Books of Interest

Notes on James Clear, Atomic Habits: An easy & proven way to build good habits & break bad ones (2018)

 

James Clear, Atomic Habits: An easy & proven way to build good habits & break bad ones, Penguin Random House, 2018.

 

Rules: make obvious, fun, easy, satisfying. ie, hide 'bad' habit stimuli, see them as unpleasant, hard, unsatisfying, to break ‘bad’ habit.

-the more tasks you can handle without thinking, the more your brain is free to focus on other areas.

-little stresses compound into serious health issues.

-knowledge builds up, like compound interest. (buffett)

-if you see people as angry, unjust, selfish, you will see them everywhere.

-the more you help others, the more others want to help you. Build up connections (~ knowledge)

-not how successful you are right now. Your current trajectory rather than current results.

-fall in love with the process rather than the product. True long-term thinking is goal-less thinking. Your commitment to the process will determine your progress.

-true behaviour change is identity change. Start habit from motivation but stick with it because it becomes part of your identity. Must believe. Your habits are how you embody your identity. (when you write each day you embody identity of creative person.) Identity: proof in pudding. (what you do is what you are.) process of building habits is the process of becoming yourself.

Review: Diana Johnstone, Circle in the Darkness: Memoir of a World Watcher (2020)

First, Diana Johnstone’s memoir is a classic, and will be read and quoted as long as we keep struggling for peace and justice. It is one of the great personal accounts of the anguished decline of our uncivilization, both a riveting eye-witness account of many of the horrors and perfidies, and a primer for students of history and all those struggling to not only dismantle the beast, but to prepare us for what follows it.

Read it and weep. And smile at the follies. And shout ‘Yes!’ as light bulbs flash in your mind.


Johnstone’s concern in Circle in the Darkness Is not so much ‘the lived experience of the transitory nature’ of things but ‘especially of the moral environment.’ She was blessed to to begin at the beginning of the end. At the empire’s undisputed zenith under FDR. And though not a card-carrying anything religious or left wing, she grabbed that blessing and stoked and nurtured it, creating her life, her jobs, a single mother raising a daughter in Minnesota and then France, seeing through the cant everywhere and using her only weapon, the pen, to expose it.

It is a frightening, unremittingly gruesome, Dantesque journey, but Johnstone’s steady moral compass sees us through and is uplifting.

Review Rob Kall, The Bottom-Up Revolution: Mastering the emerging world of connectivity (2019)

Our civilization is a top-down hierarchical one, as are most large-scale ones in the past, i.e., one-to-the-many, 'top-down', explains Kall in an interview with Tom Hartmann. Kall's book is the distillation of his experience founding and running the  website Opednews, which started as a personal blog, i.e., one-to-the-many, 'bottom-bottom', and morphed into a many-to-the-many, with the potential of bottom-top, as a volunteer-based collective.


Kall calls this 'gayan', as contributors and management are directly interconnected in a symbiotic, transparent relationship. Writers can 'fan' their favorite writers at Opednews and both comment, generating discussions of controversial topics, and contact other members directly.

Review of Max Blumenthal’s The Management of Savagery (2019): ‘AQ is on our side’

The 9/11 dust is finally settling. Blumenthal takes us on a nightmare tour of the landscape, starting with two key moments in 2018 that dramatically expose the plot behind the passion play taking place even as we sip our morning coffee: Trump’s absence from the establishment’s lovefest-funeral for McCain, and a few days later, the New York Times editorial ‘I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration’, excoriating Trump’s ‘amoral leadership’.


McCain has been latched onto as the anti-Trump icon (he’s safely dead so he can’t mess things up, a habit this very Trump-like loose cannon was prone to). At the virtual state funeral (absent the head of state), McCain’s  daytime talkshow host daughter Meghan repackaged McCain’s ‘finest hour’, the (illegal, horrible, criminal) Vietnam War as a fight for the ‘life and liberty of other peoples in other lands’, a celebration of American empire, rebuking Trump (America was always great)  as a threat to its survival.


Blumenthal’s message is crystal clear: US-Israel policy from 1979 on has been to create and support Muslim terrorism, even as it claims to be fight terrorism. It used jihadi in Afghanistan to undermine the Soviet Union, and has used them against Iran and Syria. Create the problem, and provide the solution.

Review: Tim Anderson, Axis of Resistance: Towards an Independent Middle East

Anderson's Axis of Resistance takes on the leftist position of 'a plague on all your houses'. Yassin Al-Haj Saleh, ‘the intellectual voice of the Syrian revolution’ (for westerners), presents a bleak portrait of “three monsters … treading on Syria’s corpse’: (1) the Assad regime and its allies, (2) DAESH/ISIS and the other jihadists, and (3) the West (the USA, UK, France, etc). This is the general view from outside the Syrian cauldron, but leads nowhere.

 

 

I remember the view from Cairo, where I was writing for Al-Ahram Weekly as the 'Arab Spring' exploded. The first few months of 2011 in Egypt saw the collapse of the pro-western dictator Hosni Mubarak, and a wave of uprisings in the region, including Syria. Would protestors succeed there too, I asked myself. But the Syrian army was not behind the protests, as was the case in Egypt, where the army was angered by Mubarak's embarrassing attempt to promote his younger son* as heir. There was no such split in Syria, despite resentment of the Alawite dominance and persecution of the Muslim Brotherhood.
 
I realized that any uprising was doomed, more so, since Assad was not Mubarak,

More Articles...

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  3. Review: Bergdahl: Reluctant soldier - confused peacenik
  4. The Donald’s bedtime storybook: Review of Khalilzad’s ‘The Envoy’

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Canadian Eric Walberg is known worldwide as a journalist specializing in the Middle East, Central Asia and Russia. A graduate of University of Toronto and Cambridge in economics, he has been writing on East-West relations since the 1980s.

He has lived in both the Soviet Union and Russia, and then Uzbekistan, as a UN adviser, writer, translator and lecturer. Presently a writer for the foremost Cairo newspaper, Al Ahram, he is also a regular contributor to Counterpunch, Dissident Voice, Global Research, Al-Jazeerah and Turkish Weekly, and is a commentator on Voice of the Cape radio.

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Eric's latest book The Canada Israel Nexus is available here http://www.claritypress.com/WalbergIV.html