This became an issue when I turned about 23. Before that time I could eat anything, never exercise, and still stay as swift and nimble as I wanted. But things changed at the age of 23, and I am not sure whether due to hormonal changes or changes in lifestyle.

In any case, the necessity to maintain a decent weight arose.

Now, most people know about two methods of keeping fit: diet and exercise. However, as far as I understand, this is a misconception. Exercise, while certainly being a good thing for health, can never lead to weight loss, no matter if it is aerobic or anaerobic (running or weightlifting). When muscles are damaged during exercise (which is normal), and resources (fat) are used for feeding the muscles, the body will always replenish the loss with a slight margin. Exercise can only make you weigh more, even though it is likely to improve the quality of your body composition.

I experienced it myself. At first I did not want to spend a lot of willpower on maintaining a diet, hoping that I would just sign up for a gym, be running 10 kilometres each time, lift weights, and my life will just become better by itself.

This did not happen. After about a year of exercise and running for about 10 kilometres twice a week, I eventually managed to run two races in subsequent days, 10k and 21k on Saturday and Sunday, but had not lost a single extra kilogram.

This made me reconsider my plan, and switch to the dietary method (described below), which proved to be successful, even if a bit taxing to the brain. Using this method, I managed to maintain my desired weight for the past 10 years, within the accepted range. I did get fat again a few times, during the periods of high stress, but inevitably regained my normal weight after normal schedule was restored.

I have to admit that I have a bit of genetic proclivity to a diet, as my grandmother was very successful at maintaining a diet as well. This might not be true for you, so take the manual below with a grain of salt (pun intended).

Really, what is there difficult about reading basically any book in any language? Just take a dictionary, query the sentences one by one, word by word, and you are going to get a rough idea of any text. If you are an Indo-European speaker, try doing it with Latin.

Is it going to work? Well, not really. In Latin you have those pesky inflections, conjugations, declensions, when meaning is transmitted by word forms rather than words themselves.

But what about Chinese, especially old Chinese. Even modern Chinese does not have much grammar and has very little syntax. Surely with Chinese it should be possible?

Those were my thoughts when I bought a standard edition of “周易”, with a preface saying that it is intended to be read by parents to their children.

I spent about a weekend trying to decipher what is going on, and was overwhelmed by flying dragons (龍), speaking elephants (象), strange (magic) numbers appearing out of nowhere, superficial symmetries and a disgusting feeling that “just a little more and I will be able to make sense out of it”. Then another weekend. Then one more. Doesn’t that sound familiar to anyone trying to reverse-engineer a binary file, or even read some spaghetti code in C++?

At some point I gave up and decided that I am going to cheat and read an English translation. I just need to find a decent one, not the one done by anime fanboys which revere everything Asian and are not ready to apply critical thinking to whatever they read.

After browsing a library for a while, I found the “Book of Change” by Richard Rutt, who had been an interpreter for the U.S.~Army during the Korean war in the 1950s.

Unfortunately, even though the book uses pīnyīn for transliteration, it does not use tone marks, which makes it very difficult to find out what is going on, and sometimes allows opposing interpretations. (For example, some structures are described as “cheng”, which can mean both “chéng”(乘) and chēng (撑), which are really opposites.)

It took me months of free time to reverse engineer the book and to place the correct tone marks where they are due (and also research all the cross-references and citations). Does not this also remind you of reading an old piece of code which “somehow works”, but you need to develop and maintain it?

Let us go back to the Korean flag.

The four groups of three lines, broken and solid, are coming from the Book of Changes. In fact, they are not really coming form the original text (Zhōu Yì), but from a later, Hàn dynasty, compilation, called Yì Jīng which, despite being written almost a thousand years later, became the true classic of Chinese culture.

Those groups are called “trigrams”, and represent nothing more than “machine half-words” of three bits. Yes, really, 2400 years ago people already knew about bits.

In fact, those “machine words” of six bits (twice the three-bit half-words) are what the original book is about.

The source of the original text (Zhōu Yì, not Yì Jīng), is a little bit similar to a description of a peculiar assembly language, which gives each “machine word” a short description of what it does, as well as gives implementation details for each bit, that is why exactly it has to be 1 or 0 so that the computational module as a whole produces the desired effect on the computational flow.

The list of the “words” is the following:

䷀ ䷁ ䷂ ䷃ ䷄ ䷅ ䷆ ䷇ ䷈ ䷉ ䷊ ䷋ ䷌ ䷍ ䷎ ䷏ ䷐ ䷑ ䷒ ䷓ ䷔ ䷕ ䷖ ䷗ ䷘ ䷙ ䷚ ䷛ ䷜ ䷝ ䷞ ䷟ ䷠ ䷡ ䷢ ䷣ ䷤ ䷥ ䷦ ䷧ ䷨ ䷩ ䷪ ䷫ ䷬ ䷭ ䷮ ䷯ ䷰ ䷱ ䷲ ䷳ ䷴ ䷵ ䷶ ䷷ ䷸ ䷹ ䷺ ䷻ ䷼ ䷽ ䷾ ䷿

Can you fit a lot of data into 6-bit words? Well, not really, but you could make a calculator which can count to 64.

For example, you could have the word partitioned into 3 parts, 2 bits each. Two bits give 4 instructions: +, -, , and two two-bit operands, denoting 1 to 4 in decimal. (Why not multiply/divide? Because those are too irregular, and you need to care about carry.)

3 times 3 makes 9, which does not really fit into 8 bits, but if you sacrifice the last bit of the instruction, it works.

Here are your mnemonics for 2-bit operations:

⚌ ⚍ ⚎ ⚏ 𝌁 𝌂 𝌃 𝌄 𝌅

Of course, old Chinese did not do anything this stupid. Instead of dividing one hexagram into three bigrams, to make a calculator which can count to 9, they used three-bit half-words: ☰ ☱ ☲ ☳ ☴ ☵ ☶ ☷, also called trigrams. Or at least the Hàn scholars, which were reverse-engineering Zhōu computations (算命, suàn mìng, from Chinese “calculate commands”.)

They assumed that the instruction set was the following:

1. One 6-bit word defines a command (one hexagram).
2. Two three-bit half-words (trigrams) define the operands for the command, which are unlikely to be immediate operands, because computing with numbers less than 8 is a pity, but were probably displacements relative to the address of the instruction pointer, in which case 8 is enough.
3. Two words pointed to by the operands of the command served as the arguments of the operation.

This gave them a full 6-bit arithmetic, which is enough to execute and arbitrary Turing-complete program and model any interesting phenomenon.

The ancient Chinese did not know an alphabet, but they had to represent their language somehow, which means that they had to encode their language into their primitive computational machines.

As far as I know, they did not know variable-length prefix-free coding, such as UNICODE, so instead of expanding their instruction set to the thousands of codepoints needed to encode all of Chinese, they would just strip-down their language to a bare minimum, to 64 “letters”, which had to represent any idea that a programmer (at that time called a “diviner” as a pun on the fact that computations predict results of a physical process) might want.

Their version of the ASCII table (one instruction=one symbol) is below:

1. ䷀乾 – Qian
2. ䷁坤 – Kun
3. ䷂屯 – Zhun
4. ䷃蒙 – Meng
5. ䷄需 – Xu
6. ䷅訟 – Song
7. ䷆師 – Shi
8. ䷇比 – Bi
9. ䷈小畜 – Xiao Xu
10. ䷉履 – Lu
11. ䷊泰 – Tai
12. ䷋否 – Pi
13. ䷌同人 – Tong Ren
14. ䷍大有 – Da You
15. ䷎謙 – Qian
16. ䷏豫 – Yu
17. ䷐隨 – Sui
18. ䷑蠱 – Gu
19. ䷒臨 – Lin
20. ䷓觀 – Guan
21. ䷔噬嗑 – Shi He
22. ䷕賁 – Bi
23. ䷖剝 – Bo
24. ䷗復 – Fu
25. ䷘无妄 – Wu Wang
26. ䷙大畜 – Da Xu
27. ䷚頤 – Yi
28. ䷛大過 – Da Guo
29. ䷜坎 – Kan
30. ䷝離 – Li
31. ䷞咸 – Xian
32. ䷟恆 – Heng
33. ䷠遯 – Dun
34. ䷡大壯 – Da Zhuang
35. ䷢晉 – Jin
36. ䷣明夷 – Ming Yi
37. ䷤家人 – Jia Ren
38. ䷥睽 – Kui
39. ䷦蹇 – Jian
40. ䷧解 – Jie
41. ䷨損 – Sun
42. ䷩益 – Yi
43. ䷪夬 – Guai
44. ䷫姤 – Gou
45. ䷬萃 – Cui
46. ䷭升 – Sheng
47. ䷮困 – Kun
48. ䷯井 – Jing
49. ䷰革 – Ge
50. ䷱鼎 – Ding
51. ䷲震 – Zhen
52. ䷳艮 – Gen
53. ䷴漸 – Jian
54. ䷵歸妹 – Gui Mei
55. ䷶豐 – Feng
56. ䷷旅 – Lu
57. ䷸巽 – Xun
58. ䷹兌 – Dui
59. ䷺渙 – Huan
60. ䷻節 – Jie
61. ䷼中孚 – Zhong Fu
62. ䷽小過 – Xiao Guo
63. ䷾既濟 – Ji Ji
64. ䷿未濟 – Wei Ji

Of course the ancient Chinese knew the difference between P and BPP complexity classes, but I will re-state them here for clarity:

A language L is in BPP if and only if there exists a probabilistic Turing machine M, such that:

1. M runs for polynomial time on all inputs
2. For all x in L, M outputs 1 with probability greater than or equal to 2/3
3. For all x not in L, M outputs 1 with probability less than or equal to 1/3

P contains all decision problems that can be solved by a deterministic Turing machine using a polynomial amount of computation time, or polynomial time.

