobbying in the US is a real and problematic thing that is bad for the earth and bad for the green energy industry.

So though it’s true that you did not personally oppress any Tanzanians or Iranians or Koreans (or Guatemalans or Colombians or Haitian-Americans or Congolese or Zimbabweans or Cote-d’Ivorians) (Point #1), if you made money as a shareholder of those companies (or consumed their products), then you profited from the unethical behavior of those companies. As a direct result of those business decisions, people in other countries received less money and you received more. Period. I don’t think that this necessarily makes you a perpetrator, but I think that it does make you complicit.

If you consider this kind of capitalistic profiteering ethical (or “the way the world works”), I can agree that you do not have a moral compunction to support disenfranchised people and reject these company behaviors. However, if you think that any of these actions are morally wrong, then you should feel guilty from profiting off of them. (And I am speaking explicitly about investment income here).

Even if you do not profit from stocks in those companies, you may profit as a consumer – when you buy cheap gas or bananas. Taxes that the companies paid may have supported your elementary school. Benefits from medical protections may have been reinvested in new therapies that cured your grandmother’s cancer. The global economy is complex. But generally, the people who are already rich are those who reap a larger share of the benefits.

If you believe that this is morally acceptable (or “the way the world works”), then you do not have a moral compunction to donate to charity.

However, if you do have a problem with these behaviors and you feel morally uncomfortable with the results, you have two routes to address the issues, and both routes should be followed at the same time: to ameliorate the effects through global giving AND to pursue system reform to make it stop happening.

There are far too many to describe one as "the best", but here are some of my favourites.

The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes is a well deserved winner of the Pulitzer Prize. A combination of history, science and biography and so very well written.

A few of my favourite biographies include the magisterial, and also Pulitzer Prize winning, Peter the Great by Robert Massie. He also wrote the wonderful Dreadnaught on the naval arms race between Britain and Germany just prior to WWI (a lot more interesting than it sounds!). Christopher Hibbert was one of the UK's much loved historians and biographers and amongst his many works his biography Queen Victoria - A Personal History is one of his best. Finally, perhaps my favourite biography of all is Everitt's Cicero - The Life and Times of Rome's Greatest Politician. This man was at the centre of the Fall of the Roman Republic; and indeed fell along with it.

Speaking of which, Rubicon - The Last Years of the Roman Republic is a recent and deserved best-seller on this fascinating period. Holland writes well and gives a great overview of the events, men (and women!) and unavoidable wars that accompanied the fall of the Republic, or the rise of the Empire (depending upon your perspective). :) Holland's Persian Fire on the Greco-Persian Wars (think Cyrus, Darius, Xerxes! Think of the Movie 300, if you must) is equally gripping.

Perhaps my favourite history book, or series, of all is Shelby Foote's magisterial trilogy on the American Civil War The Civil War - A Narrative. Quite simply one of the best books I've ever read.

If, like me, you're interested in teh history of Africa, start at the very beginning with The Wisdom of the Bones by Alan Walker and Pat Shipman (both famous paleoanthropologists). Whilst not the very latest in recent studies (nothing on Homo floresiensis for example), it is still perhaps the best introduction to human evolution available. Certainly the best I've come across. Then check out Africa - Biography of a Continent. Finish with the two masterpieces The Scramble for Africa on how European colonialism planted the seeds of the "dark continents" woes ever since, and The Washing of the Spears, a gripping history of the Anglo-Zulu wars of the 1870's. If you ever saw the movie Rorke's Drift or Zulu!, you will love this book.

Hopkirk's The Great Game - The Struggle for Empire in Central Asia teaches us that the more things change, the more they stay the same.

I should imagine that's enough to keep you going for the moment. I have plenty more suggestions if you want. :)

Could all religions be talking about the same thing? Perhaps. Anything's possible. I'll give you my personal take on that question in a bit, as interfaith relations was the focus of one of my majors back in my college days and remains a hobby of mine today. If you're really interested in exploring this topic, let me offer you a few books with differing perspectives on the matter first:

• God is Not One: Eight Rival Religions that Run the World and Why Their Differences Matter, written by Stephen Prothero: This book advocates that religious differences really do matter. From my reading of various theologians from across a number of traditions, this acceptance of differences and that we're not all talking about the same thing (often called the "exclusivist" position) is probably the most common position across religious traditions (at least in my experience).
  
• The Myth of Religious Superiority: A Multifaith Exploration, edited by Paul Knitter: This book is a collection of essays by theologians across a number of world religions who argue that we really are all talking about the same thing after all. Hick (one of the essayists in this book) is a pioneer writer on this subject in particular and comes out of the Christian tradition, but I recommend this collection rather than one of his books so you can get a wider variety of perspectives.
  
• Salvations: Truth and Difference in Religion, written by Mark Heim: This book takes a sort of middle ground between the other two, arguing that each religion really is distinct from the others and pursues a different spiritual path but that perhaps multiple paths can still be right, with say Buddhists working towards nirvana and detachment and Muslims drawing towards a heaven with Allah.
  
  There are plenty more books on this topic than just these three. I merely list these three as decent introductions to their particular points of view as you explore this question yourself. As for my own opinion on the matter, I don't think all religions are talking about the same thing, no. To list just a few of my reasons for thinking that:
  
  

1. Claiming we're all really talking about the same thing in the end is just as exclusive a claim as saying that only one religion is right. In either case, you're insisting a similarly large number of people have all fundamentally misunderstood reality.
   
2. Most religions are addressing fundamentally different problems, even if there are overlaps in a few places. In most strands of Buddhism, the central problem with existence is suffering, which according to Buddhism is caused by attachment: this leads Buddhists to practice meditation in order to cultivate detachment so they can escape suffering and help others. In contrast, the central problem in existence according to my Reformed Christian faith is that we humans were all created good and in the image of God Almighty but now are so infected with evil that we can't help but go awry (whether morally, intellectually, emotionally, etc). Therefore, we need an Almighty Creator to step into our story to love us despite our sins, forgive us our trespasses, reveal the truth of the gospel, save us from evil, and teach us how to live as we were originally created to live, so even when we are weak or overcome by guilt, we can have hope that God will remain faithful to us even so and save us once again. Both Buddhism and my own faith have beauty and power to them, but they're both dealing with very different understandings of the problems facing humanity, the solutions to those problems, and how to live life having experienced such a solution.
   
3. While it's nice to say that all religions are talking about the same thing, clearly we don't think every religion qualifies. It's one thing to say, "Christians, Buddhists, Wiccans, Muslims: we're really all just talking about the same in the end." But it's quite another to lump all those people in with cults like Scientology or the Mansons, with white supremacist neo-pagan groups whose religion is mostly an extension of their bigotry, with ancient religions that held the killing of others in war or human sacrifice as essential rituals, etc. If we draw dividing lines in some instances but not among the major religions, by what standard do we so divide various religions as true or false? How can we say some don't count as "in" while others do while still being philosophically consistent? This is a problem not faced by exclusivists who just assert that they are right and all other religions, while at best perhaps helpful to living well, are not ultimately true.
   
4. Just because we disagree about foundational truths of reality doesn't mean we can't respect each other, treat each other well, etc. I firmly believe that Jesus Christ--as revealed in the Bible and attested to by the creeds of my Presbyterian denomination--is Lord God and the only means of salvation. My Muslim friends in college believed quite differently, as did my Buddhist and Wiccan friends in high school, as do all my atheists and agnostic friends to this day. Our disagreements are serious, which means it's important to discuss them civilly and with compassion for each other, because we are talking about the very fabric and truths of existence. But to just hand-wave away all that tension because it's uncomfortable, rather than to dig into those differences, to see how our disagreements highlight the unique power and beliefs of our own traditions, to learn where each of us is weak in our thinking and needs to reevaluate long-held beliefs... that's a gift I wouldn't give away lightly.
   
5. So to deal with this disagreement, I treat the conflict between me and people who hold other religious beliefs as a sort of "gentlemen's bet with higher stakes" (for lack of a better term). We disagree with each other. That disagreement matters and is rather important. Whoever is wrong is likely in some trouble, depending on how everything plays out. We can't know for sure until we die, if ever. So we each claim our beliefs, and we make our wager with our lives. Until we die, it's wise to civilly talk with each other, explore these questions, etc., because the stakes really do matter. But we can do so civilly, because acting otherwise would just cause more harm and make our attempts to understand the truths of reality all the harder. I personally am a Christian in the Reformed tradition, and my evangelism to others (and listening to them evangelize to me in turn) falls under this civil disagreement, gentlemen's bet lens. After all, with the stakes so high, it's important to share what I believe is true as best I can, while at the same time listening to others share what they think is true. Why? Because first, I might be wrong. Second, if I'm right, knowing what others think will help me explain the truth even better. And third, being civil and at peace with each other provides the best setting for discussing these ideas.
   
   That's just a few of my reasons, anyways. I'm sure I have more, but I'm trying to type this quickly as I'm writing this while on a work break.

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

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

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

> Nixon brought in the Environmental protection agency.

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

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

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

> People are the ones who vote after all.

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

I'm absolutely not defending it, I have a master's degree in Health Services Administration and have worked with many different healthcare organizations, including hospitals and physician groups, always on the provider side.

In a sense, my livelihood depends on how complicated the system is. I don't mean to be flippant about that, and I have worked throughout my career to make healthcare more accessible to people than less, believe me. My father worked in public health, several of my family members are (or were) direct care providers, from nurses to doctors to paramedics. Trust me, you didn't want to have dinner with us if you couldn't stomach really disgusting stories and lasagna at the same time.

> I don't see why everything you just said can't be true, but you make sure that the hospital you run uses doctors that take the insurance you sell.

This seems obvious, there are some variables. The main one is "network." Insurers negotiate payment rates with each individual provider (hospitals, doctor groups, etc.). More expensive plans have a broader network, cheaper ones smaller networks.

Now, in certain areas (such as mine) almost all of the pediatric specialists are employed by the educational and research institution, so insurers have no choice but to bite the bullet and take whatever the hospital offers for fees. Still, I'd conservatively estimate that 20% of that hospital's operating budget is spent simply to collect from insurance companies (they make it hard in so many ways.)

However, for adult specialists insurers take a harder line because there can be several different groups offering the same service. A good trauma doctor can basically write his own check to work anywhere, because they're so specialized. So, they formed groups to protect their own interests. Many of the specialties fall under the same category, and they're simply too expensive to employ full-time.

The major failure of the American healthcare system, in my view (and my view is not original), is that it is a mostly not-for-profit system controlled by for-profit banks. What I mean by "controlled by" is that insurers have an inherent interest (and, in fact, responsibility to shareholders) to make as much profit as possible. Essentially, they focus on profits, and that focus directly conflicts with the needs of patients, creating an inherent barrier between the provider and the patient.

Hospitals and doctor's groups are not without their own conflicts and absurd motives, but I challenge you to find any provider who is driven, from inception, by a profit motive. Sure, some providers are very egotistical, but I think you probably have to be to do those jobs. To get into the really high dollar specialties as a physician, you have to study under the most qualified and preeminent physicians in the specialty you're getting into, and they tend to be pretty powerful personalities.

For a great read albeit dated (won the Pulitzer Prize '84) I cannot recommend enough The Social Transformation of American Medicine: The rise of a sovereign profession and the making of a vast industry.

Even the first insurers separated physician services and hospital services. To get an idea why, and the book would explain: hospitals, in the past, were basically waiting rooms for the mortuary, provided as mostly as charity. Staffed by volunteers, they would give you a bed and a place to convalesce, or pass peacefully, if you didn't have family in the area.

Physicians were basically witch doctors for most of our recorded history, with maybe a few herbal remedies for common conditions, but basically if you got really sick or hurt, you were fucked. A physician couldn't treat you, you just had to convalesce.

The profession of MD and the diagnostic capabilities of healthcare organizations has evolved more than can be imagined over the last century. I am also a pilot, and marvel that we went from the Wright brothers to landing on the moon in 60 years, but honestly, what we have accomplished in diagnosing and treating physical health (IMO) dwarfs the aviation industry.

Long response to a simple question, but I hope I turn you into a universal healthcare proponent. Our system is outdated, too complicated, and results in way more bankruptcies and poor outcomes than necessary. It's part of American culture, unfortunately, and I hope that someone will change it.

For the record, I think the American Care Act was too much compromise to the banks to really accomplish change. More people are insured, but the inherent profit motive of banks still makes care inefficient and further entrenches the divide between those who practice medicine (docs) and patients.

edit: grammar

> You have to wake up. Be aware of what you're doing and where you are. If you need to, make a schedule. And adhere to it very strictly. Set alarms if you want. But you just have to wake up and be present and plan your time. Know what you're going to do, and do it. If you don't know what to do, you'll fall back into your natural pattern and just say "I'll start tomorrow."

This is typical millennial advice.

I don't know if the author is a millennial, but the style is quite typical of the gen.

I'm super familiar with gentheory which is based on the book Generations by Strauss & Howe. If you are interested in reading it, it's great, but it's heavy reading. Also it's over 500 pages.

Generations Book on Amazon

Gentheory is basically social psychology that says that different social styles (generational trends) create a backlash trend. The backlash creates another backlash etc. This repeats in a cycle of 4.

This isn't like a superstition prediction-- it's a psychology prediction of human nature. That a certain trend produces a certain backlash.

So let me set this up for you....

Gen X which is my gen-- we are an "honest" generation-- vulgar, aggressive (not polite), selfish (hey, just being honest!), introverted politically (not that politically active compared to other gens) and kind of free-form.

What does that set-up for Millennials?

• pragmatic (steeped in vulgarity honesty)
  
• success orientated
  
• logic orientated (head over heart)
  
  The above quoted advice is all that-- "make a schedule" and "adhere to it strictly"... that's all "head over heart" type stuff which as I said is typical for Millennials.
  
  This is actually good advice-- I'm not knocking its effectiveness.
  
  But I just would like you to realize that there is a backlash to this style of thinking that is predicted to arise in the following generations.
  
  Millennial is a logic, pragmatic, success generation.
  
  Gen Z.... tries to follow in your footsteps, right?
  
  They really try.... but they weren't raised in the same Gen X environment that you were raised in.
  
  Gen Z (born 2005-2025) were raised in the "success" world that you created. So their style will NOT be your style.
  
  Gen Z is actually predicted to be the most misunderstood generation because their style is seen as a "failed" Millennial style when in reality they have a very special and more heart-centered style different from your own.
  
  The reason I bring all this up is because the advice given here does work-- so Millennials get mad at future generations (it is predicted) because they don't want to follow the same "logic, success" advice.
  
  Just a heads up. ;)

A lot of people here have claimed that "there are no unbiased books." This is simply not so, unless it's meant in some facile sense--presenting evidence to support a thesis ought not be interpreted as a bias for that thesis (though the thesis, on its own, may be biased).

Mind you, finding an unbiased book on religion is not so easy. Practically all the New Atheist books are right out, so no Harris, Hitchens, or Dawkins. That's not to say that these aren't fantastic writers, but they obviously wouldn't fall into the category you describe elsewhere of "an agnostic that states all of the beliefs of both sides and arguments for it without pushing towards a particular side."

