(Part 3) Reddit mentions: The best history books

Here's a list of books I've read that have had a big impact on my journey.

First and foremost tho, you should learn to meditate. That's the most instrumental part of any spiritual path.

 Ram Dass – “Be Here Now” - https://www.amazon.com/Be-Here-Now-Ram-Dass/dp/0517543052 - Possibly the most important book in the list – was the biggest impact in my life.  Fuses Western and Eastern religions/ideas. Kinda whacky to read, but definitely #1

Ram Dass - “Journey Of Awakening” - https://www.amazon.com/dp/B006L7R2EI - Another Ram Dass book - once I got more into Transcendental Meditation and wanted to learn other ways/types of meditation, this helped out.

 Clifford Pickover – “Sex, Drugs, Einstein & Elves…” - https://www.amazon.com/Sex-Drugs-Einstein-Elves-Transcendence/dp/1890572179/ - Somewhat random, frantic book – explores lots of ideas – planted a lot of seeds in my head that I followed up on in most of the books below

 Daniel Pinchbeck – “Breaking Open the Head” - https://www.amazon.com/Breaking-Open-Head-Psychedelic-Contemporary/dp/0767907434 - First book I read to explore impact of psychedelics on our brains

 Jeremy Narby – “Cosmic Serpent” - https://www.amazon.com/Cosmic-Serpent-DNA-Origins-Knowledge/dp/0874779642/ - Got into this book from the above, explores Ayahuasca deeper and relevancy of serpent symbolism in our society and DNA

 Robert Forte – “Entheogens and the Future of Religion” - https://www.amazon.com/Entheogens-Future-Religion-Robert-Forte/dp/1594774382 - Collection of essays and speeches from scientists, religious leaders, etc., about the use of psychedelics (referred to as Entheogens) as the catalyst for religion/spirituality

 Clark Strand – “Waking up to the Dark” - https://www.amazon.com/Waking-Up-Dark-Ancient-Sleepless/dp/0812997727 - Explores human’s addiction to artificial light, also gets into femininity of religion as balance to masculine ideas in our society

 Lee Bolman – “Leading with Soul” - https://www.amazon.com/Leading-Soul-Uncommon-Journey-Spirit/dp/0470619007 - Discusses using spirituality to foster a better, more supportive and creative workplace – pivotal in my honesty/openness approach when chatting about life with coworkers

 Eben Alexander – “Proof of Heaven” - https://www.amazon.com/Proof-Heaven-Neurosurgeons-Journey-Afterlife/dp/1451695195 - A neurophysicist discusses his near death experience and his transformation from non-believer to believer (title is a little click-baity, but very insightful book.  His descriptions of his experience align very similarly to deep meditations I’ve had)

 Indries Shah – “Thinkers of the East” - https://www.amazon.com/Thinkers-East-Idries-Shah/dp/178479063X/ - A collection of parables and stories from Islamic scholars.  Got turned onto Islamic writings after my trip through Pakistan, this book is great for structure around our whole spiritual “journey”

 Whitley Strieber – “The Key: A True Encounter” - https://www.amazon.com/Key-True-Encounter-Whitley-Strieber/dp/1585428698 - A man’s recollection of a conversation with a spiritual creature visiting him in a hotel room.  Sort of out there, easy to dismiss, but the topics are pretty solid

 Mary Scott – “Kundalini in the Physical World” - https://www.amazon.com/Kundalini-Physical-World-Mary-Scott/dp/0710094175/ - Very dense, very difficult scientific book exploring Hinduism and metaphysics (wouldn’t recommend this for light reading, definitely something you’d want to save for later in your “journey”)

 Hermann Hesse – “Siddartha” - https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/siddhartha-hermann-hesse/1116718450? – Short novel about a spiritual journey, coming of age type book.  Beautifully written, very enjoyable.

Reza Aslan - “Zealot” - https://www.amazon.com/ZEALOT-Life-Times-Jesus-Nazareth/dp/140006922X - Talks about the historical Jesus - helped me reconnect with Christianity in a way I didn’t have before

Reza Aslan - “No god but God” - https://www.amazon.com/god-but-God-Updated-Evolution/dp/0812982444 - Same as above, but in terms of Mohammad and Islam.  I’m starting to try to integrate the “truths” of our religions to try and form my own understanding

Thich Nhat Hanh - “Silence” - https://www.amazon.com/Silence-Power-Quiet-World-Noise-ebook/dp/B00MEIMCVG - Hanh’s a Vietnamese Buddhist monk - in this book he writes a lot about finding the beauty in silence, turning off the voice in our heads and lives, and living in peace.

Paulo Coelho - “The Alchemist” - https://www.amazon.com/Alchemist-Paulo-Coelho/dp/0062315005/ - Sort of a modern day exploration of “the path” similar to “Siddhartha.”  Very easy and a joy to read, good concepts of what it means to be on a “path”

Carlos Castaneda - "The Teachings of Don Juan" - The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge https://www.amazon.com/dp/0671600419 - Started exploring more into shamanism and indigenous spiritual work; this book was a great intro and written in an entertaining and accessible way. 

Jean-Yves Leloup - “The Gospel of Mary” - https://www.amazon.com/Gospel-Mary-Magdalene-Jean-Yves-Leloup/dp/0892819111/ - The book that finally opened my eyes to the potentiality of the teachings of Christ.  This book, combined with the one below, have been truly transformative in my belief system and accepting humanity and the power of love beyond what I’ve found so far in my journey.

Jean-Yves Leloup - “The Gospel of Philip” - https://www.amazon.com/Gospel-Philip-Magdalene-Gnosis-Sacred/dp/1594770220 - Really begins to dissect and dive into the metaphysical teachings of Christ, exploring the concept of marriage, human union and sexuality, and the power contained within.  This book, combined with the one above, have radically changed my perception of The Church as dissimilar and antithetical to what Christ actually taught.

Ram Dass - “Be Love Now” - https://www.amazon.com/Be-Love-Now-Path-Heart/dp/0061961388 - A follow-up to “Be Here Now” - gets more into the esoteric side of things, his relationship with his Guru, enlightenment, enlightened beings, etc.

Riane Eisler - “The Chalice and the Blade” - https://www.amazon.com/Chalice-Blade-Our-History-Future/dp/0062502891 - An anthropoligical book analyzing the dominative vs cooperative models in the history and pre-history of society and how our roots have been co-opted and rewritten by the dominative model to entrap society into accepting a false truth of violence and dominance as “the way it is”

I haven't done much research on this topic. Are you saying that it is far away from a meritocracy? What measures would one use to assess such things?

I think you could start by determining what amount of money in the economy is inherited vs. earned. I would actually agree with the author's assessment that inheritance must be pretty small compared to the vast wealth that self-made men accumulate.

Consider:

• Bill Gates
  
• Jeff Bezos
  
• Mark Cuban
  
• Warren Buffet
  
  You have some people around like Donald Trump, but he's the exception rather than the rule. But like I said, I don't know much about this, and I'm just guessing with intuition. Is there hard evidence around to examine? Do you feel something other than that most money is earned? I expect you would find similar results in the middle and upper classes that the vast majority of wealth is earned.
  
  Or perhaps is the idea that individuals don't accumulate wealth through merit? How else, then? How would we measure such factors?
  
  With regards to his comments about being marked for induction, it seems to be true given such programs as Gifted And Talented Education, the National Merit Scholarship Corporation, and the opportunities presented to you if you get a high SAT score. With an excellent SAT score you are practically guaranteed entrance to a top school on a scholarship. As the author mentions, if you are also a minority or come from a disadvantaged background, you are virtually guaranteed a free ride at the top universities.
  
  This is a very interesting topic, one on which hard evidence could shed a lot of light. Is America a meritocracy? Is it not? We shouldn't have to guess about such things but I don't have the data. Your comment suggests that you have strong evidence against the author's points, so I would be interested to hear it.
  
  Looking into other literature on the topic, such as Bell Curve, there seems to be strong evidence that (according to one reviewer):
  
  > More than socioeconomic background, parents' marital status or anything else, intelligence correlates with education, income, employment, criminal behavior, disability, likelihood of being in automobile accidents, and just about everything else.
  
  I would posit that if education, employment, and income correlate with intelligence more than any other factor, America is trivially a meritocracy (how else do you define meritocracy?). Would you dispute that definition, or the fact of the correlation? Assuming the correlation is as-stated, do you conclude America is a meritocracy? If not, why not?
  
  (Anecdotal evidence is not helpful for advancing this argument on either side)
  
  For more research leads on this topic, see Mainstream Science on Intelligence. A statement signed by "52 internationally known scholars" says:
  
  > # IQ is strongly related, probably more so than any other single measurable human trait, to many important educational, occupational, economic, and social outcomes. Its relation to the welfare and performance of individuals is very strong in some arenas in life (education, military training), moderate but robust in others (social competence), and modest but consistent in others (law-abidingness). Whatever IQ tests measure, it is of great practical and social importance.
  
  Non-anecdotal evidence that America is not a meritocracy would be of great interest to me and others in the thread, I suspect. Evidence: do you have it?

The first problem you're going to run into is that no one (with good reason) wants to tell you what "works" because as soon as that becomes public knowledge, people will craft means and methods against it. There's absolutely no value to disclosing what works aside from for public relations. So understand that.

Books like this and this are great for grasping a bit of knowledge and getting a storyline, but don't share much about the nitty gritty. I've read them both, and though I have no experience in operations in the 40s-70s, I do with what Bamford speaks of and there's quite a bit of fearmongering there. Either way, it's helpful to find the perspective of what's trying to be done. These aren't people trying to trample your friends, it's people trying to find a balance between freedom and security.

A book like this is basically just a nice story. It's a few biopics in one and the writer clearly likes the people he's writing about, so he's extremely pretty sympathetic to them. Still good for motivations and perspective, though.

These two are extremely useful because they get into that nitty-gritty that I spoke of earlier.

But as I said, it basically comes down to the balance between freedom and security. If you- like a crazy amount of redditors and young people seem to be- are way way way more interested than freedom than you are security, you're never going to like what people in the IC do. And that's your preoperative, but it seems that many people that of that cloth usually live within a secure environment and just don't really worry about. It's easy to not give a shit about heavy jackets when you live in West Maui. Moreover, the craze that I've seen in reddit is just...amazing? So many people with so little experience of education in these things that insist they know just so much. These same people will flip shit if you wander into their area of expertise acting like you know what's up when you clearly don't but...if someone's talking about CIA/NSA/FBI/etc or even just international politics in general? Suddenly they're the expert. It's weird.

This is why I chuckle when people think the redacted portions of the 9/11 Commission Report somehow point to an inside job, letting it happen, or a vast Saudi conspiracy. The redacted portions were redacted because of classification, and things are classified to protect means and methods, 99% of the time. Sometimes technology is classified, but it's rare and I don't know much about that anyway.

How We Got Out of The Great Depression: New Deal


FDR swept (won by a huge margin) the elections of 1932 and took the office from Hoover; he also inherited (took on, hand-me-down from Hoover) an economy that was in ruins. Roosevelt announced a “bank holiday,” and on March 9, he and Congress (they make laws) passed the Emergency Banking Act, which provided fund to failing banks. The Glass-Steagall Act prohibited (stopped) banks from buying and selling stocks, and established the FDIC. Roosevelt took the country off the gold standard (money is backed by gold), thus making it possible to issue more money. However, the focal point of Roosevelt’s plan to stimulate (make better) the economy was the National Industrial Recovery Act. The act established (created) the National Recovery Administration (NRA), which worked with business leaders to create standards for output, prices and work conditions. Within his first few months in office, FDR changed America’s entire way of thinking from a system of total free market economy (government does not tell businesses what to do), to a system where the government is able to regulate business (government does tell business what to do). To gain support of labor unions, the new law recognized worker’s rights to organize unions, a departure (change) from open shop policies during Hoover’s administration. Unfortunately, the NRA failed to recover the economy, and it failed to keep peace between employers and workers.

To combat (fight) unemployment Roosevelt formed the Federal Emergency Relief Administration, which made grants (gave money) to local agencies in order to provide relief for those impoverished (made poor) by the Depression. He also established the Civilian Conservation Corps, which provided jobs to unemployed en working on projects such as forest preservation, floor control, and the improvement of national parks. Under the National Industrial Recovery Act the Public Works Administration was created, which built roads, schools, hospitals, and created more than 4 million jobs. Unfortunately, the PWA was dissolved (shut down) due to the costs being too much and complaints that the PWA was creating a dependency (people rely) on the government.

FDR provided relief to many farmers with the creation of the Agricultural Adjustment Act, which set quotas (limits) on crops, and paid famers not to plant more than the quota. The result was a significant raise in farm incomes, but benefits only came to those farmers who owned their land. This resulted in the eviction (kicked out) of poor tenants (rent land) and sharecroppers (sharecropping system is difficult to explain, ask for clarification and I will), and a mass migration of farmers to cities, or farms on the West Coast.
Roosevelt believed the ownership of a home was more-or-less a right (something we all get, like air for breathing). The New Deal established the Home Owners Loan Corporation and the Federal Housing Administration, which insured long-term mortgages (money paid to bank when you’re buying something over time) issued by banks. As well, millions of low-income housing units were developed by the government. It soon became cheaper to buy a home than to rent one. Sadly, none of these things ended the Great Depression, and unemployment was still at 20% when 1934 came to an end. In 1935, the Supreme Court declared the NRA unconstitutional, and in 1936 the AAA was also declared unconstitutional.
In 1934, there were no less than 2,000 strikes (people refuse to work until demands met) across the nation. Working conditions were still poor, and the ability to organize was still hindered (made difficult by businesses). The strikes would often erupt in violence, with employers and government repressing (like holding a kids head under water, holding them down) the strikers. In 1935, John L. Lewis, head of the United Mine Workers, organized a walkout (walk out of work and refuse to work) which resulted in the creation of a new labor organization, the Congress of Industrial Organizations. The CIO’s main objective (goal) was to create unions. In 1936, the United Auto Workers, a CIO union, organized a sit-down, in which workers would halt production, but remain inside the building. This tactic (plan) was effective (it worked) against strikebreakers, since it allowed the workers to basically takeover the plants that they worked in. In 1937, U.S. Steel, a major opponent of unionization, finally agreed to recognize the Steel Workers Organizing Committee in fear that they’d be subjected to a sit-down strike. The CIO was effective in stabilizing (making normal) the labor situation, but also put forward many policy ideas that were pretty radical for the time. They advocated for public housing, universal healthcare, unemployment insurance, and social security. In 1937, the UAW and General Motors reached an agreement in which the pay was reflective of the cost of living. The CIO was extremely influential in what was to come.

FDR’s Second New Deal took the focus away from economic recovery, and put the focus on economic security, such as protection against unemployment and poverty. In 1935, the REA – one of the Second New Deal’s most successful programs – was formed with the goal of bringing electricity to homes that lacked it, which would also result in these homes purchasing household appliances. As well, the Second New Deal tried to promote soil preservation and family farming. The federal government also bought eroded farms (land destroyed) and converted them to grasslands and parks. It also encouraged more environmentally friendly methods of farming. However, the small farmers were once again left out, and the land-owning farmers were the ones to reap the benefits. These programs made way for the corporate farms that we see today.
The Works Progress Administration was formed, and each year it offered 3 million Americans jobs constructing public buildings and bridges, more than 500,000 miles of roads, 600 airports, stadiums, swimming pools, and sewage treatment plants. The WPA even hired artists to paint murals, and writers to produce guidebooks. The Federal Theater Project funded plays, the Federal Music Project established orchestras, and the Federal Dance Project sponsored ballets. The National Youth Administration provided relief to American teens and young adults. The focus was on creating a more enjoyable way of life for the people.
The Wagner Act – also known as “Labor’s Magna Carta” – was formed to bring democracy (everyone votes and has a say) into the workplace, allowing employees to vote on union representatives, and outlawing unfair labor practices, such as the firing of labor organizers. The idea was that unionization and higher wages would stimulate the economy due to the boost in purchasing power of the working class (the people who work).
The main piece of legislation in the Second New Deal was the Social Security Act of 1935. The Social Security Act created unemployment insurance, old age pensions, and aid to the disabled, the elderly poor, and families with dependent children. The Progressives were finally seeing their platform become a reality. The original bill also included universal healthcare, but it was dropped due to opposition from the American Medical Association.
The last few pieces of legislation were the United States Housing Act, which passed in 1937, and resulted in a national effort to build houses for the poor. As well, the Fair Labor Standards bill passed in 1938, which banned goods produced by child labor, set a minimum wage, and required overtime pay for hours exceeding 40 hours per week. This piece of legislation established a federal minimum wage, and federal regulations of working conditions.