Ancient Chinese computers were much more primitive than we have now, and needed an external supply of random bits, usually in the sets of 9.

It is really easy: 6 bits are needed to select one hexagram out of 64, and 3 bits are needed to select a particular line out of the 6 available in a hexagram. In fact, we need 2.5 bits, because 6 is not a power of 2, but the remaining half-bit would be still useful, because sometimes there is a need to apply randomness not just throughout the computational process (the BPP model), but also in the process of decoding the text. The last half-bit is thus used to select the codeword or the “extranumerary” bits in the codewords 1 and 2.

It is not entirely clear what most of the codewords meant in that ISA, but we can be certain about the codewords 1 (䷀乾) and 2 (䷁坤): “call a procedure” (干, old Chinese Qián, modern Chinese Gān, which means “to do”, so very naturally “do” a procedure) and “yield a value” (坤, both Old and Modern Chinese Kūn, “to yield”).

It is easy to guess that ䷇比 is a comparison operator ( A < B), ䷖剝 is a noop operator, and ䷗復 is a copying operator because these words still mean the same thing in modern Chinese. Generally, most single-bit operators are easy to guess.

The evaluation was performed in a series of calls to “eval” and “apply”, which is epitomised in the famous “Yīn/Yàng” symbol:

Specifically, it was probably carried out as some kind of a fluidic solver:

1. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6553589/
2. https://theconversation.com/researchers-built-an-analogue-computer-that-uses-water-waves-to-forecast-the-chaotic-future-205842

If the “hexagrams” are actually bone plates with punched holes, it makes sense that in addition to performing calculations, the programmer also has to care about sufficient and not excessive pressure in the machine, hence paying particular attention to the first and the fourth “carrier” bits (holes). Alternatively, if one looks at the earliest depictions of the machine words:

it starts to make sense that the machine words were not punched bone cards, but rather something like clay tablets with troughs and/or bumps, which either impeded or diverted the flow of water.

The ancient Chinese had a very good understanding of binary arithmetic, as we know from other sources, not just the assembly manual:

When everyone in the world knows beauty as beauty, ugliness appears. When everyone knows good as good, not-good arrives. Therefore being and non-being give birth to one another; Difficult and easy give completion to one another; Long and short form one another; High and low fill? one another; Sound and voice harmonize with one another; Ahead and behind follow after one another. Therefore the sage accomplishes things by doing nothing, Furthering a teaching that is without words. All things arise, and he does not leave them. He gives them life but without possessing them. He acts but without relying on his own ability. He succeeds but without dwelling on his success. And because he does not dwell on it, it does not leave him.

This is one of the first self-reflections of a programmer in the world. The especially noteworthy part is “He gives them life but without possessing them”, that is, he is writing programs who appear to be alive, but he publishes them in the open-source form to not possess them, and also “Therefore the sage accomplishes things by doing nothing”, where the sage (the programmer) is relaxing while his program is doing things for him, making him rich his goals.

Ah, at the end of the brief introduction to the Book of Change, I must explain why and how exactly the word “change” comes into play.

In modern terms, the “change”, “yì” (易) would rather be correctly called “bit flipping”. When a bit changes, it switches from a state to an opposite state, there is nothing really happening there. But through the process of flipping bits, the encoding transforms from a set of codewords encoding the input and the program into the set of codewords encoding the answer, and this is how the programmer’s manual came to be known as a “manual of change”.

A good cook changes his knife once a year – because he cuts. A mediocre cook changes his knife once a month – because he hacks. I’ve had this knife of mine for nineteen years and I’ve cut up thousands of oxen with it, and yet the blade is as good as though it had just come from the grindstone. There are spaces between the joints, and the blade of the knife has really no thickness. If you insert what has no thickness into such spaces, then there’s plenty of room more than enough for the blade to play about it. That’s why after nineteen years the blade of my knife is still as good as when it first came from the grindstone.

Nowadays we can see exactly the same situation, the old knife (UNIX, C, and GNU Bash) are still as sharp as in the 70s, whereas Rust and JavaScript keep reinventing themselves every month, because they hack. But I digress.

In addition to the handbook on the instruction set architecture and the implementation, the Yì Jīng, a much later compilation (which includes Zhōu Yì), also includes some documents which were not written by the machine designers.

1. Programmers review (彖传, tuán zhuàn, meaning “the one who infers”, programmer) on the new ISA
2. Circuit/performance analysis profiles (象传, xiàng zhuàn, literally “scheme analysis”) which analyses how signal flows through each of the circuits implementing the instruction
3. Programmer’s manual (繫辭, xì cí), literally “connecting words”, meaning “writing programs”.
4. Short history of the ISA (说卦, shuōguà)
5. A mnemonic for memorising the ISA , (序卦，Xùguà)
6. An attempt to simplify the instruction set by dividing it into two parts, unfinished and seemingly later abandoned (杂卦, záguà, literally “your instruction set is in disarray”)

Wúwéi manifests in the fact that fighting with a machine is of no use (无用). To explain it, imagine the following loop:

while true ; do
      sleep 60
      xscreensaver-command -lock
done

No matter how strong you are, how much willpower you possess, or how skilful you are in typing your password, your work will still be interrupted every minute, unless you follow the principles of 道, and pkill xscreensaver.

In the case of the part of cybernetics dedicated to managing humans, well, the principle is the same – if your management process is draining your power, you will never guide the company into the direction intended.

So, 道 is essentially “the graph of computation”, which the physicists call a “world line”, and 易 is its differential with respect to time in the Minkowski space.

The book stresses quite a few times that spending “action” to achieve what you want to achieve is unlikely to succeed, because fighting against the world line it like fighting against the machine. However, sages manage to apply their “action” to redirect the world line slightly, so that eventually it comes into the point the programmer needs.

However, there are a few things to consider.

Bits

Bits, as far as we understand them, have to intrinsic meaning, and the meaning of ASCII 01000000 (@) is not composed of two independent 0100 and 0000.

Thinking about a-priori meaningless structured things

STEM people often find it enjoyable in thinking about mechanistic things, such as chess, tabletop games, even Rubik’s cube.

The Book of Changes and divination in general seems to be lying in the same domain, but taking this notion to the extreme. There is no meaning in the hexagrams whatsoever, yet they are structured in a fairly advanced way, at least if the tradition (Fu Xi order, Luo River Document, He Map) is studied carefully.

Presumably, thinking about structured meaningless things, that is, iterating over patterns presented to the thinker in pure forms (patterns which have no meaning), allow one to infer some regularities, consistent behaviours in things around him, which do have meaning, things the thinker is actually considering.

In this thought the Book of Changes is consistent not just with the Daoist tradition, but also with the Confucian tradition, and with modern psychology, which is quite aware of patterns in human behaviour, which sometimes overbear normal human lives and bring unhappiness, but also sometimes allow breaking away from the patterns which are not reflected by the person.

上古穴居而野處

I have never heard about European ancient texts mentioning living in caves. The Bible mentions living in a “Garden of Eden”.

During his lifetime, the most inconspicuous of his results were published, and the main works of life “Genetics of Genius”, “Genetics of Ethics and Aesthetics”, and “Pedagogical Genetics” were published much later than they were written, during the Perestroyka. Even so, he managed to release more than a hundred scientific papers, dedicated to the application of genetics in agriculture.

He also worked in the Research Institute for Vaccines and Serums in Moscow, and had obtained a doctoral and habilitation degrees.

(I have my own very tender relationship with NIIVS.)

But genetics was different in that its criticism since the very beginning was very political. Marxist theory of development has always been premised on the idea that progress is driven by human reason alone, not on some innate characteristics. From everyone according his abilities, to everyone according to his demands implies that those demands and abilities are not that much different among people.

So, the Marxist promise is that everyone who works hard enough and uses the best social practices (developed through the Marxist dialectic theory, of course), has a reasonable chance to become a state ruler. (See “Every cook should learn to govern”, by Vladimir Lenin.)

Indeed, if Marxist premise of a strict domination of reason is to be combined with the laws of genetics, a totalitarian Utopia of a Kommunist state quickly starts looking like a totalitarian anti-utopia, where genes decide who is to occupy which position in a society.

I can clearly see why Lysenko denounced genetics.

But Efroimson lived in the Soviet Union, and he clearly needed to add some politically correct language in order to placate the censors. I cannot resist the pleasure of citing a few phrases:

В «блистательно оправдавшемся» научном предвидении Маркса-Энгельса-Ленина о неизбежном абсолютном обнищании пролетариата и о «загнивании» и гибели капитализма все же не была учтена чрезвычайная гибкость этого самого капитализма, позволившая ему сквозь все кризисы проходить со всевозрастающим повышением производительности труда и ростом уровня жизни, в частности, и уровня жизни пролетариата.

В столь же «блестящем» научном предвидении Ленина о слиянии национально-освободительной борьбы с борьбой против мирового капитала не было предусмотрено то, что решительно все освободившиеся колониальные страны немедленно начнут войны гражданские, которые поглотят огромную долю накопленных национальных богатств и сотни миллионов жизней людей, а также войны «освободившихся от ига» молодых государств друг с другом. Не было предусмотрено, что большинство этих стран окажется под властью различных диктатур, «горилл» или олигархий, под властью продажного чиновничества, и что конфискация иностранных капиталовложений приведет к тому, что вместо развития собственной промышленности практически всем государствам «третьего мира» придется ввозить готовую продукцию из промышленных стран.

I am quite sure that the original text did not really have the quotation marks.

