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The People's Historian by David Zirin Book Review

2026-10-06T09:42:52.185-06:00

The People's Historian by David Zirin

BOOK REVIEW FIVE STARS

This is an in depth biographical exposé of Howard Zinn’s actively fulfilled and outspoken life from the depths of the Hoover days depression in NYC’s slum lord tenement housing to being a bombardier in WWII. He also was a civil rights and antiwar Vietnam protester as a university professor.

Read this action packed fast moving book to discover a one of a kind crusader who has left an everlasting impact on our lives.

EXCERPTS;

“free speech warriors” trying—often successfully—to have A People’s History of the United States banned from libraries and classrooms. They would question me with hearty mockery how Zinn would feel about their counterrevolution against the twentieth century: their own “struggle from below”—bankrolled by Musky billionaires—to sack the Capitol, try to overturn free elections, fire people for thought crimes, and have the military occupy our cities. This is done both to mock Zinn’s hopes for the world and to point out proudly that they are making their own version of a “people’s history.” They want to know what Zinn would think about their radically authoritarian remaking of this country. What would Zinn say about that? Even though he had never flown in a plane, he became a bombardier during World War II, risking his life to stop the spread of fascism. Zinn was also a target of the far-right YouTubers of his day: the Federal Bureau of Investigation under J. Edgar Hoover. He stood against racism his entire adult life. Therefore, while the political violence of January 6, 2021, may be some people’s idea of a “people’s history,” these were not his people. Fascist movements taking orders from billionaire insurrectionists were the kinds of struggles that Howard Zinn demonstrated a willingness to fight and, if necessary, die to oppose.

The police received record funding. The movement called to “abolish ICE,” and now ICE agents have a budget higher than that of most of the world’s military and they maraud through cities as masked shock troops, killing people and detaining immigrants indefinitely without charges, and even arresting Indigenous people on suspicion of their being in the country illegally. The arc of history was not bending toward justice. A global axis of far-right authoritarianism, led by a virulent strain of fascist politicians, is now on the rise, supported by street-thug loyalists. The response to this disaster for democracy has been a mixture of thwarted actions, numbing apathy, and, more and more, desperate outrage.

“What would Howard Zinn have said about that?” I am asked with grave concern by those politically raised on his ideas. “Was he wrong to have faith in the people?” They would ask this as if their belief systems had been suddenly thrown in doubt. Resistance was God and God had failed.

In 2024, 77 million voters checked the box for an authoritarian to take power once again, even though four years earlier he had provoked the January 6 insurrection to violently overturn an election loss.

Trump had won masses of white working-class people and, according to political pundits, a not-insignificant number of Black and Latino men; stunning, as his campaign and life have been swamped with racist bigotry. One of his dullard sons called him “the people’s billionaire,” oblivious not only to the contradiction in terms but the reality that their father holds wide swaths of people, even the ones he is sworn to represent, in abject contempt. After his victory, Trump delivered his inaugural address to an audience in which the VIP front row was not filled with family or prospective cabinet members but tech oligarchs.

Normally at one anther's throats and most of them once donors to liberal causes, they had announced themselves united and ready to voluntarily comply—or be voluntarily complicit—in a brazenly reactionary project. The leader of this new tech dystopia, an apartheid-defending emigre from South Africa and the richest man on earth, was given his own inauguration speech, which ended with a Nazi salute. Perhaps even more alarming than the mainstreaming of this kind of symbology was a cowed mainstream media telling us that the raised arm twice pounded against his heart could have meant any number of things and not to believe our lying eyes.

A regime that exists without traditional guardrails and without restraint; a regime that sends in the military against its own citizens; a regime that arrests and disappears international students for their political opinions on social media; a regime that has attacked lifesaving federal research, medical programs, and vaccines in a manner that countless judges have fruitlessly branded as lawless; a regime that fires people who deliver facts the Great Leader does not want to hear. We have quickly become ruled by a new kind of tech fascism with algorithms that seek out the undesirable and proponents who destroy anything they brand as “woke,” an ugly bastardization of “stay woke,” a phrase used in the Black community to mean holding a vigilant awareness of injustice.

Dangerous Personalities by Joe Navarro Book Review Five Stars

2026-09-21T10:21:03.118-06:00

Book Review: Five Stars

Dangerous Personalities: An FBI Profiler Shows You How to Identify and Protect Yourself from Harmful People by Joe Navarro

This book gives insight into the personality disorders that put us all at risk.

My father actually married a psychopath, and my younger brother inherited my mother’s mental attributes.

Growing up as I did made me think, in hindsight, that I wished that I could have read and understood this book when I was five years old.

(I first read and reviewed this book nine years ago and by oversight it didn't get posted.)

EXCERPTS;

Narcissistic personality: someone who overvalues himself or herself and devalues others with reptilian indifference. That reptilian indifference is what we see in major cities and elsewhere in the phenomenon known as knockout assaults, in which the unsuspecting (including elderly women) are targeted for a blindingly fast punch without provocation, just to see if the person can be knocked out (usually causing a concussion) with a single hit. To behave with such callousness, one has to be able to devalue others—a trait the narcissistic personality has in abundance. In November 1998, 1 year after the Heaven’s Gate mass suicide in California and on the 20th anniversary of the Jones town massacre in Guyana, a small group of FBI profiteers gathered at the FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia, to look at the events surrounding Jim Jones and his cult, the Peoples Temple. It was a sobering day for me because even though I had read about the event over the years, seeing the actual crime scene photographs of the bloated bodies of children and babies gave me a new perspective on the massacre, the Reverend Jim Jones, and his narcissistic personality. For those who are interested, you can go online to the FBI’s virtual vault and retrieve the actual investigation of the massacre, which is code-named RYMUR (Murder of Congressman Leo Ryan) FBIHQ file number 89-4286, and examine some of the same documents that I viewed (http://vault.fbi.gov/jonestown/jonestown/). If you read the thousands of pages from this online FBI report or from one of the many books written about Jim Jones and the Peoples Temple, some lessons prominently stand out: A striking number of people can be made to unconditionally put their lives in the hands of one individual. Under the cloak of religion, a dangerous personality can get away with a great deal for a long time with no outside scrutiny. Sect leaders can exert total control over the lives of their followers, ruling as if in a totalitarian regime. Repeated psychological and physical abuse may be used to hamper the efforts of those who want to leave the sect. Family and friends who fear for sect members will be persistently thwarted or frustrated in their efforts to help or rescue them. The narcissistic personality of a cult leader is palpable—as was evident in Jones’s words and writings, which should have been warnings to prospective members. Only a handful of sect members may see the sect leader for what he is. Only a few saw Jim Jones as a toxic and dangerous narcissistic personality. Once vested and committed to the cult leader, followers are reluctant or unwilling to see the looming peril or to resist the urgings of the narcissistic personality, even when the lives of their children are also in peril. For the profilers looking at the Jonestown massacre, our findings were sobering particularly because we had seen ample evidence of what we can expect from the narcissistic personality in past cult leaders (e.g., Charles Manson, David Koresh, Marshall Herff Applewhite Jr.) and the danger they present to the nonskeptical believer. Our limited analysis revealed the following: Cult leaders will continue to attract people who are unwilling or unable to discern when they are being manipulated or exploited. Cults that make leaving difficult (via psychological, social, or physical pressure) achieve compliance at a great psychological cost—even years later. Isolation of the sect is key to the narcissistic personality to avoid criticism, ridicule, or scrutiny and to control the sect. The narcissistic personality thrives in a leadership position within a cult and will do almost anything to remain the leader, including marginalizing or destroying those who oppose them. The narcissistic personality as leader of a sect acts with impunity in almost all cases, allowing the leader greater privileges (e.g., travel, clothes, luxury items, sex) than sect members. The narcissistic personality as sect leader purports to have all the answers and secrets to a better life and makes all the decisions. Because of constitutional protections around religion and voluntary associations, there is little that law enforcement can do to intervene in sects unless there is a clear violation of state or federal law. In most cases, because of secrecy, it is difficult to intervene, as we saw with the case of Warren Jeffs of the Fundamentalist Church of Latter-Day Saints in southern Utah in 2006 (sex with underage girls). Or, tragically, police come on the scene too late, as happened in Jonestown.

If you think about it, many of these same characteristics (secrecy and isolation, psychological and/or physical abuse to weaken free will, absolute power concentrated in one person’s hands) can be found in toxic work environments or organizations, in homes ruled by tyrants, or even in nation-states.

Pathological narcissism is at the root of terrible suffering. Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, and Pol Pot stand out as examples of leaders with narcissistic personalities who exterminated millions, all because of their extreme grandiosity—they believed that only they had the answers.

The Lost World of Quintana Roo by Michel Peissel - Five Stars

2026-02-28T11:08:00.003-06:00

THE LOST WORLD OF QUINTANA ROO by Michel Peissel

BOOK REVIEW: FIVE STARS

This is a true story by the young Frenchman Michel Peissel of his journey to the Mexican Caribbean before it became the Riviera Maya. It is an exciting story and a “must read” for anyone who is inquisitive about what life was like in Quintana Roo before the All-Inclusive resorts transformed the jungle into a tourist mecca.

This classic book warranted me reading it for a third time. My wife and I are very familiar with the area, published a book on it and know people who verify the author’s chronicles..

At the end of this review I have a great surprise on where you can check out a digital copy.

EXCERPTS:

Through an introduction scribbled on a small, dirty piece of paper I had met some friends who rather reluctantly, as is often the case when a foreigner crashes into the privacy of a home, had invited me on a picnic. We drove down the Paseo de la Reforma, whose modern buildings and bordering parks recalled the fact that Mexico City is not only capital of the nation but a mighty city of four million inhabitants and international fame. We then sped on through Lomas de Chapultepec, the fashionable residential district whose flowered villas shelter thousands of wealthy foreigners who seek asylum, often eitlier political or matrimonial, in Mexico. I was off to Tepoztlan, a place whose strange name was to be the first of many I was to learn while in Mexico, and which, like such names as Coatzacoalcos and Teotihuacan, suggests a strange poetical beauty hidden under a harsh and complicated Indian origin.

I had come to Mexico with no particular purpose save to spend pleasantly the six months that lay between my entering graduate school and my completion of a dreary six months as trainee in a bank on Wall Street.

The only good highway in Mexico, instead of joining major cities or industrial centers, serves Mexico's two largest luxury resorts, Cuernavaca and Acapulco.

