I enjoyed enormously this book, here are some quotes:

"Man, it seems to me, is not in history, he is history."

"Those who open themselves up are cowards. Unlike other people, we believe that opening oneself up is a weakness or a betrayal."

"The Mexican can bend, can bow humbly, can even stoop, but he cannot back down. That is, he cannot allow the outside world to penetrate his privacy. The man who backs down is not to be trusted, is a traitor or a person of doubtful loyalty. He babbles secrets and is incapable of confronting a dangerous situation."

"Women are inferior beings because in submitting, they open themselves up. Their inferiority is constitutional and resides in their sex, their submissiveness, which is a wound that never heals."

"All these expressions reveal that the Mexican views life as combat, this attitude does not make him any different from anyone else in the modern world. For other people, however, the manly ideal consists in an open and aggressive fondness for combat, whereas he, we emphasize defensiveness, the readiness to repel any attack, the Mexican macho, the male is a hermetic being closed up in himself, capable of guarding both himself and whatever has been confided to him. Manliness is judged according to one's invulnerability to enemy arms or to impacts of the outside world."

"Stoicism is the most exalted of our military and political attributes. Our history is full of expressions and incidents that demonstrate the indifference of our heroes towards suffering or danger. We are taught from childhood to accept defeat with dignity, a conception that is certainly not ignoble."

"Woman is a domesticated wild animal, lascivious and sinful from birth, who must be subdued with a stick and guided by a rain of religion. Therefore Spaniards considered other women, especially those of a race or religion different from their own to be easy game. The Mexican considers a woman to be a dark, secret, and passive being."

"She does not attribute evil instincts to her. She even pretends that she does not have any, or to put it more exactly, her instincts are not her own, but those of the species because she is an incarnation of the life force, which is essentially impersonal. Thus it is impossible for her to have a personal private life, for if she were to be herself, if she were to be a mistress of her own wishes, passions, or whims, if she would be unfaithful to herself, the Mexican hair, to the great pre-Columbian religions based on nature, is a good deal more pain than the Spaniards, and does not condemn the natural world, a sexual love is not tinged with grief and horror in the Mexico as it is in Spain."

"Instincts themselves are not dangerous. The danger lies in any personal individual expression of them. And this brings us back to the idea of passivity."

"Woman is never herself, whether lying stretched out or standing up straight, whether naked or fully clothed, she is an undifferentiated manifestation of life, a channel for the universal appetite. In this sense, she has no desire of her own. The Mexican women, quite simply has no will of her own. Her body is asleep and only comes out really alive when someone awakens her. She is an answer rather than a question of iron and easily worked material that is shaped by the imagination and sensuality of the male. In other countries, women are active, attempting to attract men through the agility of their minds or the seductivity of their bodies, but the Mexican woman has a sort of heretic calm, a tranquility made up of both hope and contempt. The man circles around her. Courtship sinks to her, sets his horse or his imagination to performing. He calls for her pleasure. Meanwhile, she remains behind the veil of her modesty and immobility, she is an idol, and like all idols, she is a mistress of magnetic forces, whose efficacy increases as their sources of transmission becomes more and more passive and secretive. There's a cosmic analogy here. Woman does not seek. She attracts and the center of attraction is or hidden, passive sexuality. It is a secret, an immovable sun."

"Religion and destiny ruled their lives as morality and freedom rule ours. We live under the sign of liberty, and everything, even Greek fatality, and grace of the theologians, is election and struggle, but for Aztecs, the problem reduced itself to investigating the never clear will of the gods. Only the gods were free and only they had the power to choose and therefore in a profound sense to sin. The only thing of value is manliness, personal strength, a capacity for imposing oneself on others."

"Mexican, deeper and more genuine transcends both ethics and anecdotes, in effect, every woman, even when she gives herself willingly is torn open by the man, is the chingada. It is astonishing that a country with such a vivid past a country so profoundly traditional, so close to its roots, so rich in ancient legends, even if poor in modern history should conceive of itself only as a negation of its origins."

"History has the cruel reality of a nightmare, and the grandeur of man consists in making beautiful and lasting works out of the real substance of that nightmare, or to put in another way, it consists in transforming the nightmare into vision, and freeing ourselves from the shapeless hour of reality, if only for an instant, by means of creation."

"He was a philosopher of institutions holding that the emotions were the only faculties capable of apprehending material things, and that knowledge was the total instantaneous vision of reality. The radicalism of the Mexican revolution consists in its own originality that is, in its return, to our roots, the only proper basis for institution, when the Zapatistas made the Calpulli, the basic element in our economic and social structure, they not only savage the valid portion of the colonial transition, but also affirm that any political construction, if it is to be truly productive, must derive from the most ancient stable, and the lasting part of our national being, then genius. past. Zapata's traditionalism reveals that he had a profound awareness of our history."

"He was isolated, both radically and regionally, from the journalists and theorists of the epoch in this isolation, gave him the strength and insight, the grasp of the simple truth, and the truth of the revolution was actually very simple. It was the freeing of the Mexican reality from the constricting schemes of the liberalism and the abuses of the conservatives and the neoconservatives. Thanks to the revolution, the Mexican wants to reconcile himself with his history and his origin."

"In Europe and the United States, the intellectual has been deprived of power. He lives in exile so far as the state is concerned and wields his influence from the outside the government with criticism as his principal mission. In Mexico, the intellectual mission is political action, the Mexican intelligence that has not only served this country, it has also defended it, honestly and effectively."

"He who does not have demonic seeds within him will never give birth to a new world."

"It is still necessary to count the signs which suggest that our culture is getting ready to attack its own roots. Thankfully, it is essentially easy to grasp this fact of the field of exact science. Every step that has gone forward is like the blow of an ax against the supporting pillar, a complete and new concept of the truth is produced, and with that, a complete and new concept of understanding. The more exact we are in our thinking, the more we are open our eyes to the vagueness of the basis of our thoughts."

For early man, there could not have been a difference between living and dead things or even between imaginary and real. Instead for him, there was only a hierarchy of forms. An order of images and signs in accordance with their forces. For him, they were visible, audible, tangible, tastable essentialities, which have been partially there and had to be created by him, and which he learned to pit against each other, according to his will.

We already indicated that the type of magical man does definitely not signify something ill in the common sense, despite displaying a slot of symptoms which we call pathological in our world sphere. In the sphere, the magician operates indeed as healthy and shows the essential attributes of the healthy, that is to say, courage, self-confidence, ability to cope with life, etc. Likewise, there appears what we call imagination completely as reality in their associated world and our realities appear there simply as obtuse imbecilities quite frequently.

"Since all magic is in one way or another based on animism and demonism, contrary, for example, to our empirical domination of nature. It is explainable that the cult of the demons is also at the fore, outside of the closer area of magic. This is called pictorial magic. The word picture has to be understood in the widest sense. These are not necessarily exact replications of the object, but every piece of wood, every kind of a good drawing in the sand, and under certain circumstances, the pure concrete imagination are enough. It is only crucial that something is used as a substitute for the real thing. Therefore, pictorial magic comes into consideration only where the real object is difficult to access for direct magical manipulations. Amulet magic can be steered like pictorial magic into totally opposite directions. It is able to heal and destroy, can inspire love or crush it, can give a strength for battle or weakness, and much more, the difference with pictorial magic is only that the amulet must be worn by the one. It is designed to have effects on while pictorial magic is designed for the farthest distance.

But a history of magic cannot be written in the same manner as, for example, a history of physical science. Our knowledge is of old peoples and the exotic is insufficient to establish a biogenesis of its darkest, most cryptic and most or more or less secret beliefs and activities. Whenever we encounter people we find that they possess magic systems and practices, but we are often unable to ascertain how these symptoms emerge, where we could speak of influence or even what justifiably should be set as earlier or later.

We can only speak of the old or of the exotic and have to treat a millennium as if it were a day on the other side, magic by its nature, resist the use of our concepts of development, since it rests too much on intuitive knowledge and autogenetic power.

Arguably, great magicians are replaced by mediocre ones and time where magic dominates and penetrates all life or replaced by times where magic recedes, but true progress, in our rationalist sense can be demonstrated nowhere.