My recommendations would be as follows:

God is Not One by Stephen Prothero -- This is a book on comparative religion in which the author seeks to demonstrate that the major religions of the world are not all "different paths up the same mountain," as is sometimes expressed to infer that all theists worship the same god. He gives a pretty balanced, if brief, account of the major underlying differences between the world's religions. Informative and interesting, but not particularly profound.

The Case for God by Karen Armstrong -- Here Armstrong examines how religions have changed over time. There's a focus on Christianity and she does a good job of demonstrating the immense changes that the religion has undergone since its inception. Arguing that today's systems of beliefs and views of God are starkly different from those our ancestors, Armstrong makes a strong argument for a return to the Gnostic tradition for those seeking to understand the supernatural. Sadly, she does devote a chapter at the very end of her book (needlessly, I think) to criticizing the New Atheist movement.

The Shadow of a Great Rock by Harold Bloom -- This is simply a literary examination of the King James Bible. No position is taken on the merits of the claims made in the Bible or of individuals who believe these claims. It can be very slow at times, as Bloom painstakingly demonstrates the careful literary decisions made by the authors of the KJV and compares it against contemporary examples like the Geneva and Tyndale Bibles. Obviously, this book is only tangentially related to the topic of religion since it focuses so intently on only one book--having said this, I never really understood or appreciated how people could consider the Bible such a beautiful literary masterpiece until I read this book. Bloom conveys his love of the work (in a purely literary sense--he's Jewish) on every page.

HONORABLE MENTION: The New Oxford Annotated Bible -- It's a study Bible with lots and lots of footnotes and maps and cross-references. Very thorough. It makes everything generally clearer and easier to understand. I can't vouch for a lack bias, since I'm not knowledgeable enough on the topic to discern what parts of the footnotes and introductions are questionable bias on the part of the authors and what's just the straight dope. Further, as with any translation of the Bible, bias may be inherent within the very text itself--though this version does a good job of mitigating that by indicating where and how other translations differ.

Congrats on getting hired!!! I'd recommend a mix of PD/teaching books and content. When you get bored of one switch to the other. Both are equally important (unless you feel stronger in one area than the other).

For PD, I'd recommend: Teach Like a Pirate, Blended, The Wild Card, and the classic Essential 55. Another one on grading is Fair Isn't Always Equal - this one really changed how I thought about grading in my classes.

As far as content, you have a couple ways to go - review an overview of history like Lies My Teacher Told Me, the classic People's History, or Teaching What Really Happened, or you can go with a really good book on a specific event or time period to make that unit really pop in the classroom. The Ron Chernow books on Hamilton, Washington, or Grant would be great (but long). I loved Undaunted Courage about Lewis & Clark and turned that into a really great lesson.

Have a great summer and best of luck next year!!

While researching for my novel this morning I came across a book that seems spot-on relevant to the conversation we had yesterday. It's about why America's politics are so far to the right. Here's the link and description in case you're curious:

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

> Why is America living in an age of profound economic inequality? Why, despite the desperate need to address climate change, have even modest environmental efforts been defeated again and again? Why have protections for employees been decimated? Why do hedge-fund billionaires pay a far lower tax rate than middle-class workers?
The conventional answer is that a popular uprising against “big government” led to the ascendancy of a broad-based conservative movement. But as Jane Mayer shows in this powerful, meticulously reported history, a network of exceedingly wealthy people with extreme libertarian views bankrolled a systematic, step-by-step plan to fundamentally alter the American political system.
The network has brought together some of the richest people on the planet. Their core beliefs—that taxes are a form of tyranny; that government oversight of business is an assault on freedom—are sincerely held. But these beliefs also advance their personal and corporate interests: Many of their companies have run afoul of federal pollution, worker safety, securities, and tax laws.
The chief figures in the network are Charles and David Koch, whose father made his fortune in part by building oil refineries in Stalin’s Russia and Hitler’s Germany. The patriarch later was a founding member of the John Birch Society, whose politics were so radical it believed Dwight Eisenhower was a communist. The brothers were schooled in a political philosophy that asserted the only role of government is to provide security and to enforce property rights.
When libertarian ideas proved decidedly unpopular with voters, the Koch brothers and their allies chose another path. If they pooled their vast resources, they could fund an interlocking array of organizations that could work in tandem to influence and ultimately control academic institutions, think tanks, the courts, statehouses, Congress, and, they hoped, the presidency. Richard Mellon Scaife, the mercurial heir to banking and oil fortunes, had the brilliant insight that most of their political activities could be written off as tax-deductible “philanthropy.”
These organizations were given innocuous names such as Americans for Prosperity. Funding sources were hidden whenever possible. This process reached its apotheosis with the allegedly populist Tea Party movement, abetted mightily by the Citizens United decision—a case conceived of by legal advocates funded by the network.
The political operatives the network employs are disciplined, smart, and at times ruthless. Mayer documents instances in which people affiliated with these groups hired private detectives to impugn whistle-blowers, journalists, and even government investigators. And their efforts have been remarkably successful. Libertarian views on taxes and regulation, once far outside the mainstream and still rejected by most Americans, are ascendant in the majority of state governments, the Supreme Court, and Congress. Meaningful environmental, labor, finance, and tax reforms have been stymied.
Jane Mayer spent five years conducting hundreds of interviews-including with several sources within the network-and scoured public records, private papers, and court proceedings in reporting this book. In a taut and utterly convincing narrative, she traces the byzantine trail of the billions of dollars spent by the network and provides vivid portraits of the colorful figures behind the new American oligarchy.
Dark Money is a book that must be read by anyone who cares about the future of American democracy.

I recommend these just as general Iran books. All of them touch on the Revolution a good bit and will help you understand Iran better:

All the Shah's Men
It does get a bit boring at parts but will help your overall understanding of Iran/the Revolution.

Shah
This is another must read to understand the revolution and Iran. This touches on the Constitutional Revolution as well.
The Ayatollah Begs to Differ
One of the best books about Iran I have ever read. The author (Hooman Majd) has a good bit of "insider" access to some Iranian elites and offers a unique perspective on Iran.

A must see documentary in my opinion is The Queen and I An Expat Irani and the Last Queen (Farah) of Iran. Very interesting and shows a whole new perspective to it all.

I also strongly recommend the videos about the topic found on youtube. There are countless options on the site, most of which have been very reliable in my experiences.

PS Tell me more about your studies. History scholars are always of great interest.

That's great you are open to learning and interested in broadening your world view. That's a great first step. There are a lot of great books about religion and philosophy. You should start where you are most interested but it can be helpful to get a high-level overview with books like:

• http://www.amazon.com/The-Worlds-Religions-Wisdom-Traditions/dp/0062508113
  
• http://www.amazon.com/God-Is-Not-One-Religions/dp/0061571288/ref=pd_sim_b_4
  
  Basically giving you an idea of different religions around the world and how they differ but also how they are similar. Also the internet is a great resource. Start reading about different religious and philosophical beliefs even on Wikipedia as an easy way to get started. Anyhow, best of luck with everything.

I've actually been really disappointed to read into the history and current usage of most modern non-profits (charities) and realized that they are basically a tax dodge for the super-rich. For instance, think of the tax breaks for donating to various non-profits. They don't disappear if you own the charity, allowing you to create charities, place your own money in them to reduce your tax burden, and spend it how you like.

And almost none has to be directed towards your stated goal, similar to how non-profits like The Wounded Warriors Project use less than 10% of the donated money to actually help veterans.

Even worse, depending on the type of 501 non-profit it is, you can usually use that money politically. Recent-ish court cases have determined that, even ones that were originally designed to not permit political spending, the word "primarily" allows for up to 49% of money to be spend on political issues directly. And obfuscation can allow for plenty more to indirectly support political issues.

A final piece of the puzzle is how you can set up tax-free trusts for your kids to avoid estate taxes. They sound good: the rich get no taxes to transfer money to their kids because the interest that accrues on the trust for a decade or two goes to charities. But when own the charity you are giving the interest to, it's just a tax dodge.

If you are interested in reading more, the book Dark Money is a fascinating read. It is a bit left of center, though. Provides a lot of background on non-profits and their inception though... they used to be illegal and thought of as thoroughly un-American. And now, they are used to take billions of dollars from the wealthy, while reducing their tax burden, to fund their political causes with no limits, thanks to cases like Citizen's United.

Sorry if this was all a little off topic.

I second the reading idea! Ask your history or science teachers for suggestions of accessible books. I'm going to list some that I found interesting or want to read, and add more as I think of them.

A short history of nearly everything by Bill Bryson. Title explains it all. It is very beginner friendly, and has some very entertaining stories. Bryson is very heavy on the history and it's rather long but you should definitely make every effort to finish it.

Lies my teacher told me

The greatest stories never told (This is a whole series, there are books on Presidents, science, and war as well).

There's a series by Edward Rutherfurd that tells history stories that are loosely based on fact. There are books on London and ancient England, Ireland, Russia, and one on New York

I read this book a while ago and loved it- Autobiography of a Tibetan Monk It's about a monk who was imprisoned for 30 years by the Chinese.

The Grapes of Wrath.

Les Misérables. I linked to the unabridged one on purpose. It's SO WORTH IT. One of my favorite books of all time, and there's a lot of French history in it. It's also the first book that made me bawl at the end.

You'll also want the Adventures of Tom Sawyer, To Kill a Mockingbird, The Great Gatsby, The Federalist Papers.

I'm not sure what you have covered in history, but you'll definitely want to find stuff on all the major wars, slavery, the Bubonic Plague, the French Revolution, & ancient Greek and Roman history.

As for science, find these two if you have any interest in how the brain works (and they're pretty approachable).
Phantoms in the brain
The man who mistook his wife for a hat

Alex and Me The story of a scientist and the incredibly intelligent parrot she studied.

For a background in evolution, you could go with The ancestor's tale

A biography of Marie Curie

The Wild Trees by Richard Preston is a quick and easy read, and very heavy on the adventure. You'll also want to read his other book The Hot Zone about Ebola. Absolutely fascinating, I couldn't put this one down.

The Devil's Teeth About sharks and the scientists who study them. What's not to like?

Start by putting down the phone. I got rid of Facebook and Instagram off my phone and it was the best thing I have ever done. I have them back now because I would check them on my browser and have like 20 notifications from last week so they were irrelevant when I would read them. I have significantly decreased my intake though and feel way better for it.

But what to do with your spare time? I would say put down any form of screen (no gaming or YouTube/Netflix binging) and instead pick up either a book or a deck of cards. They have expanded my mind and have made it easier for me to fall asleep. In terms of books, I would recommend Astrophysics for People in a Hurry by Neil deGrasse Tyson (he does a great job of explaining complex principles regardless of your knowledge level). I would also recommend The novelisation of 'The King's Speech' which I think is beautifully written and has some brilliant source material attached to it. It has so much more historical depth than the movie. In terms of cards, set up a game of Solitaire with yourself, the simplicity of it is incredibly soothing.

Outside of this, make sure you're having a good night's sleep, get up early and have a decent breakfast.

Hope this helps you out my friend.

Maybe this?

From: https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/kochland-examines-how-the-koch-brothers-made-their-fortune-and-the-influence-it-bought

>If there is any lingering uncertainty that the Koch brothers are the primary sponsors of climate-change doubt in the United States, it ought to be put to rest by the publication of “Kochland: The Secret History of Koch Industries and Corporate Power in America,” by the business reporter Christopher Leonard. This seven-hundred-and-four-page tome doesn’t break much new political ground, but it shows the extraordinary behind-the-scenes influence that Charles and David Koch have exerted to cripple government action on climate change.
>
>Leonard, who has written for Bloomberg Businessweek and the Wall Street Journal, devotes most of the book to an even-handed telling of how the two brothers from Wichita, Kansas, built up Koch Industries, a privately owned business so profitable that together they have amassed some hundred and twenty billion dollars, a fortune larger than that of Amazon’s C.E.O., Jeff Bezos, or the Microsoft founder Bill Gates. The project took Leonard more than six years to finish and it draws on hundreds of hours of interviews, including with Charles Koch, the C.E.O. and force without equal atop the sprawling corporate enterprise. (David Koch retired from the firm last year.)
>
>While “Kochland” is more focused on business than on politics, in line with Leonard’s “The Meat Racket: The Secret Takeover of America’s Food Business,” from 2014, it nonetheless adds new details about the ways in which the brothers have leveraged their fortune to capture American politics. Leonard shows that the Kochs’ political motives are both ideological, as hardcore free-market libertarians, and self-interested, serving their fossil-fuel-enriched bottom line. The Kochs’ secret sauce, as Leonard describes it, has been a penchant for long-term planning, patience, and flexibility; a relentless pursuit of profit; and the control that comes from owning some eighty per cent of their business empire themselves, without interference from stockholders or virtually anyone else.
>
>Saying anything new about the Kochs isn’t easy. The two brothers have been extensively covered: they are the subject of Daniel Schulman’s excellent biography “Sons of Wichita,” from 2014, and the focus of much in-depth investigative reporting, including a piece I wrote for The New Yorker, from 2010, and my book “Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right,” from 2016.
>
>Leonard, nonetheless, manages to dig up valuable new material, including evidence of the Kochs’ role in perhaps the earliest known organized conference of climate-change deniers, which gathered just as the scientific consensus on the issue was beginning to gel. The meeting, in 1991, was sponsored by the Cato Institute, a Washington-based libertarian think tank, which the Kochs founded and heavily funded for years. As Leonard describes it, Charles Koch and other fossil-fuel magnates sprang into action that year, after President George H. W. Bush announced that he would support a treaty limiting carbon emissions, a move that posed a potentially devastating threat to the profits of Koch Industries. At the time, Bush was not an outlier in the Republican Party. Like the Democrats, the Republicans largely accepted the scientific consensus on climate change, reflected in the findings of expert groups such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which had formed in 1988, under the auspices of the United Nations.

The Genius: How Bill Walsh Reinvented Football and Created an NFL Dynasty
https://www.amazon.com/Genius-Reinvented-Football-Created-Dynasty/dp/0345499123/ref=sr_1_74?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1475238145&sr=1-74&keywords=nfl+book

Jaws might be loudmouthed idiot on tv, but he co-authored a pretty darn good book
The Games That Changed the Game: The Evolution of the NFL in Seven Sundays
https://www.amazon.com/Games-That-Changed-Game-Evolution/dp/0345517962/ref=sr_1_67?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1475238131&sr=1-67&keywords=nfl+book

And all hail Belichick
War Room: The Legacy of Bill Belichick and the Art of Building the Perfect Team
https://www.amazon.com/War-Room-Belichick-Building-Perfect/dp/006208240X/ref=sr_1_11?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1475238058&sr=1-11&keywords=nfl+book

The Education of a Coach
https://www.amazon.com/Education-Coach-David-Halberstam/dp/1401308791/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1475238301&sr=1-1&keywords=david+halberstam+belichick

Pretty funny insight into players perspective:

The Rookie Handbook: How to Survive the First Season in the NFL
https://www.amazon.com/Rookie-Handbook-Survive-First-Season/dp/1682450341/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&qid=1475237975&sr=8-4&keywords=nfl+book

Also Pete Carrolls book Win Forever is an excellent read.
It has more to do with his Trojan days, but is a very clear telling of his coaching philosophy and why he has succeeded in Seattle. That man knows how to connect with people.

