Category Archives: Books Nonfiction

A Worthy Life

17 September 2023 By in Books Nonfiction, Philosophy, Religion, Uncategorized Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Socrates

By A.E. Taylor

Published by Forgotten Books

Copyright: © 2017

Original Publication Date: 1933

A.E. Taylor – Wikipedia

Author Biography:

Alfred Edward Taylor was born in Oundle, England in 1869, and died in Edinburgh, Scotland in 1945. He was a professor, a Greek classicist, and a philosopher of metaphysics and ethics. He spent his adult life at the ancient Scottish Universities of St. Andrews and Edinburgh researching and teaching the spiritual; the immortal basis for morality and the philosophy of Plato. Plato was a student of Socrates and as such he was a concern to and within the orbit of Taylor.

Socrates’, leaving no written record, entire philosophical corpus and biography have reached us today primarily through the writings of two near contemporary Greeks: Plato and Xenophon. Taylor’s contribution to our present day understanding of Socrates was to argue that Plato’s four basic texts on Socrates: Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, and Phaedo, are accurate depictions of what Socrates said and did. Xenophon, who also wrote extensively about Socrates but later, Taylor argued, is less reliable. This may seem trivial, but this point has been and still is contested due to the immense stature of Socrates as one of the founders of Western philosophy in general and ethics in particular. The basic question among philosophers is whether Plato’s writings describing Socratic philosophy are accurate or are amalgamations of Socratic and Platonic thought? Who knows? The dispute will continue till the end of days so we will leave it as Taylor says.

Taylor’s studies within the philosophy of ethics and morality centered on what is right and good, whether the two were complementary and/or achievable. Taylor argued right and good or the moral practice of the individual is constrained and flawed without the aid of the supernatural: God. His thesis was that searching inward, within oneself for rebirth and betterment, for a moral compass, flows only in circles leading nowhere. To reach a higher level of morality or good requires looking outward to the spiritual through contemplation of the eternal good. Taylor argued that the will to reach for a better or eternal good is impetus for the eternal, the divine good to reach for you. Additionally, morality, Taylor surmises, plateaus in the human confines of a person’s physical life, requiring, unfortunately or fortunately depending on your perspective, death to continue the soul’s moral journey for better or worse.

Socrates:

Any biography of Socrates is going to be short. Almost all authoritative writings concerning his work, teachings, and life that have reached us in the 21st century consists of approximately two hundred written pages, in English, by Plato and about three hundred English written pages by Xenophon with the two containing significant overlap. Taylor’s biography, using Plato and Xenophon as primary sources, is no exception managing to encapsulate Socrates’ remarkable life into a quick read of 142 pages. Within these few pages concerning this most remarkable man everything has been disputed except for the Athenians putting him to death for being a royal pain in the rear, some have used the term gadfly. That is the one piece of his life that no one disagrees with. No one disputes that he was put to death in 399 BC, and it is likely that no one disputes that he was a royal pain in the posterior, a gadfly.

Socrates was born, circa 469 BC, grew up and lived in Athens until he was put to death in 399 BC at the age of seventy. He lived during the Golden Age of Athens (478-404 BC) and the overlapping Age of Pericles (461-429 BC) both now combined and known by the excessively non-descriptive non-demonym: Fifth Century Athens. (Why classical historians thought this was a useful, didactic change defies any sound, logical reasoning. Alas it was changed to avoid hurt feelings of Greeks and Athenians whose best years occurred two thousand seven hundred years ago. How you soothe pouting children should not be an instruction manual for sane adults.)

Socrates only left Athens to serve in military battles prior to and during the (second) Peloponnesian War. He was a hoplite in the Athenian army, a heavy infantry soldier outfitted with a shield, sword, and/or spear fighting in a phalanx or block-like formation. By all accounts he was a good and courageous soldier. His first recorded engagement, at the age of thirty-eight, was the battle and siege at Potidaea beginning in 432 BC. lasting until 429 BC. Potidaea was a Greek city-state, approximately 155 miles, as the crow flies, north of Athens, threatening to break free of Athenian control. This battle helped trigger the much larger and costlier Peloponnesian War beginning in 431 BC and lasting until 404 BC.

Socrates saved the life of Alcibiades, a gifted Athenian general and politician, but exceptionally duplicitous and erratic. Socrates heroic action should have garnered him the prize for valor, but Alcibiades was awarded it instead due to his higher birth and rank. A very powerful disincentive to the rank and file indeed.

Five and seven years later Socrates fought for Athens in the losing battles of Delium and Amphipolis, respectively, during the initial stages of the twenty-seven year-long Peloponnesian War. During the battle of Delium in 424 BC, Alcibiades saved Socrates’ life thus repaying Socrates’ valiant deed and cementing their life-long, but problematic, friendship.

Alcibiades recounts a story of Socrates during the engagement of Potidaea that bears on the philosopher’s power, or possibly prophetic power of thought. One morning Socrates, while contemplating an assumed perplexing problem became motionless, a state he remained in until the next morning when he said a prayer and walked away invigorated, amazing his fellow soldiers who had been watching him through the night. This story has him either being completely lost in thought, refusing to move to avoid breaking that train of thought, or as another occurrence of the ‘Sign’, voice, or daimonion that came to him, starting in his childhood and continuing throughout his adult life.

The ‘Sign’ was a voice usually described as an inner call, not to action, but to caution, a warning of future woes to come. Socrates mentioned at his trial that whenever the voice spoke to him it turned him away from something he was about to do. Some believe the ‘Sign’ was simply his subconscious speaking to him while others feel it was divine. A message from God.

To stretch a minor detail, Socrates almost never referred to the Gods, just God in the singular, a minor point yes, but a point all the same that the ‘Sign’ may have been religious vision or experience from the perspective of monotheism versus accepted Greek polytheism. At his trial he states, “It is to fulfill some function that I believe God has placed me in the city. I never cease to rouse each and every one of you, to persuade and reproach you all day long…” His ‘Sign’ did not speak to him during his trial leaving him to conclude that the sentence of death was something he should accept.

Socrates’ ‘religion’ began with his belief in the soul, and that it was immortal and unchanging. The soul existed before you were born and continued after your death. He believed the soul was your truth, your essence, your reality beyond your corporal self. He believed the soul must be looked after and kept in immaculate condition.

Socrates believed that to care for your soul required a focus on personal growth. Growth comes from the pursuit of wisdom and knowledge, the study of philosophy, to further one’s understanding of not only yourself but the world around you. The pursuit of wisdom through what became known as the Socratic method, questioning and logical reasoning started with yourself: ‘know thyself’ and expanded to include the universe beyond your own flesh. To seek wisdom and knowledge by examining your life was to seek truth. Seeking wisdom and knowledge for the sake of truth is what Socrates meant when he spoke his famous line at his trial in 399 BC, “The unexamined life is not worth living.” Without truth, life is not worth living. Without truth one risks living a lie.

Socrates examined and questioned everything and everyone. His thirst for knowledge and wisdom all flowed from his stated belief in his own ignorance, stating “as for me all I know is that I know nothing.” No one that knew Socrates believed this statement for a second. He was known as a sage, a philosopher, and shrewd one at that. His wisdom was even embraced by the Oracle of Delphi who said Socrates was the wisest person in Athens.