Mexico is entirely composed of innumerable different worlds which really meet only in the green or gray smudges of international atlases. It was in Tepoztlan that I fully realized that Mexico was a country yet to be fully explored.

Gustav Regler, the writer we had come to visit in Tepoztlan. Gustav Regler, well known as a cynic and for his profane and ironical books on the sixteenth century, is also one of the men who know Mexico the most thoroughly. His book The Three Faces of Mexico has acquired world fame.

He had, through involved circumstances, been banished from his paradise and now lived beyond its gate.

The Mayan civilization, I found out, was probably the most sophisticated culture of pre-Columbian America.

Mayas were probably the greatest builders of the ancient inhabitants of Central America. They left thousands of temples and palaces spread all over what was their domain, the principal cities being Palenque, Tikal, Copan, Uxmal, and Chichen-Itza, strange places whose pyramids, towers, and palaces still stand today as silent testimonial of the great Mayan civilization.

Mayan is more widely spoken in Yucatan than Spanish, and many books are written, in modern characters, in Mayan, which is also taught in schools.

The Yucatecans take good advantage of their god-sent gift which goes well with their lazy character, and hammocks are strung up everywhere and the majority of the population sleeps all day and all night. Hammocks are found under railroad cars, between trees, and in all the houses, which have hooks on the walls of every room. This allows the Indians to live in comfort in their small huts, with more living space by day. Since mosquitoes are the plague of Quintana Roo and I presumed also of the so-called Mosquito Coast, I bought a large, fragile-looking mosquito net, a cocoon affair that could be fastened around my hammock.

The hammock, mosquito net, Antiviperine, and medical kit, plus twenty rolls of assorted film, cameras and lenses, and a pair of sandals, were all neatly thrown into a large henequen bag. Besides this, I carried a small bluish bag, a cross between a flight bag and a briefcase, for my shaving and toilet articles.

How much modern Yucatan could envy the ancient Mayas. What had once been a thriving coast, with innumerable ports such as Yochac, Puha, Puerto Chile, and Ak, was now nothing more than jungle and occasional isolated palm huts. Being curious about the lives of chicleros, men began telling of the deeds of chicleros and of their own experiences, of murders committed by their colleagues, and of the bloody orgies at the great chicle camps such as Leona Vicario (the god-forsaken corrugated-iron inferno I had passed through on my way by bus to Puerto Juarez). To my horror I was soon to realize that the worst tales told about the chicleros were true. Apparently the chicle areas of Quintana Roo, which are situated behind the coast from Tulum up to Cape Catoche, are exploited by several companies, but for the chicleros the two most important companies are two clans of chicleros who are constantly at war with each other.

Curious and want to read the book.

It is available free to borrow from Internet Archives. Follow this link:

https://archive.org/details/lostworldofquint00peis

Although the book is no longer in print, you can obtain a used copy at Amazon. com. Follow link: The Lost World of Quintana Roo.

It is also available through Abes Books. Follow link: The Lost World of Quintana Roo

Also read: Yucatan for Travelers by John M. Grimsrud

The Mexican Heartland: How Communities Shaped Capitalism, a Nation, and World History, 1500–2000 by John Tutino - BOOK REVIEW

2026-02-04T10:46:00.002-06:00

BOOK REVIEW – FIVE STARS

The Mexican Heartland: How Communities Shaped Capitalism, a Nation, and World History, 1500–2000 by John Tutino

This book is a history of capitalism from the perspective of the indigenous peoples of Mexico.

It covers the Spanish Inquisition’s 700 year war to drive the Moors out of the Iberian Peninsula, to conquests and imperialistic lust for gold and silver in the Americas using enslaved indigenous labor to dig it, build the fleets to transport it, and retire from toil to manage their seemingly infinite bonanza.

Spain eventually became complacent in their lucrative victorious financial position and suffered a rude awakening when infinite wealth was discovered to be finite.

EXCERPTS:

The commercial capitalism of early modern times linked diverse centers of production across the globe—China and South Asia leading in manufacturing (in the literal sense of making by hand), European empires fighting to profit, and New World mines and plantations driving trade across oceans. Spanish-American silver capitalism and Atlantic war capitalism mixed to make the Americas essential to a polycentric global commercial capitalism from 1550 to 1800.

1810, working men facing new predictions took arms to destroy New Spain’s silver economy. The silver capitalism that made Spain’s Americas an engine of trade collapsed.

A century of decline in Spain and depression in Europe saw the center of the Spanish imperial economy shift to New Spain.

VIEW MY AUTHOR'S PAGE ON AMAZON

Praying for Sheetrock: A Work of Nonfiction by Melissa Greene Fey BOOK REVIEW FIVE STARS

2026-01-29T11:46:00.004-06:00

BOOK REVIEW: FIVE STARS

Praying for Sheetrock: A Work of Nonfiction by Melissa Greene Fey

“From award-winning author and journalist Melissa Fay Greene, Praying for Sheetrock is the story of McIntosh County, a small, isolated, and lovely place on the flowery coast of Georgia—and a county where, in the 1970s, the white sheriff—Tom Poppell—still wielded all the power, controlling everything and everybody. Somehow the sweeping changes of the civil rights movement managed to bypass McIntosh entirely.
It took one uneducated, unemployed black man, Thurnell Alston, to challenge the sheriff and his courthouse gang—and to change the way of life in this community forever.” quote from Amazon.com

My wife Jane and I actually tried to buy waterfront property in the area of McIntosh County back in the day. We loved the place but after exhaustive exploration and investigation found out that outsiders were not welcome.

We wrote about McIntosh County, Georgia, in Sailing The Sea Islands set in the era of Pat Conroy and his monumental book, The Water is Wide, that was about Daufuskie Island and had the names changed to protect the guilty.

We were there too and amazingly watched history evolve.

EXCERPTS:

The civil rights movement is told like a litany at times, as if well-anticipated goals were achieved in a series of distinct and strategic skirmishes: Montgomery, Little Rock, Greensboro, Albany. But it happened in McIntosh County, too.

Whether you see the place as a footnote or as the front lines, it happened here, too.

According to their inner moral compasses—one must drop down to the level of the sidewalks, kitchens, and backyards. What were people saying? Who was saying what? How did their own histories, biases, and perceptions inspire them? And why did an epoch of social change play differently here than in New York or Detroit, Atlanta or Memphis, or in the small county up the road?

Large and important things happening in a very little place. It is about the end of the good old boy era and the rise of civil rights, and what that famous epoch looked like, sounded like, smelled like, and felt like in a Georgia backwater in the 1970s.

For fifty years before the construction of modern Interstate 95, on the east coast, old U.S. 17 through McIntosh County was the northerners’ main route to Florida. Traffic, even in the middle of the night, was fast and constant.

“It was the spirit of fleecing the Yankees that was tolerated by even the law-abiding citizens, I suppose,” said Woody Hunter, dean of the Emory University Law School and a former resident of McIntosh. “Tom Poppell was Billy the Kid. He was Robin Hood.”

“We had the postwar South, the poorest-of-the-poor South right here in McIntosh County. It was the dirt-poor type of people swarmed the place like ants, and Tom wasn’t about to stop anybody from getting a pair of shoes.”

The court system is full of all sorts of little junk, but back then the sheriff was judge, jury, and monarch. He’d help a young man out of trouble the first time. But then a lot of people he flat run out of the county because they wouldn’t abide by his law.

In 1971, Tom Poppell was a dinosaur, the last of his kind. Statewide observers called him “the last of the old-time political bosses in Georgia.”

Georgia State Troopers, Georgia Bureau of Investigation agents, FBI agents, DEA agents, and U.S. Customs agents up and down the southern coast all agreed with the words of a Brunswick police detective: “The only crime that existed in McIntosh County was Tom Poppell’s. He was the last of the great old-time High Sheriffs.”

The people here were just happy with nothing. It was a plantation mentality. The sheriff was running this county just like an old plantation.”

View John Grimsrud's page on Amazon

Link to Sailing the Sea Islands:

https://www.amazon.com/Sailing-Sea-Islands-Travels-Dursmirg-ebook/dp/B009438L96?ref_=ast_author_dp_rw&th=1&psc=1&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.0BOlEhsBG_fvQ48GrUY8SBKqrmR_q60hk665lya9x_PRYGwkLFzh1qD_cjBwnnuuXQZ_UgLzThWQoo9hwY1nufcYIyzYrYe5u7pWy9QbxFQ9FhhLnVW5hLDyOZv9Uos2pQ8JRw0rEuDkcM2a3KnllfsU47XirezwKoOAZV9QE7Y.SbZv87BnmllnHA2Bnp8zSQyxTzSGZryZvUUsOpkqxtY&dib_tag=AUTHOR

Leeward (Nightingale & Courtney Book One) by Katie Daysh Book Review, Five Stars

2026-01-29T11:11:00.000-06:00

BOOK REVIEW: FIVE STARS

Leeward (Nightingale & Courtney Book One) Katie Daysh

1850 and the sailing days of British Imperialism.

This well-written fast moving five star book looks into the life and personalities of a family struggling for self-preservation while dealing with psychopathy and survival where no positive outcome can ever be expected.

EXCERPTS:

A sword-hilt cracked down on his shoulder. He turned, slashed, and felt blood splatter his sleeve. Another body dropped against him. He kicked it to the side. Musket shots rained from the Scylla’s maintop in a hail of invisible darts that dropped men all around Nightingale. He heard the whistle and puncture of the bullets, the crack of wood as they missed their mark, and everywhere, the cries of men. The chaos, the slaughter, the loss – the same as on the Lion – swamped him.

Insensible emotion raged in Nightingale. He stabbed his sword at a charging man and twisted it out of his stomach.

As he fell, Nightingale caught sight of the helm. The finely dressed captain stood there, his uniform blackened with smoke.

‘Why obey your father?’ he asked. ‘Loyalty. Obedience. Because of what he held over me. Love. Fear.’ Hargreaves sighed. ‘Then there is your answer.’ ‘I also disobeyed him for the same reasons. Loyalty to those who have lost their lives. Acknowledging what I have long held over myself. The fear of choosing the wrong path. The love for… many people, many ideas. If I had not done it, I would have regretted it even more intensely.’ ‘It was not your place,’ Hargreaves repeated. ‘Your regret will mean nothing to those who shall question you. You were ordered to retrieve the gold – I was ordered to retrieve the gold…’ ‘Well. There, you have my explanation. I believe that you have an explanation too. You say that they shall not care about my reasons, but I will listen to yours, Michael. I want to know.’

