Book Reviewed - Scale: The Universal Laws of Life, Growth, and Death in Organisms, Cities, and Companies by Geoffrey West

The nature of complexity The philosophical framework presented in this book represents a physicists’ perspective which states that one universal principle of scaling law applies for all complex systems such as living systems, cities, or companies. And this scaling law reflects systematic regularities from geometric and dynamical behaviors. For example, for a mammalian system, the author argues that a network that supply energy and remove waste from the animal’s system leads to the outgrowth of circulatory network constructed according to size of the mammal in question. This is the principle of scaling law that he argues also applies to all complex systems like cities and corporations and to living systems. The scaling law falls short of explaining the complexity that arises when matter (non-living) transitions to living matter (living cell) by caging a set of biomolecules in a highly organized manner that appears to contradict the second law of thermodynamics. In this scenario, less information creates more information, disorder becomes order, non-living matter becomes living where the newly created entity becomes independent and self-regulating that becomes aware of surviving, adapting, growing, and multiplying itself. Consciousness seems to pervade the living cell that continues to adapt and evolve. Consciousness seems to pervade spacetime where matter and energy behave according to the laws of physics. The physical reality we observe, and experience is based on the reality we perceive here on earth. The observable reality consists of 5% of visible matter and the rest 95% is made of dark matter and dark energy. We still don’t know the nature of spacetime and how reality appears for other living species in the cosmos. Near extreme gravity, where spacetime is highly curved (close to black holes,) the images look highly distorted. Scaling law is a highly simplified concept, and one may question author’s contention that it has universal application. The author is from the Santa Fe Institute (SFI), a reputed research institution dedicated to the multidisciplinary study of complex adaptive physical, computational, biological, and social systems.

Book Reviewed: Our Monongalia: A History of African Americans in Monongalia County, West Virginia by Connie P. Rice

The race and reconstruction in Mon County, WV In 1619, a group of thirty-two African men, women and children arrived on the shores of Virginia by the English privateers. They were kidnapped from the African nation of Angola. Thus, the migration of slaves started flowing into the new world. The first recorded African Americans in Monongalia County, West Virginia was in 1766, and a second group arrived in 1769. Part One of the book deals with colonial and early post-colonial period. Technically the slavery ended in 1863 when the state of West Virginia was born. The second part focuses on freedom and reconstruction, the legalized segregation, and the civil rights era. There were no personal diaries, letters, or legal documents of slaves or free blacks in Monongalia County in the early days of slavery, but part two comes from census reports, church records, school board minutes, and newspapers like Morgantown Weekly Post. Throughout the history of Monongalia County, African Americans have played a vital role in building and shaping the community. Both slaves and free blacks were among the first settlers of Monongalia County, and both groups contributed to the building of "Morgan's Town." Between 1770 and 1863, people of color never constituted a large percentage of the population of the county. The highest percentage was in 1820 when 4.45 percent (3.39 percent slave and 1.06 percent free) of the population was black. One of the interesting part of the history is the story of Henry Dorton of Clinton District. His story is the best documented among the free African Americans in Monongalia County. Dorton was born in 1748 near Bladensburg, Maryland, the illegitimate son of a white indentured servant named Anne Dorton and a black father. He moved to Monongalia County in 1790. He was a farmer and owned a substantial amount of land in the district. There are several grammatical and spelling errors, I wished the editor could have done better. This book is interesting to anyone interested in the African American history.

Book Reviewed: Israel: A Simple Guide to the Most Misunderstood Country on Earth by Noa Tishby

Israel’s resilience Over many centuries, the Jewish population have overcome incredible sacrifice to do inspirational things such as creating a nation of their own. They thrive against all odds. For them, survival isn't optional, it's a necessity. Israelis routinely carry on with their day-to-day lives not just when things are calm and peaceful but when rockets are launched at them, during conflicts and wars and unofficial waves of gruesome terrorism that precede wars. They not only survive, but they thrive. This is not a history book per se. But it is more of author’s story book, about her mother and grandparents. The author argues that over the course of recorded history, the land of Israel belonged Jews, Romans, and others but it was never a sovereign Palestine. Jewish people have built a state of their own on a piece of desert that was nearly uninhabitable, but they turned into a flourishing community of agriculture and booming economic growth, a foundation for the state Israel today. The author observes two potential problems in how the conflict with Israel is viewed by the larger Islamic world. The international community started paying for the protection of Arabs to a tune of $1.2 billion a year, and the United Nations help to perpetuate the problem. The United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) provide crucial assistance such as food, education, and healthcare to 5.7 million Palestinian refugees. Children under UNRWA are taught antisemitic propaganda and encouraged for violence and martyrdom. For Palestinians, the best way to keep the war with Israel alive is to maintain a perpetual "refugee problem" under UN legitimacy, which maintains an international concept of "right of return. This has become a conflict of Israel with Islam that is mobilizing opinion against Jews across the globe and the continuation of attacks by terrorist proxies of Iran. Every time a peace process starts, the Islamic radicals resist the attempts. When Israelis send soldiers into Gaza or the West Bank to deal with terrorists, Palestinians are killed, and the cycle of violence continues, which is exactly what Iran, and its proxies are after. The second problem, the author points out is the "boycott Israel" movements that have become legitimate. Activists are crying for sanctions and boycotts, effectively stopping Israel from helping the world and Arab neighbors advance in technology, science, healthcare, and agriculture. When you weigh the entire region and look at Israel's unique freedoms (of religion, speech, gender, LGBTQ+ rights, etc.) it is hard to understand why it feels like everyone wants to drag Israel down. The reality is that once Golda Meir, the first prime minister of Israel said that "If the Arabs put down their weapons there will be no more war. If Israel puts down her weapons, there will be no more Israel.” This is precisely what much of Palestinians and the Islamic world is after.

