Peter Sean Bradley

Sengoku Jida: Nobunaga Hideyoshi and Ieyasu by Danny Chaplin

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I watched a multipart documentary on the three men who re-unified Japan, namely Oda Nobunaga, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, and Tokugawa Ieyasu. I had been previously somewhat aware of these men but had a fairly vague idea about who they were and what they had done. The documentary helped a lot and sparked my interest in the subject.

To rectify my ignorance, I picked up this book. I discovered that it is absolutely encyclopedic. One of the surprising and nice things about the book was that it provided a background section on the ancient - virtually prehistoric period - of Japan. Again, I had a vague understanding that the Emperor of Japan was more of a figurehead and that the Shogun was the power that ruled Japan.

What I learned was there there was a period when the emperors ruled as well as reigned. There were two prior shogunates before the Tokugawa Shogunate was initiated in 1600. So, Japan already had experience with the division between the symbolic court - think of the English monarchy during the parliamentary period - and the military power of the Shoguns. Ironically, in the period prior to the Tokugawa Shogunate, the power of the shoguns had deteriorated, such that shoguns were puppets of powerful clans in Kyoto.

The period before Oda Nobunaga had seen approximately two hundred years of civil war. Actually, central power had deteriorated as the nobility in Kyoto had been supplanted by their managers in their holdings. These managers became the daimyos with their subordinate samurai.

Oda Nobunaga began his rise in the mid 16th century as the leader of a minor wing of the Oda clan that controlled portions of a province. Battles between clans were endemic in this period. Nobunaga put himself on the map by employing a force of 3,000 men to defeat an army of 15,000. He parlayed his success and his military skills to consolidate his province, take over adjacent provinces, conquer Kyoto, put the old shogunal family out to pasture.

Nobunaga was then killed by a disgruntled underling in one of the epic betrayals that characterize this period of Japanese history. Daimyos and samurais could be fantastically loyal, even to the point of committing suicide on the order of their superiors, but they could also betray if they thought that was necessary for clan survival/advancement.

Nobunaga was replaced by his subordinate Toyotomi Hideyoshi, who in avenging the death of Nobunaga, positioned himself as the new shogun. Hideyoshi extended the power base put together by Nobunaga to the point where he could order two disastrous invasions of Korea. The invasions resulted in the exorbitant deaths of samurai and daimyo and Japanese defeat, but it did keep restive samurai from plotting against Hideoyoshi. Hideyoshi also established rules that stratified Japanese society in the form that it would retain until it was opened to the world by Commodore Perry in 1865.

Hideyoshi had been born a peasant and rose to the height of power on his own talents. Ironically, his rules resulted in a stratification of society that would not allow that kind of ascent again.

Hideyoshi died with a young son. Five powerful daimyo formed a council to rule Japan until the boy grew up. One of the members was Tokugawa Ieyasu, who had been a close ally of both Nobunaga and Hideyoshi, but just as Hideyoshi pushed aside the Oda clan, Ieyasu pushed aside Hideyoshi's son. To be precise, Ieyasu plotted and connived to bring down the council on terms that would allow him to fight a battle that would put total power in his hands.

This is an informative book, but not entirely accessible. I learned a lot about the ups and downs of Christianity in Japan and the Japanese infatuation with tea and tea paraphennelia. On the other hand, Japanese naming conventions are hard for Westerners to follow. For example, virtually every member of the extended Oda clan had a name that was a variant of “Nobu.” The reason for this is that aristocratic Japanese children were given a children's name, but took another name when they became an adult (around 13, of course.) The name was compounded from two syllables taken from the names of respected elders.

Sometimes as a privilege for a job well done, an even higher superior lord might permit the daimyo or samurai to incorporate a syllable of their name - dropping a syllable from their prior name as an honor. Tokugawa Ieyasu's name evolved through the course of the book. It didn't take its final form until well after he had established himself as a power to be reckoned with in Japan.

This is obviously not the author's fault, but it does make for a dense narrative.

Another problem is the unfamiliarity of Japanese geography. I could have used a few more maps scattered throughout the book as an aid. Again, this is my limitation, not the authors.

I felt that I got what I was looking for, which was definitely an introduction to an interesting and different culture and history.

Lonesome Paladin (A Fistful of Daggers 1) by SM Reine

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This story has a very complicated setting. Apparently, at some point in the past, North America split in two, releasing Hell. Demons enslaved and murdered average Americans, and, I assume, the world. It seems that the City of Dis was placed on the Earth and that demons ran the joint. Then, there was something called “the Breaking,” which led to “Genesis,” when people were sucked into a void, where they died, but, then, some were reborn. A lot were reborn as people, but some became vampires, weres, sidhe, and assorted other paranormal species. In addition, it seems that alternate dimensions - specifically, the Summer, Winter, and Autumn Courts of the Sidhe - have come into existence.

Got all that?

That is some complicated stuff, and not much of it plays any particular role in the story, except to serve as decoration for the story.

The story seems to center around Lincoln Marshall, who was a former deputy of a rural Appalachian town, but who was reincarnated in Reno, Nevada after Genesis. We learn from the story that he was possessed by a demon before Genesis, and it seems that he was saved from possession by his girlfriend, who is called the “Godslayer” because she killed God.

All that happened before this book starts, although it is constantly mentioned without any explanation about how any of it was possible or what it meant for Lincoln.

Lincoln is presented from the outset as an obnoxious homophobe who hates the supernatural people around him. He starts by gay/fairy bashing a pair of were-coyotes, who kick his ass. He is put in the hospital, where he meets Cesar, the undersecretary of the Office of Preternatural Affairs, which covers the supernatural beat. Cesar seems like a decent person, but he is undergoing some surprising changes after being a witch allergic to magic prior to Genesis and then a mere human after Genesis.

This is some complicated stuff.

Cesar's difficulties result in Cesar being sent to the land of the Sidhe, where his sister is - no kidding - the Queen of the Winter Court, because she can help him or so the head of the OPA thinks.

In Fairyland, Lincoln and Cesar meet Sophie who is The Historian, but not much is disclosed about her, except that she knows about gods who existed in prior cycles. Cesar, Sophie and Lincoln have adventures, culminating in a confrontation with a former god. Then, there is some kind of ending where Lincoln - who gets offended when people mention the existence of Gods - is let into a new god's temple, but that's the hook to read the next book.

I actually didn't mind the complexity of the imagined world. The writing moved along. There was enough adventure to keep my interest.

The problem I had with this book is that the author clearly has no sympathy for Lincoln. Although he is presented as a tough dude, he is constantly getting his ass kicked. It isn't even close; his fights generally end up with him failing spectacularly, unless he is rescued by someone or some odd circumstance. (I might give him credit for the unicorns, but he botched his plan so badly that he really deserved to lose.)

There is one scene where Lincoln is given a gelded unicorn to ride, but it trips and he is lifted by the Summer Queen into her saddle to ride double. So, there you are the burly man is rescued by the damsel.

You could see this coming a mile away. Lincoln starts off as a homophobic fairy hater and then he demonstrates that he is a racist by saying that he is not attracted to black women - Sophie is black, which leads to that observation. If the reader is slow on the uptake, Cesar explains that Lincoln is a racist and that Sophie should be careful around him.

Then in the final denouement, we learn that Lincoln is harboring part of the soul of a large-breasted female goddess, which leads other characters to laugh at the burly man with the girly soul.

Weird stuff.

It is hard to root for the hero of a story when that character exists to be a buffoon.

I was sufficiently interested in the story, however, to buy the next installment, so that indicates that story made enough of a sale that the low price was not an obstacle.

Mr Wilson's War by John Dos Passos

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John Dos Passos started out his career as a socialist author in the 1920s after a stint as an ambulance driver during World War I. When I saw this book, I assumed that it had been written in his earlier radical years, but, in fact, it was written in the early 1960s after his conservative turn.

Based on my false assumption, I thought that this was going to be an indictment of war profiteering and the kind of things that the younger Dos Passos attacked so fiercely in his USA trilogy. In fact, though, this is an engaging and insightful history book. Dos Passos begins with President McKinley in the late 1890s and basically follows presidential politics through to the last years of the Wilson administration.

I learned a lot from this book, although I have read a few books on World War I. Dos Passos has a nice way of humanizing his subjects and presenting them as multi-dimensional human beings. The relationship between Woodrow Wilson and his advisor, the “confidential colonel,” Edward Mandell House is a major feature of the latter part of the book. I had read of House previously, but I had not appreciated the extent of House's representation of Wilson or Wilson's dependence on House. Likewise, I knew that Wilson's wife was named Edith, but I hadn't known that Wilson's first wife died during his first term of office, or that he had remarried during his second term.

As I was reading this book, I was put in mind that the years between 1916 and 1918 looked a lot like the present era. Wilson was re-elected after a heavily contested election. Wilson won only when California's votes were finally totaled and he won by less than 4,000 votes. Likewise, in our era of cancel culture and manufactured outrage, Wilson pioneered censorship measures to silence opponents of the war. And, of course, the 1918 Spanish flu outbreak is the modern pandemic by which we measure the 2020 pandemic.

I think my favorite feature of Dos Passos's USA trilogy was his short biographies that were peppered throughout the books. Dos Passos always had a nice way of getting to the nub of the person he was talking about and presenting that person in a sympathetic way. He approaches historical figures in a way that treats them as fallible human beings and yet preserves their dignity.

This is a first-rate history book that is worth the investment of time.

Lysistrata and Other Plays by Aristophanes

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I have reviewed the Acharnians and the Clouds separately, so this review will be on this text and Lysistrata.