I've been asking myself that question recently, and after surfing around I've come to three answers that have helped me:

1.) Keep surfing around. Some of the history subreddits are great places for general information, trivia, and links to cool facts, while /r/AskHistory and /r/AskHistorians are great getting answers to specific questions you have.

2.) Read a general world history. While a lot of these seems to be a bit Eurocentric and can't, by nature, go into great depth about any particular place or period, it seems to me that this is a good place to start if you aren't sure what interests you most. This reddit's book list mentions The History of the World by J. M. Roberts as a good world history book, and I've personally enjoyed The History of the Ancient World by Susan Bauer (and the other books of that series). Wikipedia is pretty great, too.

3.) Like another comment said, try to narrow your topic. It's easy to delve into history when you've picked something you find really interesting.

For the Revolutionary War

• This Glorious Cause. One volume book, so it's not going to cover everything but for a general overview of the Revolutionary War it's great.
  
  
• Six Frigates: The Epic History of the Founding of the U.S. Navy I'm partial to this one because of the focus on the Navy.
  
  
• Paul Revere's Ride Fischer does a great job in explaining the build up to the Revolution using Revere as a central figure.
  
  
• The First Salute. Barbara Truchman writes here about the vital role the Dutch played in keeping the Revolution alive via trade, and the consequences of that trade for the Dutch. It can sometime lose focus as Truchman goes into great detail about things that probably would be better left to footnotes, but it's still a great read. (Her Guns of August won a Pulitzer, and in my opinion it's a must-read for anyone at all interested in WWI.)
  
  For the Civil War
  
  
• The Civil War: A Narrative, by Shelby Foote. I'm a big fan of this, but it is three volumes so that means it's rather long.
  
  
• Battle Cry of Freedom by James McPherson is also another classic in the field.
  
  
• Grant's Memoirs and Sherman's Memoirs are both must-reads.
  
  I have to recommend Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane and Killer Angels by Michael Sharra, both fantastic military fiction.
  
  
  
  

You'll have to read Paul Starr's The Social Transformation of American Medicine to understand the whole story, but here's my parable:

• In the US, since about the turn of the 20th century, health care financing has been about finding ways to make paying for the health care costs of hospitals and health professionals regular and predictable - rather than being principally concerned with supporting the ability of patients and families to pay some or all of their treatment bills. That latter issue has always been of secondary concern. It's always been a concern, just never the foremost concern.
  
  
  
• Health treatment has always been inherently conservative - "first do no harm", and all that. When they change at all, health treatment habits change slowly, as do their practitioners.
  
  
  
• We pay for health treatment transactionally - as if we were buying units of care off the shelf. Naturally facilities, and doctors, who "do" health care and want to make more money, do more procedures. The more procedures, the more payments. We don't buy health, we buy a knee surgery here, a bottle of blood pressure medicine there. "Of course we don't buy health, silly" you say - "we can't". So ask yourself; why not? Because it's not impossible, it's just that we just don't do it that way.
  
  
  
• Treatment of the most desperate, difficult cases takes serious resources, and serious skills. The most desperate cases are a very small share of the total - but they consume a very large share of all resources devoted to health care. This is America - we're good at addressing really tough problems. Remember the moon landing? Well, saving the lives of 1.5-pound babies, born at 22 weeks, are like mini-moon landings. Anyway, we find ways to tackle those really tough problems, to find resources to do it, and to fool ourselves that we can afford it, because that's what we do.
  
  
  
• But meanwhile we hate "taxes", and government, and bureaucracy - those aren't the American way. So we fool ourselves that our inefficient, wasteful means of gathering and deploying resources is the 'right' way, the pragmatic, "free market", "innovative" way to pay for health care - that our refusal to be systematic about acquiring resources to support our pretty highly capable health treatment facilities and clinicians makes "our" special, "exceptional" kind of sense. It would be funny, if it weren't so stupid.
  
  
• Taken altogether, we spend a lot more - 33 to 50% more - than people in other comparable countries do on "health", and we get no better health than they do for all our spending. We generally don't even get more health transactions - we just pay more for them. Mainly because that's how we do - that's our habit.
  
  But that still doesn't explain why health insurance* is so expensive, but now that should be easy to see. Health insurance is designed to pay some or all of a decently well-defined realm of possible treatment charges. It's not suited, mainly, to change how those procedures happen. It's a mostly passive follower of what gets charged, and while payers exert some pressure on care providers to moderate their ways, the pressure is feeble, and its motivations compromised.

Leo Szilard hade ideen och var orolig att Tyskland skulle komma först redan 1933.

~

Allmänt.
En av de bästa böckerna jag någonsin läst:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Making_of_the_Atomic_Bomb

Håller med varje ord i denna recension. Vill tillägga de fantastiska anekdoterna:

1. När Fermi dirigerar världens första kedjereaktion under en squash läktare i Chicago. En stoppstav hänger i ett rep från taket och en gubbe står med en yxa ...Fermi instruerar utdragande av bromsstav millimeter för millimeter, Geiger räknaren stiger och slår i botten, skiftar område, stiger och slår i botten igen, skiftar på nytt område ... Personer lyssnar på tickandet som går över i ett högfrekvent tjut och är osäkra om de ska stå kvar eller springa därifrån. Fermi är cool och deklarerar experimentet lyckat och avstängning.
   
   
2. Det är en fin hög ("pile") det där, säger en hantlangare när uran anländer inför chicagoexperimentet. En vetenskapsman hör det, blir kritvit, sliter fram och arbetar räknestickan några minuter innan han slappnar av och säger: "Nej, det är det inte". Fotnot, en del av uranet kommer från en kapad tysk ubåt på väg till japan med det senaste i tysk teknologi, inklusive Me 262 delar).
   
   
3. Teoretiske kärnfysikern och judinnan Lise Meitner begrundar ett brev i ett kyligt Göteborg (vädermässigt och något antisemitiskt) efter att precis ha funnit det nödvändigt att lämna Tyskland. Brevet kommer från hennes före detta kollegor och vänner, etniskt tyska vetenskapsmän som inte förstår resultatet av ett experiment de precis genomfört och ber (teoretikern) Meitner hjälpa till att förklara det. Flyktingen Meitner blir på så vis ensam i världen att först förstå att kärnvapen och kärnenergi har lämnat sfären av spekulation och nu är reell och trolig verklighet. Tyskarna (Otto Hahn bla) hade klyvt uranatomen utan att ha förstått det.
   
   
4. Den tyska atomklyvningen tillkännages (av Nils Bohr?) på Columbia University. Den hade hemlighållits, inte av militära skäl, det kommer snart, men för att säkerställa vetenskaplig preferens, rätt personer skall få äran av upptäckten. En undergraduate springer ner i Columbias källare och upprepar det tyska experimentet innan föredraget är över.
   
   
5. Nils Bohr smugglas till England från Danmark i ett Mosquito bombrum. Hans huvud är för stort för hjälmen och han svimmar av på vägen av syrebrist.
   
   >The book covers the subect on a number of levels. First is the factual story of the events leading up to the making of the bomb, which in themselves would be fascinating. For example, the fact that in two years the Manhattan Project built an industrial plant larger than the US automobile manufacturing base. That only in December of 1938 was the fission of Uranium first discovered, but the course of events were so rapid as to lead to the Trinity test in July of 1945. As a sometime program manager, but no General Groves, it was a fascinating account of the world's most significant projecct.
   The second level is a very enjoyable history of nuclear physics as the reader is lead through the discovery process from the turn of the century to thermonuclear fusion. That discovery process is the vehicle for the third and fourth levels of the book. The stories and personalities of the scientists, around the world, who added to that knowledge, what shaped and motivated their lives and how they indiviually gained insight, brilliant insight, into the riddle that was physics. I felt I got to know people like Rutherford, Bohr, Oppenheimer, Fermi, Szilard, and Teller. The fourth level was that the insight was not really individual but collaborative. This book is one of the finest descriptions of the scientific process and how this open, collaborative and communicative process works across boundaries.
   
   >http://www.amazon.com/The-Making-Atomic-Bomb-Anniversary/dp/1451677618

I took a class on African Religions, so I can help on the Yoruba side!

For a quick primer, pick up Stephen Prothero's God is Not One. It's an introduction to World Religions type book, but it's a great read and he includes an entire chapter specifically on Yoruba.

For more mythology, pick up Osun across the Waters by Muphy and Sanford It's a great history of the Yoruba pantheon and how they crossed to the Americas. Osun has some fantastic myths attached to her.

For a really fun read that's a little off topic, pick up Karen McCarthy-Brown's Mama Lola: A Vodou Priestess in Brooklyn. It's an anthropologist's conversations with a Vodou priestess, with descriptions of the ritual (Vodou is a daughter religion to Yoruba - they share a lot of the same ideas and gods), and every other chapter is a short story written by the author that explores some of the history and themes of the tradition. Her descriptions of the various orishas/lwas are really fun reading.

They made an economic decision to live in a balloon-frame timber house, and not use cable ties for their roof and foundations. How should we react to people who spend more money invested on making their homes look decorative rather than sturdy?

All people and all societies need charity to survive. However, that charity shouldn't be so overwhelming and institutionalized that it discourages people from making good decisions.

I live four feet above sea level. I know the risks, and I accept them. I find it unreasonable that anyone else should bear the burden of my choices. After Katrina, I lost nearly all my possessions and "important" documents, but I was perfectly healthy and was able to help family, neighbors and fellow citizens cut their way out. For a period of time before we were able to return, my family and a million other people sorted out a bit of couch surfing. Those people who maintained a lot of positive goodwill with friends and family had a more comfortable camping trip than others. In the period before we could settle down the real task of digging out, I helped a private group from Seattle setup a computer network for refugees to access helpful sites like searching for missing relatives, sites that were run by private groups or individuals. Our other intention was to help them access government aid websites, but I saw very few people attempt to do this, and even fewer succeed at it. Mostly, bored children played web games, and I busied myself with making it harder for them to download spyware and viruses. It was a losing battle. People that can't help themselves generally can't be helped at all.

Katrina was when I stopped believing in the organizational capabilities of government. That was when I traded in Zinn's "A People's History" for Voegelin's "Modernity without Restraint."

In the interest of trying to recommend books you may not have read, I am suggesting some that may seem far afield from books like HPMOR. But I have read each of them multiple times and loved them, and all of them gave me a lot to think about.

I just created a comment for Chapter 85 recommending Between Silk and Cyanide by Leo Marks. It is non-fiction, a painfully honest autobiography, and not very similar except for the bits about Knut Haukelid, but it is an amazing book. The author was the head of codes for SOE during WWII and so the book is about cryptography and secrets. And courage. I'm reading it for the third time right now.

Tuf Voyaging is a collection of short stories by George R. R. Martin (no one named Stark is in it), about Haviland Tuf, a misanthropic cat-loving merchant who starts with his humble ship "Cornucopia of Excellent Goods at Low Prices" and ends up with terrifying power and some hard decisions to make about how to use it. I'd call it comedy because it is hilarious, but it is also brilliantly-written horror.

Memoirs Found in a Bathtub is a tiny surreal book by Stanislaw Lem, about a journal uncovered by a post-apolcalyptic civilization. The main character has no name, and is apparently a spy on a mission so secret even he doesn't know about it. It is nightmarish, has absolutely no rationality to it at all, is clever and unlike any other book I've read, and most people haven't heard of it.

The Control of Nature by John McPhee is another non-fiction book. I recommend it for the beauty of the language, the depth of the research, and the fact that it is incredibly fascinating and impossible to put down. McPhee makes every person he meets into someone you want to know, and his science has substance without ever losing that sense of wonder.

>When you give a group an environment where they can flourish they seem to do a lot better when they’re solely with people of the same culture, there’s nothing inherently racist about that

Correct. There's nothing inherently racist about that. The problem is that this way of thinking is only applied to races right now. So really, it is kind of racist.

>People point to some predominantly white Scandinavian and European counties that have remarkable economies and next to no crime and tout this as a victory for white race, whilst the opposition claims this is yet another case of white people ruling the world by oppressing minorities.

European empires that dominated the world didn't do so by mining their own countries. England doesn't naturally grow tea, yet they're known for it. England and other European countries only have so many natural resources, but they got them from other countries and they drove the regions into political turmoil in gathering them. India is largely shaped by British occupation even to this day.

One book I'll recommend to you is this one: The History of White People. It does a fairly good job of breaking down, via historical agreement and evidence, how White cultures aren't what alt-right or even "light" alt-right people claim it to be. People claim Scandinavia is a great model of racial purity and a homogenous society. Save for the part where Norse and Scandinavian history largely involved moving people around and settling areas that weren't their own, and bringing many immigrants in to do work. But let's forget all that for our narrative.

The greatest civilizations on Earth learned that cultural segregation was a pretty bad idea. The Mongol Empire, Egyptian, Mali, British, Roman, Greek, Aztec, whatever: they all learned how to unite people. Albeit, depending on how far back and which ones, in bloody ways. They all reached similar conclusions, like that it's a good idea to build sewers and educate people. They all reached the same mathematical standards, like how pi can be 3.14 or 3.16. We know it to be 3.14 ad infinitum, but that other cultures got so close is amazing too. Every Greek philosopher that is seen as the bedrock of Western civilization, that's touted by people who believe that West is best? They studied in Africa. And Africans studied in Greece.

The days of expanding are (hopefully) over, but the days of people sharing ideas and moving about aren't. Only now, people are deciding to move and not being conquered. Instead of Rome coming to your doorstep, other people are arriving in Rome.

I haven't espoused my own views on immigration or multiculturalism, but the idea that we need segregation like the alt-right suggests is just stupid. There have always been people who believed we shouldn't mix. Those people are dead and died out, because they refused to do what comes naturally to humans - get along with others.

Obama's mother was born in 1942, her father fought in WWII and Obama was 7 years old in 1968. She was eighteen when Obama was born in 1961. She was a boomer, an early hipster and Barry is an early GenXer.

When we talk about the Baby Boom it is a well-defined timeframe describing people born in the 40s and 50s when there was a huge increase in birth rates in the US. This generational cohort shares common set of experiences, marked by historical, cultural and social events that everyone reacts to in their own way, but which mark that generation in a way that younger/older generations don't share.

You are right from the perspective of a biological family unit that the parents belong to one generation, and the children to another. This fact gives us no insight into how different generations (in the sense of age-group cohorts) might react to the same set of historical circumstances.

A lot of what I see in these threads on reddit is a familiar intergenerational resentment that probably dates back to the dawn of civilization. Old people gripe at the young, because they resent their youth. Young people resent old people hanging on to economic resources and social status. So what else is new?

What's more interesting is the interplay between generations that become defined by watershed events (like WWII or the Vietnam War) that demand a collective response from young adults. As they get older they are still defined to a large degree by those events (think about how the Boomers have continued to play out old traumas of the 60s on current events).

Back in the early 90s a book was published that posed a theory of the way these generational tensions played out through American history:

Generations: The History of America's Future, 1584 to 2069

It's amazing to me how much influence these ideas have today, over 30(!) years later. Here's a wiki on the theory.

In a nutshell, the authors argue that there are 4 different generational types that repeat in a cycle which can be traced back in the US to before the American Revolution. Each generation is roughly 20-22 years in historical time.

