Americana by Bhu Srinivasan

 American history treated from an economic point of view is informative and fascinating. The Pilgrims went from England to Holland for religious freedom but cam to America because of the hard conditions in Holland. They needed funds for the expedition and got them from England who needed settlers. His chapters on cotton, steam, canals, railroads, telegraph, gold, and slavery finish the first part. Each chapter highlights the economic importance signified by its title. Slaves were worth $4 billion dollars and the most valuable part of the US economy were not going to be freed without a fight. Politics is interesting but this well-written book shows that it's economics that makes the difference.

Breath The New Science of a Lost Art by James Nestor

 Effective breathing is really important for good health and long life. In a study by Buteyko "the healthiest patients breathed alike, too: less. They'd inhale and exhale about ten times a minute..." This book contains many other tips about breathing. Appendices give breathing exercises corresponding to each chapter. It takes more than one reading to distill the wisdom here but it is worth the effort.

With Malice Toward None A Life of Abraham Lincoln by Stephen B. Oates

 This is a well-written coverage of Lincoln's life with insight into his personality and his struggles and achievements. In one volume it gives one a feel for the times with an insight into Lincoln who was against slavery his entire life. He wasn't an abolitionist but felt the the country could not remain divided over slavery. He had hoped that if confined to the southern states it would eventually die out.

Energy, Hierarchy, and Inequality by Blair Fix

Living the Good Life in a Non-Growth World, Investigating the Role of HIerarchy

 This is an online essay 

The Elegant Defense: The Extraordinary New Science if the Immune System by Matt Richtel

 The author presents a really interesting of informative discussion of the immune system including many new developments. He makes it interesting relating it to actual cases. In the end it is a bit depressing to see that the patients suffer and die with medications to treat the immune system and then medicines to treat the side effect. By contrast the previous book I discussed, The Energy Cure, Unraveling the Mysteries of Hands-On Healing, describers a healers who cures cancer with no side effects. Western medicine seems to be going in the wrong direction and not taking into account other wisdom.

The Energy Cure Unraveling the Mystery of Hands-On Healing by William Bengston

 The author is a Sociology professor who learned to heal as a young man. He is able to cure cancers and some other ailments but not everything. He trained students to become healers and it turns out they could do it too. Since healing can operate over a distance it's hard to know if more than one person is present who actually is responsible for the healing. An appendix details the procedure for becoming a healer which involves creating a sequence of distractions to take your conscious mind off the healing process. The mind interferes and must be distracted. He also tested remote viewing and found that it worked sometimes, even if the viewing times were not synchronized. Asian medicine has a history of working with energy, and we should have an open mind to the possibilities.

The Modern Anglo-Dutch Empire: Its Origins, Evolution, and Anti-Human Outlook by Robert D. Ingraham

 This book talks about two forms of government, one that emphasizes the pursuit of happiness and the other property rights. Venice is the origin of the modern version of the latter and it moved to the Netherlands and England. Gottfried Leibniz was an outstanding advocate of government for the people. He influenced Ben Franklin and thereby the founding of the US.

Perfidy by Ben Hecht

 A journalist in Israel accused, in the early 1950s, Rudolf Kastner of collaborating with the Nazis in the killing of 1 million Hungarian Jews and the Israeli government sued him for libel. This book is the story of that case. Hecht portrays many of Israel's leaders as placating the British. American Jews incorrectly called an offer by Eichmann to trade Hungarian Jews for Trucks and other material as false causing the American help to flounder. 

Listen, Liberal - or whatever happened to the party of the people.

 Bill Clinton became a "New" Democrat. He cut welfare, kept the high penalties for crack compared to powdered cocaine, and was going to cut social security until Monica intervened. He enabled the bankers by removing Gram-Schmidt controls. Because of globalization labor had less clout so he needed a more reliable source of funding. Democrats since Clinton have followed his lead. Republicans have old business corporations, and Democrats the new technocrat billionaires and some Wall St hedge funds. The working class traditional Democrat constituency have no representation. Liberals tout innovation and talk frequently about innovators as if that a path that workers whose jobs have vanished can take. Instead of jobs liberals promise inclusiveness for minorities and sexes which is nice but avoids the real economic issues.