The Europeans, and with them, the late type of man is the general characterized by his lack of feeling for the concrete corporeal. He does not experience the physical world as something intrinsic and substantial, and he therefore lacks every sense for a deeper meaning of the gazalt like the actual. It is always said that the European has a pronounced sense of reality and a sense of fact, but closer inspection reveals that he always looks past reality and the facts, and what he holds in his hands are empty schemes, the whole materialism and rationalism of, or time virtually strikes in the face, every deeper sense of reality and facts. The European type of man is solely attuned to his running dry of the brain, and therefore he is not able to grasp the fullness of reality anymore. What I don't clearly and distinctly recognize is not says the clatis and this shape, the fundamental principles of European rationalism. European poll, and therefore the degeneration of magic of demonism and of religion begins around the world, roughly at the same time, namely, about 500 years before Christ, the year 500 BC identifies the climax of a magical consciousness. At that time, allowed, say, was working in China, a representative of a certain enlightened mystic in India. Buddha was completing Brahmanism, and Persia, Zoroaster was reforming the older magic and was founding his quite a rationalistically substantiated sect. The concrete human, the concrete people, the concrete gods are thereby eliminated, and in their stead, the abstract notion of humanity is placed above which a likewise purely conceptual monotheism is enthroned. The slogan of humanism of the general humanity, the universal manhood derives from this tendency of universalism, of a late time, likewise do dreams of a solely true world of religion. The immediate consequence of abstract monotheism was the establishment, the absolute morality, which was seen as equally applicable for all people.

The early time knows no morality in this universal sense, its rule of life is given by the folkish custom and by the will of the tribal god whose governing was utterly autocratic and was giving orders at his discretion. These, as well as the customs of the people, can potentially be very violent and immoral. They can demand blood and destruction have nothing to do with humanness, brotherly love, or an abstract good of some sort. The so-called good for which the late universal moral strives consists of an apotheosis of the abstract and rational, and therefore of an alienation, from the concrete, from the body, from the picture, from their rational compulsiveness."

It is a moral of the castration and abatement, just as abstract monotheism is appearing as an emasculated and weighing demon, the fleshly strong aristocratic idea of life of earlier times is forsaken and forgotten in favor of sentimental, leveling down which seeks the imprisonment and domestication of all mankind. But magic is something primeval, heroic, unsentimental, something violent, violent, aristocratic, bodily concrete, which resists every abstraction, universalism and moralization.

Magic is the plunder of demonically imbued men.

The nerve center of witchcraft was the artificial creation of sama nambulant dream states by using narcotics salves and inhalence, and modeled on antiquity, and the consequential experience of mamgamation, with the otherworldly demonic potencies, analogous, the antique sexual mysteries. This devil love actually represented only a very primeval form of communal with the deity, which was also sanctioned by the Catholic Church, which gives witchcraft.

While we present the following of theory of magic, nothing will be further from our mind than to simply explain the phenomenal way and portray everything as completely natural. On the contrary, we want to show that the whole addiction to naturalness is a serious misunderstanding of nature, that at the bottom of nature, something tremendously unnatural is sleeping, and that the every intellectual understanding only leads. This pseudoscientific oriented European believes himself to be surrounded by things which he regards as objects, self-contained static qualities. His sensory organs transmits to him the perception of these things, and for him, it is only a question of looking accurately enough to form a correct view about them, and to not fall for an appearance, a deception, he thereby believes that an accurate view is indeed equivalent to the actual things of the environment. This perception was soon weakened by the realization that things are only accessible to us in accordance with our sensory organs, that we should would observe the things differently poor or richer. If we had other, more numerous or more limited sensory organs, we could there still be an equivalent between our mental image and the thing itself.

Now the objection is suggested that in this way, every differentiation, between fantastical perceptions, imagination, and objective observations might be blurred. But there is indeed no fundamental difference between them. Imagination and observations are the same extent, products of the cosmic dynamic and of inner bodily forces, and as such, are real, provided that the notion of reality still has any means at all. That, in practice, we nevertheless differentiate between imagination and observation is because of the fact that the imagination is to stronger degree caused by inner bodily compression of cosmic energy. Observation, on the other hand, is caused more by the influence of layers of cosmic force net, which are further away. These distinguishing features can be very important for daily life, but they do not play any role in relation to true or false, real, or illusion. The notions of true and false are completely relative and depend on the overall meaning of our world of perception, just as the meaning of an individual world always depends on the overall meaning of the whole sentence or even the whole book.

Now the objection is. That is somewhat gives rise to the emergences of this perception. The difference between true and false has disappeared. We have only gained one thing, an insight into the structure, that is to say, into the drawing floor of that jugulary of fantasy, which we call the objective world, but quite a lot of it is gained with it, namely, the possibility to intervene in this structure that is to say, change the world according to our will. But this is magic, and on this basis, we are able to create reality, where no reality is.

The man with the greatest force of imagination is commanding of the world and creates realities according to his will, instead of being the slave and unstantial bodily less empiricism. Empiricism fulfills the laws of probability, but imagination makes the impossible happen. The pure empirical man is the entropic type which leads to the complete devaluation of cosmic energy. The imaginative man instead, the magician is the actual focus of the ectropic, the renewal of the world, remodeling of the world, the new birth of being. Magic is autogenetic exertions of power on the basis of imagination, and we have gained a new definition or for the notion of reality. Reality is the becoming an image of our deepest essential powers. Truth is nothing receptive about something creative. The process of observation, not a process of depiction, but of a construction.

There has been worldviews which have rejected being for this reason, renounce it, and neglected it, for example, the doctrine of Buddha or Schopenhauer, but this is a religion negativism, which is negating the will of the gods and is pushing them back into nothingness. From this attitude, springs of resigned pessimism, nihilism, and atheism, which can never act as culture creating.

Remember that thoughts create the idol, and these idols can destroy the faith. Know that these idols are really powerless, but you can endow them with power and not know it. Ah, but still, you do not understand what you have power and you've invented idols and mind gifted them with power through your faith, your imagination, you still do not know that your faith is more than just what you think, faith is you, faith in you is the high strength. Remember this only through faith. Can we free ourselves from fetters. Through faith, we can have all knowledge and realize all dreams, but the key to our deepest faith is ritual and belief and without these, we cannot obtain it.

Once again, the birth of the demon arrives all.

The other magic and making the closest possible relationship with the demon should be practiced because everything centers on the magical forces and our demon. It gives us the gift in a sense to help persuade the hidden gods, to make themselves known, only by doing magic through practice and gaining experience, will we recognize divinity, and learn to be one with her. This is the goal."

"the squaring of the circle, the duplication of the cube, the trisection of the angle, the ratio of incommensurable magnitudes, the paradox of motion, and the validity of infinitesimal methods." These problems can be associated, though not exclusively, with ancient thinkers like Hippocrates, Archytas, Hippias, Zeno, and Democritus.

The ancient schools with their astonishing achievements in geometric, arithmetic, and trigonometric procedures, as well as astronomical observations, have inspired considerable speculation concerning transmissions and influence. As Boyer notes, "Until now there is inadequate documentation to support any of the related major conjectures. There is however, a great deal to be learned from recent translations of these and prior texts."

The 17th century, which Boyer calls "the century of genius," produced remarkable mathematicians like Torricelli. However, as the author observes, "The discoveries of great mathematicians do not automatically become part of mathematical tradition. They may be lost to the world unless other scholars understand them and take enough interest to look at them from various points of view, clarify and generalize them and point out their implications."

Boyer explores Daniel Bernoulli's distinction between mathematical expectations and moral expectations, noting his assumption that "a small increase in a person's material means cause an increase in satisfaction that is inverse proportion to the means." This leads to the equation dM=kdPPdM=kPdP​, where M is the moral fortune, P is the physical fortune, and k is the constant of proportionality, concluding that "as the physical fortune increases geometrically, the more fortunes increase arithmetically."

The book highlights Jacobi's advice to "always invert" as "the secret success in mathematics," noting how this principle helped him achieve simplicity through inversions of functional relationships in elliptic integrals. Boyer divides the history of logic into three categories: Greek logic, scholastic logic, and mathematical logic, explaining how each stage progressively transformed logical formulas from ordinary language to specialized artificial languages.

Boyer traces the revolution in geometry to when Gauss, Lobachevsky, and Bolyai "freed themselves from preconceptions of space," and similarly notes how "the thorough-going arithmetization of analysis became possible only when, as Weierstrass foresaw, mathematicians understood that the real numbers are to be viewed as intellectual structures, rather than as intuitively given magnitudes inherited from Euclid."

In a historical irony, Boyer points out how "while Bourbaki and many other pure mathematicians pursued the goal of substituting ideas for calculations, engineers and applied mathematicians developed computers that would revive interest in numerical and arithmetic techniques, and sharply affect the composition of many departments of mathematics." He also notes that in the first half of the 20th century, "the history of computing machines involved more statisticians, physicists, and electrical engineers than mathematicians."