Corporations and political parties spend tens of millions of dollars trying to predict generational trends for marketing and campaign purposes. The authors even set up their own consulting business because of the predictive accuracy of their model.

Millennials, they say, correspond to the Greatest Generation, marked by idealism, hard work, and if predictions come true they will successfully "clean up the mess" left by prior generations, as did the WWII cohort. GenX, marked by well-earned cynicism and world-weary pragmatism, will serve as cautionary elder council to the exuberance of the Millennials.

It's not surprising that so many twenty-somethings resent being characterized as slackers because I don't see that at all. As a GenXer I know we invented that shit. We had reasons.

Rather than point fingers and decide which generation is good or bad, maybe we should take into account the different experiences and challenges and baggage each generation brings to the game.

BTW. Douglas Copeland would be mighty surprised to hear that people over 50 aren't GenX, since he was certainly considered as such when he wrote the book that defined the generation.

"Who are they? Does Generation X even exist? If so, how can we make money from it? Are they boomers or are they different? Do they require a different management style?

"And on and on.

"I’ve never had an answer to any of these questions, although, as a shorthand, I said, and continue to say, that if you liked the Talking Heads back in the day, then you’re probably X. Or if you liked New Order. Or Joy Division. Or something, anything, other than that wretched Forrest Gumpy baby-boomer we-run-the-planety crap that boomers endlessly yammer on about – I mean, good for them, have and enjoy your generation! – but please don’t tell me that that’s me, too, because it’s not, it never was and it never will be. The whole point of Gen X was, and continues to be, a negation of being forced into Baby Boomerdom against one’s will." -DC

I guess I'm not sure what to say about your "climate cult", but scientists and engineers (and the jobs they create) will go to where the culture favors them. That was the US from the 1930s to today. Perhaps you want them to go to France now?

I strongly encourage reading The Making of the Atomic Bomb.

This book details how the UK, Germany, Holland, France, and Russia all had a few pieces of the puzzle, but only the USA brought the scientists and engineers together to make the first atomic bomb and fucking win WWII. It's a star-spangled version of science and industry, far better than the Moon race.

Denying climate change basically says "fuck everything we have ever learned about science and engineering in the 20th century, let's let a few rich oil fucks make a few last bucks while America rots."

I say fuck that shit, we're better than that, let's continue taking the best scientists of the world and producing the best high-end products. But we can't do that unless this country welcomes the best and the brightest. Which means we cannot be Baghdad Bob about climate change.

I read The Catcher Was a Spy probably 20 years ago. It's mildly interesting in recollecting Moe Berg's life, but it reads more like someone's idea of what their life may have been like, than what it actually was.

If you want some interesting baseball books, I'd suggest October 1964 by David Halberstam, The Boys of Summer (classic) by Roger Kahn, or Great and Glorious Game by Bart Giamatti. The last one includes an essay entitled "The Green Fields of the Mind" that is probably one of the most beautiful pieces written about the game.

The authors of the book Generations make a pretty good description of it. Basically, the Boomer generation was born into the 'perfect world' created for them by the GI Generation (their parents).

Their whole world-view is basically self-centered and idealistic, and you can see this in advertisements for retirement funds that are targeted at boomers. (There's one I think narrated by Dennis Hopper: "We were the generation that was going to change everything, and now we're changing the way we retire")

Much of the Woodstock stuff was idealistic. As a generation, they are basically narcissistic, which is why the 70s was the "Me" decade, and why so many members of Generation X were either latchkey kids, or children of divorce - the Boomers were more obsessed with career climbing or their personal 'happiness' than institutions of marriage or family.

Although their self-centered independence was counter-culture in the 60s and 70s, in the 80s as they grew up and became more corporate and career-centered it became less about peace and love and more about profits and low taxes. (Wall Street - Gordon Gekko: "Greed is Good") Conservativism/Libertarianism is another form of dreamy-eyed Idealism.

As you would find out if you read Generations or The Fourth Turning by the same authors, this is nothing new as the general 'lifestyles and values' of generations tend to repeat cyclically, due to the complex interaction between generations. Hence, the Baby Boomer generation had a lot in common with the Missionary Generation of the 1860s-1880s.

That's a broad topic. Let's see:

• Recent, still relevant baseball: The Arm by Jeff Passan. One of the best sportswriters today goes way in-depth to what's going on with pitching injuries. Fascinating read.
  
  
• Historical / Classic Reads: Roger Kahn's The Boys of Summer, about the Brooklyn Dodgers in Jackie's day. Kahn's a wonderful storyteller.
  
  
• Weird, but wonderful: Philip Roth's The Great American Novel, about the fictional Patriot League. One of these days, I want to run an OOTP sim of the league and see what happens. Completely out there, but I loved it.
  
  
• Edit: Almost forgot! The Kid Who Only Hit Homers, by Matt Christopher. First baseball book I ever read.

This was the one that we used for Cosmology. It starts pretty gentle but moves into the metric tensor fairly quickly. If you don't have the maths I don't know that it'll help you to understand them but it'll definitely have all the terms and equations. As with Dirac's Principles of Quantum Mechanics, the funny haired man himself actually had a pretty approachable work from what I remember when I tried reading it.

​

This one has been sitting on my shelf waiting to be read. Given the authors reputation for popularizing astrophysics and the title I think it might be a good place to start before you hit the other ones.

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

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

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

Strauss-Howe Generational Theory

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

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

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

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

Neil Howe also published a book in 2000:

Millennials Rising: The Next Great Generation

To quote one of the reviews:

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


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

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

If you suspect that you're not getting the whole story from television, I'd suggest picking up Noam Chomsky. He literally wrote the book, Manufacturing Consent, on the propaganda model for analyzing the media. Maybe start with The Common Good or What Uncle Sam Really Wants. That last one was one of the catalysts that started my own ideological transformation around your age that led me to becoming a conscientious objector and leaving the USMC.

Admittedly, Chomsky is a leftist intellectual, a self described supporter of anarcho syndicalism and libertarian socialism, but then, a lot of thinking people gravitate to leftism. Einstein wrote a letter entitled, Why I am a Socialist-

>'The oligarchy of private capital cannot be effectively checked even by a democratically organised political society. The members of legislative bodies are selected by political parties financed or influenced by private capitalists. Moreover, private capitalists control the main sources of information (press, radio, education).'

• Albert Einstein
  
  The majority of scientists, who are generally analytically gifted people, and whose daily job is essentially to understand and describe the nature of reality, are also political leftists. So maybe there is something to this very wide body of thought.
  
  At any rate, I think that you'll be hard pressed to make yourself more informed by watching TV. I second the notion others have proposed of reading up on history, and offer Howard Zinn's [A People's History of the United States] (http://www.amazon.com/Peoples-History-United-States-P-S/dp/0061965588/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1342240464&sr=1-1&keywords=a+people%27s+history+of+the+united+states) as a counterbalance to some sanitized versions of history.
  
  Anyways good luck! Happy to answer any questions you might have!
  

Historian here: I recommend simply finding good books on topics or periods that interest you. Textbooks are dull and by design shallow. Most people will enjoy (and benefit) from reading more in-depth studies of a topic they are passionately interested in, at least as a starting point. For example, if you are interested in the 1920s I'd highly recommend Daniel Orkrent's Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition as a fascinating and quick read that will leave you wanting to learn more about the 1920s.

So what interests you?

Once you have some topics lined up, go to /r/askhistorians and ask for suggestions.

Thanks! I just wish I could say there were more good things on the list.

And thanks for the Patton recommendation, I'll check that out.

I do recommend anything by John McPhee in the strongest possible terms. It's all non-fiction, and always interesting and often very funny, and about a tremendous range of topics.

Like fishing? Read The Founding Fish, which is all about the American Shad, and I mentioned before.

Like boats? Looking For a Ship is about the merchant marine.

Planes, trains, and automobiles (and more boats)? Uncommon Carriers deals with all of them, and why almost all lobster eaten in the US comes from Kentucky.

Care for tales about why New Orleans is doomed, pissing on lava , and debris flows in LA? The Control of Nature covers those.

Fruit? How about Oranges?

Geology? The Annals of the Former World is a compilation of several shorter books more or less following I-80 across the US.

Sports? Tennis (and basketball to a lesser extent). He's also written about lacrosse in various magazines.

...And a ton of other stuff, ranging from bears to farmers markets to nuclear energy to lifting body airplanes to Switzerland.

Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History available on iTunes podcasts as well.

Steven Pinker’s book The Better Angels of our Nature is a fantastic total annihilation of Watchtower’s constant fearmongering about how much violence there is in the world and how it’s only getting worse.

Basically anything by Richard Dawkins is evolutionary biology gold, highly recommend his book The Greatest Show on Earth

Neil deGrasse Tyson recently released a great book Astrophysics for People in a Hurry that gives so many mind-blowing facts about our universe in quick-to-read fashion. His podcast StarTalk Radio is fascinating and fun as well.

Bart D Ehrman is a fantastic biblical scholar, his book Forged examines the Gospel writers and why many are not who the religious believe them to be.

I show this sketch when I teach about the medicalization of birth.

Woman: "Excuse me? What should I do?"

Doctor: "Oh, nothing dear. You're not qualified!"

Love it.

Edit: I knew this would draw some comments. So there are multiple ways of discussing the medicalization of birth. Personally, I don't care how you give birth. The way I teach it is in the context of physician authority. In the late 19th early 20th century American doctors had almost no respect. There was no authority overseeing medical education. You could open your own med school and pump out degrees for a fee. Thus there were tons of quacks and charlatans. There's a larger story of why that changed, but one small piece of it is that physicians had to extend their authority over things that they could reasonably improve, or (if you're a cynic) make the argument that they could improve. With the invention of the forceps and the implementation of germ theory, birth became one of those things. Contrast this with Germany, where physicians enjoyed much higher degrees of respect and autonomy relative to their American counterparts. They wanted nothing to do with birth because it was the purview of midwives. What helped establish authority and respect for American doctors would only serve to diminish authority for German doctors (or so they thought anyway). Thus birth has a stronger history of medicalization (turning a previously non-medical phenomenon into a medical one) in the U.S. than in Europe. It's much more complicated than that, but that's the basic gist. This is coming mostly from Paul Starr's The Social Transformation of American Medicine.

Again, I don't care how you give birth.

> For example, black people and white people very obviously have different nose shapes.

This was refuted in literally my first week of Anthropology 100 in my undergrad. Which of these is the black nose?

This one?

This one?

This one?

This one?

This one?

>If it were only skin tone that influenced how we label different races, we'd find it impossible to tell the difference between, say, some Indians and some African Americans, but it actually isn't that hard at all.

Except it is, which is why a number of "African Americans" successfully posed as Indian during Jim Crow, for example Korla Pandit.

>but the one area where there is variation is in the characteristics we as a society have picked out upon to make the racial split in the first place.

You really should read the books I linked about the construction of race in America. To reiterate, those were Racial Formation in the United States, White By Law: The Legal Construction of Race, The History of White People, The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime and the Making of Modern Urban America.

One of the commenters who came from /r/sociology after you suggested I cross post in subs where the users have relevant academic training also added to that some Franz Boas, which I'd like to reiterate. A good introduction to biological anthropology will reiterate what I've said about white/black groupings that you're assuming and then reifying, as will all the resources here as will a good intro to sociology.

To reiterate (1) genetic populations exist, and may share some characteristics -- for instance, San people in South Africa are reliably different than Zulu people. (2) When you try to group those populations together into something like "black" it just doesn't work. The 5 or 7 or however many you want "races" do not have any basis in biological reality (3) groupings like "black" or "African American" are too diverse to make statements like "black people all share thus and such cranial shape/nasal capacity/whatever." Therefore, (4) it makes no sense to say that you can "hear" when someone is "black" because of something biological or physiological because "black" is not a biologically meaningful category, despite its incredibly high social salience. I further argued, above, that what OP does hear is likely an accent, from an ethnolect, which came about precisely because of the social construction of race. I have friends who have "black" parentage, but everyone treats them as "white" because they "look white" and "sound white." You cannot tell by listening that their parents are black, because it's not a biologically meaningful grouping that would actually affect physiology such that it had an affect on language.

A logical terminus of the inverse argument others have proposed above is that there are fundamental biological differences, directly related to race, which affect language production. We know this to be false.

Even in your aside on tone, you're still assuming "white" and "African American" are biologically meaningful groupings, when they're not.

Einstein wasn't really involved in the project, though he played a significant role in warning the US government that it was possible and how bad an idea it would have been to let the Nazis get it first. Even though he wasn't involved, he had the name recognition that the president would read something that he sent.

Oppenheimer was basically in charge of all the science during the project.

Feynman did work on it, but he was pretty young at the time, so he wasn't one of the senior people.

There's a really excellent Pulitzer Prize winning book by Richard Rhodes that describes everything, if you're interested.

The truth is, if we could isolate one reason why healthcare is so expensive, it would be a lot easier to find a solution. I'm a few months shy of a Master's degree in Public Health, and I've spent 2+ years studying US Healthcare and Policy. To really grasp where we are today, you have to understand that the US Healthcare "System" evolved as a piecemeal operation that, through time, has been controlled by various competing interests. This is a relatively brief summary that talks about how medical care changed since the 1800s.

The shortest answer I can give is that the actual cost of providing care has become so far removed from the service itself, that prices have no reflection on reality. Providers are trying to capture the cost of all their services in your charge, and try to set it in such a way that they don't get fisted by private insurance companies and Medicare/Medicaid. When you pay $500 for a night guard at an ER, you're paying for the actual cost of the guard, the salaries and benefits of doctors/nurses/cleaning crew, the time you spent sitting in a bed, the cost of electricity on the ER floor, the sanitation and laundry charges of the hospital, etc. How those costs are allocated and how providers are paid are constantly changing through state/federal fee schedules, insurance negotiations, etc. Health care providers are trying to stay above water, and insurance companies are trying to make their shareholders happy.

Example: If an insurance company negotiates a rate with a hospital that they will pay 85% of whatever you charge, you raise your charge 117% to compensate and get back the original cost. As this happens over and over for three decades, you end up with hospital bills that charge you $30 for an aspirin that you see everyone bitching about. Medicare, Medicaid and charity care throw an entirely different monkey wrench in the system, as they almost universally underpay for services, leaving the hospital to let private payers shoulder the costs.

The most important thing to keep in mind is that, in spite of the desire to blame some sinister insurance/pharma/medical force that is made of men with cigars laughing in dark rooms, it's almost entirely the consequence of short-term responses to immediate pressures. Nobody has really stopped looked at the big picture, which is why we're in such a clusterfuck today.

If you have more specific questions, you can ask. I also highly recommend The Social Transformation of American Medicine, which is still one of the best analyses of US Healthcare out there.

Pretty much everything I know about QM, I learned from reading stuff on websites like the ones people love to link on Reddit, or similar things I've found on Google. :) I can suggest you take a look at Astrophysics for People in a Hurry by Neil deGrasse Tyson. I'm about halfway through and it's pretty dense with information, but it's still good!

Knowing what I know, I believe the issue with collecting a bunch of entangled particles is that scientists generally use photons, since it's easiest to entangle them compared to anything else, and photons aren't exactly something that hangs around waiting to be accumulated. One procedure to entangle particles requires forcing two electrons out of orbit from opposite sides of their atom. Read about creating entangled particles here. In one article, I read it would take about one million particles to get an entangled pair, but processes have improved so we can get about six a second.

