 Scotland's Hidden Sacred Past
By Freddy Silva Published in November 2021 343 Pages Thibault’s Score: 2/5 I’m not sure what the book’s main point is. This book is a haphazard mishmash of facts, myths, and speculations about the history of ancient Scotland. The facts are not well organized, and don’t amount to anything. History books can be written in one of three ways. The first, and worst, way to write a history book is to argue for something. The second, most reliable, way to tell history is to compile a well organized chronological account of events. The third way to write history - to tell a story - is most difficult but the best if well executed. This book does neither, and is fairly chaotic. The author speculates about a wide range of possibilities concerning ancient Scotland such as that the standing stones are some sort of ancient hard drive which stores information using vibrations, that the Armenian language is directly related to Scottish, and that giants used to live on the Mediterranean island of Sardinia. The historiography is sketchy. He draws a lot of radical conclusions from limited evidence, without ever providing plausible alternatives. As anyone who reads my book reviews knows, I am very open to ideas about the Younger Dryas, Atlantis, or visitations by extra-terrestrials - however, I set the bar for evidence very high. If you are making these bold claims, then you need to at least explore alternatives that are more mainstream. Finally, the book is full of melodramatic accounts about the author’s misadventures. As someone who has traveled internationally, none of these misadventurers stand out as remarkable or interesting. For example, at one point, he falls in some beachside rocks, scratches himself, and bruises his arm. He then proceeds to write about the incident as if it was a life-and-death struggle for survival. However, he doesn’t go to the hospital. Instead, he has a beer, and takes photos of his arm for Instagram, and proceeds with the adventure. Either he is a big baby and the incident itself is cringy because it wasn’t severe, or the passage is poorly written because it doesn’t do justice to the injuries the author actually sustained. I’ve read many worse books, and it definitely has its fascinating moments. Despite the positives, I would not recommend this book.
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 Secrecy World: Inside the Panama Papers Investigation of Illicit Money Networks and the Global Elite
By Jake Bernstein Published in November 2017 352 Pages Thibault’s Score: 2/5 The Panama Papers revealed that dozens of hundreds of world leaders, criminals, politicians, businessmen, and celebrities had registered entities with a Panamanian law firm called Mossack Fonseca. This book chronicles the history of this law firm, explains how this firm helped its clients mitigate taxes, hide their assets, and eventually how it leaked data which resulted in its downfall. Mossack Fonseca was founded by the 1986 merger of two small law firms. One was founded by the son of a German WW2 refugee and the other by a Panamanian leftist revolutionary turned lawyer. This firm specialized in finding jurisdictions that had favorable taxes and secrecy laws, and helping clients register businesses there. The firm was most active in the early 2000s, when it opened dozens of law officers across the world I actually have many good friends in this very business. Many work with citizenship by investment programs, Special Economic Zones, and small countries. The industry has not changed significantly despite the revelations of the Panama Papers and Pandora Papers. The first half of the book covers the founding of the firm, its growth, and activities. It is somewhat interesting. However, the author is an obvious communist who cannot resist inserting judgmental statements about politics which can be tedious at times. Eventually, the firm’s data was leaked due to lazy opsec and cybersecurity practices. The rest of the book follows the - very boring - lives of the journalists who leaked the data. The second half of the book is excruciating because the journalists are mostly losers and complainers. I can summarize 100 pages in one sentence: going through the Panama Papers was a lot of hard work, and the journalists had to work on short deadlines. For money laundering books to be good, they must fall into one of two categories: they must either be very informative, or very exciting. This book was neither. I didn’t learn anything new (although, to be fair, I already am somewhat of an industry insider). It also wasn’t exciting - the most exciting segments detail the lives of journalists crunching through deadlines and dealing with obtrusive funding committees. Finally, the author is very judgmental. He makes many assumptions which he doesn’t adequately defend. He just assumes that measures to create financial secrecy are bad, and I have no sense that he has even considered the other side of the argument. He creates a straw man - that supporters of tax havens just care about the economic benefits they bring to countries like Liechtenstein - and then attacks that by countering that tax havens