Lysistrata is fairly famous. It has repeatedly been made into movies, including a Spike Lee movie called “Chi-Raq.” The trope of war-weary women refusing to engage in sex with their husbands until the men call off a war, in this case, the Peloponnesian War, hits a few buttons including, ironically, both anti-war and the war between the sexes.

The play is funny. A modern reader could see this making a revival on the Catskill circuit. It has a vaudevillian quality. The jokes are in no way sophisticated. I would be censored by Amazon if I were to share some of them. Let's just say that “Spartan Walking Stick” is the punchline to one.

The translation in this text is excellent. The translator has done a lot to liven up the play by making it current and relatable. A cook is a cordon bleu and Spartans have a surprising Scottish accent.

I read this for the Online Great Book program. I am glad I did. I got a different view of Athenian society from these plays. Aristophanes was not afraid to slander other Athenians. He appears to have been a member of the “peace faction.” His plays also feature the technique of “breaking the fourth wall.” I wouldn't have expected any of these things, which goes to show how things really haven't change so much over the millenia.

A Slave is a Slave by H. Beam Piper

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The Galactic Empire annexes a backward, barbaric world on the fringe of the Empire. The Empire is a pretty hands-off operation that is only concerned that no one challenge its interplanetary sovereignty, but it is also a fairly liberal empire and among its few rules is one that forbids slavery. The newly annexed planet is founded on slavery.

We, of course, root for the slaves against the masters, but there is something off about the slaves. Are the oppressed victims always virtuous?

This is a well-written story, somewhat longer than a short story and shorter than a novella. It develops its plot and themes gradually and logically. There is not infrequent humor as the people on the annexed planet try to understand “money” and “freedom.” It is also surprisingly modern in this Year of Our Lord 2021, where we are erecting statues to thugs because they are the right kind of victim.

"”Yes. I pointed one of them out to you some time ago: emotional involvement with local groups. You began sympathizing with the servile class here almost immediately. I don't think either of us learned anything about them that the other didn't, yet I found them despicable, one and all. Why did you think them worthy of your sympathy?”

“Why, because... .” For a moment, that was as far as he could get. His motivation had been thalamic rather than cortical and he was having trouble externalizing it verbally. “They were slaves. They were being exploited and oppressed... .” “

And, of course, their exploiters were a lot of heartless villains, so that made the slaves good and virtuous innocents. That was your real, fundamental, mistake. You know, Obray, the downtrodden and long-suffering proletariat aren't at all good or innocent or virtuous.

Piper, Henry Beam . A Slave is a Slave Illustrated (p. 51). Kindle Edition.

This is the kind of meaty human insight that we used to get from science fiction.

I miss it.

Aristoi by Walter Jon Williams

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Walter Jon Williams is a very talented writer. In terms of invention and craft, he has been turning out novels that meet or exceed the quality of the greats of prior years, such as Asimov, Pohl, Heinlein, and Clarke. It is probably an indication of how far the major science fiction awards have fallen that he has not received scant attention.

Aristoi was published in 1992. I read it shortly after it was published, so this was my second reading after a lapse of thirty years. Incidentally, I picked up the Kindle version in 2012 knowing that some day it would provide me with a predictable source of engaging escapism. I had forgotten a lot of details, but some things stayed with me, such as Gabriel's explanation that the tango involved a sense of betrayal. I had forgotten this book was the source of that particular insight.

Aristoi is set several thousand years in the future. Earth was destroyed long ago in a technological accident involving nanotechnology. Humanity was experimenting with nanotechnology to work wonders, using atomic machines to build space ships and planets. Apparently, one form of nano mutated into “mataglap” and turned the Earth and everything on it into a frothing mass of wild nano.

All that remained was scattered outposts that formed a new society based on restricting nanotechnology and other dangerous science to the best and brightest of mankind, the Aristoi. These Aristoi rule domains of planets formed from their use of nano and gravity engineering. They are autocrats in their domain and permit other Aristoi - selected by a rigorously objective testing protocol - to rule as autocrats in their own domains. The Aristoi are cultured, refined, and civilized. They have created worlds of wealth and health for their populations, the Demos.

But there is a plot afoot, which the main character, Gabriel, an Aristoi draws to architecture and writing plays and poetry, becomes aware of. He follows the skein of the conspiracy from the virtual reality of the Aristoi to a barbaric world with technology on the level of the Middle Ages.

And then the fun begins.

Williams is inventive. The world of the Aristoi is well-drawn and complicated. He tosses off ideas the way that a drunken sailor tosses around money. He posits the oneichron - the virtual reality that allows Aristoi to communicate with each other even though separated by star systems - skiagnos - the forms assumed by the Aristoi in the oneichron - mataglap - the destructive nano that is a threat to all humanity - and daimones - the “limited personalities” that the Aristoi invent in their minds so that they can perform more than one task at a time.

The book is engaging. The plot is tightly constructed. The characters are well-drawn, albeit Gabriel, with his daimones, is the focal point of the story.

I was particularly impressed by the way that Williams could move his story from the highest of high-tech concepts down to a medieval world in the same story and that both could be believable and real and work together to tell a coherent story. It occurred to me as I was reading this story that he performed the same kind of trick in “Implied Spaces,” another truly great story that I'm saving for another day.

The Acharnians by Aristophanes

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This is a book I read for the Online Great Books reading program. Again, I have to say that I am very pleased that I was exposed to it now, in my 60s, although I wish I'd read it in college.

The thing that struck me about this book is that the humor is so modern. It reminded me of the movie “A Funny Thing Happened On The Way to the Forum.” The main character is Dikaiopolous, who is not very happy about the current war with Sparta. So, not having any luck getting action from the Athenian council, he “buys” a 30 year peace with Sparta for himself and opens a market, allowing Spartan allies to bring their wares to market.

In truth, this book reads like an “anti-war” book we might have seen in the '60s or '70s.

The plot is, frankly, absurd, but that is not the point. The point is that Dikaiopolous lampoons everyone in Athens - the ruling council, the military, and other Athenians. There are even two scenes based on ethnic stereotyping of Thebans and Megarians. The former ruler of Athens, Cleon, takes a beating.

We can see in this play and in the Clouds that Aristophanes was well-versed in the plays of other authors and parodied lines from those other plays.

As an amateur historian, I appreciate how we get a behind-the-scenes look in these plays at ancient Greece and what mattered to the Greeks when they let their hair down. There are points where they are aliens - joking about rape - and times when they look very modern.

Lonesome Days, Savage Nights

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This is a graphic novel.

The storyline involves a superhero's origin story. In this case, the origin story involves a werewolf. Our hero was attacked by a werewolf, survived, and then became a werewolf. I'm surprised that we haven't seen this approach to superheroes before.

The plot was straightforward with crime lords and revenge. A drawback with this kind of approach to making superheroes is that it seems that it could accidentally create other superheroes or supervillains, which sort of happens in this story.

I had a problem I had with the book was that the visuals were muddy and dark, making it hard to ascertain what was going on in the story.

How to be an Anti-Racist by Ibrahim X. Kendi

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The Post-Modern Mein Kampf.

I was not far along in reading this book when I had the oddest feeling that I had been down this road before. There was something about an author relying on his “lived experience” of oppression by racial enemies as unassailable evidence for his argument that was eerily familiar. Likewise, the endless coining of neologisms beginning with “race,” such as “race-gender,” “race-class,” and “race-sexualities,” put me in mind of terms like “race science” and “race traitors” to the point of nearly inducing nausea. When I got to the end of the book and author Ibrahim X. Kendi was describing “whiteness,” or “whites”- the terms were fairly interchangeable once the reader gets past a formulaic statement that he is not a racist, does not hold whites individually responsible for racism, and does not want his statements against “whiteness” to be considered racist – as a kind of “cancer” – two pages after saying the comparison was inappropriate – I was willing to throw in the towel, replace “white” with “Jew,” and declare “How to be an Anti-Racist” the finest updating of Mein Kampf in recent decades.

I get it. Kendi's wife had beaten off cancer and Kendi has always been obsessed with whites and their everlasting racism, whereas Hitler's mother died of breast cancer and was treated by a Jewish doctor with painful experimental drugs, perhaps kicking off his obsession with Jews. Some parallels are just too on the nose to ignore.

This is as toxic and hateful a book as the original German version. It speaks to the ignorance of our educated elites that they can't see the parallels to the race obsession of Nazi writers. They undoubtedly have never read Mein Kampf or anything by any Nazi. If they had, they would be able to spot the genre and tropes that Hitler pioneered.

Kendi's socialism – or anti-capitalism, which he calls “racial capitalism” in one of those endless, cloying, shallow neologism he favors – does not distinguish him from Hitler. Kendi writes:


Capitalism is essentially racist; racism is essentially capitalist. They were birthed together from the same unnatural causes, and they shall one day die together from unnatural causes. Or racial capitalism will live into another epoch of theft and rapacious inequity, especially if activists naïvely fight the conjoined twins independently, as if they are not the same. (Kendi, Ibram X.. How to Be an Antiracist (p. 163). Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.)

But Hitler got there first. He explained that Marxism was deficient only in ignoring the significance of race:

The racial WELTANSCHAUUNG is fundamentally distinguished from the Marxist by reason of the fact that the former recognizes the significance of race and therefore also personal worth and has made these the pillars of its structure. These are the most important factors of its WELTANSCHAUUNG.(Hitler, Adolf. Mein Kampf: The Official 1939 Version (The Third Reich from Original Sources) (p. 251). Coda Books Ltd. Kindle Edition.)

It looks like Kendi has solved that problem.

