US Strategic and Tactical problems I

It seems to me the US faces two major military issues, one strategic and one tactical. This note explores the strategic issue.

The strategic issue, it seems to me, is how to maintain a military adequate to insure the safety of the US without driving the nation into bankruptcy. Military spending isn’t the only thing driving the federal debt to dangerous levels, but it is certainly one of the contributors. We spend more on our military (about $700-750 billion next year, depending on how Congress comes out on the next budged deal) than the next 10 nations combined, including Russia and China. That is more than all the rest of the federal government’s discretionary spending (ie – not including mandated spending like Social Security, Medicare and interest on the federal debt). For more detail use the archive in the sidebar to see my series on priorities posted in April of 2017.

As I argued in a previous posting, distance is the issue that makes forward posting of US military assets highly expensive, but some in government feel the strong need to have US troops and equipment pre-positioned throughout the world to overcome the distance problem, the inevitable delay in responding to aggression in distant nations.

The common military argument is that the US needs to have a large enough military to be able to fight and win a two front war, or at least win one and stalemate the second. It’s not clear our current military could do that even with the current massive spending levels, and so achieving that goal would require even higher rates of spending, and debt. I would argue instead that what we need is a strong enough military that we WITH OUR ALLIES could fight and win a two front war.  That was certainly the strategy during the Cold War, and it would be just as applicable today.

So it seems to me the focus ought NOT to be on building US military might to be able to win two simultaneous wars ALONE, but rather on working with our allies to share the load, and to be sure their forces are adequate and properly equipped and trained to do their share in any conflict, and that we have designed and tested the interoperability, not just of our combat forces, but also of our logistics, intelligence, and command systems. Of course we do some of that now, but not nearly as much as we would do if we and our allies were serious about a true shared responsibility.

In that respect I think president Trump has done the right thing in bluntly and forcefully pressing our NATO allies to step up to their pledge to spend at least 2% of their GDP on military forces (only 8 of the 28 NATO members did so in 2018, but that is better than it has been).  And despite the withering scorn of the media and Washington foreign policy elite directed at Trump’s decision to withdraw troops from Syria and Afghanistan and let the local regional allies (Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Israel) handle the matter, I think that is the right direction to be taking in the Middle East; it is consistent with sharing the load rather than bankrupting ourselves trying to do it alone.

I have a proposal

What is noticeable about this shutdown, like all past shutdowns, is that while thousands of government workers are furloughed or working without pay, and trying to figure out how to pay their mortgage and credit card bills and whether to return Christmas presents, members of Congress and the president are all on paid holiday, totally unaffected by the chaos they have unleashed on others. As Nassim Nicholas Taleb points out in his recent book Skin in the Game, it is immoral to make policy for others if one has no skin in the game.

Government shutdowns are highly disruptive, yet they have become a tool of political hardball by both parties.  We need to discourage that, and encourage more bipartisan efforts at compromise. So here is my suggestion:

Any time any portion of the government is shut down because of a failure of Congress and the president to pass and sign an appropriation bill in time, for whatever reason:

• a)      Both houses of Congress shall be required to remain in session 24 hours a day, all members of Congress shall be required to be present on the floor for a morning and evening roll call, and the president shall be required to remain in the White House, until the government is reopened


• b)      The pay of all members of Congress and their staffs, and the president and the White House political staff, shall be docked one week of pay for each day or partial day of the shutdown and shall not be eligible for back pay at the end of the shutdown.


• c)      If the government shutdown exceeds three days, all sitting members of Congress in both houses and the president shall become legally ineligible for re-election, on the grounds that they are obviously incapable of discharging their duties. In the case of a president in her or his second term who would already be ineligible for re-election, that president’s party forfeits 40 electoral votes in the next presidential election.

Of course Congress will get around this with continuing resolutions, and we ought to discourage that was well, but this at least will discourage the chaos of government shutdowns.

This shutdown is stupid!

Democrats, and some Republicans, in Congress have driven us to a partial government shutdown over Trump's demand for $5 billion for a border wall. This is stupid. The wall may be a dumb idea, but just to put things in perspective, Americans spend an estimated $5.9 billion a year on CHEWING TOBACCO.  So Democrats want to shut down the government over less money than we spend on CHEWING TOBACCO!!!!

Give Trump his $5 billion and let's reopen the government! Yes, the wall may be a dumb idea, but it is hardly the first dumb idea Congress has funded.

The strategic issue of distance

The main strategic problem America faces if it wants to be the world’s peacekeeper is the issue of distance. Even with today’s technology, it takes a long time to get large military formations to distant locations in the world. For example, Iraq invaded Kuwait on August 2,1990 , but we didn’t begin the counteroffensive until January 17 of 1991. It took almost 6 months to get enough troops and equipment assembled to begin a response.

One solution to the strategic problem of distance is to pre-position ships and troops and equipment all around the world, so that some are relatively near any potential trouble spot. That’s fine, but it is enormously expensive.

For example, on average it takes 3-4 ½ ships (depending on type) to keep one ship on station somewhere around the world; the rest are steaming to or from station, or in training, or in maintenance.  To move a carrier group from the US to, say, the Middle East takes about 17 days, not counting the time pierside to provision it and prepare it to leave (typically 30-90 days).  That is why we maintain 11 wildly expensive carrier strike forces, so that at least 2-3 can be on station at any given time. (and that’s why China’s two carriers are hardly a serious threat).

And moving heavy armor has the same problem. A few pieces can be airlifted in, but the main body needs to move by ship, taking weeks to arrive. In 2016 we spent somewhere between $91 and $121 billion, between 15-20 percent of the entire military budget, in 2016 just to maintain our military forces in the Middle East.

An obvious alternate solution to this problem is to rely on allies closer to the trouble spots to provide the main military forces used, rather than carry the enormous cost of maintaining American troops and equipment everywhere..  Rather than maintaining American forces in Europe to counter Russia, let the Europeans carry that burden; it’s their neighborhood, not ours (and their GDP is as big as ours; they can afford it).  Rather than maintaining American troops in the Middle East at enormous expense, let Turkey and Israel and Saudi Arabia and even Russia manage the quagmire there; it’s their neighborhood, not ours. Rather than facing off against China, let Japan and South Korea and India and Australia carry that load; it’s their neighborhood, not ours. We can certainly help by providing training and weapons systems and overhead intelligence and even some logistics support, but we don’t actually have to commit major forces there unless there is an active war going on..