The New Deal created many jobs for women in the government. However, it also supported the idea of the housewife, since it advocated (encouraged) for women to stay at home while the men worked. The housewife was left out of many of the New Deal programs, since paying taxes made a person eligible or the programs. As well, individual states were allowed to set eligibility standards for benefits, which allowed for discrimination.

Suggested Readings:

A People's History of the United States - This gives such an awesome view of history that you do not get in history textbooks: that of the people. Read this for an interesting take on labor unions during this time.

The Great Depression: A Diary - Really interesting. Gives a good history, but also a personal account of the hardships faced during the era. I recommend this to everyone.

The Great Depression and the New Deal: A Very Short Introduction - I love the Very Short Introduction series, and this is no exception. Covers a lot of ground and gives a good historical perspective of how we got into the mess, and how we got out. In fact, I used some of this in writing this reply.

I've been reading a really great book on God and humanity, and how it is that we come to know ourselves, others, our environment, and God through interpersonal relationships. It's called The Face of God, written by the English philosopher Roger Scruton. He's an Anglican Christian, though he doesn't believe in the traditional dogmas of the Church (like the Virgin Birth, the Resurrection, the Trinity), and he re-interprets traditional doctrines like the real presence of the Eucharist to fit a more philosophical perspective (which I completely endorse, but the average orthodox Christian may not).

Anyway, I think he offers some very valuable insights into the nature of God and the human response to God, hinting at ways in which we come to know God through the knowledge of ourselves, others, and the sacredness of life around us. It's not necessarily "personal" in the way the typical Evangelical might define that word, but it certainly is personal in that it supports a view that we must ask God to forgive our transgressions against him and against others, and to realize that we encounter God in the experience of love and beauty.

If you enjoy philosophical reading, I would also encourage you to read David Bentley Hart's book The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss, which demonstrates the existence of God who gives the necessary ontological grounds for existence, consciousness, and the transcendental virtues. One reviewer of this book said that it made him realize that God is "the most obvious thing of all."

https://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2016/11/03/is-it-possible-to-increase-your-height/#1757e5cc5139


http://time.com/4655634/genetics-height-tall-short/


There is a reason that identical twins reach a very similar height, even if separated and live in different environments, as long as they get a minimum threshold of resources, (so that their height isn't stunted in any way). But it's not like if one gets adopted by the royal palace, and the other one gets adopted by a middle class family, that the rich one with more resources will be anything more than slightly taller. As long as they get their appropriate resources, they are intended to reach their blueprint, their genetic DNA design for their body. There is evidence that better resources can positively impact your height slightly, but not much more.


Intelligence is certainly more complex than height, and harder to measure than height, but it certainly isn't "hard to measure" in a vacuum. It is very, very easy to tell whether the person across from you meets a certain level of intelligence or not, and you don't even need a test to do so. The fact that we do have advanced testing methods only solidifies the point.


Sam Harris recently said, "What we have here is a set of nested taboos. Human intelligence itself is a taboo topic. People don't want to hear that intelligence is a real thing, and that some people have more of it than others. They don't want to hear that IQ tests really measure it. They don't want to hear that differences in IQ matter, because they are highly predictive of differential success in life. And not just for things like education attainment, and wealth, but for things like out of wedlock birth, and mortality. People don't want to hear that a person's intelligence is, in large measure, due to his or her genes, and there seems to be very little we can do environmentally, to increase a person's intelligence, even in childhood. It's not that the environment doesn't matter, but genes appear to be 50-80% of the story. People don't want to hear this. And they certainly don't want to hear that average IQ differs across races and ethnic groups. Now, for better or worse, these are all facts. In fact, there is almost nothing in psychological science, for which there is more evidence than these claims, about IQ, about the validity of testing for it, about it's importance in the real world, about it's heritability, and about it's differential expression in different populations. Again, this is what a dispassionate look at what decades of research suggests."


"The efforts to invalidate the very notions of 'general intelligence', and race have been wholly unconvincing from a psychometric and biological point of view. And are obviously motivated by a political discomfort in talking about these things. And I understand and share that discomfort."


If you would like to see the data that backs this stuff up, I would recommend reading 'The 10,000 Year Explosion', by Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending, 'A Troublesome Inheritance' by Nicolas Wade, and 'The Bell Curve', by Charles Murray.


https://www.amazon.com/10-000-Year-Explosion-byHarpending/dp/B006J4LGD6


https://www.amazon.com/Troublesome-Inheritance-Genes-Human-History/dp/0143127160/ref=pd_lpo_sbs_14_img_0?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=CAWJC6Z2AZSADXQFYNND


https://www.amazon.com/Bell-Curve-Intelligence-Structure-Paperbacks/dp/0684824299

ACTUALLY! This is something that I have recently becoming intrigued about as well.

So, basically, everyone that is born will fall somewhere on the bell curve. Obviously someone like this will fall somewhere on the far right, so, high IQ.

Ok, but that's a really incomplete answer, of course he's got a high IQ. What causes this high IQ is what you're asking.
IQ is driven in large part by genes and is highly heritable (something on the order of 0.4 or 0.5). So, odds are his parents are above average intelligence as well.

read this book, it will blow your mind http://www.amazon.com/The-Blank-Slate-Modern-Denial/dp/1501264338

Because IQ is driven in large part by genes, his race plays an important factor as well. This book goes over that http://www.amazon.com/Bell-Curve-Intelligence-Structure-Paperbacks/dp/0684824299

Then, there's a good chance that he has some level of Asperger's. They don't call it "the engineer's disease" for nothing. People make jokes about this but it really does have an effect on how an individual spends their waking hours. Google about aspergers and engineering and you'll find articles like this

http://www.wired.com/2001/12/aspergers/

There's a pbs documentary and some really good articles out there, but I don't care to track them down right now.

Basically, people with some level of Asperger's become obsessed or display a high level of interest to some thing that they latch on to https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=aspergers+obsession. This is important because it allows the individual to put abnormal and significant amounts of time toward a particular interest. This usually tends to come at a cost to other brain functions necessary for social functioning.

So, when you combine all those factors, you get an individual that is highly intelligent and able to spend abnormal amounts of time and energy on a particular interest.

Surprisingly, the "push from the parents" and the environment don't really matter that much. Obviously the individual will be able to achieve more with a good environment and resources, but, this won't really change how intelligent the individual is. Basically... they're born that way and there's really not much you can do to change them.

• Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, taught in many schools and rightfully so because it is great.
  
  
• The Underland Chronicles by Suzanne Collins(also wrote Hunger Games) very few people have read these books which is sad because they are great, they are aimed for a younger audience but still good for a lighter read for adults
  
• The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of the Elements by Sam Kean, great informative and entertaining book about science
  
  
• The Sword of Shannara Trilogy by Terry Brooks, great fantasy series that few people have read
  
  
• Pride and Prejudice and Zombies: The Deluxe Heirloom Edition by Jane Austen, Seth Grahame-Smith, a entertaining twist on the original and this version has even more zombies than the original edition, have it and love it.
  
  These are some of my favorite books, all of which I have read and hope to own someday or currently own. I highly recommend the Underland Chronicles to you since you like the Hunger Games but I really think you will like any of these books.

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 aren't going to change his mind, but for your own peace of mind, here is a start off the top of my head:

> He didn't even know about it...

Then tell him he is literally living under a rock. It is listed in 10,000+ plus articles via Google news at the moment. While it is not likely to receive proper treatment in the conventional media, it has reached critical mass, they can no longer ignore it. And for the people who are there, they can verify that it is people from all walks of life, and now in cities all around the country. This just in as an example of senior protesters

> He says all the protesters don't have jobs because they made poor career choices with their lives.

Ask him to prove this (hint: he can't). Don't let him slide on sweeping generalization. There are people protesting across the spectrum including those who have jobs. They aren't protesting unemployment, but rather greed and corruption. While the unemployed might have more time to occupy, its not simply the unemployed who are there.

Edit: In fact, you can meet some of them in this article

Ask him if people in the Tea Party had jobs. Because while they aren't identical people, both movements have some similar populist origins. Also ask him if he smeared the Tea Party in the same way he is OWS. Because before they were corrupted by corporate interests, while I didn't agree with part of their message, at the time I could applaud their original effort. Look up various populist movements through US history and quiz him on them and draw parallels.

Also ask him why people are allowed or even celebrated in making poor choices when they are rich, but are condemned if they actually don't make bad choices (or even if they are human and make some) but get screwed by the system. Ask him if it is right that the class you are born into is a stronger indicator of upward mobility than education. (I can't find the link right now, but here is one and here is another one that can perhaps point you in the right direction.

> He says they're all to lazy to go find jobs.

Really? Then ask him about the number of places that make HAVING A JOB a REQUIREMENT for getting a job.

Ask him if he understands the law of supply and demand and can understand that The main reason U.S. companies are reluctant to step up hiring is scant demand, rather than uncertainty over government policies and then ask him if he knows something that a majority of economists don't know (because that's what they said in the survey referenced).

Edit: Also this self post looked pretty good regarding addressing that question

> He says they're all socialists looking for entitlements

Ask him if he likes weekends off, an 8-hour workday, minimum wage, or even just not dying while at his job then he can thank a socialist.

Check out the condensed version of The "S" Word and the book

Also for good measure, check out A People's History of The United States to find a lot of things neither he, nor probably you (no offense, just sayin'), would have learned in school.

Even though he may not like it, the current quality of life he enjoys was fought for by progressives, socialists, even anarchists and him denying that fact doesn't make it not true.

> He says they do not represent the 99% but the deadbeat 5% who can't do anything with their lives.

Tell him that both they, and he, whether he likes it or not, ARE part of the 99% percent unless he is tucking away millions that he hasn't told you about because this is what inequity looks like in numbers Also via NPR and this explains a lot in 11 graphs. You can also take a peek at 2012

> Talking to him is like talking to O'Reily...

But remember that there are people who can stand their ground with him, like Jon Stewart, or even Marylin Manson.

If Marylin Manson can do it, so can you. Don't sell yourself short, stand your ground! (I know it makes Thanksgiving and Christmas difficult, but if he is not an idiot, it still can be worth it in the long run).

> OH and he said that I'm messed up in the head cause I go on socialist websites...like Reddit

Ask him to define the word socialist. If he gets it wrong, ask him how his education failed him. Ask him if he thinks most of the other industrialized countries in the world are "socialist" too, and if so why are the leading in many quality of life metrics, health care, and general happiness? Ask him why our life expectancy is shorter or why we are working ourselves to death with other countries being able to have several weeks of vacation with people here who may not take any.

> OH OH and then he and my little brother then come in and say, "Is that gonna be your excuse when you can't find a job?" (I'm a college sophmore.)

Tell him that perhaps someone sold you and your brother a bill of goods
that "working hard" is the key to the American Dream while the banksters are offloading it out the backdoor. Ask him if it is called the American dream because you must be asleep to believe it

Ask him why your education costs 1000's and others abroad may not cost anything at all.

Ask him why teachers are treated as scum in recent sentiments when they agree to concessions but want to preserve their right to assemble and bargain as a group yet CEO's get paid for failure based on a peer system and half the country is lead to believe that the richest group of all are the "victims".

Ask him why foreign companies like Toyota can make products in America, but "Made in America" brands like Ford may be made in Mexico.

Ask him if he knows what NAFTA is and why it was bad (and do your homework to learn more, and surprise him by suggesting that Clinton was wrong to support it -- so he can't say you just cheerlead for one party -- but tell him that both he AND a Republican congress are at fault for screwing up our banking sector by repealing Glass-Stegall under Republican pressure, but at least Clinton at least is man enough to open regret the decision)

Ask him why it is right for people to do all these things, to make inequity on par with the 20's before the stock market crash, yet when people stand up to fight that he has nothing but ridicule.

> Edit: As for what to discuss, can anyone put together a clear and irrefutable counterargument? I'm sick of his condescending attitude.

There is not magic bullet. Even this list here is simply a stream of consciousness off the top of my head. But your best friend is true education and enlightenment. It means not accepting the status quo, not relying on only domestic, conventional sources for news and information. It means digging into history with true historians.

In the long run you may not win the battle, but you will be more prepared to try and win the war, even if its not with him. (P.S. I may add more links later if I have the time.)

Good Luck!

Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford's Forgotten Jungle City is an amazing book. The main point is about Ford trying to create a company town in Brazil in order to grow rubber. But the books gives you a great picture of Ford the man, the company, what the era was like and the larger philosophical and economic ideas behind this project. Honestly, for me it read like fiction- I couldn't put it down.

They Marched Into Sunlight: War and Peace Vietnam and America October 1967 looks at the Vietnam war from three different perspectives, from students protesting, to the actual front and then from the government officials. The narrative is amazing and it's so well researched that it was captivating as well, but I think he really captured the feeling of the times as well, which is so great to see in a book.

Michael Pollan is know most for Omnivore's Dilemma (which is a great read) but I really love his first book too, and that doesn't get as much attention, which is still very interesting is The Botany of Desire. He goes through the history of 4 different plants, apples, tulips, marijuana, and potatoes. Not too interesting on the surface, but he makes the stories fascinating. It's a great in its overarching nature about our relationships with plants.

[Marriage: A History by Stephanie Coontz] (http://www.amazon.com/Marriage-History-How-Love-Conquered/dp/014303667X) is another one I always recommend. It is an expansive work showing that the idea of Marriage has been in flux since the beginning and completely depended on the culture and time period. It's well researched but also a compelling work.

I've a few recommendations here, both about writing and about langauge as a whole

• Cuneiform by Irving Finkel as a (very) short but nice introduction to Cuneiform. I enjoyed it a lot, especially since I couldn't seem to find other popularized introductions to the subject.
  
• Empires of the Word by Nicholas Ostler. This is a behemoth, a world history in the context of languages. I love the book, although it can be a bit information heavy at times. The focus is on langauges, but comes with lots of nice examples of writing as well. (I found this book through The Language Instinct by Stephen Pinker, which is tries to describe language from a neurological PoV, an amazing book)
  
• Breaking the Maya Code by Michael Coe, one of the players in the breaking of the Maya script. I didn't know a thing about mayan language or script before reading this, and albeit being too detailed on who-did-what, the mayan script is beautiful and this books documents this wonderfully.
  
• The Riddle of the Labyrinth by Margalit Fox. The theme is similar as the one above, but this is focused on the decipherment of Linear B, where both script and language was unknown. Very recommended, especially in the methodology on how to catalogue large number of correlations between script pairs in the time before SQL...
  
  I'm following this thread closely... :)

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?

Quite right they shouldn't.

Same goes for their father providing help with oil for the nazi army.

However, these days they are rising up fascism, nazis and KKK.


You can read more about where the alt right came from here

>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.

https://www.amazon.com/Dark-Money-History-Billionaires-Radical/dp/0385535597

I don't know of any that compare, but, the Napoleon's Buttons is SUPPOSED to be good.

http://www.amazon.com/Napoleons-Buttons-Molecules-Changed-History/dp/1585423319/

Other books, engineering related, that I liked are:

Norm Lieberman's Process Troubleshooting books, the guy cracks me up!

Working Guide to Process Equipment (3rd edition probably cheaper): http://www.amazon.com/Working-Guide-Process-Equipment-Fourth/dp/0071828060/

Process Equipment Malfunctions (not as good as the other one, some overlap, but still worthwhile, and covers more breadth for individual issues): http://www.amazon.com/Process-Equipment-Malfunctions-Techniques-Identify/dp/0071770208/

The Prize (mentioned above): http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/1439110123/ref=redir_mdp_mobile/188-3799228-4803548

The Quest (Follow on to The Prize): http://www.amazon.com/Quest-Energy-Security-Remaking-Modern/dp/0143121944/

Oil 101: http://www.amazon.com/Oil-101-Morgan-Downey/dp/0982039204/

The Mythical Man Month (Not engineering directly as it pertains to software, but, projects and project management are huge in engineering, though this book is timeless): http://www.amazon.com/Mythical-Man-Month-Software-Engineering-Anniversary/dp/0201835959/

Piping Systems Manual (You can NEVER know enough about pipe!): http://www.amazon.com/Piping-Systems-Manual-Brian-Silowash/dp/0071592768/

Pumps and Pumping Operations (OMG it is $4, hardcover, go buy now! This book is great... did you know OSU didn't teach their Chem E's about pumps? I was flabbergasted, gave this to our intern and he became not a scrub by learning about pumps!): http://www.amazon.com/Pumping-Operations-Prentice-Pollution-Equipment/dp/0137393199/

Any good engineer needs to understand MONEY too:

The Ascent of Money: http://www.amazon.com/Ascent-Money-Financial-History-World/dp/0143116177/

It's Nial Fergesuon, who has had his own series of dramas and dumb stuff. The Ascent of Money has a SLIGHT libertarian tinge... but it wasn't bad enough that I didn't enjoy it. I consider it a history book, and he attempts to write it like one.