Anyway, what does Efroimson suggest to placate communist censors?

He effectively suggests nationalising geniuses. Nurturing and educating geniuses is expected to provide a benefit to the society as a whole, so that, perhaps, not every cook would learn to govern a state, but every cook would benefit from a genius governing the said state.

To his credit, he is not suggesting Eugenics, but rather carefully selecting and bringing up the geniuses which already managed to come into this life.

I used to believe that a genius is a person of a highest talent, capable of creating masterpieces and great deeds. But Efroimson reserves this description for the “talented” or “gifted”. A genius for him is something different, even though a genius can be talented, and the most famous geniuses are talented.

For him, a genius is someone who can spend all his efforts onto doing something professional, the one who never stops. So being a genius is more about being industrious rather than about being clever.

But is industriousness and inheritable genetic trait? This is a great question!

Even though most people would accept that talent is heritable, well, to a degree at least, most people would vehemently refuse the heritability of industriousness. After all, aren’t we all told in school “order and structure defeat talent and chaos”, and “most of us are not prodigies, but if you work hard, you can be successful”, implying that orderliness and hard work are accessible to everyone?

But Efroimson does not really discuss “success”. He discusses a demonstrated ability to work beyond what a reasonable person can be expected to work and to dare to do.

He is claiming that societies who manage to successfully raise the percentage of geniuses to the lever permitted by the genes become vastly superior to their neighbours.

As examples of those “genius-rich” societies he is giving: Pericles’s Greece, Carolingian Revival, Renaissance, English and German aristocracies of the 18th-19th centuries.

He is claiming (with evidence) that in the societies which have no conditions for the growth of geniuses, geniuses also manage to emerge, and he gives plenty of examples of such geniuses, but his, perhaps, main point is that as a norm geniuses are not adapted to grow in a society by themselves, and therefore need support. Even when geniuses manage to emerge in an unfavourable society, they are usually political geniuses rather than scientific or cultural.

What is a normal percentage of geniuses in a society? Presumably, the normal level of geniuses who manage to manifest themselves as geniuses in a society is about 0.015%, whereas in a society which is favourable to geniuses it is possible to increase their percentage to 0.1%, or even 1%. Although, honestly, I am finding his argumentation dubious.

He has done a colossal amount of research, surveyed lifes of hundreds of geniuses, and is basing his claims on this work.

Most of the works is based on the pathography of historic figures, trying to find diseases, especially heritable disease, or other phylogenetic traits associated with increased intellectual activity.

I would personally find this approach bizarre, but he does manage to find a large correlation.

He roughly divides geniuses into 4 categories:

1. Gout type (correlation about 15%).
2. Bipolar type (correlation about 15%).
3. Marfan type (some evidence).
4. Androgenic type (indirect evidence).

The first two types are the most prominent, whereas the last two types are less prominent, or, perhaps, less documented, because Marfan syndrome is fatal in many cases, and Androgenic abnormalities are hard to discern, with a sole exception of men who are “known to be extra sexually active”.

Gout geniuses “increased intellectual activity” is expected to be provoked by an increased amount of uric acid in blood. High uric acid levels are expected to cause gout, which can sometimes be fatal, but usually is not, and is tormenting enough so that its manifestations would be documented since ancient times. But uric acid has also been found to stimulate human activity, both physical and mental. These people are not expected to be necessarily very smart, but they are expected to be hardworking, insistent, risking, and daring.

He claims that a huge number of geniuses had gout, including Alexander the Great, Marcus Agrippa, Septimius Severus, Christopher Columbus, Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, Louis XIV, Edward Gibbon, Albrecht Wallenstein, Benjamin Disraeli.

Efroimson claims that in up to 15% of geniuses, symptoms of gout have been identified.

Bipolar Disorder manifests itself in geniuses in an atypical way. Usually BAD (a bipolar-affective disorder) means that a person has extremely fast and strong mood swings. In geniuses, however, BAD swings might be just as strong, but not fast at all, but rather very slow, lasting for months and even years. The examples of BAD-type geniuses are Jonathan Swift and Nikolai Gogol, who seemed to have episodes of excessive creative activity, working without any rest, and periods of boredom and spleen, during which even their close friends considered them boring.

As opposed to the gout-type geniuses, BAD-type geniuses are usually not military or political leaders, with the exceptions of Theodore Roosevelt and Winston Churchill, but rather are writers, scientists, composers, and painters.

Interestingly enough, BAD-type geniuses seem to be universally sensitive to the change of seasons, being more active and productive in spring a autumn than in winter and summer.

Mixed type geniuses are those who have both gout and BAD. To this kind of geniuses Efroimson attributes Alexander Pushkin, the pillar of Russian literature, Martin Luther, Rudolph Diesel, and a few others.

This king of geniuses does not really deserve its own category, because it basically just combines the benefits of tireless work of hyper-uric geniuses with talents and giftedness of BAD-geniuses.

Other kinds of geniuses. There a few other pathologies which seem to be associated with higher intellectual activity, but data are scanty: Marfanoid symptoms (long arm and legs, concave chest), Morris syndrome (XY women, in whom the SRY gene failed), and various unclear sexual hormone side-effects, and the overarching sign of “having a high forehead”.

If his treatment of Marfanoid-type geniuses does deserve some credit (Lincoln, De Gaulle, Chukovsky) really seem to fit his description, and worth having attention to, especially since it is heritable, his treatment of genius sexuality I consider insufficient.

Indeed, he does give some evidence that women with unusually high amount of male hormones exhibit higher intellectual activity (this is the place in the book where he is discussing women the most), and shows that “generally accepted geniuses” have sexual activity much higher than average, his treatment of men with effeminate behaviour is just nonexistent, and overall the whole chapter on sexual hormone stimulation of intellect should have deserved much more effort and attention.

I should not be overly too critical though, human life is limited, and he spent a colossal effort on reviewing other kinds of geniuses, so perhaps this research direction should just be proclaimed open for further investigation.

Okay, if gout and BAD are making people geniuses, does it mean that you should genetically-edit your kids to have them? Don’t answer, it is a provocative question. Are they even a cause or an effect of being a genius?

At the time of Efroimson, gene editing was not that widespread, I am not even sure that genetic sequencing existed.

His ultimate goal was less ambitious technically, but more ambitious socially: raise the number of geniuses in the society to 1%. And this can be done with no specific human programming, just with identifying geniuses (spotting the nature) and growing them up as geniuses (nurture).

Indeed, he spends a lot of effort on discussing “genius families”: Pushkin-Tolstoy, Churchills, Ottoman sultans, Prussian kurfürsts, Bernoullis, and Medici. They had to do both: be very accurate and picky at selecting spouses for themselves, and spend a lot of money and attention on bringing the children up, giving them the best education and exposure to the talented people around them.

Well, sort of an unsurprising conclusion, isn’t it? Promising genes, good upbringing, a lot of investment into education, and you have a stunning 1% chance of success. Was it worth even starting to write this book?

I cannot recommend it to just everyone to read. The treatment of most historic figures is not actually that “genetic” in spirit, but rather feels like worshipping the historic tale formed around them during the ages. It does feel that he loves those geniuses and feels an unfakeable attraction to them, and, well, I can understand him.

But from scientific point of view, I am really finding the book weak-ish.

Nevertheless, the conclusion is correct, nature and nurture are both required, and I have written down a ton of masterpieces to check on when I have time, since at least now I know that they were written by universally recognised geniuses.

1. Character :: ?
2. Symbol :: ?
3. Glyph :: ?
4. Grapheme :: ?
5. Typeface :: ? The way the letters look like?
6. Script :: A font imitating handwriting.
7. Orthography :: A subset of writing system. Say, ”writing system”=Han, orthographies: Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Japanese
8. Shape :: ?
9. Hinting :: Making character pixels fit the monitor grid.
10. Anti-aliasing :: Interpolating diagonal lines to avoid ”stairs” effects.
11. Kerning :: Moving characters left-right to remove excessive space?
12. Serif :: Font with triangular marks which indicate ends of strokes.
13. Sans/Sans-Serif :: Font without marks which indicate ends of strokes.
14. Slab :: Font with rectangular marks.
15. Mono (monospace) :: Font which has all characters of the same width. In reality not actually so, because Han characters are usually 2x wide.
16. Half-width :: the width of normal characters in a text, especially when intermingled with wide Asian characters.
17. Full-width :: when normal characters are made 2x wide, the same size as Asian characters.
18. Term :: Monospace, and also without ligatures and other ”helpful” features, text on a grid. Usually Sans.
19. Typewriter :: Usually the same as Term, but also often with Slab-Serif.
20. Font Set :: When many fonts are combined to make a single set of characters which covers all of Unicode.
21. Latin :: Not what you think. Latin usually means ”ASCII+diacritical marks”, that is, a Latin alphabet combined with é, è, and similar characters for French, Czech, Vietnamese, Latin languages beyond English.
22. Roman :: Upright.
23. Italic :: Slanted like rotated.
24. Oblique :: Slanted like distorted.
25. Sample :: Means nothing.
26. Fallback :: Also means nothing.
27. Regular :: Medium thickness.
28. Medium :: ? no idea, but not ”medium thickness”.
29. Normal :: ?
30. Light :: Lighter than Regular.
31. Bold :: Bold.
32. Heavy :: Bolder than bold.
33. Black :: Very bold.
34. Vector font :: Font drawn using special micro programs, mathematical expressions. May also include pixel fields, if people draw them intentionally.
35. Raster font :: Font consisting from pixel fields (which may be generated from a vector-drawing program).
36. Hēitǐ (黑体) :: Font in which beginnings and ends of strokes are indistinguishable.
37. Sòngtǐ (宋体) :: Font which has beginnings and ends of strokes marked with ”fish scale”.
38. FǎngSòngTǐ (仿宋体) :: No idea.
39. MíngTǐ (明体) :: Sòngtǐ.
40. KǎiTǐ (楷体) :: Font in which beginnings and ends of strokes differ by width.
41. PostScript :: A programming language for drawing vector graphics.
42. PDF :: A programming language for drawing vector graphics, incompatible with PostScript.
43. TTF (TrueType) :: Vector font format.
44. OTF (OpenType) :: Vector font format.
45. OTB (OpenType Bitmap) :: Vector fonts format consisting entirely of bitmaps.
46. bdf :: Raster font format.
47. pcf :: Raster font format.
48. psf :: Raster font format.