deprive money for social programs. For example, he doesn’t acknowledge that the US government is a downright evil police state which uses taxpayer money to fund genocide in Palestine, racist cops who kill black people in cold blood, finances right wing terrorists in Latin America, and irradiates Iraq using depleted uranium. He simply assumes that everyone who has money is bad, and the government is a fundamentally benign institution. My position is the polar opposite. Our world is becoming an increasingly repressive, violent, and totalitarian police state. Any steps which private citizens can take to undermine the state are welcome breaths of fresh air. The economist Ludwig von Mises once wrote that “capitalism breathes through loopholes.” I do not recommend this book. There are much better books on the world of financial secrecy.  Freezing Order: A True Story of Money Laundering, Murder, and Surviving Vladimir Putin's Wrath
By Bill Browder Published in April 2022 336 Pages Thibault’s Score: 4/5 This book is a fast paced action packed account of how the author, Bill Browder, exposed a massive Russian state backed money laundering network. I listened to the audiobook, which is masterfully read by Adam Grupper - one of the most pleasant audiobooks I have heard in awhile. Bill Browder is a creep with bad physiognomy. Google him, and find a picture of him. He is your stereotypical spooky fund manager. I’ve met a lot of guys who look like him at finance conferences in Zurich and Washington DC, and that kind of person is always bad juju. The truth about Bill Browder’s story depends on who you trust. These facts are uncontested: he founded Hermitage Capital Management in 1996. Hermitage went into Russia right after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and participated in the privatization of Russian state assets. The investments wildly succeeded, seeing a 2500% plus return on investment. If you believe Browder, he invested in Gazprom. Russian mobsters worked with crooked cops to forge documents, and stole 10% of Hermitage’s assets. If you believe the Russians, Browder worked with corrupt officials to steal his own assets. Obviously Browder paints a good picture of himself and a very sinister picture of Russia. He describes himself as an “activist investor,” trying to stomp corruption out of the companies where he invested. I don’t know the details, but in my own career, I have seen other people describe themselves as “activist investors.” Often, they are pro-socialism and pro-imperialism investors who complain about “diversity” or “climate change,” then use those causes to bully people. Once again, I do not know the details of Browder’s investments - but am suspicious of people who use that language. Russia responds to Browder’s investments violently. They first expelled Browder from Russia. Then they slowly start jailing, arresting, and intimidating his associates. Sergei Magnitsky is imprisoned, then tortured to death. Boris Nemtsov is murdered. One of Browder’s friends was poisoned, and survived with life changing injuries. Another was thrown off a roof by mobsters or spies posing as construction workers, and slowly and painfully died from his injuries. I personally know people who have been tortured by the Russian government. I know people who participated in anti-Putin protests, and had to endure absolutely horrible treatment at the hands of police. I also know people associated with the band Pussy Riot, who also had horrible things happen to them. I have no doubts that the mistreatment by Russian officials that Browder describes are completely real, and unexaggerated. The Russians also harass Browder in many other ways. They put out false interpol arrest warrants, which get him detained at the Geneva airport and later in a hotel in Spain. They hired the corrupt American lawyer John Moscow to gain Browder’s trust, obtain secret information, then betray him. They hired private investigators to disrupt him while he was skiing in Colorado with his family. Browder also admits to using dirty tricks, although his dirty tricks are far less dirty. He dodges subpoena servers, which is illegal in the United States. He also uses defamation lawyers to censor his opponent’s movie, and prevent it from getting screened. Browder denies that he is a US intelligence asset. I am sure that he is, but do not have any proof or evidence. You rarely can get into the mind of the hedge fund managers pillaging countries on behalf of US intelligence agencies. This autobiography is absolutely fascinating, and I recommend it highly. Finally, I want to end on a final note. Many people have a retarded “our team” versus “their team” worldview. I know people who correctly mistrust the US government, which has a very bad recent track record of truth telling, but instead blindly believe Russian propaganda that they see on RT and Telegram. I also know people, including many Russian exiles, who distrust Putin’s government, but believe everything that they see on CNN and in the New York Times. The reality is that we live in a world where good and moral governments are rare - usually confined to places like Singapore and Switzerland. Most governments are imperial states, which collude with private finance, to violently crush all opposition. The reader should see this as not just a cautionary tale about Russia, but a cautionary tale about what happens to enemies of the state in general. This is a fantastic book, and I recommend it highly.  In the Closet of the Vatican: Power, Homosexuality, Hypocrisy