View John Grimsrud's page on Amazon

2025 Cancun, Playa del Carmen – Visitors from Norway

2025-12-25T10:48:00.006-06:00

2025 Cancun, Playa del Carmen – Visitors from Norway

My two Norwegian cousins Wenche Svendsen and her sister Bjørg Bowman came to visit me, it was their second time to Mexico.

Twenty years ago they visited in Mérida. On this visit I agreed to meet them in Cancun.

An all-inclusive beach front resort in Cancun was enticing to them, especially after leaving the cold land of the midnight sun.

We were very happy to have them visit, and we began researching our accommodations and bus connections.

Our daughter Grisel lives and works in nearby Playa del Carmen, so we decided to extend our visit to be with her. Jane undertook the logistics and looked at over 200 options.

We decided to make the get-together as effortless as possible. We booked at the Hotel Plaza Caribe directly across from the ADO bus terminal in downtown Cancun where we stayed previously. Jane only had to book our bus tickets and used the company's App which she had used before.

Using the ADO App Jane filled in all of the pertinent details, paid by credit card, and surprise! Some company numskull automatically fixed it so our tickets that reserved our departure date for two weeks ahead were automatically changed for a departure in less than half an hour. Another surprise! No where on the App was there a cancellation button to click. They now had our money, and tickets that would be worthless to us.

Quick thinking Jane instantly ordered a taxi to the ADO bus terminal...we had minutes to get to the terminal before the bus departure. Jane does not need another heart attack!

OMG we made it. The man at the ticket booth canceled our tickets and issued new ones for November 14. Whew! Thank you again Jane.

Ready to Roll!

Back to our Cancun adventure at the Hotel Plaza Caribe.

Even though the hotel room had no hammock hooks, it had easy access, a great location, and a restaurant that featured a Motuleños ala Yucatecan breakfast specialty that is very sustaining, plus a lovely garden shaded by tropical trees, and a tranquil pool area.

Wenche and Bjørg wanted to buy us day passes for their all-inclusive hotel, but we being octogenarians and not able to gluttonously indulge at our age plus being under therapy for skin cancer and needing to avoid the sun, found it better for them to visit us.

Downtown Cancun is NOT wheelchair friendly and crossing the street from the bus terminal to our hotel had a raised pedestrian walkway speed bump that had a gaping hole. Several people came to my aid to help me to cross. We were amazed when the hardy Viking sisters, Bjørg and Wenche, in her wheelchair, came to that gaping hole. Unaided Wenche merely did a wheelie in her wheelchair and then powered across like this was an every day event. These were surely powerful people as we also witnessed when Bjørg pushed me in my wheelchair up an inclined ramp at a speed like a rocket ship being blasted off.

Bjørg, John, Wenche

Back to our terrific family reunion:

Wenche and Bjørg asked more questions than a thousand wise men could answer.

We were amazed at their exuberance and enthusiasm. I had compiled and written many family stories and accumulated numerous photos going back in time over two hundred years. Jane and I had built up an impressive online presentation, and it was time to pass this enormous collection on to the next generation so I sent out inquiries to all of my family members to pick up the ball and carry on what I had begun.

Here we finally found two family members, Wenche and Bjørg to take up this very important project. Jane and I will be doing whatever is necessary to assure their success.

We had a wonderful time with Wenche and Bjørg. We talked and talked and laughed a lot and even shed a few tears.

We are now awaiting their next visit. This time we expect them to come to nearby Playa del Carmen. The ADO bus service from the Cancun airport departs to Playa del Carmen every fifteen minutes, and from the bus station it is then a short walk to a nice hotel with roof top swimming pool, a terrific Caribbean Sea view, plus fresh briny breezes and a convenient location.

Next our visit at Playa del Carmen with our loving Grisel:

Departing Cancun for Playa del Carmen by bus was almost too simple because of our great location across from the ADO bus terminal. There are continuous mini bus departures costing $120.00 pesos or less than seven US dollars for the both of us. In about an hour we were let off six blocks from our hotel Sofia.

We arrived early for our hotel reservation. The desk clerk was very accommodating and gave us a pass card to enter the roof top swimming pool and lounge area. What a terrific place to relax and escape the rushing commotion of the outside world with fresh clean briny Caribbean Sea breezes topped off with an extraordinary view... easy going and relaxing.

At three that afternoon our accommodations were ready. Less than a year earlier we were booked in the same studio, and we liked it a lot. Comfortable, quiet, and with one wall of plate glass overlooking a jungle garden with towering tropical trees where we could enjoy the moon and stars by night and filtered sun shine by day. Close to the Caribbean Sea, we had no use for air-conditioning.

Our favorite pizza place and liquor store were nearly next door and a super restaurant, plus grocery and sundry shops a block away. The bus terminal was only a fifteen minute walk.

Our daughter Grisel, 42 years old, with three grown children, Diego a university graduate, made Grisel a grandmother this year with a daughter Olivia, Julian, the next youngest is a university senior, also an honor student, and her youngest a daughter, Ambar at 18 years entered a university as a medical student. They all love their Mom, and she loves them.

Grisel is now happily married to a man of her own age, but had a very hard life. She has a big heart, is a gifted artist, and became the head of the artists of Tulum when she lived there. Now she works 6 days a week at a beautiful beachfront resort in Playacar.

We had many wonderful evenings with Grisel, plus beer and pizza as is our tradition.

Another amazing Caribbean Seashore trip November 14 to 26.

Our bus trip home was uneventful, and we arrived after dark in Mérida. The overwhelming traffic was astonishing. We were extremely happy to have our ecological sanctuary jungle garden to escape to.

Thirty four years ago we purchased our home and spent two years building it into our ecological refuge. At that time there were deer and rabbits hopping around and it was peaceful. Now we have cars, and more cars, all racing somewhere. The explosive expansion of Mérida has no signs of slacking.

More photos:

Jane enjoying the balcony at our hotel.

John enjoying time among the trees in Playa del Carmen.

More information:

For the best information on Playa del Carmen, follow TheRopeMonster on YouTube.

Playa del Carmen

For the best information on Cancun, follow William on You Tube.

Overboard!: A True Blue-water Odyssey of Disaster and Survival - Five stars book review

2025-09-12T14:58:00.001-06:00

BOOK REVIEW-FIVE STARS

Overboard!: A True Blue-water Odyssey of Disaster and Survival by Michael Tougias

Gripping, exciting, and fast moving!

I don’t remember ever reading anything the equal of this well-written and exquisitely edited one-of-a-kind true life thriller.

My wife Jane and I both spent many years of our lives out to sea as captains and navigators, and we can’t believe our good fortune surviving our learning experience that generated four Travels of Dursmirg sailing books.

EXCERPTS

He glances down and notices a bottle of Yuengling beer floating in the water. God damn it, I’m going to have a beer. He snatches the bottle out of the sloshing seawater, and returns to his perch. Bloody hell, this may be my last beer, might as well enjoy it. He taps a cigarette from his pack, lights it, and enjoys a long leisurely smoke with his beer.

The Gulf Stream’s current may have been partially responsible for the two unusually large waves that hit the Almeisan, as well as the two that clobbered the At Ease two days earlier. Some experts now think rogue waves technically defined as any waves more than twice the height for the average current sea state are to be expected in the Gulf Stream in stormy weather because of the explosive combination of wind and sea current.

The kind Loch is most worried about is the mako, both the short-fin and long-fin mako; the latter can grow to thirteen feet in length and weigh 1,400 pounds. Both makos are fast, and the short-fin is said to be able to reach bursts of speed topping thirty-five miles per hour and jump close to twenty feet out of the water. Neither is the shy, retiring type, and more than one mako, having been hooked by an angler, has jumped out of the water and into the boat, fighting its tormentors in the cockpit. And in rare instances, a mako has freed itself from the hook, only to come back and ram the boat.

The International Game Fish Association says the short-fin mako is the undisputed leader in attacks on boats.

The actions of a sleep-deprived person are often similar to those of someone who is drunk, and the ramifications can be just as disastrous. Loch has had no sleep since Friday night because of seasickness on Saturday and being pitched into the sea early Sunday morning. No sleep in more than forty hours combined with expending incredible reasoning skills will slowly decrease the longer he stays awake, but he’s facing another issue due to sleep deprivation, hallucinations, which might have graver consequences.

Although a person may see most of his surroundings correctly, imaginary images may be interjected or a real image altered.

The person is conscious, but loses the ability to tell the difference between self-generated and real external stimuli

Initial hallucination begins not with his immediate desires, such as the vision of a ship, a life raft, a bed, or drinking water, but with a Nautilus weight-training

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Info. on Sailing Beyond Lake Superior, Travels of Dursmirg

Ho Chi Minh: A Life by William J Duiker - Book Review Five Stars

2025-09-11T10:25:00.001-06:00

BOOK REVIEW: FIVE STARS

Ho Chi Minh: A Life by William J Duiker

The extraordinary life of Ho Chi Minh not only had an immense impact on Vietnamese and US history but world history as well.

America hasn’t won a war since 1945.

Now the struggle is for global economic supremacy, and that is changing at lightning speed.

This book is a great eye-opening look at that ever changing power struggle.

EXCERPTS

To many who met him, Vietnamese and foreigners alike, he was a sweet guy who, despite his prominence as a major world leader, was actually a selfless patriot with a common touch and a lifelong commitment to the cause of bettering the lives of his fellow Vietnamese. Critics, however, pointed to the revolutionary excesses committed in his name and accused him of being a chameleon personality, a wolf in sheep’s clothing.

Since the end of the Vietnam War, Ho Chi Minh’s colleagues, some of whom are still in power in Hanoi today, have tirelessly drawn on his memory to sanctify the Communist model of national development. Ho’s goal throughout his long career, they allege, was to bring an end to the global system of capitalist exploitation and create a new revolutionary world characterized by the Utopian vision of Karl Marx. A few dissenting voices, however, have argued that the central message of his career was the determination to soften the iron law of Marxist class struggle by melding it with Confucian ethics and the French revolutionary trinity of liberty, equality, and fraternity. In justification, they point to one of Ho’s slogans, which is seen everywhere on billboards in Vietnam today:

“Nothing is more precious than independence and freedom.”

The country that French warships had attacked was no stranger to war or foreign invasion. Indeed, few peoples in Asia had been compelled to fight longer and harder to retain their identity as a separate and independent state than had the Vietnamese.

