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Goddess of Fortune Bibliography and Other Sources

December 22, 2015 By Andrew Blencowe

The following are the bibliography and other notes from the English edition of The Goddess of Fortune.

Bibliography

While obviously a work of fiction, the history is accurate.

This brief bibliography lists some of the more useful books and authors.

All books mentioned are available on Amazon.

In addition, both YouTube and Wikipedia are useful—the Yokohama sword story is based on a YouTube video.

This list is not meant to be complete and comprehensive, but it does cover some of the major points.

In addition, I would like to thank Dean Lekos whose tireless fact-checking and proof-reading removed countless errors; the errors that remain are due to me alone.

  • Shlaes, Amity. The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression. New York: HarperCollins, 2007.

This novel is inspired by The Forgotten Man, by Amity Shlaes. In fact, the seven words of the dedication are based on the first paragraph of the introduction to Shlaes’s book. The Forgotten Man destroys many myths and shibboleths and as such it is highly recommended.

I happened on this book from a review in the Economist. Before reading this book, I had the standard-issue regular commonsense view: the naughty and wicked Republicans caused the Great Depression, helped largely in part by the boozy excesses of the Twenties—flappers, Jay Gatsby, and all that; then the wonderful FDR saved the day.

Unfortunately, this view conveniently ignored all the facts, such as the Chicago School aphorism that all bubbles are monetary bubbles: the Dow’s rise from 200 to 381 between Spring 1927 and Summer 1929 was caused solely by the Fed’s printing presses; and the disaster of 1937—the infamous Depression Within A Depression—was caused by the ill-advised Excess Profits tax, much along the lines of the today’s policies of “Super Tax The 1%” (France has already implemented this. Plus ça change…).

A survey a few years ago showed that of 900 college history teachers surveyed in the U.S., 830 were registered Democrats; it’s likely Europe is even more unbalanced. With this bias, it is very unlikely that the truth will ever be told about “the wise old bird” (Roosevelt’s self-serving description of himself).

The photographs Rex shows Louise are depicted in Shlaes’s book.

  • Tooze, J. Adam. The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy. New York: Viking, 2007.

This book is seminal—most of the thousands of books about the Second World War in Europe speak in terms of battles and armies, and mostly focusing on the wrong battles at that (the five leading battles were all on Russian territory).

Tooze’s book is how all history should be written—starting with the most important aspect first, namely the money. This is the major theme of The Goddess—Sasaki’s printing press, etc. Wages is both engrossing and well written. The Notes section alone is pure gold dust. Wages suggests the obvious question: how did Third Reich survive until 1945? It certainly wasn’t because of the leadership from the top. It is clear that Germany could have won had Jodl, Model, Rundstedt, et al, done the strategic planning rather than the mad-cap Alice-in-Wonderland nonsense that actually occurred. It’s one thing to be an opportunist, it’s another thing to confuse beginner’s luck with professional acumen, and very short-lived luck at that (Greece in summer 1941 was the Austrian’s last victory).

  • Keegan, John. The First World War. New York: A. Knopf, 1999.

All books by the late John Keegan are a pleasure to read; his book on the World War I is no exception. The description of terror and misery of the British soldiers during the Somme is an abstraction from this book. (I was in Bermuda three years ago and read a gravestone in a Hamilton churchyard for a soldier who died on August 15, 1916, “From wounds received on the river Somme.”)

  • Beevor, Antony. The Spanish Civil War. New York: P. Bedrick, 1983.

Fat Herman’s double-dealing via the Bramhill is described in Beevor’s book, as is the description of the horrors of the Lincoln Brigade, and the Battle of Brunete.

  • Manchester, William. The Arms of Krupp. Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1968.

Jodl’s comments of 1870 are based on Manchester’s description of the effects of the rifled cast steel Krupp cannon, as is the presence of the two American generals. (Burnside and Sheridan are changed to Sherman and Sheridan—better alliteration.)

The Kaiser’s horror-filled evening in 1901 is described in detail by Manchester; Jules Verne’s submarine is converted to a space ship, “the engine is constructed of the finest steel in the world, cast ‘by Krupp in Prussia.’ ”

  • Heller, Anne Conover. Ayn Rand and the World She Made. New York: Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, 2009.

This book is an extremely interesting description of Ayn Rand and her acolytes. It is the basis of Speer’s visit to Barcelona. The train conversation is based on two likely candidates for the U.S. Presidency in 2016; I will let the reader deduce who they are; there are more than sufficient hints.

