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.