Again, what struck me, as I think it would strike anyone who has read Mein Kampf, is the continuous biographical material. Just as Hitler wanted to say that although he grew into an anti-Semite because of his exposures to Jews in Vienna, he was still able as a precocious Volkisch child to discern something “off” about the only Jewish boy in his school, Kendi goes one better by having him as a third grader interrogate a white teacher about why there weren't more black teachers at his elementary school. All this while his parents stood by without embarrassment that their son was exposing that he had been raised in a race-obsessed household.

Allow me to voice some skepticism about Kendi's precociousness: I don't buy it. I can't imagine a nine-year-old thinking in this kind of cliched racist terms any more than I believe that Adolph Hitler was a burgeoning German nationalist at close to the same age. Obsessed people like to burnish stories about how precocious they were concerning their obsessions.

However, both men's invention/description of their journeys says a lot about where they mentally are at the time of their memoir. In Kendi's case – as in Hitler's – the racist is clearly seen. Kendi offers a lot to support this conclusion. In one of the more bizarre self-revelations, Kendi shares how he got interested in, and took seriously, the Nation of Islam's crazy weltanschauung that white people were a black scientists failed genetic experiment. This sets up a description of his conclusion as a college student based on reading occult race books – the same genre that would have been familiar to Hitler and to his circle - that white people are aliens:

“They are aliens,” I told Clarence, confidently resting on the doorframe, arms crossed. “I just saw this documentary that laid out the evidence. That's why they are so intent on White supremacy. That's why they seem to not have a conscience. They are aliens.” (Kendi, Ibram X.. How to Be an Antiracist (p. 134). Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.)

Thank heaven, his roommate laughed at him, but Kendi went on to write an article for his college paper that included:

Wrapped in this tornado, I could not escape the fallacious idea that “Europeans are simply a different breed of human,” as I wrote, drawing on ideas in The Isis Papers. White people “make up only 10 percent of the world's population” and they “have recessive genes. Therefore they're facing extinction.” That's why they are trying to “destroy my people,” I concluded. “Europeans are trying to survive and I can't hate them for that.”(Kendi, Ibram X.. How to Be an Antiracist (p. 135). Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.)

Kendi now says something about the idea is “fallacious,” but apparently the fallacy is that describing Europeans as a “different breed of human” is too simplistic. Even today, when Kendi is seemingly trying to show that he has moved beyond such simplistic racism, the structure of the relevant sentence indicates that he believes that Europeans are at least a “different bread of human,” but that there is certainly more than that which needs to be said.

This is nutty stuff. We might chalk it up to being a college student, but if, when I was in college, I had known a white student in college who obsessed about reading this kind of nonsense and writing papers like this, I would have considered that person to be a weird, ignorant racist. The fact that Kendi went off to a segregated Black Studies program which involved many of the same ideas wrapped up in academese do not convince me that he “got better.” You can see this in his defense of racial segregation on the grounds that protecting “black spaces” contributes to “racial equity.”

Another, a weird “tell” is how he describes his daughter as “my nearly two-year-old Black girl” (p. 235) It seems that in Kendi's world racial identity – black – most definitely takes precedence over her family relationship to him. He doesn't use the term daughter, which is the most intimate thing he can say about her. Instead, his daughter's blackness is enough. That is psychotically ideological, almost the polar opposite of Whittaker Chamber's rejection of Communism while holding his daughter in his arms and contemplating God's design of her ear.

There is also Kendi's name change. Kendi was born Ibrahim Henry Rogers. Clearly, sometime after college, he dumped the name his beloved parents had given to him for the purpose of being more authentically African. This is only a mild inference. Throughout the book, Kendi confesses his obsession with African authenticity to the extent of confessing his “color-racism” against lighter-skinned black women. This is the guy who white leftists are turning to for advice on how to be an anti-racist?

The final weirdness is Kendi's revival of the concept of “racial memory,” something which Nazi Ideologist in Chief called “Race Soul,” which is a neologism that Kendi missed. Kendi calls this “deep structure.” Deep structure seems to be something that is racially preserved somehow which pops out and restructures artificially imposed culture for an authentic African culture. Kendi explains:

“Those surface-sighted eyes have historically looked for traditional African religions, languages, foods, fashion, and customs to appear in the Americas just as they appear in Africa. When they did not find them, they assumed African cultures had been overwhelmed by the “stronger” European cultures. Surface-sighted people have no sense of what psychologist Wade Nobles calls “the deep structure of culture,” the philosophies and values that change outward physical forms. It is this “deep structure” that transforms European Christianity into a new African Christianity, with mounting spirits, calls and responses, and Holy Ghost worship; it changes English into Ebonics, European ingredients into soul food. The cultural African survived in the Americans, created a strong and complex culture with Western “outward” forms “while retaining inner [African] values,” anthropologist Melville Herskovits avowed in 1941. The same cultural African breathed life into the African American culture that raised me. (Kendi, Ibram X.. How to Be an Antiracist (p. 86). Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.)

This discussion comes after Kendi's observations about African American culture:

“I HATED WHAT they called civilization, represented most immediately by school. I loved what they considered dysfunctional—African American culture, which defined my life outside school. My first taste of culture was the Black church. Hearing strangers identify as sister and brother. Listening to sermonic conversations, all those calls from preachers, responses from congregants. Bodies swaying in choirs like branches on a tree, following the winds and twists of a soloist. The Holy Ghost mounting women for wild shouts and basketball sprints up and down aisles. Flying hats covering the new wigs of old ladies who were keeping it fresh for Jee-susss-sa. Funerals livelier than weddings. Watching Ma dust off her African garb and Dad his dashikis for Kwanzaa celebrations livelier than funerals.” (Kendi, Ibram X.. How to Be an Antiracist (p. 85). Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.)

So, dashikis for Kwanzaa and renaming oneself “Kendi” are really about a “deep structure” of black psychology, never mind that Kwanzaa was invented in the early 1970s.

Alfred Rosenberg would have agreed. He was concerned with the authentic Nordic racial soul and not with Catholic/Christian artificiality. Rosenberg wrote:

A racial soul instinct creates works of a gifted, uncaptivated kind. It takes a far reaching hold on its environment, and autocratically alters its lines of power. When Wotan was dying and we sought new forms, Rome appeared on the scene. When the Gothic had ended its lifeline, Roman law and humanist priests of art appeared who sought to cripple us by application of new standards of value. With the rediscovery of Platon and Aristoteles, with the first discoveries of Hellenic works of art, the Nordic spirit, during a time of searching, seized upon the newly found art but with it also its late Roman falsification. (Rosenberg, Alfred. The Myth of the Twentieth Century: The Myth of the 20th Century; Mythus des 20. Jahrhunderts; An Evaluation of the Spiritual-Intellectual Confrontations of Our Age . . Kindle Edition.)

As I noted Kendi offers some formulas that white people can grab onto to reassure themselves that Kendi really is not racist. He defines “antiracist” as “One who is expressing the idea that racial groups are equals and none needs developing and is supporting policy that reduces racial inequity.” (Kendi, Ibram X. How to Be an Antiracist (p. 24). Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.) The definition of “racial groups” being “equals” does not mean “integrated” or “identical.”

The reader has to be careful with Kendi's use of words. Kendi takes words and twists them in ways that would have done justice to the efforts of Arian Christians trying to pass as Trinitarians without actually being Trinitarian. As with the ancient heretics, it takes some critical thinking to unspool what Kendi is hiding. For example, Kendi writes:

“But generalizing the behavior of racist White individuals to all White people is as perilous as generalizing the individual faults of people of color to entire races. “He acted that way because he is Black. She acted that way because she is Asian.” We often see and remember the race and not the individual. This is racist categorizing, this stuffing of our experiences with individuals into color-marked racial closets. An antiracist treats and remembers individuals as individuals. “She acted that way,” we should say, “because she is racist.” (Kendi, Ibram X. How to Be an Antiracist (p. 44). Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.)

This seems promising but it really isn't. Kendi repeatedly generalizes individual faults to an entire race, so long as the race is white. This is what Kendi is doing when he writes:

“THE DUELING WHITE consciousness has, from its position of relative power, shaped the struggle within Black consciousness. Despite the cold truth that America was founded “by white men for white men,” as segregationist Jefferson Davis said on the floor of the U.S. Senate in 1860, Black people have often expressed a desire to be American and have been encouraged in this by America's undeniable history of antiracist progress, away from chattel slavery and Jim Crow. (Kendi, Ibram X.. How to Be an Antiracist (p. 33). Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.)

It sure looks like Kendi is taking the behavior of an individual white man – Jefferson Davis (who lost a war to determine how American culture would be shaped) - and is attributing that man's statements to the entire white race.

Kendi does this repeatedly. For example:

“But the statue attracted a middle-aged, brown-haired, overweight White guy. Clearly drunk, he climbed onto the tiny stage and started fondling Buddha before his laughing audience of drunk friends at a nearby table. I had learned a long time ago to tune out the antics of drunk White people doing things that could get a Black person arrested. Harmless White fun is Black lawlessness.” (Kendi, Ibram X. How to Be an Antiracist (p. 203). Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.)

Really? Always? Everywhere? And doesn't that look like generalizing the behavior of white individuals to all whites?

Likewise, he writes:

“At Oneonta, Whiteness surrounded me like clouds from a plane's window, which didn't mean I found no White colleagues who were genial and caring.”(Kendi, Ibram X. How to Be an Antiracist (p. 217). Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.)

That seems very similar to what people have traditionally called “stereotyping” or “racial bigotry.”

Here's another one:

“Racist Americans stigmatize entire Black neighborhoods as places of homicide and mortal violence but don't similarly connect White neighborhoods to the disproportionate number of White males who engage in mass shootings.” (Kendi, Ibram X.. How to Be an Antiracist (p. 169). Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.)