1. In a common human understanding, a font is a mapping from characters to character shapes.
2. In a common programmer understanding, a font is a file which has a mapping from a codepage entry (say, unicode 263A, ☺) to a raster image.
3. In a typographer’s understanding, a font can be any sort of confusing, weird, unclear and mystical stuff.

This creates a lot of confusion, because everyone sees things differently, and because common intuition always fails.

1. Fontconfig :: Transform a ”font request” into a font file and parameters.
2. Freetype :: Render characters on screen on paper.
3. Xft :: A library to make X11 use Freetype.
4. Harfbuzz :: Some ligature-related mumbo-jumbo, but
5. Font-manager :: A powerful font browser, in some respects better than gucharmap. https://github.com/FontManager/font-manager .
6. Gucharmap :: A GUI for fonts and characters browsing.
7. Fontforge :: A font-creation multi-tool.
8. xgridfit :: A tool to write hinting scripts for fonts.
9. Metafont :: A TeX-related tool to create fonts programmatically.
10. Fontaine :: https://www.unifont.org/fontaine/
11. xlsfonts :: lists fonts available from an X server.

1. LibreOffice
2. TeX
3. Firefox
4. Emacs
5. X11/Fontconfig

LibreOffice, Firefox, Emacs, and Fontconfig can use system-wide fonts in /usr/share/fonts.

LibreOffice does not support Type1 fonts.

Emacs can also use its own fonts.

TeX can use system-wide fonts if called via LuaLaTeX.

\usepackage{fontspec}
\begin{document}
{ \setmainfont{URWGothic-Book.otf}[Path=/usr/share/fonts/OTF/] Your Text! }
\end{document}

Fandol Song works if you only have a TeX installation, and quickly need to have something done, and do not need diacritics.

This is the default font of X11, XFree86, X.Org.

I have not found how to load an otb file in LuaLaTeX, message me if you have.

Standard VGA and DOS font.

https://int10h.org/oldschool-pc-fonts/showcase/

https://ilovetypography.com/2015/02/22/making-arabic-fonts-climbing-everest/

So many questions, and none of answers them seem to be obvious enough to start reading this particular book on finance and not any other, as there is plenty.

In fact, this book was recommended to me by a friend with a comment that it is possible to virtually ignore all the actual financial advice given in it, only look at the financial terms and the context in which the authors operate, and this would already be enough to find this book useful and understand what investing is about. This is really the answer to the last question from the previous paragraph, why is this book called a “guide”. It is even published by Wiley, which is a publishing house that most computer people consider to be most famous for publishing software manuals rather than financial books, even though they have a series dedicated to finance and economics.

When reading a book, it is always a good idea to first spend a few minutes and consider which aim the author is pursuing. Why? Because there is a problem with literature – it affects the reader’s brain, and hence gives a disproportionate power over the reader to the author. You see, people write books (and in general do any conscious activity) due to one of the two main reasons: they either want to brainwash you, or they want to make money. When reading fiction, it is unclear which case is worse, because if the author just wants to make money, he is interested in making you crave his works, and try to brainwash you into buying more of his books. When reading non-fiction, the author is usually aiming at making you believe his cause, which may or may not be what you want, but it is usually easy to find your attitude after reading the first chapter or two. Financial books combine the worst of both genres. They want to both brainwash you, AND make money. And it is very tempting to brainwash you into a behaviour which brings money to the author somehow, in fact, so tempting that all of them do it.

Does it mean that reading all financial books is worthless? Well, alas, most of us are not inheritors of large estates, and we are children of poor fathers or uncles, who are the only people sincerely interested in our wealth, so, unfortunately, we have no option other than reading financial books. This means, however, that we have to be very careful and very suspicious of everything the authors are claiming.

What it an “index mutual fund”? It is a fund, sometimes traded on the stock market, sometimes not, which attempts to replicate the average behaviour of the market as a whole.

You see why this idea makes sense? Because the market “on average” seems to be growing. Sometimes it grows better, sometimes grows worse, sometimes it falls, but on average it grows, and on average its growth exceeds inflation, so even if you do not earn much by holding the “shares of the whole market”, at least you do not lose. Now it clearly starts to make sense why long-term holding is required – because the market only grows “on average”. Certain crises do happen, and the market may fall quite a lot in a very short time. But if your planning horizon is measured in decades, it is almost surely likely to grow back. (This is called “Reversion To the Mean”.)

In fact, if you live in a relatively stable country, this strategy might even make you rich, well, sort of, when you are already old, because even though on average the market does not grow that much, the money and the interest is still compounded over the years, so the growth is exponential.

What is this strategy then good for? What would you like to have a lot of money for when you are old? Well, the answer is, obviously, your pension. A-ha!

We need to recall that Vanguard is a US company, the three authors are Americans, and the USA does not have a simple and straightforward general pension scheme akin to the ones used in the former Soviet Union. Everyone is expected, at least in theory, save their money during lifetime, and live off their savings when old, or, in the worst case, rely on the descendants at a late age. This is not entirely correct, as the USA has many retirement “schemes”, most of them very complicated, but overall this is true.

So, if you were hoping that this essay would uncover certain mysteries of financial market which would open some new exciting opportunities for you, now it is the time to close the page. This essay is really only about not having to starve to death when you are old and feeble.

I do have, however, one argument which might make you bear with me for a little longer, which is more exciting than blunt promises of becoming rich quickly: exciting mathematics.

Indeed, despite the fact that saying “follow the market” is easy to understand, and despite that the authors are claiming that the strategy is easy to implement, it is by far not obvious how to do this with limited capital in a fund and with low transaction costs. Which financial products do the fund managers need to buy and when?

You might tell me that this is the place I am lying to you. After all, aren’t traditional stock market brokers proposing essentially the same strategy “buy low, sell high”, only differing in that they are suggesting to buy promising stocks at right time, rather than trying to do some obtuse mathematical juggling in order to earn less?

Now unsurprising bit is that predicting promising stocks is generally impossible, unless you really know what is happening inside the companies and the markets, which is impossible for a normal person. The surprising bit is that it IS possible to emulate the market with a deterministic algorithm given a large enough fund. This is a beautiful theorem from stochastic processes, and where there are mathematical theorems, things are usually starting to look very bleak for human performers.

Now, there is a BIG caveat here. The “total market value” is, at the end of the day, still more or less a “stock” or a “bond” of the Planet Earth Inc. And, just as the three Bogleheads are claiming, it is just as impossible to faithfully predict the evolution of the whole market as it is impossible to predict the evolution of a single financial instrument. The answer to this valid opposition proposed in the book is, however, that if the whole stock market is consistently falling for so many years that it influences the final outcome of your investment, then you have bigger problems than just a failing investment plan.

1. Moving money into a savings account.
2. Selecting index funds to invest into (there are many), and possibly something else.
3. Keeping paying into the savings account each month.
   1. And take into account contingencies
4. Rebalancing the portfolio when needed.
5. Moving the money out of the account:
   1. Lump sum (buying a flat)
   2. Early fixed-term payment (education fee)
   3. Late term-less payments (pension)
6. Leaving the rest of the money to your heirs.

This plan, if you look at it from a bird’s eye, seems very simple, just amounting to saving money all your life and withdrawing some of it when you need, but even such a simple plan has many nuances, and most the 300 pages of the book are dedicated to explaining them.

It introduces the basics of investment, tells a consistent story in a simple, clear language. It was easy to find out where the math is expected to kick in, which is important for me. It also made me re-think some of my life choices, which is always a sign of a good book.

There were some clear drawbacks:

It is very USA-specific. Many of the issues which the authors pay particular attention to do not exist outside of the USA, and many of the tricks used to circumvent problems are also not available.

Inflation. The authors seem to have a general consensus that a portfolio should grown an average of 8% per year, and that inflation would be about 2%. These are not the numbers I am familiar with. I would expect inflation to be about 16%, and growth to be about 5%. Which means that on average everyone is becoming poorer, but isn’t this what we are actually seeing right now?

Market knowledge. While a single person is certainly incapable of knowing all of the market enough to “actively manage” (a technical term) a comprehensive portfolio, I suspect that some people do have enough knowledge of a market niche to roughly understand how it is going to be developing in the next few years. This claim is not refuting the Efficient Market Hypothesis, because people who have enough knowledge of a niche are probably proportionally ignorant about the other niches, and moreover, they are the actual people who push market equalisation by their trades.

Do not take this as an advice to buy some unorthodox investment instruments.

1. Marxism
2. Data and evidence
3. Axiomatic approach

For those readers who care little about the book itself, and just came her looking for a layman summary of Austrian school of Economics, go no further, this section is the only one you need to read.

Austrian School of Economics was founded, indeed, in Austria, but not by its most famous nowadays representative Ludwig von Mises, but by Carl Menger, to whose work “Principles of Economics” I probably should refer anyone willing to read the sources. This work was released in 1871, 6 years after the first volume of “Das Kapital”, but before the last volume was published, and, of course, 23 years after the “Communist Manifesto” was published.