In August 1939, Party cadres had frequently encountered problems in explaining why Stalin had chosen to ally his country with Hitler’s Germany, widely viewed as the archenemy of the world revolution. By late June 1941, however, word of the German attack on the USSR reached the border area and undoubtedly facilitated Nguyen Ai Quoc’s effort to coordinate the activities of the ICP with the global struggle against world fascism. As he explained it on one occasion: The fascists have attacked the Soviet Union, the fatherland of the world revolution, but the Soviet peoples will definitely be against the fascists.

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Old Glory (Vintage Departures) by Jonathan Raban BOOK REVIEW - FIVE STARS

2025-08-25T10:25:00.003-06:00

BOOK REVIEW- Five Stars

Old Glory: A Voyage Down the Mississippi (Vintage Departures) by Jonathan Raban

“Riding the river, I had seen myself as a sincere traveler, thinking of my voyage not as a holiday but as a scale model of a life. It was different from life in one essential: I would survive it to give an account of its end. The journey would turn into a complete narrative, where life—my own life—could be only an unfinished story with an inconclusive plot.” The author, Jonathan Raban

Jonathan Raban’s account of floating down river across America on the mighty Mississippi and being submersed in every type of political, religious, and regional controversy that cursed a country that is often diverse and extreme paints a vivid picture and weaves an adventure.

Interesting and educational, this story is an on going escapade.

EXCERPTS

“I think God made the Mississippi as a sort of warning, to prove that things really can be worse than you think.”

I ran into the man again. “You’re not still thinking of going down that river, are you?” “I’ve written off about getting a motor.” “It’d cost you a hell of a lot less if you just swallowed a packet of razor blades.

The state fair sprawled across a hillside and a valley, and at first glance it did indeed look like a city under occupation by an army of rampaging Goths. I’d never seen so many enormous people assembled in one place. These farming families from Minnesota and Wisconsin were the descendants of hungry immigrants from Germany and Scandinavia. Their ancestors must have been lean and anxious men with the famines of Europe bitten into their faces. Generation by generation, their families had eaten themselves into Americans. Now they all had the same figure: same broad bottom, same Buddha belly, same neck less join between turkey-wattle chin and

sperm-whale torso. The women had poured themselves into pink stretch-knit pant suits; the men swelled against every seam and button of their plaid shirts and Dacron slacks. Under the brims of their caps, their food projected from their mouths. Foot-long hot dogs. Bratwurst sausages, dripping with hot grease. Hamburgers. Pizzas. Scoops of psychedelic ice cream. Wieners-dun-in-buns. Stumbling, half-suffocated, through this abundance of food and flesh, I felt like a brittle matchstick man.

The sound of dice being shaken in a wooden cup. “That’s a rattler. He’s in there somewhere.” Tickety-tickety-tickety. “He’s moving away from us now. He was right close up when I first heard him.” The noise of the snake was lost in the rustle of the leaves. “A while back, this was a real good place for rattlers.

When I was a kid, we used to come out and hunt them. You got twenty-five cents for every rattle then. They was trying to exterminate them. Then a whole lot got drowned in the summer floods.

There was rattlers all over, trying to climb aboard. They was just desperate to get on anything that was floating, logs, boats, I guess they weren’t discriminating too much. It wasn’t me they was after, it was just a ride on my boat.

Whenever anyone’s been in trouble in the world, we’ve gone in there to help them. Hell, we helped you out when you was in trouble in World War Two. Now America’s in trouble, and everyone’s looking the other way. No one wants to help us. Even your country, you ain’t going to come in with us and lend a hand. Even you.” His jowl was set in a melancholy line of deep personal grievance. “I reckon in America now, we ain’t got but one friend left in the world. Know who that is?” “I’m sorry it’s not England.”

“South Korea.” He gave an irritable snort of laughter. “Fuckin’ South Korea!”

I wasn’t a traveler at all; I was just another rubberneck in a city that made its living out of credulous rubbernecks. Go buy a guidebook! Take a buggy ride! Get your picture painted! Eat beignets! Listen to the sounds of Old Dixie! Have yourself a relief massage; then go home, shmuck!

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The Berlin Wife by Marion Kummerow - Book Review - Five Stars

2025-08-14T10:36:00.005-06:00

BOOK REVIEW FIVE STARS

The Berlin Wife: A totally gripping WW2 historical novel about bravery against the odds by Marion Kummerow

An eye-opening novel that is timely and based on true history.

In this age of enlightenment it is unfathomable that an entire adult population could be duped into voting for and backing a Fascist with a criminal record.

As an introduction to this era and the political climate that precipitated a Fascist government which quickly spread over Europe and beyond resulting in 13 over run countries and millions of victims, I recommend listening to the audio book; The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by William L. Shirer.

Pay special attention to 1943.

It has been said that Americans can be sold anything, even a war. The last war they won was in 1945.

EXCERPTS:

Did you know that he recently founded his own party, the National Socialist German Workers’ Party? It already has fifty thousand members.” Joseph puffed out his breast, leaving no doubt that he was one of the fifty thousand.

“This is the problem of all democracies. The commoners are simply not educated enough to know what is good for the country, they tend to put their personal benefit over everything else. We need a strong ruler in Germany to reunite the states.”

I have experienced more crises in my life than I care to remember. All have passed sooner or later. Those who are prepared will profit, the rest goes under.

You just sit back and let the inflation do its work. I’m quite certain a currency reform is the only way out of this depression, then you have got it made.

“Hitler is our man,” Joseph said as he took the offered cigar. Julius shook his head. “I don’t see how. He’s too hotheaded, has no political experience, no allies, and, most importantly, no backing in the population.”

Hitler has to stifle his rhetoric if he wants to be successful.”

The task was done. Germany was on its way to a bright future! And he would be an important part of it.

Joseph offered a toast. “Our leader Adolf Hitler can always rely on his SS. We will do our duty. Heil Hitler!”

A vicious coup had been prevented and everyone in the unit would receive a promotion.

Over the course of a week, not only had fifty SA leaders in the hotel been eliminated, but also Ernst Röhm had been arrested and shot on Hitler’s order.

Hitler told his senior SS men, in the same words he later repeated in front of the German Parliament, consisting solely of trusted NSDAP members. About two hundred men had been killed: Only Vice-Chancellor von Papen evaded death and was placed under house arrest.

Hitler had won on every count, and at the same time had shown his people that he was their sole leader, who would ruthlessly oppress any and all critics, no matter who they were or how much power they held.

The Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor supposedly protected the racial purity of the Master Race and forbade “miscegenation”, or inter-breeding, between Aryans and Jews.

Reich Citizenship Law additionally stipulated that a Jew, and to a lesser extent a half-Jew, did not belong to the German race and nation, thus was not allowed to have the Reich citizenship.

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373 Mind-Boggling Facts and Questions from the Puzzle Vault by Nayden Kostov - book review

2025-07-23T10:53:00.005-06:00

BOOK REVIEW

373 Mind-Boggling Facts and Questions from the Puzzle Vault by Trivia and Quizzes by Nayden Kostov

Entertaining, thought provoking and informative. A collection of often overlooked truisms that are sure to expand your knowledge base.

EXCERPTS;

President Johnson admitted as much in 1965, telling Congress that the actions of Black Americans who had joined the civil rights movement “called upon us to make good the promise of America. And who among us can say that we would have made the same progress were it not for [their] persistent bravery, and [their] faith in American democracy?”

When Johnson uttered these words, Congress was polarized; the Democratic Party was coming apart at the seams; and the country, by denying Black citizens access to the ballot box, was undemocratic in fact.

In other words, the Washington that passed transformational legislation outlawing racial discrimination, expanding access to healthcare, food, and education, and slashing the poverty rate was just as broken as the Washington of today. Ordinary Americans still found a way to win, as we now must. Poverty will be abolished in America only when a mass movement demands it so. And today, such a movement

American labor is once again on the move, growing more boisterous and feistier by the day, organizing workplaces once thought untouchable. A renewed movement for housing justice is gaining steam. In a resurgence of tenant power, renters have formed eviction blockades and chained themselves to the entrances of housing court, meeting the violence of displacement with a force of their own. The Poor People’s Campaign has elevated the voices of low-income Americans around the country, voices challenging “the lie of scarcity in the midst of abundance” and mobilizing for things like educational equity and a reinvestment in public housing.[

They march under different banners—workers’ unions and tenants’ unions; movements for racial justice and economic justice—but they share a commitment to ending poverty in America.

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Poverty, by America by Matthew Desmond - Book Review

2025-07-23T10:36:00.003-06:00

BOOK REVIEW: FIVE STARS

Poverty, by America by Matthew Desmond

It is past time to wake up America!

The Europeans refer to America as the land of the working poor where there are over 800,000 homeless.

This book is a reality check. It has been said that the Americans can be sold anything, even a war.

EXCERPTS:

I have met poor Americans around the country striving for dignity and justice—or just plain survival, which can be hard enough: home health aides in New Jersey who belonged to the full-time working homeless, fast food workers in California fighting for a living wage, and undocumented immigrants in Minneapolis organizing for affordable housing, communicating with their neighbors through the Google Translate app. This is who we are: the richest country on earth, with more poverty than any other advanced democracy. If America’s poor founded a country, that country would have a bigger population than Australia or Venezuela.

Almost one in nine Americans—including one in eight children—live in poverty. There are more than 38 million.

Instead, we let the rich slide and give the most to those who have plenty already, creating a welfare state that heavily favors the upper class. And then our elected officials have the audacity—the shamelessness, really—to fabricate stories about poor people’s dependency on government aid and shoot down proposals to reduce poverty because they would cost too much. Glancing at the price tag of some program that would cut child poverty in half or give all Americans access to a doctor, they suck their teeth and ask, “But how can we afford it?” How can we afford it? What a sinful question. What a selfish, dishonest question, one asked as if the answer wasn’t staring us straight in the face. We could afford it if we allowed the IRS to do its job. We could afford it if the well-off among us took less from the government. We could afford it if we designed our welfare state to expand opportunity and not guard fortunes.

Americans throw away more than that amount in food every year.

What could $177 billion buy? Quite a lot. We could ensure that every person in America had a safer and more affordable place to live. Every single one of us. We could put a real dent in ending homelessness in America, and we could end hunger.

Companies are doing all they can to avoid paying what they owe. Wealthy families, too, have found new ways to weasel out of paying taxes. Studies have shown that most Americans pay 90 percent of the taxes they owe, but the ultra-rich pay only 75 percent. This is possible because affluent have increasingly come to rely on a burgeoning industry of tax professionals who have devised ingenious ways to get around investing in the common welfare.