This is a lie, incidentally, if you are using the same metric used to argue that “more” blacks are killed by cops than whites, i.e., as compared to their proportion of the population. You can look it up. Black mass shooters make up 21 of 121 mass shooters between 1982 and 2021, which makes the black proportion (17%) more than their percentage of the population (13%.) Whites are underrepresented (52% of the total.) But the fact that it is a lie does not stop Kendi from trading in stereotypes, despite his claims to the contrary.

Kendi's definition of “antiracist” is absurdly question-begging. He actually incorporates the word to be defined into the definition. He writes:

“So let's set some definitions. What is racism? Racism is a marriage of racist policies and racist ideas that produces and normalizes racial inequities. Okay, so what are racist policies and ideas? We have to define them separately to understand why they are married and why they interact so well together. In fact, let's take one step back and consider the definition of another important phrase: racial inequity. (Kendi, Ibram X.. How to Be an Antiracist (p. 17). Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.)
Racial inequity is when two or more racial groups are not standing on approximately equal footing. Here's an example of racial inequity: 71 percent of White families lived in owner-occupied homes in 2014, compared to 45 percent of Latinx families and 41 percent of Black families. Racial equity is when two or more racial groups are standing on a relatively equal footing. An example of racial equity would be if there were relatively equitable percentages of all three racial groups living in owner-occupied homes in the forties, seventies, or, better, nineties.
A racist policy is any measure that produces or sustains racial inequity between racial groups. An antiracist policy is any measure that produces or sustains racial equity between racial groups. By policy, I mean written and unwritten laws, rules, procedures, processes, regulations, and guidelines that govern people. There is no such thing as a nonracist or race-neutral policy. Every policy in every institution in every community in every nation is producing or sustaining either racial inequity or equity between racial groups.” (Kendi, Ibram X.. How to Be an Antiracist (p. 18). Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

A policy is racist simply because it produces a racially inequitable result. A racist is simply someone who does not object to racially inequitable results. Seriously, what does this mean?

This is inane and suggests that Americans are not getting their money's worth from Black Studies majors. Kendi cannot really be serious about his definition. Let's take the example of professional sports. Blacks are overrepresented in professional football and basketball. If we take Kendi seriously, our silence on this racial inequity makes us racists. In fact, since Kendi is silent on this inequity, he is a racist.

Forty Words for Sorrow (John Cardinal 1) by Giles Blunt

Because I really enjoyed the Canadian series, I decided to give this book a go. The series established a somber, brooding tone that seemed to fit the wintry Canadian setting of the first season. All three seasons did a nice job of interlacing the troubled personal life of the main character, John Cardinal, into the mystery, which set the series apart from the normal myster.

The book is obviously different. The plot and characters closely follow that of series, albeit with some departures that are quite apparent. The writing is effective and the plot comes together with an overriding threat and red-herrings to lead us astray.

The plot involves the hunt for a serial murderer in the small Canadian city of Algonquin Bay. The discovery of a dead girl's body brings John Cardinal back into an investigation. He had previously disgraced himself by insisting that a different girl's disappearance had been a murder. With the newly discovered body, Cardinal is able to discern that a serial killer has been working the city for some time. The killers are creepily drawn. They are sadistic and nuts. At some point we flip back and forth between the detectives and the killers, which heightens the suspense.

The book is good, but it lacked something that would have made it great. Cardinal remains a troubled man with a daughter he is supporting through art school and a wife with mental issues. He is assigned a partner who is secretly investigating him for corruption, but he is a fundamentally decent man. This is an enjoyable read, but, like I said, not great.

Veronica Britton - Chronic Detective by N.P. Boyce

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I read the Amazon digital version of this, which covered the first couple of chapters of the complete book. In those chapters, we were introduced to Veronica Britton, a woman living in late 19th century London, with all the social strictures and restrictive clothing that entails. It seems that there are a number of well-mapped worm-holes through time that the enterprising can use for illegal purposes. Miss Britton is a detective employed by an agency that works against such malevolent use of the phenomenon.

It was a short and fairly entertaining introduction. Unfortunately, it seems that the story has been pulled from the digital catalogue and that the author has not published the further chapters in story format.

Unsettled by Steven E. Koonin

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The important take-away from this book is that an expert who should be parroting the Global Warming/Climate Change mantra we read in the newspapers is not. Instead, that expert is saying that quite a lot of the information we are told by the media is massaged, spun, taken out of context or distorted.

The author, Steven E. Koonin, is an environmental scientist, former undersecretary of science for Obama's Department of Energy. In 2014, he was asked by the American Physical Society to “stress test” the state of climate science. As part of this, Koonin determined that while humans play a small but growing warming influence on the climate, the science is unsettled and does not support the hysterical projections being used to scare the world. Koonin also notes that distinguished scientists are embarrassed by some media portrayals of the science (but, apparently, they hold their tongues.)

Here are some the major take-aways on specific issues:

“For example, both the research literature and government reports that summarize and assess the state of climate science say clearly that heat waves in the US are now no more common than they were in 1900, and that the warmest temperatures in the US have not risen in the past fifty years.”

Interestingly, the chief effect of global warming has been warming at the colder end of temperatures, not the upper end. Thus, it is getting less freezing, not more hot. One would think that this would be a good thing, not something to fear.

Other specific issues:

“•​Humans have had no detectable impact on hurricanes over the past century.
•​Greenland's ice sheet isn't shrinking any more rapidly today than it was eighty years ago.
•​The net economic impact of human-induced climate change will be minimal through at least the end of this century.”

Another one on the ever-popular hurricane issue:

“This seemed directly at odds with the National Climate Assessment's alarming figure, so I went back and searched the NCA more thoroughly. On page 769, buried in the text of Appendix 3, I found this statement:
There has been no significant trend in the global number of tropical cyclones nor has any trend been identified in the number of US land-falling hurricanes.13
Wow! I thought to myself. That's surprising and pretty important. How come this isn't up front as a Key Message?”

I have been following climate news since global warming became a thing in the early 1990s. I have learned to debunk specific claims by paying attention to the data that is conveniently omitted from stories. Certainly, the Earth is getting warmer, but it has been coming out of a minor ice age since the mid-nineteenth century. Could CO2 play a role? Koonin says it does, and I think I will have to listen to him since he is an expert who may be telling the truth.

However, his expertise doesn't mean that I give up autonomy over reason. The last year (2020) has been an awful time for expertise. The public has been told so many lies about Covid-19 and experts have flip-flopped with regularity that the idea of expertise is fraying at the edges.

Koonin is nice - I should say “politic” - in his discussion of the role of scientific institutions in promoting global warming hysteria, but then he has to live with his academic colleagues. I don't. I've noticed that science is corrupt. Scientists do lie to the public for what they feel is the public's good. Bakunin might have been nuts, but he was right in saying that scientists can become tyrants just like any other interest group if they are given the opportunity. Koonin explains:

“Trust in scientific institutions underpins our ability—and the ability of the media and politicians as well—to trust what is presented to us as The Science. Yet when it comes to climate, those institutions frequently seem more concerned with making the science fit a narrative than with ensuring the narrative fits the science. We've already seen that the institutions that prepare the official assessment reports have a communication problem, often summarizing or describing the data in ways that are actively misleading.”

Koonin gently offers this explanation:

“Scientists not involved with climate research are also to be faulted. While they're in a unique position to evaluate climate science's claims, they're prone to a phenomenon I call “climate simple.” The phrase “blood simple,” first used by Dashiell Hammett in his 1929 novel Red Harvest, describes the deranged mindset of people after a prolonged immersion in violent situations; “climate simple” is an analogous ailment, in which otherwise rigorous and analytical scientists abandon their critical faculties when discussing climate and energy issues. For example, the diagnosis was climate simple when one of my senior scientific colleagues asked me to stop “the distraction” of pointing out inconvenient sections of an IPCC report. This was an eyes-shut-fingers-in-the-ears position I've never heard in any other scientific discussion.”

But then cuts to the chase:

“Whatever its cause, climate simple is a problem. Major changes in society are being advocated and trillions will be spent, all based on the findings of climate science. That science should be open to intense scrutiny and questioning, and scientists should approach it with their usual critical objectivity. And they shouldn't have to be afraid when they do.”

This book is a pretty tough read. Koonin offers the math, data, and graphs to support his points. I'm usually good with graphs and data, but a lot of this eluded me. Koonin's writing tends to the technical side, but there are nuggets that will interest those of us who want the big picture.

Dark Bargain: Slavery, Profits, and the Struggle for the Constitution by Lawrence Goldstone

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This is a nice book focused on some key personalities and issues involved in framing the Constitution. The author, Lawrence Goldstone, provides an informative survey of how the Constitution came to be written, what the framers were originally intending, and what the alternatives might have been.

According to Goldstone, the event that provided an impetus to the drafting of a new Constitution was Shay's Rebellion, which suggested that even northern states might be more susceptible to internal insurgencies than they had previously believed. Southern states knew that they had such a problem in the form of slave rebellions, although the south had largely avoided that form of domestic revolt. All states had some interest in a common defense against both domestic and foreign enemies, but they also had interests that were opposed.

Goldstone's thesis is that the interest that most divided the states - and which explains the development of the Constitution - was slavery. The northern states were opposed to slavery and wanted it ended; the lower southern states wanted to protect slavery; the upper South was more ambivalent than the lower South; they wanted to end the slave trade so that it could sell its own slaves more profitably and dreamed that slavery would naturally come to an end as had happened in the North.