For Socrates, though, his statement professing to know nothing wasn’t an expression of humility or ignorance but a challenge. A challenge to question one’s beliefs and opinions concerning all things seen and unseen. Two plus two equals four, everything else is questionable. “All I know is that I know nothing” is an acknowledgement that the search for wisdom: truth, at a minimum is transitory, possibly imaginary, and thus one must never stop searching. This was not to say there were no truths available to the living, but the search could be difficult and deceptive.

Socrates’ quest for the truth manifested itself first through his rejection of fame, money, and power. The corollary of that rejection is he lived a life of poverty, neglected hygiene, and wore no shoes. No shoes whether with feet on burning stones or frosted rocks. Pain and discomfort did not seem to bother him.

Secondly his quest for the truth was through the spoken word, never written. Conversations with his fellow Athenians occurred throughout the city, the Lyceum and the Agora were his two favorite haunts where he questioned his victims, and they were victims, in his famous ‘Socratic Method’ style of inquisition. Below is a short description of Socratic torture from the–Explainer: Socrates and the Life Worth Living (link below):

  • Socrates engages an interlocutor who appears to possess knowledge about an idea
  • The interlocutor makes an attempt to define the idea in question
  • Socrates asks a series of questions which test and unravel the interlocutor’s definition
  • The interlocutor tries to reassemble their definition, but Socrates repeats step three
  • Both parties arrive at a state of perplexity, or aporia (ed. a philosophical puzzle), in which neither can any further define the idea in question
Socrates’ Address. Louis J. Lebrun. 1867

A humorous sketch illustrating his method from Plato’s ‘Euthyphro‘ picks up near the end of a discussion concerning the gods:

Euthyphro: Why you don’t suppose, Socrates, that the gods gain any advantage from what they get from us, do you?

Socrates: Well then, what would those gifts of ours to the gods be?

Euthyphro: What else than honor and praise, and, as I said before, gratitude?

Socrates: Then, Euthyphro, holiness is grateful to the gods, but not advantageous or precious to the gods?

Euthyphro: I think it is precious, above all things.

Socrates: Then again, it seems, holiness is that which is precious to the gods.

Euthyphro: Certainly.

Socrates: Then will you be surprised, since you say this, if your words do not remain fixed but walk about, and will you accuse me of being the Daedalus who makes them walk, when you are yourself much more skillful than Daedalus and make them go round in a circle? Or do you not see that our definition has come round to the point from which it started? For you remember, I suppose, that a while ago we found that holiness and what is dear to the gods were not the same, but different from each other; or do you not remember?

Socrates: Then don’t you see that now you say that what is precious to the gods is holy? And is not this what is dear to the gods?

Euthyphro: Certainly.

Socrates: Then either our agreement a while ago was wrong, or if that was right, we are wrong now.

Euthyphro: So it seems.

Socrates: Then we must begin again at the beginning and ask what holiness is. Since I shall not willingly give up until I learn. […]

Euthyphro: Some other time, Socrates. Now I am in a hurry, and it is time for me to go.

Socrates: Oh my friend, what are you doing? You go away and leave me cast down from the high hope I had that I should learn from you what is holy, and what is not, and should get rid of Meletus’s indictment by showing him

Socrates’ learnings in search of the truth have been passed down to us through Plato, Aristotle, Epicurus, Locke, and others, climaxing in Jefferson’s preamble to Western civilization’s crowning ode to self and country: the ‘Declaration of Independence‘, proclaiming the fundamental, natural rights of man: Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

The phrase the ‘pursuit of Happiness’ has been thoroughly misconstrued to mean something foreign and vulgar to Jefferson’s original intent. The ‘pursuit of Happiness’ was not a grant to seek earthly enrichments and pleasures but a call to a higher state of being. Epicurus provided a definition of happiness that comes closest to the meaning of Jefferson, “the end of all our actions is to be free from pain and fear, and once this is obtained the tempest of the soul is quelled.” Life, Liberty, and the pursuit free from pain and fear. The ‘pursuit of Happiness’ sounds better.

Epicurus seeks a soul free of pain and fear. Socrates sought a pure soul. Both pursued it through the same means. Socrates and Epicurus’ greatest pleasure in life was the pursuit of wisdom and truth. Neither sought fame, money, or power nor feared death. Epicurus did not fear death because it was the end of the body and the soul. There was nothingness after death. No greater glory. No damnation. Just nothing. Socrates did not fear death because a pure and good soul went on to something better.

Socrates, then, lived a good life. A life in pursuit of truth. A death to continue his journey to a higher plane.

Socrates died, supposedly, for impiety and corruption of the youth. Both charges were difficult to square with reality, but they achieved the desired outcome: removing an inconvenient seeker of truth. Silencing the moral inquisitor, the examiner of the soul. Extinguishing the gadfly.

At the end of his trial Socrates’ soul was at peace but still he seeks truth: “Now the hour to part has come. I go to die, you go to live. Which of us goes to the better lot is known to no one, except God.”

The Death of Socrates. By Jacques-Louis David. 1787

Taylor’s Bibliography:

References and Readings:

Trending

17 August 2023 By in Books Nonfiction, Trading Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Trend Following: How to Make a Fortune in Bull, Bear, and Black Swan Markets

Michael W. Covel

Published by Wiley

Copyright: © 2017

Michael W. Covel – Wikipedia

(Note: This is the third of 3 reviews detailing the stories and methods of stock market trend followers and traders that collectively became known as ‘Turtles’. The following short bio is a repeat from the second post in this series.)

Biography:

Michael W. Covel, 54, born in Virgina, is an author of 8 books on markets and trading with a specialization in the market technical analysis known as trend following or ‘Turtle’ trading.

He also hosts a podcast, ‘Trend Following Radio‘, which he has, to date, recorded more than 1200 episodes. The podcast follows a format of interviewing leading authorities in economics, trading, and various other topics of interest to the investment world.

Market Players:

People analyzing and trading the markets fall into two distinct groups: fundamental and technical. Those taking a fundamental approach to the markets tend to be long-term investors whereas technical analysts have a short-term focus.

A fundamental analyst of the market keys in on news and financial data to assess the relative strength of a security. These investors tend to adhere to the Efficient Market Hypothesis/Theory (EMH or EMT): that individual securities are fairly valued. Inherent to this theory is that markets are rational. Stock prices reflect all the information available and are not affected by emotional spasms otherwise known as volatility. Ha.

Actually, volatility is a well-defined statistical measure of a stock’s price swings away from its mean. Large price swings equate to high volatility. High volatility stocks are riskier stocks to trade because the price swings are large and unpredictable. There are those on the technical side of trading that believe that volatility and risk are unrelated, but this always seems to be, at its core, a sematic argument. Additionally, higher volatility stocks have a higher price premium built into their option prices.

By sifting through mountains of market news and financial data investors are attempting to identify financially strong securities to hold for the long term. Also, in their quest to understand and know the markets and companies, they hope to uncover the rare, undervalued security which may lead to significant profit. Ironically, undervalued, aka value stocks, belie the premise behind the EMH. Doubly ironic, searching for value stocks is akin to unicorn hunting, neither exists in the real world, so why bother, in my most humble opinion.

The timing of entry to and exit from a market trade is the greatest pitfall for a long-term investor. A trade may take the price elevator south, accumulating significant losses before there is any data, or none, to support its rapid descent.

A technical analyst is only concerned with the security’s price, and its current trend. Is it going up, down, or sideways? There is a belief that technical analysts and traders are attempting to predict the future direction of security’s price, but this is incorrect. Technical traders, using statistical probabilities, attempt to take the path of greatest potential profitability. The greatest downside to technical trading is that all statistical analysis of a security or market is calculated from data derived from the past and the present but never the future so even with the best tools trends reverse themselves with warning.