It is might against might, man against man, money against money, brain against brains, and everything to the winner.

Chinese civilization deliberately distorts its children's feet by swathing them in bandages of silk and hoop iron; Christian civilization crushes and cramps the minds of its youth by means of false philosophies, artificial moral codes, and iron-clad political creeds. Delirious sub-theories of good and evil are systematically injected into our natural literatures and gradually crystallize themselves into iron-clad formulas, invaluable constitutions, will-o'-the-wisps, evangels, and other deadly epidemics.

Modern leaders of thought are almost wholly wanting in originality and courage; their wisdom is foolishness, their remedies poison. They idiotically claim they guide the destinies of nations, whereas in reality they are but the flotsam and scum, the froth that glides smoothly down the dark stream of decadence.

If we would retain and defend our manhood, we must not permit ourselves to be forever rocked to repose with the sweet lullabies of Eastern idealism. Too long we have been hypnotized by the occult charm of Hebrew utopianism. If we continue to obey the insidious spell laid upon us, we will wake up some dread morning with the gates of hell upon earth yawning wide open, to close again upon us forever.

Nature does not love the wrongdoer, but endeavors in every possible way to destroy him. Her curse is on the brood of the meek and lowly. Her blessing is on the very heart's blood of the strong and the brave.

Only Jews and Christs and other degenerates think rejuvenation can ever come through law and prayer. Freemen should never regulate their conduct by the suggestion or dicta of others, for when they do so they are no longer free. No man ought to obey any contract, written or implied, except his will himself. He has given his personal, informal adherence thereto when in the state of mental maturity and unrestrained liberty. It is slaves that are born into contracts signed and sealed by their progenitors. The free man is born free, lives free, and dies free.

He is, even though living in artificial civilization, above all laws, all constitutions, all theories of right and wrong. He supports and defends them, of course, as long as they suit his own ends. But if they don't, then he annihilates them by the earliest and most direct method.

All threats of hell and hopes of paradise—One thing at least is certain: this life flies. One thing is certain and all the rest is lies. The flower that has once bloomed forever dies.

I deny, and I affirm, is the countersign of material freedom. I believe, and I obey, is the symbol of serfage. Belief is a flunky, a feminine. He is a creator, a master. He who denies fundamentals is triple armor-clad; indeed, he is invulnerable. On the other hand, it has been said that every belief, every philosophy has some truth in it, but so we might add, has every insanity.

Strong men are not deterred from pursuing their aim by anything. They go straight to the goal, and that goal is beauty, wealth, and material power. The mission of power is to control and exploit the powerless, for to be powerless is to be criminal.

Bravery includes every virtue; humility, every crime. He who is afraid to risk his life must never be permitted to win anything.

But courage that goes its way alone, as undauntedly as when it marches to victory or death amid the menacing stride of armed and bannered legions—courage that delights in danger, courage that proudly, defiantly smiles on death; courage that regards with equal loathing the multitudes' mad howls of hate, their stupid hee-haws, and their treacherous, tremendous applause; courage that asks no quarter, even with a knife at its throat; courage that is stiff-necked, unyielding, sullen, pitiless; courage that never falters, never retreats; courage that looks down with supreme disdain upon all slave regulations, upon all rights and wrongs, upon all good and evil—courage that has made up its mind to conquer or perish—that is the kind of courage that this world lacks. That is the kind of courage that, by active cooperation, aids the survival of the fittest, the survival of the best. That is the kind of courage that has never turned a master's mill; that is the kind of courage that never will turn it. That is the kind of courage that will die rather than turn it.

The philosophy of power has slumbered long. But whenever men of sterling worth have found it, they must again sweep away the ignoble dollar-damned pedantism of today and, openly as of old, dominate the destiny of an emancipated and all-conquering race.

All over continental Europe, there is a popular superstition that Jew rabbis steal and murder Christian infants and maidens in order to use the blood on the door lintels at Passover and other ceremonials. A similar charge was brought against the early Christians and even proved in the imperial law courts, if we are to judge by the verdicts.

The Romans first appear in history as a gang of banditti, the English as a nest of pirates, the Germans as a horde of roving freebooters, the Russians as a band of mounted horse thieves, the Americans as pious anarchists and nigger-stealers, the Australians as exiled cut-purses, the Turks as Bedouin brigands. Everywhere, symbols of kinship, tribal totems, and insignia of states speak violence, defiance, and war. Be strong and fear not, for all abstraction melts away before real strength of deed and strength of character.

Nothing succeeds like success. Do not quibble over the order of your succeeding, but succeed. Thou shalt not give thy heart to no God, for that is idiocy; neither shalt thou love thy neighbor as thyself, for that is madness. Let "Kneel or hang" be your motto, even to the death. If you fail, you are right, just, and detestable; but if you triumph, thrice blessed art thou. The great vice of our age is cowardice. Glory and honor beyond to him that wins, but a marathon be upon the head of him that fails.

Failure is not only disgrace but practical proof of organic incompetence. Power and proprietorship cover a multitude of sins, of alleged sins. The men and women, especially women, have an overflowing fund of sympathy and forgiveness for the bold, bad man if he is victorious. How women admire men of leonine resolution and eagle-like principle, how they detest cowardice, goodness, feebleness, effeminacy, failure. There is no character in history so universally applauded as the bold, bad rebel, the mighty conqueror. Readers must distinctly understand that sexual morality is nowise commanded in these pages. In all sexual relations, as in everything else, morality is what strength decrees.

Women are frail beings at the best of times and, in their secret hearts, are probably lovers of the unlimited. For the welfare of the breed and the security of descent, they must be held in thorough subjugation. Man has captured them; besides providing for and protecting them, it is necessary to keep them on the chain, as it were, for want of him, for want of them, and for want of our race. If ever these lovable creatures should break loose from mastership and become the rulers or equals of man—but that is impossible, for the earliest ancient man captured his wife by force or stratagem, and to this day, he does the same. The marriage ceremony symbolizes his proprietorship, his capture. The marriage rule is one link of a chain, emblematic of the fact that the prehistoric bridegroom chained his beloved one in a cave till she became tame, tractable, and reciprocative. The sexual degeneracy that is now so prevalent among us is the result of Christian civilization; that is to say, the demonetization of men and the equalization of woman. As long as the husband is absolute imperator within his own four walls...

"The Manipulated Man" by Esther Vilar, first published in 1971, is another eye-opening literature on how radically far away modernity is from nature. The author argues how all of modern activities in today's life is to feed the comforts of women at the expense of men. She says this begins from a childhood where a mother draws a square around a baby, repeatedly, denouncing good and bad behaviors, and what is virtue and what is sin. This is an act that comes from fear, as when a boy grows into manhood, only the conditions he's grown to will stop him from acting in harm to himself, the people around him, and his community. What I might take away from this book was the emphasis of education. I went to university and I remember at the entrance campus, it wrote, "The truth shall set you free."

I've also had the luxury to be around very bright people of both sexes - this book simply creates a framework around economic dynamics between the two, its not the end all be all truth.

This book is banned in many circles, read at your own caution.

In summary, she argues man is a working machine.

Here are some quotes from the book:

"A man who changes his way of life or rather his profession for life and profession are synonymous to him is considered unreliable. If he does it more than once, he becomes a social outcast and remains alone."

"Of course, one might say that a man who has lost his capacity of earning money is automatically freed from his burden and should be glad about this happy ending, but freedom is the last thing he wants, his function as we shall see according to the principles of pleasure is in non-freedom. To be sentenced to lifelong freedom is a worse fate than lifelong slavery. To put in another way, man is always searching for someone or something to enslave him, for only as a slave, does he feel secure, and as a rule, his choice falls on a woman."

"Life offers the human being 2 choices, animal existence, a lower order of life, and spiritual existence, in general, a woman will choose the former, and opt for physical well-being, a place to breed, and an opportunity to indulge unhindered in her breeding heavens. At birth, men and women have the same intellectual potential. There is no primarily difference in intelligence between the sexes."

"It is also a fact of potential left to stagnate will entropy. Women do not use their mental capacity They deliberately let it disintegrate. After a few years of sporadic training, they revert to the state of irreversible mental torpor."

"Why do women not make use of their intellectual potential? For the simple reason that they do not need to. It is not essential for their survival. Theoretically, it is possible for a beautiful woman to have less intelligence than a chimpanzee and still be considered an acceptable member of society."

"By the age of 12, at least, most women have decided to become prostitutes, or to put it another way. They have planned a future for themselves, which consists of choosing a man and letting him do the work, all the work. When a man sees a woman spending hours cooking, washing dishes, and cleaning, it never occurs to him that such jobs probably make her quite happy, since they are exactly at her mental level. Instead, he assumes that this drudgery prevents her from doing all those things which he himself considers worthwhile and desirable."