Have fun!

Your post is deeply flawed, and I'll do my best to explain how as diplomatically as possible.

>Everyone deserves exactly what they bargained for.

Are you saying that if I'm bargaining at a Ford dealership for a new a truck, I automatically deserve it? I'm assuming you mean something else, but I don't know what.

> This "fair share" argument is used commonly and is false right from the get go. Everyone has their own idea on what "fair share" means, and the progressive plan to implement "fair share" usually involves some sort of forced redistribution of wealth which is wrong from the beginning.

So by your own logic, the rich also don't deserve their wealth. I mean, if everybody's idea of fair share is purely subjective, then we simply cannot take anybody's word for it, rich or poor. "Fair share" becomes a non-starter for any discussion. So how can you possibly argue it's "wrong from the beginning" if we have no standard of what "fair share" even means? Why is it wrong?

>It's robin hooding except instead of taking it from the extremely rich, it's taken from everybody.

This claim is a non-sequitur. How did you get from the notion that "fair share" is arbitrary to this idea? It simply doesn't follow.

The reasoning at work in your posts is sloppy and, at points, self-contradictory. Perhaps it would help to take some time to deepen your knowledge of political principles A good primer that covers some arguments from various parts of the political spectrum might be helpful. This. It's edited by Canada's own Will Kymlicka, one of the the most renowned contemporary political philosophers.

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.

Before I get to my main point, I would just like to briefly comment upon this short phrase,

>another case of philosophy failing to keep up with modern science

which demonstrates a patent lack of understanding of what philosophy and science are, and what distinguishes them, as disciplines. Science's domain is the empirical -- it is concerned with physical stuff, with things that can be physically (and usually quantitatively) observed, measured, and examined. Philosophy is concerned with metaphysics, that is, with non-empirical reflection, and for that reason can never really 'keep up' with science. You cannot derive from empirical foundations the principles of moral behaviour, nor what constitutes a 'just' political system, nor whether there is an immaterial God. There is no 'keeping up' between philosophy and science. They deal with fundamentally different subject matter.

To the main point: Arguments to the effect of modern science (in any field, not just cosmology) definitively disproving the existence of God are short-sighted. Even recent developments in the field of cosmology are insufficient to demonstrate the non-necessity of a God, for the reason that they do not broach the fundamental question of why anything at all exists. The classical theist, drawing upon Aristotle, would consider the notion of a godless universe as patently bizarre. Any universe is necessarily 'contingent' in philosophical terms, which means that there is a distinction between what it could be (its potentiality) and what it is at any given moment (its actuality). Since any universe (or any set of pre-universe laws or constants) is necessarily contingent, subject to either change or the mere theoretical possibility of existing in some other way, its existence is not necessary as such.

The theist would then say that, to explain all contingent realities, we must posit some ultimate non-contingent reality in which no distinction exists between potentiality and actuality. In other words, all contingent, non-necessary reality must derive from some necessary reality, which cannot be any particular universe nor any pre-universe state of contingent laws. In theological language, this necessary entity which is fully actual (the 'I AM who am' of the Jewish tradition) is termed 'God.'

Edit: To quote from the great David Bentley Hart,

>Hawking’s dismissal of God as an otiose explanatory hypothesis, for instance, is a splendid example of a false conclusion drawn from a confused question. He clearly thinks that talk of God’s creation of the universe concerns some event that occurred at some particular point in the past, prosecuted by some being who appears to occupy the shadowy juncture between a larger quantum landscape and the specific conditions of our current cosmic order; by “God,” that is to say, he means only a demiurge, coming after the law of gravity but before the present universe, whose job was to nail together all the boards and firmly mortar all the bricks of our current cosmic edifice. So Hawking naturally concludes that such a being would be unnecessary if there were some prior set of laws — just out there, so to speak, happily floating along on the wave-functions of the quantum vacuum — that would permit the spontaneous generation of any and all universes. It never crosses his mind that the question of creation might concern the very possibility of existence as such, not only of this universe but of all the laws and physical conditions that produced it, or that the concept of God might concern a reality not temporally prior to this or that world, but logically and necessarily prior to all worlds, all physical laws, all quantum events, and even all possibilities of laws and events. From the perspective of classical metaphysics, Hawking misses the whole point of talk of creation: God would be just as necessary even if all that existed were a collection of physical laws and quantum states, from which no ordered universe had ever arisen; for neither those laws nor those states could exist of themselves. But — and here is the crucial issue — those who argue for the existence of God principally from some feature or other of apparent cosmic design are guilty of the same conceptual confusion; they make a claim like Hawking’s seem solvent, or at least relevant, because they themselves have not advanced beyond the demiurgic picture of God. By giving the name “God” to whatever as yet unknown agent or property or quality might account for this or that particular appearance of design, they have produced a picture of God that it is conceivable the sciences could some day genuinely make obsolete, because it really is a kind of rival explanation to the explanations the sciences seek. This has never been true of the God described in the great traditional metaphysical systems. The true philosophical question of God has always been posed at a far simpler but far more primordial and comprehensive level; it concerns existence as such: the logical possibility of the universe, not its mere physical probability. God, properly conceived, is not a force or cause within nature, and certainly not a kind of supreme natural explanation.

from The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss (https://www.amazon.com/Experience-God-Being-Consciousness-Bliss/dp/0300166842)

Fantastic recommendation, I got to read Junger's memoir last year and thoroughly enjoyed it. Absolutely horrifying and enlightening.

One of my favorite WWI books is A World Undone, by G. J. Meyer. Which is ironic since I don't think I've ever posted a single anecdote from it (an error I need to severely correct).

It's super dense, but probably one of the best overviews of the war, encapsulating a deep amount of academic research, primary sources from soldiers, civilians, leaders- all the while providing important historical context and background for the many many actors/nations involved, their motives, and goals.

I recommend this book to ANYONE interested in WWI besides a passing understanding. At 816 pages it can be daunting to most readers, but if you have the interest, absolutely check out this book.

Another great book is Max Hastings's Inferno, which is one of the best "social histories" of the war IMO. The wide-range of intimate, tragic, surprising, and sometimes funny testimonies collected in the book, along with Hastings's excellent prose, is one of the most "human" retellings of WWII, I've ever read and is a must for anyone who is interested in the war beyond just the military and political aspects.

Edit: I also want to include Hastings's Retribution which covers the Pacific campaign (1944-45) in equally masterful prose and heartwrenching testimony. Learned not only a lot about the Japanese perspective but also of people's lives under Japanese occupation.

Also Rick Atkinson's Liberation Trilogy, which is a fantastic (American POV) of the war and incredibly well written.

> I suspect this is why the left calls all IQ discussions 'racist'.

It was even called racist back in the day. In the 20's and 30's most everybody was fine with the concept and had no issue with it, despite the fact that the science of IQ was in its infancy compared to today. After WW2 though, I suppose on some level, its understandable why the topic became too hot to touch, but in academia from that point, its still been very difficult for the issue to make a comeback. And it's especially a bitter pill to swallow for public consumption.

Charles Murray though is the case in point that everyone likes to point to. He was crucified by (mostly) liberal academics in his line of research. In particular, Stephen Jay Gould who wrote the Mismeasure of Man (which was a direct response to the Bell Curve), which most psychologists and virtually all psychometricians today dismiss. But I don't know enough about the science as a whole to know if what Murray's talking about is true. I'll take it at face value that it is on some level.

> Hierarchy exists as a part of nature.

I agree entirely with this but it is important to remember nevertheless, when more sophisticated people on the left (and I'd like to include myself here just a bit) criticize hierarchy and inequality, we're not talking about natural inequalities for the most part.

> The funny thing is, no one bats an eye that black people make up most of the NBA and the NFL, not to mention are at the elite top of pretty much every track and field event (sans shot put maybe). Apparently in the context of sports it is just fine to discuss, but actually want to talk about things that affect success at life outcomes? How dare you!

True, unfortunately.

> I think you are an example that the overton window is shifting on this. It may not be mainstream, but the data is certainly on the side of those who think IQ is important. I can't wait until it does go mainstream - maybe then we can actually start having conversations about what we (as society) are going to do about all the low IQ people who just had their jobs automated.

It's increasingly getting a lot more steam and mainstream attraction. What I worry about however are the political/economic and social implications of this. People should be free to make of their life whatever they will, but the extent to which our choices and abilities to do what we want to are constrained by our IQ and other factors, makes this very difficult. And will always cause conflict unless its directly addressed. And this is the scary part, because its where you get into subjects about dysgenics and other things.

> This is a huge problem coming up. I don't think either side has particularly good solutions.

Indeed.

Hi!

My name is Ed McDonald and I'm a fantasy author. My debut is going to be released across 6 languages in 2017/18, so I have some insights on this. I am looking forward to Blackwing being published so that I don't have to write this as a disclaimer all the time :D. I'm also speaking on a panel about getting published in fantasy at the London Book Fair in March.

Firstly, read fantasy. All the fantasy. But it's more important to read the things that are currently being published than it is the classics. You won't learn much from Tolkien these days, times have changed since LOTR. Instead, if it's epic fantasy you want to write, then you need to read Rothfuss, Sanderson, Abercrombie, Lawrence and Lynch. They are the big sellers for epic. If you want to write YA stuff then read YA stuff. This is not just because those writers are great, but because it will teach you the market trends.

Next though, reading outside the genre is great, but only to find books that you enjoy so that you can cut them apart. My guilty pleasure? Lee Child's Jack Reacher books. They frequently have glaring plot holes or don't make sense, and are full of deus ex machina resolutions or just "and then Jack blew his head off" finales, but the pace and the simplicity keeps me turning the page. And from that, I learned that I much prefer a Reacher novel to trudging through 5 pages of world building at a time, so when I write fantasy, I write fast paced thrillers which is what then sold Blackwing around the world. I wouldn't have gained that style without reading outside the genre.

Finally, I guess I'm cheating because I have some degrees in history, but if you're writing historically inspired settings, you ought to be reading some history. Don't try to plough through dry academic texts if you aren't a historian though - I'm an academic and even I find those dry as sand. Get the popular stuff, even kid's history, just to try to soak up the feel of the period. The Time Traveller's Guide to Medieval England is essential for those that want to gain a quick overview.

https://www.amazon.com/Time-Travelers-Guide-Medieval-England/dp/1439112908/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1486802982&sr=1-1&keywords=the+time+traveller%27s+guide+to+medieval+england

I write a blog that mainly focuses on assisting aspiring authors such as yourself and you may find some of it helpful.

https://edmcdonaldwriting.com/2017/01/25/you-are-not-george-rr-martin-how-to-get-published-in-the-grimdark-era-of-fantasy/

I'm a liberal egalitarian. In response to a post someone had made in this subreddit as an introduction to Marxism, I wrote on DepthHub a criticism of socialism from a liberal perspective. I'll here reproduce that first post, but I also was replied to by the author of the post introducing Marxism, and wrote a reply to him in turn, which can be found in the DepthHub thread.

=

JasonMacker has written an excellent brief introduction to socialism. Since I don't see any critiques of socialism from a liberal perspective here, let me quickly outline a couple of points.

The most conceptually important target is the central idea of socialism: that the means of production ought to be socially owned. Now, there are basically two forms of social ownership. One of them is to have state ownership and a centralized system of central planning. The other, called "market socialism", is to have corporations compete in a decentralized market, but have those corporations be owned by the workers. The problem with the first is that it does a poor job of allocating resources compared to markets, i.e., it does a poor job of telling us who should get what. A good explanation of this problem can be found in the conclusion to The Rebel Sell by Potter and Heath:

>Suppose that one year, thanks to a fortuitous combination of rain and sun, the rubber farmers get a bumper crop. This means that there is more rubber available than usual. Who should get it? There are literally millions of different ways in which the rubber could be used. Should it be used for bike tires? Lacrosse balls? Waterproof boots? Gaskets? Cables? Shock absorbers? The most persuasive response would be to say that the rubber should go to whichever use is most urgent, or whoever needs it most. In other words, the rubber should be sent to where it will do the most good. Unfortunately, in a pluralistic society [i.e., one in which people do not agree on a single overarching conception of the good, which is the universal condition of modern nation-states], we lack any common measure of "the good." There is no fixed metric that will allow us to determine whether one person's desire to fix his bike tire is more or less important than some other person's desire to replace the washer in her faucet. The only way to approach the question is to ask how important it is to the person in question. And the only way to find out how important it is to that person is to ask how much he or she would be willing to give up in exchange for the rubber. In other words, we must ask how much that person would be willing to pay for it. (If there is no sacrifice involved, then we can be almost certain that the goods will be wasted, since individuals will ask for all sorts of things that they don't really need. Just look at the difference in the way people behave when they are charging things to an expense account rather than paying for them out of their own pocket.)

Okay, so what about having workers determine their working conditions by owning the means of production within their corporation? A question that anyone who advocates market socialism will have to answer is, why aren't corporations already worker-owned? There aren't legal obstacles to the formation of co-operatives in capitalist countries like Australia or the United States. In fact, in many jurisdictions, worker co-ops get huge tax advantages over shareholder-owned corporations. So what's preventing co-ops from being the dominant form of corporate organization?

The answer to this is complicated, but as it turns out, a big part of it is that worker co-ops don't work very well in many kinds of business. The main problem is corporate governance. When workers own the corporation, it's often very hard for them to agree on how great a share each of them should get of the revenues. This is because, in many corporations, people do very different jobs that require very different qualifications, and there's no straightforward way to say what level of wages properly compensates x years of experience, or a or b kinds of qualifications, or p or q amount of input. So the worker-owners face big internal political problems when they're doing very different kinds of work.

Evidence that this is an important reason for the relative lack of success of worker co-ops is that many of the most successful worker co-ops have extremely similar kinds of "input" from the workers. For instance, a co-op might be owned by dairy farmers, and each farmer gets paid proportionally to how much milk they contribute to the corporation. Since there's only a single kind of input the workers add (milk), the distribution of revenue is very straightforward. More information on this perspective on corporate ownership can be found in The Ownership of Enterprise by Hansmann.

Lastly, another problem with worker ownership is that it seems to have little to do with citizen welfare. Marxism doesn't have the same theoretical resources as liberalism to deal with cases where people are disadvantaged because they're excluded from working, rather than because they are working—for example, when women or children are not allowed to work in a country and, as a direct result of not being allowed to work, face crushing poverty and are barred from economic independence. Another point about the lack of a relationship between citizen welfare and one's status as a worker can be made about the concept of "alienation". Obviously, no one would prefer doing alienated labour to doing unalienated labour. But what if the comparison is between, say, ten hours of unalienated labour and six hours of alienated labour plus four hours of leisure? If a worker prefers the latter to the former, who are we to say that something is wrong with them? These and other criticisms can be found in the chapter on Marxism in Will Kymlicka's really, really excellent introduction to contemporary political philosophy.

So those are some criticisms of the socialist worldview. I hope this adds an extra dimension to the conversation.

Edit: I should add that not being socialist doesn't mean being inegalitarian. Liberals can still support strong investment in public goods and redistribution of income as means to achieve greater social welfare and equality.

I was a Catholic. I had issues with certain parts of the faith that I didn't think too much about since I didn't really have a way to answer them, such as reconciling the idea of the trinity with monotheism.

I've studied the church's stance on it but it doesn't FEEL like the two beliefs are compatible and it never has. The explanations I was given and that I thought of myself always seemed a bit unsatisfactory like technicalities. That and the idea that I had to accept the teaching of a church whose members consist of fallible people. How do I accept creeds and beliefs laid down by other people throughout history hundreds and thousands of years after Jesus lived? It was, in fact, the vow of obedience to the church that dissuaded me early on from contemplating joining the clergy.