Technical analysts like to think of themselves as card counters at a blackjack table trying to ascertain when the deck is heavy or light in high cards. A higher ratio of high cards favors the player. Stocks with a strong trend favor the trader. The problem with this analogy is that the US market has close to ten thousand ticker symbols that trade daily or to keep the metaphor intact about two hundred decks of cards for the card counting trader to digest.

Ten thousand securities, all with their own trend or no trend, all in constant state of flux, it is difficult to consistently pick the stocks with the winning trend. Losses are and will be incurred under the best of systems. Successful trend followers exit losing trades when they are down about 20%. Exit your losers and quickly to stay in the game.

Whether a fundamental investor or a technical trader, forecasting price is fraught with danger and losses. In the immortal words of Niels Bohr, father of the mathematical foundations of quantum theory: “It is very hard to predict, especially the future.” (Quote and variations sometimes attributed to others such as: Samuel Goldwyn, Yogi Berra, and Mark Twain)

Trend Following:

Covel’s ‘Trend Following’ deals with the technical analysis of the markets with a not so insignificant dollop of whining condescension directed towards the fundamentalists. The book is divided into three sections. The first two sections, written mainly by Covel, define and explain market technical analysis and trading along with seven in-depth interviews with successful trend traders. The concluding section is a collection of trend following research papers written by experts in the field of technical analysis and trading. Interspersed throughout the book are a plethora of epigraphs, epigrams, and aphorisms, ranging in worth from the profound to the quaint. Most are the equivalent of footnotes, sometimes useful and instructive, but mostly time-consuming and distracting.

The first edition in 2004 was a manageable 256 pages. The second edition in 2005 increased in size by 65% and totaled 420 pages. The 2009 third edition was even fatter with 464 pages. The fourth edition I can find neither hide nor hair of, but it likely experienced similar inflationary page count pressures. The 5th edition of this book comes in at an eye watering 688 pages: 578 pages of trending stuff and 109 pages of footnote/index stuff. Stuff is the correct word, mostly.

This book is beginning to resemble the 3-semester text for college calculus where every possible type of integral insists on its 15 minutes of fame. Teaching and learning take a back seat to the authors’ need to impress their peers. For the sake of future readers interested in trading on the price trend let us hope that Covel may stop adding material and start addressing the always interesting topic of concision.

Trend following, trend trading, momentum investing, ‘Turtle’ trading all refers to the same basic method of analyzing the market: probabilistic analysis of the current price and the trend of its price history. The concept of price and its trend is too simple of a concept for a good chunk of Wall Street traders to accept but we all follow trends without thinking. We follow the herd when deciding where to shop, what schools to send the kids to, what books to read. Why are stock price trends anathema to a good chunk of the investor class? Who knows? Ed Seykota, one the world’s most successful trend traders’ comments, “All profitable systems trade trends.” Trading at a profit or loss implies a trend.

To evaluate the results of trading on the trend requires a focus on absolute return. All that means is that one makes the most profit possible. Making the most requires that the trader be on the right side of the market at the right time. Being on the right side of the market starts with not fighting the trend, going with the flow. When the markets or security are on an upswing do not try to convince yourself that a downturn is imminent, even though trend reversals are common, betting on reversals is the road to bankruptcy. The trend is your friend. Stay friendly. Stay profitable.

Michael W. Covel Media:

References and Readings:

The History of Turtles

13 August 2023 By in Books Nonfiction, Trading Tags: , , , , , , , , 1 Comment

The Complete Turtle Trader: The Legend, The Lesson, The Results

Michael W. Covel

Published by Collins

Copyright: © 2007

Michael W. Covel – Wikipedia

(Note: This is the second of 3 reviews detailing the stories and methods of stock market trend followers and traders that collectively became known as ‘Turtles’.)

Michael W. Covel, 54, born in Virgina, is an author of 8 books on markets and trading with a specialization in the market technical analysis known as trend following or ‘Turtle’ trading.

He also hosts a podcast, ‘Trend Following Radio‘, which to date has recorded more than 1200 episodes. The podcast follows a format of interviewing leading authorities in economics, trading, and various other topics of interest to the investment world.

The previous post, ‘Turtle of the First’ was from the perspective of Curtis Faith who, in 1984, began his trading career in the first class of Richard Dennis’ ‘Turtles’. Michael Covel’s book is from the perspective of an outsider looking in. Before moving onto Covel’s story a quick recap from the previous post.

In 1983 Richard J. Dennis and his partner at C&D Commodities, their Chicago trading firm, budgeted $15,000 to run a recruitment ad in the Wall Street Journal, Barrons, and the International Herald Tribune seeking recruits to train in futures trading:

…Mr. Dennis and his associates will train a small group of applicants in his proprietary trading concepts. Successful candidates will then trade solely for Mr. Dennis: they will not be allowed to trade futures for themselves or others. Traders will be paid a percentage of their trading profits, and will be allowed a small draw. Prior experience in trading will be considered, but is not necessary. Applicants should send a brief resume with one sentence giving their reasons for applying…

From Richard J. Dennis et al ad in the above-mentioned newspapers and magazine.

From the replies to his ad Dennis chose 23 inductees into the ‘Turtle’ program that included college graduates with degrees in accounting, business, economics, geology, linguistics, marketing, music, and the US Naval Academy. Those from the paycheck world he picked a security guard, salesperson, broker, phone clerk, bartender, board game designer, and someone who listed himself as unemployed. An eclectic bunch for a very structured task indeed.

Dennis was looking for high IQ types willing to break from the herd and take risks. Intelligently calculated risks to be precise.

Dennis and his partner William Eckhardt taught the students in a conference room, not the trading pits, all they needed to trade in two weeks. Each student received $1 million to trade and was allowed to keep 15% of the profits.

They had one objective. Make as much money trading, on their terms, as humanly possible. It was definitely high risk, but the rewards were commiserate. The persistent need to win was mandatory if they were to survive as a ‘Turtle’.

Dennis insisted that to win, his students must always question conventional wisdom. He knew from experience in the trading pits that the majority opinion was wrong a majority of the time along with information coming from the news sources.

‘Turtles’ were discouraged from following the news, reading economic reports, or collecting stock tips because the markets move faster than information can be assimilated into the market. Or in other words information didn’t move the markets; people trading, often irrationally, did.

Conventional wisdom on Wall Street was to buy low and sell high. ‘Turtles’ tossed the conventional wisdom, bought high, and sold higher or shorted new lows.

Dennis and Eckhardt taught the ‘Turtles’ to follow the trend. They waited for the market to move then they followed it. Capturing most of the trend, up or down, was the goal.

They determined when to buy high, or to short stocks going lower, by observing breakouts in the markets or securities. If a stock made a new 20 or 55 day high, they bought the stock. If it made a new 20 or 55 day low, they shorted the stock. If the trend continued in the desired direction, they bought, or shorted, more of the stock. When the trend ended they sold.