Until then, the dominant theory of value in economics had been the “cost-of-production” theory of value. This theory, created by Adam Smith around year 1760, can roughly be summarised in the following way: “the value of a product is the sum of values of its constituent parts”. To be more precise, “labour”, invested in creation of the product, is also its constituent part. What immediately follows from this “definition” is that the value of a batch of goods is the sum of the values of the individual goods contained in that batch. (Hence if manufacturing a bigger batch has the same “fixed costs” as is manufacturing a small batch, then bigger batches are strictly better than smaller batches.) The same theory was further developed by Karl Marx, who, despite being a strict opponent of Capitalism, already firmly associated with Smith, fundamentally supported the same basic definition of value.

One important thing to mention here is that “value” is not the same thing as “price”. While “price” is more or less a well-defined number, usually represented in money (but not always), “value” requires some a-priori psychological definition. Smith was aware of this and this is why he actually started his economic studies from a theory of morality, not from the theory of capital, in the book “Theory of Moral Sentiments”. (The book came out in 1776, when the USA was not yet independent from Great Britan.) Marx and Engels, on the other had, are opposed to this view! In some sense they are more Capitalist than Smith, as their moral theory of value comes after their monetary theory of value. (The book is called “On the Origins of Family, Private Property, and the State”, and was released in 1884.)

Yet in 1871 a certain Carl Menger is not satisfied with the cost-of-production theory of value. Stated informally, his objection rests in that this literally means that we are measuring produced work by tiredness of the labourers. The two most obvious counter-examples to the cost-of-production theory are encapsulated into the phrases “you cannot load money into a gun” or “you cannot eat money”. Indeed, Menger argued, “value” can be created just by selling a product by someone who does not need it to someone who does, since for the first one it is in some sense more of a liability than a value, and the second one really needs it. Moreover, no matter how subjective value (or utility) is, it is clearly strongly non-linear, and moreover, not even strictly positive. Imagine someone eating a vitamin: small amounts can be life-saving, like in the case of scurvy, whereas large amounts can be lethal.

More radical strands of Austrian school (defined here as Menger’s followers) go even further in rejecting cost-of-production theory of value, they claim that it isn’t just not linear but also mathematically indescribable. From here starts a long and painstaking struggle of Austrian school with objective measures, data, and mathematics.

Some more vulgar interpretations of Austrian theses claim that Austrian economists totally reject any econometric methods in the study of economics, but this would be a gross overstatement. The largest counter-example to this overly imprecise claim are the works of Abraham Wald, who was a PhD student of Menger himself, and likely most known to the readers of this blog for “Wald’s identity” in the theory of random processes, who introduced rigorous mathematics to economics.

Not many people know that Wald is actually the person behind the meme picture of a bomber plane with pockmarked wings, illustrative of the “Survivorship bias”. In the Russian context it is more known as an anecdote about dolphins pushing drowning swimmers toward the seashore, presumably helping them to survive; the problem is that those who were pushed in the opposite direction never survived and hence could not tell how dolphins (potentially) caused their demise. This meme represents a fundamental stance of Austrian economic school with respect to data: “correlation is not causation”. That is, data can be used to refute a cause-and-effect hypothesis, but not to prove it.

How would value be determined then, if not on the basis of any solid model? The answer is then: experimentally and politically, through the process of negotiation, bargaining, and trading. From this basic premise, however, Austrian economists make quite an overarching conclusion that in order to determine the value of a good, the bargaining process must be as unrestricted as possible (the First Premise of Austrian economic school). There is the Second Premise as well: private property is sacrosanct, because otherwise bargaining would not make much sense. It is important to note that the theory of “bounded rationality”, as it is known in modern economics (especially the Institutionalist paradigm) and “computational complexity”, as it is known in Computer Science, would likely play a large role in trying to model at least roughly the value preferences of agents.

Menger also had a theory of money where he discussed the relative advantages of gold and silver coins as a medium of exchange concluding that no other available medium of exchange can really compare with them, a premise that the Austrian economic school still holds until today.

The Austrian school was growing in Austria after Carl Menger for many years. The critique and the attempts to disprove Marx played a large role in their studies. Curiously, it can be argued that they were Popperians before Popper, who unfolded his crusade against “historicism” in 1944. Curiously, Popper is not traditionally attributed to the Austrian school, even though he studied in Vienna and was opposed to Marxism on, basically, the same premises: an unfalsifiable theory which cannot be verified or falsified on the basis of historical data.

In the 1930s, Europe saw many transformations, in particular, Germany was building its empire, persecuting inconvenient scientists, and after Austria became a part of Germany, the same phenomena unfolded in Austria too. At that time, one prominent member of the Austrian economic school was Ludwig von Mises. Even people who know nothing about the economic and mathematics of the Austrian school have a chance of hearing surname “Mises”, either as a part of “Mises Institute” in political news, or as “Cramer-von-Mises test” in statistics. The Mises of the Mises Institute is the same Mises, whereas Mises the statistician is not the same Mises the person, but it is the same Mises the surname, it is Ludwig von Mises’ brother, Richard von Mises. By the way, Mises’s mother’ maternal name had been Landau.

Mises is the second or third most prominent figure in the Austrian school, after Menger. Mises is famous for formulating the “Action axiom”, that is, “an action will be taken if its expected utility will be positive”. (What if our agent cannot compute that utility?) Mises is also known for extensively working on the theory of money, continuing to support Menger in that silver and gold are still the best exchange methods, arisen through evolution, but he also spent effort describing why other exchange methods are inferior. He taught at NYU.

Since Ludwig von Mises the story of the Austrian school splits into two branches: the one symbolised by Friedrich von Hayek, a colleague of Mises in Vienna in the 1920s, and sometimes called the Chicago branch, because Hayek, after leaving his mark on the London School of Economics, later moved to Chicago; and the one associated with Murray Rothbard, who was the first prominent Austrian school economist born and educated in the USA. Even though in the later part of the 20th century Hayek won the Nobel Prize and thus revived public interest to the Austrian school, in this introduction I do not have much to say about this branch due to space constraints and insufficient knowledge.

Rothbard studied mathematics, later economics, and got acquainted with Ludwig von Mises in 1950, when Mises was already living in the USA. Rather productive, he wrote more than 10 books, most of which deal with refuting mainstream economic theories as overfit models based on survivorship bias. Instead of applying “scientific method” and econometrics to the study of human value-maximising actions (economy), he promoted the use of Mises’ “praxeology”, which is a mathematical in spirit (rather than physicalist in spirit, Marxist) approach to economics.

Rothbard was active politically, which is a fairly logical consequence of rejecting “strict” academism, and where he surprisingly converges with the “New Left” academics such as Judith Butler, ironically. As a result of his work, several journals, academic institutions, and political movements were founded or heavily influenced, including Centre for Libertarian Studies, Cato Institute, Mises Institute, Libertarian Party USA. He was a friend, and at the same time a bitter rival of Ayn Rand whom he admired for the ability to promote Libertarianism among the common fork, but bitterly ridiculed for her economic misconceptions and vulgar understanding of “natural order”.

There are much more Austrian school economists and economic theories to discuss, but I want to conclude this brief introduction with the author of the book I wanted to review in this essay, Hans-Hermann Hoppe. Hoppe was born and educated in FRG, and to this day is, despite his extensive connection to the USA, a European economist. He worked for the Mises institute, was on friendly terms with Rothbard, and is still considered a leading figure in the Mises branch of the Austrian school, even though nowadays he is developing his own social movement called “Property and Freedom Society” and is based primarily in Turkey.

In a few words, Hoppe has developed and deepened the economic-political theory of Rothbard, leading it to its logical conclusion, a vaguely masqueraded monarchy. Admittedly, it’s not entirely a monarchy, it has certain unique traits, but roughly speaking, still a monarchy. This is where he is different from Rothbard and all the previous Austrian school economists. Even though they were already sceptical about democracy and universal suffrage, none of them had actual courage to proclaim that the whole paradigm of the world’s social evolution as “progress” is misleading. He has wrote several works, but this one, “Democracy: The God that Failed”, is probably the most famous and aimed at the widest audience, ready to be used as an introductory reading.

Returning a little bit to the beginning of the review, and re-considering the Marxist theory of value, we can easily see how the idea of (social) progress has become one of the foundational, and, indeed, one of the most attractive properties of Marxism.

If we believe in the cost-of-production theory of value, then the larger the production, the more “civilised” is the society, because with constant “fixed costs” the price of each individual “good” is reduced, and hence the “social progress”, the process of civilisation, naturally becomes a process of scaling production. Hence the evolution of social stages: prehistoric society, slave-owner society, feudalism, capitalism, communism is largely the process of creating the more and more scale in production, and the more and more complex systems. The theory of exploitation stems from the same basic premise: if the only “added value” introduced into a more complex product besides the values of its constituents is the labour cost, then the capitalist, who is owning the means of production, is not adding any value into the production process, is a parasite.

The book does not mention it, and it is a big drawback of the narrative, that even most orthodox schools of economics do not disregard the fact that linear approximation of value from size is a rough approximation. What the book does explain quite in detail is the fact that this “value function” depends not just on size, but also on time. By time dependence they mean not just the actual dependence of the function on time, which can be naively constructed from instant snapshots, but the subjective dependence of a value produced by a good on the time of “maturation” of this good. The dependence of this function from time represents the “planning horizon” of an economic subject. Naturally, most goods are better today than tomorrow (after all, I might not happen to live until tomorrow), but how exactly better? The process of flattening of this curve, broadening the planning horizon and thus encouraging saving and investment is what the Austrian school calls the “civilisation”. (Compare this to the Marxist definition of progress.)