The last reticent doubt I had was about the authenticity of the bible, having studied a bit about the Documentary Hypothesis and the different authors of the bible. It became a bit hard for me to believe it could be very factually accurate or (more importantly) have spiritual authority for me to base my beliefs on. Different people throughout hundreds of years wrote different documents and I'm supposed to follow this specially compiled group of them as an authoritative fact? It would require me to accept the authority of the people who wrote them, and the people who edited them, and the people who compiled them, the authors and the church. So I ended up not reading too much of the bible after a point.

When I learned about Islam (completely by happy accident, I enjoy studying world religions anyways and realized reading through the Islam wiki I had no idea what this huge religion was about or how it originated, etc) I found that I agreed with Islam's teachings about Jesus as prophet. And then the Qur'an (in Islam) does not present the same difficulties as the bible does in Christianity IF you believe in the prophethood of Muhammad ﷺ. That came to me upon reading the Qur'an and reading a short biography about the prophet's life and the origin of Islam source

If you'd like to talk more about this please feel free to PM me :)

> It's a good reminder that "white" people in America are not homogenous. Check out the book American Nations by Colin Woodard. He doesn't go into Minnesota so specifically, as I recall, but he covers the vastly different histories and backgrounds of the people that regions of our country were populated by and how much those original values and principles still explain politics and such today.

> American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America https://www.amazon.com/American-Nations-History-Regional-Cultures-ebook/dp/B0052RDIZA

This was a really good read! It's an interesting perspective on North American history that makes the broad strokes fit together a lot better than my high school textbook ever did and focuses on what I think is the most interesting part of history: how it explains why things are the way they are today.

If you have more interest in this idea, there is a book I would recommend.

Marriage, a History: How Love Conquered Marriage By Stephanie Coontz

This book traces how marriage has evolved over thousands of years, and deals with a lot of familiar issues to the FGM debate. If you pay special attention to the chapters about the cult of purity during the 18th century, you'll notice how western men society held very similar notions of protecting a woman's "purity".

Now, this book isn't related to FGM, but it's an interesting read if you want to kind of understand how institutions can evolve from restricting women to empowering them to be equal partners (in the best circumstances).

Edit: Changed "western men" to "western society" to avoid under emphasizing women's roles in enforcing these behaviors as well.

An interesting side note: during the era of the "cult of purity" this was one of the first opportunities for women to gain some rights. Because society was focused on protect the innate 'purity' of women, women were able to refuse sex from their husbands, something which western courts had never afforded them. Until then, men had the right to demand sex basically whenever they wanted and were empowered to "reprimand" their wives if they refused.

During this era of 'purity' courts began to rule that women had a right to protect that purity and deny their husbands sex.

This is undoubtedly far more wonky than you're looking for, but it's an interesting read and speaks in interesting generalities about various parts of the US: American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America.

There are definitely regional differences, but I think there are a lot of similarities as well, and you're probably not going to write the peculiarities of a place as well as someone who's lived there so agonizing over it will only bring you headache and frustration. Otherwise, I agree with someone else somewhere on this thread. Pick a town. You can wikipedia pretty much any town and find out its size, the primary thing it produces, geographic density, local flora/fauna, etc. You don't have to say you're writing that specific town. Just use it as a blueprint. You can google image it to get pictures of what the countryside looks like, and even describe interesting features about whatever town it is without embedding it too much in an actual town. Relying too much on stereotypes regarding the state or city might turn it into a caricature.

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.

Not fiction... but if you find the era interesting:

• Sapiens
  
• The Humans Who Went Extinct: Why Neanderthals died out and we survived
  
• Before the Dawn: Recovering the Lost History of Our Ancestors
  
  Jean M Auel provided a fun introduction to the period but, as readers of the series know, she took creative liberty. More than occasionally the books wandered into fantasy. To enjoy a fascinating view based a bit more on scientific evidence, the three listed are (or were to me) quire enlightening.

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.

Additions:

Lives of other Prophets Series

• [Video] Lives of the Prophets - Series of 31 lectures by Sheikh Shady on the lives of the Prophets from Adam (AS) to Isa (AS).
  
  
• [Video] Stories Of The Prophets - Series of 30 lectures by Mufti Menk on the lives and stories of the Prophets from Adam (AS) to Isa (AS).
  
  End times, Death, Hereafter
  
  
• [Video] Death and the Hereafter - Series of 10 or so lectures by Sheikh Shady on what happens during and after death. Also, the minor and major signs that would occur until the end of times.
  
  
• [Video] Signs of Day of Judgement - Series of multiple lectures on the signs of the day of judgement by Sh. Yaser Birjas.
  
  Seerah (Life of Prophet Muhammad (SAW)
  
  
• [Video] Seerah - Series of 47 lectures on the signs of the life of Prophet Muhammad (SAW) by Sheikh Shady.
  
  Understand the Quran
  
  
• [Video] Story Night - How Allah(swt) wrote/directed the Quran with analogies to popular works of flim and stories. Another way of looking at it is that why does it seem the Quran is out of order sometimes? Noman Ali Kahn mainly talks about the story of Musa (AS) and how ayats pertaining to his story are written.
  
  
• [Book] The Qur'an by M. A. S. Abdel Haleem - Translation of the Quran with modern English vernacular.
  
  
• [Book] Approaching the Qur'an: The Early Revelations by Michael Sells - There's a chapter that goes in depth about how the pre-Islamic Arabs previved the concept of love and the female beloved character layla and what Islam changed about this concept.
  
  
• [Book] No god but God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam by Reza Aslan -- Covers lots of topics, excellent writing overall.
  
  
• [Audio] Fahm al-Qur'an - Tafseer of the entire Quran in very simple English. The commentary is by a female scholar, Amina Elahi so it's a good tafseer for gatherings with a lot sisters but obviously anyone can listen. Best way to make the most of this tafseer and others like it is to have a translated copy of the Quran in front of you and some highlighters, sticky notes and a dedicated notebook and just scribble away as you listen. BTW, if you have a Muslim friend(s) who is/are interested in Islam and you don't have access to a teacher or w/e, have a listening party/gathering with these lectures once a week. Since each lecture is 2 hrs long, in 30 weeks, you will have finished the tafseer of the entire Quran and you have a notebook filled with notes and a translated Quran that is now colorful and filled with notes.

You're right to ask how we know God exists and that Christianity is true. Contrary to what many believe, "having faith" does not mean believing in something for which there is no evidence, and Christianity hasn't survived for nearly two thousand years just because nobody ever thought to question it. You shouldn't envy anyone for their ability to shove these questions aside; their faith is founded on sand.

I think the best way to start forming an answer to questions like these is to find out how others have answered them in the past. So I suggest that you read a textbook like An Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion.

A recent book with a heavy focus on the kind of wonder you describe at the existence of the world is The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss by David Bentley Hart. It has a great bibliography for further reading.

This post is relevant only if you are interested in politics in the sense of the question of what politics ought to consist in, what policies ought to be pursued and so on, as well as what others have thought about it in the past. If your main interest is in the current political climates and policies pursued in the USA and other countries in the world then consider looking at political economics/public choice theory.

I wouldn't recommend wikipedia. It's not that it's wrong. I just don't recommend it. I'm from the UK and have never heard NPR so I can't speak to it (I'm imagining it as similar to BBC Radio 4). Again I wouldn't necessarily use it as one of your main resources because these things take a false "balanced" view of things and end up with a splintered perspective, though no doubt there are hundreds of interesting shows and they definitely contribute to a more well-rounded, learned and cultured personality.

A very good introduction to (liberal) political philosophy is Contemporary Political Philosophy by Will Kymlicka. This goes in depth on the arguments for (and against) libertarianism, communitarianism, feminism, utilitarianism, all from the perspective of a contemporary egalitarian.

From there I'd recommend digging straight into actual works of political theory (e.g. Anarchy, State and Utopia, A Theory of Justice, not to mention works by Dworkin, Cohen and so on). If you are interested in specific ideas like property, liberty, equality and so on: what they mean, how one applies them, the different normative perspectives and positions surrounding them than I (and others) can give more specific reading lists. Equally if you have a particular interest in the historical side of things (Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Locke, Hobbes, Rousseau and so on) then focus on that once you have the basics.

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.

Hey folks. I used to be a big war history book buff back when I was a kid, but got out of it in later years. However playing some BF1 and realizing that my WWI knowledge was pretty spotty got me looking for a book to brush up. I recently finished this guy and wanted to say that I really recommend it.

https://www.amazon.com/World-Undone-Story-Great-1914/dp/0553382403/ref=sr_1_5?ie=UTF8&qid=1503508652&sr=8-5&keywords=WWI+history

Trying to do a comprehensive war overview book is always fraught with peril. There is so much to cover and you need to do justice to all the major events while not turning into just a continual series of dates and casualty numbers. This book does a great job of balancing covering the action on the battlefields along with the homefronts and other political topics. I also liked how it helped to connect you to some of the major characters and empires by giving small side-chapters to fill in the background on them (The Romanovs, Ludendorff, The Ottoman Empire). Way less dry than John Keegan's "The First World War." Probably the best full war history book that I've read, it's pretty amazing how much it crams in without being too much of a doorstop.

I'm glad you weren't forced or pressured, though you do seem a little zealous when it comes to free-market ideology. Not to say there's anything wrong with that! We all have our passions in life.

It's just interesting that you seem zealous about free-market ideology and happen to attend a specific University center program that just happens to be funded by Charles Koch. Also, the author of the report you mentioned (Russell Sobel) just happens to be a Koch-funded academic at WVU. I'm sure he's not influenced at all by the funding either, especially when he blasts all regulations of all types. ;)


Are you aware that the conditions of many of Koch's academic grants are that his operatives in the program get free hand in selecting and approving resulting publications? This is where much (if not most) of the climate change denier research comes from. Does that bother you at all? (not that you were necessarily aware)

If you ever want to learn more about the Kochs and their influence, try to check this out in your spare time. Parts of it go into great detail about their inroads into academia. :)

I think that Sor Juana's plays in nahuatl are religious. And the music compositions in nahuatl are religious too.

The book I was talking about is the Florentine Codex. It is written in nahuatl and Spanish and it is about the Aztec world (customs, religion, and even animals and way of living). It was written by Indians that were taught to write, under the supervision of Fray Bernardino de Sahagún. If I remember correctly these people that learned arts and writing had been nobles before the conquest. It is hard to find sources on my phone. The book can be read online:

https://tecpaocelotl.livejournal.com/25254.html

I did not know about Tupi, but it sounds interesting. I will take a look at that. The Brazilian empire is a fascinating topic. I have seen some videos online that talk about it. I have never learned Portuguese, but I can get way more than the general idea. Brazilian YouTubers produce a lot of good videos about history!

In Mexico at first friars tried to evangelize in the indigenous languages, but because it is too much work (they did learned the languages, and even wrote grammars sometimes though) they decided to stick to nahuatl, the biggest language. They kept using the language also for some legal affairs until the crown changed the policy hundreds of years later. I read the detailed story in the following book:

https://www.amazon.com/Empires-Word-Language-History-World/dp/0060935723/ref=asc_df_0060935723/?tag=hyprod-20&linkCode=df0&hvadid=312155960128&hvpos=1o3&hvnetw=g&hvrand=11995308479004741996&hvpone=&hvptwo=&hvqmt=&hvdev=m&hvdvcmdl=&hvlocint=&hvlocphy=9007733&hvtargid=pla-452502828902&psc=1

What he says makes a lot of sense, but I have never tried to find other sources. I guess there are many sources in Spanish concerning the use of nahuatl after the conquest. This book also talks about the history of Portuguese and other global languages.

I read Vasconcelos' essay not long ago, because I found an article somewhere on the construction of the Mexican identity. It seems that the phenomenon of trying to find elements to be different from Europe at the end of the XIXth century happened all across Latin America then. Ironically nationalism at that time seemed to have been a European idea too.

I do not know of any other works like Vasconcelos', but you should look into what his friends were doing at the time. They might have had similar ideas. This is a TV show he made in the 50s:

https://youtu.be/Hmhq1bcnrKM

He appears in the show and mainly discusses history.

You should also look into Mexican muralism (ca 1920). The painters incorporate indigenous elements in their works (and socialism too):

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mexican_muralism

Come now, that's too sweet of you. And yeah, I myself am imprisoned by my books too. I dread the ideas of moving due to the sheer amount of books I have. I thought I was done with it since I bought a kindle 5 years ago but I threw it away after half a year 'cause I could not be without my hardcover books. And sometimes I feel like putting a good book under my pillow or on my night stand makes me feel closer to the book itself. Now if only I can read everything that I own is another problem...

Those are some solid suggestions. I definitely would love to devour...I mean read and appreciate them someday. I have to finish House of Leaves first. Goddamn it's exhausting to read that book but also quite rewarding. I also just ordered The Time Traveler's Guide to Medieval England. Was thinking about either medieval time or the growth of the Silk Road and ended up with medieval time.

We are such book worms, aren't we? I'd feel so bad if I end up with someone who doesn't like books 'cause I would be so boring and reading all the time.

Natural laws are not imposed on man like the prescriptive laws imposed by a government. I am capable of disobeying state-imposed laws, and the justice system is in place to take care of people who do, but I am unable to disobey the law of gravity. It is simply a fact of nature that gravity works as it does, not a prescriptive law imposed on man by an institution. The same goes for other natural laws.

Besides that, an institution is something instituted by people. In Sapiens, Noah Yuval Harari talks about how we create fictions that help shape how society works. One example is money. Money works because we all agree that it does, not because of any property inherent in the stuff we use for money. This would be an example of an institution. Likewise, the family is an institution among humans because of agreement among humans that it is one. Cats also mate and have children, but for them, there is no institution of the family, because they are unable to consider it as such and agree on making it one.

The power nature has over us is not due to how we think about nature, and we don't have the option of violating natural laws. Nature is a concrete reality we are subject to, not an institution.

For a more comprehensive look at Europe in the 20th century, touching on WW1, WW2, and The Cold War I suggest Out of Ashes by Konrad H. Jarausch. You can find reviews online and everyone is jizzing their pants over it, but I'm halfway through and I really like it. He's a great writer. For WW1 specifically, I'd suggest [A World Undone by G.J. Meyer] (http://www.amazon.com/World-Undone-Story-Great-1914/dp/0553382403/ref=sr_1_10?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1449775167&sr=1-10&keywords=ww1). I didn't read it personally, but my bff is a huge military historian and she liked that it gave a larger global viewpoint than other more European-centric ones. I haven't read it yet (but she keeps bugging me to lol).

I'm an Agnostic, So I'm not gonna be of much help here..But as you said Signs & Eclipses & End times and your Connection with it as gay.. If you don't mind I'm gonna suggest you two books by two authors & which changed my life ..And my thought about religion , god , who we we & what we can do.. Before That, i was a person who was scared of Religious Dogmas..Like Apocalypse, Or Whatever..But After Reading these & more I'm not scared of anything & I Respect Nature & everything around me more..

There are Lot Things we Don't Know About..I Would Say Never Supposed to Know about..Till Today People Don't Know That Gospels are 4 Separate books belong to different Time written by different authors & have completely different stories..& discrepancies with one other if you know how to read it you can she for it yourself, other than how you are TAUGHT to read it..

Similarly,
some biblical views of women are superior to others. And so the
apostle Paul’s attitude about women is that they could be and should
be leaders of the Christian communities—as evidenced by the fact
that in his own communities there were women who were church
organizers, deacons, and even apostles (Romans 16). That attitude is
much better than the one inserted by a later scribe into Paul’s letter
of 1 Corinthians, which claims women should always be silent in
the church (1 Corinthians​ 14:35–36), or the one forged under Paul’s
name in the letter of 1 Timothy, which insists that women remain
silent, submissive, and pregnant (1 Timothy 2:11–15) ..See, if you know how to Read the Bible...You Get to Know More about religion..

Okay its Enough about Religion..As I Said If You Have Time..Please Read The Books I Suggested..It will be helpful for you to separate nature & religion.. Natural Phenomenon Happens whether you connect it with religion or not..Eclipses happened 30000 Years Before, Ancient People Recorded It for Thousands of Year & Made Calendars for next thousands of Year.. it is Happening Now, It Will Happen In Future.. There is no stopping it by any means.. Instead of Fearing it because of Religion..LOVE IT ..Respect It..Admire it..Its a beautiful Phenomenon, and Just a small part of Nature..