It was a simple system and it worked exceptionally well for the ‘Turtles’ who collectively made profits of $175,000,000 over the 5 years they worked for Dennis’s firm. The spreadsheet to the right shows the individual ‘Turtle’ results while they were working for Dennis (source: Covel and the Wall Street Journal – not all ‘Turtles’ listed)

Michael W. Covel Media:

References and Readings:

Turtle of the First

10 August 2023 By in Books Nonfiction, Trading Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Way of the Turtle: The Secret Methods that Turned Ordinary People into Legendary Traders

By Curtis M. Faith

Published by McGraw-Hill

Copyright: © 2007

Curtis Faith — Amazon Picture

(Note: This is the first of 3 reviews detailing the stories and methods of stock market trend followers and traders that collectively became known as ‘Turtles’. Curtis Faith was a turtle and a trader. The two reviews following this one concern publications by Michael Covel a market writer and trading coach who has lectured and written extensively on trend trading and Turtles.)

In 1983 Richard J. Dennis and his partner at C&D Commodities, their Chicago trading firm, budgeted $15,000 to run a recruitment ad in the Wall Street Journal, Barrons, and the International Herald Tribune seeking recruits to train in futures trading:

…Mr. Dennis and his associates will train a small group of applicants in his proprietary trading concepts. Successful candidates will then trade solely for Mr. Dennis: they will not be allowed to trade futures for themselves or others. Traders will be paid a percentage of their trading profits, and will be allowed a small draw. Prior experience in trading will be considered, but is not necessary. Applicants should send a brief resume with one sentence giving their reasons for applying…

From Richard J. Dennis et al ad in the above-mentioned newspapers and magazine.

The ad was the opening volley to proving a nature versus nurture disagreement between Dennis and his partner William Eckhardt. Dennis believed successful trading could be taught. Eckhardt, a mathematician by training turned trader, believed trading was innate, natural, inborn. You either had it or you didn’t, and no amount of teaching could change that.

To settle the debate Dennis agreed to teach his trading style and rules to a select group, letting them learn the craft using his money. From the firm’s ad and a follow-up true and false questionnaire they cobbled together a group of candidates, 23 in two tranches of 14 and 9 that were taught the firm’s trading rules. The traders came to be known as ‘Turtles’ because Dennis had seen a turtle farm, of all things, in Singapore and he believed he could raise traders as efficiently as Singaporeans raised turtles.

Over the next 5 years the ‘Turtles’ as a whole earned, made is probably a better word, $175,000,000. Dennis won the bet, but he worried that no amount of instruction could ultimately overcome human nature. Not sure if the following quote is a contradiction or just plain old irony but he worried his ‘Turtles’ couldn’t remain true to their training, stating “I always say that you could publish my trading rules in the newspaper, and no one would follow them. The key is consistency and discipline.  Almost anybody can make up a set of rules that are 80% as good as what we taught our people. What they couldn’t do is give them the confidence to stick to those rules even when things are going bad” (from Market Wizards, by Jack Schwager).

Curtis Faith was a ‘Turtle’ selected in the first group and began trading under Dennis and Eckhardt’s tutelage in 1984. He was C&D Commodities’ most successful student, reportedly earning $31.5 million for the firm by the end of the experiment. To put that into context the 23 ‘Turtles’ as a whole averaged a little over $7.5 million each. Some twenty plus years later Faith published a book detailing his experience and methods living in ‘Turtle Time’ during the 1980s (apologies to Danny Flowers and Don Williams).

Faith was a risk taker, and he was probably the greatest risk taker of all the ‘Turtles’, even greater than Richard Dennis. Taking and managing risk is what traders do. They buy and sell risk. And you need nerves of steel or as Dennis states above: discipline. When managing risk, one needs a plan to get into a security and a plan to get out. In the immortal words in Don Schlitz’s 1976 song ‘The Gambler‘ made famous by Kenny Rogers: “You got to know when to hold them, know when to fold them…”

Traders buy and sell liquidity and price risk. Market Makers trade liquidity–making money off the spread between buy and sell prices. Speculators trade price risk. Buying low and selling high. Or with ‘Turtles’ buying high and selling higher or vice versa.

Speculators are not long-term investors. Speculators are short-term traders who have no desire or need to find the intrinsic or fundamental value of any security. Their only concern is price and which way is it moving; up, down, or sideways. The statistical analysis of price momentum and sometimes volume are the tools of the trade for the short-term speculators. This is usually referred to as technical analysis and technical trading.

Turtles are speculators, technical traders, playing trends in price that may not have a fundamental basis. Price trends without a fundamental basis are almost by definition irrational.

Adam Smith in his ‘Wealth of Nations’ postulated the first form of the Rational Choice Theory, that an individual’s actions are mostly selfish, which he dubbed the ‘Invisible Hand’. The theory suggests that individuals act in their own best interest and that their behavior is rational. At the beginning of the 20th century the hypothesis that the markets are efficient and rational began to take hold among traders and economists. This led to the Efficient-Market Hypothesis (EMH) or Theory that maintains that valuations or prices for assets such as stocks and bonds reflect all available information and are fairly valued. Only added information will then affect the price of an asset. This implies that it is impossible to beat the market. Just invest in DIAs, IWMs, SPYs, and QQQs and forget about them until you retire.

Faith and the Turtles say bunk to all that market rationality and index investing. Technical trading and trading like a turtle works because market movements are driven by the irrational collective behavior of the market participants or so they believed.

Turtles were trend followers attempting to take advantage of large price increases or decreases over a period of several months. Significant profitable trends happen infrequently with a high percentage of promising trend trades turning south soon after placing them. They experienced significantly more losers than winners but exited their losses quickly, usually around 20% below entry price.

Following trends is geared towards the present and what the market is currently doing. It is never about trying to predict the future. They entered trades when the calculated probabilities, through technical analysis, were in their favor.

The Turtle method was simple and easy to understand. The strategy could be summed up in one sentence. Trade with an edge, manage risk, be consistent, and keep it simple.

Trade with an edge. Have a plan and stick to it. Through experience or preferably back testing find a trading strategy that will have positive returns over the long run.

Manage your risk. Control your risk or in other words don’t bet the bank on a single trade and don’t hang onto your losers hoping for a turnaround.

Be consistent in executing your strategy. Do not jump into trades that look interesting but fail the tactical elements of your plan.

Keep it simple and follow your plan. Most of your trades may be losers but the winners will make up for the shortfall or drawdown. Think in terms of the long game and don’t fixate on the individual losing trades.

The Turtles tactics used in implementing their strategy were also simple.

  • Turtles traded liquid futures such as commodities, currencies, metals, energy, and bonds.
  • The Turtle’s most complicated tactic was position sizing the trades. Generally, the more liquid the market the fewer the contracts they traded.
  • The Turtles identified trends using two similar systems employing price breakouts at 20 and 55 days. They tried to enter as many of these breakouts as possible so as not to miss out on the rare but very profitable, large price movements.
  • All trades had stop losses.
  • Trade exits were set as a 10-day low for long positions and a 20-day high for shorts. They never exited a trade at maximum profitability but only when the end of the trend was evident.

Simple stuff and they made $175,000,000 with it. Dennis reportedly made $200,000,000 trading his own account.

References and Readings:

Bad Bees

30 May 2023 By in Books Nonfiction, Philosophy Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

The Fable of the Bees or Private Vices Publick Benefits

By Bernard Mandeville

Commentary and Analysis by F.B. Kaye

Published by Liberty Fund

Copyright: © 1988

Original Book Publication Dates: 1705/1714/1729/1733

Bernard Mandeville was a free thinker, a contrarian, a troublemaker and likely loved every minute of it. His writings on vice and free living were greedily consumed by the 18th century public, and his notoriety began with a simple poem of 433 eight syllable coupled, rhymed lines, a doggerel of no artistic merit but with a moralistic message that has echoed, in various forms throughout the ages. It was originally titled: The Grumbling Hive or, Knaves turned Honest.

