The Breath of the Gods, a book review

Sometimes smelly too! 😊

Remember our ancestors abandoned windmills for better and more reliable sources of energy, but many retrogressive contemporaries and charlatans bring back wind turbines in large wind farms onshore and offshore.

Caveat: I did not read the book.

"Is there anything better than a nice breeze on a hot day? People often take the wind for granted, but as Simon Winchester explains in The Breath of the Gods, Earth’s airflow has always had a marked impact on our lives. From the winds that power ships to the tornadoes that tear apart homes, human history has been shaped by breezes and gusts. Even to this day, “wind has remained an important factor in human civilization,” writes reviewer Sarah Boon. The book dives into the science of describing and measuring wind throughout the ages as well as the myriad ways people have capitalized on the air’s movement. As Winchester puts it: “A world without wind is just too dreadful to contemplate.”"

ScienceAdviser

The secret history of China’s most powerful company Huawei

Recommendable!

"How did a small Shenzhen-based manufacturer of telephone switches defy tough domestic and international competition to become a world leader in telecoms technology? And how did it manage to start producing its own 5G processors despite international sanctions specifically designed to prevent this from happening?

Telecoms equipment makers are notoriously publicity-shy. They guard their trade secrets jealously and manage their public images carefully. But even by the sector’s exacting standards, Huawei, currently the world’s largest manufacturer of telecommunications equipment, is exceptionally secretive. Its founder, Ren Zhengfei, studiously avoids the limelight, and media visits to the company’s huge campus in Dongguan in southern China are carefully curated and give away little.

In House of Huawei, Eva Dou lifts the veil of secrecy surrounding the tight-lipped company. Dou is a technology reporter for The Washington Post and spent seven years in China and Taiwan covering politics and technology for The Wall Street Journal. ...

Ren established Huawei in 1987 in the Shenzhen special economic zone to manufacture telephone switches for China’s burgeoning economy. Before establishing the company, he worked for the engineering corps of the armed forces. ...

Dou highlights two turning points. The shift from analogue to digital technology in the early 1990s allowed Huawei to expand production and begin supplying China’s state-owned enterprises. At that point, Ren made sure that his company was on the radar screen of the country’s top leaders.

The second turning point came a decade later, when Huawei went global.

As Huawei expanded, so did its symbiotic relationship with China’s party-state. The government helped to ensure the company’s success, while Huawei supported the expansion of state surveillance. Soon after Xi Jinping came to power in 2012, he initiated the Sharp Eyes urban surveillance program and blanketed China with security cameras. In response, Huawei developed its Safe City facial recognition technology, which is now used throughout China and has been bought by countries in Asia, Africa and even Europe.

China’s national intelligence law requires organisations and individuals to ‘support, assist and cooperate with state intelligence work’, a clause that is frequently cited to justify sanctions placed on Huawei. ...

For the past decade, Huawei has been caught in the crossfire of the technology war between the United States and China.

In 2018, Ren’s daughter, at the time Huawei’s chief financial officer, was detained in Canada at the request of the US. The US accused her of covering up Huawei’s sale of telecoms equipment to Iran in violation of US sanctions.

The following year, president Donald Trump declared a national emergency based on ‘vulnerabilities in information technology’, a clear reference to Huawei’s market dominance. ..."

Bookshelf: the secret history of China’s most powerful company | The Strategist

MIT book review: One nation under insurance contract

This MIT book review is lousy as it is written from the ideology of racism and other leftist pet narratives! The author of the book is probably leftist leaning too!

"... “One way to turn the tide of public opinion away from expansion of the welfare state was to associate public insurance programs with dependency, and private programs with autonomy, freedom, and individual responsibility,” Horan says. “That rhetoric started in the late 1930s, and has been incredibly successful, and it’s still with us.” ..."

The 1930s was also the time when the United States federal government leapt forward towards communism and socialism under the most socialist President of all times FDR!