The Washington neoconservative foreign policy consensus (or perhaps groupthink) of course thinks we ought to keep American forces everywhere, which is why the dismay when Trump pulls them out of Syria. But in fact we need to be realistic about the national budget – we simply can’t afford to maintain troops and equipment everywhere. We are already deeply in debt, and it is getting worse.

How dangerous, really, is Russia today?

The media made much of the two Russian nuclear-capable TU-160 bombers that flew to Venezuela this week for a few days of exercises with the tiny Venezuelan air force, which shows that the old Cold War mentality is still alive and well in the media, and perhaps in Washington as well.

There is no question that Russian engineers and designers are good, and that new Russian aircraft and ships are perhaps as good as anything we build in the West, though usually a bit behind in electronics.  For example, the new SU57 fighter appears to be quite good, but Russia has only ordered 10 pre-production prototypes, and 12 production models. In contrast, the 9 countries that have ordered America’s new F35 fighter account for 3,100 orders so far (the US Air Force alone plans thus far to acquire 1,763 of them).

Or consider nuclear attack submarines. Russian currently has 17 operational, as near as US intelligence can determine (one Sierra I, two Sierra IIs, three Victor IIIs, 10 Akulas, and one new Yasen). They also apparently have 22 conventional (non-nuclear) in service, most 25-35 years old and useful mostly for inshore defense. In contrast, the US has 51 nuclear attack submarines currently in service (32 Los Angeles class, 3 Seawolf class, and 16 Virginian class, with 14 more Virginia class planned or under construction).

Or consider the TU-160 (Blackjack) strategic bombers that just caused such a media hysteria. The Russians have 16 of them in service. We have 62 B1 and 20 B2 bombers currently in service, though for both the Russian and American bombers maintenance is a problem (largely for budget reasons in both cases), and probably neither nation could actually field on short notice more than half their total.

Certainly the Russians have enough force to cause us problems around the Russian periphery, and of course they are a nuclear nation, which suggests that we would be unwise to invade them (but Napoleon and Hitler both demonstrated that was unwise in any case). But they are hardly an existential threat to the US, or even a serious threat to Europe. Indeed, it is not even clear they could actually successfully invade and hold all of the Ukraine, though they might like to.

For all their designers are good, their economy just isn’t large enough to field and support large numbers of expensive weapons systems. In fact the Russian economy (GDP about 1.7 trillion) is about the size of Italy’s economy, and somewhat less than the economy of Texas.  Looked at in terms of GDP per capita, Russian’s is about $8,700 per worker while Texas workers produce about $58,000 a person.  

Media hysteria is never helpful.

Climate Change - yet again

As a friend pointed out about my last post, the French have a peculiar attachment to street demonstrations, many of them violent  (perhaps a residual national pride still in the 1789-1799 French Revolution, or perhaps just because they are French!),  so really the current street violence in France may not be indicative of how the rest of the world might react. A valid point. And of course there are other factors at work as well - the French middle class and rural class have been under financial pressure for years now, so it's not just the petrol tax that is at issue, French president Marcon has already shaken up the labor markets and unions and is highly unpopular at the moment, and the demonstrations have been taken over by thugs and fringe elements, which accounts for much of the violence and destruction. 

Still, the elites of the world are under pressure everywhere. Trump's election, the rise of the socialist Bernie Sanders wing of the Democratic party, the Brexit vote and the political chaos that has followed in Britain, and the rise of right-wing parties all across Europe are all symptoms of an international order under stress, largely because of growing inequality - in both political power and wealth- between a small elite class and the rest (the so-called 99%). And all of this unrest is being amplified by the new social media.  Imposing the radical changes recommended in the recent climate report would be hard enough in good times when the populace was prosperous and happy; in the current stressed atmosphere any additional hardships will just feed the anger and resentment at whatever party is in power.

I don't expect this problem to be resolved quickly. I think the world order will continue to be disrupted for decades yet, and I think there are other forces in the wings which will continue to feed it, including increased automation (which will put more people out of work, and perhaps depress wages for the rest), and the demographic changes which are beginning to depopulate many first world nations, which will badly upset the social safety nets and tax bases of nations.
      

Climate change - again

I argued in a post back in October that there was little chance that governments would follow the recommendations of the recent climate change report, and that if they even tried their populations would probably revolt.  So the French government raised its hydrocarbon tax this year by 7.6 cents per liter on diesel and 3.9 cents on petrol, as part of a campaign for cleaner cars and fuel, with a further proposed increase of 6.5 cents on diesel and 2.9 cents on petrol on 1 January 2019. The result has been four weeks of rioting in Paris and elsewhere in France. I rest my case.

Can you imagine what would happen if a government tried to ban eating beef, milk and cheese, or using wool (domestic cattle and sheep produce 20-25% of the world's methane, a greenhouse gas about 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide) ? Or if a government demanded that we cut in half the energy used to heat and cool our homes (think of the people in Phoenix with no air conditioning, or the people in Maine with no heat). Or if a government banned almost all personal automobiles?  Yet these are all recommendations of the climate report.

Recommended: The Dead Hand: The Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race and Its Dangerous Legacy

Now that the Cold War is over (though a new one may be starting) and some of the secret files of both the USSR and the USA are available to scholars, we are learning a lot that we didn't know at the time, most of it a bit unsettling. David Hoffman's 2010 book The Dead Hand: The Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race and Its Dangerous Legacy, working from newly declassified documents and interviews with some of the key players in both the US and the USSR, takes us into the thinking of Soviet and American leaders at the time.

This is interesting history, especially for those of us who lived through those times. But it is more than that; it is a template for how things, in both the US and Russia, are probably still evolving, especially with Russian resurgence under President Putin and the renewed US arms buildup in response to that resurgence (not to mention China's threat).  And it makes clear how easy it is for leaders to misjudge and misunderstand leaders in other cultures. This book is worth reading.

Saudi Arabia and the Jamal Khashoggi murder

President Trump is under a lot of pressure these days from politicians and activists to sanction Saudi Arabia over the murder of Jamal Khashoggi. What this reveals, more than anything else, is how naïve most of the political class and most activists are.

First of all, oil prices depend heavily on how much oil Saudi Arabia chooses to pump. At the moment, at our request, they have increased production to help make up for declining Iranian production (on account of US sanctions), thereby keeping oil prices lower. If we sanction Saudi Arabia over this issue, they can simply pump less oil and let prices rise, which actually helps them while it hurts us. And Russia would love it, because it would help their financial situation.