The North's interest in ending slavery in the United States is a surprising feature for the time. No other sovereignty in the world had outlawed slavery at the time. The states were essentially separate countries, and they could have taken the position that what went on in other countries was not their business. This understanding obviously strengthened the hand of the deep South on issues pertaining to slavery since those issues mattered very much domestically to those states. Goldstone points out that the deep South was very successful in the struggle over the constitutional clauses dealing with slavery.

One such clause was the “3/5th Clause.” The issue was whether slaves would count as the population for apportionment of representatives in one of the two houses of the legislature or not be counted. Goldstone locates the origin of the 3/5th compromise in prior compromises over taxation of states. The apportionment of taxes was to be done on the basis of state wealth, and slaves were certainly part of that calculation. Similarly, in the Constitution, any taxation was also to be done on the basis of wealth by apportioning taxes to states based on their representation. As it turned out, this method of taxation was never used and the Constitution was subsequently amended to permit direct taxation, but only based on the income of citizens.

One interesting feature is how James Madison, the “father of the Constitution,” essentially receded from the picture as the negotiation went along. His ideas, such as basing one house of the legislature on apportionment by population excluding slaves and one house including slaves, were rejected in favor of the approach we have today.

There were high-minded calls against compromising with slavery from some delegates. However, even abolitionist New Englanders compromised their principles to avoid a walk-out by the lower South:

“Ellsworth and Sherman were creatures of their upbringing, their values, and the society in which they lived. They were in Philadelphia to protect and promote a way of life and this, not personal gain, or even a specific commercial advantage for Connecticut prompted them to act as they did. Both men genuinely believed that their actions, even their compromises with slavery, were for the betterment of the society they represented and, as such, were also for the betterment of the United States.”

As a consequence, a fugitive slave provision was included, the slave trade was left untouched for twenty years, the electoral college was established, and even the census was compromised. Concerning the census, the belief of the delegates was that population growth would favor the South. Southerners, therefore, wanted more frequent census in order to adjust the House of Representatives in their favor. The ten-year census was very much a product of compromise.

The Northwest Ordinance may have been involved in the compromise. The Northwest Ordinance was passed by the old Congress virtually unanimously the day after the 3/5th compromise was accepted. Goldstone speculates that the passage of the Northwest Ordinance, which outlawed slavery in Northwest territories, was part of the inducement for the compromise. If so, that may have been what spelled the doom for southern slavery since those states were part of the alliance that defeated the Confederacy.

There is a lot of convenient finger-pointing about the compromise with slavery by people who were not there. Goldstone concludes on that subject:

“Philosophical concerns seemed to play only a minor role in the proceedings, and only then with but a few of the participants. Nonetheless, for all that, precisely because the delegates in Philadelphia were pragmatic, and were there to represent specific, parochial interests, they were able to draft a document that was workable, adaptable, and able to survive challenges that could never have been imagined in 1787. It is distinctly possible that had idealism dominated in Philadelphia, American democracy would have failed.”

I found this to be a well-written, interesting and informative book. I appreciated that it avoided the moralism that is all too common in this day and age.

Reflections on the Failure of Socialism by Max Eastman

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I read this book immediately after reading Nathan J. Robinson's lightweight “Why You Should be a Socialist.” Robinson should have done himself a favor and read Eastman before writing his book and he might have either written a better book or realized that his path had been trodden by a better man and given up Socialism.

Eastman was a Socialist of the reddest color as a young man. He was the editor of the far-left Masses journal. He raised the money to send John Reed to cover the Russian Revolution. Eastman went to Russia in 1922 where he met Lenin and Trotsky. Eastman was responsible for translating and publishing Trotsky's English language version of the history of the Russian Revolution. (Not mentioned in this book, but interesting as a historical footnote - Eastman got into some kind of physical tussle with Ernest Hemingway that probably resulted in bruising Hemingway's pride and forehead.)

Despite this pedigree, Eastman was unusual for seeing through the glamour of socialism and repudiating it as a threat to human decency, freedom and progress. As a result, Eastman was considered an apostate by his former friends who would no longer speak to him, not an unusual occurence. Eastman's path was not unprecedented - just rare. Around the same time, or slightly later, Eugene Lyon (“Assignment in Utopia”) was coming to his own terms with the nightmare of lies and repression that was the Soviet Union.

This book seems to be a collection of essays that are sometimes autobiographical in explaining Eastman's journey out of leftism, sometimes theoretical, and sometimes practical. This book was published in 1955 but covers Eastman's observations going back to 1912 as he watched the practical results of the experiment in socialism.

I reviewed Robinson's book earlier this week. Robinson argues that people must be outraged by economic injustice and that they should not tell him he will learn to understand when he gets older. Robinson stumps for utopia and refuses to accept Karl Marx as normative - except when he touts Marx as being someone everyone should engage with - or the Soviet Union as Socialist - except that he thinks that Soviet Union did better economically than is properly allowed (based on a study done one year before the complete collapse of the Soviet Union, ironically.)

A reading of Eastman will dispel these conceits. Eastman shared the faith that Russia was the first true socialist country led by good and decent men concerned with the working class. The fact that these men - starting with Lenin - produced a horror can't be swept under the rug with a “No True Socialist” argument.

Eastman's conclusion was that political liberty comes from economic liberty. This is hardly surprising since Marx said as much:

“(p. 110) Marx himself, as I remarked in another connection, was the first to realize this. It was he who informed us that the evolution of private capitalism with its free market had been a precondition for the evolution of all our democratic freedoms. It never occurred to him that, if this was so, those other freedoms might disappear with the abolition of the free market.”

Outside of cloud-cuckoo-land this is not hard to fathom:

“(p.27) A state apparatus which plans and run runs the business of a country must have the authority of a business executive. And that is the authority to tell all those active in the business where to go and what to do, and if they are insubordinate put them out. It must be an authoritarian state apparatus. It may not want to be, but the economy will go haywire if it is not.”

“(p.27) There ‘has to be a boss, and his authority within the business has to be recognized, and when not recognized, enforced. Moreover, if the business is vast and complex, his authority has to be continuous. You cannot lift him out of his chair every little while, tear up his plans, and stick in somebody else with a different idea of what should be done or how it should be one. The very concept of a plan implies continuity of control. “

“(p.28) How could you unseat an administration with every enterprise and every wage and salary in the country in its direct control? Not only private self-interest would prevent it, and that would be a force like gravitation, but public prudence also-patriotism! “Don't change horses in midstream,” we say. But we'd be in mid-stream all the time with the entire livelihood of the nation dependent upon an unfulfilled plan in the hands of those in office. “Don't rock the boat” would be the eternal slogan, the gist of political morals. That these morals would have to be enforced by the criminal law is as certain as that mankind is man.”

These are all live issues today, but we've forgotten the arguments.

In contrast to Socialism, the experiment with so-called capitalism worked:

“(p.47) During the nineteenth century, “capitalism” so-called raised the real wage of the British worker 400 percent; the average real wage of the American worker rose, between 1840 and 1951, from eighteen to eighty-six cents an hour. A good fairy could hardly have worked faster. Of course it was not “capitalism” that did this; an abstract noun can't do anything. It was just the spontaneous way of producing wealth with elaborate machinery and a high division of labor. The word “capitalism” was invented by socialists for the express purpose of discrediting this natural behavior, and apart from the contrast with their dream it has no precise application. We should talk more wisely if we dropped this facile abstraction altogether, and made clear in each case what, specifically, we are talking about. “



Eastman's answer was pluralism - opposing social forces that would allow liberty to exist in the margins:

“(p. 42) The state occupies a special position in society because it has a monopoly of armed force, but that only makes it more vital that it should not be sacrosanct. Not only must the power of the government be limited by law if the citizens are to be free-that too was known to Plato and to Aristotle-but it must be limited by other powers. It must be regarded as one as but one of those social forces upon whose equilibrium a free society depends. When the state overgrows itself, the attitude of the anarchists becomes, within sensible limits, relevant and right; just as when the bankers swell up and presume to run a country, the attitude of the Marxists, barring their claim to universal truth, is right. “

For those of a liberty-loving orientation, the scary thing in 2021 is how virtually all social forces are lining up behind Wokism. In Nazi Germany, that kind of thing was called approvingly “gleichschaltung.”

Eastman was a witty prose stylist and a clear-eyed observer of reality. Here are some final observations worth reading to get a flavor of the man:

“(p.52) I remember how when I traveled in Russia in 1922, long before I had waked, or knew I was waking, from the socialist dream, a certain thought kept intruding itself into my mind. These millions of poor peasants whose fate so wrings the heart of Lenin have only two major joy-giving interests outside their bodies and their homes: the market and the church. And Lenin, devoting his life selflessly to their happiness, has no program but to deprive them of these two institutions. That is not quite the way to go about the business of making other people happy.”

And:

“(p. 61) It is not only freedom that they betray, however, in apologizing for the Soviet tyranny, or pussyfoot-ing about it, or blackening America so savagely that Russia shines in unspoken contrast. They are betraying civilization itself. They are lending a hand in the destruction of its basic values, promoting a return march in every phase of human progress. Reinstitution of slavery, revival of torture, star chamber proceedings, execution without trial, disruption of families, deportation of nations, massacre of communities, corruption of science, art, philosophy, history; tearing down of the standards of truth, justice, mercy, the dignity and the rights of man- even his right to martyrdom- everything that had been won in the long struggle up from savagery and barbarism. How shall I account for this depraved behavior-for that is how it appears to me-on the part of friends and colleagues who were once dedicated to an effort to make society more just and merciful, more truth-perceiving, more “free and. equal” than it was?
They shield themselves from facts, I suppose, by a biased selection of the books and newspapers to read.”

That last is more true today.

