Books and More

Stock market futures are up for now, about 1%. Gold continues to rally. The market needs a better jobs outlook for a sustained rally, in my "humble" opinion. That might come in early December.

BBC: "Russia has now turned into a "criminal state", according to the man who was once its leading foreign investor" - Bill Browder. I hope he gets coverage and continues to push. Russia gets way too much slack in the media. It's a gangocracy.

Book of the Week

"Plagues and Peoples" by William H. McNeill. This superb book - "A book of the first importance, a truly revolutionary work" in the words of The New Yorker on the cover - is a "must read" for those interested in the broad human history. Plagues had huge influence on the development of many regions and in many historical epochs. The book also covers how people understood them in the past and dealt with them, and how the growth in population densities changed the nature of the spreading of plagues.

As simple plain history, this book provides critically important knowledge on plagues throughout the world and throughout history. For those who might want to put the current controversies about Ebola, bird flu, and swine flu into historical context, the book is a one stop read to do just that. I read it about 25 years ago and still refer to it on occasion.

Bonus Book

"Life and Fate" by Vasily Grossman. This weekend's WSJ featured this book as #1 of the five best outstanding fiction works on World War II. I read it about 25 years ago when it was first published in the west. The book had been banned by Communist ideologists, but was eventually sneaked to the west for publication. To quote from the review: "Vasily Grossman's "Life and Fate" is the "War and Peace" of Stalinism and the Great Patriotic War, as the Soviets called World War II. This deliberate act of literary homage to Tolstoy uses the Battle of Stalingrad in the place of the Battle of Borodino, and there are several parallels in construction. But the characters in "Life and Fate" and the dilemmas they face when confronted by the moral distortions of the system ... The anti-Semitism that emerged in Stalin's later years convinced Grossman of the parallels between Nazism and Stalinism. This similarity became a covert but recognizable theme in his great novel."

Reading the book helps get beyond the WW II propaganda about the "Great Patriotic War".

Word of the Day

"Feculence" - noun [$10] and "Feculent" - adjective [$10]
Feculent means full of foul matter; fecal
Sentence: The feculence of ObamaCare as manifested in the 2,000 page Senate health care bill is going to get a lot worse as various senators are bribed for votes one at a time.