Second, Arab regimes may fight among themselves, but they pull together in the face of external interference. If we try to force Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman out over this issue we will be seen as an external power meddling in Middle East affairs, and probably most of the Middle East regimes will turn hostile to us for a long time to come – hardly a smart move.  It would be nice if some of the other princes unseated him, but it will be terrible for us if we are seen to be the reason he loses his position.

Third, we need Saudi Arabia to help us contain Iran. Pissing them off at this point risks destroying the coalition we have been painfully and slowly assembling to meet the Iranian threat.

Fourth, Saudi Arabia is already playing Russia and the US off against each other. We are trying to limit Russian influence in the Middle East, and at the moment we have more influence than Russia. The last thing we need at the moment is an ill-considered move that drives Saudi Arabia into Russia’s arms.

So yes, let’s condemn the murder of Jamal Khashoggi. There has probably already been enough bad press for Saudi Arabia, especially from Turkey, on this issue that they have probably figured out that this ought not to be tried again. But there are a lot of complex and intertwined issues here, as is usually the case with Middle East politics. Let’s remember that at the moment we need Saudi Arabia more than they need us, and let’s not cut off our nose to spite our face.

Nuclear Weapons

I have just finished reading Richard Rhodes' three excellent books on the history of nuclear weapons, The Making of the Atomic Bomb (1987), Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb (1995), and Twilight of the Bombs:Recent Challenges, New Dangers and the Prospects for a World Without Nuclear Weapons. (2010). They detail the fascinating history of this effort, the personalities of the key players, and the inevitable political battles that were involved. One comes away amazed that so many exceedingly difficult problems were overcome in such a short time. The creators of America's nuclear weapons - both physicists and engineers - were truly brilliant.

I have also gone back and read John McFee's The Curve of Binding Energy (1994), which deals with the question of just how easy would it be for an individual, or a very few individuals, to build a home-made nuclear weapon. To cut to the chase, the answer is - very easy! All one has to know is freely available on Amazon for less than a couple of hundred dollars. All one needs in the way of equipment is freely available on e-bay, from chemical supply houses and from the local hardware store. And in fact we know this is possible because South Africa, Israel, Pakistan, India and North Korea have all managed to do it without help from us. It is easy to make a crude weapon, though much harder to make a weapon small enough and durable enough to fit a rocket.  The only difficult part - the only real barrier to a terrorist building a crude bomb - is obtaining enough enriched uranium, or (preferably) plutonium to make a bomb. A few kilograms of plutonium, an amount perhaps the size of a  grapefruit or less, would be enough.  And far more than that has already gone missing from nuclear inventories around the world, though how much of that is really missing and how much is sloppy record keeping is an interesting question.
                
This is an important question, because as I have argued elsewhere, if we really want to deal with the climate change issue we need to move much or most energy production to nuclear energy, which means there would be a lot of plutonium (an inevitable byproduct of running a nuclear reactor) around the nation in power plants, and it needs much better safeguards that we currently have, or that private power companies have the financial incentive to provide.                   

Recommended: 21 Lessons for the 21st Century

Yuval Marari is a Israeli historian and a tenured professor in the Department of History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and author of  Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (2015) and Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow (2017), both global best-sellers and both well worth reading. His newest book, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century (2018) is extraordinarily good, full of hard-headed reasoning and solid common sense (though that sense is not anywhere near as common worldwide as the name implies!).

The world faces a number of increasingly difficult problems. Harari takes on many of these and proposes fruitful ways of thinking about them and approaching them. I like especially his piece on "How do you live in an age of bewilderment, when the old stories (fascism, communism, liberalism) have collapsed, and no new story has yet emerged to replace them?"

Midterm election

Both sides will of course try to spin the results as a big win, but in fact the mid-term election results are just about what one would have expected. The Republicans seem to have picked up a couple of Senate seats, and the Democrats flipped about 30+ House seats to take narrow control of the House. As I mentioned yesterday, a 30 seat shift against the current president's party is right on the historical average for midterm elections. For a president with approval ratings below 50% (as Trump has) a 37 seat gain is the historical average. A "Blue Wave" would have been 40 or 50 or more seats, and that didn't happen. For comparison, the Republican "wave" of 2010 picked up 63 House seats, and the Republican "wave" of 1994 picked up 54 House seats.

The media will analyze the results endlessly and in minute detail, but my own reading of the situation is that Democrats once again shot themselves in the foot, an uncomfortably common occurrence these days. Midterm elections, with generally low turnouts, are often determined by who is energized to turn out to vote.  Until the Kavanaugh debacle, polls show that Republicans weren't very enthusiastic about the midterms while Democrats were. The Democrat's down-and-dirty street fight on the Supreme Court nomination energized Republicans, and probably stopped what might well have been a "Blue Wave" in the making.

With Congressional political control split between the two parties now, not too much will get done in Congress - and is that any different than the last two years?  The one major bipartisan issue that might possibly get through both the House and Senate is a infrastructure bill, if either party can get its act together. The question now is whether Democrats, with narrow control of the House, will focus on policy issues that might help them on the 2020 elections, or will waste the next two years in fruitless attacks and investigations of Trump.

By the way, Democratic pundits were so sure they would do better because of Trump's low approval ratings. But at the point of recent midterms the approval ratings of  recent presidents have all been below 50% (2018 Trump 41%, 2014 Obama 38.7%, 2010 Obama 45.7%, and 2006 Bush 30.3%). It seems to me Democrats have spent too much time making up fantasies about how they were going surely to beat Trump and believing their own propaganda, and not enough time in realistic hard-headed planning on regaining power.

What this election should have made clear to Democrats is that just being "against Trump" is not a winning strategy - it takes more; it takes some real policy proposals. Another thing that this election seems to me to have demonstrated is that far left candidates don't do well in America. Most of the ultra-liberal candidates that were the darlings of the party - Beto O’Rourke, Andrew Gillum, Stacey Abrams etc - lost despite the enormous amount of money spent on their campaigns.

Recommended: Democrats Are So, So Bad at This

Election day is tomorrow, and while this political season is largely in uncharted waters (there are lots of unknowns at the moment, like who will turn out to vote), my guess is that there will be no “blue wave”. Republicans will probably not only keep the Senate but even perhaps pick up a seat or two. Democrats will probably win the House by a thin margin, gaining just about what the opposition party usually gains in an off-year election (historically the president’s party usually loses about 30 seats in the next midterms) but not much more.

As I have said several times before, we badly need a viable liberal party to keep the nation’s politics in balance, and the current Democratic Party simply isn’t that party any more. In that regard, let me recommend the article today in Slate by Ben Mathis-Lilley entitled Democrats Are So, So Bad at This.