The Human Blend (The Tipping Point Trilogy Book 1) by Alan Dean Foster

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Alan Dean Foster returns to his gritty cyberpunk future. In this future, global warming is a reality with most of the Atlantic seaboard underwater. Cities like Savannah are either flooded, on stilts or behind walls. The human population has split between “melds” and “normals.” “Melds” are people who have modified their bodies in whatever way they want with cyber or biological augmentations; some people have elongated their lower limbs so that they can jump like, and look like, crickets; others have built up their strength to Herculian dimensions.

In Savannah, Jiminy Cricket and Wispr murder a tourist by overriding his cyber-augmentations and steal his cyber hand and a length of data storage “thread.”

And, then, their troubles begin.

At the same time, Dr. Ingrid Seastrom finds an odd implant among a malfunctioning meld of a young girl. The implant disappears when it is scanned but not immediately.

The story is about Whispr and Ingrid's search for the riddle of the thread. Their journey takes us through a different world. The story moves along and makes for an enjoyable read. Alan Dean Foster's characters are usually nice allowing us to empathize with them. These two are no exception, although there is a criminal edge to Whispr that is disquieting. We will have to see how that turns out.

Why You Should be a Socialist by Nathan J. Robinson

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Nathan J. Robinson is a Socialist and thinks you should be one also.

Why?

Because other people have nicer things, things that in Robinson's estimation are sins of luxury and should be banned by post-modern sumptuary laws. Robinson spends the first part of the book trying to engender a sense of envy and outrage at luxurious McMansions that have whole rooms devoted to making pizzas in pizza ovens. Because of this opulence, he asserts on the next page, children in Third World countries don't get vaccinated.

Huh?

Robinson does not explain how money earned by someone in America and spent by someone in America deprives anyone anywhere of goods. He also doesn't tell us exactly what he suggests, e.g., does he forbid the sale of a private pizza oven? Does he confiscate all money above a certain income level? He implies something like that but never comes out directly with the negative features of Socialism that must exist if Robinson's self-avowed utopian dreams are to come alive.

Robinson seems to think that “capitalists” - a label he applies like “kulak” to an undefined other - put their money into a swimming pool to lay upon like Scrooge McDuck. It doesn't occur to him that capitalists are people and actually spend their money, which creates jobs for other people who own businesses, we might call them capitalists. The Clinton administration played with a luxury tax with the result that it raised not a nickel for the destitute but destroyed yacht builders, putting their employees onto welfare.

Elsewhere Robinson assures us that leftists hate borders and want unlimited immigration. On the next page, he points out that American wages have stagnated and that Americans are dying younger and more often of drugs. It never dawns on him that the two things might be related. If he knew some history, he would know that the last time this happened was a prior period of unrestrained immigration in the 1840s, which saw American health, life expectancy and prosperity drop dramatically. (See Robert William Fogel, Without Consent or Contract.)

But who cares about results when Socialism is about solving that envy problem and dreaming utopian dreams.

Robinson provides a chapter on dreaming about utopia, which he feels distinguishes socialism from social democracy. Social Democrats just want to improve and reform things, while Socialists want utopia. He provides some long lists of what utopia would entail, and, frankly, it is quotidian and prosaic in the extreme. Ultimately, he concedes that utopia is about the following:

“My friends and our Current Affairs readers are obviously disproportionately young lefties. But I think their dream worlds are very appealing. There are some common themes: They want to be free of the stress of having to think about money all the time. They want to be abIe to choose what they do with their time. They want a vibrant culture, where art, music, and literature flourish. They want people to be able to satisfy their intellectual curiosities and understand science and the natural world, but also have plenty of time for play and leisure.”

In other words, they want family and community. That makes sense, particularly since those things have been exsanguinated over the course of the last several decades.

On the other hand, they sound like children who want to hold onto their childhood. Some people want the responsibility or take on responsibility because they feel the call of duty. Such people join the military, for example. Other people get married and have children. Anyone who has raised children learns that the ability to choose what they want to do becomes less likely. They also want their children to do better and have better things than they had. This is so common that it constitutes a natural drive of human beings that will have to be eradicated before Robinson's plans to confiscate all of a person's property on their death because their children are not in Robsinson's opinion “deserving” of what their parents' delayed gratification has created.

Robinson dances around a definition of Socialism. While he offers some reforms - some of which might make sense, others of which are totalitarian nightmares - he refuses to be bogged down by “labels,” notwithstanding how he loves labeling his enemies. Thus, conservatives are “mean,” he says, offering the example of William F. Buckley calling Gore Vidal a “queer” and saying he would punch Vidal in the nose. However, Robinson omits that Vidal had immediately prior to those statements called Buckley a Nazi, something that Buckley had been drafted into the military to fight did not appreciate.

Robinson strains to avoid the connection of Socialism with Communism in the Soviet Union. But Robinson endorses Marx as having good ideas, although he was a bit too technical at times. Robinson doesn't mention Marx's flat-out racism and nastiness, apparently there are no bigots to the left either. Robinson also can't resist trying to defend the economic results of the Soviet Union relying on a 1988 study. The fact that it was a study one year before Communism fell, and while it was still bamboozling the world by claiming a non-existent domestic product, is a telling sign of Robinson's either being a dupe or trying to dupe the dupes.

I would be a lot less suspicious of Socialism if its adherents would finally admit that Communism was an inhuman failure.

When pressed on the totalitarian dimensions of Socialism, Robinson brings “libertarian” Socialists like Emma Goldmann and Bakunin into the mix. Bakunin in no way represents historic Socialism. Goldmann departed from Socialism to the extent that she recognized that the Soviet Union was a police state, something that other Socialists have managed to do, while the great bulk of them never quite managed that trick, choosing to apologize for atrocities rather than leave their friends.

I read Max Eastman's “The Failures of Socialism” after this book. Eastman was a longtime socialist in the period from 1910 to 1930. He knew Lenin and Trotsky. If anyone has any doubt that Communism was not Socialist, read Eastman's book. His description of the utopian hopes and dreams of the Russian Revolution could be mapped directly onto this book, including the outrage and envy.

For example, Robinson touts “[t]he great socialist writer A!exander Cockburn, when he worked at he Nation, used to ask all of his interns the same question: “Is your hate pure?”“

Ah, how cute.

Except it's not Hate is an essential feature of the totalitarian tendencies of Socialism. Cockburn was talking about what Max Eastman called the “propaganda of class hate.” The preaching of hate against the bourgeoisie was the well-spring of Socialism. The problem is that hate can change its target as we saw in the Soviet Union, as Old Bolsheviks and Kulaks were made the object of hate campaigns and, then, murdered. Eventually, as Eugene Lyons depicted in “Assignment in Utopia,” the hate moved on to consume the proletarians who didn't manage to live up to the bright new utopia that the Socialists in power thought they were in the process of providing.

Utopian visions are the worst. There can be no utopia in this world. Utopian promises always fail. When they fail, those in power look for scapegoats.

Accordingly, the answer is to find a social equilibrium in opposition of forces. Government and free market should both exist. Robinson's vision eliminates the latter, leaving us to what he admits will be a dictatorship of bureaucrats. Robinson is coy in stating his goal, but since one of his dreams is an international taxing authority so that capitalists can't hide their money in other countries rather than being taxed for the common good, it seems clear that he intends to inject steroids into state power. (Also, we tend to call such “hiding” money, foreign investment, and governments compete for such investments by providing favorable tax investments. What Robinson is actually arguing for is preventing countries from competing for such investment.)

When you cut through the happy-clappy pep talk, you end up with a vision of envy, hatred, an alienated party base, and nebulous utopian promises through ideological fulfillment. Given Robinson's age and education, he probably has never been exposed to Eric Hoffer's exploration of totalitarianism in “The True Believer.” These factors are precisely the factors that made for the rise of the Nazis and the Communists.

Robinson has all the elements: he just needs the moment.

Without Consent or Contract by Robert William Fogel

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Robert William Fogel is a Nobel Prize winner and a “cliometrician.” Cliometrics is the study of history by the use of quantitative, usually economic, data. This approach may shed light on what really happened in history, outside of the subjective experience of historical actors.

Fogel's career involved an extensive engagement with the issue of American slavery. In fact, the third and final part of this book deals with Fogel's developing understanding of the nature and moral implications of slavery based on his cliometric studies.

The first part of this book is most involved with cliometric analysis. By looking at studies that have been done on various statistical information, Fogel comes to the unsettling notion that the South was largely right in its positions before the Civil War. The South was prosperous because of slavery; in fact, if it had been an independent country it would have been the fourth most prosperous nation on Earth and more prosperous than any other European country other than England.

Likewise, slavery was efficient and productive, at least with respect to the “gang system” used in the cash crops like cotton and rice. As a result, slave plantations could outcompete free farmers.

Southern plantation owners essentially turned their gang system into an industry using techniques that would be employed by factories in later years. Slaves were given simple, repetitive motions to engage in. Work was done quickly. Lengthy breaks were given at regular intervals. It turns out that slaves worked far fewer hours than Northern factory workers worked. Slaves would work less than four hours a week, less than 8 hours a day, and regularly had Sundays and portions of Saturday off work. When they did work, they worked hard and fast.

Slaves were also well-fed. Slaves in the South were taller and healthier than the free population of most European countries and in the North. In fact, because of immigration, the Northern free population was in a vice of unemployment, depression, low wages, and squalid conditions. Fogel notes:

“The exceptional health of native-born Northerners during the late eighteenth century is revealed by new time series on stature and life expectation recently constructed by cliometricians (see Figure 28) They show that by the end of American white males were more than 68 inches tall (which was 2 to 4 inches taller than the typical Englishman) and had average expectations at age 10 of close to 57 years (about 10 years longer than the English.) However both life expectations and stature began to decline l early in the nineteenth century. The most rapid of deterioration was between 1830 and i860. By the eve of the Civil War life expectation was 10 years less than it had been just before the turn of the century and males born in i860 reached final heights that were about 1.5 inches less than those born in the early 1830s.” (page 360.)