Other Sources

The Esquire article is F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Crack-Up” (Esquire, February, March, and April 1936). I learned of this from a quote in a John le Carré novel—Smiley is asked by Roy Bland, “who said ‘the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time?’ ” The article is available via the link above as well as in an Esquire compendium of articles from Amazon.

The Confederate one hundred dollar bill was bought on eBay for six U.S. dollars; good Union money.

Senator Beveridge’s 1900 speech is quoted verbatim and the complete speech is available online.

“Tim” is, of course, the English traitor Harold Adrian Russell “Kim” Philby.

Secretary of War Henry Stimson’s diaries are quoted verbatim.

Morgenthau’s notes, quoted verbatim, are from his appearance in front of the House Ways and Means Committee in May 1939.

“Cigar” and “The Diplomat” were nicknames of Curtis LeMay’s, Milch’s counterpart.

The “hairy hand in the ice bowl” is taken from a description of Lord Beaverbrook.

A “damn close run” is a slight misquoting of Wellington’s comment on Waterloo.

“{W}here bed and boys were also not expensive” is from Michael Holroyd’s Lytton Strachey: A Critical Biography, London: Heinemann, 1967.

The “ovaries rattling” quote is from the Austrian’s driver, commenting about Magda Goebbels.

The Caudillo’s mortgage plan is actually the HUD dictate, starting in 1992, to direct 30% of Fannie Mae’s and Freddie Mac’s mortgages to borrowers who were at or below the median income in their communities—the start of “Cov-lite.” It ended at 55% in 2007; what happened next is now ancient history.

“Whole thing goes arse over tit” is from the book A Bridge Too Far, describing a glider’s landing on soft ground.

“I don’t want to have to eat a broomstick” was a boast from the Reichsmarshall that “If any enemy bomber ever attacks Germany then I will eat a broomstick.”

Tex Wheeler and his much-displayed gold watch, a gift from Prisoner Number 1 at Nuremburg, are transposed to Hawaii.

Edwina Mountbatten’s well known adventures in Harlem in the 1920s are juxtaposed to Wallis Simpson in the Bahamas, ten years later.

ARB

Filed Under: Resources

Japanese Ultra-Pure Food ‘Paradises’

August 30, 2015 By Andrew Blencowe

[The following is an excerpt from the forthcoming The Last Bastion of Civilization: Japan in 2041.]

By Akira Yoshida, Ph.D.
Japanese National Food Standards Board (JNFSB)
Monday, 21 October 2041

Japanese Ultra-Pure Food ParadisesThe rapidly increasing cases of adulterated food being imported into Japan at the start of this century prompted the government to expand the scope and gamut of the Japanese National Food Standards Board. It was the case of lettuce imported from the “old China,” adulterated with human feces, that outranged Japanese housewives.

Most people do not realize today that the now ubiquitous Japanese Food Paradises were originally created as a research project of JNFSB. The initial name of these production centers was “Food Factories,” but even the most hardened bureaucrat realized very quickly that no self-respecting Japanese housewife would ever consider buying food for her family produced in a “factory.” So, a name competition was held in the JNFSB offices next to the Imperial Palace; the winner was a 21-year-old office lady, Miki Okino, originally from Osaka, who won the prize of four tickets to Tokyo DisneySea. Her winning suggestion was “Food Paradises,” a name the three judged unanimously agreed was the best. So “food factories” became “food paradises.”

* * *

The most important concept of the food paradise was to make Japan self-sufficient in food. The extensive attempts by the Americans to starve Japan to death in the early 1930s had not been forgotten. In addition, the rapidly aging farming population had to be addressed; not only was the farming population aging, but young people in rural areas were fleeing to the big cities, especially Tokyo, to escape the backbreaking stoop labor that all farmers endure; better to be working in a clean and warm Starbucks serving espresso than in the freezing cold of the fields back home.

These factors combined with Japan’s growing pre-eminence in robotronics led to the rapid development of the food paradises. Actually, the basic concepts were surprisingly simple: have artificial sunlight shining 24 hours a day, seven days a week; use both hydroponic and traditional soil, but the enhanced soil was a product of the Fiji Soil Company—three times as nutritious as real soil, and over 500 times more pure—no debris of modern society to pollute this soil; and provide purified water that was both nutritious and pure at the same time.