By Frédéric Martel Published in February 2019 576 Pages Thibault’s Score: 4/5 Like everyone, I had heard vaguely about the Vatican sex abuse problems. I expected this book to be about that. To my surprise, the problem goes way beyond sex abuse - this book alleges that roughly half of the leadership of the Catholic church is homosexual. Homosexuality has a long, and strange history in the Vatican. On one hand, the Catholic Church is very politically opposed to homosexuality. On the other hand, many high level Catholic priests have been found to be secretly gay. A lot of things surprised me. First, I didn’t know that the Catholic church was openly homophobic. In fact, my personal experience has been the complete opposite - that Catholics are a bunch of obnoxious homosexual social justice warriors who never shut up about LGBT rights. However, my experience mostly involved dealing with Catholics in the San Francisco and Washington DC areas. I was very surprised to hear that, in fact, the Catholic church isn’t predominantly leftist. The author is a lot older than I am. It might boil down to a generational difference - he grew up in a world with a very different Catholic church than I did. The other thing that surprised me was likely the thing that surprised just about everyone who read this book: that the entire leadership of the Catholic church is openly gay. In many cases, the evidence is direct - court cases, admissions, interviews with gay priests, etc… In other cases, the admission is anecdotal - interviews with gay prostitutes in Rome, rumors, the presence of homosexual paraphernalia, etc… The authors even used gay dating apps in the Vatican, and through data engineering, found many clergymen on the apps. Attempts by the Catholic church to reduce the presence of homosexuality in the church have dramatically backfired. This has only succeeded in attracting self-hating homosexuals. The presence of large amounts of celibate and closeted homosexuals contributes to pedophilia. The author argues that the solution is, instead, to allow priests to marry people of either gender. That will make it easier for the church to attract people with normal sexual tendencies, rather than people desperately attempting to restrain themselves. One example really stood out to me. For awhile, some Catholic churches offered gay conversion therapy - a therapeutic treatment designed to help homosexuals become heterosexual. This gay conversion therapy was usually targeted towards teenagers. The priest administering the therapy would undress the boys, and masturbate them. Obviously, the gay conversion therapy was just a ploy for pedophilic abuse with vulnerable teenagers. I’ve never liked Catholicism for the following reason - it is a religion entirely predicated on earthly authority - the authority of a Medieval corporation. Most Catholics I have met are very uninformed, and can’t even tell you who the most prominent medieval popes were and what they did. They cannot explain, in historical terms, why the papacy exists and should exist. They are both ignorant and loud. I have many Catholic friends who happen to be homosexual. Immediately after publishing this book review, I will suggest that they read it. I look forwards to hearing their thoughts.  The Horse, the Wheel, and Language
By David W. Anthony Published in 2007 568 Pages Thibault’s Score: 3/5 Almost all currently spoken European languages descend from a single original root language - Indo-European. This language was spoken by an East Ukrainian steppe people. Around 4000 BC, this people fragmented into various warring tribes, who then conquered adjacent lands to the west in western Ukraine and Russia; and to the east in the Caucasian and Aral mountains. These fragments themselves spread and fragmented. Over thousands of years, the descendants of the Indo-Europeans spread from Spain in the West to India in the east. Most modern languages spoken across this vast expanse of territory are evolutionary descendants of the original Indo-European language. This book covers the science, archeology, genetics, and linguistics behind the discovery of the Indo-Europeans. It does a great job of exploring the Indo-Europeans themselves, the history and evolution of the scientific theory, and the methods used. However, it can be a little bit niche at times. I would only recommend it to someone who is already interested in the topic; not to a layperson.  The Giants of Stonehenge and Ancient Britain