It is not of course just that Democrats haven’t learned how to get their message across; it’s also that in this election they don’t seem to have any message except outrage at Trump. If the sky had fallen and the economy plunged after Trump’s election, as liberal pundits assured us it would, outrage might have been enough. But in fact the economy surged, unemployment fell to a 50 year low, and working class wages began to rise, all a strong reversal of the anemic economy under the Obama administration. In the face of that, outrage alone simply isn’t a meaningful policy.

The UN Climate Report

Most readers are probably already aware of the report issued Monday by the United Nations’ scientific panel on climate change. It predicts that we have only about 12 years before global warming will reach some critical "tipping points" that will accelerate the increase in global temperatures, and that we ought to strive to keep the global temperature rise to no more than 1.5° C. if were are to avoid the worst of the effects. This is much more ambitious than the 2° C. that was the goal in the recent Paris Climate Agreement.

Assume for the moment (a) that these predictions are accurate, and (b) that the technological fixes proposed  (reforest an area the size of Australia, cease using coal anywhere in the world, drastically reduce or eliminate the consumption of beef and dairy products worldwide, replace most cars worldwide with public transportation, heavily tax carbon emissions, drastically reduce the amount of energy used worldwide, etc, etc) would achieve this goal.  The report estimates that it would require approximately 2.5% per year of the world's total economic output (about $3 trillion per year) to implement these changes, though I think that is probably a gross underestimate when one looks at the steps proposed and thinks of all the follow-on ramifications.

The central question then becomes whether there is any practical way to actually make governments and populations agree to these profound changes in lifestyle, or to pay the costs involved. I doubt it. It is not just a question of the US making these changes; places like China and India would have to essentially give up their goals of modernization, and probably face massive internal problems as a result. Many, perhaps most, corporations would have to drastically change their business plans or even go out of business (think, for example, about the profound worldwide impact to car manufacturers, to chemical companies, to the agricultural sector) and produce massive unemployment.

Could any government, even if it had the political will to do so, actually enforce these changes on their populations without getting voted out of office or overthrown by revolutions? And could any political party, anywhere in the world, ever get enough political will to even attempt it?  Certainly I don't think either the Republican or the Democratic party in the US could do so. Oh, Democrats might talk the talk, but I doubt they would attempt more than token moves in that direction (like slightly raising the mileage requirements on some small subset of motor vehicles), and if they did do more than token moves I doubt they could hold political power very long.

Yes, it might be wise and rational to make these changes, even if there is a possibility that the predictions might be overly pessimistic, but practically I think we need to prepare to live with the climate change and accommodate to it, because human nature being what it is I doubt the world can summon the will to make the changes proposed in time to make a difference. Yes, if the predictions are even half accurate the results will be profound, and million or even billions of people will be displaced, economies will be profoundly changed, and food worldwide may get short. But getting humans to bear pain now for a future benefit that they can't really see yet is incredibly difficult.

Wars are incredibly destructive, as everyone can see, yet we haven't yet managed to eliminate wars. So why does anyone think we can get people to be rational about this issue?

The madness of crowds

Journalist Charles MacKay published his book “The Madness of Crowds” in 1841. Friedrich Nietzsche said “In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.” And we have always known that lynch mobs, once they form, will do things, horrible things, that no individual in the crowd would ever be willing to do alone.

I think of that as I watch the bitter liberal/conservative, religious/secular, rural/urban, etc etc battles in American’s current cultural and political wars.  We have had bitter divides in the nation before, and it even once led to the Civil War. But this is as bitter as I have seen it in my lifetime, and I keep wondering why.

One factor certainly is that we have no external enemy to draw us together as we had during the Cold War or World War II. So now that we aren’t facing outward to protect our nation against a common foe we have fallen to fighting bitterly among ourselves – a common enough occurrence in groups and nations.

But I am beginning to suspect another cause, the rise of social media. I find it interesting, and perhaps significant, that people on social media, where they are essentially anonymous, become so vituperative and irrational. Read any of the millions of flame wars going on at any given time to see what I mean. More significantly, notice that the comments section of a posting often only goes three or four comments deep before people begin to be uncivil to each other. (That is why comments are turned off on this blog).

It seems to me likely that the effect of social media is to facilitate the rapid formation of virtual crowds around an issue, which then blows up out of all proportionality and demonstrates all the irrationality and blind brutality of a lynch mob.  Of course the mainstream media loves it; it produces great stories and drives readership, but it also continues to amplify the echo chamber that is feeding the crowd’s frenzy.

The level of bitterness and irrationality, and yes, hypocrisy, evident on all sides in the recent Kavanaugh Supreme Court battle demonstrated all these symptoms of crowd madness. And for that matter the same effect can be seen on the #MeToo movement, the #NeverTrump movement, and dozens of other current “movements” being driven largely by social media.

Social media was supposed to be a boon to humankind. It may turn out to be a disaster for us.

Recommended: The Righteous Mind

Jonathan Haidt is a moral psychologist and Professor of Ethical Leadership at New York University. If you have never heard of "moral psychology" before it is because until recently it was a near-moribund field. Moral psychology is the study of how humans define and use morality. His 2013 book The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divide by Politics and Religion is a profoundly important book in today's highly irrational, bitterly decisive political and religious atmosphere, not only to understand the current battles in America, such as the emotional fight over the recent Supreme Court nomination of Justice Kavanaugh, but also to understand larger issues such as the roots of the battles between the West and the Muslim world, or China, or Russia. To name just three important insights from the book (there are far more): (1)  there are far more dimensions to morality than the justice/fairness dimension that is almost the only dimension American culture focuses on, (2) Americans, and especially the educated middle-class Americans that are the group that most psychologist study, are highly atypical in the world as a whole, which calls into question much of our psychological research, and (3) not only are humans driven more by their emotions/intuitions than by reason (others have said this too), but in fact reason itself simply cannot operate without emotional/intuitions input.

Read this book. It will change your thinking and your perspective on lots of issues.

Supreme Court nominations

If one backs off from the highly polarized and divisive battles going on over this Supreme Court nomination, really nothing exceptional is happening. Democratic presidents tend, naturally enough, to nominate more liberal justices while Republicans tend, naturally, to nominate more conservative justices. Republicans (nominally, if Trump can be considered a Republican) hold the presidency at the moment, so of course more conservative justices are going to be nominated. If Hillary had won no doubt the nominated justices would have been more liberal. What is new here?