I can't find any references to the "17 fields," though. I found quantum field theory, but nothing else.

It's quite a lot to bite off, but everything you want is contained in these four books:

https://www.amazon.com/Making-Atomic-Bomb-25th-Anniversary/dp/1451677618/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8

https://www.amazon.com/Dark-Sun-Making-Hydrogen-Bomb-ebook/dp/B008TRUB6O/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8

https://www.amazon.com/Arsenals-Folly-Richard-Rhodes-ebook/dp/B000W93DEO/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8

https://www.amazon.com/Twilight-Bombs-Challenges-Dangers-Prospects-ebook/dp/B003F3PKXQ/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8

Rhodes is the guy for nuclear history. I've read all four, but the last two are, admittedly, somewhat forgettable. They deal with the continuing command issues surrounding nuclear arsenals and the eventual political movement to eradicate (or, as it happened, simply limit) strategic stockpiles.

That being said, the first two, Making of the Bomb and Dark Sun, are utterly indispensible. The Making of the Atomic Bomb is a Pulitzer Prize-winning, 1986 history of the scientific effort to elucidate the physical principles which led to bombs and of the miliitary-scientific-industrial effort to realize the possibility of a weapon. It discusses many interesting characters within this history, such as Ernest Lawrence, Leo Szilard, and of course, Oppenheimer.

I have to be honest with you - I've saved Dark Sun for last for a reason. This is one of the most phenomenally engaging books I've ever read. It has everything: the creation of doomsday weapons of, and I don't use this term loosely, unimaginable destructive potential and the obsessive quasi-fetishization of their refinement and testing on behalf of the United States' and Soviet militaries. Rhodes discusses the post-war split within the scientific community over whether to develop a hydrogen "Super" bomb, whether to share information relating to it with the Soviet Union, and the factional leveraging of security privileges and political favor to exclude those from research who did not take a sufficiently hard stand against cooperation with the USSR.

Dark Sun details bomb physics and the minutia of the testing program in just enough detail to remain compelling and accessible. Rhodes also does his best to humanize Soviet scientific personnel such as Igor Kurchatov, the father of the Soviet bomb, and the strained relationship they shared with their political patrons, such as the Darth Vader-esque Lavrenti Beria.

I hope this answers your question, and I hope that you enjoy these books as much as I did!

> 4) Area 51. I suspect the truth is pretty mundane, but it'd be neat to see what projects they work on there. Maybe, just maybe, there's a group of giant space cockroaches there that shoot the shit around the coffee station.
>

https://www.amazon.com/Area-51-Uncensored-Americas-Military/dp/0316202304

That book is a pretty good read about Area 51. Essentially an Air Force (military) and CIA (civilian) aeronautics research facility. Doing research and operations that are extremely sensitive. Also reverse engineering and studying foreign aircraft like MiG and Chinese warplanes. Specifically the U2, F117, A12/SR71, and drone reconnaissance aircraft (before anyone even knew what a drone was) development.

It was/is also used to study effects of using nuclear weapons. Specifically contamination effects and how long it would take to clean up a nuked city (they did this by setting off nukes to contaminate the desert and see how much dirt they had to dig out to make it safe again). I believe the defense contractor EG&G handled most of the nuclear research at Groom Lake.

War Room is a great book that gives insight to how teams are built, prepare for the draft, and gives background on the 1995 Browns Staff that ended up having like 3 GMs and 7 head coaches

I'm at work right now, but will add some more as I think of them.

Edit: There's also "The GM" which gives insight about being a GM, the decisions made, and again building a team. It's centered around Ernie Accorsi who was the GM of the Giants, and one of the more respected GMs in football history.

And of course, everything you are looking for can be found in The Winning Edge by Bill Walsh. Literally covers everything from top to bottom on how to run/build a football team. But it is super expensive. If you can find the means, I highly suggest it.

These should be the top recommendations hands down, both of these books were designed with your specific goal in mind:

A People's History of America - This focuses on history of the US from the perspective of the everyman rather than the 'big man' side of history where every politician is a gentle statesman. It shows just how barbaric and ghoulish those in charge often are.

Lies My Teacher Told Me. - Similar to the last one, this one shows how modern history loves to pretend all sorts of shit did not happen or ignore anything that's even slightly discomforting, like the idea that Henry Ford literally inspired Hitler, both in a model industry and anti-semitism.

These are both relatively easy reads with lots of praise.

Adam Curtis docs are always good, I recommend starting with one called "Black Power" which answers the question "What happens to African countries when they try to play ball with the west?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I haven't read any Dawkins, but Daniel Okrent did a great job with Last Call. (I'm also a huge Dubner/Freakonomics fan.) I'm always very hesitant about authors reading their own work, and I'm pleasantly surprised when it great.

Six Frigates

It’s about the early years of the US Navy’s first Frigates. A really great read, especially if you enjoy American or Naval history. It manages to hit that perfect balance of delving deep into subjects like ship building while still being very entertaining. Plus the audiobook is narrated by Stephen Lang, who played General Longstreet in Gettysburg and the scar dude in Avatar.

Haha - my girlfriend keeps telling me to start a YouTube channel. Personally, I think she just wants me to rant around the house less lol. But I've been thinking about putting something together - the lovely response from Redditors when I post comments like this make me think it might have a chance to be a successful way of getting the message out.

But if you're interested in reading about this stuff here are a few books by the people with real talent who did all the investigative legwork that I'm just repeating:

Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right https://www.amazon.com/dp/0307947904/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_i_V2.xDbT0G7T9Q

Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right's Stealth Plan for America https://www.amazon.com/dp/1101980966/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_i_23.xDbQ9EHJR5

Unfortunately, I don't think it can be said with full context. But I'll try. You can get what the book is about here:
https://www.amazon.com/Dark-Money-History-Billionaires-Radical/dp/0307947904/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1506716249&sr=8-1&keywords=dark+money

Basically, the trust fund kids (koch brothers and other billionaires) are creating/funding think tanks that focuses on whatever means to add to their bottom line. They are willing to skewer education in the way that teaches limited government is good for business. However, when the bailout idea came, they gladly took it. So they're not really taking on any ideological side, but whatever is easy for them to gain more money.

The reason for this is because the Koch brothers were brought up in a very militaristic style parenting by their father.. who teaches you must do whatever means to win. They were pitted against each other in fights, games, etc. so they carry that determination in business as well, and it's causing harm in our political system and society because they have so much control of wealth and thus influence.


There's a lot more to this obviously, the book is really a must read.

/u/LeeroyJenkins- has a good start in his post.

I would add Boys of Summer by Roger Kahn and Pull up a Chair The Vin Scully Story.
Not Dodger specific but Watching Baseball Smarter is also very good. It will help you appreciate the game you watch that much more.

The Baseball documentary by Ken Burns (as mentioned by /u/LeeroyJenkins-) is a must watch. It is long, around 20 hours including the 10th inning follow up, but it is well worth it. Available streaming on Amazon and Netflix.

If you took away my baseball, you might as well take away my air, water, and food. I live, breathe, and eat the game... so much so I work part time for one of the clubs!

A favorite non-fiction book is Crazy '08 about the 1908 season if you like the history of the game.
Also Summer of '49, The Boys of Summer, The Glory of Their Times, and Eight Men Out

For fiction... you MUST read Shoeless Joe. The Natural, For Love of the Game, and Bang the Drum Slowly aren't bad either... I'm sure you've seen all the movies too.

Well, Hemmingway wrote of a "lost generation," in 1926, but it was more of a poetic term and no one of that group would have called themselves/their cohorts that.

Likewise, Kerouac referred to a Beat Generation, but that never caught on and was really just a subculture, rather than a description of an entire generation.

The "Silent Generation" was first used in a Time magazine article in 1951, but again it was more poetic/metaphorical/descriptive term rather than a nominative. There was a book in the 80's called "Generations" that used the Silent Generation name to describe that group, but again, the actual people in that group would mostly never have referred to themselves that way and it wasn't really a "thing" until people started delineating the generations. Plus this name, like Gen Y, is a reactionary name to the Greatest and the Boomers, so it's more of a default than anything else.

Similarly, "While evidence exists for greatest generation being used to refer to these men and women during the Second World War, Greatest Generation as a moniker was more or less coined by journalist Tom Brokaw in his 1998 book The Greatest Generation. This generation is also sometimes known as the G.I. Generation.

If you ask the Patriots who their gunner is, they will tell you that it's Matthew Slater.

If you ask the Patriots who their General Manager is, they will tell you that the position doesn't exist.

This is not semantics, either. The position has never existed under Robert Kraft's ownership. Most of the people on this subreddit were not alive the last time the Patriots had a General Manager.

When Kraft assumed ownership of the New England Patriots, he inherited Bill Parcells as his head coach. Parcells had been hired by the previous owner, James B. Orthwein, and had essentially been given full control over player personnel.

Over time, Kraft did not feel like Parcells accepted enough of his input in player personnel decisions. This came to a head in the 1996 NFL Draft, when Parcells wanted to draft defensive end Tony Brackens with the 7th overall pick, but Kraft overruled him and selected WR Terry Glenn instead. Parcells resigned from the Patriots after the 1996 season, and took over as HC of the NYJ.

His experience with Parcells led Kraft to believe that coaching and personnel should be separated, and as a result, his next head coach, Pete Carroll, was given no authority over personnel decisions. When this arrangement failed spectacularly, Kraft had to revise his thoughts about separating coaching and personnel, and agreed to give new head coach Bill Belichick broad authority over personnel decisions, provided that Kraft himself would be included in discussions.

Thus, the duties traditionally carried out by a General Manager are handled by a group of individuals working together, which include Kraft, Belichick, and some lesser-known people like Nick Caserio and Monti Ossenfort. Kraft believes that this is the best way to run the front office, and that's how Belichick wants it to be run anyway. The reason why Thomas Dimitroff and Scott Pioli have been successful in their GM jobs in Atlanta and Kansas City is due, I think, in no small part to their expanded duties as part of the Patriots front office.

Source: War Room: The Legacy of Bill Belichick and the Art of Building the Perfect Team by Michael S. Holley

Bottom of the 33rd was a very well written look at both the longest game in history as well as the players, ballpark staff, and fans in attendance. It puts the game in perspective.

If you're more into fiction and don't mind diving into a book written for Young Adults Summerland is a very enjoyable read. But it sounds like you would like more baseball in the book.

The Boys of Summer has a great blend of baseball and real life, talking about baseball in the 1930s and 40s and the hearts that broke when the Dodgers (and Giants) moved from New York to California.

Seriously, read this book.

Or the wiki version

"Hero generations are born after an Awakening, during an Unraveling, a time of individual pragmatism, self-reliance, and laissez faire. Heroes grow up as increasingly protected post-Awakening children, come of age as team-oriented young optimists during a Crisis, emerge as energetic, overly-confident midlifers, and age into politically powerful elders attacked by another Awakening.[44]
Due to their location in history, such generations tend to be remembered for their collective military triumphs in young adulthood and their political achievements as elders. Their main societal contributions are in the area of community, affluence, and technology. Their best-known historical leaders include Cotton Mather, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan. These have been vigorous and rational institution builders. In midlife, all have been aggressive advocates of economic prosperity and public optimism, and all have maintained a reputation for civic energy and competence in old age. (Examples among today’s living generations: G.I. Generation and the Millennials.)[45]"

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

All the Shah's Men is a great book about American interventions in Iran and it's aftermath(s).
https://www.amazon.com/All-Shahs-Men-American-Middle/dp/047018549X

Charlie Wilson's War (the book) is the amazing tale about how US got involved in Afghanistan. very well researched and fun to read. https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_2?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=charlie+wilson%27s+war

There is a free lecture course given by a Stanford professor "History of the International System" if he'd prefer to listen. free on iTunes, and i'd imagine elsewhere https://itunes.apple.com/us/itunes-u/history-of-the-international-system/id384240428?mt=10

Hm, I'm currently reading a history of artificial light, so maybe I'll eventually get around to 1493, but feel like it would be a let down after 1491, and I'm not sure I want to stay on the same topic. I also want to read "The history of white people," whose topic is probably relevant to this thread, but I haven't read it yet. Thanks for your explanation on your issues with Diamond's book. Very to-the-point explanation. My family is 2 social science professor parents, and I've got just 2 more years in my PhD, so it's a very interesting topic to me, and I appreciate your expertise.

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

I have, actually. You might try a couple books I've found to be very helpful in that regard.

Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong

A People's History of the United States

I'm only halfway through the second one, but there's really nothing quite like reading history through the words of everyday people like you and me. Rather than the heroic narrative that glorifies and omits based upon the preferred narrative of the writer.

This book is a great beginner's guide to Marx, very easy to understand and has all of the basics.

A People's History of the United States by Howard Zinn is also a great socialist history of the US and includes some anecdotes about radical religious figures.

I would also point him towards anything by Father Dan Berrigan.

Being a person who has taught many university geology courses, I would say that in general geology textbooks are really boring (in my opinion). I think there are some good non-fiction books our there about geology that may be more interesting. Some suggestions:

1. If you live in the US, see if there is a "Roadside Geology of <your state>" book. These books are pretty good, and relevant to where you live.
   
   
2. "Thin Ice" by Bowen, all about climate and ice cores. Lots of good climbing stories.
   
   
3. Books by people like John McPhee, such as "The Control of Nature"
   

If anyone wants to read a really good book about these trees and the people who study them, I recommend The Wild Trees by Richard Preston. Among other really awesome interesting things, it talks about the discovery and exploration of the two trees mentioned in the article.

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

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

I learned more about US history from the books below than anything I learned from my high school teachers. I did have some good college professors - but they are the ones who recommended these books. Also, "Untold History of The United States" documentary by Oliver Stone on Netflix. If you like dry stuff any Ken Burns documentary.

Lies My Teach Told Me

People's History of the United States

Not sure what all the hate is about but I have a degree in Gender Studies and don't regret my education.

I recently finished Girls Like Us which is about sex trafficking and sexual exploitations of minors and learned a lot. It's also an engrossing read, which is always nice. I also recommend When Everything Changed and A People's History of the United States if you haven't read it before.

Fellow patriot. If you would like to get a freedom boner to end all freedom boners the you need to read Six Frigates: The Epic History of the Founding of the U.S. Navy. You will learn about the Constitution but also the other 5 Frigates that were constructed at the same time: The Constellation, The Chesapeake, The President, The United States and The Congress. It is one of my favorite books.

The Doomsday Book by Connie Willis. I'm a fan of time-travel, and history, and I was completely sucked into it. She's got a number of books in the same universe- some comedic, some very dramatic, but The Doomsday Book is my favourite.

If you're at all interested in high fantasy, I'd recommend either Tigana or The Fionovar Tapestry by Guy Gavriel Kay. You either love his prose style or hate it, but if you love it, it will definitely take you away.

If you like SF and haven't read them, I'd try either Dan Simmons' Hyperion Cantos, or David Brin's Uplift Series (I'd skip Sundiver until later, and start with Startide Rising.)

