Here is the thing about old books. We usually think they are dusty and boring. But The Analects is actually a collection of vibes and conversations from a guy named Confucius. He lived about 2,500 years ago in China. He was a teacher who had a lot of thoughts on how to be a good person and how to live in a world that felt messy.
Book: Common Sense on Mutual Funds: Fully Updated 10th Anniversary Edition by John C. Bogle ISBN: 978-0-470-59748-4
Chapter 2 is where Bogle pulls out Occam’s Razor and cuts through all the noise about how the stock market works.
Book: Common Sense on Mutual Funds: Fully Updated 10th Anniversary Edition by John C. Bogle ISBN: 978-0-470-59748-4
Bogle opens this entire book with a story about a gardener. Not a hedge fund manager. Not a Wall Street analyst. A gardener.
Forty-two thousand people shot in a single day. That is the number at the center of this chapter, and it is almost impossible to hold in your head. Operation Harvest Festival was the single largest German shooting massacre of the entire war. Bigger than Babi Yar. And Reserve Police Battalion 101 was right in the middle of it.
Book: Common Sense on Mutual Funds: Fully Updated 10th Anniversary Edition by John C. Bogle ISBN: 978-0-470-59748-4
So there’s this guy named John Bogle. He founded Vanguard. He created the first index mutual fund available to regular people. And then he wrote a book that basically tells you everything you need to know about investing your money without getting ripped off.
Seven posts ago, I started this series because I wanted to understand something. Not just what the offshore world is, but how it works, who built it, and why it keeps winning. Now I want to share what stuck with me, what surprised me, and who should read this.
Twenty-three posts. One complicated, difficult, brilliant man from the 1700s. And a book that still makes you think harder than most things written last week.
There is a word the men of Reserve Police Battalion 101 invented for what they did in the final months of 1942 and into 1943. They called it the Judenjagd. The “Jew hunt.” Not an official term. Not something that came down from Berlin. The men themselves coined it. Because that is exactly what it was. They tracked human beings through forests and farmyards and shot them like animals.
And that’s a wrap. We went through all 18 chapters of Dan Kennedy’s No B.S. Guide to Powerful Presentations. Here are my closing thoughts.
Rousseau’s last three sections on Poland cover three questions: how people climb the ladder of public service, how you pick a king without tearing the country apart, and what to do about serfdom. Each one is practical. This is Rousseau working through real problems, not philosophizing.