By Hugh Newman and Jim Vieira Published in October 2021 404 Pages Thibault’s Score: 4/5 Across Eurasia, but especially in the British isles, there are countless ancient legends about giants. This book is a compilation of various legends, customs, and traditions about giants from across the British islands. There have also been a number of giant bone finds over the last 500 years, although few of the alleged artifacts survive into the present. The book is divided by geographical section. Each geographical section is divided by very short subsections that each cover a specific myth. For example, one legend concerns a group of rocks which locals once believed were used as a table by giants. In the first two chapters, the authors cannot help but wonder to what extent these legends may hold some truth. What I like about this book is that the authors freely speculate, and are unafraid of putting out a wild - and likely wrong - hypothesis. That takes a lot of guts. What I like even more is that for the majority of the book - maybe 350+ pages - they then just collect the evidence and legends, and don’t worry about interpreting it. They then revisit the hypothesis at the end of the book. I got the physical book. It is very easy to read, because it can just be picked up, flipped to any random section, read for 5 minutes, and put down for a year. It is the perfect book to keep in a library, and never both reading cover to cover. I recommend it highly.  The Emperor's New Road: China and the Project of the Century
By Jonathan E. Hillman Published in September 2020 304 Pages Thibault’s Score: 2/5 This book covers the state of China’s Belt and Road initiative as of September 2020. Somehow, in 2024, it already feels dated. Global geopolitics have shifted so much in the last four years in favor of China that many of the questions that the author asks have much less ambiguous answers. The author traveled to a dozen projects along the Silk Road in locations such as Sri Lanka, Djibouti, and Kazakhstan. He reports on the progress of various projects. The most memorable aspect of the book are the many lessons he draws from the European history of colonialism in each location. In many ways, China’s projects reflect similar past projects that Europeans attempted a century earlier. For example, I found his description of Qing Dynasty China’s reluctance to accept the railroad fascinating. Qing officials were concerned about the power that railroads would give to foreigners. They cloaked their reluctance in superstition. The British accepted magical and superstitious reasons for opposition to the railroad literally. This reflect’s modern China’s struggles with convincing countries in Africa and elsewhere to accept their technology. There is something very annoying about the academic writing style. Academics lack the balls and courage to make any bold observations. They cloak all of their remarks in “this may happen” and questions. They worry that speculation will make them look unscientific. The author asks many blandly framed questions, and doesn’t venture to guess at the answer. This is because modern academia has been taken over by nitwits who think that a piece of paper is equivalent to learning and intelligence.. On one hand, the nitwits love to criticize each other when their speculation turns out wrong. On the other hand, they refuse to speculate out of fear of judgement. The result is that works published by the likes of Yale University Press alway ask questions such as “what effects could this have on Kenya? Only time may tell…” without ever venturing an educated and well framed guess at an answer. The other problem with academic writing, especially when it comes to economic and geopolitical issues, is the technocratic framing of everything. The human spirit is discounted, and crushed under the mass of policy. Considerations such as freedom are not valued as intrinsic goods, and are weighted by their pros and cons in terms of material factors such as equity and equity. This book suffers from the technocratic framing that many other books in the genre suffer from. I think that if Jonathan E. Hillman had taken some LSD before writing this, and had not been afraid to speculate (as long as he lets the readers know he’s speculating) he could have written a masterpiece. However, the academic publisher - Yale University Press - should have been the only clue that anyone needed in order to instantly be able to tell that this book would just be another technocratic treatise on the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative. I learned a lot, but didn’t have very much fun on the way. I will not recommend this book.  Blood Money: Why the Powerful Turn a Blind Eye While China Kills Americans: Uncovering China's Covert Operations in America