According to this measure, human progress does not at all increase (or decrease) linearly, at least there is nothing fundamental about it increasing. (As we remember, the trajectory, which Mankind has been developing along, and which fits the Marxists definition of progress, the Austrians do not consider to be that progressive.) Indeed, the Austrian school considers the recent 250 years to be exhibiting the process of de-civilisation, that is the retreat of a more civilised monarchist society, where monarchs exercised private property ownership, toward the more primitive collectivist society, more fit to antiquity and the incessant 500 years of Roman republican warfare than to a modern “enlightened” era.

Before reading this book I had essentially two models of “social orders” in mind, the Aristotelian basic grouping into: Democracy (the power of the many), Oligarchy (the power of the few), and Monarchy (the power of the one), based on the concentration of power; and the Marxist one, based on the theory of the “ruling class”: Prehistoric, Slave-owner, Feudal, Capitalist (Bourgeois), and Communist (Socialist).

Hoppe’s theory, I would say, is even more self-contradictory than the previously mentioned two, contains the following three: Democracy, Monarchy, and Anarchy, also called Anarcho-Capitalism or Natural Order. I am saying “self-contradictory”, because, really, in spite of claiming that natural order is the superior system, maximising produced value, either I failed to fully grasp the true difference between Monarchy and Natural Order, or Hoppe failed to explain it in sufficient detail.

He discusses:

1. Liberal-Democrats,
2. Conservatives,
3. Libertarians.

Curiously absent are the classical Soviet-style socialists, perhaps because by the time of writing of the book the Soviet union had been already dead for 10 years.

With respect to Liberal-Democrats (Democratic Socialists), Hoppe says that their main issue is that they are too shy of being true Communists. In fact, he says that Liberalism as designed by Locke is an incomplete theory. It is based on the premise that the State is a monopolistic provider of protection, and that protection is the only resource which is better when provided by a single supplier. Both of those premises, says Hoppe, are false. As I have already mentioned when describing Hoppe’s theory of Natural Order and Insurance Companies he does not see competitive provision of security services as impossible, whereas the main problem with Liberalism per se is that it is unclear what should be the limits of protection provided by the government.

Clearly in the days of Locke it was protection against foreign military invasions, but this is just a historical coincidence and the result of the overall prevalence of monarchies in the world. But ordinary untrained people are not just unfit for the production of protection from foreign armies, he says. People are just as equally unfit to protect themselves against health issues, ageing, discrimination, and a lot of other things. Hence people who are voting in an election, are expected for vote for more and more “protections” from the government, until the government bankrupts the country.

With respect to Conservatives he is saying that while conservatives are generally well intended, their main issues are that they still support a big government, even with less resources, still support democracy, and, frankly speaking, do not really know what they are exactly trying to “conserve” because none of them were alive when monarchies were omnipresent. Overall, Conservatism is a reactive ideology, not pro-active, therefore is always expected to be on the losing side. As to their “social conservatism”, he is fully on board it, except that it should be voluntarily accepted on private properties, not imposed by a law, however, he has little doubt that this will be the case, as most people are conservatives in the heart, and are corrupted by Socialism. He is sarcastically derides the Conservative establishment though, calling them National-Socialists, so he is aiming more at cannibalising their movement rather than at making an alliance.

With respect to Libertarians he is even more derisive. The Libertarian Party is still democratic in spirit, which has largely stood on the “socially liberal, economically liberal” position, and it is more often associated with the Cato Institute and “Minarchist” (that is, not An-Cap) libertarians. While their intentions are good, says Hoppe, they fundamentally do not reject democracy, which to him is a major problem, and, from a practical perspective, they have become an attractor for asocial elements, freaks, people with pink hair, and similarly socially maladjusted people, and hence are unlikely to ever get successful in implementing their programme. He is also very sceptical about people promoting free movement of people analogously to the free movement of goods, but on this see later.

Discussing how Anarcho-Capitalism can be established at least somewhere, we should recall that Hoppe and An-Cap Austrian economists highly value public opinion and disregard elections, democracy, and bureaucracy. Therefore, there is no “political party” at whose numbers we can have a look and determine their success or failure.

Moreover, since they are sceptical about “public debate” and “social mobility”, it is logical that these people would be very likely to try and participate in “non-public politics”, “politics with non-political means”, and hidden subversion. In such a case it is not at all easy to assess their success from the outside.

As to what Hoppe is saying openly about the political competition, it is as follows; the best examples of the “seeds of An-Cap” are micro-nations which already exist on Earth: Hong Kong (formerly), Singapore, Monaco, Luxembourg, Lichtenstein, San-Marino, Andorra, and to lesser extent, Switzerland and UAE. He is generally saying that the most efficient way to invest one’s political resources is the local level, and the investment should be aimed at promoting cultural disunity and political secessionism.

That is, rather than having a revolution in the whole country, what is desired is having those big countries be torn apart into myriads of tiny independent city-state, which would have to trade using gold as a medium of exchange, because they would not be able to agree on a single fiat currency, and would generally hate each other so much that migration would be unlikely.

It is fun that Hoppe seem quite sceptical Roman roads and bridges, because, even though they facilitate trade, they also incentivise invasions.

Overall, he supports villages and towns in their opposition to big cities, claiming that big cities naturally promote collective ownership, which is evil.

Overall, while he is a big proponent of trade of goods, he is very sceptical about human migration. The point being that goods do not have their own willpower and decision-making (see the Action Axiom by Mises), while people do. He considers letting people enter some territory without a unanimous agreement of all of the owners to be equal to an invasion. (Again, private property on land.) The only case for which he can make an exception is when somebody is inviting the person to come, and is fully responsible for every action of that person in all civil and criminal cases.

This position sounds almost as if it supports slavery, but I do not think this is intentional, this serves rather as a reduction ad absurdum.

He does not oppose migration by buying and selling land though. That is, if someone sells a piece of land, and someone buys a piece of land, he can, obviously, come, as long as his neighbours would let him pass over their territory.

Overall, Hoppe is very critical to the very idea of cities and large urban centres, which, in my opinion, is a great defect in his theory. Perhaps, the libertarian theory of a City is still to be developed.

If all this sounds anti-egalitarian, that is because it is anti-egalitarian. Hoppe repeatedly emphasises the importance of distinctness between people, groups, clans, families, voluntary associations, being them religious, cultural, linguistic, or productive, stressing that fundamental distinction between sexes is the most fundamental basis for cooperation, and he extends this model further – the division of labour only makes sense if people are different, and the more different they are, the more varied tasks they can perform, and the more cooperation is needed. To be honest, the way “cooperation” is justified is just completely wrong from the biological perspective, when speaking about non-human species. In particular, he does not seem to be aware of symbiotic relationships, and disregards voluntary and coercive cooperation between high primates.

Throughout all of the book, he stresses that the main de-civilising force is forced integration. The term “forced integration” is even more prominent than the term “forced expropriation”, and presumably more sinister.

So, answering this question we should first recall that An-Cap is essentially a Monarchy with minor tweaks.

In a Monarchy, the supreme right to decide what is right and wrong on his private land belongs to a monarch, that is to the land owner. So, if you are present on someone else’s land, you have to read in advance, how exactly that person organises justice. Most likely, this person pays an Insurance Company for policing services, and this police look more or less like everyday private security firm employees you can see guarding office buildings, it is easy to recognise them. Therefore, the laws on his land consist of his own demands and the demands of the Insurance Company. If you misbehave or somebody else misbehave, probably the first place to raise concerns is that private police, which will likely either sort out the case according to the Insurance Company regulations, or bring you to the court, organised and funded by the property owner. This court will likely be quick and simple, to save money and effort, and most likely not include the most in-depth investigation, however you are also unlikely to get a huge sentence there, you (or the perpetrator) will likely get an expulsion, and a huge fine. This fine will be extracted via an Insurance Company to Insurance Company negotiation, which might happen to be violent, but unlikely to be so.

This is the simplest case. The jurisdiction might happen to be a Catholic or Muslim, or with some other unorthodox rules, but, as far as I understand, still would not imply capital punishment.

Another story is what happens when two land owners have a conflict among them, each being physically present on their own land. In this case, if they employ the same Insurance Company, the company probably has arbitration rules, and you have to follow them and cannot appeal. If your Companies are different, they would have an arbitration mechanism among themselves, which would usually be simple, but would imply violence in the most severe case.

History is a sarcastic bitch. The at the time Crown Price of Austria-Hungary was Rudolf von Hapsburg, who was a student of Carl Menger and could, potentially, reform Austria on the principles of Austrian economic school after ascension. However, due to subjective theory of the value applied to his own life, Rudolf chose to commit suicide together with his lover, a lady 13 years younger, which made Franz Ferdinand the new Crown Prince of Austria, which was in turn killed in Sarajevo, igniting the World War I, and which destroyed Austria, created a lot of resentment in one Austrian painter, and made the USA the dominant world power.

Hoppe speaks a lot about this symbolic competition of Austria and the USA before WWI, in which the USA emerged victorious, and Austria disappeared. Austria was the only European empire with no overseas colonies, consisted out of a large number of not-at-all integrated regions, and was one of the world’s leading producers of culture. Wittgenstein, mentioned on this website a few times, also emerged from that enlightened monarchy broth of ideas which constituted the Ancien Regime in Austria.

I got interested in this phenomenon, and wanted to find a book which would explore it and tell me more. “Blown to Bits” came as a blessing.

Before I get to the book’s contents, I need to think about who exactly wrote the book, because the perspective influences what is visible.