Mandeville was born in 1670 in the Dutch city of Rotterdam where he received a classical education at the Erasmus school and a medical degree from the University of Leiden. In the medical field he developed a special interest in what we would now call psychiatry and the use of talk therapy for curing hypochondriacs, the same branch his father practiced. He anticipated Freud by 175 years. Upon completing his medical studies, he moved to London to learn the language and decided to stay. In London he specialized in treating hypochondriacs, stomach ailments, writing political and philosophical tracts, all in which he achieved minor fame and fortune.

Beyond these meager particulars of his early life very little is known about Mandeville’s personal history. To know him, but not necessarily understand him, one must study his pamphlets and books on politics and philosophy and everything he wrote was soaked with politics and philosophy.

Mandeville’s written works sold so well that dozens of editions were needed to keep up with demand. His most celebrated work was The Grumbling Hive which he published anonymously in 1705. This little ditty immediately became a hit with the public and generated an immense amount of discourse and criticism.

Over the next 25 years or so he expanded the poem with commentary and essays under his own name with the next updated edition coming out in 1714 titled: The Fable of the Bees: or Private Vices, Public Benefits. In 1923 he again expanded the Fable of the Bees with an essay attacking charity schools, free schools for the poor, as nothing more than a vehicle to assuage the guilty conscience of the rich. The schools, while teaching the basics, the three Rs, were also a forum for instructing young minds in morality and religion. Mandeville was not so much against instructing the kids in addition and subtraction but that teaching morality in a capitalistic society was counterproductive.

Mandeville’s premise was that the rich set up and donated to the schools to atone for their gains attained through vice and greed. Mandeville would likely surmise that today’s charity and political donations, such as George Soros’ funding of weak on crime prosecutors, was atonement for their selfish gains in business and the markets. To put it mildly this did not go well with the upper crust, but it did increase the sales of his books.

In 1728 Mandeville expanded the Fable of the Bees again by adding a second volume which provided additional defense of his thesis that vice is good in the form of dialogs: elaborations on the division of labor and their associated economics. The two volumes were published together in 1733, the year of Mandeville’s death.

Mandeville’s basic thesis underlaying the Fable of the Bees was that greed and vice were good for the economy and society. A person’s self-interest in the pursuit of wealth and luxury provides benefits for everyone. A rising tide lifts all boats. The idea of selfishness for the public good certainly predates Mandeville and continues to the present day. The 1987 movie Wall Street, Gordon Gekko played by Michael Douglas argues that the human march of progress is fueled by personal self-interest and greed. Self-interest to accumulate wealth and fame. Morality does not enter into the equation, or it shouldn’t.

Mandeville believed that vice had a negligible effect on the population, but he obviously understood that it was the gateway drug to harder crimes. He understood that victimless crime led to felonious crime. He understood the “Broken Windows Theory” before it had a name. As such he strongly advocated for a robust and universal system of justice. A system that John Adams in 1779 would codify into the Massachusetts constitution as “a government of laws, and not of men.” By laws Mandeville meant the rules of conduct that private society imposed on itself over centuries of trial and error. He was not prescribing a legislative solution to criminal behavior although he offered advice in that arena also. Rather his economic laissez faire attitude carried over to his thoughts on justice. The fewer government mandates the better. He would readily agree with the 20th century Italian political philosopher Bruno Leoni’s notion on government decrees, “legislation…has come to resemble more and more a sort of diktat that the winning majorities in the legislative assemblies impose upon the minorities, often with the result of overturning long-established individual expectations and creating completely unprecedented ones.”

He emphasized the word justice, as in justice for all, without giving much serious thought to the criminal part of the equation. Mandeville’s endeavors at navigating the differences between vice and crime usually led to ambiguous reasoning and muddy waters. He had a wishful belief in a harmless sort of anarchy where everyone didn’t or shouldn’t bother their neighbors — much. Mandeville was stuck between his belief that selfish behavior is good, and that morality is an illusion, leaving no room for compromise. In the end all behavior could be explained by our selfish desires and motives. Altruistic behaviors were just cover for a guilty conscience.

Mandeville’s intellectual, educational, and philosophical journey, with little supporting evidence other than circumstantial bits and pieces, could be a great case study in nature versus nurture. His father and great-grandfather were both respected physicians with the wherewithal to send him to the best schools in Rotterdam.

His formal education began at the local Erasmus school which gave the students a grounding in Christianity, literature, poetry, drama, art, philosophy, languages, and history with an emphasis on lifelong learning. Desiderius Erasmus, a 15th, and 16th century resident of Rotterdam believed that man could only rise above other animals through self-improvement and study.

Another local resident of Rotterdam that had a profound influence on Mandeville was his contemporary, although a few decades older than himself, Pierre Bayle, a philosopher, and skeptic in the purest sense of the word. Bayle believed Christianity did not have a lock on virtuosity and morality. He believed in religious toleration beyond Catholicism for the simple reason that he was persecuted as a protestant. And he believed that one shouldn’t burden one’s conscience with guilt from minor transgressions or sins of the flesh.

Thomas Hobbes, who died in the same decade that Mandeville was born, was an English polymath best known for his treatise on government and the governed: Leviathan. Leviathan is a discussion on how the individual and societies should be governed, and the covenants between the ruled and the ruler(s) that were needed to hold common-wealth, or as he called it, the Leviathan together. One of Hobbes main points about man as an individual in Leviathan, and which Mandeville was certainly familiar with, was that good and evil were constructs, mere names, for human emotional and physical appetites. The desires that make us human. Morality was nonsense.

26 years after Mandeville’s death Adam Smith wrote The Theory of Moral Sentiments where he introduced the concept of the ‘Invisible Hand’, a concept of individual self-interest driving the economic advancement of society. Adams stated, “They (ed. society) are led by an invisible hand to make nearly the same distribution of the necessaries of life, which would have been made, had the earth been divided into equal portions among all its inhabitants, and thus without intending it, without knowing it, advance the interest of the society, and afford means to the multiplication of the species.” Smith’s ‘Invisible Hand’ is practically interchangeable with Mandeville’s self-interest and greed thesis. Smith expanded upon the ‘Invisible Hand’ in his 1976 publication The Wealth of Nations.

The Theory of Moral Sentiments introduced the ‘Invisible Hand’ but was primarily intended to provide logical reasoning for man’s altruistic nature and furnish a rebuttal to Mandeville and others. Adams believed that morality was more than a word, more than an ethical nicety. Smith believed our sense of morality was real and natural. It was built into our being through the experience of living, and he termed it sympathy, what we would now call empathy. It was natural to care about the lives of others either because we have walked in the shoes of the less fortunate, or we can see with our own eyes what the less fortunate are living with or without. Empathy was the laissez faire sense of justice that Mandeville could not see, but should have, because it was in the opposite direction of selfishness. He wouldn’t look there because he believed it couldn’t be found.

Richard Dawkins’ 1976 book The Selfish Gene asserts that a human gene propagates itself into the future through the individual selfish motives of survival rather than through the desire to better a group or organism. The thought that a gene can be selfish is no more plausible than it can run a 4-minute mile, but it is a useful term to use as a descriptor. Dawkins claims that the selfish gene increases its chances of replication and survival by promoting altruistic behavior between like members of a group or organism. The selfish actions of the individual or the gene leads to unselfish actions of the group or the organism.