If you're looking for more light-hearted/quirky, I'd try Christopher Moore- either Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal , or The Stupidest Angel: A Heartwarming Tale of Christmas Terror. If you're into a mix of horror/sf/comedy, try John Dies at the End. They're not deep, but they're fun.

Non-fiction- if you haven't read it yet, Jon Krakauer's Into Thin Air is very difficult to put down. If you're travelling with someone who doesn't mind you looking up every few pages and saying "did you know this, this is awesome, wow-how interesting", I'd go for Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition by Daniel Okrent, The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair that Changed America, Rats: Observations on the History and Habitat of the City's Most Unwanted Inhabitants or Bill Bryson's At Home: A Short History of Private Life. They're all very informative, fun, interesting books, but they're even better if you can share them while you're reading them.

I'm sure how far back you want to start, but if you want to get into our ancient ancestors, I'd start with Before the Dawn. Follow that up with Cro-Magnon for a decent overview of the first modern human migrations into Europe. There is some overlap with After the Ice-Age, but the latter is a great resource describing the first transitions into agriculture.

The History of the Ancient World would be a good follow up; it's breadth is quite broad, starting with the ancient Sumerians and taking you up to the fall of the Roman Empire, but it's broken into small, readable chunks.

Hopefully this helps to get you started!

For anyone interested to learn more than this wikipedia article about Iran. I recommend All the Shah's Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror. It is an excellent book that talks about how exactly the coup happened (In detail) and some of the leadup to the 1979 Revolution. (Also great in Audiobook form!)

I wrote about this over on that other site that shall remain nameless and got a few comments, but also some not-so-good ones. Perhaps the community here might be more understanding and less critical, because this makes perfect sense to me.

Strauss & Howe co-authored a book published in 1997 entitled The Fourth Turning that I could not put down. While researching another topic, they discovered something odd, so they switched gears and researched in depth. They discovered that truly, history repeats itself, with quite distinctive and repeating patterns, going all the way back to the 1100s.

Their premise is simple. Each "turning" is comprised of approximately four 20-year periods similar to regular seasons of spring, summer, fall and winter. Each period lasts the time an average person is born till when we start having children. Four of these equal 80 years, an average lifespan.

The best way to envision this is to put yourself in the shoes of a person born in London England around 1904. Speaking in general, Zeitgeist terms, what would their life experiences be? That period was one of great technological advancement. Trains had been around for quite a while. Automobiles were new and were gaining in popularity. Next, what would be the life experiences of someone born in London in 1924? This time became known as "The roaring twenties" due to industrialization.

Lastly, what was the experience of a Londoner born in 1944? Starkly different. And to finish, envision the life experiences of 1964 London.

Strauss & Howe found the same repeating pattern over and over and over again, all the way back to the Dark Ages. The "turning" prior to and analogous to WWII included the Civil War. The one before that included the Revolutionary War. See where I'm going with this?

Each period corresponds to a season. "Spring" for us during this turning was just after WWII where we all rebuilt and put things back together. "Summer" was in the 1960s and everyone here knows what that was like. "Fall" was the 1980s. This is a period where things reach a zenith and begin to show signs of dying, just as during a regular fall the weather turns colder and trees lose their leaves. And then there's "Winter".

Guess where we are today?

Those born during each season also exhibit repeating patterns. We Boomers were born to buck the system, to challenge the conventionality of society, and that we did. The authors gave our archetype the name of "Patriots". Our job during the winter cycle is to help the "hero" generation, our present-day millennials.

And here is where I get to the reason for this long post. We are in this turning's "Crisis" period, which will end in approximately 2020 to 2025. Just as WWII's Dough Boys fought in the trenches during the last Crisis period, it will be the Millennials this time fighting the great fight. They will need our help, fellow Boomers. That's our job. We offer direction, but they are the one's who get it done.

And this makes me so proud and gives me hope. They are almost speaking in one voice: Enough of the madness, we want progressive policies. They are the ones who are to change the world. So your initial post is spot-on in that our systems and structures are becoming more and more dysfunctional, which will worsen until there's a single event, a tipping point if you will, that will bring everyone together. We have not reached the tipping point yet, but we can all feel and see it coming.

I just hope this time around we don't have a WWIII.

Excellent book is The Great Influenza, but reading it will really freak you out. The main theme is that medical care was actually BETTER in the early 20th century because they weren't so reliant on antibiotics.

If this particular virus hit today, we would likely see greater morbidity/mortality.

Doctors used to have to make house calls because there were no doctors' offices. There were some hospitals or convalescence homes, but they were run by charities or clergy and were places where you were given comfort rather than actual treatment.

Their profession was a very low-status one, and house calls reflected that. Doctors had to drive long distances to treat people, were paid very little, and had low status because they were largely ineffective. It wasn't until the start of the 20th century -- with the advent of clean water, antibiotics, and cleaner surgeries -- that doctors had more status, a union of professional peers (the AMA), and offices or hospitals to work with.

Source:http://www.amazon.com/The-Social-Transformation-American-Medicine/dp/0465079350

Do you think you've managed to do any of what you just outlined - at /r/femradebates more than here i guess, or whever else you might post.

> I mean interrogating the concepts/perspectives we have in terms of their assumptions

It seems like first of all you have to see if the concepts exist and what they are. At any rate I don't see much difference between what you say you are doing and what you say he's doing. It seems to me that in order to get at a common denominator, you will also be looking at differences. Those two things are not in conflict at all.

For example if you wanted to do something similar with religion, to get away from an amorphous sort of "all religions are the same " (at least the one I know about is), then you'd need to find commonality and difference. so something like this would be useful:

http://www.amazon.com/God-Is-Not-One-Religions/dp/0061571288

Once you've done that then you have a better chance to ask if the differences are significant or not, whether the different groups are essentially all the same thing with a few little trivial changes here and there or whether the common denominator as a concept shrinks upon close inspection of the different groups.

But I don't see you doing anything like this.

Not really, but you should read a book by Annie Jacobsen's about area 51 it gives a good overview on the subject. Some of her other books are also very good and 100% good journalism.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0316202304/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_hsch_vapi_taft_p1_i2

Edit: She was also recently on JRE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5VoVIpIzj_c&t=9s

Old dead classical dudes are always good. I ransack Epicurus and Marcus Aurelius for good ideas and advice fairly regularly. There are some excellent secular philosophers and thinkers out there. I enjoy Sam Harris' work the most. One of my favorite reference books is The Portable Atheist, which is a collection of secular philosophers, edited by Hitchens.

To get a sense of your place in the universe, try to find an old full-color hardback copy of Cosmos.^1 For your place in the Human story, Guns, Germs, and Steel, and your place in the American story with A People's History.


[1] As a minor biographical note, I credit this version of Cosmos for getting me through horrible angsty teenager time.

Edit: Also, good question.

Health doesn't function like a normal market good for several reasons. The most important, though, is that people do not assess healthcare like they do other commodities. You don't decide whether or not to get an operation or procedure (even an elective one) in the same way that you assess whether or not to buy a new cell phone or graphics card. That's why Martin Shkreli, for instance, can jack the price of a drug several thousand percent.

This has come out in history multiple times. My favorite is the Hill-Burton Act. That's a link to a wikipedia article but I like Paul Starr's account. Basically, they tried to drive down medical costs by expanding hospitals and increasing the numbers of doctors. More players in the market should increase supply relative to demand and drive down prices. The problem is that they failed to realize that doctors can actually drive demand. They can prescribe tests, drugs, and offer services that may only be marginally beneficial. As a patient, you're going to play it safe and do what your doctor says. This legislation actually wound up increasing the cost of medical care.

tl;dr: medical services do not function like other commodities in a market.

Edit: Here's another, and more recent article, by Atul Gawande.

Not been too many great replies here. I have the perfect book for you. Susan Wise Bauer's History of the Ancient World. It takes you from the dawn of history (~3,000BC) to Constantine, and is a really easy read, in fact it reads almost like fiction. A real pleasure. She also has two more, taking you up to 1453, but you can decide if you want them after you have read the first one.

I'm also going to suggets Francis Fukuyama's Origins of Political Order. This was the book that made me realise I didn't understand history or politics (most people go through life without ever realising this). Its also a history book, but focusing on the theme of the origins of our political institutions. A real good one. BTW ignore the boring cover that makes it look like a dry academic read; it isn't.

Thanks, interesting. I know you have probably read it (or maybe you're in it) but there is a great book called The Wild Trees that you might like.

https://www.amazon.com/Wild-Trees-Story-Passion-Daring/dp/0812975596

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

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

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

The book list just keeps growing in so many different directions that it's hard to identify which I want to tackle next (I also have a tendency to take meticulous notes while I read and that slows the process down even further!). Some of the topics I intend to read about once I'm done with the books mentioned:

• God: A Human History
  
• Why We Believe in God(s): A Concise Guide to the Science of Faith
  
• The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: A New History of a Lost World
  
• The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck
  
• Occult America
  
• When Prophecy Fails
  
• Astrophysics for People in a Hurry
  
• Cosmos
  
• Norse Mythology
  
• Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water
  
• Guns, Germs, and Steel
  
• Misquoting Jesus
  
• On Bullshit
  
• The Skeptics' Guide to the Universe
  
• Why People Believe Weird Things
  
  Plus a bunch of books by Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, Carl Sagan, and others. There are way too many. And all the fiction books I want to read too! It's not that I didn't read books before, but my faith transition has sparked an intense desire to study and learn far greater than I ever experienced before.

A few points in favor of Dale and Holley.

1. They just added a 3rd man and IMO the best patriots blogger out there, Jerry Thornton. Thornography
   
2. Michael Holley wrote this great book on the patriots rise to dominance. War Room: The Legacy of Bill Belichick and the Art of Building the Perfect Team

I actually came in this thread to recommend that book. I shouldn't be too surprised that WSPer /u/irishjihad beat me to the punch.

Richard Preston is a fantastic nonfiction author. I've liked all his books, from the Hale telescope in First Light to enormous redwoods in The Wild Trees, and of course what's probably his biggest commercial success, The Hot Zone.

Anything by or editied by Craig Elevitch - he's Hawai'i based, so focuses mostly on tropical and subtropical trees, but the insights are valuable to anyone studying agroforestry.

i highly recommend The Overstory Book, which is collection of scientific articles on tree crops, including nutrient cycling, NFT's, intercropping etc etc etc.

not related to permaculture per se, but The Wild Trees is about folks exploring and studying the world's largest trees. very engaging and readable.

polio was a good one. And The Great Influenza , while not specifically about vaccines has some vaccine info and is really good history as well.

Anybody interested in the prohibition should read Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition which has a lot of fun facts like this one, along with some excellent information regarding the political machine that allowed a very vocal minority to get this kind of legislation passed.

I actually really liked Susan Wise Bauer's The History of the Ancient World: From the Earliest Accounts to the Fall of Rome. It's kind of a slow read, but I enjoyed it, learned a lot, and am eagerly awaiting the next volume.

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

If this interests you I would highly recommend reading The Great Influenza. It is very readable and gives some great perspective on modern medicine.

If you want to read a truly excellent book on the subject of Prohibition, you will immediately buy Last Call by Daniel Okrent.
He goes into detail about this issue and a lot of others. I don't have it in front of me or I would find a citation. One thing I liked about the book was that he goes all the way back to the first stirrings of the prohibition movement way back in the mid to late 1800s. I can't recommend this book enough if you're interested in the subject.

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

Your arguments are so rampant with slippery slopes its effectively pointless to talk to you. Read the book above, how fucking naive do you have to be to consider things like Super PACs, Citizens United, lobbyists, etc. to consider it a "theory". You are clearly beside yourself, and I'm sorry you can't have a level headed discussion without hitting every emotional branch on the way down.

The best part is is that I've never advocated for not voting, an implication you are desperately clinging to.

actually, gen theory is super interesting regarding trends.

pragmatic vs idealistic

introverted vs extroverted

like gen x is introverted pragmatic and millennial predicted to be extroverted pragmatic. they don't rebel against the pragmatism vs idealism axis... they rebel against gen x introversion and lack of political involvement... which itself was a rebellion against boomer extroverted idealism.

generations book (origin of gen theory) doesn't use those terms, but the template is there... I just used more abstract terminology. I would really recommend the book before being so dismissive about the irrelevance of generations. it's a difficult and long read, but fascinating.

generations by strauss & howe (amazon link)

edit: they coined the term millennials

First, you should read this book (talks about some of the people who developed big tree climbing techniques... and it's also a nice read): http://www.amazon.com/The-Wild-Trees-Passion-Daring/dp/0812975596

Climbing large trees of course can be dangerous and it is not recommended to do so without proper instruction (there's a variety of organizations if you're truly interested http://www.gotreeclimbing.org/?gclid=CJKJr6XxwrgCFckWMgodUCEAug)

Really what you need to climb most trees includes:

• Tree saddle
  
• Static rope
  
• Smaller diameter cordage for friction knots
  
• carabiners
  
• throwline and weight
  
• Branch protection so you do not harm the tree.
  
  
  The generalized process to do this as simply as possible (without just shimmying up the tree):
  First get your throwline (string tied to a weight) over a very strong lower branch. Tie your static line to the throwline and pull over the branch. Then you tie yourself into the static line using a friction knot and you can then work your way up the tree using what is known as doubled rope technique.
  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m1RSzKkBOWc
  
  Again, this really isn't recommended unless you have some proper experienced guidance. It's really not that difficult once you get the basic mechanics down and then you can climb pretty much any tree. Do some reading.

I love reading about disease!


The Demon in the Freezer and The Hot Zone are fictionalized accounts of real events, and very good reads. The Hot Zone is about Ebola, and The Demon in the Freezer is about anthrax and small pox.


A fantastic historical account of the 1918 flu, and how it changed the United States is The Great Influenza. This is a nonfiction book that mostly discusses the reaction to the flu on a national level, and also by the scientific community.

> there's been surprisingly little generation-level analysis since the gen x stuff faded away.

This guy builds a case that Generation Y represents a sharp contrast to the boomers. He says the psychological profile strongly suggests a throwback to the values of the WWII generation.

This guy also has a lot to say about Generation Y.

> I don't think the generation y label ever really caught on.

It's definitely a real phenomenon and used in marketing circles, at least. It certainly exists as a demographic artifact; it's the generational echo of the boomers.

Not a great example, as the most dramatic and obvious changes to the flu virus occurs via a process known as genetic shift which has no correlate in mammals.

In laymen's terms, two viral strains possessing different types of neuraminidase and hemagglutinin surface proteins (e.g. H5N1) can simultaneously infect a single host and exchange genetic elements and rapidly and radically alter their surface proteins in a single cell cycle. This is especially dangerous when humans become co-infected with avian- or swine-predominant strains of influenza, to which the population has little acquired immunity. The danger in such cases is mostly to the young, who possess robust immune systems capable of mounting very strong responses to previously unseen antigens.

If you're interested in learning more, The Great Influenza is a wonderful place to start reading.

Finally, take this piece of advice from someone older (though not necessarily wiser): unless you're a high school science teacher, debating evolution with people is a waste. Barring exceptionally poor school systems or upbringings, most doubting the existence of biological change in response to selective pressure lack the curiosity, reading ability, and/or motivation to educate themselves. Your intervention is unlikely to change this. If you're really interested in helping, read voraciously yourself and recommend a beginners' reading list to those interested in better understanding the world. To the others, a big toothy smile and "yeah, bro" will considerably reduce your blood pressure.