When corporations hide profits in tax havens, and when rich families stash valuable assets in offshore accounts, they defraud the American public, forcing everyone else to pay for their greed.

“It seems to me that people who earn nothing and contribute nothing get everything for free. And the people who work hard and struggle for every penny barely end up surviving.” Universal programs, like a universal basic income (UBI), get rid of this baggage. Designed to benefit a large number of people, sometimes irrespective of their standing, universal programs are less polarizing and so are considered more politically durable.

I’m not calling for “redistribution.” I’m calling for the rich to pay their taxes. I’m calling for a re-balancing of our social safety net. I’m calling for a return to a time when America made bigger investments in the general welfare. I’m calling for more poor aid and less rich aid.

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Embers of the Hands: Hidden Histories of the Viking Age by Eleanor Barraclough - Book Review Five Stars

2025-06-10T10:36:00.004-06:00

Book Review - Five Stars

Embers of the Hands: Hidden Histories of the Viking Age by Eleanor Barraclough

Excellent well-written and edited in-depth coverage of an era in history that ever after altered many generations to come. Worthy of more than five stars.

EXCERPTS:

Scandinavia as an interconnected cultural sphere involving other indigenous peoples who inhabited the peninsula. These groups did not necessarily share the same linguistic background or cultural practices as the Norse, and yet they were notable players in the Viking Age story. The most important of these were those known as Finnar by their Norse-speaking neighbors. They were the ancestors of Scandinavia’s modern-day Sámi population. For the most part, they were nomadic hunters and fishers with ready access to valuable Arctic furs and skins. Their primary territories ranged across the far north of what is now Norway, Sweden, Finland and Russia. Hailing from Arctic Norway, Ohthere himself made much of his wealth through trading with and collecting tribute from his neighbors. But the Norse–Sámi relationship was also characterized by intermarriage and cross-cultural influences. There is also archaeological evidence that the Sámi also operated in southern areas of Scandinavia.

Through the eighth century the north began to develop rapidly in new ways. Much of this had to do with money. After the economic slump that followed the fall of the Western Roman Empire, a new influx of silver coins spread into northern Europe, lubricating the wheels of trade. Already by the year 700, new trading centers had sprung up on both sides of the English Channel. There was Quentovic, near Boulogne on the French coast; Hamwic, just outside what is now Southampton; Lundenwic, an Anglo-Saxon trading port upriver of the old Roman city of Londinium, where Westminster now stands; and Dorestad near the mouth of the Rhine, in the modern Netherlands.

The importance of food production, it is no surprise that the basic unit of Viking Age society was the farmstead. The people who lived on it tended to be largely self-sufficient. They grew, fished or hunted whatever they could, bartering with neighbors or itinerant merchants for anything else.

Other necessities, such as textiles, tools and building materials, were also produced at or near home. Animals were exploited down to the last useful sinew. The majority of the population lived close to subsistence levels much of the time, although fluctuating between scarcity and abundance from season to season and year to year. Life was tough and unrelenting, kept up through physical effort in the face of an uncompromising natural environment. Their material world was one of wood, wool, flax, bone, stone, leather and antler, hand-wrought and fashioned, with metal a precious commodity to be treasured and recycled.

The Norse world converted to Christianity far later than most of northern Europe. This means we have far more information about their pre-Christian beliefs and practices than, say, those of Anglo-Saxon England before the conversion. But on the other hand, this can lull us into a false sense of security. We need to remember that our written descriptions of Norse pagan practices and beliefs come from outside the system. Texts from the Viking Age itself were written by Christian or Islamic writers from other parts of the medieval world. They tended to be openly repulsed by whatever they deemed ‘pagan’, and reluctant or unable to understand it on its own terms. Later texts from within the Norse sphere itself were written well after the conversion to Christianity. This makes it difficult to know whether these accounts actually reflect what people did, said or believed centuries earlier.

There are times when love and lust lead to sex. There are times when sex leads to pregnancy, and times when it doesn’t. And both outcomes can prompt a range of emotions, from the very good to the very bad. Every single human living in the Viking Age was there because of sex and pregnancy. But it’s extraordinarily hard to find evidence of the experience of pregnancy, with all its complex emotions and potential outcomes, in either the written or the material record. Partly, this is a consequence of the fact that, if you had a womb, you probably didn’t have much of a voice in the official records, and so that limits the types of evidence available to us.

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RECOLLECTIONS OF THE WAR YEARS. 1940-1945 - John M. Grimsrud

2025-06-07T10:40:00.004-06:00

RECOLLECTIONS OF THE WAR YEARS. 1940-1945

I was born in 1940.

My first remembrance of those war years is that I could see real hate in everybody’s eyes as they chanted “kill the Nazis.” The chant “kill the Nazis” became “kill the Germans” by the end of the war.

There were 13 countries overrun by the Axis powers (Fascists), Germany, Spain, Italy, and finally Japan.

The U. S. issued 13 different commemorative five cent postage flag stamps depicting all of these overrun countries.

A link to the stamps: Click here.

I obtained a three by four foot world map that I framed and made into a stamp map where I affixed and labeled the countries stamps, and so opened my education in geography and interest in world history.

In 1944 when I was four years old, I ran away from home. Getting a beating, slapped around, and having soap rubbed in my eyes got me going. Mom said that I hurt her and now she was going to hurt me.Grandma’s apartment was nine blocks away, and I was on my way.

Wartime gasoline rationing made the streets quiet, and the East End Drug where Grandma’s apartment was located I knew well. It was my best-loved sanctuary…I loved Grandma, and she loved me. She named me stakkar, and said in Norwegian that means “poor thing.” Grandma was fully aware of her daughter’s personality and her eccentric dangerous behavior.

Great aromas wafted up from Grandma’s humble little kitchen where Scandinavian cookies were always in abundance. Her dessert specialty was prunes whipped up in whipping cream, oh so good!

Grandma was also a “poor thing.” When Grandma was sixteen years old she and four of her brothers set sail for America saying a final farewell to family and friends, and returning was not going to be an option.

Grandma told me a story about when the sailors played a prank on her bringing her a banana to see what she would do with it. Her little Norwegian village was isolated amd only accessible by boat in good weather with no electric or phone where they spoke only an Old Norse dialect. She had never seen a banana.

Grandma and her brothers headed west in America and did not stop until they reached a place where they could speak Norse. North Dakota is where they settled, but it was not yet a state, and Indian raids were serious business. You could see a long way in Dakota Territory but you couldn’t see much. There wasn’t anything to obstruct your view, not even a tree for a bird to sit in…they had to hop around on the ground. The soil was fabulously rich, and farming was a dream come true, not like rock bound Norway. Land was free for the taking.

Grandma married Edwin Benson, a landed Norwegian. He and his brother weren't taught any work ethics, and after the parents died the farm was lost. The sad part was that oil was later discovered on the farm land.

Grandpa Benson took a job as a watchman on the railroad when he moved to Superior, Wisconsin, with his wife and three daughters.

When the great depression hit and the “Hoover Days” began the family took up residence in a humble shanty in the woods east of Brule, Wisconsin.

My father married my mother, Myrtle Benson, the second of the three daughters and provided her widowed mother Bertha an apartment above his East End Drug Store.

Back to my runaway story, yes it was “poor thing” Grandma.

Grandma’s apartment:

Prominently displayed on her living room wall was a large sepia photo of her younger brother in his military dress uniform. He died in 1918.

I met one of Grandma’s brothers, Ingvald, who was a cook aboard a Great Lakes ore carrier that frequently called at Duluth-Superior harbor. He would always came to visit his sister Bertha arriving by city bus. One day when I was with my father in his car in downtown Superior, I spotted Ingvald at the corner of Belknap and Tower where he would transfer to the East End bus line. My Dad stopped and picked up Ingvald and drove him to Grandma’s apartment above the East End Drug Store. Gasoline was rationed at this time. but Dad received gasoline ration stamps because his drug store did home deliveries of medicine. Dad’s blue Studebaker coupe had to out last the war, rusted out floor boards and all.

Back to Grandma’s apartment, and my runaway story:

Grandma had a still working very old desk top tube radio that we would tune into for noon time weather and news plus some favorite evening broadcasts. During the war news was especially important for us and couldn’t be missed.

Her well-worn dining room table and chairs were part of a set with a bureau of drawers filled with her few valuables.

She treasured an envelope from her family in the Old County. It had been opened and resealed with an ornate tape decorated with Nazi swastikas. Inside the envelope the letter had been meticulously blanked out to censor the message. This was my first hand look at Fascism that was spreading across Europe with lightning speed and killing thousands in its wake. From the very northern tip of Norway on the Arctic Ocean at Kirkenes all the way south to the Straits of Gibraltar in southern Spain fascism had total control of the west coast of Europe. This was frighting and resistance was imperative. The U. S. was at the same time battling fanatic Kamikaze Imperial fascist Japan in the Pacific Ocean.

I have to interject that in 1944 I was only four years old, but I have to expand on this monumental story of my family’s involvement of resistance to Hitler’s Nazi invasion of little neutral Norway with a population of 3 million.

In the predawn hours of April 10, 1940, three German battle ships flying British flags stealthy and deceptively entered the Oslo Fjord refusing to halt on demand and identify themselves. My Grandfather’s nephew then performing his military duty (national guard), took aim with his Krupp German made cannon and sent 1,600 of the deceptive invading Nazi’s to the bottom of Oslo harbor. Neutral Norway whether they wanted it or not had entering the war and would be brutally occupied. They would be just one of the thirteen invaded countries of WWII.

Grandma’s oldest daughter, Esther enlisted in the military and was off to war. Her youngest daughter Nelly Bergland married a career military man who served five years in Europe during WWII, and was later sent off to Korea.

My dad’s older brother Lawrence was inducted into the army infantry and shipped off to North Africa and then to Italy where he was involved in the bloodiest invasion battle of WWII at Anzio, Italy. That brutal experience altered him for life.

Dr. Rudy Christianson, my father’s very best friend, I called him my “Uncle Rudy” gave his life to the war effort taking amphetamines “speed” so that he could do his life saving surgery until he literary dropped. Less than three years after the war his heart quit.

My father was deferred from military service because he was vital to the efforts at home, but his father, born in 1879, was eligible to be called to service. I remember my father, born in 1908, telling me that regarding military inscription of his father, he told him,

“How could they take an old man like you?”

Back to Grandma’s apartment: I was safe with Grandma.

There came a knock on the door and Grandma had me hide in her bedroom. There was a police man inquiring about me. Grandma protected me, and she sent the policeman on his way.