In the end Mandeville articulated a theory of self-interest driving societal economic advancement that causes emotional discomfort in most of us, not because it is wrong but because it is only half right. We may be selfish, but altruism and benevolence are part of our nature, a major part of who we are. Selfishness and altruism together advance our species and our society.

Bibliography:

  • 1685 de Medicina Oratio Scholastica. Regneri Leers, Rotterdam. An oration in which BM declares his intent to study medicine at Leyden.
  • 1689 Disputatio Philosophica de Brutorum Operationibus. Abraham Elzevier, Leyde. A dissertation delivered at Leyden in 1689, in which Mandeville defended the Cartesian position that animals are unfeeling automata.
  • 1691 Disputatio Medica Inauguralis de Chylosi Vitiata. Abraham Elzevier, Leyden. Mandeville’s medical dissertation in which he argued that digestion involved fermentation, rather than warmth.
  • 1703 Some Fables After the Easie and Familiar Method of Monsieur de la Fontaine. Printed for and sold by R. Wellington, London
  • 1703 The Pamphleteers. A Satyr, London
  • 1704 Æsop Dress’d or A Collection of Fables Writ in Familiar Verse. Printed for R. Wellington, London
  • 1704 Typhon: Or the Wars Between Gods and Giants. Printed for J. Pero, Little Britain
  • 1705 The Grumbling Hive, or Knaves Turn’d Honest. Printed for S. Ballard and A. Baldwin, London
  • 1709 The Virgin Unmask’d: Or, Female Dialogues Betwixt an Elderly Maiden Lady … Printed, and are to be sold by J. Morphew, and J. Woodward, London
  • 1709 The Female Tatler, by “a Society of Ladies”.  A. Baldwin, London
  • 1711 A Treatise of the Hypochondriack and Hysterick Diseases. In Three Dialogues. Printed J. Tonson, London
  • 1712 Wishes to a Godson, with Other Miscellany Poems. Printed for J. Baker, London
  • 1714 The Mischiefs that Ought Justly to be Apprehended from a Whig-Government. Printed for J. Roberts, London
  • 1714 The Fable of the Bees: or, Private Vices, Public Benefits. Printed and sold by J. Roberts, London
  • 1720 Free Thoughts on Religion, the Church, and National Happiness. Printed, and sold by T. Jauncy, and J. Roberts, London
  • 1723 An Essay on Description in Poetry with A Description of a Rouz’d Lion. Printed in St. James Journal
  • 1723 The Death of Turnus. Printed in St. James Journal
  • 1723 The Fable of the Bees: or, Private Vices, Public Benefits. Expanded Edition. Printed for E. Parker, London
  • 1724 A Modest Defence of Publick Stews. Printed by A. Moore, London
  • 1725 An Enquiry into the Causes of the Frequent Executions at Tyburn: and a Proposal for Some Regulations Concerning Felons in Prison, and the Good Effects to be Expected from Them. Letters to the British Journal
  • 1729 The Fable of the Bees: or, Private Vices, Public Benefits. Volume II. Printed and sold by J. Roberts, London
  • 1732 An Enquiry into the Origin of Honour and the Usefulness of Christianity in War. Printed for J. Brotherton, London
  • 1732 A Letter to Dion, Occasion’d by his Book called Alciphron. Printed and Sold by J. Roberts, London
  • 1733 The Fable of the Bees: or, Private Vices, Public Benefits. Volumes I and II. London

Readings and References:

(Cover page for The Grumbling Hive from UtahState Digital Exhibits. Cover page for Leviathan from Wikipedia.)

More Grease

2 April 2023 By in Books Nonfiction, History, History, Politics Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Great Society: A New History

By Amity Shlaes

Published by Harper

Copyright: © 2019

Amity Shlaes, age 62, is the Presidential Scholar at the King’s College, a Christian, classical liberal arts school in Manhattan where she teaches Coolidge, the subject of her most recent book. She previously taught at New York’s Stern School of Business, also in Manhattan where she lectured on Great Depression economics, a subject of her third book which was released in 2007. She is chairwoman of the board of the Calvin Coolidge Presidential Foundation of Plymouth, Vermont, and chairs the jury for the Manhattan Institute’s Hayek Book Prize located in, well–Manhattan. Shlaes is a past trustee of the German Marshall Fund, a public policy think tank promoting cooperation between North America and Europe, initially funded by the West German government as a memorial to the post WWII Marshall Plan. In the early 2000s she was a senior fellow of economic history at the Council on Foreign Relations, a think tank specializing in U.S. foreign policy and international relations.

Shlaes and Sauvik Chakraverti shared the inagural $15,000 Bastiat Prize, a journalism award given by the Reason Foundation, in 2002 for her political economy writing. (Chakraverti received the award for being the greatest libertarian ever.) She gave the 2004 Bradley Lecture, an American Enterprise Institute program series, on the Schechter vs United States Supreme court case that invalidated parts of the legal and regulatory over-reach during the FDR administration. Shlaes received the $50,000 Hayek Book Prize in 2007 for “The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression. She also recieved the 2007 New York City Deadline Club award, a journalistic Pulitzer type award for opinion writing. Shlaes recieved the 2021 $250,000 Bradley Prize from the Milwaukee based Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, a grassroots and faith-based philanthropic organization, for her work on economic history.

Amity Shlaes has five New York Times bestsellers: The Greedy Hand: How Taxes Drive Americans Crazy, The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression, The Forgotten Man: Graphic Edition, Coolidge, and Great Society: A New History.

Shlaes has written for numerous publications over years including The New Republic, The New Yorker, the Spectator of London, The New York Times, The Washington Post, the National Review, the Wall Street Journal, The American Spectator, Foreign Affairs, Bloomberg News, and Die Zeit. She currently writes a column for Forbes.

Great Society: A New History details Lyndon Johnson’s efforts as president to eliminate poverty in United States. On 22 November 1963, a few hours after the assassination of John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson was sworn in as the 36th president of the United States. Johnson inherited a robust, growing economy with low unemployment. As a life-long politician, inheriting a healthy economy was not something he believed he could run on for the 1964 presidential election and win. He chose to finish Kennedy’s sensible initiatives on tax rate cuts, budget reduction and civil rights guarantees to all while he worked out the details for his own signature plans that became known as the War on Poverty. The purpose of his strategy was not only to eliminate poverty but expand federal government involvement in education, health and finances for the elderly, and providing aid to the working poor and unemployed. Between August 1964 and July 1965 Congress passed and Johnson signed four major programs that were the prime tactics behind the strategy for the War on Poverty. The first bill signed was the Economic Opportunity Act which created the Job Corps and Youth Corps, along with providing work, education, and training for young adults. Additional programs were geared towards college students, rural poor, and migrants. The second bill passed was the Food Stamp Act which provided nutritional subsidies for the poor. The Elementary and Secondary Education Act was the third bill passed and involved grants to schools and states to assist in the education of low-income families. The final bill passed was the Social Security Act of 1965 which created Medicare and Medicaid.

Proponents of the War on Poverty programs state that poverty rates decreased, as defined by the US government’s Census Bureau, from approximately 23% in 1958 to 11.3% in 1973. The Great Society programs were not fully funded and implemented until late 1965 to late 1966 at which time the poverty rates had already dropped below 15% without any of Johnson’s anti-poverty stimulants. Poverty rates since the passage of the Great Society programs have stubbornly remained between 11 and 15%. An alternate interpretation of the Great Society programs is that at best, they did nothing to reduce poverty to, at worst, they cemented poverty forever more into a narrow range between 11-15% of the population. Inflation adjusted cost estimates for the Great Society programs from inception to present are somewhere north of $60 trillion or a little more than a trillion dollars per year.