How Vaccines Wreck Human Immunity by Jack Stockwell

 This short ebook is very clearly written making the essentials understandable. Our acquired immunity or humoral immunity has two types, T cells that aggressively fight the invaders and B cells that make antibodies to protect against this invader, giving lifetime immunity The T cells make you sick in the process of fighting the invaders. Those that succumb to a virus show weak nutrition and bad environmental poisons or even damaging medicines. 

So in a natural infection first come the T cells and the the B cells. Vaccines attemp to stimulate B cells to provide antibodies with the causing virus to get the T cells to reach and activate the B cells. Using dead virus does not stimulate the B cells so vaccine makers add poisons such as mercury or aluminum to get the immune system to react. All these antibodies with no virus to fight cause the autoimmune diseases which plague modern society. And they do not create lifelong immunity as did those naturally created. Polio and other diseases were on the decline before their vaccines were introduced. He asks if you would inject a neurotoxic substance that will get through the blood brain barrier and into the brain itself in exchange for not getting the chicken pox.

Vaccine Safety Manual by Neil Z. Miller

 This is a very thorough coverage of vaccines by disease condition. Mostly vaccines are ineffective and many, many examples are given of bad side effects and death. Autism is linked to the MMR vaccine. I would never get a vaccine after reading this and am sorry that my daughter had some and probably side effects like asthma and diabetes.

The Plant Paradox: The Hidden Dangers in "Healthy" Foods that Cause Disease and Weight Gain by Steven R. Gundry MD

 He explains that when animals came along plants developed defenses, poisons to kill them. They don't kill us but they do some damage. He shows the foods that are safe to eat and those that aren't and has recipes in the back of the book created by a chef. They are mostly vegetarian because meat has a different variant of a sugar than humans and so our autoimmune system attacks it causing disease. 

Conjuring HItler: How Britain and America made the Third Reich by Guido Giacona Preparata

 Britain and the US are not part of the Eurasian land mass. Britain's aim was to prevent Eurasia from uniting which would endanger Britain's empire. They worked to provoke Germany into WWI to weaken them. Britain pretended to support the Whites (the rich) in the Russian revolution but in reality were afraid that they would be natural allies of the German nobility and so covertly supported the Reds. They wanted to weaken Germany and Russia. To do that they had to build up someone (Hitler) to fight Russia and damage them both. This they did in the 30s. They even had some such as the Duke of Windsor be friendly to Hitler so that he wouldn't attack Britain. Hitler tried to ransom the Jews but neither Britain or the US would pay. Fascinating book with lots of insights.

The Wages of Destruction by Adam Tooze

 This is a thorough economic study of Germany in relation to the world wars. Just to mention a few points: He shows how the cycle of finance worked after WWI. The Germans paid reparations to the French and British who paid their loans to the US who made loans to Germany. In the early 30s Germany stopped paying reparations which broke the cycle and allowed their economy to prepare for another war. But they were deficient in many areas. Hitler hoped to defeat the Russians getting access to the food and mineral rich Ukraine. They planned to let the Slavs die. When that didn't work they weren't going to feed the Jews who was the least favored accessible victims. The economic analysis is fascinating.

Demystifying Shariah by Sumbul Ali-Karamali

 I thought shariah was some fundamentalist ritual from a thousand years ago so reading this book was truly enlightening. Shariah was created by scholars analyzing the Islamic holy works, keeping them relevant to the current age. It was not governmental but has always been progressive, humane, and fair to all. The author explains the negative effects of colonialism with conquering powers nullifying shariah rules as too lenient. No government today uses shariah law despite what they may say for political purposes. The book is beautifully written making it possible in a short time to gain real insight in place of slogans and uninformed opinions.

Virus Mania by Torsten Engelbrecht

 The author finds the HIV theory of AIDS as silly and asks what really causes diseases known as cervical cancer, avian flu, SARS, AIDS and hepatitis C and looks at alternative explanations such as drugs, medicines, pesticides, heavy metals or insufficient nutrition. A new edition includes covid-19. Chapter 11 gives 10 reasons against measles vaccination.