In retrospect looking back on this incident I learned about poisonous personalities and how deceptive and cunning they could be. Bipolar psychopathic personalities are impossible to live with and absolutely no positive outcome can ever be expected.

What sparked my memories?

I recently listened to the audio version of the book, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by William L. Shirer. I highly recommend it. It is apropos to our current times.

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Small Acts of Courage by Ali Velshi, Book Review-Five Stars

2025-05-13T09:11:00.000-06:00

BOOK REVIEW: FIVE STARS

Small Acts of Courage: A Legacy of Endurance and the Fight for Democracy by Ali Velshi

This is a powerful treatise, conveying messages extremely important and timely.

This absorbing family history is worthy of more than five stars.

EXCERPTS:

If we want to prevent the murder of the next George Floyd, it will require more than just reforming the way we police. It will require us to build a society where the rights, privileges, and protections of citizenship—and the responsibilities of citizenship—are shared by all. As my family’s hundred-year journey illustrates, for far too many people, achieving true citizenship and belonging in a new country is no easy endeavor. It can be long, arduous, and beset by discouraging setbacks at every turn. And for all of us as a society to work together to build a shared notion of citizenship, to build a truly united there are those who still maintain a sort of “yes, but” defense of Great Britain’s imperial project: that it was worthwhile because, in the end, the British left their former subjects with the rule of law and better railroads and “Western values.”

The ill effects of colonialism were compounded by environmental catastrophe. Waves of drought parched and devastated the land, wiping out whole crops and herds of livestock, leading to mass starvation. In the first half of the nineteenth century there were seven famines that killed, by conservative estimates, around eight hundred thousand people. The second half of the nineteenth century was worse, bringing seven additional famines that killed over 15 million. All the while, tons of Indian wheat were being exported to feed the British back home, and the money and resources that might have eased the devastation caused by famine had gone elsewhere, taken by the British and used to support their various military adventures overseas. The starving people of India were left with no choice but to go elsewhere themselves. Between 1830 and 1870, nearly 2 million workers left the country in search of better prospects. That was the Big Bang. The Indian diaspora was born.

In a cruel twist of fate, they left their homes and their families to toil on behalf of the same empire that had devastated their native land and forced them onto the open seas in the first place.

Scandal: when companies like MCI and WorldCom and Enron were caught cooking their books to hide billions of dollars in losses from investors. We covered those stories ad nauseam, and it was the first time that we, as financial journalists, confronted the idea that some of the people who we are all excited to have on our TV stations were a bunch of crooks. Then came cascading crises of confidence in our institutions and leadership: the Iraq War, Hurricane Katrina, the 2008 financial meltdown. As I traveled the world reporting, going to places like Hong Kong and India, people would ask me, “Why can’t you guys be more like Al Jazeera?” Meaning: “When are you guys going to stop being ESPN and really report the news and hold people to account?”

I can remember being at CNN the night that Barack Obama was elected, back in the days when CNN had twenty people at a time in the newsroom in rows of desks. There wasn’t a dry eye in the place. We were all caught up in watching history unfold, and I was thinking, “This is it. This was the big thing America needed to do that it hadn’t done, and now we’ve broken through that.” Even if you didn’t buy into the absurdities about a “postracial America,” there was a sense that we’d made a giant leap forward, and it was almost impossible to imagine things going backward from there. Obama himself leaned hard on Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous formulation that “the arc of history is long but it bends toward justice.” But with all due respect to both of those men, that’s not actually true. It’s wishful thinking that people need to abandon because it breeds a complacency that things will just continue to get better on their own. Everything about my family’s story tells me that the arc of history bends the way you bend it. That was true with the National Party in South Africa in 1948, it was true with Idi Amin in Uganda in 1972, and it’s been true in America for quite some time. For the past fifty years, extremist right-wingers have been bending it the way they wanted, and with Trump’s election, we finally got to the result of their efforts.

Everyone knew they were breaking curfew and were subject to arrest. These people, thousands of them, had taken it upon themselves to take that risk. But they were just walking, and there was no threat that called for an armed response. I’ve covered the G8 and the G20, these international conferences that draw all kinds of rock-throwing anarchists and the like, and every cop in every major city on earth learned years ago: if you’re trying to control a crowd, you don’t incite the crowd. It’s never good. So the minute they opened fire, I knew it was the result of a deliberate choice. Subsequent recordings that came out indicated, especially when it came to journalists, cops were on a hunt that night. They were jacked up. They were pumped up to do this, and we were fair game. The Minneapolis police chief himself was a decent, honest official, but his power was hamstrung by the police union, and the head of the police union in Minneapolis was a big Trumper.

So you had some cops who were juiced on this whole Trumpian mantra of “You need to rough people up a bit.” Because other than that, there was no reason to do it. None. But they did it. They were excited to do it, and they continued to do it for hours all over the city. They chased people down. It was completely unnecessary, and it was wrong. A few months later, the whole episode came up again because Trump started ranting about it on the campaign trail as part of his whole attack on the media. “I remember this guy Velshi,” he said, recounting the incident. “He got hit in the knee with a canister of tear gas and he went down. He was down. ‘My knee, my knee.’” He was wrong about every detail, by the way. It’s all on video. But Trump makes up lies even when he doesn’t need to.

The truly disturbing part of Trump’s speech was what came next, when he lavished praise on the police for attacking an American journalist. “It was the most beautiful thing,” Trump said, “because after we take all that crap for weeks and weeks, and you finally see men get up there and go right through them, wasn’t it really a beautiful sight?” Then the crowd erupted in cheers and applause.

What makes it important is not only that armed agents of the state believe that it’s OK to take unprovoked shots at both civilians and journalists but also that millions of American citizens are willing to cheer that on. It is chilling to realize there is a large and vocal faction in this country that is ready to burn it to the ground before they’ll share it with anyone who doesn’t look like them or doesn’t think like them. They stand ready to tear down everything that makes America special—indeed, everything that makes America possible, like the right to vote and the right to a free and independent press.

Up until Minneapolis, I thought of myself as someone covering those fights. It was only when I got shot that I fully realized I was in the fight. That belated realization came, in part, simply because, even as a brown guy in Donald Trump’s America, the system continued to work fine for me. It still works fine for me to this day. I make a good living. I go about my life without any real fears for my physical safety. I worry about larger societal problems, but day to day I’m good, which means I have a certain perspective on the promise of this land and I could easily go right on taking that promise as guaranteed. But I can’t anymore, because I know that promise is not guaranteed. To any of us.

It has to be good enough for all of us. As has been said many times by those much wiser than me, if one of us is in chains, none of us are free.

It’s not enough for society to be good enough for some of us. It has to be good enough for all of us. As has been said many times by those much wiser than me, if one of us is in chains, none of us are free. This is what my father and mother and sister knew. It’s what my grandparents and great-grandparents knew, despite their total lack of a formal education. Justice isn’t justice until it’s universal.

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Haakon the Good (Vikings of Norway) by Ole Åsli - Book Review Five Stars

2025-05-01T10:36:00.004-06:00

BOOK REVIEW

Haakon the Good (Vikings of Norway) by Ole Åsli

This easy reading novel of the Viking era takes the reader through the years of transition into Christianity and the end of the Old Norse pagan ways.

An informative glimpse is provided of everyday doings in a very historical and pivotal point in history.

I found the book well done, interesting, and entertaining.

Excerpts:

‘You are right, young man! Let me explain. In our belief all men are God’s children. And as we priests are God’s voice on earth, we tend to say such things like “my son”. I haven’t given it much thought, truth be told, but you are right, it is a bit strange. And maybe we should be better at explaining our behavior so that we don’t put people off. And you are also right that we are concerned about lying. In fact, that is one of the Ten Commandments; “Thou shalt not bear false witness”, which means that you should not tell a lie. Have you heard about the Ten Commandments?’ ‘No,’ Haakon said. ‘Where I am from, kings and jarls and chieftains give the commands.’ ‘Is that so?

But what do you think about God?’ Siegfried poked Haakon in the chest with his index finger. ‘I think he is one God, among many, who likes getting gifts and giving commands, but gives very little in return. Had he been a king, he would’ve been a bad king. Not a very popular king.’ Hauk almost chuckled. But he held it in, worried about how the tiny man and his God would react. They were in his house after all. He would be close by. ‘And your gods, Thor and Odin, are they more generous?’

‘That was a good game,’ Hauk said. ‘You really showed them how it’s done.’ Haakon smiled. ‘It’s not about winning, Hauk. It’s about finding solutions that help everyone. That’s the true mark of a successful negotiation.’ In a real-life negotiation, trust me, most men will give anything to get the upper hand. They can accept a lot, if they just can walk away feeling they won or got a better deal than their adversary.’

Besides making a good deal for everyone, I’ll have to make my adversaries think they won?’

someone chuckled, and laughter rippled through the crowd. Haakon raised a hand. ‘Nonetheless, I promise to do my utmost to be a fair and just king if you will have me. A leader cannot lead without the trust of his people. A king cannot rule without their support.’ Cheers erupted from the assembly. Haakon continued. ‘But these are just words,’ he said, and the crowd hushed again. ‘It’s easy to say words, as the jarl has just demonstrated.’

Haakon raised his horn of ale in a toast, his voice ringing out above the jubilant throng. ‘To Arrow, a warrior reborn! May his victory remind us that strength lies not only in skill, but in the power of unity!

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The Accidental President by A.J. Baime - Book Review Five Stars

2025-04-30T11:42:00.001-06:00

BOOK REVIEW: FIVE STARS

The Accidental President: Harry S. Truman and the Four Months That Changed the World by A.J. Baime

Truman’s presidential odyssey began on April 12, 1945, the day Franklin Roosevelt died. It is impossible to overstate the shock to the world FDR’s death caused. “The Romans must have felt this way when word came that Caesar Augustus was dead,” the columnist I. F. Stone wrote at the time.

This amazing book covers the tumultuous days from post WWI, the Roaring Twenties, Hoover administrations "get rich" for financial insiders that crashed markets, saw foreclosures of homes, businesses and brought about the great depression, known as the “Hoover Days”. It also set up President FDR for four terms that saw the United States enter WWII.

After reading this informative and amazing book you will see that FDR’s pick of Harry Truman as Vice President did America a great favor.

What came next derailed American democracy, and was the last war that America would win.