"It is true that men love women, but they also despise them. Anyone who gets up in the morning fresh and ready to conquer new worlds with frequent success admittedly because he has to earn a living is bound to despise someone who simply isn't interested in such pursuits. Contempt may even be one of the main reasons for his efforts to further the mental development of a woman. He feels ashamed of her and assumes that she, too, must be ashamed of herself. So being a gentleman, he tries to help."

"There is one great advantage which women have over men, they have a choice, a choice between the life of a man and the life of a dim witted parasitic luxury item. There are too few women who would not select the latter. Men do not have this choice."

"Women feel anything but oppressed by men, on the contrary, on one of the many depressing truths about the relationship between the sexes is simply that men hardly exist in a women's world. Man is not even powerful enough to revolt against women's dependence on him is only material of a physical nature, something like a tourist, depend on an airline, a cafe preparator on his espresso machine, a car, is on gasoline, a television set on electric current. Of course, women will always be pleased if a man turns to look at her and if she is well dressed or drives an expensive sports car so much the better."

"Her pleasures may be compared to that of a shareholder who finds that his stocks have risen. Yes, only women exists in a woman's world. The woman she meets at church, at parent teacher meetings or in the supermarket, the woman with whom she chats over, the garden fence, the woman at parties or window shopping, and the more fashionable streets knows she apparently never seems to notice. These women are the measure of her success or failure. Women's standards correspond to those in other women's heads, not in those in the heads of men. It is their judgment that really counts not those of men."

"A simple word of praise from another woman, and all those clumsy inadequate male compliments fall by the way side, for they are just praises out of the mouths of amateurs. Women are in contrast to men, practically immune to the looks of the opposite sex. If a woman flirts with her husband's best friends, her intentions to annoy his wife, whose feelings do matter, unlike those of her husband. If she fell deeply about the man in question, she would never show her emotions in public."

"It is lucky for adult women that men do not consider themselves beautiful, since most men are beautiful. Of all the qualities of man, his curiosity is certainly the most impressive. This curiosity differs basically from that of women. At that moment, man would be delighted to cease all activity, but because he is a man and is a man's destiny to act, he belongs to, begins to long for the rules of his childhood to long for someone who will test, tell him what to do, to give meaning to his now meaningless actions, these actions are meaningless because they serve his comfort. But what does he serve? At this point, he will search for the new deity, one to take a place in his, of his mother, the deity of his childhood, the moment he finds her, he becomes her objective, abject slave."

While intelligence shows itself in actions that are reasonable and logical, hence permits measurements, predictability, and control, stupidity shows itself in actions that are completely unreasonable, unpredictable, and uncontrollable.

"If he treats women as a superior being, she will become a superior being for him. Women are more gifted to differentiate between facts and fiction. Unlike other methods of manipulation, good manners or not the result of conditioned forms of behavior based on profound psychological motivations. Children are taught to behave relatively late, and manners are particularly easy to recognize as a form of women's exploitation. It is a puzzle why even today such old tricks are still successful."

"The old saying that a woman's fate is her body is true in so far as, A positive meaning, but in the negative sense, it is better applied to men. After all, a woman profits from her anatomical peculiarities whenever she can, while a man is an eternal slave to his. If anyone ought to feel a sense of envy, it is men, they should be jealous of woman's power, but of course they never are, for they glory in their powerlessness. This is a natural assumption, since he has been manipulated to think that sex is the height of all pleasures, he is, of course, quite mistaken."

"A woman will certainly feel happy when she has an orgasm, but it is not the most intense pleasures she knows, a cocktail party, or buying a new pair of auburn colored patent letters rates far higher.

Consequently, a lie becomes a luxury. It has a rarity value. The rarity value has to be maintained by incessant denigration in the interest of liars. Therefore, it is very important that women teach men love of truth. For only if he loves truth, is she able to afford the luxury of lying."

The following quotes from the early 2000s blogosphere remind us that while our tools may change, human nature remains remarkably consistent. These insights, though controversial to some, capture eternal truths about attraction and relationships that transcend technological advances.

My two cents is this: better to know one selves and temper the iron than to aimlessly indulge in hedonism. Consider these truths only reinforce that cultivating the self these pleasures naturally gravitate.

"She laughs at the absurdity and beauty of the world, but never at the expense of others. She is warm, and this is something that can't be taught."

"She says, 'I love you' early and often out of conviction, not inquisition. She understands that her heart is more important than her pride."

"If you can seduce a hot woman into bed multiple times, then seduce her into love, and then do this same thing with many hot women over the course of your life, you are an alpha male, no matter what else you have or have not accomplished in your life. Many will balk at this, but that doesn't change its truth."

"He-men will say that getting laid is less important than sticking up for your principles. I'd say tell them that having principles is fine up until the point those principles become recurring obstacles getting in the way of enjoying a satisfying love life."

"You will get bored of sex with every girl you date. The only question is how soon. No girl can completely satisfy you. As soon as you meet such a girl, your standards will shift upwards. This is the nature of your humanity."

"You should go all in at least once in your life. You'd be surprised what you can achieve under duress."

"For if women do harbor secret desires for dark seduction, then what is left of the pretext of chivalry? Women benefit from some amount of cultural pedestalization in society. There is no room in a healthy functioning society for mischievous inquisitors to lay bare the true soul of women. My understanding of women, and from what I've gleaned from their romance novels and porn, leads me to believe that rape is a fantasy for women when the rapist is implied or otherwise insinuated to be the sort of man for whom a woman would surrender themselves in other contexts willingly, i.e. an alpha. Women do have a natural social biological revulsion to rape by losers because their most precious asset, their womb, cannot suffer lightly. The gimp seed of omega trumps forcefully implanted. But what of rape by a masked alpha? That's where normal moral certainty yields to an unforgiving and woolly judgment for discomfiting ambiguity. The chads question above: how to take advantage of this female perversion without getting arrested. I would not suggest any actual rape of your beloved. Don't jump out at her from behind the bush while she's walking home alone at night."

"As I've noted before, a solid, healthy relationship rests on the foundation of women chasing the man. The day your woman succeeds at guarding you in the relationship is the day you begin to slide into betahood, infrequent sex, cuckoldry, and eventually break up."

"And the fact that women can go long stretches without sex, like a camel without water in the desert, and still keep their sanity helps them stick to their guns. A girlfriend once told me: 'For women, when we're not getting it, we kind of forget about it. When we are getting it, we crave it.' For men, when you guys aren't getting it, you crave it."

"Game is, in effect, a system for recognizing and mimicking those male mate value dominance cues in one's behavior."

"If your girl is complaining about your selfishness, you're doing it right. Your gift to her is that you don't go around sleeping with other women."

"Meaningless acts of romance are far more meaningful to girls than meaningful acts of romance. Similarly, spontaneous expressions of romance will linger in the girl's memory for far longer than elaborately planned romantic gestures."

"Chicks dig power. Don't date, never pay, play by your own rules."

"He who hesitates masturbates. Better to pursue lots of women until you find one willing to go all the way, right away, than to waste a month on a tease."

"Women want to be seduced. Hot, sexy women want to fuck someone. Why not you

"But seduction is, in its essence, the art of acting."

"This works because women love two characteristics about men: unpredictability and ambiguity. The woman who can readily predict or decipher your reaction or the meaning of your words is the woman who will make her desire more predictable and less ambiguous to you. She does not want your hostility or your sychophancy, both of which are as predictable as sunrise."

"If I could give just one piece of advice to my hypothetical son, it would be this: never take a woman seriously."

"She's banging a dude who just got married and she acts as if his marriage is going okay. No one is that stupid. She asked because by asking, she absolves herself of any guilt or accountability for what she is doing. This is how women think—they are submissive, empty vessels to their core."

"Maxim #13: Calling a girl out on her lie accomplishes nothing."

"Maxim #59: The most successful marriages are those with a balance of power that slightly favors the husband's status over the wife's looks."

"Maxim #68: The definition of inner game: hit on every woman who stimulates your crotch, make life uncomfortable for them, not yourself."

"Maxim #200: Men acquire lovers, women share lovers."

It is man's responsibility, his choice of life to uphold humankind, but women? The writer argues they are replaceable. This is narrow minded and the truth is somewhere closer to the middle - It is respect for my family and their love and their correct child-rearing that I know of the gentile side of humankind. There is public power also known as the patriarchy, and there is private, or domestic power the matriarchy which the writer misses to understand.