Book Reviewed: The Tyranny of Big Tech Hardcover by Josh Hawley

The tech giants and freedom of speech Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri describes as how the Big Tech companies drain prosperity and power from society by creating an oligarchy. These new-age corporations collect consumers’ personal data, they are tracked and fed into a vast data machine to produce algorithms that manipulate users with advertisements tailored for them. The author observes that this presents dangers to everyone through its addictive model, surveillance and data theft, psychological effects on children, censorship, and predatory form of globalism. These tech giants that include Google, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Amazon, and Apple also control the flow of information to censor, manipulate, and ultimately sway the opinion of the masses. A network of whistleblowers inside Google, Facebook and other companies explains how the tech giants are controlling the information we receive. For example, the market abuses of Google shows that it controls upwards of 90 percent of the market for online searches, both in United States and globally, and it has systematically used that market dominance to favor its own platforms. With Google-owned YouTube, advertisers pay a king's ransom to get their digital ads on YouTube, and then, according to the platform's customers and competitors, YouTube insists that these advertisers promise to use Google ad services to place ads on other sites. That's known in the antitrust world as "tying," the practice of conditioning the sale of one product to the purchase of a separate product. The famous example being Microsoft's effort to tie its Internet Explorer web browser to its Windows operating system in the 1990s, which a court ruled illegal. Google has tied access to ad space on Google Search in the same way, leveraging its dominance in both video and online search to create dominance in a third market. Even the information in Wikipedia is tailored to promote liberal values. In many instances the information is hyped up to promote the values Wikipedia sees fit. The author says that both Google and Facebook are ripe targets for antitrust enforcement and breakup, Google should be forced to give up YouTube and its control of the digital advertising market, and Facebook should lose Instagram and WhatsApp application. The author suggests that there are other antitrust changes Congress should make, to crack down on mergers involving digital platforms by giving the Department of Justice the power to designate major tech firms as "dominant." And those "dominant" firms should be prevented from merging with or acquiring another business, and all of them must undergo rigorous antitrust scrutiny. Senator Hawley concludes that by tearing down Big Tech's empire of surveillance and manipulation, the congress could send the power back to its citizens.

Book Reviewed: The Unfit Heiress: The Tragic Life and Scandalous Sterilization of Ann Cooper Hewitt by Audrey Clare Farley