EXCERPTS:

No generation had ever lived through such leaps of innovation so ruthlessly squeezed into a lifetime. The ubiquity of telephones, movies with sound, paved streets roaring with motorcar traffic, the rise of the supermarket with branded products such as Post Toasties cereal and Hellmann’s Blue Ribbon mayonnaise—none of this had existed thirty years earlier. The war had accelerated the speed of modernization. Truman could recall as a young man of nineteen reading about the Wright Brothers’ first controlled flights. Now the U.S. Army Air Forces were flying thousands of 56,000-pound B-24 bombers, equipped with radar and gyrocompasses that enabled the dropping of bombs on precision targets. Racial integration, women on assembly lines—it all felt like an H. G. Wells novel. In the previous eighteen months the nation had come of age.” Americans—especially in Washington—felt the pull of destiny, that their country had become the world’s moral arbiter.

The month had flown by in a montage of historic events. The Axis surrender in Italy, the execution of Mussolini, the suicide of Hitler, the Russian capture of Berlin, Nazi Germany’s unconditional surrender, the liberation of death camps, the firebombings of Japan. The United Nations Conference was under way in San Francisco, and the president had been briefed on the most startling secret in human history.

Bastards,” “yellow monkeys,” and vermin-infested “louseous Japanicas.” But American feelings toward the Japanese went beyond racism. A hatred had sunk deep into the American consciousness following Pearl Harbor, a hatred that did not come into play in the European war, even toward the Nazis.

The bomb was on the way.

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On the Move by Abrahm Lustgarten - Book Review-Five Stars

2025-03-19T12:11:00.005-06:00

On the Move: The Overheating Earth and the Uprooting of America by Abrahm Lustgarten

On the Move is an extraordinary and eye opening look at where our world has arrived today and a glimpse at what now awaits us all.

Hydrocarbon combustion and more water to flush have reached their finite limits. People can be sold anything...even a war.

This is a must read book to read and heed!

Excerpts:

Despite all the talk about the climate crisis, we’ve scarcely begun to consider what is expected to be one of the largest impacts: the next great human migration.

The heat waves in the United States in 2023 were hotter and longer than those of 2022 and 2021, which were in turn worse than those of 2020, and so on. Federal data shows that those heat waves, on average, have gotten successively more intense over the last decade. In some places the droughts have gotten worse, too, the reservoir levels lower and the wildfires more destructive, while in other places the rainstorms are more torrential.

According to just about every metric, the world was hitting critical warming benchmarks sooner, and with more dramatic consequences, than expected. The most dramatic changes—ice cap melting, drought, and the thawing of the frozen Arctic—appeared to be occurring faster than even the most alarmist of climate scientists thought possible.

Arctic permafrost could push the planet over a tipping point, leading to the sudden release of so much methane gas now trapped in the soil that global atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations will continue to rise steeply even if governments effectively curtail industrial emissions.

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The Ice Master: The Doomed 1913 Voyage of the Karluk by Jennifer Niven - Five Stars Book Review

2025-02-28T10:45:00.006-06:00

BOOK REVIEW: FIVE STARS

The Ice Master: The Doomed 1913 Voyage of the Karluk by Jennifer Niven

The Ice Master: The Doomed 1913 Voyage of the Karluk is a true life well-documented Arctic Ocean exploration expedition that is fast moving and guaranteed to keep the reader enticed to the very last.

EXCERPTS:

The people of the Karluk be allowed to speak on these pages in their own distinctive and passionate voices. In some places, they speak directly, and all dialogue that appears in quotes in this book comes verbatim from their own diaries or letters, or from interviews with the descendants and survivors. Likewise, any insight into the feelings or thoughts of these people comes from the feelings and thoughts explicitly expressed in their journals and descriptions of the Arctic conditions are either quoted directly or adapted from specific observations from journals and diaries of the men who experienced them.

By 1913, the Northeast and Northwest Passages had long been found, and so had the Bering Strait. The Greenland ice cap had been crossed, and the North Pole was claimed for America by Peary. But the Arctic remained much of a mystery, and the majority of its highest frozen regions were still unexplored.

They had passed through the Bering Strait and were now entering the vast Arctic Ocean. They celebrated that night with a bottle of wine. Even the teetotalers—Bartlett, among them—celebrated the momentous event, the Karluk circled the edge of the ice pack, nosing her way sluggishly through the thickening fields of white. This ice was permanent, the enormous, free-floating rafts a fixed part of the Arctic horizon, yet always shifting and drifting. Each September as temperatures began to drop and winds increased, the ice would inevitably merge into a solid, impenetrable force. Toward the end of the season, the ice would grow violent, crashing and raftering, floe against floe, as they crushed everything that lay in their path, sometimes pushing one another into great ridges, which were as insurmountable and as high as mountains.

1911, explorer Fridtjof Nansen observed: “Nowhere else have we won our way more slowly, nowhere else has every new step caused so much trouble, so many privations and sufferings, and certainly nowhere have the resulting discoveries promised fewer material advantages.”

He knew the dangers of Arctic travel. He knew it hadn’t been much improved or advanced since Leif Erickson sailed his ship from Greenland to North America a thousand years ago. He knew the ice could trap or crush a ship until it sank without a trace. He knew a man could freeze to death or be attacked by a polar bear. He knew there were no radio transmissions or air travel over that part of the world. He knew if a ship was lost, it was lost.

BARTLETT WAS JUST as unhappy with the choice of the crew as he was with the choice of the ship. Selected out of desperation from along the western coast of Canada, one of the crewmen had only a pair of canvas trousers to his name before signing on, two of the sailors were traveling under aliases, two men smuggled liquor aboard even though it was forbidden, and the cook, twenty-year-old Scotsman Robert “Bob” Templeman, was a confirmed drug addict. He made no secret of it, carrying around a pocket-sized case that held his vials of drugs and hypodermic syringes. He was a nervous man to begin with, anxious, high-strung, and rail thin, and the drug abuse had added years to him.

Siberia meant “Sleeping Land.” It was wild country and the coldest region in the northern hemisphere, with temperatures falling to minus ninety degrees Fahrenheit in deepest winter. Only in the heart of Antarctica did temperatures ever dip lower than they did in northeastern Siberia. It was Bartlett’s first experience in this place, and he had never known such bitter, destructive cold or such harsh weather, even near the North Pole.

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American Wolf by Nate Blakeslee Book - Review - Five Stars

2025-02-10T11:35:00.002-06:00

BOOK REVIEW: FIVE STARS

American Wolf: A True Story of Survival and Obsession in the West by Nate Blakeslee

This is truly an interesting book about American wolves with many noteworthy points to ponder.

It has been said that the Americans can be sold anything...even a war.

Politicians with enormous checkbooks filled with other peoples money just couldn’t resist bankrolling the project of reintroducing wolves in parts of America where they had disappeared. Politicians are notorious for screwing up an ambush as is revealed in American Wolf by Nate Blakeslee.

Read it and pass your own judgment.

The wolf domesticated became the pet dog, man’s best friend and the worst enemy of a bicycler.

EXCERPTS:

Yellowstone’s wolves multiplied just as fast as Smith and his team had hoped they would. By the winter of 2003, the 15 wolves released in 1995, along with an additional 17 introduced a year later, had become a population of 174, divided into fourteen packs spread throughout the park

Now, just fourteen years after the first pens were opened in the Lamar Valley, the wolf population in the Northern Rockies had grown to over seventeen hundred animals.

They’d found a video of wolves demolishing a dairy cow and sent it to a couple of dozen members of Congress. He wondered how many of them had had the stomach to watch the whole thing. Louie had never lost an animal to a wolf, but he’d seen the aftermath on other people’s ranches: calves so thoroughly shredded that they looked like they’d swallowed dynamite, the snow covered in blood. Wolves and sheep were a particularly disastrous combination; stripped of their natural defenses against predators after centuries of domestication, sheep were known for making no attempt to escape when wolves came calling, and the result could be widespread carnage.

In the last count taken before wolves were reintroduced in 1995, over nineteen thousand elk were roaming Yellowstone’s Northern Range. By 2010, that number had plummeted to six thousand, roughly what it had been back in the 1960s, before rangers stopped culling the park’s herds.

Everywhere human civilization flourished, wolves were routed, until Homo sapiens, not Canis lupus, became the most widely spread species. Ironically, the dog—a domesticated wolf—became the first line of defense against depredating wolves, which grew more common as wild prey populations declined under pressure from human hunting and loss of habitat. Romans sometimes referred to dawn as inter lupum et canum: “between the wolf and the dog.” Dogs ruled the day, and wolves owned the night. Humanity’s most beloved animal and its most despised were essentially the same creature, but the wolf’s threat to the shepherd’s livelihood poisoned relations between men and wolves, and the wolf’s reputation never recovered. In Western culture, the wolf became an embodiment of wickedness, from the Middle Ages, when the werewolf myth first appeared, to Grimm’s fairy tales in the early nineteenth century. Early Christians—“the flock,” as believers were called—saw themselves represented in the sheep; their shepherd was God. The wolf that preyed

upon the flock was the devil himself. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service had brought the devil back to the Northern Rockies.

They didn’t relish learning how to deal with a predator their own ancestors had so decisively defeated long ago.

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Reflections from the North Country by Sigurd F. Olson - BOOK REVIEW FIVE STARS

2025-02-05T11:31:00.004-06:00

BOOK REVIEW – FIVE STARS

Reflections from the North Country by Sigurd F. Olson

This philosophical masterpiece and compendium of insightful reflections is worthy of reading at a pace that gives the reader the time to absorb messages hidden within.

Sigurd Olson conveys his ponderous thoughtful persuasive messages in a joyful easy flowing style. I loved it.

EXCEPTS:

That became our theme song all the way. No matter what the adventure, and there were many, one of us would say, “I’ve been happier, but I can’t remember where.”

I have come to feel laughter and fun on the trails may be the secret of the joy of travel, as when one of my companions, Blaire Fraser, bellowed into an Arctic wind north of Great Slave a seaman’s ditty he loved: “Once I had a Spanish gal, and boy she was a dandy,” that song somehow took the bite out of the wind.

Intuition is different from instinct, the latter being a response to physical and physiological stimuli. When one is confronted with sudden danger, Adrenalin pours into the body in preparation for battle, flight, evasive action. When the hair rises on one’s neck and one is conscious of being followed or facing the unknown, reactions to such fears are instinctive.

Aces are born, not made. “We can train fine fliers,” he said, “but when the crunch comes, only those who act automatically survive to become aces.

I have seen horses hesitate before crossing a bridge they considered unsafe, have watched Indians skirt ice that looked perfectly solid to anyone else and have been with them when they sensed the coming of wind or storm, or an aura of impending doom.

