Nobody Wants Your Sh*t by Messie Condo

Subtitle: "the art of decluttering before you die". Published 2023. Audiobook read by Hillary Huber.

Lots of swearing. Good narration. Convincing? Helpful? I guess. It's all common sense, I think. My main motivation for decluttering is reduction of mental strain. I hate mess. 

https://www.psychologytoday.com/au/blog/the-resilient-brain/202302/the-many-mental-benefits-of-decluttering

Another is safety: swollen lithium batteries in old laptops and phones are a fire hazard. I found four! 

Another reason is privacy: not needed documents with names, birthdates and other sensitive information should be shredded or destroyed in some other way - soaking them in water and making them into a pulp is satisfying and quiet :) 

If you have old hard disks: check what's on them before disposing. If you cannot access the data anymore, destroy the device mechanically. Printers and scanners may have built-in hard disks or SSDs. Smart phones and tablets have SSDs. Be careful not to damage lithium batteries when attempting to destroy onboard SSDs - I had a Motorola phone that had the battery sealed together with the electronics.

The Bomber Mafia by Malcolm Gladwell

"A dream, a temptation, and the longest night of the Second World War."

Published in 2021. Read by the author.

An audiobook produced like a theatre performance, with sound effects, background music, and original voice recordings.

An interesting story of the discovery of napalm and its use in firebombing Japanese cities.

A story of the futile development of a mechanical targeting computer by a Dutch engineer Carl Norton - the 3rd most expensive project in American WW2 developments (the Manhattan project is #1, B-29 is #2).

A story of the insanely ineffective attempts to bomb Japan using planes launching from India, and flying over the bump - the Himalayas.

Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams

Subtitle: A story of where I used to work. Power. Greed. Madness. Read by the author. Published in 2025.

This is a book about Facebook, but it starts so slow, is narrated rather boringly, and is so wordy - why do I need to know the childhood story of the shark attack? - that I skipped randomly ahead after the  detailed story of the New Zealand's prime minister's visit to the Facebook HQ for a photo-op with Mark Zuckerberg. I landed in chapter 46 - Myanmar. Now this was shocking. I knew that Facebook had a role in the genocide - I knew that those who incited it, used Facebook, but I didn't know how important Facebook was in enabling it, starting with: 

• Early on Facebook made deals with local cell phone providers, making access to the Facebook website unmetered, which in practice meant that for most people in Myanmar, Facebook was the Internet.
• Facebook let local users use unofficial Facebook apps, which did not have a way of reporting hate speech. 
• Facebook did not have any local physical presence.
• Facebook did not publish community guidelines in Burmese.
• Facebook had only one Burmese speaking content moderator in 2014, a contractor, in Ireland.
• The head of the Facebook content policy was denying the existence of the problem of accurate and timely moderation.
• Facebook was not interested in developing the Burmese language support, which would help with moderation, even after riots caused by Facebook posts in 2014.
• Facebook hired a second content moderator in Ireland in 2015, who, if I understood correctly, was removing peace activists' and civil society's posts, rather than anti-Muslim hate speech, possibly being in cahoots with the junta.
• A month before November 2015 elections, Facebook removed opposition candidate accounts, which were re-instated by Sarah's team after being informed about it by NGOs from Myanmar (Sarah's team set up clandestine meetings with civil society organisations in Myanmar). 
• To be able to moderate Myanmar properly, Facebook would need to hire hundreds of moderators, like they do in other countries. They hired two extra for the period of elections, also based in Dublin.

...

Sarah writes: to have the best chance for being hired for a senior position at Facebook: be male, older, white, Harvard graduate, and be friends with the few people at the very top. An old Republican, Capitol Hill veteran told Sarah once: "Sarah, you know your boss Joel? He's a Jew who went to Harvard. [...] And his boss, Elliot? A Jew who went to Harvard, and his boss? A Jew who went to Harvard, and her boss? [she answers:] A Jew who dropped out of Harvard? [...] You are not like these people, and you'll never be like them, and the sooner you grasp this, the better.". Sarah took that advice to heart and tried to hire a very good candidate, a Harvard man, hoping to get the senior management's approval for expanding the Myanmar operation. Facebook didn't hire him.

The military lost the 2015 election, but did not give up.