Shlaes tells us the story of Johnson’s War on Poverty. She begins with the Kennedy years and ends with Nixon, but it is all Johnson in between. Johnson fathered the Great Society, nursed his skinny stepson into the corpulent war in Vietnam, and left before he had to pay child support. She tells the story of the events and happenings that brought us the Great Society, but she tells the story through the people on the ground and in the halls of power. Michael Harrington and Tom Hayden, socialists with the Students for Democratic Society who crafted the Port Huron statement, a communist manifesto which played a starring role in the birth of the Great Society. Abbie Hoffman who took over SDS and morphed it into a violent Maoist offshoot called the Yippies who were always throwing a temper tantrum against something. Walter Reuther, UAW president and king maker for the Democrat party and money man for all things socialist. Sargent Shriver, poster child for the Peter Principle, was the actual architect of the War on Poverty. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, an intellectual with a heart and absolutely no common sense until his epiphany on cause and effect in 1980s. Burns and Nixon who had the dubious distinction of following Johnson like the men walking behind the elephant parade with a broom and an excessively big bucket and they will be hated for it forever. And Paul Volker the man who showed the nation the secret recipe to fix problems caused by fiscally prolificate politicians — a barrel of remarkably high interest rates.

Shlaes tells this story through the eyes of the men and women who were there. She tells their stories and doesn’t offer much in the way of opinion, neither good nor bad. Even in the end she plays the historian without interjecting herself into the story but the story snitches on itself: good intentions and bad ideas are not the basis for public policy.

Shlaes’ books:

Shlaes’ Lectures and Video:

(The picture of Amity Shlaes comes from the Great Society: A New History jacket back cover. The graph of poverty rates is derived from Census Bureau data.)

A New Center

8 March 2023 By in Biography, Books Nonfiction, Uncategorized Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Galileo: Watcher of the Skies

By David Wootton

Published by Yale University Press

Copyright: © 2010

David Wootton, age 71, is the Anniversary Professor (a named professor in the British system is equivalent to a full professor in the American system…I believe) of History at the University of York in England. His work ranges from the history of the individual to the wider-ranging histories, and philosophies of ideas that shaped our world. His published interests concentrate on the Renaissance but stretch back to the Greeks and forward to the embryonic American experiment. He is an old-school historian with his scholarship supported by the evidence available coupled with the existing mores of the times. His selection of topics that I have read or perused suggests a thorough dearth of confidence in past historical interpretations and a jaundiced view of present sense and sensibilities. Or more succinctly and in his own words, “History is always about a particular time, a particular place; it is always about groups more than it is about individuals; it is always the history of somewhere.” and if I may so boldly add, it is always the history of (some)time.

Wootton’s written works (books) include:

Wootton’s lectures and pop culture additions include:

Wootton’s biography of Paolo Sarpi, a contemporary and patron of Galileo, likely provided, albeit 27 years later, the impetus and scholarship for Wootton publishing his second biography in 2006 on that aforementioned watcher of the skies. Sarpi, a devout Copernican and a supposedly not so devout Catholic supported Galileo’s heliocentric theories and shielded him, for a time, from his Roman inquisitors. Parenthetically, Wootton in his book on Galileo almost apologizes for writing biographies mainly because his peers look down on the genre, a sentiment I used to harbor but I now appreciate the category because they provide the who to the what, where, and when.

Bad Medicine, Wootton’s second book, postulates that doctors have dispensed more harm than good, beginning with Hippocrates in the fifth century B.C and continuing through to the present day. Covid or the Wuhan Flu pandemic will not provide the medical profession with the needed catharsis to dispel Wootton’s conjecture.

In The Invention of Science Wootton walks us through the birth of the scientific method starting with a supernova shining in the Renaissance night sky of the 1500s and culminating with Newton’s discovery that visible light contains a plethora, or at least 7 wavelengths and hues in the early 1700s.

In Power, Pleasure, and Profit, Wootton expands on the concept of selfishness driving all human progress. A concept, although anathema to all Christian and Western ethics and morality, was espoused by Machiavelli’s The Prince, published in the early 1500s and Mandeville’s The Fable of the Bees, also known as The Grumbling Hive, first published in 1705.

Wootton’s Besterman Lecture: Adam Smith, Poverty, and Famine, we find out that charity is not a word in Smith’s vocabulary. Academics and maybe the rest us can really get into the weeds.

And finally, before I get into Galileo, The BBC devoted 40 minutes interviewing four guests, Wootton being one of them, on The Fable of the Bees, written initially as a poem, as stated above, by Bernard Mandeville and expanded into a book length dissertation sub-titled Private Vices, Publick Benefits which proposes that personal pleasure and greed drive human progress not altruism or Christian charity.

Galileo, born in the small city of Pisa, Italy in 1564, lived to the astronomical age of 77, some 25 years beyond the average lifespan for that era. He spent his final years blind, serving a life sentence, originally in a papal prison but eventually the prison was exchanged for confinement to his home located in a small village outside of Florence. His crime was for authoring a book defending the heliocentric model of the universe as theorized by Copernicus in 1543 rather than promoting the geocentric model as demanded by the Catholic Church.

Galileo was a tinkerer and thinker more akin to our modern definition of an engineer rather than a scientist, taking innovative ideas and novel inventions to the next level. He didn’t invent the telescope, Hans Lippershay of the Netherlands in 1608 did, but Galileo’s design quickly became the standard and he eventually increased Lippershay’s 3x magnification to 23-30x. His leaden tube with a convex lens in one end and concave lens in the other end discovered the mountains and plains of the moon, the moons of Jupiter, the rings of Saturn, the phases of Venus, possibly the planet Neptune, individual stars of the Milky Way, and sunspots. Today we can purchase a 30x set of binoculars for less than $100 which we use to peep through our neighbors’ windows and watch songbirds in the meadow across the street. All his discoveries aided in the proof of a heliocentric universe, his universe being mostly what we would refer to today as the solar system. Our discoveries prove that our neighbors are weird.

Galileo was a fascinating man and genus who introduced the world to a new way of advancing our knowledge of the world and the universe. His tinkering and thinking were the rudimentary beginnings of what we now call the scientific method–observe, hypothesize, test, repeat.

His proof of Copernicus’ theory was mostly correct. The Church’s defense of the geocentric model wasn’t. The Church admitted their error in 1992.

Bits and Pieces

25 December 2022 By in Art, Books Nonfiction Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Fernand Leger

By Serge Fauchereau

Translated by David Macey

Published by Rizzoli International Publications

Copyright: © 1994

Fernand Leger in 1916

Serge Fauchereau, born on Halloween in 1939 in France, is an art curator; art critic; professor of literature, art history, and writing; and author of artist biographies and art styles. Fauchereau has spent his adult life educating the public on, and extolling, 20th century avant-garde painting and sculpture, specifically the abstract and cubist styles.

Cubism – The Woman in Blue – Legar 1912

Abstract art attempts to free visual representations of reality from the concrete, expressing form and color spiritually, emotionally, metaphysically without the chains of perspective, fact, or conclusions. Cubism, a mathematical sub-set within the abstract world, takes the whole of reality apart piece by piece, reexamines and reimages the pieces, giving them their own perspective, color, and frame; and then collects the many pieces into something greater than the one. Sometimes this works.

