AernaLingus [any]

Gonna keep track of my progress here (🔄 = in progress). Unless otherwise noted, I’ll be opting to read rather than listen to audiobooks.

1. A. Einstein’s Why Socialism? ☑
2. R. Day’s Why Marxism? ☑
3. M. Parenti’s “Yellow Parenti” Speech ☑ (I’ve watched it before but I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to watch some Parenti!)
4. M. Parenti’s Blackshirts and Reds 🔄

mfw I can’t even read the introduction to the post where you clearly explain that it’s reading time and not listening time

Chat, am I cooked?

In all seriousness, I think I ought to read these rather than listen to them, anyway. I enjoy listening to audiobooks as a way to keep my mind occupied while I’m doing other tasks and learn things while I’m at it, but my retention of them is terrible. It’s fine if I’m just listening for pure pleasure or to get a general sense of familiarity, but if I actually want to internalize the information to improve my understanding of socialism that ain’t gonna cut it. I’ve heard that Blackshirts and Reds is quite digestible, and I didn’t realize it was so short, so it seems like a natural place to start.

If I really stick with getting through this, maybe I’ll have trained my long-atrophied reading muscle enough to actually keep up with the Capital reading group next year (I washed out on week 2…forgive me, sensei). For what it’s worth, I did find the tiny morsel of Capital that I made it through really interesting and enlightening by itself, so I can only imagine what it’ll be like to read a whole volume!

Think you’ve got a typo there on the duration of the Blackshirts and Reds audiobook—should be 5 hr 29 min. I only wish the audiobook could have been read by Parenti with his beautiful Eyetalian accent and righteous anger But nevertheless, I shall read it!

Thanks for your hard work in creating and refining this list. Seeing it all laid out makes it a lot more manageable, since there’s such an incredible volume of literature out there that even deciding what to read can be overwhelming to the point that it becomes a barrier to actually reading anything.

https://www.theguardian.com/science/1999/aug/24/spaceexploration

The late astronomer and author Carl Sagan was a secret but avid marijuana smoker, crediting it with inspiring essays and scientific insight, according to Sagan’s biographer.

Using the pseudonym ‘Mr. X’, Sagan wrote about his pot smoking in an essay published in the 1971 book Reconsidering Marijuana. The book’s editor, Lester Grinspoon, recently disclosed the secret to Sagan’s biographer, Keay Davidson.

Davidson, a writer for the San Francisco Examiner, revealed the marijuana use in an article published in the newspaper’s magazine Sunday. Carl Sagan: A Life is due out in October.

“I find that today a single joint is enough to get me high… in one movie theater recently I found I could get high just by inhaling the cannabis smoke which permeated the theatre,” wrote Sagan, who authored popular science books such as Cosmos, Contact, and The Dragons of Eden.

In the essay, Sagan said marijuana inspired some of his intellectual work.

“I can remember one occasion, taking a shower with my wife while high, in which I had an idea on the origins and invalidities of racism in terms of gaussian distribution curves,” wrote the former Cornell University professor. “I wrote the curves in soap on the shower wall, and went to write the idea down.”

Sagan also wrote that pot enhanced his experience of food, particularly potatoes, as well as music and sex.

Grinspoon, Sagan’s closest friend for 30 years, said Sagan’s marijuana use is evidence against the notion that marijuana makes people less ambitious.

“He was certainly highly motivated to work, to contribute,” said Grinspoon, a psychiatry professor at Harvard University.

Grinspoon is an advocate of decriminalizing marijuana.

Ann Druyan, Sagan’s former wife, is a director of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws. The nonprofit group promotes legalization of marijuana.

Sagan died of pneumonia in 1996. He was 62.

From 2008 to 2011, Li made CRACK99 a reliable black-market marketplace, one that netted an estimated $100 million in sales. His inventory, investigators later said, was valued at over $1 billion.

Since it’s not clear from this write-up, those eye-popping figures (the ones concocted by the Department of Justice) are derived from the prices that the licenses were being sold for by the original companies, so it’s not $100 million in sales but $100 million in “value” (the idea of calculating a $1 billion valuation for the digital “inventory” is even more ridiculous). If you look on the actual crack99 website, you’ll see that most of the cracked software was being sold for anywhere from twenty bucks to maybe a few hundred dollars—this guy was not making millions from this. The government’s sentencing memorandum has the details; this includes the absurd figure of $3,812,241.57 for a single software license of some CAD software called “Catia VR520”, which Li sold to at least one other customer for the princely sum of $100.