Brice Karickhoff > Recent Status Updates

Trucking along. Simultaneously an easy 5-stars and also the hardest book I’ve ever finished. Great fun!

Only book I’ve ever tried to read, loved, and given up on, not bc it’s bad, but bc it’s too hard. This is my third attempt. First try I went 250 pages, second try I went 100. Problem was that I wasn’t giving it the attention it deserved. Some books can’t be read in loud rooms or in 5 page chunks or without a pencil in hand. Thinking I’ll finish this time having learned a lot about learning.

The first chapter of this book knocked my socks off 14 times.

Plea #3 for someone else to read this book and provide me with a sanity check. It doesn’t read like a politically motivated opinion piece. It reads like a 900 page literature review. It occasionally goes too far (still gonna vaccinate my children) but by and large it has completely overhauled my understanding of the pharmaceutical industry and the govt agencies it has captured.

Plea #2 for someone to read this and refute it bc I don’t want to believe it bc then people will think I’m crazy, but when I read it, it realllly doesn’t seem crazy.

Can someone who understands this stuff PLEASE read this and give me all the counter arguments. I want to hear both sides and this book is obviously one sided. I want to hear the evidence based rebuttals, and “RFK is crazy” is not an evidence based rebuttal.

Can someone who really understands public health and pharma PLEASE read this and provide me with all the counter-arguments? It is amazingly convincing, but I know smart people who disagree. By reading this book I am only hearing one side, and I want to hear the other side, but it’s hard to find evidence based rebuttals (“RFK is crazy!” is not a rebuttal).

Read for about 30 minutes a day for the last 2 weeks. Never committed so much effort to a book (note taking, reading online, rereading pages, discussions with others reading it)… I can already tell this will be among the most formative books I’ve ever read.

Been reading on and off for four months. This book is a monster.

Going to be the best book I’ve read this year hands down

Just got the rundown of pre-WWII Russia-German relations. Oh my! As if I needed more reason to dislike Stalin. And Hitler. The last 200 pages were some of the most impactful history I’d never heard. Crazy things going on between the second and third most murderous regimes in history.

Busy work week slowed my pace, but going on vacation today. Maybe by the end of the week I can get to 50%!

Britain and France are so peace loving that they won’t stand up to Hitler’s games. Geopolitics are like dating: sometimes small justified conflicts are necessary to avoid an eventual world war

Through book 2. Big takeaways:

1. Racism and fascism can both grow very large while charading as something less sinister.

2. Limiting the power of the federal government and specifically the executive branch is important.

3. People will compromise on a lot of morals to obtain economic security.

4. Hitler was the smartest idiot to ever live

The nazis just ran off all the professors who refused to incorporate their race-theory into their fields. They said any study of physics, chemistry or mathematics that fails to be racially-aware is problematic.

One among many historical examples of why contentious sociological ideologues shouldn’t try to alter STEM curriculum. Counterexamples welcome!

Low key cause-in-fact of Hitlers rise: the abuse of executive action preceding his taking office. Separation of powers is key, and a critical part of our govt.

Here’s a political opinion for all of goodreads to see - I don’t like when the executive branch tries to create legislation (or when the legislative branch tries to do the work of the judicial, which also happens).

Marxism-Leninism and Naziism are often spun as opposite ends of a spectrum, yet they end at the same place (mass murder). Interestingly, this book has convinced me they also start at the same place.

Maybe the longest book I’ve ever started. See you in like 2 months goodreads! (Not entirely true - I’ll probably read a couple shorter books as I read this)