Justice Gorsuch, more or less a conservative, was nominated by a Republican president to replace Justice Scalia, also a conservative nominated by a Republican president (Reagan). Justice Kavanaugh, a conservative, has been nominated by a Republican president to replace Justice Stevens, a moderate but a bit on the conservative side, who was nominated by a Republican president (Ford). Seems to me more or less what one would expect. No one was surprised when Democratic president Obama nominated Justice Sotomayor and Justice Kagen, both liberals, and in fact while some Republican Senators grumbled a bit, none felt the need to do the sort of no-holds-barred down-and-dirty street fight battle that has met Kavanaugh’s nomination. In fact Sotomayor was confirmed by a vote of 68-31 and Kagan by a vote of 63-37, with some Republicans joining their Democratic colleagues.

There has been much made of the fact that the Republican-controlled Senate wouldn’t consider president Obama’s last nomination of Merrick Garland just before the election, That maneuver is actually called the “Biden rule” because it was (then) Democratic Senator Joseph Biden who in a speech in 1992 first proposed the idea.  Apparently it was OK for Democrats to use this maneuver, just not for Republicans to use it.

Of course some liberals don’t want so-called “conservatives” on the bench because they want the Supreme Court to be able to impose by legal fiat policies they can’t get enacted through normal legislative channels.  “Conservative” justices tend to rule based on the wording of laws and the Constitution, and not to “creatively expand” the meaning beyond what the wording implies on the basis of their own political or cultural biases. And frankly I agree with that approach. Of course things have changed since the Constitution was enacted, and so the laws must sometimes also change. There is a perfectly good system already in place to make those changes. For the Constitution, there is a process by which it can be amended, as it has been already a number of times.  And Congress can also pass or amend laws as it sees fit.

The founders of this nation never intended the Supreme Court to be a powerful force in government. It would have been anathema to them for a few unelected judges with lifetime appointments to impose on the entire nation by fiat laws or rules or cultural policies which were unable to get through the normal legislative process. Yes, I can understand the frustration with the dysfunctional Congress, but the solution is to fix Congress, not to bypass it or replace it with nine unelected justices.

As it happens, I agree with most of the liberal goals, if not always with their methods of achieving those goals. Permanent cultural changes in attitudes and behaviors require convincing people (actually talking and, more important, listening to those with other views), not mandating their behavior with an all-powerful central government. We can go live in China or Russia if that is what we want.

So despite the current hysteria in some quarters about this nomination, I see nothing exceptional going on here, except for the unusually vituperative behavior of some liberals.

Microsoft Windows rant

Trigger warning - if you are not a computer geek, this post may be of no interest.

(Yes, yes. I know this isn't quite the way "trigger warning" is generally used. It's use was meant as a bit of subtle humor, apparently too subtle for some....)

I have (had) Windows 10 on three of my computers, a desktop and two laptops. This week the "Spring Creators Update" version 1803 was rolled out - one of those forced updates we cannot avoid (though with some obscure register settings one can at least delay them for 180 days) .  This update thoroughly clobbered all three computers. It killed my antivirus (Kaspersky Internet Security), which had to be uninstalled and then reinstalled to make it work. It removed the HomeGroup sharing option, which is how I interconnected my computers. So now I was supposed to set up a whole series of new services, and the forums reveal that a lot of people were finding the new sharing services don't work dependably. And it removed several other application programs that I regularly use and which it claimed were "no longer compatible" with Windows.

After spending a whole day trying to "fix" my wife's laptop after the update I simply gave up and rolled all three machines back to Windows 8.1, which is the last stable version and to which Microsoft isn't "forcing" feature updates (with "features" I neither want nor need) twice a year. Window 8.1 is still under extended support until 2023, which means I can get security patches (when I ask for them) until then.

It is simply unacceptable to have an operating system on my computers that is destabilized twice a year by "forced" automatic updates when I am not looking. Microsoft is of course trying to force everyone onto Windows 10 so they can sell more subscription services, like Office 365. As of August of this year, about 40% of the world's Windows computers are still running Windows 7, and I know why. Corporations simply can't afford to have Microsoft screw up all their thousands of computers every six months with a buggy "Creators Update", And neither can I.

So I am staying on Windows 8.1 until at least 2023. I don't know what I will do after that, but perhaps Microsoft will have come to its senses by then and revised its update system, or perhaps some bright and adventurous young entrepreneur will field an acceptable replacement for the Windows operating system and give Microsoft some badly-needed competition. (and Mac OS, at just over 9% of the current market, probably isn't that universal replacement). 

The Kavanaugh-Ford hearings

I have little more to say about this. The whole spectacle sickened me; both participants were ill-used by the cynical politicians on both sides of the aisle. Perhaps the closest to what I would say if I could write more about this is summed up in Andrew Sullivan's perceptive piece yesterday: Everyone Lost in the Ford-Kavanaugh Hearings.

The fundamental principle of American law

It is a fundamental principle of English and America law, perhaps THE fundamental principle of English and America law, that a defendant is presumed innocent until PROVED guilty in a court of law. It is the principle that separates us from totalitarian regimes and banana republics and simple lynch mob rule. And we seem to have lost it.

I have no idea whether Professor Ford’s accusation is accurate, or whether she misremembered the facts and the people involved, or whether she made it all up. AND NEITHER DOES ANYONE ELSE!! Yet millions of our supposedly well-educated and sophisticated citizens, based on nothing more than what they have heard in the media or from friends, or what they want to believe for partisan or gender reasons, are absolutely sure (a) that her accusation is accurate, or (b) that she is lying, or at least has a faulty memory.

In fact, as several prosecutors have said in public, this is not a case any prosecutor would take – there simply isn’t any evidence, it is too far in the past and memories are unreliable that far in the past, she can’t remember when or where the party occurred or how she got to or from the party, and the three people she remembers as being there all claim under oath that they don’t recall any such party. No court in the land would convict on such flimsy hearsay evidence. Yet millions of citizens, and most of the media, are perfectly willing to convict.

This is trial by lynch mob, except that the rope has been replaced by the media and social media. And it is disgusting and immoral, just as it was when Senator Joseph McCarthy ruined careers with his unsubstantiated accusations. If this is what the nation has come to, then worrying about what Trump may do next is the least of our worries, because we really will have become like Nazi Germany or Stalin's Soviet Union or the Salem witch trials or Orwell's 1984 where anyone can be ruined simply by being denounced by someone.

Pardon my cynicism but…..