Indians, woodsmen, farmers, and all those who spend their lives out-of-doors can smell the weather. This sense is not prompted by arthritic twinges or meteorological knowledge, but a certain something way down deep.

An old prospector friend of mine, Harry Moody, wrote me just before he died near Flin Flon, Manitoba, that we could sit across a fire from each other and carry on a conversation without saying a word. “I know what you think,” he said, “and you know what I think. It is enough just to be together sitting around a fire. We do not have to tell each other our thoughts or what we might be going to do.”

Wisdom is the key to a fuller life. If a richer one for me is enjoying my environment to the fullest, then it is up to me to cultivate my awareness of all I see.

Strangely enough there was a certain emptiness within me, and it was a long time before its full significance dawned. In a sense I matured during that moment of realization. Now I was an old-timer and could say “I’ve been to the Bay.” Someone said, “Do not take from any man his dream”; when a dream is gone, hope is gone, and life can become drab and without purpose. As long as a dream is ahead, there is always something to look forward to. No doubt that was the reason for the letdown when we came to the sea, but it was not long before I knew it was only the beginning of another dream: to see the Far North rivers of the Canadian shield. Eventually I did this, and found each realization was but an open door to another adventure. I remember so well the first time I saw the famed Athabasca after coming down the Fond du lac from Reindeer and Wollaston, the Athabasca I had read about in the journals of the fur trade, a three-hundred-mile sweep to Fort Chipewyan at its far western end, the place from which the Athabasca brigades came when heading for the Churchill and Grand Portage Post. Nor will I forget my first sight of the enormous reaches of Great Slave Lake with its countless islands, the gateway to the Coppermine River, the Thelon, and Great Bear Lake farther north; of the Great Bear River with its ninety-mile plunge to join the Mackenzie, the enormous waterway to the Arctic Sea, which the explorer Sir Alexander Mackenzie had thought was the way to the Northwest Passage and the Orient.

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My Bondage and My Freedom (Original Classic Edition) by Frederick Douglass - Five Star Book Review

2025-01-29T10:43:00.003-06:00

Book Review - Five Stars

My Bondage and My Freedom (Original Classic Edition) by Frederick Douglass

This amazing autobiography of pre-Civil War history accurately depicts America’s empathy towards brutal human rights that to this day is passed down generation to generation while freedom and justice for all is bantered about like the gospel.

Frederic Douglass did a magnificent job of scrutinizing personalities and conveying his analytical observations. This book is an absolute classic!

EXCERPTS:

Hidden away down in the depths of his own nature, and which revealed to him the fact that liberty and right, for all men, were anterior to slavery and wrong. When his knowledge of the world was bounded by the visible horizon on Col. Lloyd’s plantation, and while every thing around him bore a fixed, iron stamp, as if it had always been so, this was, for one so young, a notable discovery. To his uncommon memory, then, we must add a keen and accurate insight into men and things; an original breadth of common sense which enabled him to see, and weigh, and compare whatever passed before him, and which kindled a desire to search out and define their relations to other things not so patent, but which never succumbed to the marvelous nor the supernatural; a sacred thirst for liberty and for learning, first as a means of attaining liberty, then as an end in itself most desirable; a will; an unfaltering energy and determination to obtain what his soul pronounced desirable; a majestic self-hood; determined courage; a deep and agonizing sympathy with his crushed and bleeding fellow slaves, and an extraordinary depth of passion, together with that rare alliance between passion and intellect, which enables the former, when deeply roused, to excite, develop and sustain the latter.

This is American slavery; no marriage—no education—the light of the gospel shut out from the dark mind of the bondman—and he forbidden by law to learn to read. If a mother shall teach her children to read, the law in Louisiana proclaims that she may be hanged by the neck. If the father attempt to give his son a knowledge of letters, he may be punished by the whip in one instance, and in another be killed, at the discretion of the court. Three millions of people shut out from the light of knowledge! It is easy for you to conceive the evil that must result from such a state of things. I now come to the physical evils of slavery. I do not wish to dwell at length upon these, but it seems right to speak of them, not so much to influence your minds on this question, as to let the slaveholders of America know that the curtain which conceals their crimes is being lifted abroad; that we are opening the dark cell, and leading the people into the horrible recesses of what they are pleased to call their domestic institution. We want them to know that a knowledge of their whippings, their scourgings, their brandings, their chainings, is not confined to their plantations, but that some Negro of theirs has broken loose from his chains—has burst through the dark incrustation of slavery, and is now exposing their deeds of deep damnation to the gaze of the christian people of England. The slaveholders resort to all kinds of cruelty, the slave has no wife, no children, no country, and no home. He can own nothing, possess nothing, acquire nothing, but what must belong to another. To eat the fruit of his own toil, to clothe his person with the work of his own hands, is considered stealing. He toils that another may reap the fruit; he is industrious that another may live in idleness; he eats unbolted meal that another may eat the bread of fine flour; he labors in chains at home, under a burning sun and biting lash, that another may ride in ease and splendor abroad; he lives in ignorance that another may be educated; he is abused that another may be exalted; he rests his toil-worn limbs on the cold, damp ground that another may repose on the softest pillow; he is clad in coarse and tattered raiment that another may be arrayed in purple and fine linen; he is sheltered only by the wretched hovel that a master may dwell in a magnificent mansion; and to this condition he is bound down as by an arm of iron.

One of the most telling testimonies against the pretended kindness of slaveholders, is the fact that uncounted numbers of fugitives are now inhabiting the Dismal Swamp, preferring the untamed wilderness to their cultivated homes—choosing rather to encounter hunger and thirst, and to roam with the wild beasts of the forest, running the hazard of being hunted and shot down, than to submit to the authority of kind masters.

The slave finds more of the milk of human kindness in the bosom of the savage Indian, than in the heart of his Christian master.

Absolute and arbitrary power can never be maintained by one man over the body and soul of another man, without brutal chastisement and enormous cruelty.

What as a nation we call genius of American institutions. Rightly viewed, this is an alarming fact, and ought to rally all that is pure, just, and holy in one determined effort to crush the monster of corruption, and to scatter “its guilty profits” to the winds. In a high moral sense, as well as in a national sense, the whole American people are responsible for slavery, and must share, in its guilt and shame, with the most obdurate men-stealers of the south. While slavery exists, and the union of these states endures, every American citizen must bear the chagrin of hearing his country branded before the world as a nation of liars and hypocrites; and behold his cherished flag pointed at with the utmost scorn and derision.

Even now an American abroad is pointed out in the crowd, as coming from a land where men gain their fortunes by “the blood of souls,” from a land of slave markets, of blood-hounds, and slave-hunters; and, in some circles, such a man is shunned altogether, as a moral pest. Is it not time, then, for every American to awake, and inquire into his duty with respect to this subject?

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Joseph Stalin: Images of War by A. S. Semeraro Five Star Book Review

2025-01-29T10:31:00.002-06:00

BOOK REVIEW – FIVE STARS

Joseph Stalin: Images of War by A. S. Semeraro

This excellent book relates a provocative true life story of an unconscionable bully bastard paranoid short man pushing his way to the top of political power. He holds the world record for murdering twenty million of his countrymen. This fascist went on to die of old age in 1953 while still in power.

EXCERPTS:

An image of ‘Uncle Joe’, savior of his people? In reality a monstrous mass murderer.

The son of serfs who, destined for the priesthood, instead became a street-fighting revolutionary using torture and terror as tools to attain power.

Lauded abroad as a cultural giant and could, in his own country, have spellbound so many millions as an object of worship.

Whose personality cult attained Messianic proportions should be recognized not as a self-styled towering ‘Man of Steel’ but as a bloodstained, mere 5ft 5ins tall idol with feet of clay.

The Soviet Union was by this time the world’s largest sovereign state – a federation of 15 union republics, with another 20 autonomous republics and several smaller provinces. It occupied an area of 22,500,000 square kilometres (8,650,000 square miles) from Iran to Finland, from Czechoslovakia to China. It was unwieldy and needed more than the bombast of a bully like Joseph Stalin to hold it together.

outside Russia’s borders Joseph Stalin is listed alongside Adolf Hitler and China’s Mao Zedong in terms of their brutality, his image within his own country is more opaque.

History is being rewritten. The monster is being resurrected. It’s a disturbing thought as the Russian bear again sharpens its claws.

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The CIA's Greatest Hits by Mark Zepezauer - Book Review - Five Stars

2025-01-16T11:15:00.003-06:00

BOOK REVIEW - FIVE STARS

The CIA's Greatest Hits by Mark Zepezauer

This amazing volume spills the political beans on how the US spread hypocrisy instead of democracy.

An imperative eye opening account of selling the Americans anything...even a war.

EXCERPTS:

Long before World War II ended, many Nazi leaders realized they were going to lose, so they started negotiating with the US behind Hitler’s back about a possible future war against the USSR. In 1943, future CIA Director Allen Dulles moved to Bern, Switzerland, to begin back-channel talks with these influential Nazis.

As a prominent Wall Street lawyer, Dulles had a number of clients—Standard Oil, for one—who continued doing business with the Nazis during the war.

The CIA was founded and run by lawyers, you won’t need to look any further than the overthrow of Guatemalan democracy. The Dulles brothers were partners in the Wall Street law firm of Sullivan & Cromwell; time permitting, they also worked for the US government. With John Foster Dulles heading the State Department and Allen Dulles heading the CIA, they were the czars of Eisenhower’s foreign policy, and they made sure that the interests of Sullivan & Cromwell clients weren’t ignored.

The CIA has always been particularly proud of the Guatemalan operation, which inaugurated a series of bloodthirsty regimes that murdered more than 100,000 Guatemalans. In retrospect, however, some CIA veterans concluded that it may have come off too easily, leading to a certain overconfidence. As one CIA officer put it, “We thought we could knock off these little brown people on the cheap.”

Chinese “brainwashing” of US POWs during the Korean War (captured US pilots were making public statements denouncing US germ warfare against civilians).

Actually, US brainwashing experiments predate the CIA itself. 1953, under a program that was exempt from the usual oversight procedures. Code-named MK-ULTRA, many of its files were destroyed by CIA Director Richard Helms (who was with it from the start) when he left office in 1973, but the surviving history is nasty enough.

MK-ULTRA spooks and shrinks tested radiation, electric shocks, electrode implants, microwaves, ultrasound and a wide range of drugs on unwitting subjects, including hundreds of prisoners at California’s infamous Vacaville State Prison.

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