I always thought is was common sense a man can aim one day pointing at her to say 'she is the mother of my children'. And if both approach with good faith I do not see an issue.

Frankly, the writer comes from a place of self hate and its fatalistic. Here are some quotes.

It is the fashion among men to despise the smallness of women's lives. The so-called bourgeois woman with her shallow vanity, for instance, is a joke to the brave intellectuals, truck drivers, and revolutionaries who have wider horizons on which to project and indulge deeper vanities that women dare not mock or into which women dare not aspire. The fishwife is a vicious caricature of the small-mindedness and maternal greed of the working-class wife who harasses her humble, hard-working, ever-patient husband with petty tirades of insult that no gentle rebuke can mellow. The lady, the aristocrat, is a polished empty shell, good only for spinning at because spit shows up on her clean exterior, which gives immediate gratification to the spitter, whatever his technique. The Jewish mother is a monster who wants to cut the phallus of her precious son into a million pieces and put it in the chicken soup. The black woman, also a caste traitor, is a grotesque matriarch whose sheer endurance disolutes men. The lesbian is half monster, half moron; having known man, she nags. She imagines herself Napoleon.

Form conquers chaos; form banishes confusion. Form gives ignorance a shape, makes it look like something instead of nothing. The Right offers women a concept of love based on order and stability with formal areas of mutual accountability. A woman is loved for fulfilling her female functions. Obedience is an expression of love, and so are sexual submission and childbearing. Immaturity, and the man is supposed to be responsible for the material and emotional well-being of the woman. And increasingly, to redeem the cruel inadequacies of mortal men, the Right offers women the love of Jesus: beautiful brother, tender lover, compassionate friend, perfect healer of sorrow and resentment. The one man to whom one can submit, absolutely, to be a woman, as it were, without being sexually violated or psychologically abused.

The creative mind is intelligence in action in the world.

The price for exercising creative intelligence for those born female is unspeakable suffering. All things on earth have their price, wrote Olive Schreiner, and for truth we pay the dearest. We barter it for love and sympathy. The road to honor is paved with thorns, but another path, the path of truth, at every step you set your foot down on your heart. Truth is the goal of creative intelligence, whatever its kind and path. Tangled with the world, it is the problem of truth. Moral intelligence is not the stuff of which cunts are made. Moralism is the effort to find some basis for self-respect, a pitiful gesture towards being human at which men laugh and for which women pity other women. The right of men to women's bodies for the purpose of intercourse remains the heart, soul, and bowels of male supremacy. This is true, whatever style of advocacy is used, Right or Left, to justify coital access.

He said that women needed the protection of men. He said that the clan had sent men to the convention to protect their womenfolk from the lesbians who would assault them. He said that it was necessary to protect women's rights and families because that was the key to the stability of the nation. He said that homosexuality was a Jewish sickness. He said that homosexuality was a lust that threatened to wipe out the family. He said that homosexual teachers should be found out and run out of town on a rail. They could all go to Jew New York.

Trying to keep out of my end of the conversation, I asked him why he was against homosexual teachers, especially if their homosexuality was private. He said that there was no such thing as private homosexuality, that if homosexuals were in schools, children would be corrupted and tainted and molested and taught to hate God and the family. Homosexuality will claim the woman and the children if they were exposed to it. Its presence at all, even hidden anywhere, could take people from family life and put them into sin. His description was almost voluptuous in that no one in his estimation would remain untouched.

Anti-Semitism, wrote Jean-Paul Sartre, does not fall within the category of ideas protected by the right of free opinion. Indeed, it is something quite other than an idea. It is, first of all, a passion, the great hatred that suffers history, pushing it forward to inevitable and repeated horror. Of all passions, not ideas—hatred of blacks, hatred of Jews, and long-standing, intense, blood-drenched nationalist hatreds—are forms of race hatred; hatred of woman and hatred of homosexuals are forms of sex hatred. Race hatred and sex hatred are the erotic obsessions of human history? Passions, not ideas. If the Jew did not exist, he wrote, the anti-Semite would invent him. The carrier of the passion needs the victim and so creates the victim. The victim is an occasion for indulging the passion. One passion touches another, overlays it, burrows into it, unfolds, is gratified onto it, the configuration of our past and emerges. In patriarchal history, one passion is necessarily fundamental and unchanging: the hatred of women.

If the dominant group insists that the racially despised male is a rapist, it means that the dominant male is, by contrast, tinged with homosexuality and that he is less manly. They will climb the masculinity ladder by killing or maiming those whom they see as racially inferior and sexually superior. The Nazis transparently craved masculinity. It was the Jew who had stolen it from them by stealing the woman they should have had. According to Hitler in Mein Kampf: "With satanic joy in his face, the black-haired Jewish youth lurks in wait for the unsuspecting girl whom he defiles with his blood, thus stealing her from her people."

The real question, of course, was not about the family as such, but about the pater familias—who is Daddy having sex with and why.

There is no way to confirm the notion that the propagandist is essentially above the propaganda he creates, although it surely points towards some truth about the way demagogues and other propagandists operate. The notion is unlikely on its face. From what we know about the most ferocious demagogues of yesteryear, successful incitement tends to bespeak—and seemingly requires—a fierce core of radical commitment, even if the agitator consciously distorts his facts or trots out this or that rhetorical device. Hitler, Goebbels, Mussolini, Father Coughlin, Joe McCarthy, Gerald L.K. Smith, and many others were fanatical and cynical at once, neither wholly in control nor totally ecstatic. Such agitators work within a certain mental borderline land where one can never clearly see conviction as distinct from calculation. In all such cases, the investigative journalist is the propagandist's natural enemy, as the former serves the public interest while the latter tends to work against it.

(In today I see the label as journalist inverted, as a taylored palet serving it's partons interest, while the frantic and honest are the points closer to the truth)

Emil Ludwig represents Napoleon as ever on the watch for indications of public opinion, always listening to the voice of the people, a voice which defies calculation. "Do you know," he said, "what amazes me more than all [else]? The impotence of force to organize anything."

Truth is mighty and must prevail. If any body of men believes that they have discovered a valuable truth, it is not merely their privilege but their duty to disseminate that truth. If they realize—as they quickly must—that this spreading of the truth can be done on a large scale and effectively only by organized effort, they will make use of the press and the platform as the best means to give it wide circulation. Propaganda becomes a vicious and reprehensible weapon only when its authors consciously and deliberately disseminate what they know to be lies, or when they aim to achieve effects which they know to be prejudicial to the common good.

Because man is by nature gregarious, he feels himself to be a member of a herd; even when he is alone in his room with the curtains drawn, his mind retains the patterns that have been stamped on it by group influences. Trotter and Le Bon concluded that the group mind does not think in the strict sense of the word. In place of thoughts, it has impulses, habits, and emotions. In making up its mind, its first impulse is usually to follow the example of a trusted leader.

The result is that, while under the halo of the old system of production, the typical rule was that demand created supply; today, supply must actively seek to create its corresponding demand. Just as women supplement men in private life, so they will supplement men in public life by concentrating their organized efforts on those subjects which men are likely to take more [seriously]. There is a tremendous field for women as active propagandists of new ideas and new methods of political and social housekeeping. When organized and conscious of their power to influence their surroundings, women can use their newly acquired freedom in a great many ways to mold the world into a better place to live.

"Men who, through a sense of inferiority, despise money, seek to win the good will of men who love money."*

In the ethical sense, propaganda bears the same relation to education as to business or politics. It may be abused. It may be used to advertise an institution and to create in the public mind artificial values. There can be no absolute guarantees against its misuse.

There is a story that a great financier discharged a partner because he had divorced his wife. "But what," asked the partner, "have my private affairs to do with the banking business?" "If you are not capable of managing your own wife," was the reply, "the people will certainly believe that you are not capable of managing their money."

The propagandist must treat personality as he would treat any other objective facts within his province. A personality may create circumstances, as Lusitania created goodwill between the United States and Mexico.** Events may create a personality, as the Cuban War created a political figure of Roosevelt. It is often difficult to say which creates the other. Once a public figure has decided what ends he wishes to achieve, he must regard himself objectively and present an outward picture of himself which is consistent with his real character and his aim. No matter how sophisticated, how cynical the public may become about public relations methods, it must respond to the basic appeal because it will always need food, creative amusement, long for beauty, and respond to leadership. Propaganda will never die out. Intelligent men must realize that propaganda is the modern instrument by which they can fight for productive ends and help to bring order out of chaos.