By Peter Schweizer Published in February 2024 320 Pages Thibault’s Score: 3/5 As part of my day to day work, I get to talk to many high level officials and businesspeople. Many keep bringing up a major issue over and over: how China is using covert tactics to influence American society. Blood Money explains and details the tactics that China uses. Openly, the author Peter Schweizer is just an academic who works with the Government Accountability Institute. However, a bit of research into his background reveals that he has many ties to US intelligence agencies, and is associated with the Trump administration. Although the topic is intriguing, the imagery of the cover and the first few chapters put me off because it seemed very sensational. I didn’t like the tone or writing style. However, the content is very informative and well researched. I was able to confirm many of Schweizer’s allegations with some quick Googling. We are in a second Cold War; except that this time our main enemy is China (with Russia being, at best, a secondary adversary). Chinese agents use 5 major tactics to destabilize America: -Sell fentanyl on US soil at below market rates -Promote divisive social movements such as Black Lives Matter -Steal intellectual property -Promote social media apps (such as TikTok) that corrupt the morals of the American youth -Lobby politicians to implement economically damaging policies such as COVID lockdowns All of these activities are well known by US intelligence agencies. They pose major threats. However, they are not covered by the media. Schweizer fails to explain why in his book: the US government uses very similar tactics against China and Russia. Schweizer likely does not discuss these due to his intelligence ties. One reason why China is able to operate so freely within the United States is because Chinese money has purchased significant political influence in the US. Chinese lobbyists routinely fund political campaigns for both Republicans and Democrats. According to Schweizer, one of the politicians who has the most ties to China is California governor Gavin Newsom - who also passes legislation that promotes Chinese interests on US soil. I am not sure if I would recommend this book or not. I don’t like the sensational style of the first few chapters, and I don’t like the fact that Schweizer doesn’t call out America for using the same tactics on China. However, I know a few people who are curious about the topics (such as my mom) and will recommend the book to them.  Children of Ruin
By Adrian Tchaikovsky Published in 2019 597 Pages Thibault’s Score: 5/5 I rarely read books this good. Writing book reviews of fiction is hard. Any detailed reviews spoil the plot. I couldn’t give this book a better recommendation. However, I will caution that without reading the first book - Children of Time - the reader will be completely lost. This book explores how alien species would communicate, very different forms of biology, and inter-species cooperation. What are you waiting for? If you haven’t started the series, close this web page, and start Children of Time. If you have finished it, then get ready for the amazing sequel.  China's Rise and the New Age of Gold: How Investors Can Profit from a Changing World
By Stephen and Donna Leeb Published in November 2020 272 Pages Thibault’s Score: 3/5 This interesting little book makes the case that China’s obsession with the yellow metal will result in significant price increases. On one hand, this book was very “markety.” I hate books that feel like they are trying to sell you something. The last few chapters - which I skipped - literally list the author’s favorite gold stocks. Markety books are usually written in the second person. “You should do this.” “You should not do that.” I hate cookbooks, and I hate second person books. However, that being said, I expected the book to be written that way, so I wasn't disappointed. Under communism, the Chinese government discouraged citizens from storing value. Gold was especially discouraged, because it allowed private citizens to hide wealth from the government. Communism discourages the private accumulation of wealth, because it makes central planning more difficult. Over time, this policy slowly relaxed as China opened up. Many exceptions - such as the ownership of gold jewelry - were carved out. In 2009, the Chinese government made a radical U-turn. The government legalized private ownership of gold, and began encouraging it. Historically, the Chinese population are big savers. They “eat bitter” - make hard short term decisions in hopes of improving their long term outcomes. Naturally, they are attracted to gold due to its historical ability to store and preserve value. In 2013, China announced its “Belt and Road” Initiative to connect all of Eurasia using infrastructure. One less well-known part of China’s Belt and Road Initiative is its explicit objective of destabilizing the dollar. The BRICS treaty - a group of 40 countries led by Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa - recently signed a treaty explicitly calling for the subversion of the dollar as the world reserve currency. The Chinese government plans on creating a new global currency. This new global currency will not, however, be the Yuan. China knows that it lacks the credibility that the US had during the Nixon administration when Breton Woods ended. Instead, China’s global currency will be a basket of fiat currencies from all BRICS countries. Several commodities will also be included, such as gold, oil, and silver. Gold will likely be the most heavily weighted asset in the basket. This new currency will be a digital CBDC, managed by an international IGO similar to BIS. Overall, Leeb makes a very strong case for the value of gold in the coming century. |
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