Professor Christina Ford, Judge Kavanaugh’s accuser, claims that she didn’t originally want to come forward, and had asked that her July 30 letter to Senator Feinsetein, and her contacts with The Washington Post, which according to the Post had been going on for several weeks before her name became public, be kept confidential, because she didn’t want the media and public attention on her family and herself (a wise decision). She claims she only came forward once she was outed by the press.

A question no one seems to be asking is just who outed her? Did she out herself? Did someone in The Washington Post reveal her name? Did someone in Senator Feinstein’s staff leak her name? Senator Feinstein says she forwarded the letter to the FBI. Did someone in the FBI leak the name?

If in fact Professor Ford herself is the one who actually outed herself, after claiming that she wanted to stay anonymous, then I would grow suspicious of her motives and veracity.

If Senator Feinstein or someone on her staff leaked the name to the press, this suggests the whole scheme has been pretty dirty politics, and Senator Feinstein’s claim that she withheld the letter from her colleagues because she keeps her word rings pretty hollow, and she sacrificed Ford’s anonymity for her own political purposes. Perhaps I am too cynical, but after her deceitful behavior last week I wouldn’t put it past her.

If someone in The Washington Post staff leaked the name, it certainly doesn’t make the Post look very good.  But then, the Post has hardly been impartial in this whole affair, or on much of anything in the Trump administration.

If someone in the FBI leaked the name, this is really serious. The FBI is already in trouble for deliberate, politically-motivated leaking. This shows the problem is even worse than we thought.

It seems to me we ought to be asking exactly how Professor Ford’s request for anonymity was subverted. It might make a great deal of difference in how we interpret her allegations.

The new McCarthism

It occurred to me, after I wrote the preceding post, that I am old enough to have seen this movie before, in the days of Senator Joseph McCarthy and the “Red Scare”.

Just as in the 1950’s the public was swept up into an emotional fear of Communist spies and sleeper agents embedded everywhere in American society, today we have the emotional #MeToo movement sure that every powerful man has been harassing the women around him.

Just as in the 1950’s the simple accusation that someone was a Communist sympathizer was enough to get them fired and blacklisted, without any proof being required, so today the simple accusation that a man has harassed or sexually exploited a woman is enough is some quarters to get him fired, without any due process or proof required.

Just as it was almost impossible to prove one wasn’t a secret communist agent (proving a negative is almost always difficult if not impossible), so today it is almost impossible for a man to prove he hasn’t harassed a woman, especially since it is almost always done without witnesses, so it is simply his word against hers.

Just as then there were in fact enough actual communist spies and agents around to make the accusation plausible and creditable, so today there are enough actual proven cases of men using their power to sexually exploit woman to make the accusation plausible and creditable against any just about any adult male.

And just as Senator McCarthy saw how to weaponized this fear and mob justice to advance his own career, so today people have weaponized the #MeToo movement to use against any opponent. If you can’t bring your opponent down with such tactics, you can certainly ruin their reputation, because the gullible public will generally believe, without proof, that “where there is smoke there must be fire”, so the accusation alone is enough to do the damage. And if you need a little more leverage, just pay or persuade a few more women to come forward with the same accusation, because apparently numbers of accusations can substitute for actual proof in most people’s minds.

Think of this as you watch Monday’s Kavanaugh-Ford hearings.

The kangaroo court

Well, I see that Senators are going to call both Supreme Court nominee Kavanaugh and his accuser, Professor Christine Ford, to testify under oath on Monday before the Senate Judiciary Committee.  Considering the travesty that was the four days of Kavanaugh examination before this same committee last week, with endless public outbursts in the gallery and grandstanding by Senators on both sides of the aisle, this looks to me like nothing more than a highly partisan kangaroo court.

What, exactly, can come out of such a hearing? Ford makes the accusation, but claims she can’t remember the year it took place, the house it took place in, how she got to the party, how she got home from the party, or apparently how many people were in the room with her (she now claims two, but when she told her therapist about this some years ago, she said there were four.)  How is Kavanaugh to refute such vague claims? Predictably partisan groups have begun lining up on both sides. 63 women who knew Kavanaugh over the years, including when he was in high school, claim he has never been more than a gentlemen. Now a group of Holten Arms alumni have sided publically with Ford, who was a student there. All very emotional, but none of it is proof one way or the other. Nor is any such proof likely to emerge from the hearing. She will claim it happened. He will claim it didn’t, and none of us will know anything more than we know now.  But liberals will be absolutely sure (without proof) that she is telling the truth, and conservatives will be absolutely sure (without proof) that she is not.

But of course Democrats will have accomplished what they set out to accomplish – to stain the reputation, and perhaps prevent the seating on the Supreme Court, of a distinguished jurist with whom in fact they only have a few policy differences.  It’s disgusting, completely at variance with the principles of American law (presumed innocent until proven guilty), and worthy of some third-world despotism or police state.  Liberals think Trump is destroying democracy. From my point of view democracy has already been pretty well destroyed in Washington, and liberals are as much to blame as conservatives.

As I say, it is disgusting and everyone involved, on both sides of the aisle, ought to be ashamed of themselves. The drive for power in Washington politics has become so all-consuming that common decency has been completely lost and mob rule and trial by social media has taken its place.

Pity the next liberal Supreme Court nominee

The current battle over Judge Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court has gotten about as dirty as it can get. Between Senator Cory Booker’s fake “I’ll release confidential documents no matter the consequences to me” grandstanding (the documents weren’t confidential, and in any case he had cleared their release with the Committee Chairman that very morning) , Senator Kamala Harris’ setup photo of Kavanaugh not shaking the hand of the parent of a Parkland shooting victim (Harris arranged for photographers to witness the parent ambushing Kavanaugh as he was leaving the Committee room, and his security people naturally moved him away from this possibly hostile stranger they didn’t know), and Senator Pelosi’s editing Kavanaugh’s words to make it appear he said something he didn’t say, things seemed about as dirty as they could get.

Now we have, suddenly and at the last minute, the convenient appearance of someone who claims Kavanaugh tried to assault her back in high school. This is a wonderful ploy, because of course there is no evidence to either support or refute her claim, and in today’s politically-correct world the fundamental principle of English law, that a defendant is innocent until proven guilty, has long since been abandoned. So simply the insinuation, the possibility, that this might be true may be enough to destroy a man’s career.

These nominations have been getting dirtier and dirtier ever since Senator Ted Kennedy in 1987 shamelessly smeared nominee Robert Bork in a nationally televised speech, asserting that Bork held extremist views that Bork in fact had never held. That set the standard, and the Supreme Court nomination process ever since then has been getting dirtier and dirtier.