Paul Cézanne, 19th century French post-impressionist painter, is considered the father of Cubism but not actually a Cubist himself. Cezanne stretched the accepted norms of perspective, giving separate objects within his paintings their own reality, their own commentary. Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, along, to a lesser extent, with Fernand Leger, took their cues from Cezanne, developing a style that became known as Early Cubism in the first 15 years of 20th century.

Tubism – Three Women – Legar 1921
Contrast of Forms – Legar 1913

Fernand Leger, born in Normandy, France in 1881, was an extrovert who successfully kept his private life hidden from the public, expressing himself exclusively through his paintings and films. His early works, before 1908, were strongly influenced by the French impressionistic painters. Dissatisfied with his impressionistic efforts he destroyed all his paintings from this period.

Moving on from impressionism, he circulated with the Parisian modern art crowd, where he began to experiment with the Cubist style, finishing his initial works, La Couseuse and Compotier sur la Table in 1909. After WWI, in which he served on the Verdun front and was wounded, he developed his own style, a modified form of Cubism which he called Tubism, more a foray into pop art than a formal artistic movement. Beginning in the early 1920s he collaborates and directs art films beginning with La Roue followed by Skating Rink and Le Ballet Mecanique.

Till the end of his life in 1955 he continued to paint, lecture, exhibit and travel, cementing his reputation as pioneer in the world of modern art. His reputation continues to grow with his Cubist Contrast of Forms selling at a Christie auction in 2017 for $70,062,500.

Giant Before Us

18 December 2022 By in Biography, Books Nonfiction Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Isaac Newton

By James Gleick

Published by Pantheon

Copyright: © 2003

Isaac Newton at 46

James Gleick left Harvard in 1976 with a degree in English and a disposition towards independence from the 9 to 5. His initial attempt at independence after college was launching a weekly newspaper in the midwest city of Minneapolis, Minnesota. This endeavor ended in failure within a year, and it would take another 10 years before he could leave his day job, succeeding as an author of history of science and a provider of internet service in New York City.

His first book, Chaos: Making a New Science, was critically acclaimed and a million copy best seller establishing Gleick as a first-rate storyteller of difficult subjects to the lay public. He wrote two other bestsellers, both biographies, Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman in 1992 and Isaac Newton nine years later.

Gleick presents Newton’s life in chronological order, painting a beautiful portrait of his acheivements but also imparting a sense of his being as a human. His accomplishments were beyond exceptional, but his temperament was that of a reluctant member of society at large, not easily befriended, easy to offend, and not quick to forgive. Current hypotheses suggest that Newton may have suffered from Asperger’s Syndrome, one of the milder forms of autism. As a social being he appears a lot like Beethoven, also a genius but also without grace or courtesy.

Issac Newton was born fatherless, on Christmas Day in 1642 according to the Julian calendar, still in use in England at the time, or the less interesting 4 January 1643 by the today’s Gregorian calendar, on a sheep farmstead far north of London in Lincolnshire County. His father died about three months before his birth and in three years he was shuffled off to a grandmother’s care for the next 9 years to keep him away and out of site from his mother’s new husband, Reverend Barnabas Smith. His early education was at the ancient King’s School, already more than two hundred years old when he entered in 1655 and still operates as an all-boys grammer school to this day. Upon finishing at King’s School, he entered Trinity College at Cambridge in 1661 and, except for a year away in 1665, he stayed as a student and professor until 1696. Immediately following Cambridge, he became Warden of the King’s Mint and in 1703 became president of the Royal Society and stayed in that position until he died in 1727.

Newton’s contributions to the world were many and varied. His Three Laws of Motion were revolutionary in the 18th century, and as a testament to their lasting correctness are still taught to every school kid early in their education. The Law of Gravitation explained the orbit of the heavenly bodies and why apples fall and not rise, float, or go sideways. It has since been replaced by Einstein’s General Relativity but is still a particularly good approximation for us lessor mortals. Calculus. Enough said.

Newton also intensely studied the bible, believing that the universe could only exist through the existence of God. He rejected the Trinity believing there is one God, God the Father with Jesus and the Holy Spirit subservient to God. Newton also predicted that the end of times would not come before 2060, 38 short years from now. Still a little early to be maxing out your credit cards.

Newton researched and experimented with alchemy, including looking for the Philosophers Stone and the force that keeps the planets in their orbits. Seeking the Philosophers Stone may have been worthy of Harry Potter but I’m not sure about Newton. Newton never published anything on his alchemy studies, likely because it didn’t make any sense. Now looking for the force that kept planets from falling your head during a walk-in park was worthy of Newton and the rest of the world, especially Einstein. Newton found it and it was called gravity.

My one complaint with Gleick’s book is his derisive commenting on Newton’s fascination with alchemy through today’s lens of knowledge rather than accepting that understanding and meaning in this world changes, sometimes for the better, sometimes not. People respond to the time they live in not to the unknowns of the future. Newton put it this way, “What we know is a drop, what we don’t know is an ocean.” and one can only study the drop that he has.

One of my favorite quotes of Newton or anyone for that matter was, “A man may imagine things that are false, but he can only understand things that are true.” I liked this quote when I first saw it, not because it was profound, it was, but because it was an idea I had promulgated early on in my education, if it didn’t make logical sense, it probably was wrong.

Bourgeois Realism

11 October 2022 By in Art, Books Nonfiction, Uncategorized Tags: , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

The Impressionists: Their Lives and Work in 350 Images

By Robert Katz and Celestine Dars

Published by Lorenz Books

Copyright: © 2016

A small coterie of Parisian painters, less than a dozen, mostly French, mostly young and middle class, disillusioned with the elite’s adherence to Neoclassicalism and Romantism, began to experiment in the latter half of 19th century with bold colors and light, loose, broad brushwork and forms, simple, pleasing scenes of everyday life and contentment, landscapes painted in the open air: en plein air, painting what their eyes saw, and their hearts felt. Their style came to be known as Impressionism, a term lifted by an art critic who intended censure and derision from Monet’s painting: ‘Impression, Sunrise’ (shown above right). Impressionism, initially disregarded and rejected by the critics and the public, became the solid foundation for all painting to come; Post-Impressionism, Art Noveau, Cubism, and onto what is today casually labeled modern or contemporary art.

As Impressionism birthed the future of painting in the west, the Realists: Millet, Corot, Corbet, and others created the base for Degas, Manet, Monet to which they added something fresh and enjoyable. Realists painted the world as they perceived it: poor, laboring, dismal, dystopian. The Impressionists kept the Realists’ stage, the world as it is, but added cheerfulness and peace by experimenting with light and form.

Monet’s genre masterpiece, ‘Woman with a Parasol-Madame Monet and Her Son (shown above left), captures his wife and son in a leisurely stroll around a blustery Argenteuil, a suburb of Paris, in 1875. The woman and son are looking down on the painter with her umbrella blocking out the sun creating an impression of light dancing through the clouds and sky, imparting a stark contrast for the shadows below moving across the grass and flowers. The woman’s vail and dress ripples across her face and body in tune with the breeze. The boy is in the background giving the painting an added sense of depth. The detail of the painting (above right) shows the broad brushstrokes, bold colors and contrasts that came to characterize Impressionistic art.

‘The Impressionist’ brings form and substance to the lives of six of the greatest artists of the genre: Pissarro, Manet, Degas, Monet, Renoir, and Sisley, who gave birth to something new.