Whichever Religion It Doesn't Matter, Being a Good Human is Important..Instead of Thinking about these things & fearing it..Be A Good Person, Help Others In Need ..Be Truthful to Yourself, Don't be Afraid or Ashamed to be Who you are..Stand Up for Yourself..& Love Everyone..The World Needs Love today than Anything..

From the Ashes of Angels: The Forbidden Legacy of a Fallen Race by Andrew Collins

Fingerprints of the Gods by Graham Hancock

There are Ebooks too ..If you can't wait for Paperback :) ...

Its not about preference. That's like saying the difference between slavery, feudalism and capitalism is whichever someone prefers living under. Its mutually exclusive.

Communism is not your "life your life to the fullest" type of philosophy akin to Buddhism. Its not a way of life or a way of thought, its a set of viewpoints and conceptions about the nature of society, and of its respective institutions, with private property being its main focus. Communism is about viewing the contemporary world as a result of its logical, material precedents, known as historical materialism. Its about gaining an understanding into the nature of property relations and essentially of capitalism.

Marx's viewpoint in looking at history essentially centered these principles

>1. The basis of human society is how humans work on nature to produce the means of subsistence.

>2. There is a division of labour into social classes (relations of production) based on property ownership where some people live from the labour of others.

>3. The system of class division is dependent on the mode of production.

>4. The mode of production is based on the level of the productive forces.

>5. Society moves from stage to stage when the dominant class is displaced by a new emerging class, by overthrowing the "political shell" that enforces the old relations of production no longer corresponding to the new productive forces. This takes place in the superstructure of society, the political arena in the form of revolution, whereby the underclass "liberates" the productive forces with new relations of production, and social relations, corresponding to it.

From this viewpoint he went on to conclude that capitalism inherently was a class system, based on an economic and political hierarchy, which give rise to many phenomenon that is harmful to humanity. Marx for example explained Imperialism as being the result of such a construct. This is a widely documented study and something you can find so easily.

Michael Parenti gives a good talk here which encompasses these ideas. I highly recommend watching it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GEzOgpMWnVs

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZTrY3TQpzw

If you never heard of the book "A People's History of the United States" by Howard Zinn, I also highly suggest it. Its a great and popular book that tells the history of the US through the perspective the American proletariat, and clearly explains how dominant role economic hierarchy plays in history.

You see, communism is not just an opposition to commercialized lifestyle, and what not, its an explanation as to very contemporary problems within society itself. Problems that are very much deeply rooted within the system. For example, the mass media and its operation as a business. Noam Chomsky, considered US's best intellectual, along with Edward Herman wrote a great book called Manufacturing Consent that
deals with this topic.

You're operating on a huge straw man. You see, communism is more about understanding society from a logical, scientific perspective, rather than creating some utopia. I can point you to a few more sources that you might find of interest. Or at least start with Wikipedia articles. But I do recommend at least watching the Michael Parenti clip. Chomsky has good talks to but I don't like hes style as much. You don't even have to call yourself a "communist" to accept that world view and knowledge.

I enjoyed reading Marriage, a History: How Love Conquered Marriage by Stephanie Coontz, which covers what relationships looked like in several different time periods and cultures. Its a really good book, and addresses the questions you're asking. I read it when I was thinking about getting engaged and it helped me think about what I wanted my marriage to look like. What feels like the widely-held 'ideal' status quo now (monogomous life partners who provide emotional satisfaction) really is a fairly new idea.

https://www.amazon.com/Marriage-History-How-Love-Conquered/dp/014303667X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1527796012&sr=8-1&keywords=coontz+marriage

Hmm ... The names were always of Arabic origin for me. Alnilam, Mintaka, Alnitak.

And it was always curved somewhat ... an arc of sorts.

Ancient Islam actually had very advanced astronomy and named so many of the stars and constellations. That was before the dark ages and all of that. Not exactly a history expert (but working on this) so I'm not sure of the exact terminology or timeframes, but you get what I mean. From early civilization to medieval times to Romantic times to now. Or something like that.

I am somewhat of an amateur astrophotographer and astronomer as well, and I particularly focus on Orion, and Sirius in Canis Major, and Aldebaran and the Pleiades in Taurus, because of their relevance and mention in the ancient mysteries -- The Sirius Mystery, The Dogon people in Africa, and The Orion Mystery. The Great Pyramids at Giza align with the belt. I believe Graham Hancock mentions this variously in his works like The Message of the Sphinx and Fingerprints of the Gods.

> Trumps level of popular support is not surprising at all

Some of the reasons why Trump supporters are angry are understandable. The fact that they believe anything he says, think he gives a shit about them, or will in any way make their lives better is asinine.

> The idea being that whether the founding fathers were libertarian in their ideals is actually quite debatable

You could make the argument that some founding fathers (using the broadest possible definition of that term) may have held some points of view that square with modern libertarian thought. Hell, I share some views with libertarians as well, with respect to personal and civil liberties, for example.

But it's a ridiculous leap to declare that they were united in their belief in libertarianism and a weak central government, or that the country was founded on those principles.

When people speak of the founding fathers they're generally referring to the authors of the Constitution (mainly Madison and Jefferson), and other highly influential characters that included George Washington, Ben Franklin, John Adams, and Thomas Payne. It's amusing to hear conservatives using these historical figures to support their positions considering they all held many political views that were in stark contrast to those held by today's Republicans or Libertarians.

There were many other signatories to the Constitution, some of which you might find more ideologically compatible with your beliefs, but those folks were on the margins and cannot claim the title of architects of the Constitution or intellectual founders of the nation.

The quotes I cited, not to mention the extensive historical literature available on the topic, make it clear that the country was founded by people with widely varying and often bitterly conflicting points of view and ideologies, and were united only by their determination to gain independence from England.

Suggested reading:

American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America

https://www.amazon.com/American-Nations-History-Regional-Cultures-ebook/dp/B0052RDIZA/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=#nav-subnav

First off, welcome! I have a book to recommend for you OP, American Nations, it provides some great perspective and history about the cultures in the US.

The book mentions something really interesting--the US isn't becoming more homogenous, it's instead becoming more divided as people move to areas with cultures they identify with. We're 'self-sorting'.

Anyway, I'm with a lot of others here. The government doesn't really represent anyone but the wealthy and powerful. From what I understand, BC is underrepresented in it's government.

The US government is not only violating our rights (NSA etc) but is either unwilling or unable to deal with environmental and social problems. We're looking at a future with increased automation (where are the jobs going to come from), climate change disasters, sustainability problems, oil reliance, etc. As I see it the government is paralyzed because of how the current system works. The country is too big, too divided, and too reliant on lobbyists. I don't think change has much of a chance that way.

Also, the Cascadia movement isn't just about independence. A lot of folks don't care about independence. The Cascadia movement is also about recognizing our shared culture and working together in this region. I'm a huge fan of this idea--we have to work together to deal with climate change and to deal with future natural disasters.

Edit: I want to add, I think it's easier to take risks and try new things when you're smaller and more localized. As a California transplant, I feel like the culture up here is more accepting of trying out new ideas.

Because humans have agreed upon rules that have evolved to be socially beneficial. This set of rules could take the form of cultural norms, language, or a constitution. What's important is that these systems (usually) exist because the confer some type of net benefit to the community that adopts them. In this case we can weigh the pros and cons of allowing non-citizens to vote in school board elections:

pro: They have more control over how their child is educated.

con: Inherent cultural norms could mean they advocate for a less effective education system.

And we can weigh the pros and cons of allowing non-citizens to vote in presidential elections:

pros: greater representation of the total world (idk I'm kinda reaching for this one)

cons: China can just decide our president.

Because we want a system that does the most good for citizens of the US we can easily say that allowing non-citizens to vote in presidential elections is bad. I'd argue that allowing non-citizens to vote in school board elections is much more up for debate.

If you're interested in the argument I was trying to present in the first paragraph I recommend Sapiens. The way Harari explains cultural norms is incredible! :)

Edit: grammar

It depends on what you're interested in really. You can get the general explanation of Federal Reserve, Illuminati, 9/11, CIA, NSA, etc from just about any YouTube video. Some books that have recently opened my mind to other topics, however include:

The Source Field Investigations by David Wilcock - The best written and most well-sourced book I've read concerning alternative history, conspiracy theories, suppressed science, and a host of other topics. Main thesis being that consciousness is a nonlocal field.

Fingerprints of the Gods by Graham Hancock - Some of the best evidence out there for a lost civilization which fell out of power and memory sometime around the end of the ice age. A bit outdated, but a sequel is due this year.

Genesis Revisted by Zecharia Sitchin - Read this if you want to understand why some people think the Annunaki are a thing. Some interesting info, but I don't really buy into it that much.

Dark Mission by Richard Hoagland - Occult history of NASA, coverups of what was found on the Moon, Mars, and some suppressed science.

The Holographic Universe by Michael Talbot - Exactly what it sounds like

Rather than reading about the same theories in different words over and over, these books gave me perspective on possible reasons why TPTB do what they do. And an idea on what some deeper purpose for their intensive consumerism propaganda might be for, other than profit. Additionaly they exposed me to new/old ideas on what the universe fundamentally is and how it works, with some good science to back it up. Highly recommend all of these books.

This seems like a word salad of assertions without any actual derivation from first principles. A first principles faith would be Thomism and it's already extensively mapped out with all sorts of variations. Maybe look into analytic Thomism? Physics, the multiverse, etc. would have to be first derived from metaphysical principles which aren't established here. I don't know what the first principles of the article are. It seems more like an aesthetic than a coherent set of beliefs.

You're trying to untangle what can and cant be coherently said about God. Sophisticated theology mapped out all these linguistic issues thousands of years ago, and in the analytic tradition continues to get more and more precise statements. It engages with the multiverse, the probabilistic logic of good/evil, what does and doesn't fit in a word game, all of that. You're unnecessarily reinventing the wheel here. I personally think analytic thomism is misguided and you're better served by a classical picture. But it is a whole field that seems to share your interests and made lots of rigorous logical progress.

Glad you liked it! That’s Ryan Cleckner, and I agree with you. I’ve really gotten into his stuff. He has more videos on YouTube (try searching “NSSF Ryan Cleckner”) and I’m loving going through his book (I’m a beginner). Best of luck!

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.

one of my Criminal Justice professors recommended this book: legacy of ashes
Not entirely focused on the MK Ultra but good nonetheless.
It's a very good read.

Also the Men Who stare at Goats a good cinematic example.

It's very intriguing to see how they added the program into the show. Very cool way to introduce 11 (messed up) but cool.

I do see a trend in people who do very poorly in IQ tests are very combative towards it because it can be very humbling. An IQ test doesn't define every piece of your intelligence and there can be exceptions to the rules such as someone with dyslexia who happens to excel in their field. IQ tests have purposes other than defining "intelligence" for each and every individual with 100% accuracy; it's actually somewhat interesting to run IQ tests against many different races of people and see where differences are. See the very controversial book "The Bell Curve" for example.

IQ tests are not perfect but you can graph a lot of data from it that will average out the minorities or exceptions to the rules such as your examples and still provide useful accurate data. On the other token, think of the "rain man type" who are very gifted savants who may or may not do horrible on an IQ test but also can't tie their shoe or recognize facial cues. You say what good is an IQ test if geniuses can do poorly on them? Some people might say what good is being a genius if you can't even take care of yourself?

So to your point IQ tests are not perfect and I don't think anyone is actually claiming they are, but they serve a purpose as a measuring device that can be used with other devices to produce useful data.

PART II

BUT there are problems with your prose too

There are times where you really do TELL us stuff that you should not.

>We had no idea of the horrors that lay ahead, only that the world we left was not alone. Someone had made a life here, someone not of our land, so it stood to reason that there were more of them out there and a new land that perhaps we could call home.


This is a bad TELL. Don’t let us know there is more horrors. Let us discover them as the narrator does.

Don’t tell us that people made a life here. SHOW us that they did.

> the scene was a thousand times more unsettling than before

This almost made me puke. This is terrible. DO NOT SAY SOMETHING WAS 1000X MORE UNSETTLING. Show us this. It is that simple. SHOW us why it was unsettling. Describe the scene, and let us revel in the quiet horror that you paint.

> I understood then that he was never a coward, but that he simply could not bear the sight of more death. Ironically, his exile brought him in contact with more death than we ever saw at home.


A thousand times NO. You CANNOT tell someone the point of the story. You MUST trust your reader to figure it out. If you do, then your ending will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine.

At other times, you use ineffective language:

> and cities buzzed like beehives,

This really tells us nothing. It really doesn’t. HOW do they buzz? What are the people doing (or what does the narrator imagine they are doing) that they are buzzing?

OK, on the whole there is middling-to-bad prose, with moments of just absolute mind-boggling brilliance. If you can practice your prose and get it all up the point of the first 4 paragraphs, you will dazzle all those who read your stuff.

You are a LONG-ASS way from this. But the fact is that you can do it. You have done it. You just need to train your writing so that you do it all the time.

So, get to it.

WORLD BUILDING/CONSISTENCY

There are a LOT of problems here. You don’t really lay out a accurate view of the black death. You have the characters describe artifacts that they have never encountered – using words that are commonly used by people familiar with these artifacts. You have them know things about the world they cannot (e.g. like which houses are better built, when they have never seen houses like it).

This is a major problem – but it is an EASY problem to solve

First, decide when you think this occurred. THEN, read a 2-6 books each on the periods of time – both in the Americas and Europe. This will give you a sense of what is reasonable to expect in the Europe setting and what the native Americans would be used to seeing (and not seeing).

If you want to go for the middle ages, I suggest the following (for Europe): The Time Traveller’s Guide to Medieval England. I have no good suggestions for the Americas.

Again, as written the world you have is not good enough to be credible, but this is readily solved via some research.

So, get to it.

CONCLUSIONS

I don’t say this often (ever?). You have the beginnings of an amazing story. Your strongest asset is your moments of amazing prose, and the fact that you have already established compelling characters with so little. If you expand this, while maintaining what is good and correcting what is bad, you will have quite a story. But there is much work to be done. You need a more fleshed out plot. You need more -- and more active -- characters, and you need a more believable story. NONE of these are problems that cannot be solved.

So…Get to it. :)

It's a bit of a mixed bag, if you look at the Politifact tracker. Even so, we're never going to have transparency into the DoD or intelligence operations. There's a book called Legacy of Ashes that points out that the very existence of an intelligence office is counter to an open democracy. That really made it clear to me that we can't actually have everything in the open, and we elect officials to be in those dim rooms seeing what we can't and making decisions in our best interest.

Proven a long, long time ago. You just aren't allowed to talk about it. Real differences too, like IQ, which is the greatest predictor of success in life far above things like family wealth and social status.

https://www.amazon.com/Bell-Curve-Intelligence-Structure-Paperbacks/dp/0684824299/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1505490989&sr=8-1&keywords=the+bell+curve

Well, obviously you should give Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics a thorough read.

A modern philosopher well known for his attempts at reviving virtue ethics is Alasdair MacIntyre - his seminal book on the subject is After Virtue.

Also, another philosopher, with virtue ethics in the baggage, who's more politically oriented would be Martha Nussbaum. She's noted for going on about her 'capabilities approach' for many years, and some people regard this as an equally viable political option to utilitarian/liberal minimal states or Rawlsian social democracies. The literature on the approach is rather massive, so I'd go give the SEF page on the subject a go for starters, as she also makes very compelling arguments strengthened by interdisciplinary research with experts from other fields.

Also, I highly recommend [this book](http://www.amazon.com/Contemporary-Political-Philosophy-Will-Kymlicka/dp/0198782748/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1414771070&sr=1- 1&keywords=contemporary+political+philosophy), as it has great chapters on communitarianism and citizenship theory, which draws heavily on the Aristotelian legacy - the citizenship theory chapter being especially great, since Kymlicka there points out how difficult it turns out to be trying to cultivate civil virtues in modern societies.

EDIT: grammar.

• Look through a few political science books
  
  
• Read from a few well respected publications:
  
  -The Economist
  
  -Slate
  
  -The Atlantic
  
  -Foreign Policy Magazine
  
  (Just to name a few well rounded publications.)
  
  
• Read an enormous amount of History Books.
  
  A People's History of the United States By Howard Zinn is a great primer, but I'm sure some people will say that it leans too far to the left. Either way I thought it was great, regardless of your political view.
  