Great picture! If you are interested in Constitution and her sisters, I highly recommend the book "Six Frigates".

No - one of the ironies of modern medicine is that hand hygiene and isolation of infected patients was probably better in 1918 than it is now. Modern doctors have come to rely on rescue meds/equipment/antibiotics that their counterparts did not have back then. But 1880-1920 was the first golden age of evidence-based medicine, and doctors then knew very well what was killing their patients.

A truly excellent book if you're interested is The Great Influenza by John Berry.

Control of Nature by John McPhee has a great chapter on that project specifically as well as all of the levees and other river control schemes that take place on the Mississippi. It is a fascinating read.

He openly praised Jim Crow, too. He actually regarded America quite highly for that reason.

Edit: A great book to read is "The History of White People" by Nell Irvin Painter. An exhaustively researched examination of race attitudes from Roman times til today, and adds a lot of valuable context to what we're seeing now.

If you are interested in reading more on this subject, you absolutely have to check this book out The Social Transformation of American Medicine: The rise of a sovereign profession and the making of a vast industry It won the Pulitzer Prize in 1983 and describes the evolution of our healthcare industry over the past 200 years.

There is a great book I read a few years back about the search and discovery of these massive trees. It's called The Wild Trees. Highly recommend it if anyone is interested in a personal/detailed account of the history of the discovery of these.

Are you asking a question, or making a statement? Would you like to define what you mean by "other stuff"?




If you want to know where I derived the ideas that I formed my comment from. It was mainly from reading these three books -




Security Analysis, 6th edition, by Graham & Dodd




The Intelligent Investor, by Graham




A People's History of the United States, by Zinn

There's an informative book titled All the Shah's Men that tells the story. It's been a while since I read it, but it was very engaging and well written. It is slanted towards the American involvement, but discusses in some detail Britain's coercion of the U.S. to join resources.

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

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

I'm not an expert on religion. This is the best book I've found about how to view the religious aspects of the world. Just reading a good summary of the book would be good, but I have yet to find a good one online.

She was built after the revolution.

If you're interested, here's a good book about her.

This one is very good also.

I really want one of those pens now.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qh7rdCYCQ_U

Poslusaj video ukoliko imas vremena.

Svi izvori upotrebljeni u ovom videu:

The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon
http://www.amazon.com/dp/0307700763/?tag=freedradio-20



Ancient Rome: The Rise and Fall of An Empire by Simon Baker
http://www.amazon.com/dp/1846072840/?tag=freedradio-20


The History of the Ancient World: From the Earliest Accounts to the Fall of Rome by Susan Wise Bauer
http://www.amazon.com/dp/039305974X/?tag=freedradio-20


The Rise of Rome: The Making of the World's Greatest Empire by Anthony Everitt
http://www.amazon.com/dp/0812978153/?tag=freedradio-20


A History of Ancient Rome by Mary Beard
http://www.amazon.com/dp/0871404230/?tag=freedradio-20


Rubicon: The Last Years of the Roman Republic by Tom Holland
http://www.amazon.com/dp/1400078970/?tag=freedradio-20


The Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History of Rome and the Barbarians
http://www.amazon.com/dp/0195325419/?tag=freedradio-20


The Twilight of American Culture by Morris Berman
http://www.amazon.com/dp/039332169X/?tag=freedradio-20


The Fate Of Empires by Sir John Glubb
http://people.uncw.edu/kozloffm/glubb.pdf

Hmm. Interesting. We've only ever heard Bill speak off the cuff. Why is he doing this? Is he a military history buff? I would guess that his management style is somewhat influenced by military culture. I'm reading War Room: The Legacy of Bill Belichick and the Art of Building the Perfect Team right now and I can see a lot of similarities between Belichick's leadership/organizational style and the time I spent in the military.


I mean, if Bill wants me to come play, you know... I'll show up on time for team meetings n' stuff.

You are wrong about your history. There was a purely bible thumping aspect to prohibition, but the much larger basis for its support was the progressive movement. And there was a great deal more overlap between nativists, evangelical protestants, and Progressives than you seem to believe. Progressivism was and is very much based in America's puritanical tradition. You should read about things before you talk about them.

Overthrowing Mossadegh was one of the greatest mistakes America ever made. This is an excellent book on the subject if you're interested.

The Boys of Summer is a great book about the 1955 Brooklyn Dodgers.

This is an outstanding Lou Gehrig biography.

I don't know enough to answer your question, but there's a book on my to-read list that I thought you might be interested in, called A History of White People. Written by a highly respected (black) historian, it traces the development of modern concepts of race.

There is a big difference between "hoping for a collapse" and being prepared for "unexpected massive world change."

I've studied a lot of history in my lifetime, and this is what scares me the most:
>"That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons of history." -
Aldous Huxley

I am in my early sixties. I have always been interested in history, learned much of it, and have lived through the history made since WWII. Literally, a lifetime ago.

As I have watched world events over my lifetime, I have felt that something was coming, something was changing, something "new" or unplanned for or expected was due to occur.

In 1997, Straus & Howe came up with this theory of how history repeats in roughly 80 year cycles. This work galvanized what I had learned in decades of study and thought. It just made so much sense.

Zero Hedge did a four part series about this last month that I view as prescient. I didn't post it here, firstly because most here think ZH is baloney, not a truly important alternative news source, and because it was four parts, WAY beyond the attention span of most readers here.

In this article, I find to my amazement that my feelings, my conclusions, my anticipations were shared by others, and that what I was "part of" had happened repeatedly, so it seems that perhaps whatever "event" is coming is an inevitable cycle of history. A cycle that lasts roughly 80 years.

Born in the early fifties, my life has spanned the "Spring, Summer, and Fall" of this cycle. Now the "season" has had it's "fourth turning" and tumultuous times might inevitably be at hand.

It would be foolish to ignore this possibility, as signs of the fourth turning have abounded for some years now. Since you can't exactly predict what and when, it just makes sense to try to be ready for whatever happens, knowing that something is headed done the pike in your direction.

Check out All the Shah's Men by Stephen Kinzer.
It's an easy and compelling read which ought to raise many questions and spur further curiosity on the subject. If you get through that, try giving this gem a go. It's an easy read that give a sweeping overview of religious developments through the region. Many debatable points made by the author, but an easy starting point to branch out from.

I don't rant much on the topic. Generally the ranting people are oversimplifying matters and attempting to reconcile their personal bias with reality. Be attentive of the people willing to step back and question what they think they know about this diverse region.

"Surprising Op-ed"??


"Singing a new tune"?!?!


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

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

"Dark Money" should be required reading for everyone.

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

Or listen to the audiobook free here:

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

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

This book made the interesting point that a lot of Oxcart (early SR-71) test planes didn't have black paint but were silver. Flying a lot higher than commercial flights, the recently-set sun would still be shining on them, and could have made them look like bright flying saucers going at then-unheard of speeds.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0316202304?pc_redir=1409111139&robot_redir=1

Passage from the War Room where Bill Belichick discusses with Atlanta GM Thomas Dimitroff about trading up to get Julio Jones:

>"Thomas, I'm just telling you as a friend," Belichick says, "I wouldn't do it."
>When Belichick began studying the 2011 draft, he saw great depth at the receiver position. Why go all-out for someone like Jones when you can have a Jonathan Baldwin, who as far as, Belichick can see, is just as good if not better than Jones?

I have not read this (yet) but it comes highly recommended from people I trust. The author was also one of the main contributors for Ken Burns' Prohibition.

https://www.amazon.com/Last-Call-Rise-Fall-Prohibition/dp/074327704X

Books that touch on Prohibition but don't focus on it that I have read:

https://www.amazon.com/Drinking-America-Our-Secret-History/dp/B016MXGYPI/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1499305189&sr=1-1&keywords=drinking+in+america+our+secret+history

https://www.amazon.com/Whiskey-Women-Untold-Bourbon-Scotch/dp/B01B3H8960/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1499305231&sr=1-1&keywords=women+in+whiskey

I have just started this, and I expect a good portion to talk about Speakeasies and Blind Pigs:

https://www.amazon.com/America-Walks-into-Bar-Speakeasies/dp/B00PCQITW8/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1499305375&sr=1-1&keywords=america+walks+in+a+bar

Have you read John Barry's book about the 1918 influenza? I love it so much. I love reading about diseases! I know too much about the bubonic plague for my own good.

For anyone thinking "What? I thought Area 51 was for aliens!" I would encourage you to read Area 51: An Uncensored History of America's Top Secret Military Base by Annie Jacobsen. Really interesting book that explores aerial reconnaissance and nuclear arms development post-WWII.

For anyone interested in inter-generational dynamics and how they have played out in the history of this country I seriously recommend The Fourth Turning. It was written in 1997 and becomes more relevant everyday.

I've read some good ones. I'll try to list all that I can remember from when I was getting my history degree and ones I've read for fun. I read the Iliad, odyssey, Thucydides, Herodotus. I read a lot of those guys. Unfortunately I don't have very many of my books and I can't remember all the titles. But, I do work in a library and have seen some good ones. Here are some links to some:
https://www.amazon.com/Wonders-Ancient-World-Metro-Books/dp/1435129660/ref=sr_1_18?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1495553357&sr=1-18&keywords=Wonders+of+the+ancient+world
https://www.amazon.com/History-Ancient-World-Earliest-Accounts/dp/039305974X/ref=sr_1_27?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1495553171&sr=1-27&keywords=Ancient+Greece
https://www.amazon.com/Rise-Athens-Worlds-Greatest-Civilization/dp/0812994582/ref=zg_bs_4880_22?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=C0JCVQDM2MA8DDZ43TYV
https://www.amazon.com/SPQR-History-Ancient-Mary-Beard/dp/1631492225/ref=pd_sim_14_33?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_i=1631492225&pd_rd_r=0HRJM2DS4HWZMWWQXP8B&pd_rd_w=OTprV&pd_rd_wg=vT33O&psc=1&refRID=0HRJM2DS4HWZMWWQXP8B
https://www.amazon.com/National-Geographic-Greeks-Illustrated-History/dp/142621670X/ref=zg_bs_4880_43?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=RXBQK8K2K31NX6BE98ME

If you ever wanted to read about the interesting history of the creation of the SR-71, check out this book [Area 51] (http://www.amazon.com/Area-51-Uncensored-Americas-Military/dp/0316202304)

The last chapter or so of this book jumps the tracks and goes off on some crazy conspiracy theories but the first part on the history of the U-2 and SR-71 is pretty good.

Annie Jacobsen wrote a book about area 51 from accounts of the place by people who worked there. I read it and it was really cool. As far as we know they are pretty much an R&D department with a ton of resources. But its pretty cool. If they were building Mach 3 airplanes in the 1970s (60s, 80s? Im not sure sometime around then), then imagine what they are building today. Super giant killer robot of death? I vote yes
http://www.amazon.com/Area-51-Uncensored-Americas-Military/dp/0316202304

it can't be both?

you can't test your two different style of bombs to compare results and show an overwhelming show of force to Japan?

Do I have a linkable source or recording of somebody saying "man that one was great, let's see what the next one does"? no.

But I have read "making of the atomic bomb" by Richard Rhodes and from the information there, I myself came to the conclusion that there was a desire to test both designs.
it's a good book. I highly recommend it:
https://www.amazon.com/Making-Atomic-Bomb-25th-Anniversary/dp/1451677618

This book won't answer every question you might possibly have on the nuances between the "Abrahamic" Faiths, but it is a great introduction:

http://www.amazon.com/God-Is-Not-One-Religions/dp/0061571288/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1369104390&sr=8-1&keywords=Prothero+God+is+not+One

There's a pretty good book about this topic that I recommend to anyone hoping to read more about flu pandemic of 1918 => https://www.amazon.ca/Great-Influenza-Revised-John-Barry/dp/0143036491

The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes!

Excellent Pulitzer Prize winning history of the Manhattan program.

Oh, my. I just read a great book about Prohibition, and how involved in banning liquor the suffragettes were. Women likely wouldn't have earned the right to vote if it weren't for all their hard work in passing the 18th amendment. And if it weren't for Prohibition, most women would never have started hanging out in pubs at all, b/c it was suddenly so illicit and exciting to do it. Win-win!

Study, I dunno. I like to listen to books about nuclear science, nuclear power, weapons, accidents and the like while I'm driving. I don't do many fiction books.

While it may not be studying, learning about the world around you can help expand your mind and keep it active while you're focusing on the road. I've listened to these books a few times over by now.

Link 1
Link 2
Link 3
Link 4
Link 5
Link 6

I recommend reading The Wild Trees, by Richard Preston. Yes, it is a nonfiction book about trees (mostly Giant Redwoods), but it focuses on people searching for the tallest trees in the world and is a quite fun read.

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

Read Dark Money, buy a copy for a friend.

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

Texts and Reference Books

Days in the Lives of Social Workers

DSM-5

Child Development, Third Edition: A Practitioner's Guide

Racial and Ethnic Groups

Social Work Documentation: A Guide to Strengthening Your Case Recording

Cognitive Behavior Therapy: Basics and Beyond

[Thoughts and Feelings: Taking Control of Your Moods and Your Life]
(https://www.amazon.com/Thoughts-Feelings-Harbinger-Self-Help-Workbook/dp/1608822087/ref=pd_sim_14_3?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=3ZW7PRW5TK2PB0MDR9R3)

Interpersonal Process in Therapy: An Integrative Model

[The Clinical Assessment Workbook: Balancing Strengths and Differential Diagnosis]
(https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0534578438/ref=ox_sc_sfl_title_38?ie=UTF8&psc=1&smid=ARCO1HGQTQFT8)

Helping Abused and Traumatized Children

Essential Research Methods for Social Work

Navigating Human Service Organizations

Privilege: A Reader

Play Therapy with Children in Crisis

The Color of Hope: People of Color Mental Health Narratives

The School Counseling and School Social Work Treatment Planner

Streets of Hope : The Fall and Rise of an Urban Neighborhood

Deviant Behavior

Social Work with Older Adults

The Aging Networks: A Guide to Programs and Services

[Grief and Bereavement in Contemporary Society: Bridging Research and Practice]
(https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0415884810/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o02_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1)

Theory and Practice of Group Psychotherapy

Motivational Interviewing: Helping People Change

Ethnicity and Family Therapy

Human Behavior in the Social Environment: Perspectives on Development and the Life Course

The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work

Generalist Social Work Practice: An Empowering Approach

Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association

The Dialectical Behavior Therapy Skills Workbook

DBT Skills Manual for Adolescents

DBT Skills Manual

DBT Skills Training Handouts and Worksheets

Social Welfare: A History of the American Response to Need

Novels

[A People’s History of the United States]
(https://www.amazon.com/Peoples-History-United-States/dp/0062397346/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1511070674&sr=1-1&keywords=howard+zinn&dpID=51pps1C9%252BGL&preST=_SY291_BO1,204,203,200_QL40_&dpSrc=srch)


The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

Life For Me Ain't Been No Crystal Stair

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

Tuesdays with Morrie

The Death Class <- This one is based off of a course I took at my undergrad university

The Quiet Room

Girl, Interrupted

I Never Promised You a Rose Garden

Flowers for Algernon

Of Mice and Men

A Child Called It

Go Ask Alice

Under the Udala Trees

Prozac Nation

It's Kind of a Funny Story

The Perks of Being a Wallflower

The Yellow Wallpaper

The Bell Jar

The Outsiders

To Kill a Mockingbird

This matches up pretty perfectly with the theory in The Fourth Turning:

The Fourth Turning: An American Prophecy - What the Cycles of History Tell Us About America's Next Rendezvous with Destiny https://www.amazon.com/dp/0767900464/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_MQYwybY776C08

The Boys of Summer by Roger Kahn

It's a pretty great memoir of the 1955 Brooklyn Dodgers written by their former beat reporter.

https://www.amazon.com/Wild-Trees-Story-Passion-Daring/dp/0812975596

https://www.amazon.com/Redwood-Forest-History-Conservation-Redwoods/dp/1559637269/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?keywords=Redwood+ecology&qid=1566444550&s=gateway&sr=8-1

These two are pretty decent. I haven't read this one yet but it looks interesting as well.

https://www.amazon.com/Redwood-Logging-Conservation-Santa-Mountains/dp/0940283263

I'm pretty sure this is the same incident as OP mentions. One of the researchers believed there was a small possibility that the nuclear detonation would cause a (fusion?) chain reaction in the oxygen in the atmosphere.