The authors are USA university professors. That is they are fairly rich people, living in urban areas, with modern conveniences available, and what is the most important, with a certain perception of justice. The attitude to justice as something that shapes the life is that peculiar property of the USA life that is hard to find elsewhere, even though Common Law is not unique to the USA, and many other countries have it. In the USA people think about litigation, courts, and case law all the time.

Why am I mentioning this? This book is not just a work of political philosophy or social theory, even though it has bits of both of those. What is more attractive in it is that it mostly consists of real cases. Many people are capable of groundless theorising and predicting doom and gloom or moonshine and roses with little justification, but far less people are capable of accumulating a large amount of already happened cases to illustrate their theoretical derivations.

This book is full of cases. In fact, each chapter starts with an indicative case, which serves as the kindling for the narrative presented in it, describing a certain broadly defined aspect of the “digitalization” of society. The narrative is then intentionally misleading the reader to come up with some interim conclusion on how an issue should be solved, only to present another case, which is likely to completely break down that tentative solution. This really makes the reader think!

I was quite surprised that, even though in many cases the evolution of regulation and legislation was driven by financial interests of mighty parties (such as the Internet commerce industry), there were cases when courts made decisions on the basis of public good. I was impressed that such events still happen sometimes.

1. The uniformity of bits.
2. The abundance of bits.
3. Longevity of bits.
4. The speed of transmission.
5. Privacy of bits.
6. The copyright.
7. DRM
8. Defamation.
9. Fraud.
10. Algorithmic biases.
11. AI black boxes.
12. Encryption.
13. Net neutrality and publishers versus newspapers.
14. Organization of data: hierarchies and search.
15. Obsolescence of regulation and outdated metaphors.
16. Digital access limitations.

I need to say a few words about each of those lest I forget.

This case is not huge, but recently I had the same story in the metro. A 20-y.o. girl called herself the “chief of the metro station”, although she clearly could not solve any issue. She only was there to receive the blame for robots’ faults.

Also, the instability of bits spoken of too little. Bits live for a long time, if somebody cares to back up them.

Care is taken for the narrative to be neutral and unbiased. Every case is substantiated by an extensive list of supporting material.

I certainly recommend it to everyone.

What is different?

The World War itself is not really new, there has already been one.

The coming of mass ideologies making people seemingly insane is also not new. This is especially true about Marxism, which has been around for many years already.

Burham is well aware of that, because he had been a prominent American Marxist for many years before turning a conservative.

Well, the most influencing things for people are actually things that are close to them, not far. The thing close to Burnham is the New Deal.

The New Deal is a set of government bodies in the U.S.A., which made the government the largest employer in the country, far surpassing any private one. These bodies were employing people for a fixed wage on simple straightforward tasks, mostly building roads, for a wage which was just enough to survive a month during the Great Depression.

Why is the American Government, seemingly so completely controlled by the magnates, organising these public works? Because people are dying form starvation. Adult, healthy, hardworking, people with protestant working ethic are struggling to find a job that would feed even them alone, not even their family.

The interesting thing is that American Government is not trying to conscript them into the army and send to the front lines somewhere out there in order to conquer some land. It is also not helping them establish a peasant swath of land. It is giving them low-complexity industrial jobs.

Why exactly American Government decided to do so it beyond the scope of this book, but for Burnham all those things are a symptom of something that has shifted in the very bottom of the social construction, the base, the foundation. Public works, perhaps, just as government employment, are nothing new, but the new things are: the scale, the efficiency, the striking similarity to the social structure of the Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, which are both still alive and kicking at the time of writing the book. Moreover, the book was out before the Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union, so they are not even fighting each other, against all odds.

Burnham is shocked, and not even once, but twice. The first shock, the failure of the American Model, had shocked him deeply enough to become a Marxist. Here I am deliberately not saying ”a Socialist”, because ”Socialism” has sort of a weird meaning in this book, which I will touch later. But ”Marxist”, in the sense of taking Marx’ words at face value, in the sense of ”acting in the interest of the proletarian masses” is still correct.

But every true Marxist eventually has to confront the grim reality which life in the Soviet Union has turned into by the 1930s. For Burnham as for a true believer this was devastating, and just as devastating must have been the New Deal, which essentially mimicked the Soviet Practices.

I think this is where the second part of the title comes from. It could have just as well been ”what the fuck is going on?”.

So Burnham is starting to investigate the process of totalitarianisation of the formerly freest nation in the World, and soon finds a very plausible excuse: the Americans have done nothing wrong, is is the very formation of the world that is changing. The world is not capitalist any more (which also means that his former Marxist ideas of destroying capitalism don’t work any more), it has been falling for a while, and will undoubtedly finish falling very soon. What is noteworthy is that no deliberate human intervention was needed to implement its fall, no actual bloody revolution or even a coup.

This is very important, because this indicates a stance which is one of the two most fundamental stances in any social scholarship: ”history obeys objective laws, and evolves according to principles similar to scientific”, sometimes called ”deterministic”. The other stance is that ”history has no laws, and everything is in the hands of Man”, which can be called, perhaps, Popperian, in the honour of Karl Popper, who was a vehement opponent of ”historicism”.

Both stances are just stances, and I am finding it unlikely to be able to establish which one is true, since we are unable to experiment at such a scale.

But let us see what exactly Burnham suggests as an objective course of evolution.

For him, the objectively observable formations are ”feudalism”, ”capitalism”, and ”managerialism”. It is curious that he rejects ”socialism”, in his specific meaning of the word (meaning a classless and egalitarian society), as infeasible, although he mentions that ”broad masses hate all kinds of ruling class”, and acknowledges that there is some energy stored in the masses, which, for example, Lenin managed to exploit.

But time and again he says that the end and the means almost never follow one from the other, and in fact intentional social transformations end up obtaining a result completely opposite to the planned one.

For me it is interesting that he mentions neither a prehistoric society (okay, which is sort of expected), not (which is more interesting) an antiquity, which Lenin called the ”slave-owner society”.

But for Burnham the antiquity and the feudalism are more or less the same thing. And he spends a great deal of work explaining how feudalism transitioned into capitalism, trying to distil from scattered examples an overall theory of social transition.

For him the ruling class is the class which has preferential access to the means of production. In feudalism this is the nobility, and they control the peasants and the land, which are the key to wealth and power in the medieval time. The capitalists are present in the medieval time too, but they barely constitute 1% of the economy. Nevertheless, they have ”some” access to the means of production, which can be called a ”base”, from which they, when the social conditions become favourable, grow to be the dominant social class.

So why would capitalism give way to the next social formation, and what will be that social formation?

He calls this new social formation ”Managerial Society”, of which the ruling class would be ”managers”. But I would probably be more accurate nowadays, if I just called this formation ”socialism”, and the ruling class ”bureaucrats”. Burnham would disagreee, he would object, and he even spends some effort in the book trying to distinguish between the managers and the bureaucrats, but I refuse to give him this excuse. I am not a Marxist, and I don’t have to court his feelings with respect to Marxism, I will say that ”managerialism” has been built into Marxism from the very start, that ”classless society” has never been anything more than a propagandist meme, and that the ”left” who have split from the Stalinists to become ”social democrats” in the West were in no way more capitalist than Stalin, they just wanted to attain the managerial society via covert means rather than via the overt ones.

The bureaucrats exist both in the government, and in private firms, but these two groups are almost indistinguishable in real life by the manner of thinking or acting.

What is the main causes and symptoms for the change from a capitalist society to a socialist one? For him, the main symptom is unemployment, and hence inability to fully utilise all of the productive forces in a society. And when a society is unable to fully utilise its productive forces it has a high likelihood to stop investing into the Armed Forces, which means that it will start losing the international competition. It will have to either adapt or be conquered.

The secondary symptom is the fact that liberal (capitalist) economies stopped being able to raise people to war. Apparently, voluntary military service failed both in Britain, and in the USA during the World War II, and they resorted to conscription.

The process of turning into a socialist country will consist of three steps:

1. Getting rid of capitalists
2. Brainwashing the masses
3. Conquering neighbours

The end result can be measured by looking at the embodiment of the sovereignty in a country.

1. The feudal society will have most of the power in the Upper Chamber of the Parliament.
2. The capitalist society will have most of the power in the Lower Chamber.
3. The socialist society will have most of the power in the Government.

It is funny that the book written in 1948 starts with a phrase that ”social sciences are still in their nascence”, because I remember a similar phrase being said by Karl Marx a hundred years earlier, and by Alexander Hamilton 50 years before that.

Has ”Managerial Society” won? Not yet, but it has advanced significantly. The world we live in is certainly not a free market society.

However, the managers don’t seem to have won entirely, at least not yet.

In some sense it is a book about a girl getting far out of her initial social stratum by getting a good education level, and reflecting on her own experience.

On the other hand this is a book about spirits deeper than conscious (and older than the trees) dominating our brain.

They are religious, hard-working, and on the surface distrustful of the government. Therefore she, as well as everyone in her family, is not allowed to go to a school or to a doctor.

This rule is not rigourously enforced however. Or should I say, it is not enforced systematically. When some members of the family decide to leave, they end up doing that. Her brothers eventually do, just as she does.

And the more education they are getting, the more distanced they become from the core of the family, eventually ending up in something I would call a ”divorce”, if people could divorce their relatives. That is, they end up never almost talking after she gets her PhD in history. And although she wants a reconciliation, the issue is not resolved by the end of the book.

Throughout the rest of this review I will try to express my feelings about different phenomena depicted (with great colour) throughout this book, and how they relate to either my life, or lives of people around me.

It is noteworthy that this book is perhaps the first one I have read about people roughly my age, so I should have quite a lot to reflect upon, and indeed I do.

It is true that one’s monetary worth is not exactly proportional to how smart or how educated one is, but in this book this inconsistency is just outright baffling.