In 2017, Facebook security operations team and civil society groups reported that verified accounts with large following in Myanmar were being hacked and used to spread hatred and fear, so people would demand the protection by the military. Facebook's algorithm promoted these posts because they received a lot of engagement. Sarah's team recommended these posts to Facebook content management and legal teams, but they refused to take them down, arguing they didn't violate local laws.

In late August 2017, the military launched a campaign of atrocities against the Muslim population. At least 10,000 people were murdered. Over 700,000 Muslims fled the country. The UN later recognised it as a genocide. Reporter Paul Mozur wrote in New York Times that the military was using at least 700 people spreading misinformation and hate on Facebook. They took over verified accounts of celebrities, fans, a military hero, etc. to pump out false, inflammatory posts. Troll accounts ran by the military helped spread the content, shut down critics and fuel arguments between commenters to rile people up. 

Sarah's conclusion is that none of her bosses at Facebook - Joel, Elliot, Sheryl, Mark - gave a f*ck.

----------

Update:

I've listened now to the chapters that I skipped originally. I got used to the narration. The story with the shark is referenced later, so I understand now why it's in. The breastfeeding dramas are super weird to me, not because I'm a man, but because breastfeeding is a natural, harmless thing, and the Facebook's policy prohibiting employees to breastfeed in public is cruel. My wife breastfed our kids in public: on a plane, in a park, anywhere you can sit down. A few months ago I saw a woman breastfeed her baby on a crowded train platform here in Australia. Nothing wrong with that.

It's a very good book overall, and very important to understand Facebook and global politics. It's also important that the author read it herself. It makes it more like a witness statement. If you need to be convinced to stay away from anything ran by Meta, it will help you. 

Man's Search for Meaning by Victor E Frankl

Read by Simon Vance. Released in 2004.

This short book was originally written in 9 days by a Viennese doctor Victor Frankl, shortly after his release from a German concentration camp. It was first published in 1946 in the author's native German.

According to a survey conducted by the Book-of-the-Month Club and the Library of Congress, possibly in 1991, it belongs to a list of "the ten most influential books in the United States."

This book is part a story telling about life in concentration camps, part a foundation for logotherapy - a psychiatric technique used to help patients by finding their reason to live, the meaning of their lives, in their specific situation/point in life.

It's a very good book. I listened to it a few times and probably should return to it a few more times in the future.

When our life has no meaning to us, we are miserable, get sick more often, or in extreme cases commit suicide.

There are three things why our life may be worth living:

1. Doing something that we think is worth doing. Having a goal, a calling, a mission.

2. Loving someone.

3. Suffering, when we think it is worth it, when it has a meaning in a bigger scheme of things.

------

One thing that I don't like about the book: in large part it talks about World War Two and the concentration and death camps, but it omits the word "German". When Victor talks about arriving at Auschwitz, he wonders if the train is still in Silesia or already in Poland... Poland is not a well-defined geographical and cultural area. Auschwitz at different times, belonged to Poland, Bohemia (Czechia), Austria, and Germany. Poland was re-created in 1918 after 123 years of partitions. Poland's borders, together with millions of people, were moved west in 1945 by hundreds of kilometers. Poland, in the period described in the book, did not exist as a country with land under its control.

When Victor talks about Dachau, he says "Bavarian camp". He has no qualms to say Japanese or North Korean camps, just not German. 

There was no country named Nazi. 

Germany invaded Poland in 1939 and annexed it. Part of it outright - to Germany proper, and part - to Greater Germany, as a temporary "General Government", until the Generalplan Ost could be implemented. 

Most of the other half of pre-war Poland was annexed by the Soviet Union*, and never became Poland again. These lands are today in Ukraine, Belarus and Lithuania. 

* - or Soviet Russia as it was sometimes called back then - my grandfather who was a young man during the war, was using the words: Niemcy and Ruskie to refer to people who attacked and occupied Poland: Germans and Russians.

On the ground, since 1939 to 1945, Auschwitz was within Germany proper. There was no border between Berlin and Auschwitz. Poles were expelled from the immediate surroundings of the camps. Poles or Poland had no say in its location or management. Poles' role was to die there, not just Jewish Poles, but also Catholic Poles.