  
• Debate with people. Seek out (constructive) debate with those that disagree with you. Constantly challenge your own ideas and preconceived notions.
  
  
• Rinse and Repeat.
  
  EDIT:
  
  
• Also, I forgot the most important thing: Constantly study and improve your skills in this subject. Without it, everything else is useless.
  
  

First of all, can I just say how much I love giving and receiving book recommendations? I was a religious studies major in college (and was even a T.A. in the World Religions class) so, this is right up my alley. So, I'm just going to take a seat in front of my book cases...

General:

1. A History of God by Karen Armstrong
   
   
2. The Great Transformation by Karen Armstrong
   
   
3. Myths: gods, heroes, and saviors by Leonard Biallas (highly recommended)
   
   
4. Natural History of Religion by David Hume
   
   
5. Beyond Tolerance by Gustav Niebuhr
   
   
6. Acts of Faith by Eboo Patel (very highly recommended, completely shaped my view on pluralism and interfaith dialogue)
   
   
7. The Evolution of God by Robert Wright
   
   Christianity:
   
   
8. Tales of the End by David L. Barr
   
   
9. The Historical Jesus by John Dominic Crossan
   
   
10. Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography by John Dominic Crossan
    
    
11. The Birth of Christianity by John Dominic Crossan
    
    
12. Who Wrote the New Testament? by Burton Mack
    
    
13. Jesus in America by Richard Wightman Fox
    
    
14. The Five Gospels by Robert Funk, Roy W. Hoover, and the Jesus Seminar (highly recommended)
    
    
15. Remedial Christianity by Paul Alan Laughlin
    
    Judaism:
    
    
16. The Jewish Mystical Tradition by Ben Zion Bokser
    
    
17. Who Wrote the Bible? by Richard Elliot Friedman
    
    Islam:
    
    
18. Muhammad by Karen Armstrong
    
    
19. No God but God by Reza Aslan
    
    
20. Approaching the Qur'an: The Early Revelations by Michael Sells
    
    Buddhism:
    
    
21. Buddha by Karen Armstrong
    
    
22. Entering the Stream ed. Samuel Bercholz & Sherab Chodzin Kohn
    
    
23. The Life of Milarepa translated by Lobsang P. Lhalungpa
    
    
24. Introduction to Tibetan Buddhism by John Powers
    
    
25. Zen Flesh, Zen Bones compiled by Paul Reps (a classic in Western approached to Buddhism)
    
    
26. Buddhist Thought by Paul Williams (if you're at all interested in Buddhist doctrine and philosophy, you would be doing yourself a disservice by not reading this book)
    
    Taoism:
    
    
27. The Essential Chuang Tzu trans. by Sam Hamill & J.P. Seaton
    
    Atheism:
    
    
28. Atheism by Julian Baggini
    
    
29. The Future of an Illusion by Sigmund Freud
    
    
30. Doubt: A History by Jennifer Michael Hecht
    
    
31. When Atheism Becomes Religion by Chris Hedges
    
    
32. Atheism: The Case Against God by George H. Smith

I'm not sure if this is exactly what you are looking for, but you could try Marriage, a History. It's a non-fiction book about the shift in the culture of marriage and the growing importance of romantic love over time. It was written in 2006!

There were also several layouts proposed for the table, and debates on how best to arrange the elements.

It's also easier to see that they fit in this configuration because it's a human invention. Elements as we know them are just electrons, protons, and neutrons. Certain electron shells convey certain properties, and have been arranged to show the most in common properties.

For a good read on this topic, check out The Disappearing Spoon. It has some history behind the discovery of various elements.

Yes, Muslims don't worship Christ, but they do recognize him as a prophet- though not as great as the prophet Mohammed. Similarly, Christians recognize Abraham, Isaac, Moses (and many others) as prophets even though they were Jews and are also considered prophets by Jews.

If you want to go by the almighty Wikipedia, check out this handy chart.

Also, some more reputable sources: here, here, here

While I don't believe in any religion, I do think it's interesting to learn about their origins and tenets. If you're interested in reading a very well-written book on the subject, I quite enjoyed Reza Aslan's No god but God

> Think of a medieval market where people met at a specific place at a specific time to directly exchange goods

they didn't. They used coins. Minted in silver, roughly 230 pennies to the pound.

>Is this a market?

Yes because they had buyers, sellers, and price tags.

>Is a system of semi-formal gift exchange a market in some sense?

no, it's a gift exchange. Push, not pull. In general:

give someone a gift, you're typically not obligated to reciprocate.

In a white elephant multi-person rotation exchange, everyone must throw one gift into the pot in order to participate. No this isn't a market.

>I think your definition is perfectly reasonable btw, it just seems more like a personal rubric.

It is; that's why I'm trying to see who can poke holes on it. I got it from a Science Paper involving non-humans (mice). So it's an objective standpoint for something not familiar with those price tags (mice).

Fakta om IQ, eller g (generell intelligensfaktor)

• Hög ärftlighet (r = 0.5-0.8)
  
• Korrelerar med hjärn- och skallstorlek (r = 0.2-0.4 beroende på mätmetod)
  
• Har prediktiv validitet (skolbetyg, lön, utbildning, arbetseffektivitet, succesivt bättre förmåga att lösa kognitiva problem för varje percentil etc.)
  
• Hög reliabilitet (r > 0.9) för återtest av samma individ senare i livet
  
• Validitet och reliabilitet är densamma för samtliga folkslag.
  
• Svarta i USA erhåller i genomsnitt en standardavvikelse (1 σ) lägre resultat än vita européer som i sin tur erhåller ungefär en halv standardavikelse lägre resultat än östasiater.
  
  Detta är konsensus i forskningen. Även forskare som exempelvis Richard Nisbett eller James Flynn, som tror att gruppskillnaderna är helt och hållet miljömässiga instämmer i det som skrivs ovan. Ingen insatt i forskningen tror på det typiska "IQ mäter ingenting", "IQ gynnar västerlänningar", "IQ mäter en minimal del av intelligens". Sådana påståenden visar att man ej läst litteraturen, exempelvis Nisbett, Murray och Herrnstein eller Mackintosh.
  
  Huruvida intelligensskillnaderna mellan grupperna (svarta-vita-asiater) beror på arv, miljö eller en kombination är mer spekulativt och här får man bilda sig en egen uppfattning genom att tillgodogöra sig argumenten från båda sidor. Här (kort och lättläst) är en bra sammanfattning av argument för och emot en ärftlig komponent till gruppskillnaderna skriven av Rushton & Jensen som tror på en 50-50-modell (observera att ingen tror på en 100% ärftlig modell, striden står mellan de som tror på 100% miljö mot de som tror på ungefär 50% miljö/50% arv).
  
  Data att fundera över (diagram):
  
  
• Minnesota Transracial Adoption Study
  
  
• Koreanska och icke-koreanska adoptivbarn mot infödd befolkning i Sverige
  
  
• Amerikanska högskoleprovet SAT, efter inkomst och ras
  
  
• Piffer (2015):
  
  > Published Genome Wide Association Studies (GWAS), reporting the presence of alleles exhibiting significant and replicable associations with IQ, are reviewed. The average between-population frequency (polygenic score) of nine alleles positively and significantly associated with intelligence is strongly correlated to country-level IQ (r = .91). Factor analysis of allele frequencies furthermore identified a metagene with a similar correlation to country IQ (r = .86). The majority of the alleles (seven out of nine) loaded positively on this metagene. Allele frequencies varied by continent in a way that corresponds with observed population differences in average phenotypic intelligence. Average allele frequencies for intelligence GWAS hits exhibited higher inter-population variability than random SNPs matched to the GWAS hits or GWAS hits for height. This indicates stronger directional polygenic selection for intelligence relative to height. Random sets of SNPs and Fst distances were employed to deal with the issue of autocorrelation due to population structure. GWAS hits were much stronger predictors of IQ than random SNPs. Regressing IQ on Fst distances did not significantly alter the results nonetheless it demonstrated that, whilst population structure due to genetic drift and migrations is indeed related to IQ differences between populations, the GWAS hit frequencies are independent predictors of aggregate IQ differences.

Thank you very much for expounding on that. So much of what you say rings with truth.

>That was probably more than you wanted to know? :)

No, you reply was wonderful, and I appreciate you taking the time to write it.

Now that I understand the terms a bit better, I understand that I broke away from the blank slate model about a decade ago when I read The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life. It discussed the evidence that IQ is both largely heritable (and less environmental) and affects life outcome in almost every way. I thought the book was compelling. What surprised me was the outcry from academia. I realized then that they had some sort of egalitarian agenda that they didn't want disturbed.

>I am so fucking hungover dude and now I gotta read your wall of text bullshit at fucking 2 in the morning. Whiny cunt.

Nice start, 15 lines ain't a wall, only for you hominoidea.

>Ok, assuming your assertion is accurate and backed up (Race Realism tires me greatly),why does that literally matter for anything? At all?

It matters about virtually everything, as for wealth/education levels to criminality/birth out of wedlock, intelligence is a great predictor, which seems you don't have much. For pisa and timss for example the correlation is around 0.8.

>STUDIES SAY SO BUT I AIN'T GONNA LINK SHIT.

Since you can't search for shit, here goes:

Heritability IQ

Heritability IQ Wiki

Bell Curve

IQ and Global Inequality

A Study of Jewish Intelligence and Achievement

More about Jews

Blacks commit more violent crimes and poverty isn't correlated:

Truth about crime

A little bit of Harris

>'THESE ANIMALS ARE GONNA BREED AND WE GOTTA LEAVE THEM IN FILTH' That is what you said, dude. In fact, I would respect you more if you just came out and said it, or retracted your prior statement, not become a whiny cunt when someone treats you at the same level as your (repugnant) statements.

First world people aren't responsible for the chaos and irresponsibility by african adults. Africa had 200 million people at the start of 1900, now it's 1.216 billion and it's still sky rocketing. They need to become self-sustainable without european aid.

>That statement pisses me off, I've seen it kicked around ad nauseum, as if when people say that 'all men are born equal', they're like 'WELL ASCHTUALLY, WE ARE BIOLOGICALLY DIFFERENTTT'. No fuckwad, that's not what such a sentiment means. It means that, regardless, everybody should be treated with a baseline of respect and dignity. No more, no less.

Never said people needed to lose their natural rights, aid isn't a natural right.

>GUESS FUCKING WHY? IT AIN'T BECAUSE THEY'RE 'THE SUPERIOR INTELLECTUAL RACE', IT'S BECAUSE THOSE ARE FIRST WORLD CIVILIZATIONS WHO DON'T SHIT IN A TROUGH. That is why people get frustrated with you as an individual, because you're dense. Abjectly dense.

You need a smart population to maintain good institutions and have professions, which requires higher cognitive abilities.

>Refer to the above. But regardless, keeping them in poor conditions won't stop any suffering. I abjectly fail to see your amazing solution to this issue. 'IF WE KEEP THEM IN POVERTY, THEY'LL JUST DIE OUT OR SOMETHING'. Nope, they'll just continued to be impoverished and continue to have more dying kids. Good job.

Lack in food supply would force african parents to considerate their number of children and their capability to feed them, like any adult needs. Also, there is no duty to send aid and most of the aid is stolen by the african elite.

>Stop spreading bullshit. Abject bullshit.

The demographics of Africa only exploded because of european technology and aid, if that stabilises is another story, regardles, there is no duty to give aid.

>GUESS FUCKING WHY? IT AIN'T BECAUSE THEY'RE 'THE SUPERIOR INTELLECTUAL RACE', IT'S BECAUSE THOSE ARE FIRST WORLD CIVILIZATIONS WHO DON'T SHIT IN A TROUGH. That is why people get frustrated with you as an individual, because you're dense. Abjectly dense.

They have higher intelligence and intelligent people tend to have less children and invest more on them.

>I dislike your assertion that, because I share an ideology, we are somehow comparable. Or I should have 'x, y and z' beliefs. Eat a dick.

Because antinatalists rely on human nature and evolution to support their claims, but there will be always people like you in any political spectrum.


Cheers.








>

The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of the Elements by Sam Kean is a really good book and covers a lot of chemistry. It is well written and engaging and has a lot of fun facts and accounts of scientists.

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.

I loved that book! I think the author has a few others - I remember liking the Violinist's Thumb as well by the same dude.

I also really liked the book Napoleon's Buttons: How 17 Molecules Changed History.

I have some more on my bookshelf, let me run up and check what I've got. I also found I like reading about non chemistry but still science things. I'm getting a Ph.D. in organic and sometimes it's nice to break out of chemistry. I tend to like reading about plagues, or anything by Oliver Sacks.

If you want a super interesting read into America's failures at espionage, Legacy of Ashes is a great read. We are decades behind other nations as far as infiltrating successfully and keeping our people alive.

Probably a lot more detail than you're asking for, but this is a great, easy to read book on what medieval europe was actually like to live in.

I've never read "The Selfish Gene," so I'm not sure my suggestion will be any good, but I loved reading "The Disappearing Spoon" by Sam Keane.

It's basically a collection of narratives that have to do with various elements on the periodic table. Loved every minute of it.

Dan Carlin is so fun to listen to. If you enjoyed Blueprint for Armageddon make sure to pick up "Wrath of the Khans," about the rise and zenith of the Mongol Empire. You can listen to it 4 times through and still hear new things on every listen... trust me haha.

Also, if you're interested in WW1 literature, this is required reading: https://www.amazon.com/World-Undone-Story-Great-1914/dp/0553382403

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.

This is a huge question, if I were you, I would do a combination of reading the book "American Nations"

And to get a better political understanding(which does in general inform culture quite a bit), read this report https://hiddentribes.us/

It's well regarded, long, but very very good. I think the report is fascinating.

No one of note takes the NAP seriously enough to critique. For example, a rudimentary search on google scholar for "non aggression principle" or "NAP" returns irrelevant results concerning psychology, biology and international relations and inbetween those a few self-published papers by mises libertarians like Kinsella or Block.

The right-libertarian philosopher Matt Zwolinski, associated with the "bleeding heart libertarians" crowd, has a post arguing against the NAP here (and Kevin Vallier here) where he argues that the NAP might simultaneously be too counter-intuitively restrictive and too counter-intuitively permissive a principle, but again, no serious papers on the subject.

A basic point (which Zwolinski partially makes) is that the NAP is either incompattible with the libertarian / anarchocapitalist (or any other political) project, if it can not authorize any initiation of force (where by force is meant acting or threatening to act on another's physical body or some similar day-to-day definition of violence), or insofar as it authorizes the initiation of force in defence of property titles (and construes this force as defensive in the special sense that it responds to an infringement on one's -property- rights and not in the sense that it responds to previously excercised force in the day-to-day sense), it is parasitic on a prior theory of justice (such as a theory of property rights) which must (in order to avoid obvious circularity) make no reference back to the NAP. However arguing for that theory of property rights succesfully would already authorize the use of force in defense of those titles, and thus the NAP would then appear to be redundant within the libertarian project, and more than this, under this interpretation the NAP would be seen to be trivially consistent with any and all political projects. The rawlsian blogger Matt Bruenig sort of makes similar points here. It's obvious the NAP isn't popular with people named "Matt". Yet again, no published papers on this, since academic philosophers don't think this argument requires any special attention to it (i.e., they don't take it seriously enough to write a paper on how wrong it is).

A good critical introduction to libertarianism in general is the fourth chapter of Kymlicka's Contemporary Political Philosophy: An Introduction (here is a preview I could find on scribd)

Note: This is generally a very good introduction to polphil, which is sometimes used as a textbook in universities that teach the subject. The chapter on libertarianism introduces the two best arguments for deontological libertarianism, made by Nozick and Gauthier, and then proceeds to outline the major arguments that have been made against them to date. These indicate some serious problems with libertarianism that aspiring libertarians should take care to resolve. It mentions Flew, so you might be interested in subsection 4. "Libertarianism as Liberty". At any rate, it's a book worth reading to acclimate yourself with how polphilosophers argue.

There is also Cohen's "Self-ownership, freedom and equality" and his reply to Narveson. If you are interested but can't find any of those, send a PM my way, and we'll see what can be done to remedy that.

Don't get caught up in labels like "races" or "breeds" etc, here are the basics:

When different communities of the same organism live in different environments they adapt to their situation. This is the basis of evolution.