Here are some quotes from the book:

"The propagandists see this as a war in which information is a weapon, you use not to win an abstract argument, but to confuse, dismay, demoralize, and distract. It is a tool to tap into human fears, vulnerabilities and secret, often violent and cruel desires, and twist them to the benefit of the powerful forces they serve. Fact checking doesn't stand a chance."

"Delmer tells the story from the point of view of his childhood self, but he can sense the adult author implying a more mature question: Where does the private person end and the public role begin?"

"The real power of propaganda is not to convince or even confuse. It's to give you a sense of belonging."

"There were good will and good nature everywhere, and not the faintest trace of the bullying of the civic population by everything in uniform that I had become so familiar with and had grown sick of in Prussia. How good it is to be back in England. If ever I realize what liberty means, liberty of thought and liberty of conscience, it is now after having lived for nearly three years in an enemy country where there is neither."

"While my reports at the Express were read by about 12 million people before being used to light a fire, those I delivered to MI6 were distributed to several hundred persons, read by no one, and then incinerated as secret waste."

"Littman argued that optimistic notions about the democratic public sphere where citizens debate the facts and come to common policy decisions were impossible to fulfill. Instead, power had to be handed over to an enlightened elite to make decisions.

Truth was not a value in itself. It was a subset of power."

"The propaganda allowed you to both relinquish responsibility and enjoy dominance. This was part of the psychological deal the Kremlin offered people. You can identify yourself with a sense of supremacy, but you don't need to carry any moral burden."

"Even the name of Delmer's broadcaster, GS1, Gustav Siegfried Eins, was designed to make people wonder: what did it stand for? General Stab, One? Or maybe Geheim Sender, Secret Transmitter 1? In actuality, GS1 didn't stand for anything. It was just there to stimulate enquiry."

"Where the Nazis wanted to obliterate the difference between truth and lies, Delmer's careful approach to fibbing accepted the primacy of facts, respected reality, even as he twisted it. 'Never lie by accident, only deliberately' was the creed of his operation."

"It has spoken only in such a way that the idea of action is planted in the mind of the subject without letting him see that he is being influenced at all."

"For example, Delmer's programs tried the following: To make people take habit-forming sleeping drugs during air raids, it was described how the U-boat crews, who ought to know, took Von tablets before going to sleep. Von's were habit-forming. To induce panic buying of clothes, GS1 described how people were already rushing to buy clothes because they had heard that large numbers of extra ration cards were being printed."

"Garnard describes this focus on behavioral over attitudinal changes as revolutionary. Delmer and Ingrams had always favored the kind of propaganda which aims to induce action on the part of the listener. What he believed seemed to them of quite secondary importance if he could be made to act in the desired manner."

"Delcher would act appalled at some behavior that many people were doing, such as buying up clothes on the black market, thus normalizing it even as he condemned it, and making his listeners feel that it was a safe thing to do."

"Most people, Delmer reckoned, want to stay in the collective rather than stand up and stand out and take personal risk."

"Have you ever experienced that sense when you suddenly become aware of the artificial, constructed, mannered nature of the way you speak, the language you are using, how you use that language? Or have you ever glimpsed your reflection in a mirror you hadn't noticed and didn't have time to compose yourself for, and notice just how forced your behavior is? And in that moment you are paralyzed by the realization that all the times when you thought you were you, you were actually acting without knowing it. Or have you ever looked back at your old social media posts months or years after you made them—posts that perhaps you felt so passionately about at the time, and which represented your true feelings, but now you realize how artificial they sound?"

"There was an old man from Lavier
who kept a dead whore in a cave.
Said he, 'I admit, I'm a bit of a shit,
but think of the money I save.'"

"Delmer had pulled off something unprecedented with the sender. He had created media that was both for those millions who were not comfortable with taking risks—that let them hang on to their desire for a collective identity—and simultaneously thoroughly subversive. He had created media whose very interaction, the way you tuned into it, stimulated independent thought and even action."

"The Kremlin's diplomatic demand for a Russian sphere of influence denotes less something hard and definable, which can be hammered out with other great powers in some grand new geopolitical deal based on rational self-interest, but a sphere that also swells with suppressed resentment and what Dick described as 'secondary narcissism'."

"And just as scholars define different types of Russian audience today, ranging from active supporters to the larger groups of passive supporters, loyal neutrals, and apathetics, so Dicks could segment Germans. Although some Germans were a psychologically ideal fit for Nazi propaganda, not all were. He calculated that 10% of the German soldiers were fanatical Nazis, and, further, that 25% were believers with reservations. As the war neared its end, Dicks was most worried about this 25%. Their Nazism was mixed with a more general admiration of German militarism, and they could easily blend in as a good patriot in the Germany of the future without changing their underlying authoritarian predilections."

"In this, the Germans were not alone. All the peoples of Western Europe had developed the habit of blaming their misfortunes on some force out of their reach."

"Arendt tied the lack of responsibility to the Nazis' relativist attitude to truth. If you thought facts and truth were all subjective, then everyone could choose their own reality and avoid responsibility. This is why fact checks rarely work when they directly challenge a political identity. What we need to do is give people the motivation to care about truth again."

This book lays out the relationship between the four broad markets: stocks, bonds, commodities, and currencies. Again, broadly speaking, these four markets revolve in a rhythmic pattern through correlations and hedges against inflation. With cryptocurrency as a new asset class, I will meditate on how these new digital currencies absorb and coordinate with the other markets. Below is a quote giving a general flow of the four markets:

Basic market principles:

• All markets are linked domestically and globally.

• No market moves in isolation; analysis of one market should include all the others.

Market groups:

• The four market groups are stocks, bonds, commodities, and currencies.

Market relationships:

• The dollar and commodities trend in opposite directions.

• Bond prices and commodities trend in opposite directions.

• Bonds and stocks normally trend in the same direction.

• Bonds peak ahead of stocks during deflation, and bond prices rise while stocks fall.

• A rising dollar is good for US bonds and stocks.

• A weak dollar favors large multinational stocks.

Effects of the commodity-bond ratio:

• A rising commodity-bond ratio favors inflation-type stocks, including gold, energy, and basic material stocks like aluminum, copper, paper, and forest products.

• A falling commodity-bond ratio favors interest-rate-sensitive stocks, including consumer staples, drugs, financials, and utilities.

As often happens in financial markets, the anticipation of an event is usually worse than the event itself. The market discounts expected events well before they happen.

Here are a few quotes I highlighted while reading this book:

A famous Austrian economist, Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk, declared that the cultural level of a nation is mirrored by its rate of interest. The higher a people's intelligence and moral strength, the lower the rate of interest. He was speaking of free market rates of interest, not of controlled rates of interest. In his time, market rates of interest throughout the principal trading nations of the world were historically low: two and a half to three and a half percent for long-term prime credits.

There is, however, a great deal of evidence that most ancient loans were intended to run only a few months, or at most from one to three years. Rates were usually quoted at so much a month. Even loans secured on real property usually specified repayment in one year. Occasionally a longer period was specified, but there was no distinction of rates according to term. Long-term capital projects were not generally financed on credit, and states rarely borrowed. There were no large corporations. Some credits were in fact outstanding for years, but this was apparently due to regular renewal or to default.

"Of all kinds of capital," said Demosthenes, "the most productive in business is confidence. And if you do not know that, you do not know anything."

Few chapters in the economic history of a young nation are more astonishing to the ordinary mind than the stories of its monetary and banking legislation. The Constitution gave to Congress the power to coin money and regulate the value thereof. All money, however, not coined money. The Supreme Court declared in 1839 that the right to issue bank notes was common law and an occupation open to all men. The states might, if they wish, restrain and regulate their citizens in pursuit of this attractive occupation, but the federal government was not to be concerned. Monetary authority was thus divided: hard money was controlled by the federal government, paper money by private concerns regulated at the discretion of each of many states, with which the federal government was free to compete. Successful merchants had to become connoisseurs of banknotes, accepting only the best at par.

Interest rates through history have been subject to political controversy, and so they are today. During the 20th century, many persons impressed by the success of science in controlling the physical environment have urged the advantages of also controlling the economic environment. The old liberal doctrines of laissez-faire have given ground in most countries of the world and were at times abandoned altogether in some. When this happened, however, it soon became apparent that controlling an economy, unlike controlling the physical environment, required controlling possibly uncooperative groups of people. Trying to do this, especially in peacetime, met with a very understandable opposition wherever freedom is a political tradition. And as the 1980s demonstrated, even where it is not, various compromises have been achieved, based largely on the degree of control that people have been willing to accept or unable to avoid. But the issue of government controls, though much better understood now than it was a few decades ago, remains far from settled. It is important to this history because interest rates are among those prices most directly influenced by governments. No doubt, the ultimate verdict of history will associate some parts of the very wide swings of interest rates during recent decades with political doctrine. No doubt, also, the political issue of high or low interest rates will survive to occupy frequent headlines in the decades to come and will have its share in determining the future patterns of markets.