It is mentioned somewhere in the book The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes. It's a really, really good book by the way, it won the Pulitzer Price. It's very thorough, they don't discover the electron until page 150 or so.

Anyway, the probability was very low, but they still checked the math. It's similar to the extra hearing they had when they started the Large Hadron Collider, because someone thought they could create a black hole that would devour the planet.

This is a really good book on the influenza pandemic

The Great Influenza

There's this book that was written in the 90's about our generation. It's called The 4th Turning. You might be interested in the theory that generational behaviors follow circadian rhythms and that we may in fact BE an echo of the Greatest Generation, or at least in the same position in the cycle. Check it out!

It's a fantastic and fascinating book. Check it out.

That doesn't sound quite right.

Prohibition movements pre-date WWI and WWII and had much more to do with religious temperance groups (specifically among Protestants and particularly among Methodists) than any anti-German sentiment. If you enjoy the subject, I highly recommend Ken Burn's Prohibition series as well as Daniel Okrent's "Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition."

Sorry that Dream is one of the Santa like stories sold to youth -- especially those of enlistment age. Columbus came for the gold and the the glory. We've been following his mighty footsteps ever since.

Sorry, knew it. Though it is certainly an obscure incident. Hopefully someone will have learned something from our exchange!

Good relevant reading material: http://amzn.com/039333032X

You might be interested in reading Area 51 by Annie Jacobsen. It goes into some really good detail about what shenanigans the Department of Energy and others were getting up to out in the desert.

Most of these are analytical:

Take your eyes of the ball by Pat Kirwan.


The Games That Changed the Game: The Evolution of the NFL in Seven Sundays by Ron Jaworski

War Room: The Legacy of Bill Belichick and the Art of Building the Perfect Team by Michael Holley


The Art of Smart Football by Chris B. Brown

Well I think I did make factual claims, but I definitely didn't justify them to a sufficient extent. Here are a couple of books which develop the only possibly contentious claim, that the U.S. and U.K. backed overthrow of Mossadegh led inexorably to the Islamic revolution:

https://www.amazon.com/Iranians-Persia-Islam-Soul-Nation/dp/0452275636

https://www.amazon.com/All-Shahs-Men-American-Middle/dp/047018549X/ref=pd_rhf_dp_s_cp_1?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_i=047018549X&pd_rd_r=5WBGQ1NQ4PDPSE4R8MQQ&pd_rd_w=fJdqr&pd_rd_wg=rOgoA&psc=1&refRID=5WBGQ1NQ4PDPSE4R8MQQ

I apologise that I can't really go into depth on this topic myself; frankly I'm not knowledgeable enough to come close to doing the argument justice, and I have simply drawn my conclusions from the existing available scholarship, such as the above.

It should be noted, however, that this is not a particularly controversial position; I'm not a historian and haven't studied history beyond the undergraduate level, or modern history at all, but as far as I'm aware there aren't many academic sources that would contradict the claim that the overthrow of Mossadegh and the subsequent perception of the Shah as a Western lapdog were significant contributing factors to the revolution of '79.

If you want to understand the history of healthcare economics in the United States, I think this is an excellent place to start:

http://www.amazon.com/Social-Transformation-American-Medicine-profession/dp/0465079350

Also for those that are interested in an in-depth look is the book All the Shah's Men. A great detailed account of these events.

Several years ago I read and was impressed by Generations: The History of America's Future, 1584 to 2069 . Although I've since come to recognize some of its flaws, I still think it's worth reading. Its science is pretty soft, though. If you're looking for hard science—such as that is in the social sciences—it probably won't scratch that itch.

God Is Not One by Stephen Prothero might be helpful. It's a book that explores the differences, rather than the similarities between some of the major rteligions in the world. You can find it at http://www.amazon.com/God-Is-Not-One-Religions/product-reviews/0061571288/ref=cm_cr_dp_qt_hist_one?ie=UTF8&filterBy=addOneStar&showViewpoints=0. Note that you can ignore most of the one and two star reviews there, as they're pretty clearly mostly by butthurt members of one religion or another who claim that Prothero isn't respectful enough of their particular religion. However, the complaints that it is not the most scholarly of works is probably pretty accurate; given that it's meant as a book for non-scholars to understand the differences, though, that might not be a terrible thing.

The wiki article sources this book in several spots, also written by Strauss and Howe:

https://www.amazon.com/Fourth-Turning-American-Prophecy-Rendezvous/dp/0767900464

And the method that captivated people like Bannon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yaWYO_FG9Ec

The theory isn't hard and two of his chief strategist believe it solves their ills.

"Inside and Under Area 51 - Underground Cities"

8-Minutes --> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c-qu_cOo_Dk

"Area 51: An Uncensored History of America's Top Secret Military Base"

"It is the most famous military installation in the world. And it doesn't exist. Located a mere seventy-five miles outside of Las Vegas in Nevada's desert, the base has never been acknowledged by the U.S. government-but Area 51 has captivated imaginations for decades....
...
Annie Jacobsen had exclusive access to nineteen men who served the base proudly and secretly for decades and are now aged 75-92, and unprecedented access to fifty-five additional military and intelligence personnel, scientists, pilots, and engineers linked to the secret base, thirty-two of whom lived and worked there for extended periods. In Area 51, Jacobsen shows us what has really gone on in the Nevada desert, from testing nuclear weapons to building super-secret, supersonic jets to pursuing the War on Terror."

https://amazon.com/Area-51-Uncensored-Americas-Military/dp/0316202304/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1520125771&sr=8-2&keywords=area+51&dpID=419OjHWv5ZL&preST=_SY344_BO1,204,203,200_QL70_&dpSrc=srch

{I recommend going to the public library for all your books.}

Science fiction is nice, but it's also important to be realistic, especially when he's consulting others on the future of technology and space. If you're interested in UFO stuff you should check out this book:

http://www.amazon.com/Area-51-Uncensored-Americas-Military/dp/0316202304/ref=la_B001K7ZHF0_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1346813936&sr=1-1

I would highly recommend Thomas Jefferson: Author of America by Christopher Hitchens. Hitchens was a journalist and essayist, heavily influenced by George Orwell, Thomas Jefferson, and Leon Trotsky. He's one of the few people I can think of who described himself as a "socialist" of sorts who also admired the American Revolution. An interesting source, but he's a person who hugely admired Jefferson and was also willing to criticize his failings. Basically, you will get the general story that most Americans know, but Hitchens also writes about the more troubling/controversial aspects of Jefferson such as his ownership of slaves and his fathering of children with them.

Anyway, that's Jefferson. For general American history I would suggest reading both A People's History of the United States and A Patriot's History of the United States. Those books will provide general knowledge from two very distinct perspectives. People's is very critical of the country's past, while Patriot's is...well, patriotic.

I just finished reading The Boys of Summer, about the Brooklyn Dodgers. Easily one of the best baseball books ever written.

> Do you have any books you'd recommend that are in the same vein? I have also read about how we ended Smallpox and ebola.

The Great Influenza

> Is the white people book new?

https://www.amazon.com/History-White-People-Irvin-Painter/dp/0393339742"

2011

Super interesting read

But you didn't give me "actual numbers." You throw up a fact sheet and expect me to accept that as if you have some deep understanding of America's healthcare system and how it's financed and nothing could be further from the truth.

You don't understand the system and you don't understand it's problems, let alone how to fix it. If you want some numbers I suggest you read some Paul Starr. Jonathan Cohn is a good choice too.

There's a book called The Fourth Turning that I would HIGHLY recommend reading. It's by a historian and economist that got together and looked at trends the last few centuries that have lead to our great wars. They found there is a, roughly, 80 year cycle when shit MAJORLY hits the fan, and the generation of young adults has to fix it, for better or worse.

Ex: about 80 years ago was WWII, 1860 was US Civil War, 1780 American Revolution, etc etc (and this is just the US)

If I didn't know that these guys were scientists, I would think they were prophets. They predicted a ton of major events that came to pass including the market collapse and Great Recession and the FACTORS THAT WOULD CAUSE IT... at least 10 years prior to it happening.

The book doesn't take a side (liberal or conservative), it just looks at trends in history and economic factors and calls it like it is. It also stressed the DUTY that you and I and our entire generation has to make sure the world doesn't turn to shit.

Every shits on the millenials and compares us to the "Greatest Generation" from WWII, but the old people from their time were shitting on them and accusing them of being lazy and spoiled just like people are doing to us now. It's just a cycle. Stay strong, dude, and stay positive.

Keep digging:

Look up Jane Mayer and Nancy MacLean.

Look into the Koch, Scaife, Olin, De Vos, Bradley, and Coors families, as well as Sheldon Adelson.

Look into the economics departments at the University of Virginia, Virginia Tech and George Mason University since the 1950s.

Follow the money.

And look at the use of neurolinguistic programming in the higher levels of the fundraising, voter registration and get-out-the-vote schemes in both of our major political parties.

And once you've done all that, go volunteer to work for your county or state party political organization to see how the pyramid works and whether or not I'm talking out the side of my neck.

cc: u/Lamont-Cranston, u/troublesomefaux

Agreed! This is a great book btw: https://www.amazon.com/Six-Frigates-Epic-History-Founding/dp/039333032X

You should read this book on Generations theory. The "science" of generations basically comes down to: people affect history, then history affects people, repeated ad nauseum. This wikipedia article also helps.

Developmentally, people are most affected in like the first 20 years by that history, specifically by events that take place, and those events will change them more than they will change someone who is older. This makes the events a good way to gauge when a generational shift has occurred after the fact.

For example, those younger than 20 during 9/11/2001 would be different than those who are older than 20 at the same time. That catalyzing event made an impact on the lives of millennials, born after 1980, than it did on Generation X, born between 1960 and 1980. But those who weren't old enough to be aware of the events on 9/11 wouldn't have felt that catalyzing event in the same way that the millennials did, meaning they'd belong to a different generation.

["The Boys of Summer"] (https://smile.amazon.com/dp/0060883960/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_a38BzbK07YC9Q)

Odd Man Out is also excellent. It's written by Matt McCarthy and the year he spent playing single A ball in the Angels org after graduating Yale. Not Dodgers (although he does mention playing the Ogden Raptors a few times).

Jonas Salk did some amazing vaccine work (polio is the big one but his work with the flu is important). not sure if that counts but in my mind vaccines and semiconductors are the two biggest life changers science has produced. there were many, many doctors involved but Salk was pretty key. if you are remotely interested this book is really informative on both the science side and practical side.

Richard Rhodes "The Making of the Atomic Bomb" (Pulitzer winner) is widely regarded as the best writing on the Manhattan Project, by far. Highly recommended.

Daniel Okrent's Last Call is a delightful and readable history of Prohibition which spends a great deal of time discussing this very issue. In addition to the manufacture of 'sacramental wine' as others have discussed, many vintners, having torn up their precious vintages, were forced to replant quickly as soon as they realized that Prohibition wasn't reeeeally going to be enforced. This resulted in the extraordinary spread of alicante bouschet, a very hardy type of wine grape that could survive export to the East Coast, where the grapes would be bin on at auction houses (where it was sold as "table grapes"). Alicante grows fast and furious, so vintners could replenish their harvest quickly. After Prohibition ended, they were left with essentially an entire state of Two Buck Chuck quality grapes and were forced to buy graftings from the few vineyards which had maintained their original vines for sacramental wine production.

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

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

Chile, the right libertarian puppet dictatorship for example, economy didnt grow or improve until they got rid of the free market dogma. While it was in place they brutally suppressed and murdered people for dissent.

Venezuela is another good example of neoliberalism causing chaos and violence, they were shooting starving protestors until chavez was elected. Neoliberals are still causing chaos there today.

https://www.telesurtv.net/english/analysis/Venezuelas-Caracazo-State-Repression-and-Neoliberal-Misrule-20150226-0028.html


The IMF have been dictating neoliberal dogma for decades, now they know it doesn't work.

>Rising inequality and slow economic growth in many countries have focused attention on policies to support inclusive growth. While some inequality is inevitable in a market-based economic system, excessive inequality can erode social cohesion, lead to political polarization, and ultimately lower economic growth. This Fiscal Monitor discusses how fiscal policies can help achieve redistributive objectives. It focuses on three salient policy debates: tax rates at the top of the income distribution, the introduction of a universal basic income, and the role of public spending on education and health.

http://www.imf.org/en/publications/fm/issues/2017/10/05/fiscal-monitor-october-2017


Now that socialist lybia is destroyed, Rwanda is the best economy in Africa - asian style capitalism, high investment in education, infrastructure, welfare, job creation ...


Put a right libertarian in charge of an economy and they will for example want cut backs in vaxinations, and other government programs, recommend allowing billonaires to take private ownership of the countries resources and extract it while putting as little as possible back.


It was populaized among americans through well funded propaganda and manipulation.

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


The right libertarian movement introduced the racism to what we call the "alt right " to help the movement along.

>Rothbard was one of the foremost proponents of the pseudo-psychology known as praxeology. Rothbard viewed property rights as paramount to freedom and so went even beyond von Mises, who was a minarchist, in advocating anarcho-capitalism. He was also known as a big critic of fractional reserve banking and the Federal Reserve. Because of his philosophy, he held many views that would be seen as progressive as well as ones that were batshit crazy. For example, he voiced support for the civil rights movement[1] as well as opposition to the Vietnam War and the draft, but also defended the practice of child labor, "racialist science,"[2] and that "cops must be unleashed, and allowed to administer instant punishment."[3] Also, despite his initial vocal support for revolutionary black power politics, he later worked with Lew Rockwell, founder and then president of the Ludwig von Mises Institute, to run a campaign strategy to exploit racism in order to build a libertarian/paleoconservative coalition[4] and praised the notorious work by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Bell Curve.[5] He was known as the first "Anarcho"-Capitalist

https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Murray_Rothbard


This is why jordan peterson and you guys get called alt right.



Id guess pinker is on the pay role of a right libertarian think tank, like those that JP retweets.