"... More subtly, perhaps, insurance companies and industry groups started a wide variety of seemingly public-minded campaigns to get Americans to live healthier, more balanced lives — distributing materials to schools and libraries about health and weight, and launching driver-training programs. However, Horan notes, those efforts had the effect of shifting responsibility for healthy living to individuals (as opposed to, say, environmental drivers of health outcomes). ..."

This book author is pathetic! So it must be OK when big government tells citizens in no subtle terms you need to live healthier?

"“You have this attachment of individual responsibility to insurance itself,” Horan says. “People who end up being classified as a good risk by insurance companies feel they have deserved that designation, while [thinking] the people who end up being classified as bad risks also deserve that designation. [It creates] this perpetuation of already existing inequalities.”"

What a nonsense! Anybodies risk assessment can change for the better or worse with time and effort or negligence!

This book review contains more of such dubious examples!

One nation under contract | MIT News | Massachusetts Institute of Technology MIT historian Caley Horan’s new book chronicles the development of the insurance business into a U.S. behemoth

The Divine Plan

There appears to be at least one very serious issue with this book: The omission of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher! Without her, I don't think President Reagan and Pope John Paul II would have been as successful in such a short time! Then, there was the last General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev.

Rarely in history do great minds meet, but with Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, Karol Józef Wojtyła (better known as Pope John Paul II), and Mikhail Gorbachev such a great moment happened!

Excerpt from the book of the months review by Intercollegiate Studies Institute:
"Just six weeks apart in the spring of 1981, Pope John Paul II and President ­Ronald Reagan took bullets from would-be assassins.
Few realized at the time how close both men came to dying.
Surviving these near-death experiences created a singular bond between the pope and the president that ­historians have failed to appreciate.
When John Paul II and Reagan met only a year later, they confided to each other a shared conviction: that God had spared their lives for a ­reason.
That reason? To defeat Communism.
In private, Reagan had a name for this: “The DP”—the Divine Plan. ...

And no leaders proved more important than the pope and the president."

The Divine Plan - ISI Books:

“John Paul II and Ronald Reagan both understood that they were preserved through this suffering for a high purpose. And I don’t think you’ll understand either one of them without understanding that"

A Critical Book Review On Climate Change

Trigger

Just read “The game is up for climate change believers\Charles Moore reviews The Age of Global Warming by Rupert Darwall”

This a well done summary about one of the greatest hoaxes of recent times. When will humans finally overcome superstition and unfounded fears.

Salient Excerpts

Emphasis added:

1. “The origins of warmism lie in a cocktail of ideas which includes
   [1. ] anti-industrial nature worship,
   [2. ]post-colonial guilt,
   [3. ]a post-Enlightenment belief in scientists as a new priesthood of the truth,
   [4. ]a hatred of population growth,
   [5. ]a revulsion against the widespread increase in wealth and
   [6. ]a belief in world government. ”
   (This is a great summary)
2. “These beliefs began to take organised, international, political form in the 1970s. One of the greatest problems, however, was that the ecologists’ attacks on economic growth were unwelcome to the nations they most idolised – the poor ones. The eternal Green paradox is that the concept of the simple, natural life appeals only to countries with tons of money. ”
3. “By a brilliant stroke, the founding fathers developed the concept of “sustainable development”. This meant that poor countries would not have to restrain their own growth, but could force restraint upon the rich ones. This formula was propagated at the first global environmental conference in Stockholm in 1972.”
4. “The G7 Summit in Toronto in 1988 endorsed the theory of global warming. In the same year, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was set up.”
5. “The final push, brilliantly described here by Darwall, was the Copenhagen Summit of 2009. … The warmists’ idea was that the global fight against carbon emissions would work only if the whole world signed up to it. Despite being ordered to by President Obama, who had just collected his Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo, the developing countries refused. The Left-wing dream that what used to be called the Third World would finally be emancipated from Western power had come true. ”
   (I love this observation)