Short-term yields reached their extreme low points in 1940-1941 and rose thereafter, whereas long-term bond yields continued to decline until 1946. Thus, from 1940 until 1946, there occurred one of those rare periods when short- and long-term rates moved in opposite directions for several years. And as rates of inflation come down, so again, with a lag, do market rates and yields. In this new financial and economic environment, there is much more risk and uncertainty about the future value of money.

There were other contrasts. In this decade, Spain's cost of living doubled, while Portugal's cost of living rose only 9%. The dollar value of the Spanish peseta fell by 50 to 75%, while the dollar value of the Portuguese escudo was unchanged. These contrasts are significant because both economies were controlled by authoritarian governments.

Chart 1 provides a very rough sketch of the trends of minimum ancient Greek and Roman interest rates, though those were mostly traditional rates on short-term loans and thus were very different from modern long-term yields. A saucer-shaped pattern was followed by interest rates during the history of each ancient civilization. Rates declined under early centuries of development and expansion, bottomed out in the centuries of commercial activity, and finally rose again with the disintegration of social and commercial life. Chart 78, which is based on long-term interest rates in those nations forming what is often called Western civilization, reveals what could be the first part of a similar saucer.

(The chart refered in this quote is graphed in decennial points with the last date plotting on 2005. The FED has maintained a steady interest rate relative to its mandate)

It is almost as if the bubble of the late 1990s did not really end when the stock market began its steep decline in the early 2000s. Asset speculation just shifted from stocks to real estate in response to large declines in long-term interest rates. This is hardly a conundrum. The long history of financial bubbles often featured more than one asset class becoming a focus of speculation, either simultaneously or sequentially.

The Feynman Lectures on Physics, Volume One is a dense, comprehensive, and enjoyable educational material for anyone curious about physics. He goes into detail about how the physical universe works. The book is organized in a way that encourages readers to read from cover to cover. It's not a reference book, but a series of lectures on the quantifiable subject of our shared physical reality. Feynman is a phenomenal teacher. His breadth of knowledge helps digest this topic in a comprehensible manner for those willing to learn. Moreover, my takeaway is that the study of physics, mathematics, and its application, engineering, only explains how things work; the question of why things work is for humanity to decide.

Here are quotes from the book:

The astronomers, for example, have only looked at some of the stars. Every day they turn their telescopes to other stars, and the new stars are doing the same thing as the other stars. We therefore conclude that the universe is not a fluctuation and that the order is a memory of conditions when things started. This is not to say that we understand the logic of it. For some reason, the universe at one time had a very low entropy for its energy content. And since then, the entropy has increased. So that is the way towards the future. That is the origin of all irreversibility. That is what makes the process of growth and decay, that makes us remember the past and not the future. We remember the things which are closer to that moment in the history of the universe when the order was higher than now, and why we are not able to remember things where the disorder is higher than now, which we call the future.

So as we commented in an earlier chapter, the entire universe is in a glass of wine. If we look at it closely enough, in this case, the glass of wine is complex because there is water and glass and light and everything else. Another delight of our subject of physics is that every simple and idealized thing, like the ratchet and pawl, works only because they are part of the universe. The ratchet and pawl works in only one direction because it has some ultimate contact with the rest of the universe. If the ratchet and pawl were in a box and isolated for some sufficient time, the wheel would not be more likely to go one way than the other. But because we cool off at night and get heat from the sun, the ratchet and pawl that we make can churn one way. This one-wayness is interrelated with the fact that the ratchet is part of the universe. It is part of the universe not only in the sense that it obeys the physical laws of the universe, but its one-way behavior is tied to the one-way behavior of the entire universe. It cannot be completely understood until the mystery of the beginnings of the universe is reduced still further from speculation to scientific understanding.

We conclude this chapter by remarking on the connection with quantum mechanics. In quantum mechanics, the vibrating object or the thing that varies in space is the amplitude of a probability function that gives the probability of finding an electron or system of electrons in a given configuration. This amplitude function can vary in space and time and satisfies, in fact, a linear equation, but in quantum mechanics there is a transformation in that what we call frequency of the probability amplitude is equal, in the classical idea, to energy. Therefore, we can translate the principles stated above to this case by taking the word frequency and replacing it with energy. It becomes something like this: The quantum mechanical system, for example, an atom, need not have a definite energy, just as the simple mechanical system does not have to have a definite frequency. But no matter how the system behaves, its behavior can always be represented as a superposition of states of definite energy. The energy of each state is characteristic of the atom, and so the pattern of amplitude, which determines the probability of finding particles in different places, the general motion can be described by giving the amplitude of each of these different energy states. This is the origin of energy levels in quantum mechanics, since the quantum mechanics is represented by waves in the circumstance in which the electron does not have enough energy to ultimately escape from the proton. They are confined waves. Like the confined waves of a string, there are definite frequencies for the solution of the wave equation for the quantum mechanics. The mechanical interpretation is that these are definite energies. Therefore the quantum mechanical system, because it is represented by waves, can have definite states of fixed energy, examples are the energy levels of various atoms."

(I started this study because of the quantum computing FUD within Bitcoin circles, but as i continue to read on this topic I have a hunch the quantum computers ability to hack through cryptographic proofs are not in whole a discourse on the computational proofs - how complex the cryptography is, but more so the energy intensity for such hacks ie; the hash rate.)

At first, one might think that nothing can move faster than the speed of light. However, light in glass has a phase velocity less than the speed of light in a vacuum. And it is possible to shoot a charged particle at a very high energy through a block of glass such that the particle velocity is close to the speed of light in a vacuum, while the speed of light in the glass may only be two-thirds the speed of light in the vacuum. A particle moving faster than the speed of light in the medium will produce a conical wave of light with its apex at the source, like the wave wake from a boat, which is from the same effect, as a matter of fact.

(This explains why our information technology, and microprocessors are so fast! But the truth is man does not live in a vacuum again proving my my thoughts that computers are apathetic to humanity, not humanity itself.)

So our problem is to explain where symmetry comes from. Why is nature so nearly symmetrical? No one has any idea why. The only thing we might suggest is something like this: There is a gate in Japan, the gate of Nikkō, which is sometimes called by the Japanese the most beautiful gate in all Japan. It was built at a time when there was great influence from Chinese architecture. This gate is very elaborate with lots of gavels and beautiful carvings and lots of columns and dragon heads and princes carved into the pillar and so on. But when one looks closely, he sees that in the elaborate and complex design along one of the pillars, one of the small design elements is carved upside down. Otherwise, the thing is completely symmetrical. If one asks why this is, the story is that it was carved upside down so that the gods will not be jealous of the perfection of man. So they purposely put an error in there so that the gods would not be jealous and get angry with human beings. We might like to turn the idea around and think that the true explanation of the near symmetry of nature is this: that God made the laws only nearly symmetrical so that we should not be jealous of His perfection."

It starts after WWII, when many of the pre-war leaders were reinstalled into their positions by the Americans. They then cloaked themselves inside the Bank of Japan within the Ministry of Finance. These men would rule over the interest rate into the new millennium, and their influence continues even today. The writer, Richard Werner, argues they intended a structural change in the Japanese economy by shaking out the old guards the bureaucratic class, the managerial class, and the shareholder class by raising interest rates, shoving loans on the Japanese people, and creating the famous 1980s bubble. The men who controlled the price of the Yen came from an elite cohort of educational backgrounds and were hand-picked over the course of their careers—most of them put on fast tracks to climb the corporate ladders.

I reflect on this and see similarities with the BOJ today, again raising interest rates, perhaps to reignite the Japanese economy. The past decade Japan saw negative interest rates! I’ve learned how sensitive all of these markets are to this rate and how they are all connected complicitly—whether that's the futures contracts or the news media sifting through sentiment. But behind the daily noise, there are central banks calculating moves that can shape the nature of a society—all while being unelected by the very people they serve

At the center of all this, Aron does not touch on the issuance of money (credit and debt). Fiat currencies across the globe are heightened with unaffordability due to inflation. Bitcoin is not an investment; it is simply an alternative form of currency. However, I am confident that if nation-states, businesses, and individuals adopt this innovation in money, many of the odd and comical consequences of fiat currency inflation can be resolved.