I should say it in other words: in Russia being honestly hardworking almost never brings you money and success. This is not to say that Russia is totally anti-meritocratic, Russia has both a meritocratic and a corrupt way of attaining wealth and power. But in Russia if you are rich, you are either a social engineer, skilful in climbing the social ladder by fair and unfair means, or you are a well-educated, highly proficient ”engineer” (not necessarily a scientific engineer) that the socially-aware people use as a tool in their cunning schemes.

In the book the opposite is happening. No matter how high in the education ladder the protagonist is climbing (and eventually becoming self-sustainable), her initially poor, ignorant, and mis-informed family ends up more affluent and powerful than her. Is this the American Dream coming true?

Seriously, I started reading the book with the feeling that this is going to be a ”break away from poverty with education” type of book that we have so plentiful in Europe. But this is not the case, these people, despite their provincial culture, are not poor at all. Her father is buying industrial heavy machinery: forklifts, harrows, man-baskets. She is driving a car since 16 or even 14.

She is working in a supermarket, and for her father in his business, and he is paying her (!) enough money to pay for that extremely expensive American education. Gees, her father, the one she calls a tyrant and an eccentric is actually paying her. An unimaginable thing in Russia, where in patriarchal families the children are obliged to give their salaries to the head of the family.

A very American thing, even though filial piety and family domination very well exist in Russia, Europe, and China. But it is really the Americans who I have seen contemplating about this more than anyone else. I have an acquaintance in China, a former American, who is feeling much freer in the relatively restrictive Chinese society than back in America, because he is gay. And despite all the American march towards tolerance and acceptance he feels himself better here, where nobody really gives even a little shit about who he sleeps with.

In Russia there are quite a lot of dominating patriarchal families with tyrant fathers/mothers who terrorise their children, but ”getting out into the city” is usually the ultimate solution. People very seldom go back to the villages, and remote control via shame, guilt, does not really work in Russia. Russia is, after all, really about violence more than anything else, and it is hard to project violence over the distance.

Church and religion play a big role in the story. I still have not fully understood the attitude of the author towards the Church, but by the objective criteria, the Church is what has shown her the way to freedom. This is very painful to read for a Russian, for whom the Church is another way of human oppression. The devout Orthodox attain Church responsibilities in addition to the filial ones, not as a substitute. For her the Church was the way out, the method whereby she learns about the outer world, about the university, while singing in the choir. The Church helps her with a sick tooth, the Church helps her with a grant application.

Her father tries to control her via the money needed for her tuition, but eventually fails.

She struggles with her relationship with men, with other women, with her father, with ”city life”, and even with herself. She wants to look good so that her boyfriend would like her, but she also looks down at other women who want to be admired by men, and dress ”frivolously”.

She lays the burden of this hypocrisy on her father, who seemingly ”practised what others just believed”, and I would have agreed to her if I didn’t know my relatives, who, obviously, grew in unrelated circumstances and conditions. They are neither Mormon, nor even a christian. Nevertheless, they are very shy and easily embarrassed when confronted with the physical part of the world. Once I heard an opinion that skirts are intentionally designed in such a way that would make it easier for men to assault women. On the other hand on the other hand I remeber hearing that trousers are improper for women because of being men’s clothing. I have no idea how they live in a real world, but I remember being asked me several times about how girls in my school had dressed, and being never quite satisfied with my answer.

Not exactly related to that, but I spotted a few things that time and again appear in the women’s writing trying to reflect on the differences between men and women.

One more example is her saying that ”you are not defined by your clothing”. I have heard that many times from women as a revelation (Zhu JingNing is writing about this in her book about making business female-way), even though for men this has never been a secret. Actually spending conscious effort choosing clothing for the very small advantage it might be giving in a working environment might be worth it.

I do understand what she is writing about when she is speaking about ”not having a right to be here”, but I should really speak about this in the next section.

This might very well be true.

However, bipolar disorder is a hereditary disease, and in fact cannot really be called a disease, because it is not necessarily debilitating. Throughout reading this book I really had a feeling that she has a bipolar disorder herself, just as all of her family.

After all, she is talented. I should be writing this in a different section, but the book is written in a wonderful, colourful and vivid language. She managed to study on all As, even when having a sick tooth and prepare herself for a university while never even attending a school. She is a genetic genius. And while this all are great traits, it somehow discounts her accounts of her life.

No, I am not saying that she is lying. I am saying that we are all influenced by our genes more than we are willing to admit.

The same animalistic stubborness and headstrongness that she is so strongly disapproving in her father is what actually let her enter a university without any school education, and what let her other brother become a Purdue PhD.

The book has a lot of stories about their family disregarding healthcare and relying on improvised treatment methods. And since most of them are probably useless, we just have to admit that humans are way-way more durable than we can imagine. They are getting in car crashes, falling from heights, getting burned alive, have brain injuries and holes in theirs skulls, and still survive.

I cannot, on the other hand, say that everything her father is saying about ”medical establishment” is wrong. Conventional medicine is full of fraud, overprescription, and plain neglect on the side of the medical providers. It is true that their herbalist approach is in no way a substitute, and the fact that it is it that made her family rich at the end is making me lose my hope in humanity.

Use your own brain, that is the only thing I can recommend to my readers.

One of the first chapters of the book contains a description of her father preparing for the End of Days, and one of the latest chapters contains a description of the family using their substantive wealth to build their own chapel, and generally extend their 4-bedroom cottage into a well-defended castle.

Is it a stupid thing to do? Maybe it is.

But I am writing these lines while the code for my own Android flavour is being compiled on my laptop for my ”new” phone. I had bought this phone about New Year, and I still haven’t managed to migrate to it. Why? Because it very heavily relies on the ”Cloud” ”AI” services ”provided” by the OPPO company. Supposedly for free. But nothing in this world is free. A ”cloud” is just another man’s computer. Can you trust this man? Maybe you actually can. Until you are a famous politician and a businessman, and some of the employee of that company is sending you an email with your naked photos and demanding a ransome.

But this feeling of being left at the mercy of the ”Leviathan” is just horrible.

Make no mistake, this ”self-reliance” that her father is vehemently defending, and which is nowadays called ”conservatism”, is in reality neither old nor conservative. People have never lived autonomous lives, people have always been collective species. Now her father being able to say ”No” to the collective, and not just the national collective, but even to the rural community is a harbinger of the future, not the past. Not all of the future, just a part of the future, and maybe even not the brightest part of the future. But some of it.

(Make no mistake, future has collectivism in it too, just remember how much of the COVID isolation has been imposed onto us in 2021.)

And this self-reliance that looks so hilarious and backwards to use now, in fact relies on so many things that the progress has given to us in the 20th century. I have to repeat myself, her father could afford buying heavy machinery by himself, as an individual entrepreneur. My grandpa only managed to buy a single rototiller by the end of his life.

And although I, myself, resemble her much more than her father, and I understand why she loathes that stronghead and limited world of the father, I can’t stop thinking that there is something indomitable in that independent attitude that ”nothing can save you except yourself”.

Modern life and this book is largely about the fight of conservatism and progressivism, has lead to the reality in which children are unable to properly inherit the things that their parents owned.

They can’t do that because their parents are still alive.

Britain has left this impression in particular on me – a country of old people.

So what used to be natural for people for thousands of years, of children defeating their parents in a symbolic combat, and inheriting the world after them, is not here anymore.

This book gives good account of it. The real, basic, fundamental issue that she had with her father was that her father was still alive when she got her PhD, a thing hardly imaginable during most of the human history.

We are already old, but our parents are still alive.

One of the signs of the abnormality of the world we are living in is the fact that although sh managed to defeat her father, by all accounts, by earning a PhD, and by making money on her own, and by refusing his control, she still have not managed to bear the fruit of her victory. People live long now.

And all that despite the disregard for government’s healthcare that her family exhibited.

But her parents had many children (and most of her relatives). She had many aunts, to whom she could reach in the search of help, she had brothers and sisters, some of which abandoned her, and some, instead, sided with her in a family conflict.

This book made me thinks that having many brothers and sisters was what actually liberated her from a lot of tyranny from her family. Her family just did not have enough time and attention to oppress many kids, so some freedom could slip through the fingers. I have seen the opposite too many a time, even among my classmates, who, even though they lived with ”progressive” and ”liberal” parents, were so dominated by them that they never grew up. As this book shows, manage to grow up by themselves, given that you don’t fuck them up too much.

The everlasting American struggle between the NIMBY rednecks and socialist city-dwellers is visible like in few other books.

I could not deny that the book is written in a compelling manner, and I can reflect on what she is saying.

But I have not heard the other side of the story, from her other relatives. She accuses her brother of something, but after all he manages to contain himself in almost all circumstances. Poor dog though. Do not get me wrong, he probably does need help, and being a rural Mormon is not an excuse to be a manipulative abuser.

But sometimes she just writes things that almost seem like the ”Faith creed”, for example getting vaccinated in England. As if to prove to herself that she now believes in a different faith, different to that of her father. Or saying that she didn’t feel anything in the Sacred Groove. After all, she has been a Mormon for a long time, and that Groove is significant as a cultural place too. Seems quite like changing a faith rather than becoming faith-free, which, again, is a very American thing to do.

The images of people she is depicting are convex, believable, easy to imagine and visualise. She is very talented and I would probably really enjoy reading her other works too.

This book made me learn a lot of names for herbs, agricultural and construction tools, nature, and animals.

Would I recommend reading this book to anyone? Yes, I will. In some sense it is a good book about growing up in a ”new world”.

It is a little bit like ”Harry Potter”. Not too much, but it is certainly within that ”Bildungsroman” that became so iconic in the British culture.