This matters, because the use of such language as in this book, helped shift the perception for the responsibility for one of the biggest crimes in history from Germany to Poland:

In 2024, in Germany, an Ipsos poll of 2000 people conducted for the Pilecki Institute showed:
"Asked about responsibility for the Holocaust, 57% believed that Germans and collaborators from occupied nations were responsible to a similar extent. Only one third (34%) believed it was “mainly Germans” who were responsible and 9% that it was “only Germans”."

https://notesfrompoland.com/2024/09/02/gaps-in-germans-knowledge-of-wwii-nazi-crimes-finds-polish-study/

In 2024, in Israel: a poll of about 1000 people lead by Gisela Dachs from Hebrew University in Jerusalem showed:
"Asked whether “the Polish people [are] responsible for their Jewish neighbors being destroyed in the Holocaust,” 47% of Israelis replied: “Yes, exactly like the Germans,” and another 25% said “only partly.” Only 11% of Israelis surveyed said that the Polish nation was also a victim of the Holocaust, and another 18 gave no answer."

https://www.timesofisrael.com/france-seen-as-more-antisemitic-than-poland-in-new-poll-among-israelis/

Germans set up their administration in occupied Poland with German as the official language. Germans introduced terror. For each killed German, ten Poles were killed in reprisal (my wife's grandfather was killed in such a way). Germans killed tens of thousands of Polish leaders. Germans issued a decree that any Pole helping a Jew will be killed with the whole family. Germans told Polish Jews to move to ghettos. Germans starved Jews. Germans told Jews to get on the trains. Germans told Jews to take showers (enter gas chambers)... and now half of Israelis think Poles (Catholic Poles) are responsible for Jews (Polish Jews) being killed "exactly as the Germans"?

No reasonable person would say that a person murdered in an NKVD prison in Lviv in 1940 was killed in Poland, or that Poland or Poles as a nation are responsible. Or for that matter if the NKVD officer was Jewish, no reasonable person would blame Jews or Israel, even partially, for the crimes of the communist Soviet Union.

Nobody uses the adjective Cuban when talking about the Guantanamo camp. It's an American camp, not Cuban.

How widespread is that particular distortion of the Holocaust? Very. Most recent example: when Trump's government started kidnaping people in the streets and sending them to a prison in El Salvador (an independent country), a prison which some compare to a death camp, because there is no legal process to leave it alive, and the conditions there are inhumane, many posts on social media, said "Auschwitz was also not in Germany", or "El Salvador is a new Poland" gathered millions of views, and were NOT taken down by moderators, including by moderators of large Mastodon servers.

Why is this important? Because lies start wars. Lies are behind blood libel pogroms. Hitler's lies about Jews is what caused the Holocaust. Lies, secrecy, and scheming are causing immense suffering of innocent people all over the world. 

This is especially important for Poland, because of Israel's Samson Option policy, which could bring a nuclear attack on Poland if Israel's existence was threatened. This is not rational, but that's what lies do. I remember when someone stole the 'Arbeit Macht Frei' sign from the gate to Auschwitz and a member of Knesset (Israeli parliament) called it an act of war (by Poland). Later it turned out the sign was stolen by common criminals for some collector in Sweden. I know of only one other case when a danger to a state's survival might result in a nuclear holocaust for the world. Russia. In some candid interview, Putin said that if the Russian state was to stop existing, why should the rest of the world exist.

Everything is F*cked. A book about hope by Mark Manson

Read by the author. Released in 2019. 

This is the second book by Mark Manson that I listened to. It's also very good. It's very serious though compared to the other one. There was maybe one bit that made me chuckle. The ending is surprising and a bit of prophetic. I listened to the whole book twice and probably should do it again in a few years or at any time I feel like I everything is f*cked. Which it is now. From the US to Poland, via Australia, Ukraine and Palestine. Everything is seriously f*cked. Lies, hate, and greed cause a great number of innocent people to suffer and die, and it does not look like it will get better... until the AI takes over?

Part I 

Chapter 1 is about the hero Witold Pilecki who volunteered to be imprisoned in Auschwitz, and told the world about it.

Chapter 2 is about a patient named Elliot, studied by Dr. Antonio Damasio, who after a brain operation lost the ability to have any feelings, while retaining his thinking abilities. This is a chapter about the thinking brain and the feeling brain and their struggle for control over us.