The “sunlight” was light generated from specially developed LEDs by the Toyota Motor Corp. and protected by 47 patents worldwide; this light provided the most perfect light to encourage rapid and natural plant growth—no chemicals or pesticides, just perfect light around the clock. Of course, different vegetables required different Growth Optimization Spectrums—the LEDs used for light-green-colored lettuce were very different from those used for dark-green spinach and broccoli; this differential spectrum constituted over half of the patents.

* * *

The area of most rapid evolution was the robotronics—in the early food paradise prototypes the plants were harvested with human-like hands that attempted to mimic humans. As is described elsewhere in this yearbook, one of the biggest mistakes that early robotronics engineers made was their slavish attempts to have the early machines mimic humans—akin to Monkey See, Monkey Do. This was a mistake. The correct approach, finally adopted after much trial and error, was to answer the simplest question: how can the lettuce, or carrot, or spinach best be harvested with the least bruising? And it turned out that a thumb and four fingers was one of the least effective ways—humans did it this way in the past for the simple reason they had no alternatives.

* * *

Obviously a hydroponic food paradise was the easiest case. In a hydroponic paradise the vegetable is grown in a highly nutritious water bath; no soil is used at all. Hydroponic cultivation has a long history dating back to 1627 with a book written by Francis Bacon; in 1699, John Woodward published his experiments with the cultivation of spearmint in water; in 1842 the Germans took the lead when Julius von Sachs and Wilhelm Knop published a list of nine elements they believed essential for the best soil-less cultivation.

Lettuce was the first hydroponic vegetable grown in the Japanese food paradises. After the first five years, the food paradises were all constructed by building robots, so the proliferation and growth of the paradises was extremely rapid: in 2018, just under 1% of all food grown in Japan was produced at a food paradise; by 2028 it was 45%.

Following the pioneering work of Sachs and Knop, the most important question the JNFSB had to answer was what is the optimum combination of trace elements and the type of light? Would a change of the spectrum mandate a change in the mix of trace elements? And if so, how could this be developed?

The elegant solution provided by the JNFSB scientists was to first list the trace elements and the likely upper and lower bounds. Then the possible spectrums to be used were listed. Once the lists were compiled, a robotronics program was created so that in the third basement of the JNFSB in Tokyo, an experiment of over 32,000 permutations was conducted. Each growing area or cell measured 15 centimeters square and was protected on all four sides by blackened aluminum shades to prevent pollution from the adjacent cells. In this way the optimum mix was developed in a little over two weeks. Not surprisingly, these optimum mixes were protected by worldwide patents.

* * *

There are clearly many benefits of food produced at food paradise. First and foremost, it is grown in Japan under Japanese control—never again could a starvation blockade by America hurt Japan. Second, the food is the purest possible, even by the strict Japanese food standards. More for amusement than for edification, the JNFSB did a comparison of lettuce produced at a Japanese food paradise with lettuce grown in the new North China Confederation and the United States. The results were as expected: the Chinese food had over 167 times the number of impurities, including—hard though this is to believe—traces of rat poison; the American samples had no rat poison but massive doses (over 1,120 times the Japanese sample) of herbicides including massive amounts of glyphosate known to create birth defects. Third, the growth rate—for a far superior vegetable—was reduced from 70 days to 10 days. Fourth, the “product density” (as JNFSB analysts still insist on calling the growth density) is over nine times that of a traditional farm per level. In other words, on the same area of ground, there are nine times the density of lettuce when compared to traditional open-field cultivation. But this neglects the fact that the robot-built food paradises are typically 16 or 32 layers and each layer is just 1.5 meters in height—no human ever enters a layer.

It is these last two statistics—the growth rate and the growth density—meant that Japan was exporting food as early as 2031. And the ultra-pure Japanese produce commanded a significant premium over the traditional vegetables produced using massive doses of herbicides.

In summary, the JNFSB is proud to have made Japan a food-exporting country for the first time in history, and is equally proud of leading the way in growing vegetables of unparalleled purity. While the statistical data is still sketchy, it seems that the highly nutritious paradise vegetables, that are now available to all levels of Japanese society, have added two or three years to the average Japanese life expectancy.

 


Originally inspired by this article: Here’s What Happens Now That American Farming’s Fat Years Are Over

AB

photo credit: Greensgrow Farm, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania via photopin (license)

Filed Under: Essays

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