For the left, this is challenging to stomach because of the abundance of storytellers in the world today; to criticize them (CEOs, statesmen, older generations, i.e., parental figures) can cause schisms in their worldview.

For the right, it is too difficult because of Bitcoin's neutrality. Proof-of-Work does not care about your creed or ethnic background. If one was raised with the conditioning that a certain omnipotence destines one over another, and that perception doesn't fit with today's reality, then intolerance and technicalities are not the path to one's search for creating value, felicity, and love.

Roulette is an open game, meaning it's mostly reliant on chance. This doesn't mean the game is unbeatable. Players can choose strategies for where to place their chips. Increasing the probability of winning decreases the potential payout if the bet is won. In investment terms, I see these two axioms as preservation of capital (diversification) versus focusing positions on the risk/reward of capital (value investing).

Interestingly, from my experience in crypto, these two axioms are inverted compared to TradFi. Meaning, diversifying increases the likelihood of hitting a multiple, while focusing capital increases only the downside risk of purchasing power without the upside multiple. This is because all tokens, as of writing this, tend to run to zero.

Lowery shifts the lens of monitoring and using Bitcoin from one of finance and economics to one of national security and survival.

He defines the ethereal world as a place currently dictated by god kings and the Bitcoin network as man's antlers to for self defense in this ever-expanding space with counterintuitively yet result, proof-of-work.

The physical demand of hash power guarantees Bitcoiner's their digital property ownership.

He even goes as far as declaring that the third world war has begun, only most are not aware because we are not using the same weapons as the last one.

This one is sharper, as the internet, and the application layer media attacks directly the psyche.

After reading this book, I came away with a sense of purpose, a need to fortify my mind to uphold values of cypherpunk, integrity, and a free agency.

I also am eased now, knowing that this transition of power will not be one of violent revolution, but of trade.

Here are some quotes from the book:

There are solid technical and meta-cognitive grounds for sapiens having an instinctual fear of, or distrust in, or attraction to, good rhetoricians, (i.e., politicians, religious leaders. )To put it simply, peak storytellers or peak predators. They deserve caution.

Storytelling can therefore be seen as the glue that holds modern societies together. Without that glue, sapiens are both physically and psychologically incapable of cooperating together at levels exceeding small tribes. We literally don't have the time, energy, or memory capacity for it. This means a primary value-derived function of storytelling is to overcome the constraints of shared objective physical reality. We use our spoken and written stories to bypass the constraints of physics as well as the constraints of our own bodies to communicate with each other, and inspire each other, cooperate with each other, and achieve things we would otherwise be both physically and psychologically incapable of achieving.

If an intelligent, intellectually honest reader can acknowledge there's merit to this line of reasoning, then they should understand the argument for why there are very important, complex, emerging social benefits to warfare that we have a logical, moral, and more importantly, existential responsibility not to ignore. We must be willing to entertain an uncomfortable, potentially valid hypothesis that war provides an irreplaceable social and technical benefit to humanity. The self-inflicted stress of predation and global power competitions have clearly made life more prepared to survive and prosper against the universe-inflicted stress and entropy.

For whatever reason, probably because it is not necessary to understand computer science or write software, people keep falling into the same trap of forgetting this undisputed truth: that all computer programs are abstractions and can therefore be described in any different way using any imaginary concept, abstraction, or metaphor. People don't know a basic lesson of computer science: that the way any software engineer chooses to describe the function, design, and behavior of software, including, but especially its creator, is arbitrary. This not only leads to pointless debates, where people argue about what the right metaphor is to describe software as if there's an objective answer. Obvious to the fact that there can't be an objectively right way to describe an imaginary abstraction, but it also leads directly to security incidents because the metaphors we use often hide safety and security-critical design information in a technique commonly known as information hiding. Software engineers consider it to be a virtue to create abstractions that suppress as much of the technical detail about a computer program as possible. The more information and details are suppressed by software abstraction, the better it is perceived to be. At this point, it should be clear to the reader that if the goal is to hide as much information as possible, then it's going to lead to a breeding ground of confusion about how software is designed and how it actually functions.

The author's third recommendation is for U.S. policymakers to explore the ideas of protecting proof-of-work technologies like Bitcoin under the Second Amendment. An argument can be raised that efforts by some policymakers to ban Bitcoin is a violation of the Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. People have a right to physically secure what they freely choose to value in their informational lives. The intent of the Second Amendment should not change, but the scope of what is considered 'arms' should be expected to change. Citizens have a right to bear arms in whatever form those arms take, kinetic or electric, to physically secure their property. It shouldn't matter if the property, as well as the systems, use physical costs on attacks. Would take the form of computer systems.

The author's fourth recommendation is to recognize that proof-of-stake systems are not viable replacements for proof-of-work systems. Not recognizing this opens up windows to systematic exploitation and abuse. It also directly threatens national security and strategic security. Proof of stake is essentially a form of cyberback, a way for a singular organization with centralized administrative privileges to masquerade as a decentralized system and systematically exploit a weight voting reputation system. Stake is nothing more than an abstract name given to a zero-sum and inegalitarian administrative privilege that has already been assigned to an unknown group of anonymous users, probably those who awarded themselves the majority supply of ETH before the protocol was publicly launched several years before the protocol fork to proof of stake. To adapt the proof-of-stake system is to put oneself at the mercy of the users who control the stake, based on nothing more than blind faith that stake isn't already controlled by a single group of people who could easily exploit its reputation by dividing that stake across multiple addresses and masquerading as a decentralized group of people. The fact that proof-of-stake software developers, who in the case of Ethereum are non-U.S. citizens, openly admit to awarding themselves the majority supply of ETH before forking the protocol to proof of stake, claiming to be a decentralized system without proof, is more likely to be a fraud than it is to be an innovation. Because we know, based on first principles of computer theory, that it's physically impossible for an object-oriented software abstraction, like stake, to be verifiably decentralized in the first place. Stake doesn't physically exist, so it's incontestably true that it's physically impossible for the special administrative privileges with Ethereum developers arbitrarily named 'stake' to be verifiably decentralized. If there's no way for people to independently validate through shared objective physical reality, i.e., with their eyeballs, that the special administrative privileges of a given software system are decentralized, then the system can only be decentralized in name only. For a more detailed discussion, see section 5.10."

(this last quote is a curious one as it forms my speculation that NFTs with fixed supply and living community such as the Cypto Punks or Milady hold more value comparatively than gas tokens such as $ETH, which ironically launched on its network.)

Both men and women are equal economically and democratically, and because of this, our differences are more pronounced than ever.

She uses symbols of kingdoms and fealty to highlight the differences between men and women, and their needs and wants.

This was another book by her that I read, which helped me grapple with manhood in the 21st century.

Subjects such as accountability, responsibility, and providing are thoughts to consider while moving from a juvenile to adulthood.

Also, frog farming.

Here are some quotes from the book.


"When you are accountable, you have to be judgmental. You cannot bet the well-being of your family, tribe, or company on someone's potential. You have to judge it if they are actually competent or not. 
It's black and white."

"It takes courage to let go of old beliefs Claudia replied."

"It takes courage to question your own perceptions, especially when they are validated every day by our culture."

Consequently, it must be acknowledged that the opposition between private life and public life is a matter not so much of place as of power. But the contrast is not between power and non-power; it is between two different kinds of power. Think of two realms in which peace and order were disciplined, supervised, corrected, and punished, but correction and punishment were administered by different authorities.

Mediocre but prolific writers lacking scientific intention or training have, in the guise of popular history, embroidered on two themes; the proud and adultered lady, and woman as victim of oppression. But "women" are not a good subject for history in the "age of cathedrals" or any other period. Social classes were too diverse, and women occupied too many different positions (wifes, sisters, mothers, and so on), to permit a unitary treatment.

Abduction remained common until the 12th century, but was it merely an act of barbarianism and oppression directed against women. Many women instigated their own abductions or at any rate aided their abductors. When lovers faced opposition from their clans, abduction was a means of asserting individual freedom. If the clans later recognized the fate, it ended happily. A girl imprisoned in her own home or a wife abused by her husband might look upon her abductor as a liberator. Women gave themselves in order to attract a champion. Thus, the meaning of abduction is ambivalent. Proof of the oppression of women forced to resort to such measures to free themselves. It was one of their most effective weapons. Abductions were often rather theatrical affairs. In a more profound sense, they were kind of a ritual. They symbolized the way in which high drama and fierce pressures were combined in the lives of feudal women. The fact is, however, that we know nothing about feudal women except that men tell us the texts that paint her in a fearsome light or as a suspect.