Good, solid, vivid writing!

I'm not bored, however. I'm appalled and more than a little scared. We haven't learned anything!

How do we fix it?

I don't know.

We tend to not learn well, or quickly, learn from past mistakes, and seem to prefer to respond to the shit hitting the fan instead of thinking forward and doing the right things in advance.

Approaching 60, it is a reason my wife and I neither watch or listen (or even read much) about news any longer. It is simply groundhog day - over and over again (or is that redundant!)

And we will be given an eviction notice by Mother Nature.

then will get back to setting things to where they should be.

funds and have day jobs, lives to run, kids to raise and no staff. And are not Machiavellian anyway.

It's not their day job to outthink the likes of the Koch brothers. That is what they were taught/brainwashed that their choices in voting booth, their elected representatives and their donations to the IRS to support their elected representatives and their respective staffs and lawyers and accountants and strategists, etc. would do for them.

Sometimes I blame them/us, most times I don't.

people - no matter what - have issues learning from the past. And current short attention spans, reduced reasoning and analysis and time spent thinking - make it worse and worse - we as a species are our own (and earth's) worst enemy...in general.

That's what I was sure of at first, but I don't think that anymore.

Agreed, but I am speaking beyond percentages

...or houses for no money down to distract the marching morons.

I, too, tire of the reruns. Thank goodness I live in San Francisco. Why didn't I move here 30 years ago?

Someone's dreamy little fantasy. Yet it appears that the Captain we all admired for inspiring that spirit for so many years is just a money-grubbing capitalist on the real Terra.

Up until that part I was really enjoying this. Still do, but it gave me pause. Because it isn't the same dance over and over. It is getting shorter every time.

Soon, there will be no music.

History was easier to manipulate or hide back then, however now because of the invention of the Internet the new age Renaissance may very well avoid such ugliness that man will ascend to have a beauty and elegance that has the attention of the life force.

Yes it is far from being boring, in fact it is almost an addiction to know those cultural ways that were corrupted and went awry in this last century. Now knowing the Vatican has secrets, secret bank accounts in the world, or our own secret government metadata to control behavior.

Our passion for the secrets our government officials use to make decisions yet kept secret we find is nothing more than the a regular pattern of the ancient profiteering, tyranny, greed, power, and in America now self-evident; selfishness is apparent and obnoxious in our Congress, Senate, and Supreme court.

Yes, we have a very powerful corrupt system. One were advanced mathematics could be taught freely every day in the simple public weather report. But it isn’t, because that type of knowledge would give the citizen reasoning power to look beyond the charade of everyday breaking news and the next commercial break.

It is surprising more people don’t go berserk. Or they are yet suppressed by the media or advanced University studies. Especially in medical issues where there is insanity that twenty military veterans commit suicide every day.

Or from my own experience knowing the United Health Care System directly connected to Medicare, and AARP is likely to have a bogus medical data base for diagnostic determinations.

Saving this for later savoring.

Which is, coincidentally, the same amount of forward motion the QE2 gets from a gallon of diesel. There must be a metaphor in there somewhere.

Editing to add:

EXCELLENT summation - or introduction, depending on perspective - on a very intriguing subject, at least for me. First, of course, the inequalities scream at us, but there are other parallels between then and now. There was a confluence of events that greatly fostered this giant growth and concentration of wealth and power.

Did Lee touch on those at all? While parallel, they are obviously different, as virtually everything has grown in size and sophistication over the last half-millenium or more. At the risk of boring anyone who has got this far into the post, I'll jot them down and one can draw their own conclusions. In no particular order...

It was forbidden for obeservant Christians to lend money and profit from the lending. ANY profit was considered usury, which is usually reserved today for exploitative interest rates. Some ingenious soul came up with the idea of using Jews as intermediaries, thereby leaving a great deal of the profit for themselves while circumventing the proscription.

Wide acceptance of Arabic numerals made more complex commerce possible. It was simply to unwieldly to use Roman numerals, and until the Moors pointed it out, there was no written expression for "zero."

Acceptance of paper scrip instead of pounds and pounds of silver or gold. This, of course, demanded a high confidence in the issuer, but was essential for several reasons. The Knights Templar had had an internal "bank draft" system since the Crusades, but I don't imagine that was available to people outside the organization.

Lee's main thrust concerns the dark underpinnings of the explosion of art during the period, art funded by guilty Italian merchant bankers who hoped God's forgiveness could be purchased. Art held great power at the time, as there was no television, and the super-wealthy funded vast amounts of self-anointing sculpture and painting.

Cosimo de Medici is buried in a huge marble encasement directly in front of the altar of the one of the most beautiful churches in Florence. Forever.

I would like to presume he is squirming, but that is probably accepting a false premise.

So the financial malfeasance and the massive greed was more the backdrop to. and the means by which the Renaissance with which we are all far more familiar with was able to happen? Very interesting, but in a slightly different vein than I had thought.

Somehow, the Medici name has been greatly redeemed over time. Possibly because their bad actors were overshadowed by those of the Borgias? It would seem that there was room for more than one villain in this tableau.

Thank you for the introduction to this. Lee's book sounds like it should be on my "Upcoming Hits" list.

the more they stay the same. We're still fighting the same shit since the Bronze Age.

I'm still reading the book. It's powerful.