The Autism Vaccine The Story of Modern Medicine's Greatest Tragedy by Forrest Maready

 The book looks at the historical incidences of autism and associates autism with the damage caused by the addition of toxins such as aluminum to vaccines.

The Invisible Rainbow by Arthur Firstenberg

 The subtitle is A History of Electricity and Life and the author elucidates the perils of our increasing use of electricity. Our bodies are electrical but at a weak level. The powerful radiation of modern life interferes with our natural processes causing serious illnesses including anxiety disorders, influenza, diabetes, heart disease and cancer.

Conceptual Physics Eight Edition by Paul Gittewitt

This is a very clear introduction to physics. Chapter 26 on Color explains the difference between additive and subtractive color. We have three kinds of color receptors for red, green, and blue which cover the visible spectrum. If we shine lights of these colors in various proportions we can create all the visible colors. If we use physical pigments, then we see red because the pigment reflects red and absorbs green and blue so we can't paint with red, green, and blue to get all colors. Green pigment absorbs red, so using both would be blackish. The colors used in ink are cyan, magenta, and yellow. Cyan absorbs only red, yellow absorbs only blue, and magenta absorbs only green so we use this backwards (subtractive). If we want green we avoid magenta, for red avoid cyan, and for blue avoid yellow. Because light is white composed of all the visible frequencies we need to subtract from it to get the right color when white light is reflected.

Chapter 25 Properties of Light
            An oscillating electric field generates an oscillating magnetic field which in turn generates an oscillating electric field and so on. The vibrating electric and magnetic fields regenerate each other to make up an electromagnetic wave which moves outward from the generating charge. Visible light is a small part of the wave spectrum. The speed of electromagnetic waves must be constant because energy is conserved. If the speed of light slowed the new fields generated would be smaller and smaller with a total energy loss. If light speed increased the energy of the generated field would continue increasing. James Clerk Maxwell found the speed of light from his equations as about 300,000 kilometers per second.

Incognito by David Eagleman

     "Our brains run mostly on autopilot, and the conscious mind has little access to the giant and mysterious factory that runs below it." Your brain doesn't encode everything. Your internal model omits stuff that doesn't seem relevant. Given a little information your brain uses its best guess to turn it into something larger.

     Outfielders move in such a way that the parabolic path of the ball always progresses in a straight line from their point of view. That's why they crash into walls. Our brains predict where the ball will be. Vision has to be learned. Blind people can learn to sense vision on their skin. The brain learns this way too. 

     The program for moving the muscles for walking is built into the machinery of the spinal cord. The entire central nervous system works this way. Hallucinations are simply unfastened vision. We can think of a scene and the low-level vision areas light up. 

     Perception works by matching expectations to current sensory data. The visual cortex constructs an internal model that allows it to anticipate the data streaming from the retina. The thalamus reports on the difference between what comes in from the eyes and what was anticipated. The thalamus sends only what wasn't predicted so the model can be refined. Awareness of your surroundings occurs only when sensory inputs violate expectations. 

     Time is a mental construction. The brain adjusts for different physical times say for sound and light or touch. 

     Plane spotters or chicken sexers have to be trained by example (like neural nets).

     We get the sense of things before we consciously make the connection. 

     Deliciousness is an index of usefulness. We identify what we can experience sensually as the entire objective reality. If you are blind you accept that reality. We accept our limited sense of smell.

     Cards 5 purple 8 red vs tequila 33 sprite 16 show social thinking easier than abstract. 

     The brain is a team of rivals. Approach-avoidance, two conflicting desires. For weight-loss provide a system to compete with the dire for food that has an incentive to make it competitive.

     Rational cognition involves external events, while emotion involves your internal state. Cognitive reserve-- overlapping solutions. 

     Minds see patterns. Consciousness exists to control-and to distribute control over-the automated alien systems. An index is the capacity to successfully mediate conflicting zombie systems. A secret represents a rivalry between two parts of the brain, one that wants to tell and one that doesn't.