Whether Democrats manage to derail the Kavanaugh nomination with this ploy or not, you can bet that Republicans will remember this the next time there is a Democrat in the White House and she/he nominates a liberal judge for the Supreme Court. What goes around comes around. Pity that nominee.

Bureaucratic excess

I have argued before that the unelected “fourth branch” of government, the federal agencies, are out of control. Here is an interesting statistic. A recent project went through all federal criminal law and counted them. There are about 4,500 federal criminal laws, all passed by Congress.

Professor John Coffee of Columbia Law School has tried to estimate how many federal criminal regulations there are. His work leads him to estimate more than 300,000  federal regulations that carry criminal penalties – regulations that were never approved by congress and penalties that are applied outside of any court.

I rest my case.

The more I think about….

The more I think about the anonymous Op Ed piece in the New York Times, the angrier I get. Trump has been claiming since his election that there is a “deep state” within the Washington bureaucracy working against him. Others, especially liberal media figures, have claimed he is just paranoid. Well, now we know he was right, as proved by the public (if anonymous) self-confession of one of the very “deep state” figures working against him. Bureaucrats of course always try to shape the policies of their elected leaders to fit their own ideology, or to enhance their own power or line their own pockets. That was the substance of the highly successful  1980’s British comedy series “Yes, Minister” and “Yes, Prime Minister”. But this now borders on an outright coup.

Now I don’t think much of Trump’s style or language, but he was legally elected by the citizens of this country, and to be fair he has worked to implement most or all of his campaign promises, something politicians are not noted for. And indeed some things have improved, even if the left won’t admit it or won’t give him any credit for it (though they are quick enough to blame him for anything that goes wrong). Growth has almost doubled, unemployment is the lowest it has been in a decade, working class wages are climbing, and illegal immigration seems to have dropped. We may not like some of his campaign promises, but enough voters did like them to get him elected, and in our democratic system of government that is how the system is supposed to work.

The overweening arrogance of elite Washington insiders who presume to assume that their own personal judgement is better than that of millions of American voters is disgusting, but it is also dangerous. We are in danger, it appears, of being governed by a secret cabal of unelected elites who subvert the elected officials they supposedly work for and who think many of the voters are stupid “deplorables” (Clinton’s words) “clinging to guns and religion” (Obama’s words), and who are, in their self-righteous manner, absolutely sure that their Ivy League training qualifies them override the electorate.

There is indeed a constitution crisis at the moment as many on the left claim, but the source of that crisis is not the President but rather some of those who oppose him. The left apparently aren’t capable of learning. In 2013 when Democrats controlled the Senate Harry Reid unwisely eliminated the filibuster for judicial nominations below the Supreme Court, and that unwise maneuver is why Democrats, now out of power, are now powerless to oppose Trump’s Supreme Court nominations. Along the same lines, the vicious attacks by liberals on President Trump are setting the stage for the next president from their own party to be similarly attacked and mercilessly harassed.  Or as the old saying goes, “what goes around comes around”. This is not healthy for the nation.

The anonymous New York Times Op Ed

I assume everyone by now knows that the New York Times just published an anonymous Op Ed piece by ”a senior government official” alleging that senior White House officials, including him/herself, are deliberately and systematically sabotaging President Trump. The news is hardly new – the Washington establishment, Republican as well as Democratic, has been trying its best to bring down Trump since he first won the Republican nomination - their hardball efforts are visible every day. Nor is the piece very flattering to the anonymous writer, whose poor writing style, aggrandizing self-righteousness and inflated ego are all too apparent.

But it does seem to me dangerous in at least two dimensions.  First , that a major newspaper would publish an anonymous piece attacking a sitting president. Since we don’t know who wrote it, we have no way of judging how likely it is to be true, and what the motive of the writer might be. Or, for that matter, the motive of the newspaper itself.

Second, that the White House staff might harbor a person (or perhaps more than one) actively sabotaging the efforts of a duly elected President of the United States.  I’m no fan of Trump, but if we are worried about Russian interference in our elections, we ought to be far more worried about active sabotage among our own high government officials. It’s fine to disagree with the president. It’s fine to try to convince him to change his policies, It’s fine, if all else fails, to resign in protest.  It’s not fine to steal papers from his desk so he can’t sign them, or indulge in other active sabotage. That is, not to put too fine a point on it, outright treason.  Of course this person (or persons) may feel justified by their political views – just as traitors usually are. But it doesn’t make it right.

It seems to me the New York Times has put itself in a very dangerous position, actively abetting a self-confessed traitor. No doubt it makes good copy, but it makes terrible politics

Highly Recommended: The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner

Daniel Ellsberg is remembered by many simply as the man who leaked the classified Pentagon

Papers to the press in 1971, to the mighty embarrassment of the administration, which was revealed to have lied extensively to the American public. The government tried to prosecute him for this, but prosecutors engaged in so many illegal acts in trying to discredit him that the charges were eventually dismissed. But in fact Ellsberg was intimately involved in shaping our government's nuclear planning in the Cold War. He knows first hand what he is talking about.

The book is very, very important, because it details the thinking of American military planners as they thought about nuclear war and about nuclear strategy during the Cold War. His discussion of the Cuban Crisis, and what we now know that neither the Soviets nor we knew then, will alarm you, and it should. The impracticality and inflexibility of our early nuclear strategy will alarm you. True, Ellsberg is reporting on what things were like half a century ago – they might be different today, but then, they might well not be any better, any more practical, or any safer. Bureaucracies, military or civilian, are relatively inflexible and change little over decades.

Don’t read this book if you want to protect comfortable illusions about government control of nuclear weapons

Recommended: Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us

Some people are upset that Trump apparently used persuasion techniques to win the election  - never mind that all politicians, including Hillary Clinton, also tried to use the same techniques. They just weren't as good at it. But the issue is far larger than just presidential politics. Corporations and special interest groups (political, religions, marketing, kooks, etc.) all do the same thing to us every day. Michal Moss, in his 2013 book Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us, details how these technique have been used to delude the public into eating poorly, with the result that we now face an epidemic of obesity. This book will (or at least, should) make you fighting mad, not only at the food industries and corporations, but at your own federal government as well. It's probably no news that too many government agencies are controlled and subverted by the very industries they are supposed to regulate, but this book will drive the point home and make you skeptical of any FDA food guideline.