Like most people, I want to believe that such an evil system must have been inefficient and on its last legs, but Fogel's analysis does not fit the “just world” I want to believe in, at all.

The section of the book looks at the history of slavery and abolition in the English-speaking world. Fogel first looks at abolition in the English-speaking world that was the product mostly of the “saints” working altruistically to force the world into their moral image. England ended its involvement in the slave trade, then ended slavery in its Caribbean colonies, and, finally, sought to end slavery through the world, using its diplomatic and military power to coerce other countries, such as Brazil, to give up slavery, and, also, intervening in the politics of other countries in a most imperialistic fashion.

Fogel's description of American abolitionism is involved and educational. Slavery was in the process of abolition in the North during the years of the Founding Fathers as the North attempted to live up to the ideals of democracy. But slavery was more intertwined into the economy of the South and the South moved in the direction of protecting slavery. The abolitionist movement waxed and waned but things began to come to a head because of two issues - the expansion of slavery into the territories and the fugitive slave law. For Fogel, the former was more important since the South kept pushing slavery further and further into formerly free territories. Free farmers were concerned that they would be rendered second-class citizens if they were forced to compete with slave plantations.

Fogel's discussion of the Know-Nothing movement was eye-opening. I had always considered the Know-Nothings to be a fringe movement of kooks, but it was a serious contender against free soil/antislavery/Republicans. In the 1850s, the Know-Nothings had control of the legislatures of several states and had 70 members in Congress. The question was whether politics in the American North would re-organize in opposition to the Vatican Power or against the Slave Power. The Kansas-Nebraska Act changed the dynamic of the competition by fomenting open war in Kansas and dividing the country along clear sectional lines. It was a near run thing that could have gone the other way.

The final section involves Fogel's reflections on slavery and his research. Fogel is clearly aware that his research gives apparent aid and comfort to those who want to argue that slavery “really was not so bad.” Fogel is a conventional liberal and does not want to be the guy responsible for that. I suspect that if this book was written in the 2020s, it would never have been written or published, or that the usual crowd would be demanding his head.

Fogel's response to the conundrum of well-treated slaves, just like the slave-holding South claimed, is to reflect on the core evils of slavery - that it denies dignity and opportunity to human beings. Being well-cared for may be an ideal way to treat a horse, but human beings are not horses.

I found this book to be absolutely fascinating. The first part can be very dense but the insights and learning of this book make it a first-rate book to study on the issue of slavery.

Sophocles I: Antigone, Oedipus the King, Oedipus at Colonus

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This is a good translation. I found it to be readable and clear.

The three plays presented are:

Antigone - This involves a conflict between Antigone, the daughter of Oedipus, and the positive laws of King Creon of Thebes. Creon has ordered that the body of Antigone's brother will not be buried after he led a foreign army against Thebes. Antigone breaks Creon's law out of her own filial duty. The rest is a horrific working out of the effects of this breach and Creon's enforcement of his law.

Oedipus Rex - Obviously, this is the famous story of how Oedipus finds out the truth of a prophecy and his family. Creon takes over as king and Oedipus leaves Thebes with his daughters, Antigone and Ismene.

Oedipus at Colonus - Years later Oedipus comes to the outskirts of Athens as an old man. There's a lot of family drama as Creon comes to take him back to Thebes against his will and his son asks for his blessings in conquering Thebes, but receives only a curse.

Obviously, in the sequence of the stories, Antigone comes last, but apparently, it was written first and so is presented in the order indicated.

These plays are classics of Western Civilization. They raise issues of fate, duty, the conscience and other themes that are still important today.

Shadow and Bone (The Shadow and Bone Trilogy Book 1) by Leigh Bardugo

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I came to this while watching the Netflix series. What I liked about the Netflix series, I liked here, namely the Russian/Eastern European fantasy setting, which is so different from the English urban fantasy noir setting/English medieval setting. I also liked the main characters who seemed to be engaging in their peasant stereotypes

On the other hand, the book has two drawbacks. First, it is largely cliche. The main character is a beautiful girl who thinks she's homely but has a secret power that makes her the One. Naturally, once she's discovered, she's elevated to the world of high culture where she is still the honest but scorned girl. She learns how to use her art. Conspiracies are afoot.

Second, this is not a complete book. It's a rather short section of a much larger novel. The book is barely starting when it ends and we are then invited to get the next book. I don't consider that fair, but it has become very common.

Nonetheless, this is a fun read.

One interesting difference between the novel and the series - apart from the Crows not being in the book - is that the main character, Alina, is depicted as Hsu in the series, but not in the book. This allows the series to play off of the trope of racial discrimination, rather than boring old class discrimination. It's almost as if the series is telling us that being a peasant is not a big enough drawback unless there is racial discrimination in the mix.

What that says about our age is for the discriminating reader to determine.

Oedipus the King by Sophocles

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Things couldn't be better for King Oedipus of Thebes at the outset of this play by Sophocles. He is beloved by his people. He is heroic. His wife Jocasta has given him a large family. Admittedly, there is a pesky blight among the crops and epidemic among the people, but Oedipus is a take-charge guy and has dispatched brother-in-law Creon to an oracle to find out how to solve the problem.

Creon soon returns with the happy news - all they have to do is banish the killer of the old king from the kingdom.

How hard can that be?

This is a quick and interesting read that you must know from other sources. For example, I think I was permanently scarred as a child by the thought of the use Oedipus made of broaches. I think that I learned about that 50 years ago and as I was reading I kept wondering how I knew that.

I read this as part of the Online Great Books program. Once again, I appreciate the opportunity to fill in the rough spots that I may have been missing in the cultural education.

I will confess that I am not a comic/graphic novel fan, so I don't have much experience to judge a good comic from a bad one. I enjoyed this one and the art looked good - particularly the iconic drawings of the masked Shadow with guns drawn, scarf flying and trench coat flaring.

Although this comic is set in pre-World War II China (actually pre-Pearl Harbor China), it was obviously written much later....presumably in the last decade. So, it has modern sensibilities. I am still interested in seeing what classic 1930s The Shadow comic books looked like.

The Shadow is a hard ass. None of this “I won't take a life” ethics of Batman. The Shadow guns down everyone in the room. He also is not morally conflicted because, as he says, “he knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men” and the people he guns down are running a surplus of evil.

The Shadow has a mission to redeem himself from his own evil and he tends to use people like pawns, including his love interest, Margo Lane. By the time he's done, his OSS liason, Mr. Finnegan, is a shadow of himself.

The story involves The Shadow's return to China to prevent Japan from acquiring raw U235 for its dastardly purposes. The story clicks along. I wondered at times where alter ego Lamont Cranston was hiding the Shadow outfit, but best not to ask questions like that.

No Period by Harry Turtledove.

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Every great writer needs to indulge in a little experimentation.

Or a little prank.

Since this is Harry Turtledove this short story involves alternate history, precisely a meditation on the “what-ifs?” that might have enabled the poor shlub narrator to have had a successful marriage rather than a failure.

The prank is that the story is told as a six-page run-on, stream of consciousness, single sentence.

As a reader, you should be onto the joke in the first page, but there is a nice twist at the end and the narrative is pretty amusing.

This is a party trick, not really a story, but it's not a bad party trick.

It's also about a five-minute read.

A Deadly Education: A Novel (The Scholomance Book 1) by Naomi Novik

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There are problems with this story, but I found it to be so thoroughly enjoyable and novel that I willing to be flexible with my “willing suspension of disbelief” meter not to mark this book down on those problems.

This is a dark, dark YA urban fantasy. In this world, there are magic users hidden in the world. The elite of this group lives in “enclaves” in various cities. These enclaves appear to be fortress-like structures where wizards band together to mutually protect themselves from “maleficaria” or “mals.” Mals are evil bits of wizardry alchemically or artificially produced to become autonomous and filled with a need to eat wizards for the magical power, aka “mana,” they possess.

Mals particularly like younger wizards. In the external world, 19 out of 20 wizardly children never make it to adulthood because of mal attacks. Wizard society, therefore, developed the “Scholomance” which is an educational facility built-in “the Void,” separated from the world. Wizards send their children to this facility at age 14. They stay there until they graduate four years later. There are no adults at the Scholoamance. Instead, the Scholomance doles out lesson plans and food and provides negative motivations for failure to study.

It's a weird system with no mentors, no models of behavior, and no going outside.

There are mals, though, since they can get in through the gates where the Seniors graduate. Fortunately, the protective nature of the Scholomance ups the survival rate of the young from 5% to roughly 25%.

The main character is Galadriel (“El”). The school has decided that she has an affinity for death and destruction and is therefore giving her lesson plans based on mass destruction and torture. She is a dark person but has an uncorrupted core that doesn't want to be a dark wizard. When the chips are down, she's personally courageous and self-sacrificing, but no one knows it because the school seems to want to deny her the satisfaction of being known as a good person.

There is a Harry Potter figure in the story, who is Galadriel's foil. This is Orion Lake, who is authentic hero material. Orion rushes around destroying Mals and saving the lives of his classmates. Unfortunately, this has starved the Mals, making the ones waiting for the graduating seniors in the graduation hall more fearsome, suggesting that an epic wipe-out waits for the seniors.