The case of heiress Ann Cooper Hewitt This book narrates the sad tale of Ann Cooper Hewitt, the daughter of famed engineer and inventor Peter Cooper Hewitt, and how her case about eugenics, arranging human reproduction to increase the occurrence of heritable characteristics regarded as desirable. This was not only common but widely accepted in the United States and it targeted poor women and racial minorities. When Ann was caught with her hands down her under-garment by her mother Maryon Hewitt, she 3 years old girl. Her mother became overly concerned that her little girl has inherent deformities that may lead to promiscuity. The doctors back in 1920 confirmed the anxiety of her mother and later sterilized without the knowledge of Ann Hewitt. Much of the book discusses the legal and medical scholarship that worked to expose the inequities in the system regarding eugenics. When Peter Cooper Hewitt died in 1921, his estate was worth over $4 million, the future equivalent of about $200 billion in 2021, compounded at 4% interest rate. According to his will, Ann would receive two-thirds of this amount, and her mother would receive one-third. A caveat, however, stipulated that should Ann die childless, her share would revert to her mother. At this time forced sterilizations was widely accepted. Involuntary sterilization of poor, disabled, and wayward individuals gained quick acceptance to reduce the number of unsound people in the population. Ann’s mother Maryon Hewitt was first charged with “mayhem” in 1936 for her daughter’s sterilization, but charges were dropped, and Ann filed the civil suit against her mother for $500,000 in January 1936, alleging that she paid the doctors to remove her fallopian tubes without Ann’s knowledge. Soon after, the San Francisco district attorney charged Maryon and both doctors with “mayhem,” a rare charge that was reserved for cases involving the act of disabling or disfiguring an individual. Judge Tuttle dismissed the case against her mother and declared. “The prosecution has completely failed to make a case against the defendants, mother Maryon and the two doctors. According to the judge, sterilization in California was not a crime; therefore, mayhem had not been committed, and there had been no conspiracy to commit it. The judge disagreed with the prosecution that the timing of Ann’s sterilization (occurring within a year of her 21st birthday) was meaningful. He claimed, “The law makes no distinction between a case where the minor is 19 years of age and where the minor is five years of age.” From a legal perspective, “both are under the identical disability so far as consent to an operation is concerned, and the parents or guardian have the same power to consent in each case.” If this reality leads to situations that are unjust, “then the remedy is with the legislature and not the courts.” At that time, there was not a single protest, riot or even op-ed written to criticize the decision, recalls author Audrey Farley. In doing so, the ruling lessened the burden of proof to demonstrate a woman’s unfitness for motherhood. Also, in denying that mayhem had been committed, the case might have affirmed individuals’ right to sexual pleasure. Prior to 1936, legal scholars had struggled to apply the definition of mayhem (the “unlawful and malicious removal of a member of a human being or the disabling or disfiguring thereof or rendering it useless”) in sterilization cases because they couldn’t pinpoint the primary purpose of the female sex organs. If the organs’ primary purpose was reproduction, these scholars reasoned, then a case of mayhem could indeed be made. However, if the organs’ primary purpose was gratification of sexual desires, then there was no case for mayhem. Which was it? The defense suggested that pleasure was a right of all women, but procreation is a privilege of the certain few that hurt Mexican Americans in California who were branded as reckless breeders. This meant that now more than ever, eugenicists needed to emphasize societal interests over individual ones. Rather than simply claiming that sterilization was protective or even curative, they needed to stress the impact to society when defective individuals reproduced. Author Farley offers a fascinating discussion of medical ethics and legal responsibilities of the legislatures and judicial systems. This exposes the hypocrisy that existed 100 years ago when it was believed that upper class and wealthy have more rights with regards to reproduction because they have healthy hereditable characteristics.

Book Reviewed: They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South by Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers

The southern female slave owners In this book, the author describes the role of Southern white women in the plantation economy and slave-market system and disputes the belief that they played a passive role in slaveholding. In fact, she contradicts the stories told by some white sympathizers regarding slavery and female slave owners. Author Jones-Rogers examined the testimonials of formerly enslaved people archived by the Federal Writers' Project, and bills of sales of slaves bought and sold by white women. It turns out that 40% of bills of sales from South Carolina in the 18th century were white women buyers, and/or sellers. It focuses on how white women were groomed to become plantation mistresses from girlhood through various social norms and often exacted cruelty and sexual violence onto enslaved people. It dispels the notion that white women were gentler than white men. Slaveholding was a key mechanism for them to build wealth and maintain financial independence from their future husbands, and they skirted losing enslaved people to their husbands through various legal tools. The narratives are strong and clear containing no shortage of appalling stories of the violence and cruelty endemic to southern slavery. Within months of confederates surrender in 1865, enslaved people began placing advertisements in "Information Wanted" and "Lost Friends" columns of southern newspapers. They were searching for their loved ones. These ads described mothers, fathers, children, siblings, aunts, uncles, grandparents, many of whom were not seen for decades. They wanted to know if they were still alive. The ads were filled with yearning and despair, and often named white women owners as responsible for their separation. The author also looks at the other side of arguments in which the white women and their female descendants wrote remarkably different stories. Interwoven within tales of privileged living, these women constructed narratives that omitted the trauma of separation, loss of self-determination, or brutality of living conditions. In fact, they portrayed themselves and their female forebears as forever sacrificing women. They regarded that slaves should be happy that white southerners freed from the “African savages.” Took comfort in the notion that slavery was "God's own plan" for helping these inferior people, and white women were just following this divine instruction. Many of them opposed abolition, and the white women's economic investments in slavery lay at the heart of such accounts. Information obtained from slave auctions, courtroom documents, the ads from pages of local newspapers, military correspondence, and formerly enslaved people's pension applications provided figurative and literal platforms upon which white slave-owning women paraded their economic ties to the institution of slavery. The author concludes that Southern white women's roles in upholding and sustaining slavery form a larger history of white supremacy and oppression, and through it all, they were not passive bystanders, but they were co-conspirators.