I’m amused by the fad for electric cars

I see people who want to feel environmentally conscious shelling out big bucks for electric cars, like $74,500 for a Tesla Model S, under the assumption that it pollutes less than a standard gasoline-powered car. It seems to me another case of the gullible public being conned into buying something they don’t need.  Just where do they think the electricity comes from when they plug their car into the wall at night?

Certainly it is true that there is less pollution from the car itself when it is driven, and that matters if one lives, say, in the smoggy Los Angeles basin. But in fact the pollution is still there – it is just displaced to a power plant, probably coal- or oil- or gas-fueled, some miles away.

A modern gasoline car engine has an inherent maximum efficiency of about 30%, meaning it extracts as energy about 30% of the total energy available in the gasoline – the rest is lost to heat and exhaust. But once one factors in friction, power load of the accessories like air conditioning, and perhaps the loss to an automatic transmission, the actual total efficiency of an average American car is in the range of 15%.

Now let’s look at the electric car. The best of them convert something like 60% of the battery energy to power in the wheels. The batteries/converters themselves are about 70% efficient at capturing and recovering the charge put into them, so the total efficiency at the car is about 42% (60% of 70%).  The power plants (somewhere else) that produced the electricity that charged the batteries probably have an averaged efficiency around 40% (power on the grid comes from a number of plants burning a variety of fuels, but 90% of US energy still comes from hydrocarbon-fueled plants.), and another 10% or so is lost in the electric transmission lines. So the total efficiency of the whole system, from power plant to car wheels, is in the range of 15%, about the same as a gasoline-powered car. We just moved the pollution from the car to the power plant.

Still, if it makes people feel better…….

Recommended: Energy: Myths and Realities

Dr. Vaclav Smil is Distinguished Professor Emeritus in the Faculty of Environment at the University of Manitoba, Canada, and author of almost 40 books (to date) and innumerable academic articles on energy and environmental issues. His most recent book (2017) is Energy and Civilization: A History. A quick look at his listing in Wikipedia will produce a list of his other books.

This book, published in 2010, deals with the unrealistic claims being made in many circles about our transition to carbon-free "green" energy.  Smil does not write popular books - he writes carefully documented academic accounts of the real state of the world, and it requires some mental effort to follow all the various physics-based units of measurement. But it is worth the effort if one wants to understand the actual facts and constraints about transitioning to carbon-free energy, rather than succumb to the unrealistic ideology-based (rather than fact-based) fantasies being peddled in some quarters.

Recommended: Pre-suasion: A Revolutionary Way to Influence and Persuade

I listed (previous post) Dr. Cialdini’s 2009 book Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion as the book to read after Scott Adam’s 2017 book Win Bigly: Persuasion in a World Where Facts Don’t Matter. This then is the book (published 2016) to read after reading Influence. It deals with “setting the table”, or preparing people psychologically to accept an influential message to follow. This whole field of persuasion is terribly important, because these methods are being used on us all the time, with increasing sophistication, to sell us products and policies and ideas that we ought to know better than to accept.

Recommended: Influence - The Psychology of Persuasion

Dr. Robert Cialdini is Regents Professor Emeritus of Psychology and Marketing at Arizona State University and CEO of his own company that provides influence training worldwide. This is the book to read after reading Scott Adam's 2017 book Win Bigly: Persuasion in a World Where Facts Don't Matter (recommended in a post back in June)  Cialdini is the master persuader that Adams calls "godzilla" in his book. If you want to understand how everyone from politicians to marketing executives to special interest groups to sales people are messing with your mind every day, this is the book to read. You won't be happy with what you learn, especially if you like to think you are not susceptible to influence, but you will be better prepared to deal with the real world.
 

Recommended: The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction

All of us who have been distracted – indeed, intensely annoyed – by the ubiquitous television screens dominating waiting rooms, restaurants and airport lounges will resonate with this book. Crawford deals with how to structure our lives to avoid the constant distracting claims on our attention to which the modern capitalist world subjects us. Like his excellent 2009 book Shop Class as Soulcraft, Crawford leads us into a philosophical meditation on how to make our lives more meaningful – on how to become an individual in an age of distraction.

Recommended: Skin in the Game

Nassim Nicholas Taleb's previous books, Fooled by Randomness, The Black Swan, and more recently Antifragile, all dealt one way or another with how humans, including economists and bankers and stock brokers, don't understand randomness and risk very well. His most recent book, Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life, deals with a new subject - the morality of giving advice or creating policy if one has no "skin in the game", if one sufferers no consequences if the policy is a disaster for others. As he points out, the very politicians and policy makers who disrupted the Middle East in the name of "spreading democracy", resulting in the death or displacement of millions of people, still retain their high-paying jobs, and may even be unaware of the chaos their policies have produced.

Taleb is arrogant and very sarcastic about some of the academic and political fields and people whom he thinks mislead the public while suffering no consequences themselves. If you are a government policy wonk or an economist or a politician you probably won't like this book. I find his sarcasm acceptable, because I think he is right on most of the issues he raises.

Recommended: Shopcraft as Soulcraft

Matthew Crawford’s 2009 book Shop Class as Soulcraft is reminiscent of Robert Pirsig’s 1974 cult classic Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Repair. Crawford also repairs motorcycles (and with a Ph.D.), but really this book is about is the value of craft work – of working with one’s hands to produce something tangible in the world, as opposed to shuffling bureaucratic paper in a cubicle, or worse yet, shuffling electrons in a computer. This is a philosophical essay about the nature of work and workers, about how the modern corporate world dehumanizes workers and their management and leaves them unsatisfied with life, and how one might recover that satisfaction with a vocation, or at least an avocation, of craft work.  It is well worth reading.

Recommended: Energy: A Human History

Richard Rhodes, who wrote the wonderful 1987 book The Making of the Atomic Bomb, has written a new book on Energy, entitled Energy: A Human History. It is well worth reading just for general interest and to appreciate the degree to which energy use throughout the ages has shaped civilizations and cultures. But of more immediate application is his last chapter, in which he deals with the mythology and facts of renewable energy. Basically, the glowing promises of some that we will transition to carbon-free renewable energy within the next 20 years or so are a fantasy being sold to the public with little or no factual or scientific or economic basis. Moreover, if we really want to get to mostly carbon-free energy, we will have to overcome the American public's irrational fear of nuclear energy, because nuclear energy is the only way we can provide enough carbon-free energy to manage our growing electrical base load throughout the world.  This book will give the reader a factual basis with which to judge the (often unrealistic) claims of the renewable-energy proponents.