The story starts with El as an unknown loser junior being saved to her disgust by Orion, again. El knows that she is powerful and she knows that she has to earn a reputation as powerful if she hopes to form a graduation alliance to get past the horrific mals waiting for her class the year after next. Orion's heroism wrecks her plan and she lets Orion know that he is not welcome. Orion, naturally for what is effectively a kind of romance, finds her caustic character to be fetching. The story follows the two of them through the rest of the school year and the trials and tribulations of the Scholomance. Orion and El are not “item,” although they are thought of that way by others.

The book is exciting and adventurous and thoroughly acquaints the reader with this interesting magical world. A drawback is that a lot of this development is through El's introspective reflections. She's kind of “b*tchy,” but, then, she has reasons to be that way. I might have taken a star off for this, but I thought the rest of the story compensated.

I found two things interesting. First, is the class war aspect of the story. The Enclaves have the power, even in the Scholomance. Outside the Enclaves, life is hard. Non-enclave children were allowed into the Scholomance to provide the Enclave children with cannon fodders and servants.

Second, the Scholomance environment manages to create a student body of Slytherins. Some young wizards gain power by murdering their classmates; others get better rooms by murdering their classmates. Sometimes the obvious thing for seniors to do is to break down a wall so that the Mals in the Graduation Hall can break into the Scholomance and murder the freshmen. That way the really fearsome Mals will be otherwise occupied while the Seniors make their dash for graduation.

This is not Hogwarts.

Irenaeus of Lyons: Identifying Christianity (Christian Theology in Context) by John Behr

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I had always thought of Irenaeus as a cataloger of heresies. After reading John Behr's book, I gained an appreciation for Irenaeus as a theologian. The chief effect of this book has been to make me resolve to attempt to read Irenaeus's works.

Behr's book seems to fall into three parts. In the first part, Behr seems to be interested in retrieving the reputation of Irenaeus from that of being a heresy hunter. Behr's thesis seems to be that the Great Church was tolerant of other versions of Christianity, but it was the heretics, such as the Gnostic Valentinians and the Marcionites, who withdrew from contact with the Great Church.

I'm sure there was a lot of that going on, but the idea that orthodox Christians were comfortable with sects that wanted to eliminate the Old Testament, identify the Creator God with evil, or read the Bible as a total metaphor for various quasi-divine emanations seems like a tough sell in light of the willingness of orthodox Christians to anathematize heretics both before and after the second century AD when Irenaeus was active.

Behr spends a lot of time promoting the Lampe thesis that there was no monoepiscopacy in Rome until literally the historic 12th bishop, Eleutherus (174/5-189), the immediate predecessor of Pope Victor, about whom no one doubts were the bishop of Rome. Behr's arguments in adopting the Lampe thesis are weirdly backfiring. Thus, he points out that Ignatius of Antioch wrote his epistle to “the church in Rome” and not to a particular church in Rome, and that the Church of Rome - again, not a particular church in Rome - wrote to Corinth. Lampe argues that since no bishop is named, this means that there was no single bishop of Rome, but Behr acknowledges that this is evidence that the Christians of Rome understood that they were in some sense of single community (p. 22) (which would be consistent with some kind of hierarchy among possibly fractionated communities, involving a leader.) Likewise, Behr acknowledges that the Corinthians had a tradition of reading the Letter of Clement as “the letter of Clement” who was the bishop of Rome. Did they just make up that tradition after Eleutherius? That seems doubtful.

Behr also gives value to Lampe's argument that the list of bishops provided by Irenaeus was falsified because the sixth bishop bore the name “Sixtus.” (p. 48) One has to wonder why the forgery didn't include “Septimus” as the seventh bishop and “Octavius” as the eighth bishop? These were, after all, not uncommon names in Rome.

On such evidence, Behr states with certainty, the basis for which was not clear, that Irenaeus's list cannot be older than Eleutherius, not only because it includes the name of Eleutherius as the final bishop on the list but because Eleutherius was using the list to justify an “emerging understanding of the office of bishop.” (p. 48) Thus, Eleutherius omits Peter as a bishop and makes himself 12th, with a totally fictional “Sixtus” as sixth, to support his claim to fullness of the apostolic office. (p. 48-49.)

What a con job. One has to wonder why they gave the show away by naming the sixth bishop “Sixtus”? A lack of imagination? They couldn't have used “Septimus,” “Primus,” “Octavius” or “Gaius.”

Also, Irenaeus was literally in Rome during this period. Wouldn't he have learned when he went asking about prior bishops that there really hadn't been prior bishops? This seems odd. Irenaeus shares that he listened to the teachings of both Polycarp and Polycarp's teacher, John, the Beloved Disciple, who knew Jesus Christ. Irenaeus knew what it was like to get information from the source.

It's not clear what this discussion means to a book about Irenaeus. Irenaeus obviously believed in the credibility of the list. In fact, its credibility is a major part of his argument for the validity of the Great Church. So, why the effort to discredit Irenaeus's apologetics? Behr is an Orthodox priest, which may have something to do with why he finds Lampe's thesis so compelling.

I will give one part of this part of the book major props. I had known about Pope Eleutherius fight over the dating of Easter. I knew that he proposed to excommunicate those who held to the Jewish-based dating of Easter. I had always thought this meant most of the churches in Asia. Behr explains that this probably referred to immigrant communities in Rome that continued to follow the traditions of their home country. Eleutherius was persuaded by Polycarp not to go down this road, although later the entire Great Church adopted the Roman position.

This makes a lot of sense. Rome was a great city with a lot of immigrants. Immigrants tend to stay within their own communities. They don't adopt the customs of their host community for a long time, sometimes never. It seems reasonable that people from Antioch or Alexandria in Rome might have continued to go to churches in Rome that had ties to, and recognized the authority, of the bishops back home. That, in fact, is what we still see in many American cities today.

This also might explain some of the conflicting evidence on Lampe's “fractionation thesis.” There were immigrant communities in Rome, who might have their own leaders, with ties to their prior homes. There were also native Christian churches with a native Roman bishop. As the host community with connections to Roman society, the Roman church would have been understood as the leading church, which is why Pope Clement of Rome could write a letter to Corinth on behalf of Rome. It also explains what church would be getting the mail from Ignatius and Polycarp, although the mail might have been lateralled in via connections between the home church in Antioch and the colony church in Rome, which is how things are usually done. In any event, it would have been understood that these colony churches were on Roman territory. Finally, it would explain how “fractionation” ended without any record of the usual human conflict associated with such realignments - the immigrant churches always understood that they were on Roman territory subjected ultimately to the Roman bishop.

The second part of the book involves a deeper look into Irenaeus. I may have known it before, but it stuns me that Irenaeus knew someone who knew Jesus. The conventional datings of their lives do not make them contemporaries, but if you adjust the dating on both slightly and they could have overlapped, and Irenaeus says he listened to John.

Irenaeus was a disciple of Polycarp and affirmatively testifies that Polycarp was a student of John. This is far more likely under conventional dating. It also suggests how broad a sweep of history can be encompassed by three lives. An example: the man who taught me saber fencing in my teens remembered seeing Czarist cavalry in the streets of Warsaw. Let's put that at 1910. My daughter will be able to tell her children when she is 80 in 2080 that she knew someone who knew someone with first-hand knowledge of Czarist troops in the streets of Warsaw. That will be 170 years in the past by that time.

It also indicates why Irenaeus accounts of Christian teachings may contain a fair bit of the understanding of the early church.

The final and lengthiest part of the book is a minute analysis of Irenaeus's writings. Behr really flourishes in this part. I will not attempt to recap any part of it, but I will say that it is valuable for getting an introduction to Irenaeus's thoughts, which I will say again that I had no idea were so deep and important.

Empress of Eternity

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This seems to have a lot of the same flourishes that I found intriguing in Modesitt's “Ghost” series - bureaucratic infighting, an interest in ecological issues, and an ending that leaves me wondering “what the hell just happened?”

The McGuffin in this case is a massive, indestructible canal - 2, 000 “kays” long and 6 kays wide - that spans the “middle continent” of the Earth. I don't know what a “kay” is. I assumed that it was a kilometer, but it seems to be a common unit of measurement in the three cultures depicted in the book, each of which seems to be separated by tens of thousands of years of time.

At first, I wasn't sure if the “Earth” was our Earth, but the references to a shiny belt in place of the moon made me think otherwise, and, of course, hooked me with the question, “what happened to the Moon?”

Modesitt tells the story from the viewpoint of three pairs of characters separated widely in time. The earliest characters are aristocrats in some kind of constitutional democracy called the “Unity of Caelaarn.” In their time, glaciation has reached the canal. Authoritarian forces are plotting to take over the Unity, and Lord Maertyn is studying the canal in the hopes that there might be a clue in this ancient, indestructible, mysterious artefact that will stave off the glaciers.

The second pair are in the Ruche, which is a polity heading toward a hive mind. The characters can communicate mind-to-mind in a kind of shorthand. Ruche is threatened by global warming and desertification. One faction of the Ruche has overthrown a somewhat more liberal faction and are threatening our characters, who are studying the canal for some clue to fight global warming, with brainwipe.

The final pair is in the far future in some kind of world state called the Vanir Hegemony, which is dealing with separatists called the Aesir. The Aesir have a weapon that can destroy the universe and are using it without care about the risk. The culture of the Vanir is very Norse, for no explicable reason.

As we read the story, the plotlines begin to merge. The canal provides a time-traveling deus ex machina.

I enjoyed the story. I liked that Modesitt provided an answer for his destruction of the Moon plot point, but I'm not sure I understand or accept the explanation. Nonetheless, I enjoyed the characters and was pulled along by the thirst to know more. This is a story with a big science fiction concept wrapped in the big science fiction concept of “deep time,” which nicely captures the gosh-wow! feel of golden age science fiction.