Darwin's finches are a great example. You can also look at dogs like greyhounds and huskies. The one developed in a dry environment and the other in the cold.

This does not mean that a greyhound is better than a husky, it just means that they have different inherent AVERAGE population attributes. Now what makes it more interesting is that these attributes are spread over Bell curves. So while your average greyhound is faster than your average husky, there is an overlap where your very fast husky beats your slow greyhound.

This is why it is very dangerous to generalise about people. So while the average black IQ is 80, nine out of ten times you are bound to run into the 1% with a gifted intellect.

The sad thing is that we want the world to be equal and fair, thus we are very reluctant to admit to inherent differences. This cognitive dissonance prevents us from effectively addressing problems arising from these differences.

Relevant reading materials:

http://www.nature.com/scitable/topicpage/pharmacogenetics-personalized-medicine-and-race-744

http://www.jenjdanna.com/blog/2012/7/10/forensics-101-race-determination-based-on-the-skull.html

http://www.amazon.com/Bell-Curve-Intelligence-Structure-Paperbacks/dp/0684824299

Try reading the book "Legacy of Ashes" by Tim Wiener because it is a good non-biased history of the CIA. It will tell you about how they have behaved in the past as well as give you a good history about the CIA. They have done some very questionable stuff but they have also acted in the best interests of the USA at times. It really is a tough call but reading more about the history of them might help.

https://www.amazon.com/Legacy-Ashes-History-Tim-Weiner/dp/0307389006/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1511592188&sr=8-1&keywords=legacy+of+ashes

If I had to choose one single book to recommend about Vietnam it would be Neil Sheehan's superb A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam

Also essential:

• Bernard Fall's Street Without Joy
  
  
• David Halberstam's The Best and the Brightest
  
  
• Daniel Ellsberg's Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers
  
  
• Tim Weiner's Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA(not specifically about Vietnam, but goes into a great bit of detail regarding the CIA's involvement in south-east Asia. Illuminating.)
  
  
• David W.P. Elliott's The Vietnamese War: Revolution and Social Change in the Mekong Delta, 1930-1975
  
  Hope this helps!

No, I'm not. I just read "the book". :D

​

If you want to learn more about long range shooting, there's a great book by Ryan Cleckner called "Long Range Shooting Handbook." I highly recommend it.

​

https://www.amazon.com/Long-Range-Shooting-Handbook-Cleckner/dp/151865472X

​

He also did several great videos for the National Shooting Sports Foundation that are on YouTube. And he's got a podcast that's really good too.

I guess science and data are racist now lmao

Here ya go:
https://www.amazon.com/Bell-Curve-Intelligence-Structure-Paperbacks/dp/0684824299

The findings are pretty well accepted at this point. Scientific figures like Richard Dawkins have acknowledged the findings as legitmate, just "not useful to talk about".

But sure, go ahead and stick your head in the sand rather than engage in dialogue. Ignorance is bliss.

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

> For example, how much words you would create if you have only 2 letters?

Are you serious? That makes no sense. If you have e.g. only 10 letters you can create exactly 1814400 different 8 letter words, so one could assume that 10 letters is enough for a language that would have close to two million 8-letter words, which would be more than enough for anything since one needs to know ~1000 words to understand 75% of English.

That's simply not how languages are formed/transformed, nor "measured". E.g. German is considered the most expressive language because whenever there's a term missing for something they simply lump words together and they have a new word (and that's the reason behind claims of superior German philosophy). So it's not "how many words can one invent", but "how much information can one put in the least number of words".

But I honestly believe that you should learn a bit more about languages, even from popular literature like Steven Pinker, but I'd always suggest Empires of The World to anyone.

Go for it. I hope it works out for you.

I'm interested in going back to school to study linguistics/history. This book cemented the idea that language is fundamentally the most important aspect of individuals, society and humanity as a whole.

Good luck!

The Joe Rogan Experience with Graham Hancock #142 These two episodes of the podcast are both a must watch

The Joe Rogan Experience with Graham Hancock #160

Fingerprints of the Gods by Graham Hancock is a good book to start with.

Revelations of the Pyramids is a great documentary. I've seen this one at least a dozen times.

Graham Hancock's "Quest For The Lost Civilization" documentary is a bit on the slower side, but still very informative. He also has a ton of conferences and videos on his youtube channel.

The Pyramid Code & Magical Egypt are both good series.

Hope this helps!

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.

I'm super curious to learn whatever you find. I read Marriage, A History (https://www.amazon.com/Marriage-History-How-Love-Conquered/dp/014303667X) a while back and it had a lot of great info, but it was focused on the overall arc of what marriage has meant through most of time (spoiler alert: nobody gave a shit about love in marraige until very recently), versus taking an in-depth look at what happened in the US during/after the Civil Rights movement.

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

We do know why they're happening.

Have you ever read a history book? Generally speaking every single discussion* they ever had required a "note taker" and it's our custom to speak about these decisions a couple decades after. Obviously the whole truth isn't out there, and certainly not everyone tells the truth. But the motives behind everything I mentioned were clear as day.

I would encourage you to read books like

http://www.amazon.com/Legacy-Ashes-The-History-CIA/dp/0307389006

http://www.amazon.com/Osama-Bin-Laden-Michael-Scheuer/dp/0199898391

http://www.amazon.com/One-Minute-Midnight-Kennedy-Khrushchev/dp/1400078911

These men aren't all powerful, they don't take orders from some homogenous group that always retains the same position. And most importantly the information our leaders are given is often woefully inaccurate. The president more than anyone has the information that he is presented to him manipulated. Although some certainly have been more savvy than others.

The substance of civilization. Technically about materials, but this is a great read.

Napoleon's buttons more a collection of stories about how chemistry mattered in society. Very enjoyable though their little briefs on how chemistry works might bore you, but they are quick. and the book is a lot of fun.

Molecules of murder I didn't have time to finish this one, but the parts I got too were quite good. He is an analytical chemist and it comes across in his writing.

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.

I really enjoyed my reading of "A World Undone: The Story of the Great War, 1914 to 1918" https://www.amazon.com/dp/0553382403/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_Eh21AbS0PCY5A
Covers all aspects and "fronts" in a very interesting way. I highly recommend it. I was in the same place you were now and this was my first book in my journey (I've since read about a dozen books on the war, and I keep wanting more!) Hope you find your book of choice and enjoy the topic as much as I have!

>A claim whose veracity can never be tested or verified. Got it.

Do you only believe in what is scientifically verifiable?

>if it occurs, can be measured,

What? how would you measure it? is there some god-o-meter i don't know about?? I mean most theist will say that god instigated the universe which makes the laws of physics essentially the action of god if done with intention. But say, look at a miracle, how can you test it using science which is methodologically naturalist when supernatural miracles are by their nature non-repeatable phenomena. The second science can test or replicate a miracle it is no longer a miracle the question is malformed.

>Which of the thousands, millions or billions of definitions of god are we talking about?

The core claim of all monotheistic traditions today which also lies at the heart of many other traditions: this is of a necessary premise, common to all classical theistic philosophies. That is god as the source and ground and end of all reality. The immaterial transcendent reality of which all things are contingent upon. This can describe Brhama,the Sihk god the Abrahamic gods, it applies to various Mahayana formulations of the Buddha consciousness or nature or even earlier the conception of the unconditioned, or to certain aspects of the tao.

For a more thorough explanation go to David Bentley Hart's work The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss
https://www.amazon.com/The-Experience-God-Being-Consciousness/dp/0300166842

This, essential belief that all major religious traditions have some premonition of is what I'm concerning.

>What if it was actually an alien? You'd just be fooling yourself into believing something that you wanted to believe, not believing what actually is.

Thats kinda my point... science cannot prove or disprove god, there will never be a way to be certain even if he walked up to you and said hello

The existence of god is and always will be an a priori claim, now you can dispute all a priori knowledge but that is a different question for another time. The fact of the matter is that science cannot prove or disprove the existence of god, it is a category error (at least regarding the vast majority of major world religions)

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 wouldn't hold my breath... The CIA has been up to some pretty shady shit for a long time- For a good, tidy account of the historical highs and lows of the CIA, check out Legacy of Ashes
by Tim Weiner. A good read but definitely not does make one very proud to be an American at times. That and the special cocktail of hubris, stupidity, and lack of accountability that the CIA displays is breathtaking.

This might. Private funding, funneled through philantropic foundations to charitable and social causes. Aimed and organized specifically to swing close elections, influence their idea of a conservative ideology and culture and hand-pick candidates in their service. Billions of dollars from very very rich donors. Candidates either toe their line or find themselves either without funding, or run out of primaries. Paul Ryan and many others are featured.

Lots of names, lots of details. One of the best books I've read on american politics in a long time.

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.

First and foremost: the Scandinavian ancestry and cultural values that came with it.

Pretty much everything else people have listed flows from that: work ethic, practicality, emphasis on education, mix of capitalism can-do attitude and well funded social programs.

Scandinavian countries usually rank really highly worldwide in all of the things you mentioned. Minnesota is an extension of that.

It's a good reminder that "white" people in America are not homogenous. Check out the book American Nations by Colin Woodard. He doesn't go into Minnesota so specifically, as I recall, but he covers the vastly different histories and backgrounds of the people that regions of our country were populated by and how much those original values and principles still explain politics and such today.

American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America
https://www.amazon.com/American-Nations-History-Regional-Cultures-ebook/dp/B0052RDIZA

This is a pretty good book that you'll find interesting, I think: https://www.amazon.com/Empires-Word-Language-History-World/dp/0060935723

This one should be good, too: https://www.amazon.com/Last-Lingua-Franca-English-Return/dp/0802717713

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.

Don't get so butt hurt dude, I am not attempting to smear his character. I am simply pointing out he has made serious mistakes of judgment in the past.

If you are interested, my source is the national book award winning Legacy of Ashes. A very interesting book in which Gates tenure is examined, amongst all directors.

https://www.amazon.com/Bell-Curve-Intelligence-Structure-Paperbacks/dp/0684824299/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1527199813&sr=8-1&keywords=the+bell+curve

This book compares genders for IQ.
The smartest men are smarter than the smartest women.

The number of lowest IQ men is greater than the number of lowest IQ women.

This would suggest that "the glass ceiling" is just an artifact of which gender is smarter in aggregate.

Women try to redefine the problem and it does not work.

This here is just bursting at the seems with real life examples of the state doing its best to save small property owners from the predation of the ultra wealthy. Can't imagine how "please don't dump mercury into the river that waters my farm" would go over without the state there to back that up.

The Disappearing Spoon is a great book if you are interested in how the periodic table shaped the history of the world. It's a really easy read and offers a lot of history and science facts that you may have not otherwise come across.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Disappearing-Spoon-Periodic-Elements/dp/0316051640

I took an undergraduate class called "History and Philosophy of Science (Chemistry)", but that involved multiple books.

I'd recommend you start with a popular science novel such as Napoleon's Buttons: How 17 Molecules Changed History.

The Chemical Tree by Bock and The History of Chemistry by John Hudson are more academic history texts of the development of chemistry. To read and understand these books you probably need to be a chemist yourself. They are more targeted towards teaching a class.

Thanks for asking, I was about to ask this question too.

Anyways here's my contribution, haven't read it yet (as I was reading another book recently) but here you go:

https://www.amazon.com/Language-Death-Canto-Classics-Crystal/dp/1107431816

Language Death.

https://www.amazon.com/Empires-Word-Language-History-World/dp/0060935723/ref=pd_bxgy_14_img_2?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=B4NRG3VGFM2K6R058R97

This one is recommended with "language death", seems interesting but I'm not sure how it is.

One I recently read from my library was Lingo, https://www.amazon.com/Lingo-Around-Europe-Sixty-Languages/dp/0802124070/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1479413646&sr=1-1&keywords=lingo and this oe was a pretty fun light read, with little tid bits about 60 languages from Europe.

Hey r/kappa! Since I was not chosen for the winter komike, that means I'll have more time to focus on improving my fundamentals, as well as doing more fighting game related NSFW art. Hopefully I'll be able to post here more often from now on!

I have also been reading quite a lot recently. Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari has been as inspirational as lord Daigo's book to me. Highly Recommended.

Yes, it was a Princeton study iirc... a short summary can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5tu32CCA_Ig

If you're interested in a detailed and quite focused historical review of how the US went from democracy to oligarchy I would recommend Jane Mayer's, "Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right"

I also started by watching Sniper 101. This is a better source for all the information found there.
It's available as an ebook and physically. I largely consider the series useful to a point, but not worth the 40+ hour investment. You can learn everything you need in much less time, and without massive tangential ramblings and half an hour of self-aggrandizing per video.

His whole "thing" basically boils down to "record your shots under every known condition so you can hit on a cold bore shot by referencing what you've already done." Requires a notebook to go shooting, in addition to the logbook most snipers use.

A ballistic calculator will basically get you there with a lot less effort.

Some people know this, others don't- you might have heard it already- but don't clean your bore from the muzzle side. That's probably the best tip I can give you to protect you from making a mistake early on.

In the book, however, there is one thing I disagree with, that's my personal preference (and I am by no means an expert- check my flair). The author likes second focal plane scopes; I prefer first focal plane. It's mostly about how you use the rifle, and what you're comfortable with.

What?

Read the book. You can get a used copy for $5 at amazon. Great summer reading, well written, fascinating. You might just learn a few things you never knew.

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.

That sounds awesome! I'm currently building a world for a book. And something like this seems super helpful. Do you think it's the same as this one, even though the cover isn't quite the same? https://www.amazon.com/Time-Travelers-Guide-Medieval-England/dp/1439112908

read all about it -- and the whole CIA corruption of Planet Earth -- https://www.amazon.com/Legacy-Ashes-History-Tim-Weiner/dp/0307389006 -- still ongoing running our foreign policy for the good of Banksters, Multi-national Corps, and Military Industrial Complex ... under the guise of freedom & democracy until US rules planet earth's people and natural resources

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.

The $20 spring kit for the Compass from Mcarbo helped me a lot, brings the trigger way down and does it safely from what I can tell. Before I installed that kit, I was actually moving the reticle just trying to squeeze the trigger on the lowest setting. With it installed it feels somewhere around 2-3lbs, breaks a lot cleaner, and there's no more jump when I squeeze the trigger. Also, if you're dialing distance with your turrets, you want a bubble level attached to the scope. A $10 one off amazon is doing fine for me. Without one, a couple degrees of cant between shots is inches (or feet) off at distance.

Also, even as an experienced shooter, when I started getting involved with long range this book from Ryan Cleckner taught me quite a few tips that made me even better.

I also bought a T/C Compass this year in 6.5CM, got a discounted shooting mat on Midway, a $20 bipod off amazon and a $100 UTG scope. I plan on upgrading to a Vortex, but the so-so UTG scope does okay for now. With that setup, I'm handloading Hornady ELD-X bullets and am doing a good job whapping golf balls at 300 yards currently.

I think the book Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind might be an enlightening read for you. Particularly the first half has great information about the emergence of religion and how certain religions came to be dominant in the world we know today.

On a much more basic note than the previous comment:

In the book Napoleon's Buttons there is a very good introduction to organic chemistry notationand how organic molecules are drawn. I recommend it to anyone who is learning any level of chemistry. I need to re-read it to determine if it is accessible (i.e. - can it be easily understood) for a high school audience. It is certainly accessible to any college level student.

Nice! If you haven't I'd recommend picking up a copy of the long range shooting handbook: https://www.amazon.com/Long-Range-Shooting-Handbook-Cleckner/dp/151865472X

It's not exhaustive, but it was pretty useful in coming up to speed (and cutting through the chaff).

John Espositio has written several books about Islam. He is a staunch Catholic. Islam: The Straight Path is really good.

I Karen Armstrong has written some books as well that I've heard are good, but I haven't read them myself.

No God but God by Reza Aslan is good too, but it has some controversial things regarding the beginnings of Islam.

Thanks. You still might want to read it just because Diamond's thesis is pretty unique so it's enjoyable to read.

It's quite a controversial book but if you want the opposite perspective of Diamond, Wade's "A Troublesome Inheritance" is among the best: https://www.amazon.com/Troublesome-Inheritance-Genes-Human-History/dp/1594204462. The other obvious contender is Charles Murray's The Bell Curve, though there's basically only chapter that's relevant to this discussion, and unsurprisingly it's the chapter that has gotten him the most praise and the most criticism: https://www.amazon.com/Bell-Curve-Intelligence-Structure-Paperbacks/dp/0684824299

For criticism of Diamond from someone opposed to Wade/Murray, try Wertheim's review in the Nation (it's short): http://www.columbia.edu/~saw2156/HunterBlatherer.pdf in which he argues that even Diamond is too deterministic.

do yourself a favor and read "A World Undone"

this book is an amazing look at ww1 and the individuals that drove the war... I studied WW1 in college (history major) and this book stands out as one of my all time favorites.