Chapter 3 is about Isaac Newton's formative years and the laws of emotion:

1. When someone/something causes us pain, a moral gap opens up, and our feeling brain wants us to equalise.
2. Our self-worth equals the sum of our emotions over time.
3. Your identity will stay your identity until a new experience acts against it.

Chapter 4 is about finding a meaning, about religions.

Chapter 5 is about Meta von Salis and Friedrich Nietzsche, and also about religions and the nature of hope.

Part II

Chapter 6 is about Emmanuel Kant and the formula of humanity. Kids are driven by the feeling brain - they are learning what the values are. No empathy. Just needs. Adolescents apply what/if rules to decision making, but approach life as a series of transactions. Well formed adults do things that are good, because they are good, not for any gain.

Chapter 7 is about pain being constant. About the blue dot experiment. 

Chapter 8 is about manipulating feelings in marketing.

Chapter 9 is about the AI.

Zucked - Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe by Roger McNamee

I posted a short review on mastodon.social:

https://mastodon.social/@tom_andraszek/110835146181262835

Finished listening to #Zucked - "Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe" by Roger McNamee. A bit wordy in the beginning and author's trust in Mark Zuckerberg at a time of Trump's election annoyingly naive, but correct in the conclusion: #Facebook and #Google are monopolies that have too much of our data and too much power. They have proven to be a danger to democratic societies and need to be broken up and the internet more regulated to protect our rights.

The F*ck-it List by John Niven

It's good. Really good. The best. It has an unlikely hero. It is dark. It has guns. It describes real recent events. It describes a likely future or what could have been. It's dystopian, but the American reality in 2020s is dystopian. 

Audiobook read by Ian Porter.

Warning: 18+ content.

Karolina's Twins by Ronald H. Balson

Karolina's Twins by Ronald H. Balson read by Gabra Zackman

A very moving, and, as far as I can tell, historically accurate Holocaust story about a young Jewish woman from Chrzanów. Gets quite emotional towards the end. Well narrated audiobook.

Exile

Originally posted 2008-04-17.

Author: Richard North Patterson
Category: Fiction
Ready by: Dennis Boutsikaris
CDs: 17

A very objective look at the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. You will listen to many disturbing stories. You will hear from people living in that divided strip of land, talking about their rationales for living there, occupation, suicide bombings, hatred of others. Few will talk about their hopes for life in peace.

The author, Richard North Patterson prepared very well. He visited Israel and Palestine. He talked to influential people.

The fictional story is about David Wolfe and Hana Arif.  He is a US citizen and a Jew. She is a Palestinian. They studied together law at Harward, but their ways parted afterwards. They meet again after 13 years and that's all I can say without  giving up the plot.

The book is very captivating, especially towards the end. I did not mind traffic jams at all while listening to the story.

The narrator, Dennis Boutsikaris is very skilled allowing you to immerse in the story and almost forget that all voices come from the same person. Female voices sound a bit harsh, but maybe it was intentional.

Playing for Pizza

Originally posted 2008-06-18.

Author: John Grisham

Category: Fiction

Read By: Christopher Evan Welch

I do not know much about American football, but the story of an extremely unlucky NFL player Rick Dockery is still captivating.

Playing for Cleveland Browns, Rick makes 3 mistakes in a matter of minutes, and lands unconscious in a hospital. He's fired. Browns fans want to kill him...  

John Grisham likes Italy. This is his second book I listened to, that takes place mostly in Italy. He likes the food, the people, the clothes, the way of life. I like it too. It is hard not to. 

Predictably Irrational - The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions

Originally posted 2010-03-07.

Author: Dan Ariely
Category: Popular Science
Read By: Simon Jones
CDs: 6

Refreshing, if not groundbreaking, look at human behavior in the context of economics.
Dan Ariely writes about results of real, clever and meaningful research experiments in a very approachable way.
Even though this is a truly scientific book, it has very practical implications for regular consumers like you and me. Make sure you read it before making your next big purchase. An eye opener.

For all chapter overviews go to wikipedia: Predictably Irrational

Highly recommended for adults. Contains details of reasearch about human sexuality that may not be appropriate for young readers.

The Associate by John Grisham

Read by: Erik Singer
9CDs

Another story from the world of lawyers. We meet Kyle McAvoy when he is a senior at Yale law school. He is about to graduate and start a career in public law, but someone sinister has other plans for him. What will Kyle do with his life? Will he follow his ideals or will he give in to the dark side?