>Spencer invited two prominent members of the movement to join him. One was Peter Brimelow, the founder of the website VDARE.com, which the Southern Poverty Law Center describes as an "immigrant-bashing hate site that regularly publishes works by white supremacists, anti-Semites, and others on the radical right." (Brimelow freely admitted during the event that he publishes white nationalists.) The other was Jared Taylor, a self-described "race realist" who explained why the white race is superior to all others (except for East Asians, he said, who are superior to whites)

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/09/alt-right-makes-its-main-stream-debut

>He added, “the alt right accepts that race is a biological fact and that it’s a significant aspect of individual and group identity and that any attempt to create a society in which race can be made not to matter will fail.”

Read more: http://dailycaller.com/2016/08/26/the-intellectual-godfather-of-the-alt-right-talks-to-the-daily-caller/#ixzz4XBkyMSQU

>Spencer declared in 2013, "We need an ethno-state so that our people can 'come home again,' can live amongst family and feel safe and secure,"

http://www.dailywire.com/news/11089/5-things-know-about-alt-right-leader-richard-aaron-bandler


And very anecdotally I have engaged several alt-right trump supporters in why exactly they are prejudiced towards Hispanics & African Americans and they usually link me to the very flawed book called "the bell curve" in which the author puts out the implication that people with lower IQ scores are inferior in some way. At the very least these people are using the book as a intellectual high-ground to put down other races while completely ignoring flaws in IQ tests & socioeconomic differences.

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.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Contemporary-Political-Philosophy-Will-Kymlicka/dp/0198782748
This is an excellent general overview of the major theories. Well written, fun to read. For my money this is a great starting point.

For the medieval period, I found The Time Traveler's Guide to Medieval England very interesting. Definitely more of a popular book than hard-core history, though.

Nice one. Thanks for your honest post. If you’re just starting out, I might suggest: https://www.amazon.com/dp/151865472X/ref=cm_sw_r_sms_c_api_i_0uATDb2WJJQG5

You mean like they've always done throughout all of history? Only recently has love been a theme in marriage. Throughout the majority of history, marriage has been about economic or political benefit. Marriage: A History presents a fascinating view on the subject.

This book and it's series of books will tell you most you want to know, from what colors you couldn't wear or what kind of birds you were not allowed to eat. Great detail and fun read.

https://www.amazon.com/Time-Travelers-Guide-Medieval-England/dp/1439112908

I won't give any direct answers because this is something you need to know for yourself, not because someone told you.

So if you want to know how to approach this, first you need to know the history. Read for example A People's History of the United States by Howard Zinn to see specific instances how was government behaving in last 500 years. Watch documentaries from John Pilger. Watch Assassination of Russia to see how Putin got into power. Read War is a Racket. I could go on and on; there are hundreds and hundreds of great books and documentaries and unclassified documents which you can get today and check for yourself.

Also I need to point out - don't make a (common) mistake thinking of any government as a single entity. It is made of people, each of them having his own agenda. More proper question then would be, could some people in government have so much power and skill and at the same time be so unscrupulous, that they plan, commit, and get away with committing terrorist (false-flag) acts for their own profits?

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

Source: Jane Mayer's Dark Money

Bell Curve by Hernstein and Murray would say yes. But there's some caveats to that - first, it's less than a single deviation across all racial groups, and second, there's enough variation within a single racial group that knowing a person's race can't be used to predict an individual's intelligence. Essentially, your genetics appear to control you maximum potential intelligence, while environmental factors will limit the expression of your genes.

American Nations by Mainer Colin Woodard might also help you make sense of cultural differences between the regions. It's a good read. Welcome to Yankeedom!

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

I highly recommend this book for you:

http://www.amazon.com/The-Experience-God-Being-Consciousness/dp/0300166842

In it's way it's a philosophical defense of the idea of God or the Divine in response to Dawkins et al. The author is Orthodox, but the argument in defense of God is undertaken philosophically, without being tied to any one faith or denomination.

Subsistent being: God is the experience of being itself. Rather than being an object within reality God is reality itself. See: https://www.amazon.com/Experience-God-Being-Consciousness-Bliss/dp/0300166842

2+2=4 is also necessarily true. It cannot be any other way than the way in which it is. Is the fact that that is axiomatically true an example of "circular logic"?

I finally have time to upload a bunch of pictures from Paris's Musee d'armee.

For some reason, the camera took terrible pictures indoors. Suffice to say, I got a new camera after this trip.

I studied history in college and found this book to be the best resource on WW1.. A World Undone by GJ Meyer. Easy to read and isn't dull like some history books can be.

I enjoyed Muhammad: The messenger of God by Betty Kelen as an introduction and preview for what is to come, and then No God But God by Reza Aslan.

These books are entertaining and touch on several issues without too much study.

If you become serious and want to learn more, go ahead and read Tafheem Ul-Qur'an by Sayyid Abul Ala Maududi.

If you're into neuroscience, have you ever looked into class/race differences in IQ distribution?

Pretty good book I recommend: https://www.amazon.com/Bell-Curve-Intelligence-Structure-Paperbacks/dp/0684824299/

I haven't read that much contemporary political philosophy, but if you're looking for the theoretical part and not a novel I would recommend:Contemporary Political Philosophy: An Introduction by Kymlicka

It's a good place to start, I would think. There are also tons of very good articles on the subject such as Huntington's Clash of Civilizations (note that it's more from a political analyst than a philosophers).

Fingerprints of the Gods, it describes some kind of weird theory that suggests as early as 4000 BC, the continent of Antarctica was free of ice, and speculates about how (possibly extraterrestrial) explorers were able to map the parts above sea level remarkably accurately many years before the first seismic probes through the ice were done (ca. 1949). Interesting, so far doesn't strike me as a crackpot kind of work like "The Philadelphia Experiment" did.

WhatShouldIReadNext is a good way to find new reading material based on stuff you and others already like.

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!

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.

Blackwater by Jeremy Scahill is a great look into OIF which is the most significant event to happen in the region in the 21st century.

His book Dirty Wars is also excellent.

Also, Legacy of Ashes

This is all super American centric, but there's a reason for that.

The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of the Elements

And I'll second Green_Army's recommendation of The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat- I'm a 'hard' scientist and even still I enjoyed this book.

Along with "The Guns of August" and Keegan's "The First World War," I'd recommend "A World Undone," by G. J. Meyer. It's quite a bit of book, but a great overview.

Friedman's review is even on The Bell Curve's Amazon page:

>This brilliant, original, objective, and lucidly written book will force you to rethink your biases and prejudices about the role that individual difference in intelligence plays in our economy, our policy, and our society

TL;DR The site's real, the clip is misleading.

The structures at Gobekli Tempe are real, and their origins are indeed something of a mystery. There is real, honest-to-goodness archaeology going on at the site. This video clip however, shows quite clearly why a great deal of the programming on the History Channel needs to be taken with a grain of salt. Here are a few issues I have with the clip that's been presented.

1. The overly dramatic tone which is more of an irritant than anything else. We get it, History Channel, this place is old and not much is known about it. Do we really need the ominous music?
   
   
2. 'Experts'. They're not - at least, they're not experts in the subject of the video. The first is Linda Moulten Howe, who's primary 'expertise' seems to lie in the area of crop circles and cattle mutilations, not ancient archaeology. Why she is here is puzzling... until you meet expert number two; Graham Hancock.
   
   Hancock is famous for writing such 'alt-history' books as 'Fingerprints of the Gods' and 'Underworld: The Mysterious Origins of Civilization', which assert that all human civilizations are the product of an ancient, hyper-advanced civilization (like Atlantis, for example), that either inspired or outright taught the younger civilizations that followed. His views are, to put it mildly, not supported by either the archaeological community, nor by the archaeological evidence.
   
   Expert number three is Robert M. Schoch, a geologist and geophysicist who's current pet theory is that all ancient pyramids (Egyptian, Mayan, etc.) are the products of an ancient, global civilization that was destroyed by some pre-historical cataclysm in ages past, possibly by a century-long rain of asteroids.
   
   Next on our list of History Channel approved 'experts', is one Andrew Collins, author of 'Gateway to Atlantis', a book which alleges that ancient Middle-Eastern civilizations may have had transoceanic contact with ancient meso-Americans, possibly via contact with Atlantis or some other ancient global civilization.
   
   Oh Gawd... at 6:00 in the clip, the 'documentary' begins to speculate if this find has anything to do with Noah's Ark.
   
   Next up, Phillip Coppens: ancient aliens, 2012, ancient global civilizations and catastrophes. Seeing the pattern here?
   
   Most, if not all of these 'experts' are cult archaeologists who have, at one time or another, flirted with or explicitly endorsed the concept of 'hyperdiffusion', which is the belief that all ancient cultures sprang from an older, advanced, global culture such as Atlantis, Lemuria, or Mu. This is one species of pseudohistory that has been quite popular over the years. The ideas that are stated (or sometimes simply implied) in this clip are a fairly obvious attempt to graft the assertions of the pseudoarchaeologists onto an actual archaeological site. The video even concludes by splashing a 'See the Evidence: Check out Ancient Aliens on History Channel' graphic. Others in this thread have warned against dismissing a claim because one doesn't approve of the source, and that is generally a good rule to follow, but in this case, a fair degree of skepticism is warranted. A good analogy here would be that these 'experts' are to the field of archaeology what homeopaths are to the field of medicine. This clip isn't history; it's pseudohistorical speculation attempting to masquerade as legitimate archaeological inquiry.
   

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

And you are implying that you have some understanding of the intelligence community?

Like most Americans, I have to go with the information that's available, but my conclusions don't seem to contradict what much better informed, Pulitzer-Prize-winning authors have concluded about the CIA.

Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA by Tim Weiner won the National Book Award for Nonfiction for 2007 and is based on >50,000 documents(mostly from from the CIA archives), and hundreds of interviews with CIA veterans (including ten Directors of Central Intelligence).

I certainly agree with that, as I read books like Cataclysm and Fingerprints of the Gods and am convinced that the scriptures have been criminally misinterpreted. However, stimulating or helping people to hang on to the retarded previous notions is not productive at all.

A World Undone ( http://www.amazon.com/World-Undone-Story-Great-1914/dp/0553382403/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1325016559&sr=8-1 ) is a phenomenal one-volume account of WWI. Just enough details to be really interesting, but not so high-level as to be dry. It's well written and very readable. Plus, it includes small, side chapters that help explain the history and historical context of events of the main chapters. It's really a phenomenal read.

Glad I could help out, hope you enjoy it! Also 'Legacy of Ashes' is another good one, follows the same track but actual interviews with James Angleton, quite a few others.

http://www.amazon.com/Legacy-Ashes-The-History-CIA/dp/0307389006

To be fair, the textbooks most of us studied in school (in the US anyway) tended to gloss over some of these more uncomfortable truths about our history. I highly recommend reading A People's History of The United States by Howard Zinn. It really put things in perpective for me.

The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of the Elements is quite interesting.

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."

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_regime_change_in_Latin_America

Those corrupt governments are installed and supported by the US.

Gathering and analyzing intelligence on other countries is its primary, original role. Most directly for keeping specifically the President informed of just what the heck is developing around the world. It was started after WW2 in order to prevent another Pearl Harbor surprise. And they were not allowed to gather intelligence on US soil, but that has not been strictly observed.

This work involves gathering tasks as mundane as always reading the news in a target country, as political context matters as much as tapped phone conversations when putting together an analysis. But the movie-caliber stuff is important too. They tap phones, recruit sources in governments and industry, build a whole network of resources.

To collect this information, the CIA uses two kinds of employees. “Official cover” officers pose as diplomats in US embassies worldwide. All embassy staff will be under surveillance from the target country’s counter-intelligence organizations — their FBI equivalents — so meeting sources is risky and they might stick to less blatant parts of the job. But on the upside, they have diplomatic immunity and just get sent home if caught spying. Non-official cover officers get jobs in multinational companies or assume some invented identity that gives them a reason to be in country. They can more freely recruit local sources but must rot in prison or die if caught, unacknowledged.

Info goes back to legions of analysis teams working in offices in the US who prepare it into reports.

The CIA also engages in covert and clandestine activities meant to influence other countries. This latter role has grown, diminished, and changed in nature throughout its history depending on political climate. Some bad press from some really ugly leaks in the 70’s (I think) about the extent of these activities put a big damper on them for a while, requiring Presidential sign-offs on killings, iirc. Post 9/11, the CIA is back on the hard stuff but keeps a legion of lawyers to make sure it’s teccchhnically legal.

These cold war activities include funding and organizing Afghan resistance against communist rule, for example. A whole covert war. Also tons of election rigging, assassination, etc. Post cold war they have been involved in anti-terror activities like running the war against the Taliban and assassinating militants and their neighbors with drone missiles.

Fun fact: “covert” operations are meant to hide who is behind an operation, “clandestine” are meant to conceal the entire operation from anyone but us. Compare an assassination to a phone tap.

Edit: in one episode (2 or 3 i think) of Netflix docu series Inside the Mossad explains how Israel’s foreign intelligence uses elaborate sting operations to recruit sources. By the time they realize they’re working for Mossad, they’re in too deep to not go along with it. Intelligence orgs do this a lot when they know the people they need probably hate the org’s country. This is basically all the time for Israel spying on other middle east states. Case officers often use really impressively manipulative strategies for recruiting and controlling their local agents. “The Americans” illustrates some great examples of this, if a little more dramatic.

Edit 2A: There are a bunch of other specialized US foreign intelligence agencies, like the NSA that traditionally intercepts signals and cracks their codes.

Edit 2B: In the UK, MI6 of James Bond fame does foreign intelligence and MI5 does counter-intelligence. These existed during WW2 but back then the lines got blurred, with both organizations running their own double agents against Nazi Germany’s own two competing foreign intelligence orgs. In fact, 0% of any spies Germany sent to Britain were able to work for enough time before being caught to send anything useful over. By 1944, when the UK was more confident that they were controlling all the sources sending info to Germany (the ones that wouldn’t work for the UK as double agents radioing harmless intel back home were either dead or imprisoned), they fed Germany massive misinformation about the location (and timing?) of the D-Day Normandy invasion. Read the excellent book Operation Double Cross to learn about this incredible operation.

BOOK EDIT:

Books on the CIA I found rewarding.

“The Master of Disguise” by Tony Mendez. Ben Affleck played him in Argo. Memoir of this artist’s time in the CIA inventing disguises and forging travel documents, often to exfiltrate an exposed source. Watch or read Argo too if you haven’t, the film at least is incredibly cool because its evacuation of American diplomats from Iran as Canadian filmmakers is largely real.
https://www.amazon.com/Master-Disguise-Secret-Life-CIA/dp/0060957913/

“Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA.” Recent declassifications are exposing just how terribly the CIA bungled things in the early cold war, which is what this is about. From massive nuclear arms race miscalculations that threatened the world, to unfounded communism paranoia that led to totally unnecessary coups, they used classification to hide their greatest errors.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/0307389006/

“Spycraft: The Secret History of the CIA's Spytechs, from Communism to Al-Qaeda.” Beyond just the tech, you get insight into the lives of tech team members who would bug homes for their career. Interesting stuff. I think I read a different edition but this is probably fine.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/0452295475/

“Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001”
Tom Clancy name, but actually an extremely detailed history of the CIA’s 1980’s support for Afghan mujahideen against the USSR and continued involvement in the 90’s. Down to highlighting cultural generational differences within the multiple cohorts of CIA officers in charge of the long-running operation. Also highlights Pakistan’s demand to hand out all the money, both to act as kingmaker for the dominant factions and to skim hella bux off the top. Descriptions of the conflict and how the Afghans relentlessly persevered and how factions had independent deals and truces with USSR. Then much of the civil war aftermath of USSR pullout when the US stopped caring. Taliban become popular for not tolerating warlords raping local boys, an issue that remains to this day among US supported administration (a coalition of “former” warlords who you will recognize if you read the book). Great read, incredible breadth.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/0143034669/